Group items tagged

The design of the game creates a silly context that the player doesn’t take seriously; instead, they laugh at the men and see the nudity as off-the-wall humor. These games don’t give the player room to fantasize or a roving eye to admire the characters’ bodies.

social media fulfilled the role of real-time reporting

powerful instrument of public scrutiny

Still, social media cannot prevent police brutality on its own.

public information, which is defined as information in any form provided to news and information media, especially information that has the potential to generate significant media, or public interest or inquiry. Examples include, but are not limited to, press releases, media advisories, news features, and web postings.

this policy shall govern and supersede any previous issuance or directive.

In 2014 NASA got a total of $17.646 billion. The 2015 request is for $17.460 billion, a reduction of $186 million dollars, or about a 1 percent cut. That could’ve been worse. As we’ll see, though, it’s where those cuts are going that are bad.

ut I still fear NASA will have to cut other missions to fund this one

Some areas got more money, like Space Technology. That includes tech that will help the proposed asteroid retrieval mission.

An estimated 1m are now resident in Africa, up from a few thousand a decade ago, and more keep arriving.

Between the Sahara and the Kalahari deserts lie many of the raw materials desired by its industries. China recently overtook America as the world’s largest net importer of oil.

Almost 80% of Chinese imports from Africa are mineral products.

Like a perfectly addictive drug, almost every aspect of the television viewing experience grabs and holds your brain’s attention, which explains why it’s so tough to stop watching after just one (or three) episodes of Orange is the New Black.

Characters run or shout or shoot accompanied by sound effects and music. No two moments are quite alike. To your brain, this kind of continuously morphing sensory stimulation is pretty much impossible to ignore, explains Robert F. Potter, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Communication Research at Indiana University.

“Our brains are hardwired to automatically pay attention to anything that’s new in our environment, at least for a brief period of time,” he explains. And it’s not just humans; all animals evolved this way in order to spot potential threats, food sources, or reproductive opportunities, Potter says.

une 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photo­graph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.

Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

Two minutes after he started his Facebook page, 300 people had joined it. Three months later, that number had grown to more than 250,000. What bubbled up online inevitably spilled onto the streets, starting with a series of “Silent Stands” that culminated in a massive and historic rally at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo.

When whales and other large animals flourish in the ocean, they carry a substantial amount of carbon to the sea floor upon dying. Whales and other large marine vertebrates could effectively function as carbon credits

About 160,000 tons of carbon per year could be removed from the atmosphere if whale populations were restored to pre-industrial levels. This amount is equivalent to adding 843 hectares of forest

Restoring the whale populations compares favorably with unproven schemes such as iron fertilization in removing carbon from the ocean surface

Dolphin meat is often mislabeled as whale meat in violation of Japanese food safety laws. The change of the meat sold in stores from baleen whales, which are low trophic feeders, to dolphins which are high trophic feeders, subjects those eating this meat to high levels of heavy metals, such as mercury, and organochlorines like PCBs, dioxins and benzenes.

Mercury is not the only toxin found in dolphin and whale meat. Whale and dolphin meat can be highly contaminated by both heavy metals and PBOPs (persistent bioaccumulative organic pollutants) such as PCBs, and pesticides such as DDT and chlordanes.

In a study presented to International Whaling Commission (IWC) conference in Australia, Japanese researchers reported finding dioxin levels up to 172 times the tolerable daily intake in marketed whale meat.

added: "The attention to physical attributes may be even more dangerous on social media than on traditional media because participants in social media are people we know.

A preoccupation with weight and shape was one of the key features of current popular culture, and was a global phenomenon, she said

"The fascination with celebrities, their bodies, clothes and appearance has all increased the pressure that people typically feel at a time when they seek to establish their own identities and when their bodies are growing and changing," she said

what’s remarkable about this future isn’t the sensors, nor is it that all our sensors and objects and devices are linked together. It’s the fact that once we get enough of these objects onto our networks, they’re no longer one-off novelties or data sources but instead become a coherent system, a vast ensemble that can be choreographed, a body that can dance. Really, it’s the opposite of an “Internet,” a term that even today—in the era of the cloud and the app and the walled garden—connotes a peer-to-peer system in which each node is equally empowered. By contrast, these connected objects will act more like a swarm of drones, a distributed legion of bots, far-flung and sometimes even hidden from view but nevertheless coordinated as if they were a single giant machine.

For the Programmable World to reach its full potential, we need to pass through three stages. The first is simply the act of getting more devices onto the network—more sensors, more processors in everyday objects, more wireless hookups to extract data from the processors that already exist. The second is to make those devices rely on one another, coordinating their actions to carry out simple tasks without any human intervention. The third and final stage, once connected things become ubiquitous, is to understand them as a system to be programmed, a bona fide platform that can run software in much the same manner that a computer or smartphone can. Once we get there, that system will transform the world of everyday objects into a design­able environment, a playground for coders and engineers. It will change the whole way we think about the division between the virtual and the physical.

Clearly, when things are networked, that has an impact on how actual value is produced. In many cases, it is no longer the industrially manufactured product that is the focus, but rather the web-based service that users access through that device.

In many and diverse sectors of the global economy, new web-based business models being hatched for the Internet of Things are bringing together market players who previously had no business dealings with each other

The question for you is: in this new cyber-physical galaxy, will your company become a new sun, a planet, a minor moon — or be reduced to stardust?

The entire infrastructure of the ad industry has been re-architected, and redeployed.  The critical change is that the infrastructure is now open across the entire "stack" of technologies, and pretty much every major platform is open and extensible. This means that new companies can innovate on specific problems without having to build out their own copy of the stack.  They can build the pieces they care about, the pieces that add specific value and utility for specific purposes – e.g. New Monetization Models for Publishers and Brand Advertisers, New Ad Formats, New Ad Inventory Types, New Impression Standards, New Innovation across Mobile, Video and Social, and so on.

targeting systems

As a songwriter Pandora paid me $16.89* for 1,159,000 play of “Low” last quarter.  Less than I make from a single T-shirt sale.  Okay that’s a slight  exaggeration.  That’s only the premium multi-color long sleeve shirts and that’s only at venues that don’t take commission.  But still.

Soon you will be hearing from Pandora how they need Congress to change the way royalties are calculated so that they can pay much much less to songwriters and performers. For you civilians webcasting rates are “compulsory” rates. They are set by the government (crazy, right?). Further since they are compulsory royalties, artists can not “opt out” of a service like Pandora even if they think Pandora doesn’t pay them enough. The majority of songwriters have their rates set by the government, too, in the form of the ASCAP and BMI rate courts–a single judge gets to decide the fate of songwriters (technically not a “compulsory” but may as well be).  This is already a government mandated subsidy from songwriters and artists to Silicon Valley.  Pandora wants to make it even worse.  (Yet another reason the government needs to get out of the business of setting webcasting rates and let the market sort it out.)

get an actual business model

About 1 in 8 U.S. women (just under 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime.

In 2013, an estimated 232,340 new cases of invasive breast cancer were expected to be diagnosed in women in the U.S.,

About 2,240 new cases of invasive breast cancer were expected to be diagnosed in men in 2013. A man’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is about 1 in 1,000.