This iPhone app is making things a bit to easy for sex offenders.

via FAIL Blog

New App Translates Baby's Cries

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

posted: 21 January 2010 02:58 pm ET

Next time your baby cries, you might want to hold the little one up to your iPhone. A new app could translate those yells into adult-speak, telling you whether it's a cry for food or perhaps a nap.

After 10 seconds of crying, the Cry Translator (patented by Biloop Technologic, S.L.) will light up one of five icons to indicate, the company claims, whether your baby is hungry, tired, bored, sleepy, stressed, or in some kind of discomfort.

While you might think the cry decoder is as valid as having a conversation with your dog or cat, some research suggests there is meaning behind those wails.

For instance, scientists have found the pitch and frequency of a baby's cries can indicate health problems and even the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), according to research published in 2005 in the journal Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.

Other more recent research has shown the cries of newborns already bear the mark of the language their parents speak. For instance, one study showed French newborns cry with rising melody patterns, slowly increasing in pitch from the beginning to the end, while German newborns have falling melody patterns, both of which are consistent with their prospective languages. That suggests infants are already picking up bits of language in the womb.

And while newborns may not have language for some time, pediatricians have known they cry to communicate.

"Babies do cry; it's their main form of communication," said pediatrician Jamie A. Freishtat, adding that over time parents tend to figure out what certain cries mean. "I know that anecdotally a lot of parents, after time, say, 'Ah she must be wet,' by a certain cry. I think pain [is something] parents tend to pick up on."

That "I'm in pain" cry could be higher pitched or more shrill, said Freishtat, who is also a spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Even so, all babies sound different, just like adults. "I'm not sure if you had ten babies and they were all hungry if you would get the same cry from each baby," Freishtat told LiveScience.

The Web site set up for the new baby-cry app acknowledges the variability of cries, explaining that rather than tone or pitch, the technology relies on some kind of pattern in the cries.

The company cautions, however, that the technology is meant to help parents and caregivers understand what their infant is trying to communicate and is not a stand-in for a medical doctor.

Freishtat echoed this caution: "Regardless of how a parent is trying to interpret his or her baby's cry, if a baby is ever crying inconsolably (won't stop regardless of interventions, such as offering a feed, changing a diaper, holding the baby, etc.) then it is very important to contact or go to the doctor immediately because that can mean there is something more serious going on."

Plenty of publishers have jumped on the iPhone bandwagon, but the latest is Playboy - a surprise, given that a ban on nudity seems to be about the only rule that Apple seems to enforce consistently. That means the Hugh Hefner is having to make do without the naked women for the iPhone edition of his monthly magazine. Spokesperson Theresa Hennessey told Krapps.com that "the pictures are all non-nude or cropped".

On Thursday  WolframAlpha launched its developer API, which should allow large and small developers (as well as businesses and educational institutions) to harness the power of the computational knowledge engine to enhance their own applications or products. Today, the WolframAlpha iPhone app (iTunes link) — which was built using the new API — was released to the App Store.

The application is pretty advanced, as its $49.99 price-tag suggests. Before your jaw drops over the price, keep in mind that this is much more than just a mobile version of the website. It’s a high end graphing calculator (that supports discrete number theory, Calculus derivative and plotting of functions), an almanac, a currency/unit converter and a pretty sophisticated stock analysis tool. And that’s just the beginning.

High Powered Proof of Concept

The buzz over Wolfram Alpha has always centered around its potential. After all, combining statistical, factual and scientific information with human-language requests is an impressive feat. However, actually showcasing the use cases for that potential has been difficult.

With the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app, the company has not only showed off what is capable with the API, but it has delivered a very good example of what is possible with the ever-increasing data engine that backs Wolfram Alpha’s core.

For instance, check out this query from the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app. Here, I typed in “MSFT vs. apple vs. IBM” and what I get back is a very high-level comparison of the companies’ financial data. Stock price, overall market cap, P/E ratios and graphs showing off revenue and stock performance are displayed quickly and in a very, very readable way.

All of this data was available in a few seconds, which is much faster than the time it would take to create these charts in a spreadsheet or to try to track down pre-made comparison data.

Examples

Music, Film and Book Data

Entering in  song titles can bring up who wrote the song, its history on the music charts, associated acts and other information. Presently, the song database seems pretty limited to older songs (I had very little luck with newer material), but the information is interesting and accurate. Check out “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles:

Films and books work the same way. Entering in film title will bring up the release date, estimated gross (not-adjusted for inflation), cast and crew information and more. If there are multiple queries that answer a certain question (for instance, “Fight Club” is both a book and a film), you can choose what information you want to see.

Historical Date Information

Entering in specific date can bring up a wealth of information. For instance, I entered in my birthday, November 12, 1982, and this is what I got back:

I can even get the sunrise and sunset data from my current location (which also happens to be the location where I was born), which is interesting information.

Mortgage Calculations

The Wolfram Alpha iPhone app has one of the best mortgage calculators I’ve ever used. You can enter in the amount of your loan, your interest rate and the time on your loan and get a breakdown of your monthly payment, total amount of interest paid and total paid for the house. You can also choose an adjustable-rate mortgage and control the loan or sale amount and other options like taxes, balloon payment info and an interest-only period.

Then, Wolfram Alpha runs a mortgage simulation showing what different low, medium or high interest rate scenarios (for an adjustable-rate mortgage), for instance.

These aren’t difficult calculations, but seeing everything visualized in charts and tables makes the information much more digestible. Plus, entering in a query like “$200k mortgage at 5% for 40 yrs” is much easier than having to do all the calculations by hand.

Who Needs a Graphing Calculator When You Have an iPhone?

The mathematical functions of the Wolfram Alpha app are in a league of their own. When the Wolfram team told me that the app could replace a graphing calculator, I was a bit skeptical, because I have experience using high-end $150+ calculators in high school and college, and I wasn’t sure that the data output would be as robust.

I was wrong. For students who already have an iPhone or iPod touch who need a graphing calculator for a high school or college math class — this $50 iPhone app might just save you money and give you more options (but make sure you can use it in class and that you have an Internet or data connection available to you).

Check out some of these examples:

Scratching the Surface

These examples only scratch the surface of what the Wolfram Alpha iPhone app can do. The application can display demographic and census information, population data, do unit conversions, solve Physics and Chemistry equations and provide information on chemical compounds, and even show domain information.

The fact that all of this is powered by Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge engine is pretty amazing. We knew this thing had potential, but wow!

Who This App is Aimed At

At $50, this app is not for everyone. From my uses, students in advanced math classes (I would have killed for this in high-school and I had a TI-89, which was the super-calculator of its time), people who do lots of data analysis, financial analysts (really analysts of almost any kind) are the most likely to find this application useful. The mathematical and scientific information is really outstanding and it’s pretty mind-blowing the sorts of data you can extrapolate and the sorts of information that you can get back.

Ultimately, this app showcases the very real potential Wolfram Alpha has. Whether that potential will ever be useful in an everyday way to consumers, I’m not sure — but to me, it seems clear that the underlying technology could make a great asset to a variety of products and services.

I like the look of this!  But the £30 price tag is a bit steep...