What's the Fastest Language to Type In?

With its characters, Chinese definitely saves space, but is it also fast to type or text in?

Credit: PhuShutter / Shutterstock.com

If you want to save space, write in Chinese.

The payoff of those labyrinthine characters is that they can fit a lot of information into a small symbol.

For example, here's the same sentence in English and Chinese:

What time did you get up in the morning?

你早上几点起床？

If it's books you're publishing, you'll be saving trees. If it's tweets, there's still a long way to 140 characters.

Of course, the other side of the bargain is that, since the Bronze Age, literate Chinese people have had to spend years of their lives memorizing thousands of ornate figures. 

But in 2016, you can live most of your life on a screen, so the difficulty of writing a language by hand is losing relevance. Rather, what matters more to a lot of people is how easy it is to type and text.

Ease of typing in Chinese

In the case of Chinese, the 3,500-year commitment seems to have paid off. The language types like a dream. [Related: What's the Hardest Language to Learn?]

It uses a no-frills grammar systemand eschews spacing altogether. And because of the challenges posed by thousands of unique characters, Chinese engineers have been forced to push software to its real potential. Case in point: On both keyboards and touch screens, Chinese peoplefavor sophisticated predictive input tools, whereas while the West mostly falls back on what-you-hit-is-what-you-get typing — a method that does a nice job of simulating a typewriter but doesn't explore any of the more agile solutions that software might open up.

With the most popular Chinese input tool, you write out a word with a phonetic alphabet called pinyin, and then select from a pop-up menu of characters that you're likely looking for. The twist: For many phrases, the only information necessary is the initial letter of each character (technically, the initial letter of the character's phonetic spelling), so you can write whole sentences with just a few letters.

For example, if you want to write "Have you eaten yet?" in Chinese, you just key in "nclm," a first-letter-only version of the phrase "Ni chi le ma?" which would be called up as the corresponding characters on your screen.

For "The air pollution is pretty severe today," just hit "jtkqwrhyz," and the characters corresponding to the phrase "Jin-tian kong-qi wu-ran hen yan-zhong" will be the first suggestion.

It's sort of like being able to type whole sentences in "ttyl"- or "lol"-style text speak, but the end result is still proper Chinese. So the same tool can be used for chats and professional emails, too.

The system does have weak spots, especially when it comes to unusual characters, and there are plenty of predictive input tools available in English as well. But even if typists of both languages were using predictive software and hitting keys at the same speed, a Chinese typist might still have an edge. Chinese can often convey an idea more concisely; the character system offers a natural way to break down words into their component chunks, which is ideal for giving a predictive tool an info-rich outline of a word or phrase.

As an example, compare the word "beautiful" and its Chinese equivalent, "美丽." The Chinese word can be easily separated into its two component characters , whose initials can then be used to sketch the word for a piece of software, while in English there's no obvious rule for how to reduce words to a few key joints.）

[Check out the Best Android Keyboard Apps from Live Science's sister site Tom's Guide]

Languages with characters

It raises the question, then, whether there's a written language that's even better suited to digital communication — one whose compactness, or amenability to predictive input software, makes it the internet generation's optimal writing system.

The United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in 475 languages and counting. A comparison of translations of the document based on character count shows that languages with thousands of distinct symbols at their disposal — such as Japanese, Chinese and Korean — have an advantage in compressing their communications. Of those, Chinese seems to be the language to beat (even after accounting for its lack of spaces), according to an informal survey. [Related: 25% of the World's Languages Are Threatened]

Nuosu, an ancient logographic language used by the Yi ethnic group in southwest China, is Chinese's closest rival in this "fast-texting competition." (Logographic languages are those in which each symbol or letter represents an entire word.) Vowel-eliding Hebrew and Arabic also have below-average character counts. Meanwhile, the Wamma language of Benin stands out for getting an unusual amount of value-per-character out of the Latin alphabet.

Innate predictability

But the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is just one text, written in a specific style, and then translated by specific people who each made their own choices. And character count alone doesn't give much insight into the speed at which a writing system might be used to communicate in the real world, especially when you add performance-enhancing software to the mix.

As software gets better at guessing the words texters are looking for before they even get to them, there's a variable in typing efficiency that could be more important than a language's concision: its innate predictability. [Related: Adding Additional Languages to an Android Tablet]

Languages vary both by the number of words in everyday circulation and by the range of permissible sequences for arranging those words. These features contribute to what linguists and information theorists call a language's entropy, where highly predictable languages are said to have low entropy and vice versa.

In general, the lower a language's entropy is, the easier it is to model with a computer, and thus the easier it should be to conquer with time-saving predictive input tools, according to Steven Piantadosi, head of the University of Rochester's Computation and Language Lab.

In a study published online in 2011 in the journal PLOS ONE, Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester in the U.K. and a colleague estimated entropy values for groups of texts from eight languages, including English, French, German, Finnish, Tagalog, Chinese, Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Among these, Sumerian showed the lowest entropy, followed by Egyptian, Tagalog and Chinese, suggesting that ancient Sumerian and Egyptian writing systems might make for fast typing if anyone cared to use them.

But Piantadosi cautions that comparing entropy across languages is not easy.

"There is one big complication, which is that the methods we use to estimate entropy may not be 'fair' across languages," he wrote in an email to Live Science.

While a model that predicts the probability of a word based on the word immediately preceding it might work for some languages (e.g., What's the probability that the word "and" will be followed by the word "sour"?), other languages might be better suited to a model that instead makes a guess based on the previous two words (e.g., What's the probability that the words "sweet and" will be followed by the word "sour"?), or other systems entirely.

Playing the Shannon Game

There's one predictive model that suits every language: the brain of a native speaker.

"One way to get around this problem is to use a psychological notion of predictability — have people guess the next word," Piantadosi wrote. "[This method] almost certainly reflects a closer estimate to the 'true' predictability of a language."

There's a name for this type of guessing game, in which players guess words or letters based on those that precede them in a sequence. It's called the Shannon Game, after mathematician Claude Shannon, considered to be the father of information theory.

Until speakers of the world's languages put in some hard hours playing the Shannon Game and produce accurate estimates for the entropies of their native tongues, the question of which language is the fastest to type is still anybody's ________.Resource: livescience.com

These Robots Are Chains of Tiny Magnetic Beads

A 7-bead chain of magnets. Each microbead is less than five microns across.

Credit: U Kei Cheang, Drexel University

Healing with magnets might one day be considered legitimate medicine — at least if those magnets are also microscopic surgical robots.

By manipulating the samemagnetic fields that were shown to control the swimming motion of microscopic robots, a team of engineers at Drexel University has demonstrated the ability to assemble and disassemble chains of tiny magnetic beads.

"If you have these simple geometries as building blocks, you can put them together to make more complicated shapes that can do more things," study co-author Henry Fu, now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, told Live Science. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created]

The hope is to eventually use these remotely controlled chains — dubbed modular microrobots — in the human body for medical purposes, such as delivering targeted medicines or performing surgeries on a very small, noninvasive scale, the researchers said.

Different combinations and shapes of the spherical beads could mean greater versatility. For example, the beads could be transported to a site in the body more easily in one configuration, Fu said, but could then be manipulated into different shapes to move through various tissues or perform specific tasks.

Charles Tremblay, a researcher in the Nanorobotics Laboratory at Polytechnique Montreal, who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email that the project is a "good idea," but said some of the challenges include the "need for visual feedback and transparent medium" to maneuver the robots.

Researchers observe the chains under a microscope, and remotely manipulate the "microswimmers" by adjusting an array of three solenoids, electromagnets that produce a controlled magnetic field. When rotated, the chains swim through fluid.

A chain of three beads, just 10 microns long (for perspective, the width of an average human hair is about 100 microns), is the simplest of the microswimmers the team worked with. That makes them "a little bigger" than bacteria that Fu studied previously. "I've looked at the fluid mechanics of how [bacteria] swim," he said, "The principles are the same whether you're a robot or a living thing."

The researchers had to work out ways to build chains without the magnets repelling each other. Disassembling the chains, on the other hand, is relatively simple. "You spin them around fast enough, and they will fall apart," Fu said.

The researchers found that longer chains swam faste

Resource: livescience.com

2016 Olympics: Visit Rio with 360-Degree Videos and Virtual Reality

Rio: Beyond the Map is an interactive video experience

Credit: Google/Screengrab

If you're not traveling to Brazil for the Summer Olympics, you can still explore the geography and culture of Rio de Janeiro, courtesy of Google.

Rio: Beyond the Map, released to the public July 29, deftly blends archival materials with stunning video, interactive media and profiles of artistic Cariocas, as natives of Rio de Janeiro are called.

The project's title alludes to Rio's favelas, the poorly mapped neighborhoods where 1.4 million people, or 20 percent of the city's population, live without addresses, according to Google's blog post about the project. Mapping these regions is part of another Google initiative, the "On the Map" project. [14 Strangest Sights on Google Earth]

The experience begins with a 360-degree video of a motorcycle taxi ride up a hillside through the narrow, twisting streets of the São Carlos favela. The interactive landscape then allows users to learn more about landmarks, or watch short segments about artists from the favelas.

Beyond the Map is presented by Google Arts and Culture alongside thousands of images and video curated in partnership with local institutions. Each online exhibits focuses on different art forms and areas of the city, with interactive slideshows that showcase artwork and photography from Rio's rich past and present.

Google has also combined their familiar Street View technology with narration in virtual tours of more than 20 famous locations in Rio, such as the statue of Christ the Redeemer, with its panoramic views, or the white sand beach at Ipanema. The tours are also viewable as virtual reality experiences with a VR headset, such as Google Cardboard, and the Google Arts and Culture app on iOS or Android.

Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Olympic Games from Aug. 5 to 21. TheRio 2016 Paralympics will subsequently be held from Sept. 7 to 18.

Original article on Live Science.

Resourece: livescience.com

Lessons From 10 of the Worst Engineering Disasters in US History

Tough lessons

Credit: Patricia Marroquin | Shutterstock.com

Things don't always work the way they were intended to work. Sometimes those failures are almost imperceptible as they build incrementally, and other times, they happen in a terrible, overwhelming instant.

"You could argue, legitimately, that engineering is the study of failure, or at least consideration of ways to avoid it," said Benjamin Gross, the Associate Vice President for Collections at the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, which specializes in science, engineering and technology.

These catastrophes are reminders that "engineering is a human activity," Gross told Live Science. "Disasters of this sort aren't just based around the technologies."

And so, when calamity strikes, people often ask three questions: "What went wrong? Who's to blame? What could have been done differently?" Gross said. Given the complexity of modern engineering projects, answers can be hard to find, but they may influence and improve the next attempts to cross the great expanses.

Here are 10 of the worst engineering disasters in U.S. history.

Resourece: livescience.com

How Skydiver Jumped Without a Parachute (and Survived)

Luke Aikins poses for a protrait at Chain Reaction in Moab, Utah, on Dec. 3, 2015.

Credit: Christian Pondella/Red Bull Content Pool

Skydiver Luke Aikins became the first person to jump from a plane without a parachute or wingsuit this past weekend, carrying out the daring stunt on live television. Aikins jumped from a height of 25,000 feet (7,600 meters) and, after a two-minute fall, flipped onto his back to land in a 100-foot-by-100-foot (30 m by 30 m) net, according to news reports. How did the daredevil pull off such a heart-stopping stunt?

To accomplish such a jump with a parachute, a skydiver would typically jump from the plane, free-fall at 120 mph (190 km/h) or faster and then, at higher than 2,500 feet (760 m) above the ground, deploy the parachute, according to Nancy Koreen, spokeswoman for the U.S. Parachute Association. The parachute works to slow the skydiver's descent enough for a safe landing, she told Live Science.

Without a parachute, a skydiver would continue to fall at 120 mph, a speed at which it would be fatal if the person hit the ground, she said. However, instead of hitting the ground, Aikins fell into a net in Simi Valley, California, reported CBS News. "That was what he used to survive," Koreen said. [8 Craziest Skydives of All Time]

But did Aikins' movements, such as flipping onto his back or tumbling in the air, slow his fall? Not by much, Koreen said. To slow down, a skydiver can spread his or her limbs to increase surface area, but "that will only slow you down maybe 10 miles an hour [16 km/h] — not substantially. You're still falling above 100 miles an hour [160 km/h]," Koreen said.

Yet, even in a jump without a parachute or wingsuit, locating a landing site (in this case, a large net) is not as difficult as people may think, said Jean Potvin, a professor of physics at the Parks College of Engineering, Aviation and Technology at Saint Louis University in Missouri.

"And obviously he practiced that move a lot," Potvin told Live Science.

Finding the net

Aikins' helmet gave him GPS alerts throughout the dive, and lights on the net, visible from altitudes of more than 25,000 feet (7,600 m), turned red when he was off-track and white when he was on course, according to CBS News.

Still, finding the net is not as simple as jumping out of a plane directly above the target and falling straight down, Potvin said. The plane is moving forward at the time of the jump, which means the skydiver leaves the plane on a forward trajectory, Potvin said, speculating that Aikins probably jumped from the plane before it flew over the net.

So how does a falling skydiver steer his body toward a target on the ground? Aikins' maneuvers in the air were efforts to do just that, Potvin said. As Aikins falls from the plane, he does something called "tracking."

"Instead of falling like an X … he brought his arms back along his body, and so we call that tracking, so it means that what he did there is he started to glide forward and direct himself to the center of the net," Potvin said. Skydivers can also direct themselves backward, he added. [Photos: Skydiver Sean MacCormac 'Surfs' on Thunderstorm Clouds]

Safe landing

And just before hitting the net, Aikins flipped over onto his back so that his body would bend in the direction the back is flexible — toward the front, Potvin said. "[Aikins] had to land on his back to not break his spine, basically," he said.

A skydiver falling at high speed has a lot of kinetic energy, and that energy has to transfer somewhere upon landing, Potvin said. If you hit the ground, the kinetic energy is "dissipated into the ground, then reflected back into your body and breaks your body into a million pieces," he said.

But the net, made of a polyethylene cord that is twice strong as steel, prevented that from happening, reported National Geographic.

"The net absorbed his fall, dissipated his energy, and allowed him to survive the jump and actually walk out of it," Potvin said.

Potvin, who is a skydiver himself, said he was impressed by the feat. But not everyone was captivated by Aikins' jump.

Michael Turoff, a skydiver and co-author of the book "Parachuting: The Skydiver's Handbook" (Para Publishing, 2007), called it "a ridiculously dangerous stunt that could have easily resulted in a fatality."

Resourece: livescience.com

New Tech Lets You Watch 3D Movies Without the Funky Glasses

A new prototype display could enable people to watch 3D movies from any seat in the theater, without having to wear 3D glasses.

Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT

Someday, moviegoers may be able to watch 3D films from any seat in a theater without having to wear 3D glasses, thanks to a new kind of movie screen.

The new technology, named Cinema 3D, overcomes some of the barriers to implementingglasses-free 3D viewing on a larger scale, but it's not commercially viable yet, the researchers said when describing their findings.

Although 3D movies can offer unique perspectives and experiences, one major drawback is the cumbersome eyewear that moviegoers typically have to wear. Although glasses-free 3D strategies already exist, these technologies currently cannot be scaled up to movie theaters. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

For example, glasses-free 3D methods for TV sets often use a series of slits known as a parallax barrier that is placed in front of the screen. These slits allow each eye to see a different set of pixels, creating the illusion of depth.

However, for parallax barriers to work, they must be placed at a set distance from viewers. This makes parallax barriers difficult to implement in larger spaces such as theaters, where people can sit at a variety of distances and angles from the screen.

In addition, glasses-free 3D displays have to account for the different positions from which people are watching. This means that they have to divide up the limited number of pixels they project so that each viewer sees an image from wherever he or she is located, the researchers said.

"Existing approaches to glasses-free 3D require screens whose resolution requirements are so enormous that they are completely impractical," study co-author Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, said in a statement.

But in the new method, the researchers used a series of mirrors and lenses to essentially give viewers a parallax barrier tailored to each of their positions.

"By careful design of optical elements, we can achieve very-good-quality 3D content without using glasses," study co-author Piotr Didyk, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Saarland University, both in Germany, told Live Science.

"This is the first technical approach that allows for glasses-free 3D on a large scale," Matusik said in a statement.

In addition, the scientists reasoned that instead of displaying images to every position in a theater, they would need to display images only to a relatively tiny set of viewing positions at each theater seat.

"In our solution, we exploit the layout of the audience in a cinema," Didyk said.

The scientists developed a simple Cinema 3D prototype that could support a 200-pixel image. In experiments, volunteers could see 3D versions of pixelated figures from a number of different seats in a small theater.

The scientists cautioned that Cinema 3D is currently impractical to implement commercially. For instance, their prototype requires 50 sets ofmirrors and lenses, but the screen is just barely larger than a pad of paper. The researchers hope to build a larger version of their display and further boost the image resolution.

"It remains to be seen whether the approach is financially feasible enough to scale up to a full-blown theater," Matusik said in a statement. "But we are optimistic that this is an important next step in developing glasses-free 3D for large spaces like movie theaters and auditoriums."

The scientists detailed their findings July 26 at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Anaheim, California.

Resourece: livescience.com

First Reprogrammable Quantum Computer Created

An ion trap with four segmented blade electrodes used to trap a linear chain of atomic ions for quantum information processing.

Credit: Emily Edwards

Scientists have created the first programmable and reprogrammable quantum computer, according to a new study.

The technology could usher in amuch-anticipated era of quantum computing, which researchers say could help scientists run complex simulations and produce rapid solutions to tricky calculations.

Previous research suggested that quantum computers could simultaneously perform more calculations in one instant than there are atoms in the universe. Prior work also found that such capabilities would allow quantum computers to solve certain problems much faster than conventional computers can, for instance, breaking encryption that would take regular computers longer than the lifetime of the sun to crack. [Top 10 Revolutionary Computers]

The functioning of quantum computers depends on the bizarre, surreal nature of quantum physics. The field suggests that atoms and other fundamental building blocks of the universe actually exist in states of flux known as "superpositions." ThisThat means that atoms, for example, can spin in two opposite directions at the same time.

That kind of superposition makes quantum computing fundamentally different from traditional computers. Classical computers represent data as 1's and 0's, binary digits known as "bits" and symbolized by flicking switch-like transistors either on or off. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use quantum bits, or "qubits," that are in superpositions, meaning that they are simultaneously on and off. This enables a qubit to essentially perform two calculations simultaneously.

The new quantum computer is made up of just five bits of quantum information (qubits).

Credit: Shantanu Debnath and Emily Edwards

Many research groups previously created small but functional quantum computers. However, these devices are typically specialized to run just one algorithm, or step-by-step set of operations.

"Until now, there hasn't been any quantum-computing platform that had the capability to program new algorithms into their system. They're usually each tailored to attack a particular algorithm," said study lead author Shantanu Debnath, a quantum physicist and optical engineer at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Now, Debnath and his colleagues have developed the first fully programmable and reprogrammable quantum computer. The new device is made of five qubits. Each qubit is an ion, or electrically charged particle, trapped in a magnetic field.

The scientists can use lasers to manipulate these ions — five ytterbium atoms — infusing them with precise amounts of energy and influencing their interactions with each other. In this way, the researchers can program and reprogram the quantum computer with a variety of algorithms.

The researchers tested their device on three algorithms that quantum computers, as prior work showed, could execute quickly. One, the so-called Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm, is typically used only for tests of quantum-computing capabilities. Another, the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm, can also be used to probe for errors in quantum computing. The last, the quantum Fourier transform algorithm, is an element in quantum-computing encryption-breaking applications.

The Deutsch-Jozsa and Bernstein-Vazirani algorithms successfully ran 95 and 90 percent of the time, respectively. The quantum Fourier transform algorithm, which the researchers said is among the most complicated quantum calculations, had a 70 percent success rate, they said.

In the future, the researchers will test more algorithms on their device, Debnath said. "We'd like this system to serve as a test bed for examining the challenges of multiqubit operations, and find ways to make them better," Debnath told Live Science.

The scientists detailed their findings in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature.

Resourece: livescience.com