In the race to eliminate humans from the face of the earth, computers have another new victory: they can grade standardized test papers with the same consistency and accuracy as human beings can.

Since those essays are often extremely formulaic (no one’s creating great literature in an SAT booklet, and it remains a question if anyone has ever read a GMAT essay), the test companies can use basic algorithms to allow computers to grade them.

A test of 20,000 essay prompts proved the computers graded the papers nearly identically to the way humans did.

Just another small task humans are no longer needed for. Really hope mankind is paying close attention. We’ve all seen The Matrix …

Via Discover Magazine

Image Credit: Robyn Mackenzie /Shutterstock

We may be living in a “post PC” world according to some, but PCs are unquestionably still big business, and they’re now a bigger business in China than anywhere else. That’s according to the latest report from market research firm IDC, at least, which found that both PC sales and shipments in China inched ahead of those in the US for the second quarter — the first time that’s ever happened, and earlier than IDC had previously projected. In terms of hard numbers, that translates to sales of $11.9 billion in China (compared to $11.7 billion in the US), and shipments of 18.5 million units, which represents a 14.3 percent jump year-over-year (as opposed to a 4.9 percent drop to 17.7 million units in the US). Not surprisingly, Lenovo is the big winner in all of this — it’s both the top PC maker in China and the fastest growing one, with a market share just shy of 32 percent.

via: engadget/pc world

NVIDIA, a company that once made giant graphics cards for home computers, has already successfully re-positioned itself as a player in the mobile graphics world. Now it’s poised to really shake things up, announcing the acquisition of Icera. The UK-based company you’ve probably never heard of has a line of on 3G and 4G baseband processors used in wireless devices and USB modems — chips that are said to be smaller, more flexible, and more efficient than the competition from Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson. Icera seems to have been focused heavily on LTE of late, which puts NVIDIA in a good place to not only manage what happens to the data when its inside your next-gen phone or tablet, but to also control just how it gets there in the first place. A future Tegra SoC that handles wireless data too? Color us intrigued

via: engadget