Month: September 2017

Enlarge / The Series 3 supports several watch faces, as expected.

The headline feature of the new Apple Watch may not work as reliably as it should when the device starts shipping later this week.

In a review of the Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular, which promises the ability to connect to LTE networks independently from a user’s iPhone, The Verge’s Lauren Goode wrote that the device repeatedly struggled to join a cellular network and would instead remain hung up on “random” Wi-Fi signals. The issue persisted across two separate test units, the review said.

The hangup was significant enough for an Apple spokesperson to provide Goode with a statement acknowledging the issue, in which the company says it is “investigating a fix” for the connectivity problem.

Enlarge / Jim Bridentstine, left, in the halls of Congress. (credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Oklahoma Congressman Jim Bridenstine, who was nominated to become NASA's next administrator by the Trump administration on Sept. 1, may get a Senate confirmation hearing as early as next week. The choice of the 42-year-old Republican pilot has raised objections among some of his fellow members of Congress, because Bridenstine does not have a technical background, as well as from environmentalists, due to his views on climate change.

However, a pre-hearing questionnaire submitted by Bridenstine addresses some of these criticisms and also offers some important clues about where he would like to see the space agency go. "With NASA's global leadership, we will pioneer the Solar System, send humans back to the Moon, to Mars, and beyond. This requires a consistent, sustainable strategy for deep space exploration." Bridenstine supports human missions to the Moon before going to Mars.

Florida senators

Among the first critics of Bridenstine's nomination on Sept. 1 were Florida's two senators, Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Marco Rubio. Nelson told Politico that the head of NASA should have a professional background, rather than a political one. Rubio echoed Nelson's sentiments, saying, “I just think it could be devastating for the space program. Obviously, being from Florida, I’m very sensitive to anything that slows up NASA and its mission." He added that NASA's administrator should have a scientific perspective.

Enlarge (credit: Cultura RM Exclusive/KaPe Schmidt/GettyImages)

Machine learning (ML) based data analytics is rewriting the rules for how enterprises handle data. Research into machine learning and analytics is already yielding success in turning vast amounts of data—shaped with the help of data scientists—into analytical rules that can spot things that would escape human analysis in the past—whether it be in pursuit of pushing forward genome research or predicting problems with complex machinery.

Now machine learning is beginning to move into the business world. But most organizations haven't truly grasped how machine learning will change the way they do business—or how it will change the shape of their organizations in the process. Companies are looking to ML to automate processes or to augment humans by assisting them in data-driven tasks. And it's possible that ML could turn enterprises into vendors—turning lessons learned from their own vast stores of data into algorithms they can license to software and service providers.

But getting there will depend on how machine learning capabilities evolve over the next five years and what implications that evolution has for today's long-time hiring/recruitment strategies. And nowhere is this more crucial than in unsupervised machine learning, where systems are given vast datasets and told to find the patterns without humans having first figured out what the software needs to look for. With minimal pre-task human efforts needed, the scalability of unsupervised machine learning is much higher.