Group items tagged

AMC Theaters issued a statement on Twitter saying that due to the negative response, it will not proceed with the plan to allow cellphones inside its theaters: "With your advice in hand, there will be NO TEXTING ALLOWED in any of the auditoriums at AMC Theaters. Not today, not tomorrow and not in the foreseeable future."

"When you tell a 22-year-old to turn off the phone, don't ruin the movie, they hear 'please cut off your left arm above the elbow,'" Aron told Variety. "You can't tell a 22-year-old to turn off their cellphone. That's not how they live their life ...

and one way would be taking "specific auditoriums and make them more texting friendly." 

"There's a certain class of content which is only going to come onto Facebook if there's a good way to compensate content owners for that,"

"We've recently rolled out the business model for this. We'll give a revenue share on a portion of the views to content owners

To grasp the scope of change unraveling in content creation, which is increasingly fragmented, consider all the mobile apps on your smartphone.

Penguin Random House announced Wednesday it will release an abridged young adult version of The Da Vinci Code for teenage audiences.

The plot of the novel will remain largely the same but will be protracted for younger readers.

Its newest toy is called Barco Escape and right now it’s essentially three theater screens in one space — the main screen and then additional screens on the left and right walls. The effect is a 270-degree image that makes viewers feel like they are in the middle of the action.

It’s the kind of premium experience that most people would expect to pay extra for but Schilowitz says part of the point of Escape is to give viewers a more theme-park like experience without charging any more for a ticket.

One of the biggest trends right now is people watching other people play video games.

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam.

the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.

There’s dissonance between the cultural and psychological associations I have about technology and the associations I have about reading. The popular mythology tells me that words are good while tech is scary.

Bottom line: the eReader makes my son read more. And my son is not unique. According to PlayScience and Digital Book World study, the Kids eBook market “has basically tripled from 2011 to 2012, that is 500% growth.”  What’s more, “A staggering number of kids  (85%) e-read at least once a week.”

“Which do you like better,” I sent him a message with gChat, “eBooks or paper books?” “ebook” “Why?” “Its a elictrak devise” I forgive the bad spelling. But I should probably correct him. Or, even better, respond with sentences that use the words and model correct spellings. “What have you been reading?” “All the Horrid Henrys” “Cool. Are they good books?” “Ya.”

As personal digital assistant apps such as Google Now become widespread, so does the idea of algorithms that can not only meet but anticipate our needs

eBay lets you shop at only one store at a time and promises delivery “in about an hour,” while Google lets you shop at multiple stores and pick your own delivery time window.

customers won’t be ordering stuff from eBay anymore. Instead, they’ll let their phones do it.

The prospect of genetically much altered future generations is no longer in the distant science fiction future but rather in the "some of the people reading this will live to see it on large scale" future.

Some more competitive governments might mandate genetic editing to put a floor on intelligence. Want a first class high tech economy? Allow no kid below 120 IQ. The first government to do that will have the highest per capita income economy in the world 50 years later if not much sooner.

My expectation is that differences in regulatory response to germ line genetic engineering technologies will cause the populations of the world's various countries to diverge in a variety of ways that will be immediately visibl

Will China's Great GREEN Wall save the country from dust storms? 100 billion tree project could halt advancing Gobi Desert

advancing

China is planting huge strips of trees to stop the Gobi DesertFor decades the desert has been advancing and causing serious dust storms in key cities such as BeijingSince 1978 the government has been planting trees to reverse the widespread deforestation that took place in ChinaNow a recent study suggests the project has been a successThey found increased vegetation and lower levels of dust storm intensityBy 2050 100 billion trees will be planted across a tenth of the country 

The team used 140,000 horror stories from the subreddit r/nosleep to teach the AI how to tell a horror story that a human would find intelligible, compelling and scary. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Shelley, though, is her reliance on human interaction to facilitate her storytelling.

AI can write surprisingly scary and creative horror stories

They’re the greatest generation — of couch potatoes.

A growing number of 18- to-34-year-olds, the world’s largest age group, prefer to unwind by staying in, watching Netflix and ordering Seamless, rather than by getting down at a club or bellying up to a bar.

on average, millennials stream 2.7 hours of TV shows a day, while the earlier generation, Gen X, does about 1.8 hours.