Uber hits London’s black cabs with a 15 percent price drop

Uber’s continuing on its mission to wind up London’s black cabbies with its convenient and affordable service today, announcing it’s cutting uberX fare prices in the capital by 15 percent. The cost of UberEXEC and UberLUX tiers — both with progressively fancier cars — will remain flat, but from 3pm tomorrow you’ll pay 15-percent less on any trip in a basic, uberX-class vehicle. Better yet, the minimum fare has also been reduced from £6 to a fiver, but the trade-off is prices will no longer be rounded down to the nearest pound. While the cut is bound to make Londoners happy regardless of that little caveat, we’re less sure of who’ll be madder — the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA), or the Mancunians that’ll still have to pay full whack.

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: Uber (Twitter)

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NFL Now comes to Yahoo Screen as it continues to expand

If you didn’t think the National Football League was really serious about its new digital network, think again. A mere week after arriving on the Apple TV, NFL Now is adding Yahoo Screen to the growing list of platforms it is currently available in. While the experience on Yahoo’s internet video service won’t be as fully fleshed as on Apple’s streaming box or the NFL’s own apps, it still gives football fans another way to keep up with their favorite teams and players — after all, NFL Now is all about personalization. Yahoo says NFL Now content is limited to Yahoo Sports on the web and the Screen iOS app, but that integration with its Android equivalent is “coming soon.”

Filed under: Misc, Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Mobile

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Source: Yahoo Screen

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It didn’t take long for a company to crack Keurig’s K-cup lockdown

When Keuring Green Mountain announced that it would cut out third-party pods for the next-generation of its popular single-serve machines, other coffee outfits were up in arms. One particular company, TreeHouse Foods, claimed that it would take a short time for the code to be cracked (and filed a lawsuit, too). Well, Mother Parker’s Tea & Coffee has done just that with its RealCup capsules. The company’s coffee and tea pods will work inside the recently released Keurig 2.0 brewers capable of brewing both single cups and carafe-sized batches. Keurig has licensing deals in place with big name coffee outfits like Starbucks, Peet’s, Caribou, Krispy Kreme, Twinings of London and others, but it’s the other not so well-known suppliers and the private label clientele that are set to suffer under the exclusivity.

[Photo credit: m01229/Flickr]

Filed under: Household

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Via: Techdirt

Source: Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee (PDF)

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Neuroscience proves nobody likes CGI

Cinema screens are huge, which is odd, because the eye can only focus on a small portion of what’s in front of it at any one time. That’s what prompted the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to team up with eye-tracking firm Tobii and neuroscientists from Birkbeck, University of London. The trio embarked upon a project to determine where in the movie people concentrated their gaze. Then, by using Tobii’s hardware, were able to create a heat map that can be overlaid on the frame, much in the same way that SMI analyzes sports matches. The conclusions from the research aren’t particularly surprising, but does confirm a long-held suspicion that people’s innate ability to detect and ignore fakery hasn’t diminished, even in an era of photo-realistic CGI.

Analyzing a scene from Iron Man 2 with director Jon Favreau, he commented that the audience’s attention was directed straight towards those on-screen moments with practical action. That is, people totally blanked the huge sweeping vistas of “Monaco,” (in fact, a car park in Downey, California), the river and the crowds. Instead, they focused on things that were “real,” like Gwyneth Paltrow’s face*, Mickey Rourke’s body and the model F1 car that was blown up for the scene.

“Everything that you’re looking at is real, and everything that you’re not looking at is fake.”

Perhaps this will help convince directors that practical, old-school effects are worth investing in, and will turn the tide against glossy, unrealistic CGI. It’s an issue that Favreau is wrestling on his forthcoming remake of The Jungle Book, saying that the reason that motion capture films — like The Polar Express and The Adventures of Tintin — don’t work, is that the uncanny valley make faces too unbelievable. That’s why he’s going to be using real actors’ heads to help his audience not feel too unsettled. If you’re curious to see the clip with heat map and commentary, it’s the first one down at the source.

*No jokes, now.

[Image Credit: AMPAS / Marvel / Tobii]

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Science, HD

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Via: Wired

Source: Oscars.org

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Researchers figure out how to turn bad memories into good ones (in mice)

We’ve all got memories we wish we could view less negatively. Some are trivial, like that drunken display at the office party; some are serious and create genuine psychological challenges. So far, researchers have figured out how to create false ones, or remove them entirely. Now — in mice at least — scientists have converted a bad memory into a good one. The researches established good and bad memories in the mice (with food rewards, or light shocks) and recorded the parts of the brain that dealt with the location (hippocampus) of those events, and the emotional recording part (amygdala). To switch the memories, when the mice returned to the location where they received the shock or food, they triggered the location memory of the other event. The mice then displayed behaviours consistent with the opposite memory (quickly moving from, or remaining calm in the current location). While the work gives us a new insight into the mechanics of memory, the process is too complex and invasive for there to be any hope of it being used for treatment of obvious conditions like PTSD. It could however lead to further validation of other therapies (like CBT) that work on similar principles.

[Image credit: rduffy/Flickr]

Filed under: Science, Alt

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Via: Wired

Source: Nature

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