In a world where technology meets comfort, smart thermostats are revolutionizing the way we manage our home environments.

These devices not only enhance energy efficiency but also integrate seamlessly into your smart home ecosystem.

Join us as we explore the top three smart thermostats that promise to transform your living space while keeping your energy bills in check.

1. Nest Learning Thermostat – The Classic Choice

The Nest Learning Thermostat is a household name known for its sleek design and intuitive learning capabilities.

It adapts to your schedule and preferences, optimizing your home’s temperature for maximum comfort and energy efficiency.

With features like remote control via a mobile app and integration with other smart devices, it’s the perfect choice for those looking to elevate their home automation experience.

2. Ecobee SmartThermostat with Voice Control – The Voice Assistant

The Ecobee SmartThermostat is not just about temperature control; it’s about convenience with built-in voice control.

This thermostat allows you to adjust your home’s climate using just your voice, thanks to its compatibility with Alexa and other voice assistants.

With its room sensors, it ensures that every corner of your home stays comfortable, making it a great option for larger spaces.

3. Honeywell Home T9 Smart Thermostat – The Budget-Friendly Option

The Honeywell Home T9 Smart Thermostat strikes a perfect balance between affordability and advanced features.

With customizable scheduling, geofencing, and smart alerts, it caters to the needs of energy-conscious homeowners.

Moreover, its easy installation and user-friendly app make it an excellent choice for those new to smart home technology.

Conclusion: Choosing the Right Smart Thermostat for Your Home

When it comes to selecting the right smart thermostat, consider your home size, budget, and preferred features.

Each of these options offers unique benefits that can enhance your home automation journey while promoting energy efficiency.

Take the time to evaluate your needs, and you’ll find the perfect match to keep your home comfortable and your energy bills low.

The post Top 3 Smart Thermostats: Which One is Right for You? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

In this smartwatch comparison, we’ll delve into the unique features and benefits of the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy, and Fitbit, helping you make an informed decision that aligns with your personal health goals.

Get ready for a visually stunning breakdown that will not only inform but also inspire you to make the best choice for your active life. Find out which smartwatch best suits your lifestyle and watch our video for a detailed comparison.

Design Aesthetics: The Visual Appeal

When it comes to aesthetics, the Apple Watch stands out with its customizable watch faces and premium materials, perfect for those who appreciate elegance.

The Samsung Galaxy offers a more traditional watch look with circular designs and a variety of straps, appealing to users who prefer a classic style.

Fitbit focuses on a sporty design, making it ideal for fitness enthusiasts who want a durable and lightweight device.

Fitness Tracking Features: Who Leads the Way?

Fitness tracking is at the heart of any smartwatch, and here the Fitbit shines with its extensive range of health metrics and user-friendly app.

The Apple Watch combines fitness and health seamlessly, offering innovative features like ECG and blood oxygen monitoring, catering to health-conscious individuals.

Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy packs a punch with advanced sleep tracking and stress management tools, making it a well-rounded choice for a balanced lifestyle.

Battery Life: Keeping You Connected Longer

Battery life is crucial, especially for active users. Fitbit takes the lead with impressive longevity, often lasting over a week on a single charge.

The Apple Watch typically offers around 18 hours, which may require daily charging, particularly for heavy users.

Samsung Galaxy strikes a balance with about two days of usage, making it a reliable option for those who don’t want to charge daily but also don’t need a week-long battery.

App Ecosystem: Options Galore

When it comes to apps, the Apple Watch boasts a rich ecosystem with seamless integration into the iOS environment, offering countless third-party applications.

Samsung Galaxy users enjoy a versatile selection of apps, also compatible with Android, providing flexibility and options.

Fitbit’s app is tailored for fitness and wellness, but it may lack the broader range of applications available on its competitors.

Health Monitoring: Beyond Fitness

Health monitoring features are vital for many users. The Apple Watch excels here, offering an ECG app and comprehensive heart health metrics.

Samsung Galaxy also provides robust health tracking, including stress management and blood pressure monitoring, appealing to a health-conscious audience.

Fitbit focuses on wellness, providing insights into sleep patterns and readiness metrics, perfect for those who prioritize overall health.

Customization: Personalize Your Watch

Customization options can enhance the personal connection with your smartwatch. The Apple Watch offers a myriad of bands, faces, and colors to match any outfit or occasion.

Samsung Galaxy also provides a variety of watch faces and straps, allowing users to express their style uniquely.

Fitbit, while more limited in customization, still offers vibrant band colors and interchangeable straps for a sporty look.

Price Point: Finding Your Fit

Price is often a deciding factor when choosing a smartwatch. The Apple Watch tends to be on the higher end, reflecting its premium build and features.

Samsung Galaxy offers a range of prices, providing options for different budgets while maintaining quality.

Fitbit is generally the most affordable, making it a great starting point for those new to smartwatches.

Integration with Other Devices

Integration is key for a seamless user experience. The Apple Watch syncs flawlessly with iPhones, allowing for easy access to notifications and apps.

Samsung Galaxy watches work well with both Android and iOS, but the full experience shines with Samsung devices.

Fitbit primarily focuses on fitness features but also syncs with various apps and devices to enhance usability.

Durability: Built to Last

Durability is essential for an active lifestyle. The Apple Watch is water-resistant and built with premium materials, making it suitable for most activities.

Samsung Galaxy watches are equally resilient, with rugged designs that can withstand various environments.

Fitbit focuses on lightweight materials, which are durable but may not be as tough as the others, ideal for casual fitness enthusiasts.

User Experience: Interface Insights

User experience can make or break a smartwatch. The Apple Watch interface is intuitive, with smooth navigation that enhances usability.

Samsung Galaxy offers a user-friendly interface that is customizable, providing a pleasant experience for all users.

Fitbit’s interface is straightforward and focused on fitness metrics, catering to users who prioritize functionality over flair.

Customer Support and Community

Support and community can significantly influence your smartwatch experience. Apple is known for its excellent customer service and a robust community of users.

Samsung also provides solid support options and a growing user community for troubleshooting and tips.

Fitbit, with its strong focus on fitness, has a dedicated community that shares insights and motivation among users.

Final Thoughts: Choosing Your Perfect Smartwatch

In the end, selecting the right smartwatch comes down to your personal preferences and lifestyle needs.

Whether you prioritize fitness tracking, design, or integration with your devices, the Apple Watch, Samsung Galaxy, and Fitbit each offer unique advantages.

Consider what aspects are most important to you and make the choice that aligns with your fitness journey.

The post Top 3 Best-Selling Smartwatches: Which Smartwatch is Right for You? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

Dramatic political polarization. Rising anxiety and depression. An uptick in teen suicide rates. Misinformation that spreads like wildfire.

The common denominator of all these phenomena is that they’re fueled in part by our seemingly innocuous participation in digital social networking. But how can simple acts like sharing photos and articles, reading the news, and connecting with friends have such destructive consequences?

These are the questions explored in the new Netflix docu-drama The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski, it features several former Big Tech employees speaking out against the products they once upon a time helped build. Their reflections are interspersed with scenes from a family whose two youngest children are struggling with social media addiction and its side effects. There are also news clips from the last several years where reporters decry the technology and report on some of its nefarious impacts.

Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) and has become a crusader for ethical tech, is a central figure in the movie. “When you look around you it feels like the world is going crazy,” he says near the beginning. “You have to ask yourself, is this normal? Or have we all fallen under some kind of spell?”

Also featured are Aza Raskin, who co-founded CHT with Harris, Justin Rosenstein, who co-founded Asana and is credited with having created Facebook’s “like” button, former Pinterest president Tim Kendall, and writer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. They and other experts talk about the way social media gets people “hooked” by exploiting the brain’s dopamine response and using machine learning algorithms to serve up the customized content most likely to keep each person scrolling/watching/clicking.

The movie veers into territory explored by its 2019 predecessor The Great Hack—which dove into the Cambridge Analytica scandal and detailed how psychometric profiles of Facebook users helped manipulate their political leanings—by having its experts talk about the billions of data points that tech companies are constantly collecting about us. “Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded,” says Jeff Siebert, a former exec at Twitter. The intelligence gleaned from those actions is then used in conjunction with our own psychological weaknesses to get us to watch more videos, share more content, see more ads, and continue driving Big Tech’s money-making engine.

“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product,” says Lanier. “That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from: changing what you do, how you think, who you are.” The elusive “they” that Lanier and other ex-techies refer to is personified in the film by three t-shirt clad engineers working tirelessly in a control room to keep peoples’ attention on their phones at all costs.

Computer processing power, a former Nvidia product manager points out, has increased exponentially just in the last 20 years; but meanwhile, the human brain hasn’t evolved beyond the same capacity it’s had for hundreds of years. The point of this comparison seems to be that if we’re in a humans vs. computers showdown, we humans haven’t got a fighting chance.

But are we in a humans vs. computers showdown? Are the companies behind our screens really so insidious as the evil control room engineers imply, aiming to turn us all into mindless robots who are slaves to our lizard-brain impulses? Even if our brain chemistry is being exploited by the design of tools like Facebook and YouTube, doesn’t personal responsibility kick in at some point?

The Social Dilemma is a powerful, well-made film that exposes social media’s ills in a raw and immediate way. It’s a much-needed call for government regulation and for an actionable ethical reckoning within the tech industry itself.

But it overdramatizes Big Tech’s intent—these are, after all, for-profit companies who have created demand-driven products—and under-credits social media users. Yes, we fall prey to our innate need for connection and approval, and we’ll always have a propensity to become addicted to things that make us feel good. But we’re still responsible for and in control of our own choices.

What we’re seeing with social media right now is a cycle that’s common with new technologies. For the first few years of social media’s existence, we thought it was the best thing since sliced bread. Now it’s on a nosedive to the other end of the spectrum—we’re condemning it and focusing on its ills and unintended consequences. The next phase is to find some kind of balance, most likely through adjustments in design and, possibly, regulation.

“The way the technology works is not a law of physics. It’s not set in stone. These are choices that human beings like myself have been making, and human beings can change those technologies,” says Rosenstein.

The issue with social media is that it’s going to be a lot trickier to fix than, say, adding seatbelts and air bags to cars. The sheer size and reach of these tools, and the way in which they overlap with issues of freedom of speech and privacy—not to mention how they’ve changed the way humans interact—means it will likely take a lot of trial and error to come out with tools that feel good for us to use without being addicting, give us only true, unbiased information in a way that’s engaging without preying on our emotions, and allow us to share content and experiences while preventing misinformation and hate speech.

In the most recent episode of his podcast Making Sense, Sam Harris talks to Tristan Harris about the movie and its implications. Tristan says, “While we’ve all been looking out for the moment when AI would overwhelm human strengths—when would we get the Singularity, when would AI take our jobs, when would it be smarter than humans—we missed this much much earlier point when technology didn’t overwhelm human strengths, but it undermined human weaknesses.”

It’s up to tech companies to re-design their products in more ethical ways to stop exploiting our weaknesses. But it’s up to us to demand that they do so, be aware of these weaknesses, and resist becoming cogs in the machine.

Image Credit: Rob Hampson on Unsplash

The post ‘The Social Dilemma’ Will Freak You Out—But There’s More to the Story first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

The post Is There Life on Venus? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

Researchers have created an artificial skin that is capable of reacting to pain just like real human skin. The goal is to improve on prosthetics, allow for better alternatives to skin grafts, and even to “augment or compensate human skin for the development of realistic humanoids,”[…]

No technology has been able to create a feeling of pain until now. When heat, cold, or pressure reaches a painful threshold, this artificial skin will react instantly. So this artificial skin will know the difference between gently touching a sharp knife or cutting yourself with it. This is the first time this distinction has been made electronically.

Lead researcher Professor Madhu Bhaskaran said the pain-sensing prototype was a significant advance towards next-generation biomedical technologies and intelligent robotics.

“Skin is our body’s largest sensory organ, with complex features designed to send rapid-fire warning signals when anything hurts,” Bhaskaran said.

“We’re sensing things all the time through the skin but our pain response only kicks in at a certain point, like when we touch something too hot or too sharp.”

This will be a huge breakthrough for people using prosthetics and the future development of robots. Because who doesn’t want their robots to feel pain? Right?

Read more about wearable robots that are in development here.

Click here to check out the story at Futurism

/disruptivetechnology

The post The Next Big Thing: Artificial Skin That Can Feel Pain first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

Humans began to develop systems of reading and writing only within the past few thousand years. Our reading abilities set us apart from other animal species. Still, a few thousand years is much too short a timeframe for our brains to have evolved new areas specifically devoted to reading. […]

Humans began to develop systems of reading and writing only within the past few thousand years. Our reading abilities set us aside from other animal species, but a couple of thousand years is far too short a timeframe for our brains to possess evolved new areas specifically dedicated to reading.

To account for the event of this skill, some scientists have hypothesized that parts of the brain that originally evolved for other purposes are “recycled” for reading. together example, they suggest that a neighborhood of the sensory system that’s specialized to perform visual perception has been repurposed for a critical component of reading called orthographic processing – the power to acknowledge written letters and words.

A new study from MIT neuroscientists offers evidence for this hypothesis. The findings suggest that even in nonhuman primates, who don’t skills to read, a neighborhood of the brain called the inferotemporal (IT) cortex is capable of performing tasks like distinguishing words from nonsense words or picking out specific letters from a word.

“This work has opened a possible linkage between our rapidly developing understanding of the neural mechanisms of visual processing and a crucial primate behavior — human reading,” says James DiCarlo, the top of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator within the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and therefore the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, and therefore the senior author of the study.

Rishi Rajalingham, an MIT postdoc, is that the lead author of the study, which appears in Nature Communications. Other MIT authors are postdoc Kohitij Kar and technical associate Sachi Sanghavi. The research team also includes Stanislas Dehaene, a professor of experimental psychology at the school de France.

Word recognition Reading may be a complex process that needs recognizing words, assigning aiming to those words, and associating words with their corresponding sound. These functions are believed to be opened up over different parts of the human brain.

Functional resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified a neighborhood called the visual form area (VWFA) that lights up when the brain processes a word. This region is involved within the orthographic stage: It discriminates words from jumbled strings of letters or words from unknown alphabets. The VWFA is found within the IT cortex, a neighborhood of the visual area that’s also liable for identifying objects.

DiCarlo and Dehaene took an interest in studying the neural mechanisms behind word recognition after cognitive psychologists in France reported that baboons could learn to discriminate words from nonwords, during a study that appeared in Science in 2012.

Using fMRI, Dehaene’s lab has previously found that parts of the IT cortex that answer objects and faces become highly specialized for recognizing written words once people learn to read.

“However, given the restrictions of human imaging methods, it’s been challenging to characterize these representations at the resolution of individual neurons, and to quantitatively test if and the way these representations could be reused to support orthographic processing,” Dehaene says. “These findings inspired us to ask if nonhuman primates could provide a singular opportunity to research the neuronal mechanisms underlying orthographic processing.”

The researchers hypothesized that if parts of the primate brain are predisposed to process text, they could be ready to find patterns reflecting that within the neural activity of nonhuman primates as they simply check out words.

To test that concept, the researchers recorded neural activity from about 500 neural sites across the IT cortex of macaques as they checked out about 2,000 strings of letters, a number of which were English words and a few of which were nonsensical strings of letters.

“The efficiency of this system is that you simply don’t get to train animals to try to anything,” Rajalingham says. “What you are doing is simply record these patterns of neural activity as you flash a picture ahead of the animal.”

The researchers then fed that neural data into an easy computer model called a linear classifier. This model learns to mix the inputs from each of the five hundred neural sites to predict whether the string of letters that provoked that activity pattern was a word or not. While the animal itself isn’t performing this task, the model acts as a “stand-in” that uses the neural data to get a behavior, Rajalingham says.

Using that neural data, the model was ready to generate accurate predictions for several orthographic tasks, including distinguishing words from nonwords and determining if a specific letter is present during a string of words. The model was about 70 percent accurate at distinguishing words from nonwords, which is extremely almost like the speed reported within the 2012 Science study with baboons. Furthermore, the patterns of errors made by model were virtually like those made by the animals.

Neuronal recycling The researchers also recorded neural activity from a unique brain area that also feeds into IT cortex: V4, which is a component of the visual area. once they fed V4 activity patterns into the linear classifier model, the model poorly predicted (compared to IT) the human or baboon performance on the orthographic processing tasks.

The findings suggest that the IT cortex is especially well-suited to be repurposed for skills that are needed for reading and that they support the hypothesis that a number of the mechanisms of reading are built upon highly evolved mechanisms for visual perception, the researchers say.

The researchers now decide to train animals to perform orthographic tasks and measure how their neural activity changes as they learn the tasks.

Reference Rajalingham et al. (2020). The inferior temporal cortex may be a potential cortical precursor of orthographic processing in untrained monkeys. Nature Communications. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17714-3

This article has been republished from the subsequent materials. Note: material may are edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Original story from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The post How a Recycled Brain Region Helped Humans Learn To Read first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

At the highest of the interview, he told Wired:

“I’ve made my peace with it. At the top of the day, the match wasn’t a curse but a blessing, because I used to be a neighborhood of something vital. Twenty-two years ago, I might have thought differently. But things happen. We all make mistakes. We lose. What’s important is how we affect our mistakes, with a negative experience.”[…]

Sounds like a man who made an error getting his ass beat by a computer. That said, how Kasparov is handling it actually has some value to the remainder of us: Making a compelling case that he was the primary guy to be truly outwitted in his job by a computer, he’s now become a thinker asking questions of the consequences of A.I. that transcend the sensible or the technical, but more towards the philosophical nature of machinery. A mind like Kasparov’s — one who understands the dynamic nature of grand, sweeping, coordinated, changeable movements, gambits, and calculable variabilities as means towards ends — is that the quite thinking the sector could probably use more of.

For instance, one aside Kasparov gave when Wired asked him how close he believes we are to human-level AI:

“We don’t know exactly what intelligence is. Even the simplest computer experts, the people on the leading edge of computing, they still have doubts about exactly what we’re doing.”

He’s utterly correct, both about the unknown nature of what we’re doing and therefore the very nature of intelligence itself, human or otherwise. the whole thing is worth reading if only to ascertain a man finally come to terms 20 years later with getting his ass beat at chess by a computer.

More on AI:

AI generates fake news articles.

AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?

Original Story on Wired

The post I’ve Made “Peace” With Robot That Beat My Ass – Chess Grandmaster Kasparov first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

WHY IT’S DISRUPTIVE:
Private space travel. Elon Musk’s Space X is preparing to fly a full-scale prototype of its Starship for the first time as it sets its sights on the moon and Mars.

This comes on the heels of Space X’s first successful manned mission to the space station this month.

Better late than never as the adage goes. It’s taken much longer than expected to get to this point as Space 2.0 points out.

“We ’re going to go to the moon, we ’re going to have a base on the moon, we ’re going to send people to Mars and make life multi planetary,” Mr Musk said as he greeted two Nasa astronauts.”[…]

Click here to check out the original story

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From lowering your risk of obesity and cardiovascular disease to improving your concentration and overall daily performance, sleep has been proven to play a critical role in our health. In a new study , researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that sleep […]

From lowering your risk of obesity and disorder to improving your concentration and overall daily performance, sleep has been proven to play a critical role in our health. during a new study, researchers at the University of California San Diego School of drugs report that sleep can also help people to find out continuously throughout their lifetime.

Writing in eLife, researchers used computational models capable of simulating different brain states, like sleep and awake, to look at how sleep consolidates newly encoded memories and prevents damage to old memories.

“The brain is extremely busy once we sleep, repeating what we’ve learned during the day. Sleep helps reorganize memories and presents them within the most effective way. Our findings suggest that memories are dynamic, not static. In other words, memories, even old memories, aren’t final. Sleep constantly updates them,” said Maksim Bazhenov, PhD, lead author of the study and professor of drugs at UC San Diego. “We predict that in the sleep cycle, both old and new memories are spontaneously replayed, which prevents forgetting and increases recall performance.”

Bazhenov said that memory replay during sleep plays a protective role against forgetting by allowing equivalent populations of neurons to store multiple interfering memories. “We learn many new things on a day to day, and people’s memories compete with old memories. To accommodate all memories, we’d like sleep.”

For example, imagine learning the way to navigate to a parking zone by going left at one-stop sign and right at one traffic signal. The subsequent day, you’ve got to find out the way to get to a special parking zone using different directions. Bazhenov said sleep consolidates those memories to permit recollection of both.

“When you play tennis, you’ve got a particular motor memory. If you then find out how to play golf, you’ve got to find out the way to move equivalent muscles differently. Sleep makes sure that learning golf doesn’t erase the way to play tennis and makes it possible for various memories to coexist within the brain,” said Bazhenov.

The authors suggest that the restorative value of sleep could also be what’s lacking in current state-of-the-art computer systems that power self-driving cars and recognize images with performances that far exceed humans. However, these AI systems lack the power to find out continuously and can forget old knowledge when new information is learned. “We may have to feature a sleep-like state to computer and robotic systems to stop forgetting after new learning and to form them ready to learn continuously,” said Bazhenov.

Bazhenov said the study results could lead to developing new stimulation techniques during sleep to enhance memory and learning. This might be particularly important in older adults or persons affected by learning disabilities.

“While sleep is certainly involved in many important brain and body functions, it’s going to be critical for creating possible what we call human intelligence — the power to find out continuously from experience, to make new knowledge and to adapt because the world changes around us,” said Bazhenov.

Reference
González et al. (2020). Can sleep protect memories from catastrophic forgetting? eLife. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.51005

This article has been republished from the subsequent materials. Note: material may are edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Original Story

Photo credit: rawpixel

The post Can Sleep Protect Us from Forgetting Old Memories? first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.

a long-deferred dream in aviation — the law will allow them to drive on the states roads, which lawmakers say was not previously legal […]

WHO, WHAT, WHERE & WHY IT’S DISRUPTIVE

What: This new law will allow flying cars to drive on the roads, which was not previously legal in the state.

Who: New Hampshire lawmakers

Where: New Hampshire

Why this is disruptive: This law clears the way for flying cars to drive on the streets without getting sited as an illegal vehicle.

Click here to check out the original story

The post Flying Cars in New Hampshire first appeared on Disruptive Entrepreneur.