Hasta La Gadget!

Sony has expanded its Action Cam offering with a new model, which it announced for the US market with a slated availability of August. There’s no specific launch date, but when it does arrive, the little $200 camcorder will bring with it SteadyShot and the same small build. This makes three action cameras for the maker, which positions them for … Continue reading

One of the benefits of having a compact camera is that sometimes it has additional functions your smartphones doesn’t. It also has its own battery meaning that you don’t want to drain your smartphone to take photos. Well if you’re in the market for a new compact camera, Sony has recently announced the Cyber-shot WX220 and the Cyber-shot W810 camera, along with the AS20 action camera if you’re looking to capture POV shots/videos.

Starting with the Cyber-shot WX220, this is pretty slim and compact model from Sony, meaning that you could probably slip it into your pocket just fine. The camera will feature an 18.2MP Exmor R CMOS sensor and a 10x optical zoom G lens. The images will be processed with Soy’s BIONZ X processor and will be able to capture Full HD videos. There will built-in image stabilization, high speed AF, and built in WiFi.

Next up is the Sony Cyber-shot W810. The W810 will sport a higher megapixel count at 20.1MP with a CCD sensor, but it has a shorter zoom of 6x optical zoom versus the WX220’s 10x optical zoom, but if you were after the megapixels then we guess this might be the camera for you. The W810 will be able to capture video albeit in 720p HD resolution, and can even extend the camera’s flash range in order to help lit up scenes better.

Last but not least is the AS20 action camera. The camera will feature Sony’s SteadyShot electronic image stabilization to help reduce camera shake, which we reckon is pretty important if you’re planning on attaching the A20 to a bike helmet and recording your ride. The action camera will also sport a ZEISS Tessar lens with a 170-degree field of view, built-in stereo microphones, and will sport a back-illuminated Exmor R CMOS sensor with Full HD video capture.

In terms of pricing and availability, the Sony Cyber-shot WX220 will be available this August for $200; the Cyber-shot W810 in September for $100; and the Sony AS20 in August for $200.

Sony Unveils Cyber-shot WX220, W810, AS20 Action Camera

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Committing oneself to an MMORPG is a big thing. This is because MMORPGs can be extremely time consuming and usually comes with a subscription fee that charges your credit card every month, regardless of the fact if you’re an active player or haven’t been playing for the last 3 months.

Now Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn has been getting some pretty good reviews and if you want to see what all the fuss is about, you might be interested to learn that Square Enix has recently announced that they will be holding a 14-day free trial event for the game.

The trial is currently live and interested gamers can head on over to its website to download the client. Unfortunately it seems that the trial is only limited to those running a Windows computer, so those on other platforms are out of luck, at least for now. At the same time, Square Enix has also introduced a Recruit A Friend campaign.

Active gamers who refers their friend to the game who pays for a 30-day subscription will receive a Friendship Circlet that grants 20% bonus XP when below level 25, and an Aetheryte Pendulum that allows players to teleport to the aetheryte closest to New Adventurers on your friend list. However if your friend decides to go for the 90-day subscription, will you be rewarded with a special whistle that summons a draught Chocobo that can carry an additional player.

Square Enix Announces Final Fantasy XIV Free 14-day Trial

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

President Obama is convening the first-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit with over 50 African leaders in Washington D.C. next week. The event will have a strong focus on Africa’s long-term economic growth, under the theme of “Investing in the Next Generation.”

To us, the next generation is, quite simply, Africa’s children. Some may think that concentrating on the economic well-being of Africa has little to do with children, but we strongly disagree. The economic future of Africa is all about the well-being of children — and with one in ten of our children dying every day, it would be a terrible missed opportunity for these most vulnerable children and their mothers to not be at the center of the conversation. Africa’s population is incredibly young, and getting younger. If we choose not to focus on the needs of Africa’s young people, particularly newborns and children under the age of five, the stated goal of “creating an enabling environment for the next generation,” will be nearly impossible to achieve. In fact, investments in maternal and child health yields economic benefits including higher per capita incomes and increased labor force participation.

The U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit on August 5 and 6 offers an opportunity to boldly commit to prioritizing maternal, newborn and child survival in Africa. The good news is that there is such a bold plan. It is called Accelerating Action in Africa (AAA) and it is designed to dramatically accelerate the reduction of preventable maternal, newborn and child deaths in Africa — specifically to SAVE MILLIONS OF MORE LIVES BY 2020. AAA focuses on four categories of proven interventions in 16 African countries and introduces an innovative new public-private financing mechanism. Building on foundations of evidence and experience, this initiative will combine the best practices in international development with new policy paradigms to scale up programs that will save lives.

This may seem like an unattainable goal, but there is historical precedence that this can be done. In the last few decades, the number of children dying from mostly preventable causes has dropped precipitously, from 12 million in 1990 to 6.6 million today — more than 40 percent. In Tanzania, we reduced child deaths by nearly 70 percent over the last two decades. Our success was largely due to increasing the use of key health interventions, including vaccines, Vitamin A supplementation and better prevention and treatment of malaria.

In spite of these efforts, our work is not done: about 390 children under five in Tanzania still die each day — mainly of preventable and treatable conditions. We are committed to putting a stop to this. That is why earlier this year, Tanzania launched a major national drive to end preventable child and maternal deaths. We have increased the number of health centers and dispensaries throughout the country. And we have committed ourselves to tackling the tragically high rates of newborn deaths.

The U.S. has a strong bipartisan legacy of leadership on this issue, but with existing resources and commitments, the goal of ending preventable child deaths will not be met. It is clear more must be done. Now — at this historic coming together of heads of state — is the time to accelerate our efforts with a presidential initiative. In this vein we call on President Obama to join with African leaders to launch a truly collaborative partnership of modern foreign assistance. The AAA proposal is unique as it is calling for the full deployment of one of the most promising tools for innovative financing of social goals: Development Impact Bonds. This innovative financing mechanism will bring in new partners and investors who will provide upfront funding for interventions that have specific evidence-based outcomes that can be monetized against savings for existing government programs. If these interventions achieve pre-agreed outcome measures, the private investor is reimbursed with an additional return on the investment using the capital gained by the savings.

Uniting American and African leaders from the public and private sector to tackle building the foundation of long term economic prosperity, the AAA proposal isn’t typical in any respect.

As a result of the investments in maternal newborn and child survival programs and policy by Africans and from our friends in America, we now have the evidence to not only solve the problem but to create private investment opportunities to help enact solutions at a scale unimaginable until now. This isn’t aid or charity; it’s economics and partnership. Indeed, it’s potentially history.

We ask that President Obama join with African leaders at the Summit to launch an international “Action Tank,” a group comprised of the brightest minds from governments, non-governmental organizations, international development, global health, nutrition, child survival and international finance sectors, who will be well equipped to tackle this unique challenge and design a truly innovative 21st century idea that solves a problem — not just tinkers with it. Presidential initiatives like this have been set up before and they have achieved incredible results. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has provided life-saving treatment for more than 6 million people.

It is time we do the same for the most vulnerable mothers and children in the world. The next generation — and Africa’s future — depends on it.

Kikwete has been Tanzania’s president since 2005. Shriver is president of Save the Children Action Network.

This piece originally ran in The Hill.

Screenwriting is an art of fakery. Put a few words of convincing jargon into the mouth of a cop or a corporate lawyer or a starship commander and the audience will believe you are an expert in criminal justice or antitrust law or the rebel alliance on the planet Xenon. Having written a screenplay about historical events in the Middle East doesn’t make me an expert on the region. But spending all day every day at a desk trying to project myself into the minds of other human beings, real or imaginary, has forced me to think in a sustained way about one particular subject: empathy. The ways in which storytellers inspire or coax or educate audiences to bring them to care about a person.

In the thoughtful new documentary Life Itself, the late film critic Roger Ebert describes film as “a machine that generates empathy.” Without empathy for a character, the audience will go to the lobby for popcorn or start thinking about whether that Chinese place is going to be too crowded on a Friday.

As I’ve flipped channels and pages this week considering the all-around tragic situation in Gaza and its rising civilian death toll — and the seeming indifference and resigned shrugs of much of the American public (including, for a while, myself, as I uttered those tautological, anodyne monosyllables: “It is what it is”) — I’ve had to stop and ask myself where in this story empathy has failed. Do we care enough to demand of our ally some curb on civilian deaths? Do we care about the people of Gaza at all? And, if we don’t, why don’t we?

The literary critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry (a teacher of mine), in her essay ‘The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,’ writes: “The way we act toward others is shaped by the way we imagine them.’ She cites a scene in Pushkin, in which opera-goers come out of the theatre weeping for those they’ve seen onstage, not noticing the freezing carriage-drivers who have been suffering in the bitter-cold night to carry them home.

Pushkin knew a thing or two. He might have been describing a crowd leaving King Lear in the Park this week, hearts filled with terror and pity as they step over the homeless man passed out on Central Park West. Shakespeare brings audiences to understand what it’s like to be a semi-mythical king going gaga on a heath — to care about Lear as though we were him, as though dividing kingdoms were a problem we faced in daily life, along with repair delays on the C train and a rash that won’t go away. Great dramatists and filmmakers — like great politicians — make us care about those whose lives are far from our own, make even imaginary people more real to us than living people.

Does anyone doubt that Katniss Everdeen and the fate of District 12 are more real, and more urgent, to many people than the fate of the citizens of Gaza? I wasn’t surprised to read recently that the Thai military — the real-life Thai military! — had banned protestors from using the three-finger salute that symbolizes resistance in Suzanne Collins’ novels and the Hunger Games films. Men carrying actual assault rifles are afraid of an imaginary teenage archer. Such is the political power that comes from imagining the lives, and the pain, of other people.

So while pundits on American television speak of Israel and Gaza, of proportionality of response, of legitimate rights of defense, and political solutions seem hopeless, I’ve come to think that the most urgent question for American citizens is a simpler, humanitarian, one: Can we imagine what it is like to be a civilian in Gaza? (Yes, I’ve heard that argument that there are no civilians in Gaza, because voting for Hamas takes away one’s civilian status. But if an unwise, self-defeating vote were punishable by death, half the world would be wiped out by Thursday and the population crisis would be over).

Imagining lives in Gaza, lives unlike our own, is difficult. It requires knowledge. It is work, but it is necessary — as it is necessary to imagine Israeli lives with equal attention.

I suspect it is easier for an American — at least for this particular American, perhaps the most culturally Jewish non-Jew in the borough of Manhattan — to imagine lives on the Israeli side of the border. We see ourselves there. We have lived — at least in some very fractional way — with the threat of terrorism in our cities, and have seen irrational extremism. We understand — at least some American families do — the chill of kissing a daughter goodbye and sending her off to the armed forces. We have some sense of the astonishing horrors of the 20th century that preceded the Jewish state. We are people united by principles, sensibility, ironic asides, and a shared love of ‘The Voice.’

But the story of Gaza’s civilians remains unimagined, and therefore unimaginable, for most of us. It is a story — a non-story — of nameless women wailing on the news. A story of things: blockades, tunnels, occupation, human shields (consider, for a moment, those two words in that order — a magic trick that turns a person into a thing). Lives that we cannot imagine as vividly and painfully as our own, as completely as Lears and Katnisses, we cannot care about and will step over in the street — with the vague sense that if you’re lying on Central Park West, then you probably deserve to be there. Is the C train running?

As we watch this conflict — or any conflict with civilian casualties halfway around the world (and, believe me, I’m not exempting Syria or Sudan or Iraq — God knows, not Iraq! — or anywhere) — we must not fail to care about a thousand civilian dead.

We must not feel, even in some secret chamber of the heart, that if you were born in a certain place, well, you had it coming to you. We must be our own empathy-generating machines, not satisfied with the general. We must think specifically, and urgently, about human lives, both familiar and foreign, before we shrug. We must imagine — in brutal, quotidian detail — what it feels like to be a civilian on both sides of the border, before we decide how many civilian deaths we will tolerate.

Imagine a grandmother in Tel Aviv carrying groceries home for Shabbat, with nowhere to run as a rocket siren goes off. Imagine a child with a slight limp, for once winning at soccer, underneath the building from which militants fired the rocket. Imagine a father who gets a call that his acoustic-guitarist 18 year-old pacifist, doing mandatory service in the IDF, has been shot and killed. Imagine the mother of a toddler who knows all the words to the songs from Frozen in Arabic, whose skull is crushed in a missile strike.

Political pressure comes from sustained attention. We pay attention to those lives with which we empathize. To imagine the lives of others is not a flight of the mind. It is a moral imperative.