The mobile market today has practically been what former Microsoft-then-Nokia-then-Microsoft-again exec Stephen Elop loved to refer to as a two-horse race. Android and iOS have been butting heads quarter after quarter, year after year. Despite their popularity and ubiquity, neither is truly perfect and neither can really meet everyone’s needs and preferences. Which leaves a little wiggle room for other … Continue reading
If you haven’t picked up the new Doom game, I highly recommend it. While the multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired, the single-player campaign is well worth it. If you can’t afford it, or your machine can’t handle it, that’s okay. You can soon get some of the new Doom flavor in the original games. (Minor game spoiler incoming.) … Continue reading
Sorry, University of New South Wales: Your efforts at shattering the efficiency record for solar cells earlier this month have been, ahem, eclipsed. A group of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a way to possibly brea…
This coming summer, all that you would like to do for the season this year would be to have a nice and quiet time at home. Sure, your home is large enough to share with a few other people, not to mention having a pool is always a sign of luxury for many. If you would like to maintain the peace and quietness as you lounge in your pool, then the Inflatable Water Shooting Float is not the thing to purchase as that would see your nephews and nieces descend on your place faster than a fly to a carcass. Rather, the $39.95 Pool Guarding Gator would be a summer essential instead.
This is a faux alligator which will compel unwanted pool visitors, be they of the feathered variety or those that walk on two legs, to think more than once when it comes to taking an uninvited dip. The Pool Guarding Gator is made from buoyant durable plastic and textured to replicate the prehistoric ridged hide of the sub-tropical reptile, sporting a trio of hinged body parts which form the gator’s head, torso, and tail so that it gains a lifelike movement as it floats and reacts to the ambient waves and wind of a swimming pool. Even better, the beady red LED eyes can be set to flash or remain steady, being powered by a pair of CR2032 batteries.
[ Pool Guarding Gator could be a good deterrent copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
The only things that Pokémon and Gundam really have in common are that they both come from Japan. At least that is all they had in common until Imgur user Khrisamisu was inspired to create these Pokémon models in Gundam style.
To create the kitbashed Pokémondam figures, the builder took three iconic Pokémon characters and then created Gundam mobile suits using parts from different Gundam model kits.
Charizard started out as the Gundam Danazine mobile suit with some bits from the AEU Enact mech kit, and some custom paint. The finished product is called the PM-006 Charlie. The next is Squirtle made using parts from the Gusion mobile suit with an extra canon added. It’s know known as the PM-009 Sheldon. The last is the Venusaur known as the PM-003 Petunia.
The models are very cool and look much like their Pokémon forms.
[Imgur via Rocket News 24]
While the latest Apple TV refresh is no slouch, it certainly pales in comparison to the rumored plans that Apple originally had for the device, which was to offer up more content like original programming, something that the company is reportedly still planning. However interestingly enough, Apple did consider acquiring some media companies to help bolster those efforts.
In a report from the Financial Times (paywall; via MacRumors), it seems that Apple actually considered acquiring Time Warner in 2015. For those unfamiliar, Time Warner plays home to the likes of CNN, HBO, TBS, and TNT, all of which would no doubt help boost Apple’s offerings in terms of video content.
However discussion of the acquisition never went beyond the preliminary stage and did not even include the higher-ups like the CEOs of either company, so we guess you could describe it as exploratory at best. That being said, the report adds that Apple is still looking to ramp up on the creation of original programming and will be spending hundreds of millions a year to help get them up to speed and compete with the likes of Amazon and Netflix.
No word on when exactly this will be taking place but last we heard, Apple was scouting Hollywood for some talent to help with their endeavors, which for all we know could mean that it’s still a long time coming.
Apple Reportedly Considered Acquiring Time Warner In 2015 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
In certain countries, there are certain messaging apps that users prefer. For example over in Thailand, messaging apps like LINE are more popular, while over in China, they might prefer WeChat. However generally speaking, a report from Similar Web has found that WhatsApp remains the most popular messaging app in the world.
According to their findings, “Of the 187 countries that SimilarWeb examined, WhatsApp was the world leader claiming 109 countries, or 55.6% of the world. WhatsApp’s countries include Brazil, Mexico, India, Russia, and many other countries in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.”
Given that WhatsApp last reported that they had 1 billion users, we guess this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. That being said, coming in at second place is Facebook Messenger in which it claimed 49 countries which includes Australia, Canada, and the US. Considering that Facebook made it mandatory to download the app to chat on the mobile version of Facebook, this shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise either.
Now like we said, there are some apps that prove to be more popular in some countries than others, and BBM is a perfect example. According to Similar Web, BBM was installed on 87.5% of all Android devices in Indonesia, while countries like Australia, the US, and the UK don’t even even the 5% mark.
WhatsApp Found To Be The Most Popular Messaging App In The World , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
In April, Xiaomi’s CEO uploaded a photo of himself wearing the Mi Band 2, the successor to the original Mi Band whose affordable price tag and straightforward usage allowed the Chinese company to quickly establish a strong foothold in the wearables market. Unfortunately last we heard, the Mi Band 2 would be delayed.
Apparently there were production issues that caused it to be launched later, but as it turns out not much later. During a recent Q&A session, Xiaomi’s CEO confirmed that the Mi Band 2 will be going on sale come 7th of June, although the catch is that for now, the wearable will only be available and sold in China.
This isn’t surprising as Xiaomi typically launches their products in China first before expanding to other parts of Asia. While the company still has yet to break into the US market in terms of mobile, hopefully the Mi Band 2 will eventually find its way stateside. The Mi Band 2 is a clear upgrade over its predecessor.
For starters it will feature an LED display and a physical button. No word on pricing just yet but given the original Mi Band was considered to be extremely affordable, we doubt that Xiaomi will be breaking away from that pattern anytime soon.
Xiaomi Mi Band 2 Will Go On Sale June 7 , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
When you come to the hospital for medical help, you don’t expect to leave in handcuffs.
But that’s exactly what happened to Purvi Patel when she came to an Indiana emergency room seeking assistance in July 2013. Ms. Patel arrived at the emergency room with bleeding following a recent pregnancy, a situation many women may experience. She stated she had been pregnant, and had already disposed of the fetal remains. Ms. Patel’s medical providers contacted law enforcement officers. She was then arrested on the charge of “neglect of a dependent.” A month later, prosecution added the charge of feticide as well. On March 30, 2015, Ms. Patel received an unprecedented 20-year prison sentence for two implicitly contradictory charges — feticide and neglect of a dependent. She remains incarcerated today.
On May 23, Ms. Patel’s case came up for appeal. After a year of silence, the medical community needs to come to her defense, and ensure that such a series of events does not come to pass again. None of us can afford to stay silent when a woman is criminalized by her own providers for seeking urgent, necessary medical care in the setting of pregnancy.
One of the laws under which Ms. Patel was sentenced was a feticide law, which was passed with the intent to punish people who attack pregnant women. Historically, courts have been reluctant to extend these laws to apply to pregnant people themselves. That’s just common sense. A pregnant woman’s actions and decisions regarding her own pregnancy — and therefore her own body — are fundamentally distinct from the actions of a criminal seeking to do harm.
The decision to prosecute and convict Ms. Patel sends a clear message to women in Indiana and around the country: that hospitals are a place of judgment and suspicion, not refuge; that women’s autonomy and physical wellbeing are not our system’s first priorities; and that criminalization is an acceptable substitute for care.
That’s a dangerous precedent. Medical experts including the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologist agree that criminalizing patients in other contexts for the choices they have made about their pregnancies when constrained by illness or lack of access deters them from seeking necessary care, a major obstacle to ensuring better health outcomes for women and families.
Those who already experience a higher risk of being targeted for legal action as a result of immigration status, income level, or race are particularly hard hit by shifts toward criminalization. An analysis of more than 30 years of legal arguments for arrests of pregnant women found that low-income women and women of color were significantly more likely to be reported to state authorities by hospital staff, arrested, and charged. In Indiana alone, the only other woman in history to be penalized in a manner similar to Ms. Patel was Bei Bei Shuai, an Asian immigrant who was arrested while receiving psychiatric care for a suicide attempt that resulted in the loss of her pregnancy. Rhetoric against Asian American women has been rife in the state of Indiana and elsewhere, embedded, for instance, in rhetoric in support of sex-selective abortion bans.
As a physician, reproductive health researcher, and also as a South Asian woman, I am deeply disturbed by Purvi Patel’s case. It is a great injustice that Ms. Patel has now spent a full year in prison. It is time to end the tragedy of her incarceration, and to use her case as incentive to bring about important and much-needed change.
My first hope is that the courts see that no one should be criminalized for seeking urgent and necessary medical care. The intent behind the laws we pass matters. The original intent of these laws, laws enacted by legislators that we have elected, should not be twisted to suit shifting political motivations. Nor should they be applied unevenly in ways that target and hurt the vulnerable.
Second, I hope that my own community of obstetrician-gynecologists and other providers of reproductive health care understand that our first responsibility is to the patient in front of us. Our personal beliefs and opinions simply have no place in the care, counseling, and recommendations we offer those who come to us in need.
When a bleeding woman visits an emergency room, I am trained to bear witness to her experiences with empathy, to assess the immediate danger present to her health, and to provide recommendations based on science and that patient’s intentions and goals — not my own personal beliefs. These moments occur in emergency rooms or on labor and delivery units, at all times of day. Patients may be scared or unsure, unstable or stable. Every person’s circumstances and health situations are unique. My role is to provide quick, professional evaluation and support.
My final hope is that my patients know that I will always provide them with this non-judgmental, consistent, evidence-based, and confidential care, no matter their background. I will provide this care safely during the most critical and vulnerable moments in their lives. Decisions about reproductive care are best left to women and individuals, their families, and their medical providers. And we were never trained to heal with handcuffs.
Pooja Mehta, MD MSHP is a practicing OB/GYN and health policy researcher at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine.
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A New York city initiative to integrate vulnerable migrants has been repurposed in Paris to combat terrorism after last year’s attacks.
The scheme, which is centred on an ID issued regardless of immigration status, is part of efforts to ‘match-make’ the most innovative ideas with the countries that need them. Drawing on New York’s unparalleled access to 115 consulates and 193 permanent missions to the UN, these efforts have scored big successes, including making New York’s traffic safer than for a hundred years.
The ID cards now being distributed in Paris are intended to prevent the civic fracturing that may foster extremism by drawing the city’s more alienated residents back into its cultural and communal life. Unveiling the cards, mayor Anne Hidalgo said they embodied the Paris’s values of ‘liberty, diversity and tolerance’.
Documents for the Undocumented
New York’s municipal ID card is aimed at recent immigrants who are in danger of falling through the social net, including at least half a million undocumented migrants estimated to be living in the city. It guarantees access to public services, allows holders to open bank accounts, gives discounts on prescription drugs and provides membership benefits at cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.
The free card is available to anyone who can prove their identity and their address, and close to a million people have signed up since it was launched last year. Created under the auspices of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and the NYPD, it allows police to issue a summons instead of making an arrest.
There have been some glitches in the programme’s implementation – few banks initially accepted the card and some of the people most in need of the card were unable to prove their identity. The city has called on its guest consulates to help identify their citizens and has recently begun to accept more types of primary ID on the application form, including tickets issued to offenders upon release from prison and paperwork provided by the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
In order to obviate the risk of the cards becoming stigmatised, the mayor’s office has used its connections to the world’s largest collection of diplomats to convince high-profile people, such as Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, to sign up first. Mayor Bill de Blasio even issued one to the Pope when he visited in September.
Paris after the attacks
It was de Blasio who introduced the scheme to his Parisian equivalent Anne Hidalgo, showing her his own card after attacks on satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket left 17 dead in January 2015.
Two weeks later, Hidalgo announced that she would create an equivalent to counter radicalism, engage citizens in the life of the city and foster communal cohesion in the French capital.
The perpetrators were second-generation immigrants who had been born and/or grown up in the city, but fallen catastrophically out of touch with mainstream culture. Paris has historically had an infamously poor record on integration, particularly in the socially isolated suburbs, the banlieues, which in 2005 erupted into rioting in which several people were killed and 3,000 arrested.
Now Hidalgo, who took office in April 2014, is rolling out the carte citoyenne-citoyen de Paris. It provides similar benefits to the New York model, but also allows holders to take part in allocating part of the city’s annual budget as well as in tours and cultural events intended to develop active citizenship.
International match-making
The connection between the administrations of de Blasio and Hidalgo came out of a conscious effort in New York to use its international connections to both spread what was working in the city and to learn from abroad.
New York is uniquely well prepared to take advantage of international sharing of solutions. Not only is it home to the world’s largest diplomatic corps, the mayor also has an Office of International Affairs, which caters for the diplomats and connects visiting experts and delegations with local officials.
One of most successful ideas New York has adopted is ‘Vision Zero’, a Swedish scheme for using open data and crowdsourced citizen reports to identify dangerous junctions or stretches of road and redesign them. Last year, fewer New Yorkers died in traffic accidents than in any year since 1910, despite the population almost doubling.
More than 10,000 people gave comments such as ‘not enough time to cross’ or ‘can’t see where traffic is coming from’, guiding the Department of Transportation in 80 improvement projects.
Despite the tremendous diversity of interests among the world’s countries, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have given them a framework for collaboration. As a result, the Office of International Affairs has launched a programme called “Global Vision | Urban Action”, the idea being that although worldwide change is the ultimate goal, it can only happen one city at a time.
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