Twitter Can Tell Whether Your Community Is Happy or Not

Maps Governments from the local to the national are increasingly interested in "wellbeing," that subjective notion that's harder to measure than per capita income or GDP, that comes closer to capturing what we more vaguely think of as happiness. We'd all like to have it: quality of life, life satisfaction, fulfillment. As researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University put it in a recent study on the topic, with a technological...

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Six Months of Computing Time Generates Detailed Portrait of Cloth Behavior for Video Games

Tuesday, July 23, 2013 Contact: Byron Spice / 412-268-9068 / bspice@cs.cmu.edu PITTSBURGH—It would be impossible to compute all of the ways a piece of cloth might shift, fold and drape over a moving human figure. But after six months of computation, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are pretty sure they've simulated almost every important configuration of that cloth. "I believe our approach generates...

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Samsung Galaxy Music S6010 updated to Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean

Samsung’s Galaxy Music (model number S6010) was launched at the end of last year running Android Ice Cream Sandwich, with the promise of a future update to Jelly Bean. Now the update is ready, and it looks like it’s being rolled-out in the UK first. Bringing Android 4.1.2 to the handset, the update can be downloaded over the air, or via Samsung Kies. At the moment, the Galaxy Music S6010 costs less than €150 unlocked. It’s a decent little smartphone...

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Apple takes in more than twice the revenue of Microsoft and loses market share

Apple earned twice the revenue of Microsoft last quarter but still lost over 10 percent of its market value.  What does that say about the differing expectations concerning Apple and Microsoft?  Mostly that investors expect more out of Apple and when they don’t get it they are quick to punish the company. The Washington Post reports that Apple’s revenue for last quarter was $54.5 billion, up from $46.3 billion.  Microsoft announced...

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Is Microsoft right to increase the price of Windows 8?

The ability to get Windows 8 on the cheap (in a legal and legitimate way) is ending soon. But is Microsoft doing the right thing in upping the price of its latest operating system? Anyone choosing to upgrade to Windows 8 from XP, Vista, or Windows 7 has, until now, been able to do so on the cheap. By taking advantage of Microsoft’s admittedly generous early discounts, it’s been possible to justify switching to the latest operating system, even if...

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Check out Mac OS X Mavericks multi-screen enhancements in action

One of the more exciting and “why didn’t they do it like that before” type features in Mac OS X Mavericks is the new and enhanced multi-monitor mode ability. For those who spend half their time on-the-go and the other half in the home office, a MacBook Pro with Retina display and Apple 27-inch cinema display is the perfect setup. The only problem is that the current way of using two screens totally killed the one great feature of Mountain Lion: Full...

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