Hasta La Gadget!

The Argentinian soccer legend has become the first man to win the Ballon d’Or while playing for three different clubs.

NYU is launching a project to spur the development of immersive 3D video for dance education — and perhaps other areas. Boosted by a $1.2 million four-year grant from the National Science Foundation, the undertaking will try to make Point-Cloud Video (PCV) tech viable for streaming.

A point cloud is a set of data points in a 3D space representing the surface of a subject or environment. NYU says Point-Cloud Video, which strings together point-cloud frames into a moving scene, has been under development for the last decade. However, it’s typically too data-intensive for practical purposes, requiring bandwidth far beyond the capabilities of today’s connected devices.

The researchers plan to address those obstacles by “reducing bandwidth consumption and delivery latency, and increasing power consumption efficiency so that PCVs can be streamed far more easily,” according to an NYU Engineering blog post published Monday. Project leader Yong Liu, an NYU electrical and computer engineering professor, believes modern breakthroughs make that possible. “With recent advances in the key enabling technologies, we are now at the verge of completing the puzzle of teleporting holograms of real-world humans, creatures and objects through the global Internet,” Liu wrote on Monday. 

ChatGPT maker OpenAI launched a model last year that can create 3D point clouds from text prompts. Engadget reached out to the project leader to clarify whether it or other generative AI tools are part of the process, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.

The team will test the technology with the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance Center. Dancers from both organizations will perform on a volumetric capture stage. The team will stream their movements live and on-demand, offering educational content for aspiring dancers looking to study from high-level performers — and allowing engineers to test and tweak their PCV technology.

The researchers envision the work opening doors to more advanced VR and mixed reality streaming content. “The success of the proposed research will contribute towards wide deployment of high quality and robust PCV streaming systems that facilitate immersive augmented, virtual and mixed reality experience and create new opportunities in many domains, including education, business, healthcare and entertainment,” Liu said.

“Point-Cloud Video holds tremendous potential to transform a range of industries, and I’m excited that the research team at NYU Tandon prioritized dance education to reap those benefits early,” said Jelena Kovačević, NYU Tandon Dean.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nyu-is-developing-3d-streaming-video-tech-with-the-help-of-its-dance-department-211947160.html?src=rss

X will no longer pay creators for tweets promoting misinformation. Elon Musk said the company is making a “slight change” to its monetization program and that tweets that are fact-checked via community notes will no longer be eligible for payouts as part of X’s revenue-sharing program.

The update appears to be an attempt to remove incentives for high-profile accounts to spread viral misinformation. “The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” Musk said. X also recently started to require community notes contributors to cite their sources in fact checks.

The latest change comes as researchers, fact checkers and journalists have raised the alarm about the amount of viral misinformation spreading on X amid the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza. European Union officials have opened an investigation into the company’s handling of misinformation related to the war.

Following Musk’s takeover of Twitter a year ago, the company laid off teams responsible for curating and promoting reputable tweets about breaking news events and removed tools for reporting misinformation in the app. Instead, the company has relied on its crowd-sourced fact checking tool, community notes.

But critics have said that community notes are subject to manipulation and that the user-contributed fact checks are often unable to keep up with the sheer amount of viral falsehoods, particularly those promoted by verified accounts. A recent analysis from NewsGuard, a nonprofit that tracks the spread of misinformation, found that 74 percent of “the most viral posts on X advancing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas War are being pushed by ‘verified’ X accounts.”

As BBC researcher Shayan Sardarizadeh pointed out, the change to make tweets with community notes ineligible for payments has already been criticized by a number of high-profile accounts whose tweets are often “community noted.” Musk added that “any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious,” but didn’t say how the company would deal with attempts at manipulation. X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/x-wont-pay-creators-for-tweets-that-get-fact-checked-with-community-notes-174206477.html?src=rss

Meta’s Oversight Board announced today it has upheld the company’s decision to leave up two posts detailing a Thai woman’s fruit juice-only diet. However, the board recommended the company restrict the monetization of similar “extreme and harmful diet-related content” on Facebook as researchers continue to wrestle with the concerning relationship between social media and eating disorders.

The Oversight Board’s decision describes the videos, posted in late 2022 and 2023 by the same account — and flagged by users as harmful. The clips detailed “content on life, culture and food in Thailand.” In both problematic videos, a man interviews a woman in Italian about her experience with “a diet consisting only of fruit juice.”

The decision illustrates the videos’ concerning influence. “In the first video, the woman says she has experienced increased mental focus, improved skin and bowel movement, happiness and a ‘feeling of lightness’ since starting the diet, while she also shares that she previously suffered from skin problems and swollen legs,” the board’s summary reads. “She brings up the issue of anorexia but states her weight has normalized, after she initially lost more than 10 kilograms (22 pounds) due to her dietary changes.”

The second video, posted around five months later, follows up on the woman’s story, asking how she feels nearly a year into her dangerous diet. “She responds by saying she looks young for her age, that she has not lost any more weight except for ‘four kilos of impurities,’ and she encourages him to try the diet.” Making matters worse, she told the interviewer she planned to become a “fruitarian” after wrapping up the fast, adding that she may start a “pranic journey,” which she describes as “living ‘on energy’ in place of eating or drinking regularly.”

Meta

The videos have been viewed over two million times and have over 15,000 comments. The posts also shared details about the woman’s Facebook page, which received a significant uptick in engagement after the second post. “Based on research commissioned by the Board, the woman’s Facebook page has 17,000 followers and features content about the lifestyle of the woman, including her diet,” the board wrote. Both the content creator and the woman’s Facebook page were part of Meta’s Partner Monetization Program, allowing them to profit from the potentially harmful advice. 

After users reported the videos, Meta’s human reviewers determined the posts didn’t violate Facebook’s Suicide and Self-Injury Community Standard. They remained visible on Facebook. Separate users for each video then appealed the decision to Meta’s Oversight Board.

The board’s decision not to remove the videos was more about the lack of specific violations of the Suicide and Self-Injury Community Standard than a belief that the content was harmless. Specifically, the videos don’t provide “instructions for drastic and unhealthy weight loss when shared together with terms associated with eating disorders,” nor do they “promote, encourage, coordinate, or provide instructions for eating disorders.” Even the woman’s mention of an energy-only “pranic journey” was determined to be “descriptive in nature” without mention of weight loss.

The board recommended Meta adjust its monetization policies to “better meet its human rights responsibilities” related to “harmful diet-related content.” Most of the board considers the current authorization of this content “a conspicuous and concerning one.”  

“With health and communications experts noting the ability of influencers to use first-hand narration styles to secure high engagement with their content — coupled with the ubiquity of wellness influencers — it is important that Meta should not provide financial benefits to create this type of content,” the board wrote.

Some board members believed demonetization of this type of content was a bridge too far. “For a minority of the Board, since demonetization may negatively impact expression on these issues, Meta should explore whether demonetization is the least intrusive means of respecting the rights of vulnerable users,” the board wrote. Meanwhile, another minority believed demonetization doesn’t go far enough. “For a separate minority of Board Members, demonetization is necessary but not sufficient; they find that Meta should additionally restrict extreme and harmful diet-related content to adults over the age of 18, and explore other measures such as putting a label on the content, to include reliable information on the health risks of eating disorders.”

Meta says that because the board upheld Meta’s decision to leave up both posts, it “will take no further action related to this bundle or the content.” The company adds that it will review the demonetization recommendation. A Meta spokesperson told Engadget it will respond to “their full recommendations in our Transparency Center” within 60 days.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/metas-oversight-board-dangerous-diet-videos-can-remain-but-please-demonetize-them-175404574.html?src=rss

This week the Doctor Who universe is expanding with the official launch of what is now being dubbed “The Whoniverse”—a streaming home for over 800 episodes of Doctor Who and its spinoffs from the BBC… and now, its first original programming.

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