An App to read your state of mind

Your phone may now know if you are depressed, stressed or lonely as researchers have developed an app that reveals mental health, performance and behaviour of users. 

An app called StudentLife app, which compares students' happiness, stress, depression and loneliness to their academic performance, the application may also be used in the general population — for example, to monitor mental health, trigger intervention and improve productivity in workplace employees. 

"This is a very important and exciting breakthrough," said the study's senior author professor Andrew Campbell from Dartmouth College in the US. 

"The StudentLife app is able to continuously make mental health assessment 24/7, opening the way for a new form of assessment," Campbell added. 

The researchers built the Android app to monitor readings from smartphone sensors carried by 48 students during a 10-week term to examine their mental health (depression, loneliness, stress), academic performance (grades across all their classes) and behavioural trends. 

So the app can tell how stress, sleep, visits to the gym change in response to college workload — assignments, midterms, finals — as the term progresses. 

The results showed that passive and automatic sensor data from the Android phones significantly correlated with the students' mental health and their academic performance over the term. 

"While the smartphone app raises major privacy concerns," Campbell said, "with proper protections in place, the app can provide continuous mental health evaluation for people from all walks of life, rather than waiting for symptoms of stress and depression to become severe enough to visit the doctor." 

The researchers presented their findings at the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing held in the US. 

India's 'cheapest' Android smartphone

 Indian feature phone vendor, Jivi, has launched Android smartphone claiming it to be cheapest. The Jivi JSP 20 is priced at Rs 1,999. 

The phone is available for pre-order, exclusively on Amazon.in and customers placing order on the website between September 18 and September 24 will also receive a flip cover (worth Rs 499), The phone will start shipping starting September 25. 

Jivi JSP 20 sports a brushed metal finish on the sides, chrome plated side-rail buttons and round edges at the bottom. It also has a drilled speaker grill at the rear. 

The dual-sim phone sports a 3.5-inch (320x480p) OGS capacitive touch display. The phone is powered by a 1GHz processor and 128MB RAM. It has 256MB internal storage and has a microSD card slot supporting cards of up to 32GB capacity. 

The phone sports a 2MP rear camera with an LED flash and a 1350mAh battery. The phone runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, a very old version of Android. The Jivi JSP 20 phone supports six languages for messaging including English, French, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. 

In terms of connectivity, the phone supports Edge, Bluetooth, FM radio and Wi-Fi. It doesn't support GPS.

Intex had also recently launched Aqua T2, an Android 4.4 KitKat phone at Rs 2,699. Powered by a 1.3GHz MediaTek MT6571 dual core processor, the phone comes with 512MB RAM and 256MB internal storage (16MB available to user). It has a microSD card slot that can support cards of up to 32GB capacity. It sports a 3.5-inch, HVGA (320x480p) IPS display. 

The Jivi phone will also compete with Intex's Aqua FX Firefox OS phone which is also priced at Rs 1,999.

One million newborn died within 24 hours

One million babies each year died within 24 hours of birth from mostly preventable causes, a UN report said Tuesday.

The report, released by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is the second in a series intended to track progress on child survival and hold the governments accountable.

“The data clearly demonstrate that an infant’s chances of survival increase dramatically when their mother has sustained access to quality health care during pregnancy and delivery,” Geeta Rao Gupta, UNICEF’s deputy executive director, said in a statement.

“Special efforts must also be made to ensure that the most vulnerable are reached,” Gupta added.

Since 1990, the number of under-five years old children’s deaths has been cut in half from 12.7 million to 6.3 million. But more remains to be done. The first 28 days of a newborn’s life are the most vulnerable and as it stands now almost 2.8 million babies die each year.

Xolo Win Q900s: The 'world's lightest' Windows smartphone

Xolo Win Q900s, which is claimed to be the world's lightest Windows smartphone, is available in India for Rs 9,999. Weighing 100 grams, the Windows Phone 8.1 smartphone has a 4.7-inch 720p display and is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.2 GHz quad-core processor paired with 1GB of RAM.

The smartphone comes with an 8 megapixel auto focus rear camera with an LED flash and PureCel Sensor, which is said to provide bright and clear pictures in both high and low-light environment. The phone includes a 2 megapixel front camera.

This dual-SIM phone has an internal storage space of 8GB. It supports a microSD card of up to 32GB. Xolo's Windows phone has 1800mAh battery.

Costliest bike:gold-plated Harley-Davidson

Lauge Jensen has unveiled gold-plated Harley-Davidson which is the world's most expensive motorcycle.

The Danish motorcycle manufacturer has revealed that the customized motorcycle is the world's most expensive motorcycle priced at 535,000 pounds, Metro.co.uk reported.

The special edition Harley-Davidson is on show at the Hamburg Motorcycle Days expo. 

A Bullet train model by HImachal student

The model will be displayed at the national-level Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) exhibition going to be held in New Delhi from Oct 6 to 8.

A Himachal Pradesh student has created a bullet train model that has been selected for a national—level exhibition, a school official said on Friday.

Shilpa, a class 10 student in Government Senior Secondary School at Sudhial near Nadaun in Hamirpur district, has prepared the bullet train model that is based on the magnetic repulsion effect of similar poles of magnets.

The model was declared the best in the state—level science exhibition, will now be displayed at the national—level Innovation in Science Pursuit for Inspired Research (INSPIRE) exhibition to be held in New Delhi Oct 6—8, school principal said.

“The model is based on my innovative ideas. Now I am focusing to further improve it technically,” said Shilpa.

INSPIRE is a programme of the department of science and technology of the Union Government .

Cargo Pants might be back in market

If you're worried your showy new phone won't fit in your pocket, you're not alone. Pants-makers are carefully watching what size and style pockets consumers are going to need.

Take the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, which ships out on Friday. It's huge, towering over the 4-inch iPhone 5S. Both men and women are worried they'll need tremendous pants pockets to accommodate the mammoth phone, or be forced to lug around the device in their hands or purse all day. The folks at WonderHowTo even made aprintable PDF to help you determine what size iPhone will fit in your hand or pocket.

"No, I won't be carrying that giant device in my pocket," wrote Mashable's Lance Olanoff. "It didn't fit well in pockets," Re/code's Lauren Goode complained. "It fits in my pants pockets, but some people who favor tighter jeans may have more difficulty," explained The Wall Street Journal's Geoffrey Fowler.

Sellers of men's and women's pants are waiting to see how big the phone manufacturers will go. Then, they'll adjust pocket sizes.

Bonobos, an online menswear brand famous for washed chinos, said it doesn't gear its design toward specific technologies, but is always conscious of changing device sizes. Brad Andrews, vice president of merchandising at Bonobos, said that the company would consider changes to pocket sizes, as long as the garment remains stylish.

"It's something that we're always looking at," Neary said of pocket sizes and styles. "I can see as technology progresses we will also have to evolve our aesthetic to make it more functional for her."

Then there's the matter of cargo pockets, those flappy patch pockets that fashion types love to hate. If people carry around gargantuan phones, it would only be practical to switch to pants that have more pocket space. Even now, cargo pockets remain a "small microtrend," said Neary. Next spring, Lee is releasing some seasonal wear that features six-by-six-inch cargo pockets, including capris and shorts.

"As we haul everything around with us all day and you need to be hands-free, you're going to need more places to store it," said Neary. "So it's a possibility."

In 2013, a design executive for Dockers told Fox News that a 5.5-inch phone was too chunky for a regular pair of khakis, so his team was adjusting its pockets accordingly.

But now there are even larger phones in the marketplace. Samsung's Galaxy Note 3, which started a trend of hybrid phone-tablet devices dubbed "phablets," has a 5.7-inch display. Nokia's enormous Lumia 1520 boasts a 6-inch screen. So does LG's G Flex phone.

And big screens aren't going anywhere. According to a 2014 report from research firm Kantar, screen size is paramount to consumers. They value it even more than the quality of the materials the phones are made from.