“Proceed with caution: this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability,” the abbreviated warning reads.
The use of fact checkers to rate news content on the web has become an increasingly popular option for platforms as inaccurate, misleading, and false news continues to plague the inter-webs and cause political trouble for companies that just want to focus on making money. Facebook’s attempts to rate news sites alongside shared links have generally been considered an utter failure, but NewsGuard thinks it can do better. When promoting its service, it has emphasized that it uses real human beings to perform the evaluations based on a transparent set of nine criteria. In August, it told Wired that it employs “nearly 40 reporters and dozens of freelancers” who are “working their way through 4,500 websites that they say account for 98 percent of the content shared online.”
The rating doesn’t automatically pop-up; it simply shows a little shield icon in the browser bar that’s either green or red—green is good, red is bad. Clicking the icon drops down a short evaluation of the site’s trustworthiness and gives you the option to “See the full Nutritional label.”
A group of professors from universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley are at work on the Unit-e, a “globally scalable” cryptocurrency that can achieve blazing speeds and retain Bitcoin’s vaunted decentralization. Unit-e will be the first project of the non-profit Distributed Technologies Research (DTR), an academic-formed foundation supported by hedge fund Pantera Capital Management. They hope to design a coin that will process transactions faster than Visa.
Bloomberg reports that, although Bitcoin “has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive,” in part, said DTR, because “inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment.”
“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale,’’ said Pantera Capital co-chief investment officer Joey Krug, who is also a DTR council member. “We are on the cusp of something where if this doesn’t scale relatively soon, it may be relegated to ideas that were nice but didn’t work in practice: more like 3D printing than the Internet.’’
Unit-e is slated to launch in the second half of 2019, with the target of processing “as many as 10,000 transactions per second.” That compares with Bitcoin’s current average of 3.3 to 7 transactions per second, and Ethereum’s 10 to 30 transactions per second. Visa, on average, processes about 1,700 transactions per second.
The unprecedented move — coming on the same day that the streamer landed its first Oscar nomination for best picture — was endorsed by Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. It is the first time in history that a non-studio has been granted entry. It also is a defining moment for MPAA chairman-CEO Charles Rivkin 18 months into his tenure.
Added Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos: "Joining the Motion Picture Association further exemplifies our commitment to ensuring the vibrancy of these creative industries and the many talented people who work in them all over the world. We look forward to supporting the association team and their important efforts.”
Additionally, once Fox is merged with Disney, the MPAA will have one less member, meaning a loss of as much as $10 million to $12 million in annual dues. Sources say the MPAA is courting other new members as well (Amazon could be a candidate).
Netflix's focus on anti-piracy has begun to match that of the big studios, with the burgeoning popularity of set-top boxes pre-loaded with customized open-source software that can be used to access pirated content. Netflix and Amazon have joined the studios in filing copyright lawsuits and, along with MPAA members, are part of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.
However, Netflix's seat at the MPAA table could irk theater owners, many of whom won't carry the streamer's original films since it doesn't abide by theatrical windows. The MPAA has stayed out of the windows debate, however.
While Google Translate offers multiple non-AR functions, its AR feature is arguably the most useful. By aiming your device’s camera at text written in any of the more than three dozen languages the app currently supports (it translates more than 100 languages when you type in the text), it will instantly translate the words.
This app invites you to “discover history’s treasures” right before your very eyes (well, your very screen). You can use it to scrutinize historical artifacts, such as ancient weaponry from Rome, an Egyptian death mask, or a Grecian urn, or you can view famous works of art in three (virtual) dimensions. It’s a must-have for the student and/or the armchair historian.
An investment fund called Candy Ventures, which is an existing Blippar investor based in London, has revealed that it bought numerous assets relating to Blippar, including its name and the platform’s underlying technologies, in addition to the assets of Layar — an AR startup Blippar bought in 2014.
This will form the basis of a new company, also called Blippar, which will focus on developing an AR creation and publishing platform aimed at everyone, regardless of whether they have technical know-how. This will be operated as a software-as-service (SaaS) business, and appears to be based on the Blippbuilder platform launched for third-party developers back in 2016.
The play4REAL Lab at the Yale Center for Health & Learning Games has received a gift from Oculus Education, a Facebook-owned technology company, to develop virtual reality (VR) educational tools that target vaping among teens.
The new gift will be used to test the effectiveness of such interventions by supporting a randomized controlled trial that the lab will conduct with 230 teens. Over the course of six months, researchers will investigate whether playing smokeSCREEN VR can impact teens’ attitudes, intentions, social norms, knowledge, and behaviors around vaping. To aid in this effort, the lab will add two full-time staff and two student interns.
For those who have long wondered what it would be like to cruise around with the real Slim Shady — your time has finally come.
The teaser trailer for Marshall From Detroit was released on Tuesday ahead of the documentary's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this weekend. The 21-minute-long virtual reality film offers an interactive, 360-degree view of Detroit as Eminem tours his hometown with interviewer Sway.
The trailer, which gives a taste of the film's interactive features, reveals Em in the backseat while a wintery and seemingly empty downtown streams past the windows.
The film is in collaboration with director Caleb Slain and the Emmy-Award winning Felix & Paul studios, which specializes in "immersive" storytelling.
“Our idea was to extend the blanket of intimacy offered by VR beyond the once-in-a-lifetime ride with Marshall and introduce you to a more mystic version of Detroit you could never see for yourself,” Slain told Variety. “We wanted to take the ‘reality’ out of VR and cook it down into something more unreal, but also truthful.”
The Academy Awards may not have a virtual reality category (yet), but one blockbuster got a nod for the VR effects it created for filmgoers.
The movie, based on Ernest Cline's book of the same name, is known for characters traveling into a virtual reality space — which needed to be experienced without film patrons having to done VR headsets themselves.
Spielberg, who did not personally get nominated for an Academy Award this year, is very focused, however on VR and its role in Hollywood. He is involved in Dreamscape, a VR theater, that recently opened its first location in Los Angeles' Westfield Century City mall.
It is inarguable that in this age of neural networks computer vision is impacting a far broader range of consumer-facing products year-over-year. But one thing that struck me as I wandered between booths: There was a noticeable disconnect between the technological focus seen in demonstrations at CES and that in the publications featured at CVPR, the leading conference on computer vision and pattern recognition.
Generative techniques are all the rage among the academics at CVPR, but they were nowhere to be found in the commercial applications I saw at CES. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently led us down a dark road of deepfakes and malicious photorealistic hallucination. This topic is most certainly on the minds of major tech companies and will only gain more prominence as our generative architectures become stronger and faster.
So, as content authenticity creeps further into the media’s spotlight, at CES 2020 I’d expect to see more computer vision applications that generate artificial content, as well as those that sniff it out.
Battle shrinking attention spans with immersive learning scenarios that your learners can experience in Virtual Reality using VR headsets. Now Adobe Captivate makes it possible for you to import 360° media assets and add hotspots, quizzes and other interactive elements to engage your learners with near real-life scenarios. Achieve learning use cases such as – “be in the shoes of”, “virtual tours”, “crises management”, “safety drills” and more.
