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Niantic, the developer behind Pokemon Go, is clamping down on cheating with lifetime bans for players who violate the game's terms of service.
In a statement on its website, Niantic announced users can be banned for falsifying locations, using emulators, modified or unofficial software and accessing Pokemon Go clients or backends in “an unauthorised manner”.
GPS spoofing enables players to trick the game into thinking they are in different regions, helping them to pick up rare Pokemon currently unavailable in their locality. Bots, meanwhile, let players automate portions of the game.
As the Verge reports, players can appeal the ban using a form on Niantic's Pokemon Go website.
Niantic said: “Our goal is to provide a fair, fun and legitimate game experience for everyone. We will continue to work with all of you to improve the quality of the gameplay, including ongoing optimization and fine tuning of our anti-cheat system.”
Hundreds of users have taken to Reddit to try to unearth Niantic's strategy, but it's not yet clear how the developer detects foul play.
The Guardian has reported that a number of bot developers had been sent cease and desist orders.
Necrobot, a premium service for account farming, said: “Due to legal action being started against other bot creators and developers (we did not receive a letter yet) the project development will be stopped. All source files/downloads will be removed.”
The latest crackdown comes after a number of third party Pokemon mapping sites were shut down last month.
The move coincided with the removal of the nearby tracking feature, which has since been updated, and frayed relations with the game's community.
Pierre Francois Mechain Scientist of the Day
Pierre-Francois Méchain, a French astronomer, was born Aug. 16, 1744.
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Image: Anat Mirelman et al/The Lancet
Virtual reality might currently be best known for its applications in gaming and porn, but some researchers have found a more noble use for it: teaching old people not to fall over.
Researchers led by Anat Mirelman at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center found that using a combination of a treadmill and VR to train older people who were at high risk of falls was effective at keeping them on their feet. The people who had this training had 42 percent fewer falls in the six months following the training than a control group who just had treadmill training.
“Virtual reality enables us to safely train both the motor or gait aspects that are important for fall risk, while also implicitly teaching the participants to improve the cognitive functions that are important for safe ambulation,” Mirelman told me in an email. “It also has the advantage of being a game that encourages participation and compliance. Our subjects were always motivated to continue to do better, and avoid more obstacles.”
To do the study, which was funded by the European Commission and published in The Lancet, the researchers recruited around 300 people aged 60-90 who had fallen at least twice in the previous six months. About half got six weeks of training on a treadmill, while the other half got training on a treadmill with a “non-immersive” VR component—a screen in front of the treadmill showing a simulated environment with paths and obstacles, with the subject's feet included via a modified Kinect camera.
Here's a video of a participant in the VR group in the first week of training:
And here's the same participant in the last week of training:
Mirelman explained that they didn't want to use immersive VR tech such as a headset because of the risk of cyber-sickness in the older population, and because the whole point was to teach people how to walk safely in reality. “With immersive systems, specifically headsets, it is quite difficult to walk without the feedback of the real world,” she said.
While this study was done one-on-one with the participants, the researchers hope that the training could be replicated in clinical practice. “The study showed that this type of training is effective and we think it can be administered in community gyms and rehabilitation clinics,” said Mirelman.
She added that they were surprised by the adherence and motivation of the participants, which suggests that people might be willing to take it up. Call it gamification of elderly care.
When Amazon first started making original series, it had a gimmick: The internet's very own big-box store would put the first episodes of potential series online so viewers could vote on which ones would become full-fledged series. The gambit made the obligatory tech-company gestures at transparency and disruption, but it also reflected the paucity of Amazon's initial series, a batch of pilots that, excepting Alpha House, barely looked professional. When a network is making such larkish TV, it hardly matters what goes and what doesn't. In the few years since, as Amazon has gotten more serious about making television, it has continued to put pilots online early, but viewer response is barely relevant: The network is going to greenlight what it is going to greenlight, apparently having discovered that disrupting the television business sometimes involves doing things the old way.
Earlier this summer, Amazon released pilots for two hourlong series: The Interestings (flawed, but promising; not yet picked up) and The Last Tycoon (very bad; picked up). This week, it is releasing pilots for three half-hour series: Jean-Claude Van Johnson, The Tick, and Jill Soloway's I Love Dick, the headlining act of this trio. Liberally adapted from a beloved cult novel by Chris Kraus, I Love Dick stars Kathryn Hahn as Chris, a stymied filmmaker who travels with her husband Sylvère (Griffin Dunne) to Marfa, Texas—where she, and then they, become infatuated with Dick (Kevin Bacon, smoldering), a macho intellectual and part-time cowboy who runs an institute Sylvère is attending. I Love Dick has potential, but it doesn't need it: Soloway, the creator of Transparent, is Amazon's most important creative asset. If you are a network, you give her what she wants, including another show.
Soloway told New York magazine, in a piece about the show, that she identified with Kraus' choice to use her own name and biography in her work. “I only want to write about somewhat unlikable Jewish women having really inappropriate ideas about life and sex,” Soloway said. I Love Dick delivers on those interests. The pilot reflects many of Soloway's strengths—her naturalistic skill with actors, her ability to capture bourgeois social milieus with a detail (in this case, fluorescent-yellow Birkenstocks), her dedication to exploring gender politics in ways that don't turn her shows into lectures—but it doesn't have the instantaneous hook or heart of Transparent.
I Love Dick, the novel, is epistolary. I Love Dick, the show, is framed by letters Chris has written to Dick. “Dear Dick, every letter is a love letter. It started in New York,” Hahn says in harried voiceover at the start of the show as the block text dramatically appears on an all-red screen. But turning the novel into a TV show takes it out of Kraus' character's head in a way that alters the texture and tone, losing some of the hothouse intensity of the novel. Television does a great close third-person, but it is very hard, if not impossible, for it do first-person, even when using first-person narration. (Recently, Mr. Robot has made some attempts.) With TV, you're always watching from the outside. The world that Chris and Sylvère inhabit in the show automatically feels bigger, more populated, and more concrete than their world in the novel, simply because you can see all the people in the shot that the writing might have ignored. The pilot also introduces characters who are not in the book at all. Also not in the book: Marfa. Soloway decided to set the show there after visiting her girlfriend, the poet Eileen Myles, there, and deciding it would be a good cross-cultural canvas to help broaden the novel's scope.
There are people who have a hard time watching Transparent because they find the Pfeffermans too excruciating. On Transparent, Hahn's Rabbi Raquel, the on-again, off-again love interest of Josh Pfefferman (Jay Duplass), works like aspirin: Raquel is so grounded, so sane that she lessens the pain of watching the Pfeffermans mess up their lives. In I Love Dick, Hahn, fantastic in everything she does, gets to play the headache. Her Chris has a big, blowsy personality: caustic, dramatic, and self-sabotaging. But she has that Pfefferman-esque charisma. When she spots Dick at a party—Kevin Bacon wears a white T-shirt as well as he did in Footloose—and expresses her attraction by jabbering about how remarkable it is that he goes by “Dick” and not Richard or Rick or Richie, her allure is nonetheless plain to see.
In the show's climactic scene, dinner at a restaurant, Dick asks Chris what her movie is about. “It's about a couple, or I would say the woman in the couple, she represents all women, and society's crushing expectations,” she says. “Sounds horrible. Sounds like you're crushed by someone,” Dick replies, before turning to Sylvère and asking if Chris' film is any good. The great thing about Soloway's work is that she herself is both Dick and Chris, a woman interested in society's crushing expectations of women but also talented and funny and wise enough to know you need character and plot and entertainment and complications to tell that story—that you need people, not symbols. You need a blowsy New Yorker who rolls into Marfa in a jumpsuit and neon Birkenstocks with her own unhinged plans about what to do with a lustworthy macho intellectual cowboy named Dick.
Paul Burnham posted a photo:
Paul Burnham posted a photo:
The tiny Swedish town of Insjön has been left shaken, traumatised and probably put off its breakfast after two porcine-feature exhibitionists launched a laser-enhanced sex spree on Friday.…
A Stanford University researcher finds that products purchased mainly by poor people were increasing in price much more quickly than those purchased by the wealthy.
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Researchers have for the first time, decoded and predicted the brain activity patterns of word meanings within sentences, and successfully predicted what the brain patterns would be for new sentences. The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure human brain activation.
Image credit: University of Rochester/Andrew Anderson, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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This is a scanning electron microscope (SEM) image of soil dust, composed mainly of silicon-oxygen minerals. This particle was collected along a highway in Scottsdale, Arizona, as part of a research study conducted by Arizona State University researchers on the flow of air pollution in the Phoenix metro area. Dust kicked up by road traffic creates a large proportion of the particles, while others are the combustion products of gasoline or diesel fuel, sometimes in combination with dust.
Image credit: Hua Xin, Ph.D., Arizona State University
These oldest known stars, date from before the Milky Way Galaxy formed, when the Universe was just 300 million years old. The stars, found near the center of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pure but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous explosion called hypernova. The discovery and analysis of the nine pure stars challenges current theories about the environment of the early Universe from which these stars formed.
"These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen," said Louise Howes from The Australian National University (ANU), part of the 2015 discovery team along with the University of Cambridge. "These stars formed before the Milky Way, and the galaxy formed around them."
"The stars have surprisingly low levels of carbon, iron and other heavy elements, which suggests the first stars might not have exploded as normal supernovae," said Ms Howes. "Perhaps they ended their lives as hypernovae - poorly understood explosions of probably rapidly rotating stars producing 10 times as much energy as normal supernovae."
Project leader Professor Martin Asplund, from ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics said finding such rare relic stars amongst the billions of stars in the Milky Way center was like finding a needle in a haystack.
"The ANU SkyMapper telescope has a unique ability to detect the distinct colors of anaemic stars - stars with little iron - which has been vital for this search," said Professor Asplund.
Following the team's discovery in 2014 of an extremely old star on the edge of the Milky Way, the team focused on the dense central parts of the galaxy, where stars formed even earlier. The team sifted through about five million stars observed with SkyMapper to select the most pure and therefore oldest specimens, which were then studied in more detail using the Anglo-Australian Telescope near Coonabarabran in New South Wales and the Magellan telescope in Chile to reveal their chemical make-up.
The team also demonstrated that the stars spend their entire lives near the Milky Way center and are not just passing through, a further indication that the stars really are the oldest known stars in the Universe.
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The Daily Galaxy via Australian National University
Image credit: ESO and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Milky_Way_Arch.jpg
>europeanspaceagency posted a photo:
Several thousand years ago, a star some 160 000 light-years away from us exploded, scattering stellar shrapnel across the sky. The aftermath of this energetic detonation is shown here in this striking image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 .
The exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our nearest neighbouring galaxies. Around 97% of stars within the Milky Way that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the Sun are expected to end up as white dwarfs. These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae, some of the brightest events ever observed in the Universe. If a white dwarf is part of a binary star system, it can siphon material from a close companion. After gobbling up more than it can handle — and swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the Sun — the star becomes unstable and ignites as a Type Ia supernova.
This was the case for the supernova remnant pictured here, which is known as DEM L71. It formed when a white dwarf reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process. Slamming into the surrounding interstellar gas, this stellar shrapnel gradually diffused into the separate fiery filaments of material seen scattered across this skyscape.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu