Hasta La Gadget!

The FCC may be having some success hauling AT&T out on the carpet for throttling unlimited data plans without clear warnings to customers, but the FTC isn’t so lucky. A Ninth Circuit appeals court has tossed out the FTC’s lawsuit against AT&…

Back in July, a SwiftKey bug saw phone numbers and email addresses that users have never seen before start appearing in their keyboard predictions. SwiftKey worked fast to address the issue and had temporarily disabled the feature, along with their sync services. However earlier this month, sync services had resumed but email and phone number predictions had not.

The good news is that it looks like whatever the issue is, SwiftKey has since dealt with it because in the latest update to the app, the company has announced that email and phone number predictions are available once again. However we should note that this only works after you update the app.

According to the update’s changelog, “Number, email and other predictions containing ‘@’ are turned back on. All previously learned number, email and @ predictions have been deleted but can now be relearned.” As Android Police points out, this update mainly seems to deal with sync and the predictions.

This means that any of the features you might have encountered in the beta aren’t part of this update, so if you want those features you’ll still have to wait. In the meantime users can get their hands on the latest update via the iTunes App Store or Google Play, depending on your platform.

SwiftKey’s Phone Number & Email Predictions Have Returned , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Could something as simple as a smile put an end to racist and sexist first impressions?

Probably not. But a new study published in the August issue of the journal Motivation and Emotion suggests that when people smile, strangers may be less likely to judge them based on their race and gender. In other words, by conveying friendliness and openness, people may stop some of those harsh snap judgments in their tracks.

But this doesn’t mean you should smile your way through unfair social interactions. (And no one should tell women to smile more.)

“Some have concluded the implication of this finding is that members of stereotyped minorities could just smile to reduce the likelihood that others will apply stereotypes to them, but that is too simplistic,” said study co-author Nicole Senft of Georgetown University.

“That conclusion places the responsibility on minority group members to combat stereotypes through their own behavior,” Senft said. “Instead, I think it’s important that we all turn the lens inward and become more aware of the many factors that play into the impressions we form of others.”

Senft and her colleagues asked 93 students to look at a series of photographs of faces and rate the person on Big Five personality traits, which include agreeableness, extroversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism. The photographs included Caucasian and Japanese men and women. Half the students looked at photographs showing faces with a neutral expression, and the other half looked at the same faces smiling.

When judging the inexpressive faces, the students showed hints of applying some preconceived notions about gender and ethnicity in their impressions. They rated Caucasian men lower on agreeableness than Caucasian women, and rated Japanese women as less extroverted than their Caucasian counterparts.

However, when the same faces were smiling, these biases disappeared from the ratings.

This might not be that surprising after all. Smiling, just like race, gender and various facial expressions, sends social cues, which people use to form a quick idea about the person they’ve just met.

“We smile to signal our intent to play, to affiliate, to approve, to appease, or to submit,” said psychologist Alan Fridlund of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who wasn’t involved with the study. “All of these motives have in common our signaling others that we mean them no threat.”

But Fridlund isn’t convinced that smiling can do away with the cultural prejudices formed over a lifetime, and said it’s more likely that the findings simply demonstrate a phenomenon called overshadowing: The smile momentarily distracts people of other cues they can get from the other person. “Give people something big to look at, and they are diverted from everything else,” Fridlund said. 

Senft also cautions that the study was small and only included American students of European and Asian descent. More work is needed to replicate these findings and examine the effects in other racial groups such as African Americans and Hispanic Americans. 

Nevertheless, the finding that something as simple as a smiling face can change how we form first impressions suggests how malleable ― and in a way, superficial ― such impressions can be. 

“For me, the takeaway is that we all need to be wary of the impressions we form of people when we don’t have much information to go on,” Senft said. “That sense we sometimes get that a person just ‘isn’t very nice’ might have more to do with our own biases than with anything about them.”

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Wedding officiants ― particularly those that do pre-marital counseling ― often get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a couple’s future marriage. And what they see is not always pretty.

Below, seven signs a marriage doesn’t have what it takes, according to officiants.

1. One partner is very judgmental of the other.

“When I conduct my premarital counseling, I can often detect a person being judgmental about some behavior or aspect of the personality of their spouse-to-be. The judgmental one figures that they will eventually change the other. The judged one assumes that the judging one will calm down. Perhaps that happens. Couples that seek help can often work this one through. The conflict is a symptom of the deeper issue; the unwillingness to accept in a deep and honoring way who the other person is. I always recommend: before you want to change someone, ask them if they sincerely want to change. If not, accept it or don’t get married. And to the other: if the other person does not stop with the criticizing, learn to set boundaries — kind, clear, firm and ruthless if need be — and if your boundaries are not respected, don’t get married.” ― Rabbi Mordecai Finley

2. The couple believes they are incomplete without one another.

“Psychologically, some people get caught up in a romanticized illusion that their partner ‘completes’ them. Thinking this indicates how ‘perfect’ they are for each other, the individual fails to recognize the negative message they are sending to themselves and to their partner. This tells the self, ‘I am not enough by myself. I need this other person to be happy’ and it gives the partner an unrealistic responsibility for the other’s well-being. I perceive this as a sign of great immaturity and personal insecurity. Unless the individual outgrows this perspective, it typically erodes the relationship as the partner eventually feels burdened with the responsibility of carrying this partner rather than having someone who stands beside him or her as an equal.” ― Judith Johnson, interfaith minister

3. One partner rationalizes the other’s odd behavior or comments.

“A bride once told me that she’d had a blowout argument with her fiancé, at the end of which he said, ‘You think you know everything about me, but you don’t.’ She wondered if this was a ‘red flag.’ I asked if she was curious as to what he’d meant, but she shrugged it off with, ‘Oh, that’s just him.’ Within a year she got pregnant and then learned what he had meant. He doesn’t like children and so he divorced her.” ― JP Reynolds, interfaith minister

4. Everything seems to come before the relationship.

“If your work, your family or your friends come before your relationship, that is a sign that something is terribly wrong. It’s totally understandable that some circumstances require more of us ― family illness, a project at work, a friend in need ― but when your attention to these matters becomes more the rule than the exception, you have to ask yourself what is going on and what are you avoiding. You are a unit, which doesn’t mean that you don’t have areas in your life without the other in it, but even a crisis such as a family illness could be addressed together. In the end, that will make you a stronger unit and build more intimacy.” ― Jeddah Vailakis, interfaith minister 

5. The couple doesn’t have a partnership of equals.

“In a healthy partnership, both individuals feel emotionally safe to be themselves and both value each other’s point of view. Alternatively, when one partner has to ‘win’ and have his or her way every time, the other becomes shut down and silenced. As time goes on, the relationship becomes increasingly imbalanced and unfulfilling.” ― Judith Johnson

6. One partner has a sense of entitlement.

“During our introductory conversation, the bride shared that she had put her career on hold so as to help her fiancé go to law school. I was impressed, but then she said, ‘So now he owes me and he’s going to give me the wedding of my dreams.’ I asked the groom if he thought he ‘owed’ his fiancé anything. He looked blankly and said, ‘No.’ She got the wedding of her dreams, and he eventually got the divorce of his!” ― JP Reynolds

7. There is a lack of emotional and physical intimacy.

“Lack of intimacy ― both emotional and physical ― means that something has broken down along the way. If your best friend is not your partner, why is someone else getting the best of you? If physical intimacy is waning, that may be a sign of a lack of communication or that you’re holding on to resentments, which in the end will cause a greater divide between you. Plan dates with your partner ― many of them. Have fun with each other. Know that no matter what, you have one another. The emotional bond will lead to the physical intimacy.” ― Jeddah Vailakis

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Chris Brown was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, after he allegedly threatened a woman with a gun

The singer was locked in a police standoff at his home in Los Angeles after a 911 call from a woman who told authorities Brown had threatened her. According to TMZ, police arrived at Brown’s house around 3 a.m. and remained outside for hours while waiting to obtain a search warrant. 

When the warrant was granted, police entered the residence and evacuated a group of people who were inside the residence. The individuals were searched and questioned by police. 

The hip-hop singer reportedly threw a duffel bag containing at least one gun, other weapons and drugs out of his window while police were surrounding his home, TMZ reports. 

During the standoff, one of Brown’s neighbors, TV and radio host Jillian Barberie, posted a video on Twitter in which helicopters are clearly audible. SWAT vehicles have also arrived at Brown’s residence.

Author Tariq Nasheed also heard the noise from his home nearby:

Brown posted a series of videos to his Instagram account from inside his house maintaining his innocence. (Warning: Explicit language.)

In one video, he brings attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, adding, “Fuck the police.” 

“When you get the warrant, you gonna walk right up in here and you gonna see nothing,” he says in a video. “Y’all the worst gang in the world — the police.”

The woman who called police is Baylee Curran, Miss California Regional 2016. She claimed to have partied with the singer in the past with no issues. 

Curran told TMZ Brown pulled his gun out on her because she was admiring a piece of his friend’s jewelry. According to Curran, when she expressed her love for the jewelry, both Brown and his friend lost their cool. Brown reportedly told Curran to “get the fuck out” before pointing his gun at her, TMZ notes. 

Curran also claimed that Brown’s people wouldn’t let her take her cell phone, which was seemingly collected on her arrival, unless she signed a non-disclosure agreement. She refused and left with her friend. 

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