Take a better selfie with Lily

Selfie sticks were the must have Xmas gift last year and now a team out of the UC Berkeley robotics lab, who built the first prototype using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino, have developed the Lily camera drone. Watch the video below to see how it works but basically it flies itself and can take video or stills of its owner. Its on my Christmas list.



from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

Put the internet to work for you.

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Calculating Ada The Countess of Computing

With Ada Lovelace Day fast approaching (Oct 13) the BBC has released a timely documentary all about her called "Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing". This is the first documentary Ive seen dedicated to Ada Lovelace and I learnt a lot. For instance I didnt know that she lost a fortune gambling on horse racing. She believed she could calculate the odds better than the bookmakers - she was wrong. The doco is available on YouTube, though I expect it will be taken down soon; otherwise it can be viewed on the BBc iPlayer.


from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Forget Turing the Lovelace Test Has a Better Shot at Spotting AI

I recently blogged about a chatbot, called Eugene Goostman, that was claimed to have passed Alan Turings famous measure of machine intelligence in June by posing as a Ukrainian teenager with questionable language skills. Motherboard notices that "the world went nuts for about an hour before realizing that the bot, far from having achieved human-level intelligence, was actually pretty dumb." This article proposes the Lovelace test for AI that demands an act of creativity from an AI rather than automated conversational skills - its an interesting idea and would be a good way of honouring Ada Lovelace.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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10 awesome internet hacks to make your life better

Well Im not  sure that they are "awesome" but they are potentially useful, interesting or just fun. The Guardian recently published "10 awesome internet hacks to make your life better" that range from: how to log out of Facebook remotely if you left it running on a friends or relatives computer, how to bring up an emoji keyboard on your Mac or PC, and how to watch YouTube in slow motion. 

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Simple is better Making your web forms easy to use pays off

Posted by Javier Bargas-Avila and Mirjam Seckler, User Experience Research at Google

Imagine yourself filling out a long and cumbersome form on a website to register for a service. After several minutes of filling out fields, coming up with a password, and handling captchas, you click the submit button to encounter your form filled with red error messages. Suddenly the “close tab” button seems much more tempting than before.

Despite the rapid evolution of the Internet, web forms, with their limited and unilateral way of interaction, remain one of the core barriers between users and website owners. Any kind of obstacle or difficulty in filling in online forms can lead to increased frustration by the user, resulting in drop-outs and information loss.

In 2010, a set of 20 guidelines to optimize web forms was published by researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland, including best practices aimed to improve web forms and reduce frustration, errors and drop-outs. For instance, guideline no. 13 states that if answers are required in a specific format, the imposed rule should communicated in advance; or no. 15 that states that forms should never clear already completed fields after an error occurs.

To investigate the impact of applying these rules, we conducted a study and presented our results at CHI 2014: Designing usable web forms: empirical evaluation of web form improvement guidelines. In the study, we examined a sample of high traffic online forms and rated them based on how well they followed the form guidelines outlined by the 2010 publication. We then selected three different online forms of varying qualities (low, medium and high), and improved them by applying the guidelines, with the high quality form needing less modification than the medium and low quality forms. We then tested both the original and improved forms extensively with 65 participants in a controlled lab environment.

In our study, the modified forms showed significant improvements over the original forms in the time users needed to complete a form, an increase in successful first-trial submissions and higher user satisfaction. As expected, the impact was highest when the original form was of low quality, but even high quality forms showed improved metrics.

Furthermore, user interviews with participants in the study revealed which guidelines were most impactful in improving the forms:

• Format specifications (e.g., requiring a minimum password length) should be stated in the form, prior to submission. The application of this guideline had a large positive impact on user performance, subjective user ratings and was also mentioned frequently in user interviews.
• Error messages must be placed next to the erroneous field and designed in a way users are easily able to fix the problem. Doing this reduced form-filling time and increased subjective ratings.
• Most frequently users mentioned that it was key to be able to tell apart optional and mandatory fields.

Example Guideline: State format specification in advance

 Example Guideline :Place error message next to erroneous fields

Example Guideline: Distinguish optional and mandatory fields

Putting field labels above rather than adjacent to the fields in the form led also to improvements in the way users scanned the form. Using eye-tracking technology, our study shows that users needed less number of fixations, less fixation time and fewer saccades before submitting the form for the first time.

Scan path for an original and improved form

From our study, we conclude that optimizing online forms is well worth the resource investment. With easy to implement actions, you can improve your forms, increase the number of successful transactions, and end up with more satisfied users. Google is currently working on implementing these findings on our own forms.

We wish to thank our co-authors at the University of Basel, Switzerland for their collaboration in this work: Silvia Heinz, Klaus Opwis and Alexandre Tuch.

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Getting Better Productivity With Construction Management Software

By Jaclyn Hurley

If you are in charge of a major construction project, you will need to assemble all the basic tools that will help you to have an excellent result. Nowadays, the use of specially made software applications is vital to being a competent manager. With construction management software, you will be able to accomplish various essential tasks. A few of these are estimating, communicating, bidding and scheduling.

Managing and directing the crucial aspects of the construction work is the project managers responsibility. Contemplation and proper planning is essential to your accomplishment in this role. Safety issues must be known, costs must be carefully calculated and time for the conclusion of various stages has to be allocated. You must see that all your team members are working in line with the stipulated plan.

With this specialized software, your responsibilities can be effortlessly handled. This computer program will enable the manager to have all the required tools for each phase of the work. It will be very easy to control the entire project from the start to the end. Since this tools works really well, deadlines will be met and lots of time will be saved.

Construction management program has a lot of advantages. It provides an enhanced means of staying in touch with every person on your team. You will easily get any information that is related to any task whenever you want. There will be no miscommunication because workers can check their schedules by simply logging in from various locations.

The cost saving benefits of this software program should be mentioned as well. You will not have to print documents that will be sent to each section because everything is accessible on the program. The inbuilt budgeting feature will make it easier to make accurate calculations. You can easily see and eliminate any budgeting problem.

When you are about to pick software for your construction project, certain issues should be weighed. There are various types of programs on the market and they all come with a variety of features. It is vital to ensure that your preferred one has the required features. A lot of vendors can give you a free sample for a couple of weeks. This is one good way to be sure of the suitability of a particular product.

The applications availability is another important factor. If a third party will be hosting it, then you must make sure that the data center can give you an up time of up to 99.99%. As a rule, the best vendors give their clients a service level agreement. This will spell out the quality of service to be given to you as well as the maintenance that will be done when necessary.

The applications user-friendliness should also be considered. The interface has to be friendly enough for everyone who is on the project to use it without difficulty. If is complex, you may have communication problems with your team sooner or later. Once you have discovered three to four applications that suit your needs, you should evaluate their conditions of use as well as their prices.

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You can visit www.project-note.com for more helpful information about Improving Efficiency With Construction Management Software.

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