Wear OS 2.1 is starting to see the light of day, with the primary focus being to improve the overall user interface for smartwatch owners. This new UI is all about swiping. You can swipe up to check your notifications or swipe right to access Google Assistant. You can swipe down to find Quick Settings, which will let you turn on things like Airplane Mode, Do Not Disturb, and more.
Swiping left will reach the new Google Fit, which saw its debut back in August. You’ll be able to see the Move Minutes and Heart Points you reach.
The new Wear OS 2.1 is rolling out now. If you want to check to see if the update is available for your device, just open up the Settings app, then open up System –> About –> System updates. The new software sounds like a worthwhile upgrade, so let us know in the comments what you think of the update after you install it.
Though we’ve heard numerous rumors about Google’s mysterious Chrome OS tablet, a new one is confirming the name of the device. David Ruddock of Android Police tweeted that “Google Pixel Slate is the name of Google’s first Chrome OS tablet.” This lines up with previous rumors regarding the name of the device, and Ruddock stated that “this is from a source I trust,” lending further credence to the name.
The Pixel Slate has been less leaky than the Pixel 3/XL, but we do know a bit about what to expect. The device will reportedly feature a 2400×1600 screen, which matches the aspect ratio of the Pixelbook. Additionally, it should feature two USB Type-C ports, a fingerprint scanner, and connector pins for use with detachable keyboard, docks, and other accessories.
Google is set to release the Pixel Slate on October 9, alongside the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL.
What are your thoughts on the Google Pixel Slate? Is this a device you’re interested in purchasing?
It’s September 1998. Aerosmith is wailing “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” at the top of the Billboard Top 100. “TRL” debuts on MTV, just in time for the release of “Baby One More Time.” Buffy Summers is staking vampires in platform sandals. Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are trying to out-bash each other for the home run record. “The Avengers” has just bombed at box offices. And sometime this month, Google is born.
The exact date of our company’s founding is up for debate, even for those of us who are in the business of providing answers. Google Inc. was incorporated on September 4, but for more than a decade we’ve celebrated our birthday on September 27—with an annual Doodle, of course.
Twenty years later, the world has changed, online and off. Answers—and high-resolution photos, car rides, commerce, and messages from friends and family—are all on our phones, at our fingertips. “The Avengers,” and strappy platforms, are back.
Google has changed, too. Starting with Search, we now have seven products that are used by more than a billion people every month. Instead of a handful of employees in a Menlo Park garage, we have tens of thousands of employees and offices in nearly 60 countries. And even Google is now part of Alphabet, our parent company created in 2015. We’ve also had our fair share of adventures along the way, like when we lost a snake in our New York office, introduced our new email product on April Fools Day, or—this one's close to my heart—launched a blog during the quiet period leading up to our IPO.
What hasn’t changed is our mission: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Walk into any Google office around the world and you're bound to find people debating an ambitious idea that might sound crazy—but also might become the next Android or Maps. We're still pushing the boundaries of available technologies, particularly AI. And we're still dedicated first and foremost to the user—to building products for everyone. To providing people the information they need, wherever they are—whether it’s to help them start a business, learn something new, or connect with each other.
As we mark our 20th birthday this month, we'll be spending some time looking back on what we've accomplished in the past two decades—starting today with the 10th birthday of Chrome—and where we're headed next. We don't have all the answers yet, but you know us: We'll never stop searching.
Asking “what if,” and using technology to find the answer, has always been a part of what we do at Google. In 2011, we started the Google Science Fair to inspire teens to answer their own “what if’s” using science, technology, engineering and math. I’ve been a fan of science fairs all my life—but I’m particularly fond of Google’s—and this year’s edition kicks off today. Students from around the world will tinker (and code, experiment, design and build), until they come up with the answer they’re after.
Our most recent Google Science Fair grand prize winner, Kiara Nirghi—an 18 year-old young woman from South Africa—is passionate about finding new ways to protect our environment, especially her community that’s affected by drought. I had the opportunity to chat with Kiara and ask her a few questions about what inspired her:
What question did you try to answer with your Google Science Fair project?
“Can fruit waste save crops during a drought?” I wanted to see if it would be possible for crops to grow without a regular water supply.
How did you get interested in this question?
When my family and I were driving to the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, I was shocked to pass empty reservoirs that had previously been full of water. It was the first time I saw the effects of drought on my community, and it inspired me to research potential solutions that would be safe for the environment.
Was there a moment when things didn't work as you had hoped?
I think that science and failure undoubtedly work hand-in-hand … not achieving the "correct" results but still persevering could take you to an award-winning solution or it could take you to a whole different idea. You have to start from the beginning again, but that's also fine. Perseverance will always move you toward the next step to making the world better!
What advice would you give other students who also want to make a difference?
Never be afraid to simply ask a question. Asking is always the first step to discovering an answer that will make a difference or solve a problem.
To join, visit Googlesciencefair.com and check out our new materials, thought-starters and inspiration to help you develop your idea. We know teachers play an important role in encouraging students and helping them work through their questions, so we’ve created a new set of ISTE-certified resources and classroom activities to help get the ideas flowing.
Submissions will be accepted through December 12—the winner will get a $50,000 scholarship, and 20 global finalists will come to Google headquarters to share their projects and be in the running for scholarships and prizes from National Geographic, Lego Education, Scientific American, and Virgin Galactic.
So now the question is, what if you could win the Google Science Fair?
“We’re bringing on my nephew, he’s super smart with computers, so you make sure he is successful!”
That was the long and short of how Reagan got introduced to the new hire, Dewey. Dewey’s keyboard only really needed three keys: CTRL, C, and V. They couldn’t write a line of code to save their life. Once, when trying to fumble through a FizzBuzz as a simple practice exercise, Dewey took to Google to find a solution. Because Dewey couldn’t quite understand how Google worked, instead of copy/pasting out of StackOverflow, they went to r/ProgrammerHumor and copied code out of a meme image instead.
Reagan couldn’t even just try and shove Dewey off on a hunt for a left-handed packet shifter in the supply closet, because Dewey’s patron was watching source control, and wanted to see Dewey’s brilliant commits showing up. Even if Reagan didn’t give Dewey any tasks, Dewey’s uncle did.
That’s how Dewey got stumped trying to fetch data from a database. They simply needed to read one column and present it as a series of HTML list items, using PHP.
This was their approach.
$sql = "SELECT information FROM table";
//yes, that is actually what Dewey named things in the DB
$result = $conn->query($sql);
$list = $result->fetch_assoc();
$i = 1;
$run = true;
while ( $list == true && $run != false ) {
if ( $list[$i] <= count($list) ) {
echo '<li>' . $list[$i] . '</li>';
$i++;
} else {
$last = array_pop(array_reverse($list));
echo '<li>' . $last . '</li>';
$run = false;
}
}
Presumably, this is one of the cases where Dewey didn’t copy and paste code, because I don’t think anyone could come up with code like that on purpose.
The fundamental misunderstanding of loops, lists, conditions, arrays, and databases is just stunning. Somehow, Dewey couldn’t grasp that arrays started at zero, but blundered into a solution where they could reverse and pop the array instead.
Needless to say, Dewey never actually had any code get past the review stage. Shortly after this, Dewey got quietly shuffled to some other part of the organization, and Reagan never heard from them again.
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Facebook is not upfront about this practice. In fact, when I asked
its PR team last year whether it was using shadow contact
information for ads, they denied it. Luckily for those of us
obsessed with the uncannily accurate nature of ads on Facebook
platforms, a group of academic researchers decided to do a deep
dive into how Facebook custom audiences work to find out how
users’ phone numbers and email addresses get sucked into the
advertising ecosystem. […]
The researchers also found that if User A, whom we’ll call Anna,
shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown
phone number for User B, whom we’ll call Ben, advertisers will be
able to target Ben with an ad using that phone number, which I
call “shadow contact information,” about a month later. Ben can’t
access his shadow contact information, because that would violate
Anna’s privacy, according to Facebook, so he can’t see it or
delete it, and he can’t keep advertisers from using it either.
The lead author on the paper, Giridhari Venkatadri, said this was
the most surprising finding, that Facebook was targeted ads using
information “that was not directly provided by the user, or even
revealed to the user.”
Paraphrasing, Hill’s back and forth with Facebook over these practices went like this:
Hill: Facebook, are you doing this terrible thing?
Facebook: No, we don’t do that.
Hill, months later: Here’s academic research that shows you do this terrible thing.
Facebook: Yes, of course we do that.
At this point I consider Facebook a criminal enterprise. Maybe not legally, but morally. How in the above scenario is Facebook not stealing Ben’s privacy?
Dogs Pooping Calendar – White Elephant Party coming up? Yankee Swap? Secret Santa? Do you know someone who loves dogs…too much? This 12 month 2019 calendar of pooping dogs will be the most memorable gift you give this year.
Most cars built since 1996 have a port called an OBD II port, at least in the US. This is generally used for diagnostics; checking stored codes and getting a wealth of data about how your car is running is great to have for the enthusiast and regular person alike.
AT&T and HARMAN are aiming to add more features to cars with OBD II ports with the Spark. It offers features like a WiFi hotspot, a “virtual mechanic” (read: code reader), a way to call roadside assistance, information if your car is towed or stolen, crash assistance, parking reservations, and a lot more with future updates. It’s frankly surprising how many features were added considering how common these dongles are.
The device will cost $79.99, or $29.99 with the purchase of a Samsung Galaxy S9, S9+, or Note 9. Plans start at $5 a month without a WiFi hotspot and go up from there. This little device will be available on September 28. It’s a great way to modernize your car a bit, though it’s not a cheap way to do so.
Daniel has a bit of a story. The story starts many months ago, on the very first day of the month.
Angular 1.x has something called a filter as a key concept. This is a delightfully misleading name, as it's more meant to be used as a formatting function, but because it takes any arbitrary input and converts it to any arbitrary output, people did use it to filter, which had all sorts of delightful performance problems in practice.
Well, Daniel found this perfectly sensible formatting filter. It's well documented. It's also wrong.
/**
* Given a timestamp in the format "2018-06-22T14:55:44+00:00", this filter
* returns a date in human-readable format following our style guide.
* Assuming the browser's timezone is EDT, the filter applied to the above string
* would return "Jun 22, 2018 10:55 AM".
*
When applicable, this filter returns "today at" or "yesterday at" as date abbreviations in lowercase.
* These can be capitalized using the "capitalize" filter above directly in an HTML file.
*/
ourApp.filter('ourTimestamp', ['$filter', function($filter) {
return function(timestamp) {
// Guard statement for when timestamp is null, undefined or empty string.
if (!timestamp) {
return '';
}
let TODAY = new Date();
let TODAY_YEAR = TODAY.getFullYear();
let TODAY_MONTH = TODAY.getMonth();
let TODAY_DAY = TODAY.getDate();
let TIMESTAMP_FORMAT = 'MMM d, y h:mm a';
let TIME_FORMAT = 'h:mm a';
let originalTimestampDate = new Date(timestamp);
let year = originalTimestampDate.getFullYear();
let month = originalTimestampDate.getMonth();
let day = originalTimestampDate.getDate();
let dateAbbreviation = null;
if (year === TODAY_YEAR && month === TODAY_MONTH && day === TODAY_DAY) {
dateAbbreviation = 'today at ';
} else if (year === TODAY_YEAR && month === TODAY_MONTH && day === (TODAY_DAY - 1)) {
dateAbbreviation = 'yesterday at ';
}
if (dateAbbreviation) {
return dateAbbreviation + $filter('date')(timestamp, TIME_FORMAT);
} else {
return $filter('date')(timestamp, TIMESTAMP_FORMAT);
}
};
This code, like so much bad code, touches dates. This time, its goal is to output a more friendly date- like, if an event happened today, it simply says, "today at" or if it happened yesterday, it says "yesterday at". On the first day of the month, this fails to output "yesterday at". The bug is simple to spot:
if (year === TODAY_YEAR && month === TODAY_MONTH && day === (TODAY_DAY - 1)) {
dateAbbreviation = 'yesterday at ';
}
On September first, this only outputs "yesterday at" for September zeroth, not August 31st.
Now, that's a simple brainfart bug, and it could be fixed quite easily, and there are many libraries which could be used. But Daniel ran a git blame to see who on the development team was responsible... only to find that it was nobody on the development team.
It probably isn't much of a shock to learn that this particular application has lots of little UI annoyances. There's a product backlog a mile long with all sorts of little things that could be better, but can be lived with, for now. Because it's a mile of things that can be lived with, they keep getting pushed behind things that are more serious, necessary, or just have someone screaming more loudly about them.
Sprint after sprint, the little UI annoyances keep sitting on the backlog. There's always another problem, another fire to put out, another new feature which needs to be there. The CTO kept trying to raise the priority of the little annoyances, and the line kept getting jumped. So the CTO just took matters into their own hands and put this patch into the codebase, and pushed through to release. As the CTO, they bypassed all the regular sign-off procedures. "The test suite passes, what could be wrong?"
Of course, it has its own little UI annoyance, in that it misbehaves on the first day of the month. The test suite, on the other hand, assumes that the code will run as intended. And the test suite actually uses the current date (and calculates yesterday using date arithmetic). Which means on the first day of the month, the test fails, breaking the build.
Unfortunately for Daniel and the CTO, this bug ended up on the backlog. Since it only impacts developers one day a month, and since it's pretty much invisible to the users, it's got a very low priority. It might get fixed, someday.
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The Roku Premiere costs $40, which means it’s one of the cheapest options out there if you want to stream 4K content. The Premiere+ costs $49.99, and aside from a few small differences, the two devices are the same. That means they both offer 4K streaming with HDR10 support (there is no Dolby Vision support), along with Wi-Fi (b/g/n), a quad-core processor, and Dolby and DTS Digital Surround over HDMI.
The Premiere+ includes a remote that supports voice controls for searching. Otherwise, they are the same streaming sticks. They go up for preorder today, and start shipping early in October.
Meanwhile, the other big news is that Roku devices will be updated to Roku OS 9 soon, and when they do they will be getting support for Google Assistant. When the feature arrives, Roku users will be able to use their voice to open apps, control playback, search for content they want to watch, and “go home”. To get this to work, though, you’ll need a Google Home product in your house, or the Google Assistant app on your phone. Roku TV owners with voice control support will be able to turn their TV on or off, adjust the volume, change inputs, and switch to a specific channel received by an antenna.
Roku OS 9 will begin rolling out in early November.
Soon after the Brexit vote, I started writing a blog post about the different usage of the term racial in AmE and BrE. This followed an incident that the UK press had label(l)ed 'racial abuse' against a North American in Manchester. I thought it odd that being abusive to an American counted as 'racial abuse'. I then abandoned the post when I discovered that I'd had it wrong: the abuse was related to the colo(u)r of the person's skin. (There was a "go back to Africa" that I hadn't heard the first time I'd seen the recording.) I still had a feeling that I sometimes heard racial and racist being used differently in BrE than in AmE, but that wasn't an example of it.
But one thing I did find was that one hears the word abuse in such contexts a lot more in the UK. In the green you can see which adjective+abuse combinations are particularly American (left column) and particularly British (right). (Pink means the opposite—much more typical of the other country.)
Click picture to enlarge.
Much of the 'abuse' in the right column (after anti-semitic, racist, homophobic) can be understood to be verbal in nature. (Worth noting: the word abuse is no more common in BrE than in AmE--it's just has more of these green phrases associated with it.) Part of the reason for more occurrences of abuse phrases in BrE is that UK has more policing of verbal actions than the US does—historically in more restrictive libel laws and more recently in greater use of hate-speech laws and anti-social behavio(u)r orders. (In the US, such laws are more apt to be challenged on constitutional grounds due to the First Amendment right of free speech.) So, verbal abuse is going to make it into the news more.
But back to racial and related words: What pushed me to think about the matter again was this tweet from a fellow American linguist in Britain.
I’m looking for an academic ref for the fact that when a white British person talks about something being "racist" sometimes they're talking about culture (religion, etc.), not race. I see this use all the time discursively but am struggling to find an analysis! Thanks Twitter �
This is not the academic analysis that Lauren was looking for, but just more reflection on the differences in how race (in the 'type of people' sense) and words derived from it (racial, racist) are used and interpreted.
There's little that's more culture-dependent than our notions of how many and which races there are among humansand who can belong to which one. And what counts as a race differs a lot depending on why one's asking. The US Census's list of races you can choose from is a strange mix of colo(u)rs, ethnicities, nationalities at different levels of specificity. If all your grandparents came from Tokyo, your race is a nationality, but if they were ethnic Germans, your race is a colo(u)r.
Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin in this case is not counted as a race, but as an ethnic or linguistic group, and people are expected to have a race as well as status as Hispanic/Latinx/Spanish "origin".
But when it comes to talking about racism in America, it's not uncommon for people to talk about racism against Hispanic/Latinx people (on the basis of their membership of that group, not another "racial" group). You can see, for example anti-Latino racism in the US column of line 16 here:
click to enlarge
Look at the dark blue boxes in the GB column, and you see the kind of thing Lauren was alluding to in her tweet: line 3: anti-Muslim racism and line 6, anti-Jewish racism (and later on in the list, smaller numbers of anti-Semitic racism and anti-Islamic racism) are found in much greater numbers in UK than in US. (The US anti-Arab examples were mostly from one source, so I'm not going to make much of Arab being a 'national/ethnic' alternative to the 'religious' British phrasings.) The Irish column is interesting too--where Irish and Welsh are treated as "races" in the British "racism" context--but perhaps not other British contexts. (Though I just checked and there are 74 hits for "the Irish race" in the Ireland data.) (The "immigrant" numbers there are interesting, but that's the word I talk about in The Prodigal Tongue, so I won't repeat myself here.)
Both US and UK have plenty of hits for "the Jewish race" (a phrase used much historically, so not surprising), but none for "the Muslim race" or "the Islamic race". So, in that case it looks like you can be subjected to racism without being a race. Here's a great example of it in a recent (well, recent when I re-started this post) tweet:
And again? It’s not a jibe, a jape, a nudge and wink, a jolly, a witticism, a hoot or harmless fun.
This is racism.
Islamophobia, to be precise.
So what on earth are you doing normalising this man’s hateful spewings, @bbcnews?
Now, religion is not part of the legal definition of race in terms of most UK discrimination law (but religion may well be another category of discrimination in other laws). The Citizens Advice Bureau advises that you may have a case of racial discrimination if you belong to or are perceived to belong to a category under this definition of race:
What is ‘race’? Race means being part of a group of people who are identified by their race, colour, nationality, citizenship, or ethnic or national origins.
Muslims make up less than 5% of the British population, but are the largest non-Christian religion. Islam mainly came to the UK through immigration from South Asia; about 6% of the population identifies as of South Asian descent (the largest 'racial' minority in Britain). Many British South Asians will have other religious backgrounds, but there about three times as many Muslims as Hindus in the UK, and about 6 times as many Muslims as Sikhs. So, while not all British Muslims are South Asian and not all British South Asians are Muslim, there may be a strong association between being Muslim and being part of a particular ethnic group. Maybe that's why the connection between Islamophobia and racial abuse seems so easy to make in the UK. And perhaps this follows on from the sectarian divisions within and between Britain and Ireland, where discrimination was (and is) not on the basis of skin colour but on the basis of tribalism defined by religion and ethnicity—and where, as we've seen, people do talk about belonging and discrimination in racial terms.
Muslims are only 1.1% of the US population. Civil rights movements to do with 'race' in the US have concerned much bigger populations: over 12% of the population are Black/African-American and 17% Hispanic/Latinx (more than half of whom ticked 'white' on their census forms). It's not that religion and race are unconnected in the US. The Ku Klux Klan famously has it in for Jews and (historically, at least) Catholics as well as African-Americans. But perhaps since racism in the US has such deep roots and affects so much of the population, it's harder for that word to be extended to other kinds of discrimination.
There may also be something to the idea that religious discrimination is more of its own category in the US, where religion is much more widely and variably practi{c/s}ed. The country was founded on the principle of religious freedom, but not on any principle of racial equality. That said, it's kind of surprising we don't have a widely used single word for religious discrimination, like religionism or faithism. But we don't seem to.
The moral of the story is: races are different in different cultures because (a) those cultures have different histories involving different peoples, and (b) the categori{s/z}ation of people is made up to serve (the power-holders in) those cultures. If you're interested in these kinds of things, I talk about some of them in chapter 7 of The Prodigal Tongue, but also I've written a few blog posts here about race and ethnicity.
As Treasurer of the United States in the Obama administration, Rosie Rios pushed hard for the inclusion of more women on US currency, culminating in the selection of Harriet Tubman for the new $20 bill. But with many more amazing women left on the list for inclusion on currency, Rios partnered with Google to create Notable Women, an augmented reality app that puts an historic American women on any US bill you hold up to your phone’s camera. Here’s how it works:
Dmitry Grozov is a Russian comic artist who has made a trailer for an anime version of Star Wars: A New Hope. This treatment of Star Wars is fitting given the Asian, and particularly Japanese, influence on the film.
I would watch the hell out of a full-length version of this.
I was recently at the beach, and no matter how hard I tried I could not pee in the water. It's like I'm hardwired to not pee myself, even when submerged in water. It's gonna take some practice.
“The EAS [Emergency Alert System] is a national public warning
system that provides the President with the communications
capability to address the nation during a national emergency,”
FEMA said.
The test message will have a header that reads “Presidential
Alert,” according to the agency. Users whose phones are on will
twice hear a tone and vibration and then see an English-only (for
now) message: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency
Alert System. No action is needed.” […]
FEMA stated that the government cannot track end users’ location
through this alert system. The test is supposed to take place at
2:18 p.m. EDT on Sept. 20.
Under the Warning, Alert, and Response Network (WARN) Act of 2006,
cellphone users cannot opt out of the presidential alerts.
On one level, yes, the visualization literally just shows what three, six, and nine feet of water looks like. But it’s showing that in a context most people have never experienced. It fills in the gaps of your imagination, and hopefully underscores for anyone in a flood zone all the reasons they should not be.
Perfect example of how showing something can be tremendously more effective than merely saying something.
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I was recently at the beach, and no matter how hard I tried I could not pee in the water. It's like I'm hardwired to not pee myself, even when submerged in water. It's gonna take some practice.
