On Wednesday, stun gun maker Taser announced that it’s offering free body cameras to every police department in the United States. That’s 700, 000 cops across 18, 000 departments. Rebranding itself as “Axon” (as in the nerve fibers that connect neurons throughout the human body), the company said in a press release that… Read more…
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Taser Debuts Orwellian New Name, Offers Free Body Cam to Every Cop in America
We’ve known for awhile that the upcoming seventh season of Game of Thrones will be a shorter run of episodes than usual—as will its follow-up, the (presumably) final season of the series . But now, after some umming and ahhing from HBO, we finally know that season eight will be six episodes long. Read more…
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It’s Official: Game of Thrones’ Eighth Season Will Be Just Six Episodes Long
Over a billion videos on YouTube are accessible to viewers who are hard of hearing or completely deaf, thanks to the video platform’s automated captions . YouTube product manager Liat Kaver has announced the milestone number in a blog post, where he also talked about how hard it was growing up as a kid who’s hard of hearing and having very little access to closed captions. After his team launched automated captions in 2009, they started concentrating on making it more available and improving its accuracy. Kaver said they made automated captions more available to YouTubers by combining Google’s automatic speech recognition technology with the YouTube caption system. They then achieved a 50 percent leap in accuracy — for English captions, at least — by improving the service’s machine learning algorithms and expanding its training data. We all know how funny caption fails can be, but people who have no other way of knowing what was actually said would end up missing bits of information. In the image above, you’ll see an example comparing the service’s old (left) and current (right) models. Going forward, the company aims to improve the accuracy of the 10 other languages its caption tech supports. Kaver is encouraging YouTube creators to chip in and review the accuracy of machine-generated captions for their videos, as well. After all, the more data they have on their hands, the easier it’ll be to improve the technology. Source: YouTube
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YouTube now has over one billion auto-captioned videos
Enlarge (credit: YouTube Red) A couple of big names are severing ties with Felix Kjellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal reported that Disney’s Maker Studios dropped PewDiePie from its company, which had previously partnered with the YouTube creator to make the entertainment network Revelmode. Shortly after that announcement, Variety reported that YouTube cancelled the second season of Scare PewDiePie , the YouTube Red show starring Kjellberg, and dropped PewDiePie from Google Preferred, one of the company’s advertising programs for top-tier brands and talent. All of this follows PewDiePie’s video posted last month in which he paid two Indian men to hold up a sign that says “Death to all Jews.” He did this using a site called Fiverr , a freelance website that lets anyone pay for a variety of services—including graphic design and programming—for just $5. One of the services listed at the time was for Funny Guys, a comedy duo consisting of the two Indian men who would hold up a sign with anything written on it for $5. After the initial backlash toward PewDiePie’s video, the YouTube creator posted a follow-up video in which he says he didn’t think the men would actually hold up such an offensive sign. Fiverr banned Funny Guys after the incident; the duo said they didn’t understand what the sign meant at the time. PewDiePie apologized while asking Fiverr to reinstate the men to its website, claiming he felt “partially responsible.” He also responded to the controversy on his Tumblr page this weekend, defending his channel as “entertainment, and not a place for any serious political commentary,” but he also admitted that his previous actions were “ultimately offensive.” PewDiePie is no stranger to offensive content, as most of his videos showcase his bombastic sense of humor, but that hasn’t stopped 53 million people from subscribing to his channel. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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YouTube, Disney come down hard on PewDiePie after anti-Semitic stunt
As currents shift in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, they bring an abundance of nutrients and plankton to the region, luring predators of all sizes. Swarms of anchoveta arrive first for an easy meal, but soon find themselves having to come up with unique ways to fend off larger predators like sharks and tuna. The… Read more…
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Swirling Underwater Fish Tornado Makes Sharknado Look Tame
schwit1 quotes a report from Digital Trends: In this generation of self-starters and self-made women and men, do-it-yourself isn’t just an option, it’s a way of life. And if there’s not an app for that, chances are there’s a YouTube video for it. That was certainly the case for a woman named Cara Brookins, who is living proof that if you’re willing to learn, you absolutely can. In 2008, Brookins was in the midst of a family struggle, having left a husband she called “violent and abusive.” Looking to make a fresh start for herself, she took the idea of rebuilding quite literally, perhaps using the physical experience of constructing a house as an extension of her emotional and mental journey. Though she had no previous experience in construction or architecture, Brookins found a series of YouTube tutorials on building a home and got to work. Over the course of nine months, Brookins worked tirelessly with the help of her four children to build a new home for themselves. “I had rented this cabin for a Thanksgiving getaway, ” the mother of four told CBS News. “And driving there, we passed this house that had been ravaged by a tornado. It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open. You don’t often get the opportunity to see the interior workings of a house, but looking at these 2x4s and these nails, it just looked so simple. I thought, “I could put this wall back up if I really tried. Maybe I should just start from scratch.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials
If you’ve ever wanted to live stream to YouTube but didn’t want to spend much money to do so, MakeUseOf has a guide for setting up a Raspberry Pi as a live streaming device that’ll broadcast automatically. Read more…
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Set Up a Raspberry Pi as a Live Streaming Camera That Broadcasts to YouTube
In case you wanted to ground your abstract TV FOMO in hard numbers, FX has data on the fact that, yes, there really is too much TV. An anonymous reader shares a report: The network, whose CEO John Landgraf coined the idea of “peak TV, ” has released its unofficial tally of the number of shows on TV, finding that 455 different scripted television series from broadcast, cable, and streaming sources aired in the last year. That’s an 8 percent increase from last year, when 421 shows aired on TV; a 71 percent increase from 2011, when a mere 266 shows were on TV; and a 137 percent increase from 2006, when there were 192 shows on TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A Record High of 455 Scripted TV Shows Aired in 2016
The ocean is chock full of incredibly weird creatures that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere but under the sea. Like the crinoid , more commonly known as the feather star, which uses countless flapping arms to propel itself through the water—but that’s not the weirdest part. Read more…
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Watching This Multi-Armed Feather Star Swimming Freaks Me Out
Recently, top YouTubers are saying that, yet again, the behemoth video sharing network is fucking them over. This time, it’s about an alleged issue with subscribers—suddenly, they’re disappearing. And, no, it’s not because they unsubscribed. YouTube, for their part, denies that there’s a glitch. Read more…
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Top YouTubers Say They’re Being Screwed Yet Again By The Platform