Preciscope: July 2017

Thursday 27 July 2017

FUJI FILM INSTAX MINI 9 ; DELIGHT OF THE PHOTO LOVERS

Fujifilm have launched new camera , that can be described as combination of electronics and Polaroid technology that gives instant photos.

The Fuji film Instax Mini 9 is built of plastic, but of impeccable finish. At the back, there is a small compartment for the film cartridge, an optical viewfinder and a counter which shows you the number of unused film sheets remaining. The batteries slot in on the side and there is a loop for the wrist strap on both sides.

The processed film is ejected from the top. There are flash and light measuring sensors the automatically adjust the exposure. There are a power button and shutter button besides the lens. In order to switch between different exposures, the ring around the lens will be used. The Hi-Key is the only key that can actually force the camera to use that sets the flash to go off at its maximum intensity for low-light situations. Other wise the camera automatically calculates the best exposure and switched to it, which is indicated by different LEDs. The instax Mini 9’s film sheets give up to to 62 x 46cm photos. The chemicals contained in the little pocket at the bottom of the sheets when exposed to light pushed in to the frame with help of rollers as it is ejected from the camera. The film will take around 2 minutes to develop fully. The frames can be personalized with white frames and drawings, etc.

The flash always fires, no matter the light conditions. The presence of close up lens that can be clipped on the front of the main lens and that allows to shoot the objects as close as a foot away from the lens.

Wednesday 19 July 2017

DATA STORAGE ISSUE? ...DNA.... THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION

Researchers of the Columbia University along with the New York Genome Center (NYGC) successfully carried out the storage of data in abundance on DNA. As described the Author Yaniv Erlich, this is the “ highest-density data-storage device ever created.”

According to the news release from the researchers, DNA is the perfect storage medium; it is ultra-compact and last hundreds of thousands of years if kept cool and dry. DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete-

Erlich; a professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering and Dina Zielinski a scientist at NYGC, successfully encoded six files into DNA: A full computer operating system, a movie “Arrival of a train at La Ciotat, An Amazon gift card, a computer virus a pioneer plaque and 1948 study by information theorist, Claude Shannon.

They first compressed the files into a master file and split the data into short strings of binary code, made up of ones and zeros. Next, "using an erasure-correcting algorithm called FOUNTAIN CODES they randomly packaged the strings into so-called droplets and mapped the ones and zeros in each droplet to the four nucleotide bases in DNA: A, G, C, and T," according to the release.

Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco based DNA synthesis entity, a specialist in converting to biological data from digital data made two molecules out of the list of 72,000 DNA strands send by the above researching organization.

It took two weeks to receive a package holding a speck of DNA molecules. The school wrote... "To retrieve their files, they used modern sequencing technology to read the DNA strands, followed by software to translate the genetic code back into binary. They recovered their files with zero errors."

According to the researchers, this technique allows for 215 petabytes of data to be stored in a gram of DNA. How ever this method costs very high monetarily.

They spent $7000 per 2MB of data to be synthesized and extra $2000 to read it. So don’t think this will be available in the market in the immediate future.

Wednesday 12 July 2017

LET ROBOTS WRITE FOR NEWSPAPERS

In par with the revolutionary changes taking place in the field of media, the journalism also experiencing similar stunning changes.

ROBOT journalism. The computers will take care generating articles considerably larger quantities that humans can’t do. If man can generate 300 articles the computer could generate 30000 or more articles per month.

Google has given US$ 620,000 to Press Association, the publisher to its Data & Robots scheme. (Radar) . The project is aimed to launch on 2018 will see robots (computer) will use the local government database to generate reports.

Pete Clifton, editor-in-chief at PA, said the robot journalism project would benefit "established media outlets" and independent publishers

The implementation of Robo journals does not mean it will end the service of human journalists, instead, Radar provides artificial intelligence to build stories based on the provided data generate articles that would be impossible to provide manually. “Cost effective way of producing local stories” we can say comprehensively about this project.

Google in a bid to help the local media in the digital age has been working on it since 2 years.

So no, computers are not taking journalists' jobs — not yet, at any rate. Instead, they're freeing up writers to think more critically about the bigger picture. "One of the things we really wanted reporters to be able to do was when earnings came out to not have to focus on the initial numbers," said Patterson. "That's the goal, to write smarter pieces and more interesting stories."

By implementing robot in journalism we can reduce the errors and false stories markedly. The promoters say.

But for sure the stories generated by robots may not be as tasty as the stories produced by Homo sapiens as the former lacks investigation and involvement.