Google Now: Hidden features unlocked by your voice in Android

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Teaching Google Now your relationship to contacts

You can help Google Now connect a relationship to each person in your contact list by a very simple, familiar process: talking.

For example, you could say:

  • “Cindy is my wife.”
  • “My boss is John Doe.”
  • “Victor is my cousin.”
  • “Lisa Smith is my cousin.”

Google Now will look at the contact data available on your device, and respond by either:

  • Confirming the relationship: “Your wife is Cindy Jones.”
  • Asking for more detail when your contacts offer more than one possibility:
    • “There are 3 entries for the name Cindy: Which is correct?”
    • The three contacts appear in a numbered list by full name:
      1. Cindy Brady
      2. Cindy Vasquez
      3. Cupcakes By Cindy
    • You can say the number for your wife’s full name, and the relationship is set by Google.

Why do this?

After a relationship is defined, you can use more natural phrases when talking to Google Now. The following examples would all produce the same result, but the first is how most of us talk to each other:

  • “Remind me to meet my wife at 6pm tomor row
  • Why doesn’t Google Now just know this stuff?

We take for granted that our brains are optimized to seek patterns, find connections and classify things by the traits unique to it. The human mind binds information it collects to learned as well as natural hierarchies, and changes the ‘container’ for a piece of information when its context is changed by something new or better understood.

Excluding advanced Machine Learning systems and the giant processing platforms few of us use regularly, mainstream databases and computers, unfortunately, need data relationships to be defined, connected and described on both ends using the same criteria.

Even then, the data it has must be accurate to be manipulated properly: if a column in a table named “Birthplace” is filled erroneously with the city names that are actually the current address, any attempt to count the number of births by city in a data set will be partially accurate, frequently wrong, and any subsequent analysis that references that bad data will also be skewed or useless.

by swiping to the Google Now screen, selecting voice recognition, and explaining to your Android device how some people, places and things have nicknames specific to you.

You may define many at once, or teach Android incrementally, or even change and remove contact-nickname pairs you created.

Once a relationship is added, you can call, text, or email the person using their nickname.

Add a nicknA

dd relationships to your contacts

You can specify a relationship to each person in your contact list. Once a relationship is added, you can call, text, or email the person using their nickname.

Add a nickname

Open the Google app .

Touch the microphone icon microphone icon or say “Ok Google,” then say a nickname for one of your contacts. For example, “Diane is my mom.”

If you have multiple contacts with the same first name, pick the correct person.

Touch Add nickname.

Once the nickname is added, you can contact them by saying things like “Text my sister” or “Email my mom.”

Nicknames you can use

Mother/Mom/Mama/Mum

Father/Dad/Daddy

Brother

Sister

Partner

Grandfather/Grandpa/Granddad

Grandmother/Grandma

Wife

Husband

Son

Daughter

Niece

Nephew

Uncle

Aunt

Cousin

Assistant

Manager/Boss

Girlfriend

Boyfriend

Remove a nickname

To remove a nickname for a contact, tell Google that the contact shouldn’t go with that nickname. For example, “Jeff is not my boyfriend.”

Once the contact appears, touch Remove nickname.

Availability

This feature is only available if your Google app language is set to English.ame

Open the Google app .

Touch the microphone icon microphone icon or say “Ok Google,” then say a nickname for one of your contacts. For example, “Diane is my mom.”

If you have multiple contacts with the same first name, pick the correct person.

Touch Add nickname.

Once the nickname is added, you can contact them by saying things like “Text my sister” or “Email my mom.”

Nicknames you can use

Mother/Mom/Mama/Mum

Father/Dad/Daddy

Brother

Sister

Partner

Grandfather/Grandpa/Granddad

Grandmother/Grandma

Wife

Husband

Son

Daughter

Niece

Nephew

Uncle

Aunt

Cousin

Assistant

Manager/Boss

Girlfriend

Boyfriend

Remove a nickname

To remove a nickname for a contact, tell Google that the contact shouldn’t go with that nickname. For example, “Jeff is not my boyfriend.”

Once the contact appears, touch Remove nickname.

Availability

This feature is only available if your Google app language is set to English.

Holiday aboard a space hotel by 2020?

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What it will be like to stay on board a space hotel

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The first space hotel may be opened as soon as 2020. But before you get excited, here’s a little warning about what an out-of this-world vacation may actually be like.

After a tiring 300km journey, there will be no time to relax because zero gravity will have you in an uncontrollable spin. The trick is to find your center of mass, usually just behind your belly button.

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Space Hotel in Dubai: no liftoff

Once you learn how to push off objects along an imaginary line running through this point, you can stop spinning and move around.

Read the full story at BBC online:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140718-what-is-it-like-on-a-space-hotel

Visit a company with plans to put their hotel in orbit by 2016:

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Orbital Technologies' space hotel room

Infographic: The Nutrition of Mental Health

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Print

Online Bipolar Test

The set of questions in this bipolar test is only valid if you’re I8 years or older and have also experienced an episode of depression bad enough to have caused problems in the functioning of one or more important aspects of life.

To take the bipolar test, respond to each statement by checking the radio button alongside. The statements make reference to how you’ve behaved and felt throughout most of your life, even if they may have recently changed.

The test is only going to score correctly if all of the questions are answered.

This test is deigned to help, and not replace expert clinical opinion.

The bipolar test is based on the Goldberg Bipolar Spectrum Screening Questionnaire, which was developed by Dr Ivan Goldberg.

 

Infographic: Mental Health and Gender

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Mental Health and Gender

This infographic goes beyond simply being attractive and
provides a wealth of information on a rarely discussed topic:
how depression affects women differently than men.

 

#infographic #mentalHealth #womenAndMen


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Women suffer from depression twice as often as men do.

The diagnostic criteria for depression are identical for either sex, but women that have depression experience anxiety, guilt, increased appetite and sleep, co-morbid eating disorders and weight gain more frequently. During a lifetime, depression happens in about 20% of women in comparison to 10% of men.

 

 

SANCTITY OF MARRIAGE: The answer? Follow God’s scriptural laws as intended

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biblical-marriage

These rules are all found in the Bible you have in your house, and they are very specific about marriage… being a rather transactional and fluid concept, much as the woman was in that era.

So…
perhaps the ‘Will of God’ angle isn’t the best way
to cloak supporting discrimination or fear.

Marriage, as we think we know it,
is only about 100 years along.

When considering all that was in and out of favor in
the 6,000 years of human existence, it’s easier
to see that marriage has survived much
more real and serious  alterations.

If two people love one another,
wouldn’t anyone want them to be happy,
together & equal among everyone else?

The Deadliest Animal in the World

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What would you say is the most dangerous animal on Earth? Sharks? Snakes? Humans?

Of course the answer depends on how you define dangerous. Personally I’ve had a thing about sharks since the first time I saw Jaws. But if you’re judging by how many people are killed by an animal every year, then the answer isn’t any of the above. It’s mosquitoes.

When it comes to killing humans, no other animal even comes close. Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do.

Take a look:

  • Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year.
  • Mosquitoes kill 50,000 times as many people, but if there’s a TV channel that features Mosquito Week, I haven’t heard about it.

 

 

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Courtesy of CoolInfoGraphics:

http://www.coolinfographics.com/blog/2014/5/2/the-deadliest-animal-in-the-world.html