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Showing posts from March, 2015

I don’t find your millions of pageviews impressive — Thoughts On Journalism — Medium

I don’t find your millions of pageviews impressive — Thoughts On Journalism — Medium : Ashton Kutcher owns one of the most important media companies in America, and almost no-one even knows it exists. Why is it one of the most important media companies in America? Because it has “27.5 million US monthly unique visitors (and 47 million globally)” and “it’s one of the fifty biggest websites in the US.” But with such mind-blowing traffic numbers, how come nobody knows it exists? This obvious paradox is never addressed in these articles. But it’s rather easy to explain. These “viralologists,” as the New Yorker described Spartz, are far from genius innovators and are instead purveyors of cookie-cutter strategies that generate near-worthless traffic and almost no brand loyalty. Visit all these websites and you’ll find they’re all near-identical in not only design and sensibility, but content as well. In fact, many of them have recently discarded any pretense that they assemble content in or...
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Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of antibiotics June 26, 1945, in The New York Times

MYREPUBLICA.com - News in Nepal: Fast, Full & Factual : Antibiotics are one of the marvels of medical science. Commercial availability of antibiotics in 1940s put an end to relentless suffering of mankind from bacterial infections. Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of antibiotics, had made the following cautionary statements on June 26, 1945, in The New York Times, “The microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out. In such cases the thoughtless person playing with penicillin is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted.” But the evil is still being perpetrated after all these years. Deaths out of infections resistant to all available antibiotics are increasingly being reported these days. Our whole environment is permeated with bacteria and other microbes. Within minutes to hours of coming into this world a baby is co...
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Antimicrobial Resistance: Tackling a crisis for the health and wealth of nations

The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance Chaired by Jim O’Neill December 2014  The UK Prime Minister announced a Review on Antimicrobial Resistance in July, calling for ideas to bring this growing threat under control. This is the Review team’s first paper, where we demonstrate that there could be profound health and macroeconomic consequences for the world, especially in emerging economies, if antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is not tackled. We believe that this crisis can be avoided. The cost of taking action can be small if we take the right steps soon. And the benefits will be large and long-lasting especially for emerging economies, including the so-called BRIC nations, who will need to make improved investments in their health infrastructure and build industries that leapfrog to the next generation of innovation. Defining the specific steps needed is what our sponsors the UK Prime Minister and the Wellcome...
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Wrist Watch Industry Statistics | Statistic Brain

Wrist Watch Industry Statistics | Statistic Brain : Germany 5.6 % Watch Sales by Materials Percent Steel 53 % Other Materials 26 % Other Metals 15 % Gold-Steel 4 % Precious Metals 2 % Related Statistics Fashion Industry Statistics Footwear Industry Statistics Hat Industry Statistics
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Can virtual reality increase interest in hockey?

Can virtual reality increase interest in hockey? : With this, it can reach fans who wish to be in the rink, but can’t. Not only can they watch the game, but viewers can feel that they’re inside the arena with a full 360� angle experience. They can be at home, but can watch the game from any seat in the arena whether it be at center ice, behind the nets or even behind the penalty box to get the in-game experience in their living rooms.
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Pope Francis Predicts His Papacy Will Be Brief - NYTimes.com

Pope Francis Predicts His Papacy Will Be Brief - NYTimes.com : “I have the feeling that my pontificate will be brief — four or five years; I do not know, even two or three,” he predicted in an interview with a Mexican broadcaster. “Two have already passed. It is a somewhat vague sensation,” the pope said, reiterating his belief that “the Lord has placed me here for a short time, and nothing more.”
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Apple Watch Doesn’t Appeal to Millennials | Re/code

Apple Watch Doesn’t Appeal to Millennials | Re/code : The conversation revealed a�generational split, with those age 35 and over twice as likely to discuss the Apple Watch than those under 35. Carlson said this may suggest that consumers in the 35-to-49-year-old range are more likely to be in the market for�a potentially pricey timepiece — prices range from $349 to as much as $17,000 for the gold-bling Apple Watch Edition. Younger professionals and college students, alternatively, were looking for new ways to watch HBO shows like “Game of Thrones.”
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IFPI Music Report 2014: Global Recorded Music Revenues Fall 4%, Streaming and Subs Hit $1 Billion | Billboard

IFPI Music Report 2014: Global Recorded Music Revenues Fall 4%, Streaming and Subs Hit $1 Billion | Billboard : A major contributing factor in the drop was a massive 16.7% decline in music sales in Japan -- the world’s second-biggest music market, accounting for more than a fifth of total global revenues. IFPI attributes Japan’s sharp decline in music sales -- which totaled $3.01 billion in 2013, down from $3.61 billion -- to falling demand for physical format and “legacy mobile products” such as downloads and ringtones, while streaming and subscription services are yet to establish themselves.
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DubMC: World Music’s 2014 Album Sales Growth Outpaces Other Genres

DubMC: World Music’s 2014 Album Sales Growth Outpaces Other Genres A Q&A With Billboard Senior Analyst Glenn Peoples About Nielsen’s 2014 End-of-Year Report Because world music recordings rarely top overall sales or airplay charts, few mainstream industry analyses explore what’s happening in the eclectic global category. Statistics company Nielsen Music’s 2014 year-end report, based on the Soundscan album sales data they collect, includes world music data. Dmitri Vietze, founder of world music and tech firm rock paper scissors, asked Billboard senior analyst Glenn Peoples – who travels regularly to Africa and Latin America on his time off – to help parse the data for globally minded producers, labels, and artists. 
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2014 Nielsen Music Report

2014 Nielsen Music Report Streaming continued to show significant growth in 2014, with over 164 billion songs streamed on-demand through audio and video platforms. Physical album sales declined, with weakness in CDs despite record-setting strength in vinyl LPs. Digital albums and digital tracks also showed declines versus 2013, although digital consumption overall (sales and streams) showed growth. Total consumption for the year, based on albums plus track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums, was down slightly versus 2013. For the complete release, including sales, record company market share, and top song and record data,  click here .
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Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories

ABSTRACT We present Themail , a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship. This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture” trends and themes in email ( haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration 
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Email Mining: Tasks, Common Techniques, and Tools

Email Mining: Tasks, Common Techniques, and Tools Guanting Tang, Jian Pei, and Wo-Shun Luk School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby BC, CANADA Abstract. Email is one of the most popular forms of communication nowadays, mainly due to its efficiency, low cost, and compatibility of diversified types of information. In order to facilitate better usage of emails and explore business potentials in emailing, various data mining techniques have been applied on email data. In this paper, we present a brief survey of the major research efforts on email mining. To emphasize the differences between email mining and general text mining, we organize our survey on five major email mining tasks, namely, spam detection, email categorization, contact analysis, email network property analysis and email visualization. Those tasks are inherently incorporated into various usages of emails. We systematically...
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How Major League Baseball Is Quietly Driving Live Online Video

How Major League Baseball Is Quietly Driving Live Online Video : But one fact that went almost unnoticed in the report (from bandwidth optimizing company Qwilt) was that live online video is also growing like crazy. Two newcomers to the list of biggest bandwidth hogs were WWE and Twitch. Together, the two companies account for 2% of all online video volume.
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How WWE Made WrestleMania XXX its Biggest Live Streamed Event - Streaming Media Magazine

How WWE Made WrestleMania XXX its Biggest Live Streamed Event - Streaming Media Magazine : Our largest event since we launched the network has been WrestleMania XXX," Lalley said. "If you're not familiar, WrestleMania is the Super Bowl for the WWE. It's a huge, huge event. It took place at the beginning of April and that's been our largest event. We were hitting a half-million to three-quarters of a million concurrents during that event. It was pretty huge, and on the same night that 'Game of Thrones' was premiering, so there's a lot of internet traffic going on at the same time." Putting on a large-scale live event involves a lot of planning, especially when the audience is paying for quality.
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Royal Wedding Breaks Live Streaming Records

Royal Wedding Breaks Live Streaming Records : The Royal Wedding has already taken over trending topics across the web, and we can now report that it has broken at least one record: concurrent viewers on Livestream. The company says that its livestream of William and Kate’s wedding topped 300,000 concurrent viewers at 6 a.m. ET on Friday morning. CEO Max Haot tells us that he expects “at least 2 million” unique viewers by the time the broadcast is done. Livestream partnered with the Associated Press, UK Press Association, CBS and Entertainment Tonight for its coverage.
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Moving On Up: 3Q Industry and Services' Ad Budgets Rise Globally

Moving On Up: 3Q Industry and Services' Ad Budgets Rise Globally
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Moving On Up: 3Q Industry and Services' Ad Budgets Rise Globally

Moving On Up: 3Q Industry and Services' Ad Budgets Rise Globally
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From the archives: The world in your hand | The Economist

From the archives: The world in your hand | The Economist : logy has come a long way in fifty years Mar 3rd 2015, 15:21 | Science and technology The Economist  ‏ @ TheEconomist     3h 3 hours ago In 1998: "Mobile phones are not a supplement to fixed-wire telephones, but could replace them" http:// econ.st/1zIJe6T  
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The Celebrity Who Won't Show Her Face | ThinkProgress

The Celebrity Who Won't Show Her Face | ThinkProgress : Yes, there’s something a little hypocritical in posing for the cover of Billboard, even with a paper bag over your head, to talk about how you wish people would stop paying attention to you. It’s like a movie star on the Academy Awards stage demanding “privacy above all else.” Pick a lane, celebrities! With perks come pitfalls. If you don’t like it, come fly coach with the rest of us. Besides, those paper bags are all well and good and symbolic but Sia’s face, like all our faces, is only as far away as a Google image search. Which makes the whole display of hiding in plain sight a little pointless.
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Left Shark, Meet The Law: What Can Celebrities Actually Trademark? | ThinkProgress

Left Shark, Meet The Law: What Can Celebrities Actually Trademark? | ThinkProgress : compiled by a visual director employed by Beyonc�to shoot “practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005,” so that she can profit from and (more importantly) dictate the nature of their distribution? Swift, too, is famous for her “insanely driven, hyper self-controlled perfectionism.”
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Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker

Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple - The New Yorker : Before we went outside, Ive showed me the work he’d done on staircases, and on the signage for employee security-card readers; we examined brightly colored polycarbonate panels that will help people establish where, beneath the loop, they have parked. Pinned to a wall were alternate versions of a visitor reception center, separate from the loop. Seen from above, both were modified rectangles. One, marked “Pill,” had half-circles at either end. The other ended in a more familiar Apple way, and was labelled “iPhone.” “We should be done, but we’re still redoing and redoing,” Ive said. He had recently introduced the iPhone option, partly for fear that a visitor approaching the Pill by its rounded ends might mistake it for an echo of the main building. He had also insisted—“a big fight”—on simplifying the control panels of the Mitsubishi elevators.
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Banksy

Banksy : Gaza is often described as 'the world's largest open air prison' because no-one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons - they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day.
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Banksy

Banksy : A local man came up and said 'Please - what does this mean?' I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens.
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'Bronies' Set to Gallop into Brooklyn for 'My Little Pony' Convention - Downtown Brooklyn - DNAinfo.com New York

'Bronies' Set to Gallop into Brooklyn for 'My Little Pony' Convention - Downtown Brooklyn - DNAinfo.com New York : Organizers of New York City's third annual Ponycon are expecting upwards of 1,200 "My Little Pony" fans to attend a three-day conference at St. Francis College dedicated to all things pony, including a screening of the much anticipated, first-time look at the show's Season 5 trailer.
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