Daniel Cooper

It’s never good to recommend a comedy by saying it makes you weep, but somehow Bluey, a comedy for kids, feels more real and more truthful than anything else on TV. I see so much of myself in Bandit’s triumphs and failures as he tries to parent his two daughters. I nod along to all of his unsuccessful parenting tactics that, I’ll admit, I’ve also tried on my own two kids. And then, at the end of so many episodes, I’ll realize that the front of my t-shirt is wet with tears because I've been crying.

There can’t be many people unfamiliar with Bluey, the biggest kids’ TV series on the planet, if not the biggest series overall. Each seven-minute episode is a slice-of-life sitcom about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic dogs living in Brisbane, Australia. Bluey and her younger sister Bingo live with parents Bandit and Chilli. The show started out focused on the playtimes the kids would have with each other or their parents. But it quickly sprawled out to create a rich world in the vein of The Simpsons, with a whole city’s worth of storylines. It can now regularly relegate the Heelers to the background to focus on the show’s deep cast of characters.

It closed out its third season with last Sunday's “The Sign,” a (comparatively) epic 28-minute episode and this week with “Surprise,” a sweet little postscript. The former’s long running time was described as a dry-run for any potential Bluey movie, wrapping up a number of the show’s storylines. It focuses on a wedding taking place at the Heeler’s home in the shadow of the family’s plan to relocate to another city. I won’t spoil too much beyond saying “The Sign” is a story about the bigness of change and how that affects parents and kids alike. Much of it focused on Bandit’s decision to move for a better-paid job and the way that impacted Chilli and the two girls. It’s a complicated issue, especially because it highlights that parents often just want to do what’s best for the kids.

This is a screencap from 'Ghostbasket' but there was no way I was going to pass up an opportunity to post a picture of Bluey and Bingo as their granny characters.
Ludo Studio

“Surprise,” meanwhile, focuses more on the mundane struggle of Bandit trying to play two different games with his daughters at the same time. Much as Bluey wants to be just seven minutes of silly fun, it can’t quite help but be honest about the emotional and physical labor of parenting. All Bandit wants to do is sit down and watch sport on the TV but his daughters won’t allow him that luxury. He’s chased around the house, forced to pretend to teach a tennis ball to ride a bike and then pelted with ping pong balls fired from a toy launcher. (Bluey’s happy to highlight how often Bandit will get hit in the groin as a consequence of whatever game the girls are playing.)

The payoff to all of that effort comes in the final half minute of the episode, which is when I started sobbing. As much as it may be pitched as a palate cleanser after the scale and emotional heft of the previous episode, the final moments offer a real (if pleasant) punch to the gut. I can’t help but feel plenty of parallels in Bluey’s life and that of my own (similarly-aged) daughter, and feel a lot of kinship with Bandit as well. If I’m one one-hundredth as good a parent as this silly cartoon dog who often gets it wrong, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

There’s been speculation that this third season may be the end for Bluey. Bloomberg reported the uncertainty around creator Joe Brumm’s future with the show, although producer Sam Moor has said it will continue in some form. Any delay would also risk that the child actors – who remain anonymous for their own safety — will age out of being able to play their roles. But in many ways, Bluey can’t not continue given the show is now a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the BBC, which owns a big chunk of the show’s rights.

I don’t want to say goodbye to Bluey and the Heelers, and I’d prefer they kept the cast as-is and let them grow up alongside Bandit and Chilli. That, to me, would be an honest thing to do, rather than indulging in the fakery that dogs so many TV shows which face this problem. But if they have to go, I’ll choose to remember Bluey’s three perfect seasons through the highs and lows of parenting.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-we-watched-blueys-joyful-finales-161527282.html?src=rss

What we watched: Bluey’s joyful finales   Recently updated !

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Sometimes, you’re in bed and the glow from your smart ring’s optical heart rate sensor creeps into your peripheral vision. It got me thinking about how Samsung (and potentially Apple) will join the smart ring market, and why that’s a terrible idea. You see, these companies want devices that make their presence known in your life, embedding themselves in your routine. But smart rings blend into the background on purpose, which limits how much you can, or will want, to do with them.

Back in February, Samsung announced the Galaxy Ring, a health-tracking wearable baked into a ring. When it launches later this year, it will continuously monitor your sleep, breathing, movement and reproductive cycle. Entirely coincidentally, I’m sure, Bloomberg reported Apple was also conducting investigations into its own smart ring platform. Both companies are not-so secretly gunning for the Oura Ring, the market leader in finger-worn wearables. And I’ve been testing one of these for a long while.

Oura tracks your sleep, temperature, activity, post-exertion recovery and menstrual cycle. It’s a marvel of engineering to get so much technology into such a small and elegant package. The downside, if you can call it that, is there’s no way to access the data the ring collects, or its insights, unless you have a phone on hand.

But here’s the thing: It’s not that often I find myself actually opening the app to see what the stats are saying. If I wake up feeling like crap, there’s normally a self-evident reason why that needs no further explanation. And on those rare occasions when I wake up and don’t know why I’m feeling bad, the last thing that would occur to me is to check my phone. Who wants to look at fine-grain data when your head is pounding and your eyes refuse to focus?

That friction, that small gap between having the information there and it being easily accessible is a problem. Yeah, you can get a notification if your "Readiness Score" — Oura's proprietary metric for overall health — falls below a certain level. But I’ve been using this thing for long enough that I’ve never taken up the habit, and I suspect others would struggle to do so, too. It’s nice to have that information on those rare occasions when I’m thinking enough about it to look at my data over a longer period of time. But I can’t imagine myself looking at this data once or twice a day.

It’s also not that useful for workout tracking, principally because you won’t want to risk your $300 gadget in the gym. The first time I took it to work out, I picked up a pair of metal dumbbells, realized their knurled handles were rubbing against the metal of the ring and quickly took it off.

Because there’s no direct method of input, it’s far too easy to forget it’s there and not make use of its information. If you’re all-in on using a ring to track your fitness because you won’t wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and you’re always checking your stats, then it’ll work for you. But, deep down, I prefer a watch with a display that’s easy enough to check as a matter of instinct. And it’s this that I think should be a concern for Samsung and, potentially, Apple, as they look to move into this space. A smart ring caters to a niche inside a niche – quantified self obsessives who refuse to wear a watch. They obviously believe that’s enough of a draw to devote time and money to building their own, but I’m not sure it’ll be a blockbuster.

Not to mention these rings only have a few hooks to keep users inside their specific corporate bubble. Both Apple and Samsung have dedicated health-tracking apps and it’s likely whoever buys one of these will have one fewer reason to switch providers in future. But compare that to the watches, which offer health tracking, messaging, app interactions and mobile payments. Smartwatches are beneficial to these platforms because they help draw together various features from the phone. Rings do not.

Perhaps this is another sight tech’s biggest players now just need to copy and destroy their smaller rivals rather than striving for new products. Smart rings cater to a small market, albeit one that big tech could dominate with very little time and effort. Especially given the strength of their relative brands, which means these devices will more or less sell themselves to diehard fans. But is that all a new product can be in 2024, and is that what we could or should expect these companies to be doing?

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/smart-rings-are-meant-to-be-invisible-and-thats-a-bad-thing-140927134.html?src=rss

Smart rings are meant to be invisible, and that’s the ...

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Picture the scene: Your date has gone well and you and your partner might sleep together. Like any safe adult, you assume there will be a conversation about STI status and the use of protection. Now imagine how you would feel if they asked to take a photo of your penis and upload it to a website you’ve never heard of. That’s the future of intimacy, as imagined by Calmara, a new service launched by “men’s health” startup HeHealth.

Banner image from the top of the HeHealth website describing Calmara.ai as as
HeHealth Website

Its press release suggests users take a picture of their partner’s penis so it can be run through a deep learning model for visual signs of sexually-transmitted infections. And while the website suggests users should wear protection, a banner atop the HeHealth sites describes the app as “Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex.” Mixed messages aside, you may notice some major issues with the pitch: That this only covers infections that present visually, and that it’s only designed to work with penises.

But even if that use case applies, you might not feel you can trust its conclusions once you’ve looked at the data. The Calmara website claims its scans are up to 90 percent accurate, saying its AI has been “battle-tested by over 40,000 users.” That figure doesn’t match up to its press release, which says accuracy reaches 94.4 percent (a figure cited in this NSFW preprint paper submitted a week ago), but its FAQ says the accuracy ranges “from 65 percent to 96 percent across various conditions.” We've reached out to the company and want to learn more about the apparent discrepancy.

Image of the Calmara website showing its claim of
Calmara

It’s not impossible for models to categorize visual information — I reported on how systems like these look at images of cells to aid drug discovery. But there are plenty of reasons as to why visual information isn’t going to be as reliable for an STI test. After all, plenty of conditions don’t have visual symptoms and carriers can often be asymptomatic long after infection. The company admits to this in its FAQ, saying that the app is a “first line of defense, not a full-on fortress.” Not to mention that other factors, like the “lighting, the particular health quirks you’re scouting for and a rainbow of skin tones might tweak those [accuracy] numbers a bit.” Even more alarming, the unpublished paper (which is riddled with typos) admits that a full 40 percent of its training dataset is comprised of "augmented" images, for instance "extracting specific visually recognizable disease patterns from the existing clinical image dataset and layering those patterns on top of images of health (sic) penises."

Image from the Calmara FAQ highlighting the variability of its tests.
Calmara

The Calmara website’s disclaimer says that its tools are for the purpose of “promoting and supporting general wellness and a healthy lifestyle and are not to be used to diagnose, cure, treat, manage or prevent any disease or condition." Of course, if it really was intended as a general wellness tool, it probably wouldn’t describe itself as “Your intimate bestie for unprotected sex,” would it.

It doesn’t help that this is a system asking users to send pictures of their, or their partner's genitalia. Issues around consent and — as writer Ella Dawson raised on Bluesky — age verification, don’t seem to have been considered. The company's promises that the data is locked in a "digital stronghold" lacks specifics about its security approach or how the data it obtains may be shared. But that hasn’t stopped the company from suggesting that it could, in future, be integrated “directly into dating apps.”

Fundamentally, there are so many red flags and potential vectors for abuse and giving users a false sense of confidence that nobody should try using it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/friends-dont-let-friends-use-an-ai-sti-test-162354796.html?src=rss

Friends don’t let friends use an AI STI test

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