Cheddar is the new home of crowd-controlled StockStream

Watching other people play video games is a big business. At any time, you can hop on Twitch and see gamers take on Demon’s Souls, Pokemon, and even Sudoku. It’s not all video games, either, with Let’s Robot and Instapainting exploring internet-controlled robots. Last May, software developer Mike Roberts created StockStream, a Twitch channel that encourages viewers to vote on which stocks to buy or sell using Roberts’ own $50,000 stock portfolio. Now, Roberts and his trading game have been acquired by Cheddar, the “millennial business news” network that broadcasts from the New York Stock Exchange. StockStream will continue, though its balance will double and the portfolio extended to ” commodities, industry portfolios, indexes, and other asset classes,” according to a Cheddar blog post.

Roberts has relocated to New York City and will take on the newly-created role of Manager, StockStream within the larger Cheddar organization. Cheddar is available on Sling TV, Amazon, Twitter, Pluto TV, Vimeo and Facebook. The company claims it is also on 60 percent of smart TVs in the US. “Mike is a genius software developer who loves stocks. When I read about him, I knew he had to join our journey,” Cheddar’s founder and CEO Jon Steinberg said in a statement. “He’s going to bring StockStream to all our platforms and continue to let his imagination run free.”

Source: Cheddar

People won’t stop stealing this company’s rentable umbrellas

Sharing E Umbrella, a Chinese startup that allows people to share umbrellas as they would bicycles has run into some early problems with its business model: specifically, people don’t bother to return the items once they are out of the rain. According to a report in the Thepaper.cn last Thursday, the company announced that most of its umbrellas had gone missing within just weeks of the sharing scheme’s launch.

“We were really impressed by the bike-sharing model,” the company’s founder, Zhao Shuping, told Thepaper. His system envisioned umbrellas being made available at shops, bus stations, kisoks and generally anywhere with a railing to hang them from. People would put down a 19 yuan deposit and pay half a yuan for every half hour they keep it. However, unlike obviously-branded bicycles, these $9 umbrellas are far easier to abscond with.

What’s more, the system, which launched in 11 mainland cities back in April, doesn’t appear to have any sort of enforcement or recovery mechanisms. “Umbrellas are different from bicycles,” Zhao said. “Bikes can be parked anywhere, but with an umbrella you need railings or a fence to hang it on.”

Still, the fact that most of his product has been spirited away, Zhao plans to forge ahead and expand the rollout of the program to include 30 million umbrellas throughout the country by the end of the year.

Source: South China Morning Post

Twitter adds more mute options to help filter out abuse

Twitter has added a few new options to its filter settings. Now you’ll be able to disable notifications from accounts that you don’t follow that are new, or don’t follow you or just accounts you don’t follow altogether. These additions follow a handful of others meant to help you keep out content that you don’t want to see.

Now you have even more control over your notifications. Mute accounts that don’t follow you, new accounts, and more. https://t.co/UapP6DtTtY pic.twitter.com/RcBQGx219k

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) July 10, 2017

Last year, Twitter launched its quality filter tool as well as an option to mute notifications and messages from people you don’t follow. Later, it began muting conversation reply notifications from people you’ve blocked or muted, even if they @ you and began restricting the reach of accounts deemed abusive. Earlier this year, Twitter introduced filter settings that let users mute accounts if they had the default egg avatars or unverified email addresses or phone numbers and it began testing a feature that would grey out profiles that might contain sensitive content. And in May, the website started siphoning off DMs from people you don’t follow and putting them into a new “Requests” inbox.

All of these changes have been introduced in order to help with Twitter’s rampant abuse issues and it will be interesting to see if the latest changes have any effect. You can find instructions on how to implement the new mute features here.

Source: Twitter

Experimental drug could restore memories after brain injury

An experimental drug could have major implications for patients suffering from memory disabilities caused by traumatic brain injury (TBI). In tests, the drug known as ISRIB completely restored the ability to learn and remember in brain-injured mice — even on those that were treated up to a month after injury. The findings are contrary to most research on brain trauma, which claims treatments must be carried out urgently to preserve normal function.

Although scientists have had some recent breakthroughs countering memory loss, TBI has been tougher to crack. Dozens of promising treatments have failed clinical trials, and no approved therapies are available. Currently, TBI (commonly caused by accidents, collisions, falls, and violent assaults) affects close to 2 million people every year in the US — that boils down to one person every 21 seconds. Additionally, sports injuries (such as concussions) and military combat are other leading causes of TBI. Concerns over brain trauma have even led the army to start working on blast amor that can detect whether an explosion has hurt your brain.

As part of the latest batch of tests, researchers injected ISRIB into brain-injured mice to see whether it would improve their ability to find their way out of a water maze. Despite struggling in comparison to normal mice at first, the injured mice quickly caught up after being administered the drug. And their ability to learn persisted a week after their last injection.

Scientists are calling it a surprising, yet promising, start. They warn that many more tests must be carried out before the drug is ready to undergo clinical trials on humans.

China orders telecoms to block personal VPNs by February

China declared that virtual private networks were illegal back at the start of the year, and now it’s giving telecoms no choice but to fall in line. Bloomberg sources understand that the government has told carriers to block individual access to VPNs by February 1st. Companies can still use VPNs internally, and will reportedly be allowed to use leased lines (registered with officials, of course) to access the full internet, but everyone else appears to be out of luck.

It’s no secret as to why China would set a firm deadline. Officials know VPNs are regularly used to get around the Great Firewall and access blocked services that might host political dissent, but merely making these private, secure connections illegal won’t deter people. It has to make the very act of accessing a VPN difficult if the law is going to have any teeth.

This is bad news for free speech in China, of course, as it makes eluding censorship that much harder. Moreover, it may hurt businesses that are just trying to get work done. What if you’re visiting China and need to use a VPN account to access business info while you’re away? Not every company needs or can justify internal VPNs in China, and it’s not always an option to visit someone else’s offices just to check a website or send a message.

Thankfully, this isn’t the only way of dodging the censors. Open proxies like Shadowsocks are still around. The question is whether or not China will clamp down on these alternatives as swiftly and thoroughly as it is with VPNs. Historically, solutions like Shadowsocks tend to be reborn or adapt in the face of threats — there’s just no guarantee that they can keep it up forever.

Source: Bloomberg

Starz pads its streaming library with more kids’ and Spanish options

Starz is turning its attention to “underserved audiences” in the world of streaming video, adding a raft of children’s shows and Spanish-language programs to its $9-a-month library and on-demand platforms. Bob the Builder and Thomas and Friends are among the fresh kid-focused titles, while adults can enjoy nearly 300 new Spanish-language movies and TV show episodes, including Columbian telenovelas La Promesa and El Cartel de los Sapos.

When Starz launched its app in April 2016, it brought 2,400 movies and television episodes along for the ride. Fourteen months later, that figure across all of Starz’s on-demand and over-the-top platforms has ballooned to 5,500, and the network plans to offer a total of 7,700 episodes and movies by the end of the year. A lot the focus has been on children’s programming: There are roughly 1,250 kids’ episodes on Starz streaming services, and the company hopes to push that figure past 2,000 by December.

Children’s programming has a prominent place in the streaming world — Netflix has said about half of its members watch kids’ content, and it just launched a slate of interactive, choose-your-own-adventure shows for wee ones. Even HBO, an adult-focused network, found it worthwhile to save Sesame Street from extinction in 2016.

By the end of 2017, Starz plans to add more than 60 new series to its kids’ lineup, including Alf, Speed Racer: The Next Generation, Kid Diners, Zatch Bell, The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat TV specials, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, Naruto and Garfield and Friends. As for Spanish-language programming, look out for critically acclaimed films I’m So Excited, Chico and Rita and No, plus children’s shows Exploradores de la Historia and Horacio y los Plasticines.

The push for more content overall makes sense as Starz attempts to infiltrate a market dominated by Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. These providers offer award-winning original programming and they regularly swap out shows, making their total title counts difficult to pin down. But, in March 2016, research firm Barclays estimated Netflix offered 7,008 films and TV series, while Hulu had 10,244 and Amazon Prime had 20,386. Note this is counting the number of series, not episodes, on each platform — Starz presents figures based on the number of episodes it offers, rather than franchises as a whole.

But, clearly, quantity isn’t everything. High-quality original and exclusive programming has become more important to streaming giants as the market has matured, and Starz is in on this movement. It exclusively offers American Gods and Outlander — shows that, for many fans, are worth $9 per month alone.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Starz

In astronomy, women of color face the most discrimination

There’s tons of evidence that women face a gender bias in the STEM fields. Last May, one report found that Facebook rejects female-authored code more often than code written by men. A female engineer who featured prominently in a recruiting advertisement faced a backlash for her gender alone. Even US governors are taking up the fight to get more girls interested in science and engineering because it’s crucial to the field and the national economy. Unfortunately, a study by Girls Who Code found that the gender gap in computing is getting worse. The bad news continues with results from a new study that show women of color working in the astronomical and planetary fields experience “the highest rates of negative workplace experiences, including harassment and assault.”

The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, surveyed nearly 500 astronomers and planetary scientists between 2011 and 2015. 40 percent of women of color reported feeling unsafe in the workplace due to their gender or sex, while 28 percent of women of color felt unsafe due to their ethnicity. 18 percent of them skipped professional events due to a “hostile climate,” with 12 percent of white women reporting the same. The study’s authors point out that this results in a “significant loss of career opportunities.”

This isn’t the first study into gender or racial bias in the sciences. The study’s authors point out other papers that show a host of other examples in the literature, including gendered language on science curriculum, implicit bias related to gender and race in mentorship opportunities and an outsider experience that leads to women faculty of color having their views validated less often than their colleagues. The community of scientists still needs to figure out how to combat this bias, of course. For now, the current study’s authors conclude that the results represent “a significant failure in the astronomical community to create safe working conditions for all scientists.”

Source: Journal of Geophysical Research

Watch Lucid Air’s EV reach 235MPH on the track

Electric cars are quick off the line by their very nature (they have gobs of torque available at all times), but what about top speed — how are you supposed to know how quickly they can go when they’re usually capped at an artificial 155MPH ceiling? Lucid Motors is happy to help… sort of. The fledgling electric car maker has posted video of a Lucid Air prototype reaching a whopping 235MPH on a test track after removing its speed limiter, or 18MPH more than it managed in April. That’s performance you rarely see from supercars, let alone a luxury sedan. That doesn’t mean that it would beat a conventional supercar in a drag race (gas-powered vehicles tend to catch up once they hit their peak torque levels), but it’s impressively fast for a company’s first car. At least, until you realize that you won’t see those numbers on the street.

It’s not just public speed limits that will keep the Lucid Air below 235MPH. As with Tesla, Lucid is unlikely to lift that 155MPH software speed limit on production cars lest it anger rival luxury brands who’ve informally agreed to that restriction in the name of safety. You certainly wouldn’t get this kind of breakneck pace from the base-model Lucid Air — you’d need to pony up for a high-powered variant to achieve this feat even if there were no restrictions. Also, notice how this prototype is both stripped down and includes both a roll cage and a large spoiler? It’s going to have a much easier time hitting 235MPH than a production car loaded with creature comforts and no real racing amenities, especially when it’s driving on a road instead of the track.

As such, this is more of a theoretical exercise than a representation of what you’ll actually get. With that said, it’s still useful as a demonstration of how far EVs have come from the days when they were barely quick enough to keep up with traffic.

Via: The Verge

Source: Lucid Motors

Valve bans 40,000 cheating accounts after the Steam Summer Sale

More than 40,000 disingenuous gamers lost access to their games, items — and in some cases, their entire accounts — last weekend after the Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) system flagged them for violations. No, that’s not a typo, 40,411 players have been nicked by the company’s robotic rule enforcer. That’s nearly triple the previous banning record from 2016, which stood at a meager 15,227 players.

Valve’s VAC system doles out around 3,500 suspensions on an average day. However, on Thursday July 6th, an unprecedented wave of bannings took place. The VAC had hammered nearly 30,000 accounts by noon Pacific. Valve launched this operation immediately after the end of its annual Summer Sale, presumably to prevent scofflaws from taking advantage of the event’s discounted prices on games.

What’s more, another 4,972 players got the hammer for their abusive in-game behavior. VAC bans prohibit accounts from connecting to Valve’s servers, which render their in-game purchased skins and items useless. All in all, the Vac-Ban website, which monitors and reports on these incidents, estimates that cheaters forfeited $9,580 worth of real world money due to their online shenanigans. Seriously guys, it’s just Counter-Strike. Not like you can even gamble in it.

Via: Kotaku

Source: DOTA Sports

Apple Maps Transit Directions Now Available in Las Vegas and Western Nevada

Apple Maps has been updated with comprehensive transit data in several higher populated areas of Nevada, enabling iPhone users to navigate with public transportation directions throughout the Silver State.

Newly supported areas include Las Vegas, including the nearby cities of North Las Vegas and Henderson, as well as the state capital Carson City and the Reno-Sparks metropolitan area in Western Nevada.

In Las Vegas, Apple Maps can provide directions for the Las Vegas Monorail and RTC Transit buses, including The Deuce and The SDX operating in and between the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown Las Vegas.

Many popular destinations are supported in Las Vegas, including McCarran International Airport and the Las Vegas Convention Center.

RTC Transit bus routes extend to North Las Vegas and Henderson, while RTC Washoe bus directions are available in and between Carson City, Reno, and Sparks. Jump Around Carson (JAC) bus routes are also supported within Carson City.

Apple Maps can also provide directions for Silverado Mainline buses, which travel between each of the cities, such as Reno to Las Vegas.

Apple Maps gained a Transit tab in iOS 9. The feature lags several years behind Google Maps, but Apple’s public transportation support is exhaustive, mapping all station entrances and listing departure times.

At launch, the feature was limited to Baltimore, Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto, and over 300 cities in China. Since then, Apple has been working to expand support for public transportation to other cities around the world.

Newer additions include Atlanta, Calgary, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Honolulu, Houston, Kansas City, Madrid, Manchester, Melbourne, Miami, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Montréal, New Orleans, Paris, Portland, Pittsburgh, Prague, Rio de Janeiro, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, Seattle, and Singapore.

For a complete list of cities with Apple Maps transit, visit the iOS Feature Availability page on Apple’s website.

(Thanks, Bill!)

Tags: Apple Maps, transit
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