Next time you're in a restaurant or where people gather in small groups, sit and watch for a while. Note how many of the groups are silent, all doing something on their phones. When you find such a group, note how long they go without saying a word to each other. There is an interesting behavioural shift occurring in the phone-enabled world where casual conversation skills are being replaced by surfing, messaging and instant posting. It won't be too long before the best way to find out what the person next to you is thinking is to live feed their Facebook, send them an SMS or Line message, or heaven forbid a tweet.
There are deeper and longer-term impacts to this behaviour trend that affects the ability of a person to hold a complex conversation and has impacts in communication abilities in general. Employers are already starting to notice that new hires have trouble building complex sentences, unnecessary in the abbreviated world of phone communication. The long term effects of this behaviour are unknown but experts are already suggesting that access to electronic devices be limited during child development and the little ones encouraged to get outside to play and mix with other children, leaving the devices at home. That goes for the older ones as well.
A couple of hints and tricks for Android users. If your OS version is 7 (Nougat) or later then if you double tap the "recent" button, it will immediately bring up the previously opened app. The recent button is the one that looks like a bent equals sign and usually opens the recent apps list. This is one way to swap quickly between two apps without needing to split the screen.
Have you ever dismissed a notification and thought, "I want to see that again?" I have. Try this. Long press an open area of your home screen and select Widgets. Find the Settings widget, long press and drag to the home screen. When the menu opens to select what to link this to select Notifications Log. Now you have access to all those dismissed notifications.
For Windows 8 and 10 users here is a little trick to restart your graphics drivers when the screen freezes in the middle of your game or at any other time. Give this a go before you hit the system restart. Press Win+Ctrl+Shift+B on your keyboard. The screen will go black and you'll hear a beep. All things working your screen will reappear and your applications will still be running because only the graphics subsystem is affected. No this doesn't work for Windows 7.
Apple has been trying to implement an under-glass fingerprint sensor, Huawei has done it. The new Honour 10, with the optional removable Notch, comes with an ultrasonic under-glass fingerprint reader. The phone also comes with a 5.84 inch screen, a 12-core Kirin 970 processor, a 3,400mAh battery, and 4GB RAM with 64GB or 128GB of storage, and includes a 24MP+16MP dual main camera. These are 2018 high end specs for the price of last year's discounted top models and list at around US$540 (17,340 baht).
So how small can you make an autonomous drone? The current answer is around 7.6cm or hand sized. While I would not call this a nano-drone, some are. The drone uses 94mW of energy and has its own neural network running on a CPU about the size of a mid-sized coin that processes images at 20 frames per second and that tells the drone to dodge or stop. Training involved a lot of cars and bicycles. Before you get too excited the down side is that it can only work correctly on a horizontal plane, moving up and down was not part of the training. It is still a ways away from a fully autonomous drone that can deliver packages unaided.
On the subject of future technology, what about a tractor beam? They would be useful for lots of things ranging from corralling a wayward infant to capturing an enemy spacecraft. Engineers at the University of Bristol have demonstrated it is possible to trap objects bigger than the wavelength of a sound wave via an acoustic tractor beam. To be fair, the object was a 2cm polystyrene ball and the process used 40KHz ultrasonic waves to keep it suspended. While this is more of a levitating beam it may be the start of something bigger.
For some failed technology, how about poor facial recognition. In London the technology was supposed to be a great tool. So far it has identified two suspects, neither of whom were criminals. The technology currently has a 91-98% failure rate. This is not even close to the early figures predicted and is so bad there have been calls to turn the technology off. The police have gamely suggested that the system was not a failure because they use other follow-up methods after (mis)identification. The promised technological utopian future seems to still be a long way off.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.