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Building a Better Tech School IF all the hopes and hype are warranted, a nondescript third-floor loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan offers a glimpse of the future, for New York City and for Cornell University. In truth, it doesn’t look like much — just cubicles and meeting rooms in space donated by Google. But looks deceive; here, with little fanfare, Cornell’s new graduate school of applied sciences is being rolled out.The sparkling, sprawling new campus on Roosevelt Island filled with gee-whiz technology — still just ink on paper. The thousands of students and staff, the transformative effect on the city’s economy, the integration with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology — those all remain in the future, too.But just 13 months after being awarded the prize in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s contest to create a new science school, Cornell NYC Tech got up and running. Eight students enrolled in January in what is being called the beta class, a one-year master’s program

A Score or More of Languages in Your Pocket Minh Uong / The New York Times In Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the hero sticks a so-called Babel fish in his ear and can understand everything said to him in any language. Today’s apps for language translation try to accomplish the same thing. While not as accurate or instantaneous, they are nevertheless useful and greatly improved from just a couple of years ago. And you don’t have to put anything slimy in your ear. The reason these kinds of apps have gotten so much better is simply that more people have been using them, said John Garofolo, a senior adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology who has studied and tested the software. The more a translation app is used, the more it learns to statistically make correct associations with sounds, text and meaning.The latest translation apps incorporate voice-recognition software so you can speak as well as type in the word or phrase you want translate

Rearranging the Furniture, Minus the Aching Back If you’ve ever sat on your couch and wondered how it would look across the room, or whether the walls would look good in red, that was your inner interior designer speaking. Now apps offer a quick and powerful way to indulge your home design fantasies.Home Design 3D ($7 on iOS) is one of the better ones. It turns a two-dimensional view of your home into a three-dimensional graphic that you can view from any angle and even walk around as if inside. It is so sophisticated you could use it as a starting point for designing a house, rather than just tweaking your interior design. You start in two-dimensional construction mode, adding rooms and adjusting their size and shape to match your place. You can add measurements and drop in items from a database, like a water fountain or a grand piano. There’s a host of options for doorways, windows and other openings, and you can choose to color walls or floors with textures that look like wallpaper

Q.& A.: Using Facebook Chat Heads Q. I use Facebook on my iPhone quite a bit, but lately these little circles with my friend’s profile pictures have been popping up around the screen. What are these? A. The circular images on the screen are Facebook’s new Chat Heads feature, which was included in a recent update to the iOS version of the Facebook app. When you see a Chat Head appear, it means that friend has sent you a message within Facebook. Tap the picture to read and reply to the message. To dismiss a Chat Head icon, touch the image with your finger and drag it down to the bottom of the screen to a gray X.The Chat Heads feature first appeared last month as part of the Facebook Home software for certain Android phones. In Facebook Home, Chat Heads can pop up when you are using other apps on the phone to keep you connected with your friends. On the iOS version, however, the Chat Heads are contained within the Facebook app itself.

Tip of the Week: Find Your System Information Quickly Want to buy that cool new video game but are unsure how much memory or what kind of processor your computer uses so you can make sure the software will work? Both Windows and Mac OS X keep these details, along with other hardware information, in a convenient place.In Windows 7, go to the Start menu and type System into the Search box. Select System or System Information in the results to open a window listing your computer’s details. For a quicker way to the information, press the Windows key and the Pause key on the keyboard to open the System window; the Win + Pause keyboard shortcut works in the newer Windows 8 system as well.On a Mac running recent versions of OS X, go to the Apple menu on the left side of the menu bar and choose About This Mac. The box that appears shows the OS X software version, processor and amount of installed memory. Click the More Info button to see additional details about the computer. If you want a s

Do-Not-Track Talks Could Be Running Off the Rails Source: Mozilla After nearly two years of negotiating and little progress, the international group trying to agree on a Do Not Track standard is convening its final official face-to-face meeting next week in Sunnyvale, Calif.Although many people may not know that advertisers and other third parties operating on Web sites install cookies, which are small bits of code that track users’ browsing history, a small subset of consumers have already activated the Do Not Track mechanisms on their devices. These don’t-track-me browser settings send out signals telling third parties that a user does not want to have his or her online activities tracked.As of March, for instance, 11.4 percent of the estimated 450 million people worldwide who use the Firefox desktop browser had activated the Do Not Track setting, according to a new report Friday from Mozilla.Advertisers say they need to collect tracking data in order to show relevant ads to consume

Shine Starts to Wear Off a Little for Google Glass White Men Wearing Google Glass, a Tumblr Web site, pokes fun at people wearing the augmented reality glasses. screenshot via Tumblr The shiny new thing luster of Google Glass may already be wearing off, even before most people have been able to try one on.When Google introduced Google Glass last year, tech nerds salivated over these augmented reality goggles from the future. But not everyone was excited. Some not on the proverbial bleeding edge of gadgetry wondered if the high-tech eye wear would offer salvation from smartphones, or turn them into zombie-eyed obsessives staring into tiny screens a few inches from their eyeballs.Over the last two weeks, as Google Glass has started to trickle into the real world, the split of tech aficionados and regular folks has only grown.Robert Scoble, an obsessive tech pundit, wrote a glowing review of the new augmented reality glasses and said, “I will never live a day without them.” He then showe