The major streaming services – both old and new – all have different catalogs, pricing and strategies. While all services seek viewers’ time and attention, in other respects they are different beasts.
Author: The Conversation
When the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge became the first human to run a marathon in under two hours as part of the recent INEOS 1:59 Project Challenge, this was arguably one of the most significant achievements of athleticism since Sir Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954.
Personal data reflect our web searches, emails, tweets, where we walk, videos we watch, etc. We don’t own our personal data though; whoever processes it ends up owning it, which means giant monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.
William Gregor, an amateur mineralogist and chemist, first discovered ilmenite – some black sand containing one of the world’s lightest metals – in the UK in 1791. Four years later, this light metal was isolated and named “titanium” by a German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth. Titanium has comparable strength to steel, the world’s most used metal, but is about 56% as dense and 45% lighter. Pure titanium is very difficult to extract from ilmenite and so it took about 145 years before the metal became generally useful. Titanium alloys are made when controlled amounts of other elements – such as chromium, iron, vanadium, aluminium, nitrogen,…
Finally, some good news from the weirdo-sphere that is social media. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that, effective November 22, the microblogging platform will ban all political advertising – globally.
These days, it’s hard to know whom to trust online, and how to discern genuine content from fakery. Some degree of trust in our devices is necessary, if we’re to embrace the growing number of technologies that could potentially enhance our lives. How many of us, however, bother trying to confirm the truth, and how many blindly approach their online communications? In a study published this week, Texas Tech University researchers tested how university students reacted when unknowingly given incorrect calculator outputs. Some students were presented with an onscreen calculator that was programmed to give the wrong answers, whereas a second group was…
In fact, the 42 authors of DeepMind’s paper, published today in Nature, greatly outnumber the rest of the world building bots for StarCraft. Without wishing to take anything away from an impressive feat of collaborative engineering, if you throw enough resources at a problem, success is all but assured.
While many websites offer a way to opt out of targeted advertisements or unwanted emails, we discovered in our recent research that exercising privacy choices isn’t always easy. But that helped us formulate some simple solutions that could make things easier for users around the web.
If you’re a Gmail user, you might have recently noticed a ghost-like presence in your email account. It’s light grey, and it comes and goes, sometimes when you’re not expecting it. And, like most ghost sightings, glimpses of it have been reported to be a little creepy.
More than 200m homes now have a smart speaker providing voice-controlled access to the internet, according to one global estimate. Add this to the talking virtual assistants installed on many smartphones, not to mention kitchen appliances and cars, and that’s a lot of Alexas and Siris. Because talking is a fundamental part of being human, it is tempting to think these assistants should be designed to talk and behave like us. While this would give us a relatable way to interact with our devices, replicating genuinely realistic human conversations is incredibly difficult. What’s more, research suggests making a machine sound human may be unnecessary and…