Techlife News №550 2022

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on plants under quarantine with the Apollo astronauts in Houston after returning from the moon. Most of the lunar stash remained locked away, forcing researchers to experiment with simulated soil made of volcanic ash on Earth. NASA finally doled out 12 grams to the University of Florida researchers early last year, and the long-awaited planting took place last May in a lab. NASA said the timing for such an experiment was finally right, with the space agency looking to put astronauts back on the moon in a few years. The ideal situation would be for future astronauts to tap into the endless supply of available local dirt for indoor planting versus setting up a hydroponic, or all-water, system, scientists said. “The fact that anything grew means that we have a really good starting point, and now the question is how do we optimize and improve,” said Sharmila Bhattacharya, NASA’s program scientist for space biology, The Florida scientists hope to recycle their lunar soil later this year, planting more thale cress before possibly moving on to other vegetation. 52

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Simply Better Living SUPERSTEAM+™ BUILT-IN WALL OVEN SSC2489DS The Sharp® SuperSteam+ Built-In Wall Oven is the start of a cooking revolution. With Wi-Fi enabled IoT features, the innovations within this steam oven are a perfect match for modern cooking needs. While regular steam only reaches 212°F, the SuperSteam+ oven can create superheated steam up to 485°F. Steam this hot can roast meats and caramelize sugars so your food can be brown and crispy on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside. With the Sharp SuperSteam+ Oven, you can grill without smoke, roast without drying, and get the roasty-toasty, tasty results you desire. SEE FOR YOURSELF Get started right away with built-in recipes and The new Sharp SuperSteam+ Built-In Wall Oven download the Sharp SuperSteam+ Oven app* to features Steam Bake for superior breads, and Water enable the smart features and access custom Bath for cheesecakes, custards and puddings. recipes powered by SideChef. www.sharpusa.com | simplybetterliving.sharpusa.com *Mobile Application and Home Assistant Skill available upon commercial release. © 2020 Sharp Electronics Corporation. All rights reserved. Sharp, Supersteam™ Oven and all related trademarks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sharp Corporation and/or its affiliated entities. Product specifications and design are subject to change without notice. Internal capacity calculated by measuring maximum width, depth and height. Actual capacity for holding food is less.

GOOGLE ADOPTS AN APPLE-LIKE APPROACH FOR ITS PIXEL PRODUCTS Google took a big step toward pushing its Pixel product line-up down a road already paved by Apple and its array of trendsetting devices. The latest additions to its six-year-old Pixel brand will include Google’s first smartwatch that draws upon the features and expertise it has gained from last year’s $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness gadget maker Fitbit. The new watch, targeted for an autumn release, marks Google’s first major attempt to make its mark in wearable technology, a market that has 56

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been growing steadily since Apple introduced its smartwatch in 2014. Until now, Google’s presence in the smartwatch market had been limited to making a version of its mobile Android operating system for watches made by other companies. Google also used its annual I/O developers conference to tease a Pixel tablet that it is scheduled for release next year to compete against Apple’s market-leading iPad. Besides showcasing its upcoming devices, Google also previewed the next version of its Android operating system, which runs most of the world’s smartphones outside Apple’s iPhone. It also highlighted several advances in the field of artificial intelligence. Google’s emphasis on new devices signals that a company best known for its dominant search engine and other popular internet software is confident it now has a better handle on how to design and manufacture hardware. It released its first Pixel smartphone in 2016. “It takes a long time to build the capabilities, and now you are seeing very visibly that technology be expressed through many different products,” Rick Osterloh, the executive in charge of Google’s device division, told reporters earlier this week. “It was like an iceberg in that you didn’t see a lot what was happening underneath, but now you can really see all these things coming to the surface.” Because it already brings more than $200 billion annually in digital ad sales, Google can afford to branch out into different directions and find new ways to connect with people, said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. 58

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Adding more products to the Pixel line-up “gives them another touch point to learn and experience things with people more directly,” Nguyen said.“Now, they not only be in your pocket, but now they can be on your wrist, and in your ears, too.” Before launching its smartwatch, Google will be fleshing out its selection of Pixel phones with a new budget model called the 6a coming out in late July, along with its first set of wireless ear buds to include noise cancellation. The Pixel 6a will include Google’s top-of-the line processor but sell for $449 -- a 25% discount from the slightly more sophisticated Pixel 6 released last fall. The Pixel Buds Pro will sell for $199. Both products are scheduled for a July 28 release. Because it already brings more than $200 billion annually in digital ad sales, Google can afford to branch out into different directions and find new ways to connect with people, said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. Adding more products to the Pixel line-up “gives them another touch point to learn and experience things with people more directly,” Nguyen said.“They not only be in your pocket, but now they can be on your wrist, and in your ears, too.” The watch will be the first product to test a privacy pledge that Google made to gain regulatory approval for its Fitbit takeover 16 months ago. As part of the deal, Google promised not to collect the health and fitness information accumulated through Fitbit features to sell digital ads that generate most of its revenue — a commitment that the company said it will honor with the new Pixel Watch. 60

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Although they still aren’t anywhere as popular as phones, smartwatches continued to make significant inroads with projected worldwide shipments of 31.3 million units this year, up from 18.5 million in 2019 before the pandemic helped stoke even more demand for internet- connected gadgets. Even after pouring billions of dollars into a hardware division that now employs thousands of people, Google hasn’t made major inroads. Despite occasional glowing reviews, Pixel smartphones have less than a 1% share of the global market for the devices, according to the research firm International Data Corp. All told, IDC estimates that fewer than 30 million Pixel smartphones have been sold since the release of the first model nearly six years ago. By contrast, Apple shipped more than 56 million iPhones during the first three months of this year alone, according to IDC. But IDC analyst Nabila Popal said there are signs that the Pixel smartphone line is starting to gain more traction. She believes the Pixel 6 would have sold even better than it already has were it not for chip shortages that have hurt a variety of products, increasing the chances that the lower priced 6a model will be “very well received.” For its part, Google says the Pixel 6 already has outsold the Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 combined during its first six months on the market. 62

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GOOGLE GETS MORE MULTILINGUAL, BUT WILL IT GET THE NUANCE? About 10 million people speak Quechua, but trying to automatically translate emails and text messages into the most widely spoken Indigenous language family in the Americas was long all but impossible. That changed this week, when Google added Quechua and a variety of other languages to its digital translation service. The internet giant says new artificial intelligence technology is enabling it to vastly expand Google Translate’s repertoire of the world’s languages. It added 24 of them this week, 66

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including Quechua and other Indigenous South American languages such as Guarani and Aymara. It is also adding a number of widely spoken African and South Asian languages that have been missing from popular tech products. “We looked at languages with very large, underserved populations,” Google research scientist Isaac Caswell told reporters. The news from the California company’s annual I/O technology showcase may be celebrated in many corners of the world. But it will also likely draw criticism from those frustrated by previous tech products that failed to understand the nuances of their language or culture. Quechua was the lingua franca of the Inca Empire, which stretched from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile. Its status began to decline following the Spanish conquest of Peru more than 400 years ago. Adding it to the languages recognized by Google is a big victory for Quechua language activists like Luis Illaccanqui, a Peruvian who created the website Qichwa 2.0, which includes dictionaries and resources for learning the language. “It will help put Quechua and Spanish on the same status,” said Illaccanqui, who was not involved in Google’s project. Illaccanqui, whose last name in Quechua means “you are the lightning bolt,” said the translator will also help keep the language alive with a new generation of young people and teenagers, “who speak Quechua and Spanish at the same time and are fascinated by social networks.” 68

Image: Martin Mejia 69

Image: Martin Mejia 70

Caswell called the news a “very big technological step forward” because until recently, it was not possible to add languages if researchers couldn’t find a big enough trove of online text — such as digital books, newspapers or social media posts — for their AI systems to learn from. U.S. tech giants don’t have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem that’s also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms. Until this week, Google Translate was offered in European languages like Frisian, Maltese, Icelandic and Corsican — each with fewer than 1 million speakers — but not East African languages like Oromo and Tigrinya, which have millions of speakers. The new languages will roll out this week. They won’t yet be understood by Google’s voice assistant, which limits them to text-to-text translations for now. Google said it is working on adding speech recognition and other capabilities, such as being able to translate a sign by pointing a camera at it. That will be important for largely spoken languages like Quechua, especially in the health field, because many Peruvian doctors and nurses who only speak Spanish work in rural areas and “are unable to understand patients who speak mostly Quechua,” Illaccanqui said. “The next frontier, or challenge, is to work on speech,” said Arturo Oncevay, a Peruvian machine translation researcher at the University of Edinburgh who co-founded a research coalition to improve Indigenous language 71

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technology across the Americas. “The native languages of the Americas are traditionally oral.” In its announcement, Google cautioned that the quality of translations in the newly added languages“still lags far behind”other languages it supports, such as English, Spanish and German, and noted that the models“will make mistakes and exhibit their own biases.”But the company only added languages if its AI systems met a certain threshold of proficiency, Caswell said. “If there’s a significant number of cases where it’s very wrong, then we would not include it,” he said.“Even if 90% of the translations are perfect, but 10% are nonsense, that’s a little bit too much for us.” Google said its products now support 133 languages. The latest 24 are the largest single batch to be added since Google incorporated 16 new languages in 2010. What made the expansion possible is what Google is calling a “zero-shot”or“zero-resource”machine translation model — one that learns to translate into another language without ever seeing an example of it. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta introduced a similar concept called the Universal Speech Translator last year. Google’s model works by training a “single gigantic neural AI model” on about 100 data- rich languages, and then applying what it’s learned to hundreds of other languages it doesn’t know, Caswell said. “Imagine if you’re some big polyglot and then you just start reading novels in another language, you can start to piece together what it could mean based on your knowledge of language in general,” he said. 73

He said the new group ranges from smaller languages like Mizo, spoken in northeastern India by about 800,000 people, to more widely spoken languages like Lingala, spoken by around 45 million people across Central Africa. It was more than 15 years ago — in 2006 — that Microsoft got some positive attention in South America with a software feature translating familiar Microsoft menus and commands into Quechua. But that was before the current wave of AI advancements in real-time translation. Harvard University language scholar Américo Mendoza-Mori, who speaks Quechua, said getting Google’s attention brings some needed visibility to the language in places like Peru, where Quechua speakers are still lacking in many public services. The survival of many of these languages “will depend on their use in digital contexts,” he said. Another language scholar, Roberto Zariquiey, said he’s skeptical that Google could make an effective language revitalization tool for Quechua, Aymara or Guarani without closer participation from community groups in the region. “Languages are deeply linked to lives, to cultures, to ethnic groups and political organizations,” said Zariquiey, a linguist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. “This should be taken into account.” The new languages added are: Assamese, Aymara, Bambara, Bhojpuri, Dhivehi, Dogri, Ewe, Guarani, Ilocano, Konkani, Krio, Lingala, Luganda, Maithili, Meiteilon (Manipuri), Mizo, Oromo, Quechua, Sanskrit, Sepedi, Sorani Kurdish, Tigrinya, Tsonga and Twi. 74

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EA SPORTS AND FIFA END PARTNERSHIP, BOTH EYE NEW VIDEO GAMES Image: Christophe Gateau Electronic Arts will stop making its hugely successful FIFA video game in its current name, marking a split in one of soccer’s most successful and lucrative partnerships after the sides failed to strike a new licensing deal. Instead, the California company said that EA Sports FC will be introduced from 2023 after it creates the final game in partnership with FIFA later this year. Licensing rights for the game earn FIFA about $150 million annually — the single biggest commercial earner in its expected $7 billion total 79

revenue from 2019-2022 — though FIFA struck a defiant tone in a statement published hours after the announcement of losing that income. FIFA promised a “number of new non-simulation games (that) are already under production” and will launch ahead of the 2022 World Cup that kicks off in Qatar in November. FIFA said it plans to create a “new gaming model” and cited the recent launch of its streaming service FIFA+. “I can assure you that the only authentic, real game that has the FIFA name will be the best one available for gamers and football fans,” FIFA president Gianni Infantino said in the statement. EA has been producing a FIFA game for nearly 30 years and its fond association with tens of millions of gamers worldwide helped the Zurich-based organization’s brand when it was tarnished amid a wave of arrests of soccer officials in 2015. For generations of young people, FIFA has means a video game rather than a sports institution. Though EA Sports FC will be unable to include FIFA content including the World Cup, it retains licensing deals with prime soccer competitions including the English Premier League and the UEFA-organized Champions League. The EA announcement showed the strength of those partnerships with warm comments from executives from the Premier League, UEFA and Spain’s La Liga while a coordinated release of tweets posted by dozens of soccer clubs used the slogan “We’re In The Club” to align with the EA Sports FC brand. 80

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“We’re thankful for our many years of great partnership with FIFA,” EA CEO Andrew Wilson said. “The future of global football is very bright, and fandom around the world has never been stronger.” Wilson promised “even more innovative and authentic experiences to the growing football audience” while its soon-to-be rival FIFA spoke of creating ”new, interactive experiences to fans across the globe.” “The interactive gaming and e-sports sector is on a path of unrivaled growth and diversification,” Infantino said. “FIFA’s strategy is to ensure we can make the most of all future options and ensure a wide range of products and opportunities for gamers, fans, member associations and partners.” 85





MS. PAC-MAN CLEARS PATH TO WORLD VIDEO GAME HALL OF FAME More than 40 years after blazing a trail for female video game characters, Ms. Pac-Man was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame, along with Dance Dance Revolution, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Sid Meier’s Civilization. The Hall of Fame considers electronic games of all types each year — arcade, console, computer, handheld and mobile. Inductees are recognized for their popularity and influence on the video game industry or pop culture over time. The Ms. Pac-Man arcade game was released in 1981 as Midway’s follow-up to Pac-Man, which entered the hall as part of the inaugural class in 2015. The Pac-Man sequel reimagined the main 88

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character to acknowledge the original game’s female fans, according to the hall. After selling 125,000 cabinets within the first five years, it became one of the best-selling arcade games of all time. There was nothing inherently gendered about early video games, said Julia Novakovic, senior archivist at the hall. But“by offering the first widely recognized female video game character,”she said, “Ms. Pac-Man represented a turn in the cultural conversation about women’s place in the arcade, as well as in society at large.” The Class of 2022 was chosen from a field of finalists that also included Assassin’s Creed, Candy Crush Saga, Minesweeper, NBA Jam, PaRappa the Rapper, Resident Evil, Rogue, and Words with Friends. It is the eighth class to be inducted since the World Video Game Hall of Fame was established at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution, first seen in arcades in Japan in 1998, was recognized for helping to pave the way for other music-centered games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The fast- paced game put players on a dance floor with a screen in front to direct their moves. “Music has been an integral part of human life since prehistoric times, so it comes as no surprise that DDR enjoyed a unique popularity that spanned ages, genders, and regions,”said video game curator Lindsey Kurano. A home version of the game followed on the Sony PlayStation in 1999. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, also first released in 1998, came out for the Nintendo 64 91

gaming console and defined what a 3D action video game could be, Hall of Fame officials said. The award-winning game sold more than 7.6 million copies worldwide and continues to be recognized by some players and critics as one of the best video games ever made. “Even today, developers throughout the world credit The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as influencing the way they create games,” digital games curator Andrew Borman said. “The game’s sprawling 3D world, fluid combat, complex puzzles and time-shifting story combined to inspire a wonder in players that they have never forgotten.” Sid Meier’s Civilization, released in 1991, was recognized as an influential simulation and strategy game. The game, which invited players to develop their own empires, launched a series of successor games, including the most recent Civilization: Beyond Earth and Civilization VI. “The addictive nature of the game, which creator Sid Meier himself called the‘one more turn’ quality, and its nearly unlimited choices that prevented repetitive gameplay, earned Civilization recognition from Computer Gaming World as the best video game of all time in 1996,”said Jon-Paul Dyson, director ofThe Strong’s International Center for the History of Electronic games.“Altogether — and given the extraordinarily long periods of play the game afforded — players have engaged with the Civilization series for more than a billion hours.” Anyone can nominate a game for theWorldVideo Game Hall of Fame. Final selections are made on the advice of journalists, scholars and others with knowledge of the history of video games and their role in society. 92

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RepairSelf Service Empowering consumers to fix their devices Image: Greg Rosenke 97

As Apple officially launches its Self Service Repair program in the United States, consumers can now purchase genuine Apple parts and tools and fix broken iPhones and Macs, setting a new standard for repairs and empowering consumers. The scheme offers real environmental benefits, cutting down on waste and extending the lifespan of the world’s most beloved tech. 98

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