Those in Japan can build an Astro Boy robot by collecting 70 magazines that come with a different piece of the robotic puzzle.
If you’ve always wanted an Astro Boy of your own, you’re in luck. You can now build your own Astro Boy robot , and all it’ll take is 70 weeks and around $1,600.
To assemble young Astro, you’ll have to be in Japan and buy the weekly craft magazine Shukan Tetsuwan Atom o Tsukuro (which translates to « Let’s Create Astro Boy Weekly »). There’ll be 70 issues of the mag, running from April of this year until September 2018, reports The Mainichi.
The toy may not be powerful enough to fight crime like the real Astro Boy, but it does have some decent tech, provided by Japanese carrier NTT Docomo and Fujisoft. Standing at 44 centimetres (17 inches) tall, he’ll be able to walk and talk, and is equipped with facial recognition tech that lets him distinguish between his owner and other humans.
Following a robot child created by a scientist to replace a son killed in a car crash, the original « Mighty Atom » manga has sold over 100 million copies since launching in 1952. It’s spawned three separate anime series, an American comic and a 2009 film adaptation.
This latest project, unveiled last week, is in celebration of the would-be 90th birthday of Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. Born in 1928, Tezuka passed away in 1989 at age 60 from stomach cancer. 2018, when the project ends, will also mark 50 years since the original « Mighty Atom » Astro Boy manga concluded in 1968.
A robotic Astro Boy won’t be cheap though. Each edition of the magazine will cost 1,990 yen, which converts to around $17. That puts the total cost around $1,250, AU$1,600 and £1,000.
Should that be a little expensive, there’s also a free-to-play mobile game in development for those avid Astro Boy Fans called Astro Boy: Edge of Time , with a free demo available.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/astro-boy-returns-as-your-new-buildable-robot-buddy/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

Jay Y. Lee, Samsung’s vice chairman, has been indicted in connection with the political scandal in South Korea.
Jay Y. Lee, vice chairman of Samsung, arrives at the Seoul Central District Court on January 18. This week, he was formally charged in connection to the political scandal in the country.
South Korea’s case against Samsung’s de facto leader just got more serious, threatening the company’s succession plan.
Jay Y. Lee, Samsung Group’s 48-year-old vice chairman and the man slated to take over control of the company, was formally charged Tuesday with bribery in connection with the political scandal in South Korea, according to Bloomberg. He had been accused of bribing the suspended South Korean president, Park Geun-hye.
Lee was arrested a couple weeks ago. Along with bribery, Lee had also been accused of embezzlement and perjury.
Samsung Group, the parent company of Samsung Electronics, became ensnared in the « Choi-gate » corruption probe facing Park a few months ago. Its offices have been raided several times on suspicion that the presidential office influenced the decision by South Korea’s state-run pension fund to back Samsung’s merger plan last year.
At issue is whether millions in donations Samsung made to two foundations controlled by President Park’s friend and confidant, Choi Soon-sil , were bribes to get the South Korean pension fund to back a merger between two of Samsung Group’s holding companies. The merger strengthened the Lee family’s control over Samsung.
In this week’s wrap-up, a South Korean court orders the arrest of Samsung’s acting leader. Meanwhile in the US, Verizon jumps back on the unlimited data wagon causing every other wireless carrier to take note.
Samsung Group Chairman Kun-Hee Lee has hospitalized since suffering a heart attack in 2014, and his only son, Jay Y. Lee, has assumed responsibility overseeing the conglomerate that makes up more than a fifth of South Korea’s gross domestic product. The younger Lee was handpicked by his father to one day take control of the company. The move by the South Korean court to indict Lee raises questions about his future at the company.
Samsung has said it made the payments but denied they were made in exchange for political favors. Choi has denied taking any part in the merger, while Lee has testified that he didn’t play a role in Samsung’s decision to make $17 million in donations to Choi.
Samsung last week said it would strengthen its rules on financial donations to increase transparency in the wake of Lee’s arrest. The South Korean company said it would now require financial donations and funding for corporate social responsibility of 1 billion won ($882,460) or more to be approved by the board of directors. Previously, only payments representing 0.5 percent of shareholder equity — 680 billion won or more — required board approval.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-jay-y-lee-south-korea-bribery-charged-indicted-political-scandal/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

It’s been too easy for counterfeiters to get away with it, the company argued in a new appeal.
Alibaba has long been accused of housing counterfeiters, leading to its eBay-like Taobao platform regularly being blacklisted by the US. But the company sees itself as a victim, too, and wants help from the government.
The e-commerce giant made a public appeal at a Monday press conference, later published on its news website , calling for the Chinese government to « impose tougher criminal sanctions » on counterfeiters.
In the appeal, Alibaba said China’s « ambiguous » counterfeiting laws were too lax for any kind of meaningful progress to occur.
Alibaba claims to have identified 4,495 leads tied to counterfeiting last year, each involving a value of goods exceeding the statutory minimum of 50,000 yuan ($7,280) for criminal investigation. However, only 1,184 cases were investigated by authorities, resulting in only 33 convictions.
« Criminals can escape any legal consequence, leaving law enforcement agents and consumers feeling helpless, and society bearing the damage, » read the appeal, urging authorities to enforce stricter laws, and impose punitive penalties to deter counterfeiters.
This is not the first time that Alibaba has declared war on counterfeiters. Last year, it sued two vendors for allegedly selling fake Swarovski watches on Taobao. Alibaba also claimed to have taken down 380 million product listings and shut down 180,000 Taobao stores and 675 operators as part of its anti-counterfeiting movement last year.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/alibaba-wants-the-chinese-government-to-curb-counterfeiting/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

The Japanese company is working on camera software that can even work on webcams.
The last few years have seen wearables that monitor your heart rate blow up. Panasonic thinks it can do one better, working on camera tech that reads your heart rate just by looking at you.
It’s called Contactless Vital Sensing and its software is capable of reading your heart rate without having to use special camera equipment, reports Nikkei Technology. The software works by monitoring skin reflectance, which lowers as more blood circulates through the skin.
Contactless Vital Sensing was shown at Wonder Japan Solutions earlier this month, according to the publication, where Panasonic demonstrated it on a person’s face. However, as the software only needs to look at a patch of skin, any part of the body will do. It’ll work on almost any camera, including webcams.
The company hopes to take the tech to market next year, primarily for sports TV — seeing player heart rates next to their scores may not be far off. Panasonic is also considering using the same technology to monitor the stress levels of office workers, Nikkei reports.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/pansonics-new-camera-tech-can-read-your-heart-rate/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

United Arab Emirates education network implements cloud-based software to improve students’ access to resources.
The United Arab Emirates’ education network, Ankabut, has linked up multiple education systems in the UAE and abroad through a learning management system (LMS) to enable students to stay connected to resources wherever they are.
With the adoption of Brightspace’s cloud-based LMS, academic institutions joined up by Ankabut have not just been connected to global online learning resources, but have also seen improved student performance, reduced carbon footprint and parents more involved in their children’s education.
Ankabut is the UAE’s Advanced National Research and Education Network (NREN) that offers academic institutions in the Gulf state connectivity to other education networks around the globe. As well as connecting universities and institutions of higher learning, Ankabut also links up schools and public institutions across the UAE.
Launched in 2006, Ankabut has the primary objective of opening up information exchange highways between academic institutions in the UAE and the rest of the world.
Today, it provides connectivity to 33 academic institutions within the UAE, spanning K-20 (primary and secondary), higher education, vocational training centres and research institutes.
Within the UAE, Ankabut provides high-capacity, high-speed broadband connectivity between educational, research and eligible non-profit organisations. Internationally, it liaises with government-approved parties in neighbouring countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to determine collaboration on services.
Ankabut was looking to implement a single, uniform learning management system across its member institutions, which would not only benefit faculty members and 100,000 students, but also make it easier to build bridges between the institutions and learning resources around the world.
As a result, it embarked on a project to unify disparate legacy learning systems across the UAE. This reduced the costs of ownership of systems and infrastructure, while allowing students to remain connected.

© Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/450413848/Developing-a-hyper-connected-ecosystem-for-UEA-education
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.

For Raspberry Pi’s fifth birthday there’s another new model. Here’s what you need to know about the Raspberry Pi Zero W
For Raspberry Pi’s fifth birthday there’s a new model. Here’s what you need to know about the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which is essentially the Pi Zero with added Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
See also: 10 great Pi projects for kids
You can buy a Pi Zero W right now. It is in stock at retailers around the world, including ModMyPi in the UK and CanaKit in the US.
It’s more expensive than the Pi Zero (which cost £4 or $5), but is still a snip at $10 (£9.60 in the UK including VAT). That may be twice the price, but it’s still cheaper than buying a Zero and plugging a Wi-Fi dongle into the USB port.
The board has the same basic specs as the Pi Zero, but with the WI-Fi and Bluetooth ch ip as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. Here are the details, with the new features over the Pi Zero in bold:
In order to use a Pi Zero W, you’ll need to add a power supply (your phone charger and a micro USB cable will do), and to use the 40-pin GPIO connector you’ll need to buy the header pins (£1). Plus, the OS will require a microSD card, which slots into the connector on the left-hand side of the board in the picture above.
The official case costs £6 comes with three lids. One is plain with no holes. A second has a hole for the camera module (around £20) and comes with the necessary ribbon cable to connect the module to the Pi Zero W. The third has a cutout for the GPIO connector. It’s also compatible with the original Pi Zero.
With on-board Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, the Pi Zero W is ideal for creating your own Internet of Things device, such as a security camera.
Costs were kept down by putting components on only one side of the PCB, but they had to be shuffled around in order to fit on the new wireless chip.

© Source: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-product/pc-components/raspberry-pi-zero-w-release-date-price-specs-3655335/
All rights are reserved and belongs to a source media.