Forget 64-bit for a moment, the new Exynos CPUs are rumored to use a 14nm process

Great performance is a good thing, but less time on the power cord is a better thing

64-bit processing is nothing to sneeze at, but it's also nothing new. The first 3Com PDAs used 64-bit processors. Every Intel Atom processor is 64-bit. I think Casio built an old watch with a 64-bit processor in it as well. It means nothing by itself, and the reason Apple's new Samsung-built A7 performs so well is because it was designed to deliver a particular experience to particular software. There's more to it than the number of bits.

While we're not going to dismiss the benefits of moving hardware and operating systems to 64-bit support, there's something much more important said to be part of Samsung's new Exynos design — a 14nm process.

To put it in simple terms, this refers to the way the processor wafers are built, and it's a measurement of space between components. When you move down to 14nm (nanometers) you do a couple very important things. You decrease the cost, and up the power efficiency. Advanced discussion of FinFET, MOFSET and MuGFET advancements are best left to the forums if you're into that.

When you have a minute hour to spare, ask Phil how he loves his Haswell (22nm) laptop. The 22nm process gives it awesome battery life compared to previous versions. Intel loves to crow about the Haswell, with good reason. They also offer a great example of the benefit of a 14nm process, with tests of their upcoming Broadwell chips being 30 percent more power efficient under the same load. 

TSMC has released a roadmap showing they are on-board, but Samsung can meet the demand. If these rumors turn out to be true, and Samsung delivers a 64-bit, HMP-ready 14nm Exynos processor, we may get the performance to power ratio we've been waiting for in our mobile devices. 

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/IUdXDFLPM-Y/story01.htm
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Book News: Arizona Lifts Ban on 7 Mexican-American Studies Books

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

• The Tucson Unified School District is reinstating seven books banned after a Mexican-American Studies program was outlawed in Arizona. In 2010, a judge ruled that the program was illegal under a law banning classes that "promote resentment toward a race or class of people." The books include Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales, Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado and 500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures edited by Elizabeth Martinez. The Arizona Daily Star reports that the governing board voted 3-2 to reinstate the books as "supplementary materials." Meanwhile, Arizona's Department of Education responded in a statement to News 4 Tucson: "Given the prior misuse of the approved texts in TUSD classrooms, the Arizona Department of Education is concerned whether the governing board's actions indicate an attempt to return to practices found to have violated Arizona's statutes in 2011."


• Iranian Culture Minister Ali Jannati said this week that Iran may reconsider its restrictions on certain books that have been banned by censors, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA). Jannati was quoted as saying: "Those books subjected to censorship or denied permission to be published in the past will be reviewed again." He told the Iranian daily Ahram that "I think if the Koran was not a divine revelation, when it was handed to the book supervisory board, they would say some words did not comply with public chastity and would deny it permission for publication."


• Jonathan Franzen speaks to Manjula Martin about writing, social media and making money during an interview in the brand new magazine Scratch: "I think the literary novelist who makes money is like a fish in a tweed suit. Flannery O'Connor talks about the fiction writer's concern being 'a poverty fundamental to mankind.' You lose touch with that impoverishment at your own risk."


• Earlier this week, writer Gregg Barrios complained in a Texas Observer op-ed that in an act of "egregious marginalization," the Texas Book Festival "features only 15 Latina and Latino writers out of 230 invited writers." In another op-ed, the festival's literary director, Steph Opitz, agreed with Barrios, writing, "I, too, am disappointed that there is not more diversity in this year's line-up" and asking to meet with him to hear his suggestions for next year.


• J.J. Abrams named his favorite writers in a New York Times interview: "Mark Twain for his amazing use of language and humor, and H. G. Wells for his wild, prescient imagination. I want to say Salinger, too, but all this is making me sound like I'm still in junior high. I have a great affection for the writing of Graham Greene and am amazed by the soul and poetry of Colum McCann. And I can't tell which is more incredible: how Stephen King can grab you by the throat in whatever damn genre he's writing in, or that as soon as you've finished his latest novel, he's published another one. His skill and prolificacy is otherworldly. Like, maybe literally."


• The New York Times has begun a series of profiles of small poetry presses. Why? Because it says that "many smart people say they're panic-stricken by poetry, as if it were an iambic migraine to be ducked. One purpose of these occasional profiles in poetry is to educate readers who might be tempted by the art, but who aren't sure where to start. We mean to gradually create a guide to the vast archipelago of independent-press poetry publishing." In this installment, Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon Press explains what he look for in a manuscript: "I look for the intentional, the weird and the unexpected that makes a voice singular."

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/10/25/240704193/book-news-arizona-lifts-ban-on-7-mexican-american-studies-books?ft=1&f=1032
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Nielsen's New SDK Adds Mobile Viewing To Its Traditional TV Ratings, Uses Data From Facebook To Match Demographics

After months of trials, Nielsen today is announcing an SDK that will give it the ability to measure how people view TV on mobile apps and other digital formats — data that Nielsen plans to use alongside its core business measuring traditional TV viewing, an essential component for how broadcasters ultimately sell ads against that content.

By doing this, Nielsen is looking for a way to track consumers who now watch TV on “new screens” like tablets and smartphones — still a small number compared to overall TV viewing, but growing by the day, and therefore representing an increasingly interesting audience for businesses that buy TV advertising. Nielsen says the SDK, which will be available to Nielsen clients, will be out by mid-November.

While Nielsen traditionally works with broadcasters and their partners to measure TV consumption, launching this SDK also opens up the company to working with other companies that are digital-only but are also playing a part in how people are consuming TV content today. They include Aero, Netflix, YouTube and more.

Nielsen’s SDK has been on the cards for some time already. In June of this year, Nielsen completed a trial that measured CBS streams that played over the Syncbak app (CBS is a strategic investor in Syncbak). This also used Nielsen’s SDK. Then, at the beginning of October, reports emerged noting an announcement of Nielsen’s mobile streaming measurement service was imminent, but without many details of how it would work.

While Nielsen’s traditional business has relied on meters in homes to measure audio codes in TV shows, that hardware doesn’t monitor devices like computers, tablets and smartphones. Nielsen says that the SDK approach tracks usage with audio watermarks as well as tags and other metadata on the TV shows and their ads. (It’s technology that Nielsen says is patent-pending.)

To figure out who is watching those streams and where, Nielsen says it will use “big data and a census-style measurement approach.” This will involve matching information from services like Facebook — presumably based on your login credentials for those TV apps — and combining this with its existing National People Meter panel.

It’s not clear if Nielsen is paying Facebook a fee to use its data or whether it will in exchange be providing Facebook with data in return that it can use to improve its own ad sales. (We’ve asked, and we’re also trying to find out who, besides Facebook, may be providing data.) Much like Nielsen’s social TV measurement partner Twitter, Facebook wants to make a big play for video and TV-related advertising, and it has been reportedly courting broadcasters with its own data about how TV gets discussed, liked and linked on its social network.

The key with the new SDK is it gives Nielsen a way of measuring consumption that will augment its data on traditional TV viewing, but it will also be able to pick up data about other online video viewing that doesn’t fall into the traditional TV category. If a broadcaster makes a TV show available for viewing on a digital device “and it meets the ad load and timeline requirements for TV ratings,” Nielsen notes, then views of that content will get counted towards overall Nielsen TV ratings.

On the other hand, content not eligible for TV ratings — “due to elapsed crediting time, dynamic ad insertion or because it originated from the Web itself” — then gets included in Nielsen Digital Ratings, i.e. Nielsen Digital Program Ratings for content ratings and Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings for the ad rating.

“We’ve been working hard to deliver this new SDK and are excited to be able to deliver a single client solution that supports both the linear (TV style) and dynamic (Internet style) ad models,” noted Megan Clarken, EVP, Global Product Leader, Nielsen, in a statement. “This unified encoding approach for video enables measurement to follow content across screens and ad models.”

Traditional TV still accounts for the majority of ad spend — just under 58% of all ad spend worldwide in Q2 went to TV advertising, according to figures from Nielsen earlier this month.

But as penetration of tablets and smartphones continues to grow, users are increasingly using those screens for their TV fix. Research from Ooyala notes that about 13% of all digital video plays now come from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, growing by 41% in the first half of this year.

In other words, while Nielsen’s traditional TV measurement business is probably still robust, a large part of that may have had to do with the fact that it can be measured better. Now that it’s introducing new ways of measuring apps and other online formats, it will be worth watching to see how and if ad spend shifts more as a result.

Below, a diagram of how Nielsen sees its new TV ratings system working:

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/6ScB0LTprkM/
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Arcade Fire On Its Brand New Beat

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET.

 

Arcade Fire's new album, Reflektor, comes out Tuesday.

JF Lalonde/Courtesy of the artist

Arcade Fire's new album, Reflektor, comes out Tuesday.

JF Lalonde/Courtesy of the artist

Fans of Arcade Fire might be feeling a bit of culture shock. The group has been called the world's most successful indie rock band — but its new album, Reflektor, explores the Haitian roots of band member Regine Chassagne.

She and her husband, frontman Win Butler, have worked with Haitian relief groups for years; the band has donated more than a million dollars to charities there. Speaking with NPR's David Greene, Chassagne and Butler say the seeds of the idea for Reflektor were planted on a trip they took to Haiti right after winning the 2011 Grammy for Album of the Year, in a total upset.

"And then there's people coming from the mountains to watch us play who've never heard The Beatles before," Butler says of the scene when the band arrived. "You realize, stripped of that context, what you're left with is rhythm and emotion and melody; it kind of gets back to these really of basic building blocks of music. So we kind of wanted to start from there and try and make something out of it."

Reflektor isn't a dance record through and through, but it does incorporate many specific dance rhythms — "Here Comes the Night Time," for example, evokes the Hatian street music known as rara in its faster moments. The title of that song, Butler says, refers to an uncanny sight that can often be seen at dusk on the streets of Port-au-Prince, large parts of which have no electricity.

"Everyone's kind of really hustling to get home because it can be kind of dangerous in a lot of neighborhoods; you have to get home before nightfall. And people have their bags of groceries and they're sprinting in the streets trying to get home," he says. "And then you see, like, three dudes in really sharp suits that are just stepping out to go out to a nightclub or something like that. You kind of have this duality where it's this really exciting atmosphere, but then also really dangerous at the same time.

Chassagne says that though the new album's themes are deeply meaningful to her, she hopes the band has created something that can be appreciated anywhere.

"I'm kind of stuck a little bit in both worlds, so I would like to make something that, basically, my mom could dance. She wouldn't dance to a New Order song, but she would dance to the Haitian beat," Chassagne says. "I want to kind of do something that everybody can lock into."

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/28/240760218/arcade-fire-on-its-brand-new-beat?ft=1&f=10001
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Livescribe 3 smartpen digitizes notes straight to your iPad, starts at $150

Livescribe broke new ground last year with the Sky WiFi pen that could transfer handwritten and audio notes straight to the cloud (well, to your Evernote account anyway), so that they'd be accessible anywhere there's an internet connection. Having to jump on WiFi to send and retrieve those notes ...

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/PpKezNhosPw/
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From metal to machine: See how the iconic Mac Pro is made

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Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/desktop-macs/metal-machine-see-how-the-iconic-mac-pro-made-229517?source=rss_infoworld_blogs
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Kim Kardashian Says She Was "Shaking the Entire Time" During Kanye West's Proposal

In absolute heaven! Kim Kardashian is still on a high following Kanye West's epic proposal earlier this week, and topped off her 33rd birthday celebrations by partying in Las Vegas on Friday, Oct. 25. There with family, friends and her new fiance, the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star dished about baby North and how the proposal (heard around the world!) made her feel. 

PHOTOS: Kim and Kanye -- the perfect match

"I was shaking the entire time," the first-time mom admitted to Us Weekly at her party at Tao Nightclub. "It was like an out of body experience." 

On Monday, Oct. 21, the Yeezus rapper shocked Kardashian when he got down on bended knee at the AT&T Park in San Francisco, Calif., with a massive diamond ring designed by Lorraine Schwartz. "I think it's pretty gorgeous," she said of her new bling.

PHOTOS: Kim's pregnant bikini body

"Complete surprise. I truly had no idea," she gushed to Us about the proposal. "I don't think anyone there though -- they thought it was a surprise birthday party. Even everyone -- my sisters -- it was such a surprise." She added: "I'm marrying my best friend." 

Kardashian and West, 36, have had a busy week since the "Blood On the Leaves" singer popped the question. On Thursday, the pair made their first appearance together since the engagement at Wolfgang Puck's charity Dream for Future Africa Foundation honoring Vogue Italia Editor-In-Chief Franca Sozzani in Beverly Hills.

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"We honestly haven't even had a moment to talk about it or even breathe," Kardashian admitted. But as for wedding plans? "Whatever he wants," she insisted. The blushing bride-to-be also confirmed that Bruce Jenner will be walking her down the aisle. (Us exclusively broke news earlier this month that Bruce and Kris Jenner decided to separate after 22 years of marriage, without any immediate decision to divorce.)

The newly engaged couple first began dating in April 2012 and welcomed daughter North on June 15 of this year. "It's amazing," the reality star told Us of motherhood. "Everything they tell you about motherhood and what it's like to have kids is everything and more. It's the best job I've ever had and the most rewarding experience of my life."

Source: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/kim-kardashian-says-she-was-shaking-the-entire-time-during-kanye-wests-proposal-20132610
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