Man vs. Robot: The Battle of Customer Service Turning Digital Customer Think When automation and online experiences first became popular, businesses were struggling to create strong relationships with their customers. It's difficult to engage on a personal level with empathy, relevance, and kindness when your entire operation ... |
VentureBeat | Anki introduces tool that allows developers to hack its Cozmo A.I. robot VentureBeat Cozmo is a playful, intelligent robot with an essence of artificial intelligence. As VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi described it, it's “something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.” Anki cofounder and president Hanns Tappeiner explained ... Hanging out with Anki's Cozmo, the toy robot putting AI at our fingertipsThe Verge Meet Cozmo, the AI robot with emotions video - CNETCNET AI-Powered Cozmo Robot Gets Easy-To-Use Development KitTop Tech News all 37 news articles » |
The Faroe Islands tourism board launched a campaign called Sheep View 360, shot by attaching cameras to some of the archipelago's many sheep.
When images and video of violent incidents like the attack in Nice, France, saturate the news and social media, many people feel overwhelmed and just want to turn away.
Will the Internet ever be free for families relying on housing assistance? HUD Secretary Julian Castro and Comcast's David Cohen weigh in on challenges of connecting public housing to the Internet.
Read more: Rob Greenfield, Sustainability, Green Living, Sustainable, Compost, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Upcycle, Biking, Environment, Environmental, Outspeak, HuffPost Live 321 News
scott.hammond34 posted a photo:
Not the most original composition this to say the least, but as i was nearby and the light was decent i couldn't help myself. Opted for the 35mm over the UWA to try and compress the city and the sky a little as it lost impact at 17 and 24mm. Generally i find if the light and composition looks good to my eyes as i look at it then the best lens to convey that is the 35mm, brings the sunrise toward me a little more. I never really thought of until recently but London is stunning at dawn and Dusk; I cant wait to get back up there, especially in the winter when the sun rises behind tower bridge. (I think)
Thanks for viewing, all comments and faves previously are very much appreciated :-)
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By Farley Fitzgerald, National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Society and the U.S. Department of State today announced the names of the five candidates selected for the third class of the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. The Fellowship provides a unique platform for U.S. Fulbright awardees to build awareness of transnational challenges, comparing and contrasting cross-border issues. Their stories will be shared on National Geographic digital platforms using a variety of digital storytelling tools, including text, photography, video, audio, graphic illustrations and/or social media.
Over a nine-month period, the five storytellers will create stories on globally significant social or environmental topics, including cultures, wildlife and food. They are:
Finalists were selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board following recommendations by National Geographic Society editorial experts. Fulbright-National Geographic Storytellers receive funding for travel, living expenses and health/accident coverage as well as a reporting and materials allowance from the U.S. Department of State. National Geographic organizes a pre-departure training, and staff mentor the Storytellers, helping them tell their stories to a wider global audience.
“We are thrilled to partner with the U.S. Department of State for the third class of the Fulbright-National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship,” said Keith Jenkins, general manager of digital for the National Geographic Society. “This platform is exactly in line with our belief in the power of science, exploration and storytelling to change the world. Our team is excited to work closely with the five Storytellers on their projects throughout the coming year.”
For more information and details on applying for the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship, visit http://us.fulbrightonline.org/fulbright-nat-geo-fellowship.
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Fulbright Program. Established by Congress in 1946, the educational exchange program is designed to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and people of other countries. The Fulbright Program annually supports more than 8,000 students, scholars, artists and professionals from the United States and more than 160 countries to study, teach, conduct research, exchange ideas and find solutions to shared international challenges.
For media inquiries about the 2016/2017 Fulbright-National Geographic Fellows, please contact:
Farley Fitzgerald, National Geographic Society
(202) 775-6119
ffitzgerald@ngs.org
"This is the first study of the role of serious mental illness in all family homicides.
There are approximately 4,000 family homicides in the United States each year. Individuals with serious mental illness are responsible for 29% of these, or approximately 1,150 homicides. This is 7% of all homicides in the U.S.
The role of serious mental illness varies depending on the family relationships. Approximately 67% of children who kill their parents are seriously mentally ill, but only 10% of spouses who kill their spouses,
Although total homicides have decreased markedly in the US in recent years, there has been no decrease in the number of children killing parents or parents killing children, the two types of family homicides most closely associated with serious mental illness.
Women are responsible for 11% of all homicides in the US but 26% of family homicides.
Elderly family members, especially women, are disproportionately victimized. Among all homicides in the US, only 2.2% of victims are ages 75 and older. In a sample of 2015 family homicides, 9.2% of the victims were age 75 and older.
Guns are used as the weapon in less than half of family homicides.
The failure of individuals with serious mental illness to take their medication and their abuse of alcohol and drugs are risk factors for family homicides. The majority of family homicides are preceded by warnings and threats that are often ignored. The adequate treatment of individuals with serious mental illness would prevent the majority of family homicides associated with serious mental illness."
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all roads lead to St Paul's
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The Anker RoboVac 10 cleans just as well as a $750 bot.
In “Unmask,” the second-season premiere of Mr. Robot, Elliot (Rami Malek) is keeping a tenuous grip on sanity, but he's menaced by intrusive thoughts. His nonexistent alter ego (Christian Slater) keeps turning up uninvited, visiting violence upon Elliot or those who threaten him, so much that it becomes routine. After Mr. Robot blows Elliot's brains out with a handgun, Elliot nonchalantly scribbles in his journal, “He shot me in the head again.”
Mr. Robot, as a show, has porous boundaries, whether it's soaking in current events or regurgitating half-digested chunks of Fight Club. But in “Unmask,” the show latched onto a particularly inspired reference point. As the literally shadowy figures who control the nation's banks addressed Philip Price (Michael Crisfoter), the CEO of the malevolent E Corp, to explain why the country couldn't bail out his beleaguered conglomerate, the only background noise was the faint hum of inside-the-Beltway air conditioning. But as Price rose to his feet, turning the tables on his would-be masters, a musical theme rose to buoy his words: Michael Small's score from the 1974 thriller The Parallax View.
The Parallax View, which was directed by Alan J. Pakula, stars Warren Beatty as a reporter who unearths evidence of a massive conspiracy to assassinate political figures, the work of the sinister Parallax Corporation. It's part of a wave of similarly paranoid thrillers that swept through movie theaters in the 1970s in response to post-1968 disillusionment and the bonafide conspiracy of Watergate: Pakula's All the President's Men, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor, and many more. The influence of the genre in general and The Parallax View in particular on Mr. Robot has been noted many times, but this explicit homage—which Vulture's Matt Zoller Seitz was one of few critics to point out in advance — takes us into a different realm, one where those past movies go from reference points to source material. It's as if they're trying to break through the surface of Mr. Robot, as if the show is being hacked as we're watching it.
In substance, Price's speech is hardly groundbreaking stuff, although it's presented with the pomp and circumstance of a major revelation, recalling New York Times' critic James Poniewozik's deadly observation that watching Mr. Robot can be “like being cornered at a party by a guy who was blown away by this Intercept article he read.” It's staged like a key monologue in 1976's Network, the one where TV network head Ned Beatty explains to would-be revolutionary Howard Beale that “the world is a business.” Price's explanation of how the stock market and the economy work—and why the government has to give his company yet another bailout—is similarly entry-level. “Every day when that market bell rings, we con people into believing in something,” he says. “The American Dream. Family values. Could be Freedom Fries for all I care. It doesn't matter as long as the con works and people buy and sell whatever it is we want them to. If I resign, then any scrap of confidence the public is already clinging on to will be destroyed. And we all know a con doesn't work without the confidence.”
The writing here is Mr. Robot at its worst, regurgitating Econ 101 lessons as if they're closely guarded secrets. (The idea that stocks rise and fall with investor confidence is pretty much a definition of how the market functions.) But Cristofer—who, incidentally, is also a Pulitzer- and Tony-winning playwright —gives it all he's got, biting down on the “con” in “confidence” like it's his last meal. There's a deliberate unnaturalness to his performance, which, coupled with the creeping dread of that borrowed score, throws the whole scene productively off-kilter, making us doubt our eyes as much as Elliot does his.
In the lead-up to the second season, USA has been at pains to stress Mr. Robot's topical relevance, producing an hour-long special stressing the show's realistic depiction of computer hacking techniques and describing the series, somewhat optimistically, as “a cultural phenomenon.” But like the 1970s movies it draws on, the show is far more powerful as a psychological study of madness and obsession than as a pseudo-profound tract with Something Important to Say About Society.
What makes The Parallax View powerful isn't it the notion that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were both part of some ominous plot, but the way Beatty plays a man who sounds crazier the closer he gets to the truth, and the way Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis frame the world in ever-more extreme and alienating ways. It forces us to see things as he does, to take on that feeling of madness. That's what Mr. Robot does best, thanks especially to Rami Malek's captivatingly unnerving performance as Elliot. In Season 2, we're moving outside of Elliot's head, seeing the world as it is and not as he imagines it. (In the first episode, we hear E Corp referred to by its real name, and not “Evil Corp,” Elliot's preferred moniker.) But that's a dangerous place for it to go, since Mr. Robot's version of the real world is a lot less interesting than Elliot's delusion.
Reports on Thursday that Donald Trump may be picking Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate led Mark Joseph Stern to reflect that Pence may be just the ticket: “Pence is a fatuous yes-man, a milquetoast mook with no strong convictions other than a desire to win and be popular,” Stern writes. “He will faithfully follow Trump's whims and commands.”
Meanwhile, Reihan Salam calls Pence a “drearily conventional figure,” and Jim Newell wonders whether Pence can even survive the mind-bending rigors of being Trump's running mate: “Pence has had his disagreements with Trump throughout the campaign, and if he is indeed VP he may struggle to keep up with Trump's relentless bullshit.”
Dahlia Lithwick looks at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's recent attacks on Trump and wonders whether longtime Ginsburg fans are right to cheer her candor. “She may be trying to speak on behalf of the judicial branch itself, a branch that has been almost completely silent in the face of six brutal months of attacks from the right,” Lithwick writes, trying to suss out RBG's reasoning. “In one sense, by speaking up for a judicial branch that has absorbed one body blow after another in recent months, she did nothing but level the playing field.”
Watching the Facebook Live video Diamond Reynolds made after the shooting of Philando Castile last week, John Kelly notes how Reynolds used politeness as “a powerful tool for dignity and subversion.” Reynolds, Kelly writes in a meditation on her repeated use of “sir,” “transforms a title of respect into a refusal to accept brutality, a performance of transcendent dignity, and a disruption of the status quo.”
Willa Paskin surveys this year's Emmy nominations and finds them full of “good taste and blind spots.” Hooray: Mr. Robot for best drama; Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch for Best Actor in a Comedy; many nods for The People v. O.J. Simpson. Boo: No Crazy Ex-Girlfriend? No Jane the Virgin?
For fun: When did you first fall in love with breakout Ghostbuster Kate McKinnon?
Tiny oomails,
Rebecca
The Emmys have become a good test for whether you are a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person. With so much television available these days, there is, depending on your perspective, more great stuff than ever for the Emmys to choose from, or more great stuff than ever for the Emmys to ignore. This year's nominations, announced earlier today, abounded with good taste and blind spots. After years of being ignored, The Americans was finally nominated for Best Drama, and its canoodling lead actors, Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, the 'ship to end all 'ships, received best actor nods. And yet the Emmys did not bounce aging snoozes like Downton Abbey, Homeland, or House of Cards in order to make room for The Americans, but rather the much more vital, if still aging, Orange is the New Black, whose cast was also nearly shut out in the supporting categories. Not everything can be nominated and yet—why can't everything good be nominated?
When it comes to the Emmys I have been, for years, a glass half-full kind of person, and this year's nominations seem to me almost brimming. Joining The Americans as a first time Best Drama contender is the incisive Mr. Robot, whose star Rami Malek adds some fizz to the Best Actor in a Drama category. Thomas Middleditch, who is great as the nervous twitchball at the center of Silicon Valley, was nominated in a Best Actor in a Comedy category that couldn't be better, except for the inclusion of William H. Macy, the most annoying thing about Shameless. Black-ish's Tracee Ellis Ross, UnReal's Constance Zimmer, RuPaul, Laurie Metcalf, Beyonce the Director, and everyone involved with The People v. O.J. Simpson were all rightly recognized, Metcalf three times. I even think that the Emmy voters showed good taste in ignoring the well-done but plodding Show Me a Hero, the brutal Horace and Pete, and Hulu's troubled-in-Silverlake comedy Casual. (Troubled-in-Silverlake comedy You're the Worst deserved some love though.)
It is true that for all these good choices, the Emmys ignored the CW's deserving Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin, whose inimitable narrator was at least nominated in the Best Narrator category. It is also true that Broad City wasn't even in the Emmy conversation. But this is what happens, a little give, a little take; no nomination for Colbert, but none for The Daily Show either. In fact, I feel calm, cool, and collected about almost all of the nominees (Sam Bee, it's your year next year!), except when I realize that Sophie Turner, the best young actress on Game of Thrones by a dragon's length, was not nominated, yet Lena Headey, Maisie Williams, and Emilia Clarke were. God damn you, Emmys!
The Emmys still has vestigial fuddy-duddy taste. It holds on to stodgy favorites like Modern Family, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, and Homeland even as it bounces edgier former-favorites like Orange, Girls, and American Horror Story. (I don't think The Good Wife is stodgy, but it got bounced this year too; so did Jim Parsons.) If I had to guess, I would wager that there is a core group of Emmy voters who like what they like no matter what is cool—PBS costume dramas, big-tent network comedies, apparently Bloodline—and a core group of voters who is sampling more widely, watching TV under the influence of cool, without being slaves to it. I'm sure these groups have overlapping taste, but this dynamic would explain both the Emmy's loyalty and its daring, and should give hope to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: if you can become the Tatiana Maslany or The Americans of the future—i.e. the thing people point to when discussing the Emmys idiocy—you have a pretty good chance of one day getting an Emmy.
The Emmys make an interesting counterpoint to the Motion Picture Academy, which has lately been embroiled in a controversy about how old and white it is, and thus, how staid in its taste. For a few years now, the Emmys have been much fleeter of foot, slowly but surely moving away from reflexively nominating bland network fare to nominating that which is vibrant, excellent and, often, diverse—alongside some bland not-necessarily network fare. There is no surefire “Emmy bait,” except that which has the feel of a phenomenon (Making a Murderer, Game of Thrones, The People v. O.J. Simpson) and as long as this is true, every Emmy nomination day should be as nicely eclectic as this one.