Are you piggybacking on the Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc, account of a friend or family member? A new report claims that you’re part of the 6% of U.S. households that are costing these companies $500 million in revenue this year.
This is according to a new report from Parks Associates, which found that 1-in-5 young adults in the U.S. are using someone else’s account to watch a streaming (or over-the-top [OTT]) video service.
Action games with big battles like Game of War are incredibly exciting to kids. And kids I’ve worked with, both male and female, will put up with a lot to play exciting games. But it doesn’t mean they like the way women are portrayed. Yet the video game industry seems to base much of its game and character design on a few assumptions, among them that girls don’t play big action games, boys won’t play games with strong female characters, and male players like the sexual objectification of female characters.
Video games are now so popular they outsell films and music in many regions. But while the psychological impact of movies has been widely studied, the effect scary games have on us is relatively unknown. By studying students in the US, researchers have now discovered that playing games scares us more than watching films – and we get a kick out of it.
Around 500 new words and phrases have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in the tome’s quarterly update, including several that provide an insight into 21st century hobbies, such as ‘sexting’, ‘photobombing’, ‘vaping’ and ‘crowdfunding’.
Other gems included in the latest version of the dictionary are the words ‘meh’ and ‘twerk’, as well as more complex ones like ‘Enviropig’ — the trademark for a genetically modified line of Yorkshire pigs with enhanced digestive capabilities — and ‘pharmacovigilance’, which denotes the practice of monitoring the effects of drugs after they have been licensed for use.
We’ve heard many troubling stories of “revenge porn”: an ex-partner seeking to publicly humiliate a person by posting private images of them, or hackers stealing and distributing images from victims’ accounts. Some images even end up on “sextortion” sites that force people to pay to have their images removed.
Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims—predominantly women. So going forward, we’ll honor requests from people to remove nude or sexually explicit images shared without their consent from Google Search results. This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures, that may surface in our search results.
It’s going to take two weeks to upload, and the table of contents will be 91 volumes alone, but Michael Mandiberg is determined to bring the project he tells the New York Times is “half utilitarian data visualization project, half absurdist poetic gesture” to fruition. That project: to transform the English-language version of Wikipedia into a 7,600-volume book set.
