When he’s not playfully trolling his fans or ruining their lives as a fallen angel on Supernatural, actor and fan favorite Misha Collins fundraises year-round for his charity, Random Acts. And while he’s always getting his fans involved in his projects, which include a record-breaking annual international scavenger hunt, this weekend he and a few lucky fans had an unprecedented meetup on the streets of Los Angeles.
Collins may be the biggest star you’ve never heard of—unless you’re on Tumblr. A latecomer to the main cast of the CW’s flagship hit, Collins’s media-savvy ways and cheeky personality have made him a huge hit with fans. His Twitter account has over a million followers, and earlier this year his massive fanbase brought Tumblr to a veritable standstill for a random act of celebration known as Mishapocalypse.
So it’s no surprise that when he got ready to run a mini-marathon on Sunday as part of his Endure 4 Kindness endurance event and fundraiser, fans turned out to cheer him on. By the end of the weekend, they would help Collins raise over $65,000 for the campaign, which involved a weekend-long global commitment to run for a planned amount of time. But not all of the fans who lined Sunset Boulevard in L.A. on Sunday morning planned to do the run themselves—at least not until he stopped in mid-jog and invited them to join in.
Kara, a.k.a. fallenfromthursday, is a self-described “wallflower” who had planned to wait for Collins on the corner near her house, “hoping just to shout a passing cheer.”
For a fan like Kara, whose Tumblr is bedecked in images of the actor, the chance for such an unexpected personal encounter with him was deeply profound. As she wrote last night:
“I was just expecting to wave and watch him keep going for the sake of kindness, when he stops at the corner and asks if I’m going to join him. And I’m wearing my PJ sweatshirt and Toms so I’m not even remotely dressed for LA running weather, but I thought what the hell neither is Misha. So I started running, unable to think....”
After describing Collins’s friendliness and his interaction with her as they ran together, Kara added a heartwarming personal note to the actor that she’d been too overwhelmed to tell him at the time:
“Misha, thank you. For everything. Thank you for being an inspiration and the reason I kept pushing because I found self worth again. I told you that the show changed my friend’s life, but YOU changed mine. With Random Acts and Gishwhes and everything you made me feel like I was worth something to the world again. I started eating again. I started trying my best to get better so that I could help other people. And I wish I had told you this but it just means more than the WORLD that I could meet you at least once since I can’t go to Burcon. Thank you for doing what you do and thank you for being. Just too everything.”
Collins punctuated the day with selfies and snapshots of his fellow runners, fans included. As Kara noted, although she wasn’t going to ask to pose for a picture, he offered her one anyway—causing them to get honked at by a few drivers.
In a followup post, referencing Collins’ role as Supernatural’s angel Castiel, Kara added: “I got to fly with an actual angel today. Not many people can say that.”
Microsoft spent $2.6 billion for Advertising in the fiscal year ended June. Apple spent $1.1 billion in its fiscal year ended October.
Other companies will report their full year ad spending later but their previous years’ spending is shown below.
I added a second graph showing the percent of sales that each ad budget represents. Note that Coca Cola retains the crown as the most prolific advertiser when it comes to budgeting.[1]
However, Microsoft is climbing into a region of 3 to 5% of sales. What’s even more striking is that we can isolate the revenues which are actually being targeted by the ads: consumers. Microsoft’s Business and Server and Tools divisions may have some ad budget but it’s likely to be much smaller than the Windows, Entertainment and Online divisions.
When the ad budget is measured as a percent of consumer sales, Microsoft suddenly looks like the biggest spender overtaking even Coca-Cola.[2] I don’t know what to make of this. It seems extraordinary that Microsoft needs the same level of effort to sell software (and some hardware) as Coca Cola does to sell soft drinks. Coca Cola spends heavily to preserve brand value for what is essentially a commodity product. Is this the way to read Microsoft’s marketing?
It’s also interesting that Apple spends the least (nearly) in absolute terms and fractionally less (one twelfth) in relative terms. This is in contrast to the alternatives above. The stronger, more differentiated the product, the less it needs to be propped up by the ad.
Notes:
Think of it as 7 percent of every Coke purchase going to pay for the ad that presumably got you to buy it.
Note that Samsung can also be similarly split into consumer vs. total.
If you’ve ever come across the #EverydaySexism hashtag or Twitter campagns like Hollaback, you’ll know that street harassment is a major problem for a lot of women. (If you’ve ever been a woman, you likely know this too.) In some neighborhoods, women can barely go outside without having catcalls, whistles, and come-ons thrown at them.
An obvious goal would be to try and eliminate street harassment entirely. Here’s another strategy: teaching men how to politely approach women in public without being a creep. On Sunday night, Redditor blackthought managed to crowdsource some surprisingly useful advice for men.
A lot of the comments seem pretty obvious: be well-groomed and clean; don’t yell at women out of your car window (“No Scrubs”). And, as the most upvoted thread points out, it’s probably a good idea to practice talking to strangers in general so you don’t come off as tongue-tied.
The main problem: Some guys genuinely do not understand what constitutes creepy behavior when you’re talking to a woman who’s never met you before. One female redditor described an incident where a guy followed her home on his bike, only to explain that he was making sure she got home safe. You may know you’re not a serial killer, but the person you’re following home is going to prepare for the worst.
“It's not always so much what you say, it's how you accept whatever answer you're given,” writes Redditor mindjyobizness.
If you go up to a girl and say, ‘Hey, you look interesting, I'd love to get to know you,’ and she acts uncomfortable, then you go all, ‘AWW COME ON GURL I'M JUST PLAYIN' WHY YOU BEIN' SO COLD,’ then it’s creepy and horrible.
Some people got more specific. “Last week a guy approached me and asked if I was into butt fingering,” writes Gingergurl63. “Do not approach girls and ask them if they're into butt fingering.”
Some women just aren’t going to be receptive to your advances, no matter what. Explained beepborpimajorp:
I don't care if the most attractive man on earth approaches me when I'm standing in line at Target and comments on the book I’m holding. I'm there to buy tampons and leave, pretty much.
The thread has inspired almost 7,000 comments so far, ranging from detailed instructions to shared experiences of how to avoid seeming creepy when you’re accidentally walking home the same way as a lone woman at night. Still, one of the best has got to be this extremely specific scenario laid out by waitingforcakeday.
The main thing is that he wears the sword on his back; waist sheathing is out. When he approaches me, he doesn't smile, but tells me that I am in danger - that we will have to flee. He scoops me up and carries me - CARRIES ME - up a ladder on the side of a building (he is so strong he has to climb with just one hand). At the top we look down and 12-14 goons are climbing up after us. He gently sets me aside and pulls the sword from his back - wait - I didn't see it before but he has TWO swords - and he starts slashing the goons. He takes me back to his place, which is on Park Avenue, and f**ks me senseless.
And also - he would have to be well groomed, of course.
And that he has one of those trumpet horns from Lord of the Rings that he just sort of slings over his shoulder.
Apparently the Lord of the Rings trumpet horn is very important. Try to keep that in mind for later, guys.
Alpha House and Betas, the first two original shows to come from Amazon, will debut later this month. Alpha House will premiere on November 15th, with Betas following a week later on November 22nd. But if you were expecting Amazon to follow Netflix's binge-friendly release format, you're in for disappointment. Three episodes of each show will be available immediately, but after that, Amazon will release just one new episode per week via Prime Instant Video — a model that essentially replicates the experience of watching on cable. The company says that an initial bundle of three episodes will help customers "try out the shows and get to know the characters." But Amazon is steering clear of Netflix's all-at-once approach in hopes that...
Machinima's massively popular gaming videos are moving beyond YouTube thanks to a new partnership with streaming service Twitch. The deal will see Machinima content featured on a new Twitch channel, and it starts today with a week-long Call of Duty: Ghosts marathon. While Machinima has already seen plenty of success on YouTube, the company says Twitch was a particularly appealing partner because of its focus on live events. "Twitch has such a massive audience," says Ryan Wyatt, director of Machinima Live. "We've always wanted to scale up our live offerings."
When a company faces regulatory uncertainty, it can do one of two things: Either hunker down and wait for a new law or rule to pass, or put out a proposal for how it would prefer to be treated.
There's little to lose from the latter strategy. Tim Cook did it when Apple came under the microscope for its creative accounting practices, proposing a system that would allow it to bring more revenue back to the United States without paying a hefty tax. Uber did it when state regulators sanctioned rival ride-sharing services, putting out a white paper pleading for a more consistent approach.
Paypal, EBay's market-leading online money transfer service, is facing a similarly unsettled landscape. Mobile payments are almost entirely unregulated at the moment, and they fall within the purview of three different agencies: The Federal Reserve, which this year began looking at mobile payments more closely; the Federal Trade Commission, which has started worrying about data privacy and security, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which seems to think that new "rules of the road" might be necessary as well. (The Federal Deposit Insurance poking its head in once in a while too.)
Everybody says that regulations need to be updated, but at the moment, nobody's quite sure how.
Paypal just charged into that morass of uncertainty, putting out a 31-page report on what's wrong with the mobile payments space, and how government ought to address it. Naturally, the company also thinks its approach could work for government writ large. In short: Be more like a tech company.
"We recommend that regulators use the same data analytics techniques that have transformed the payments sector, as well as the healthcare sector, and the getting-a-taxi sector," writes vice president for public policy and government relations Tod Cohen, in the document's introduction (which opens, in total seriousness, with a reference to Paypal's plan for intergalactic domination). "These techniques rely on collaboration and iteration; they use technology and data to measure performance and deliver results."
They've even got a catchy title: SMART Governance. For Securing data on performance, using Machines to organize databases, creating Algorithms to derive insights, Reassessing results, and Targeting insights.
The report uses a lot of words to advocate a few simple concepts.
Make rules based on outcomes, not processes.
Use data to drive decisions.
Collaborate with experts, industry, consumer groups, and the crowd.
Make policy through modeling and simulations, improving upon a prototype until you get to a satisfactory final version, in what sounds a lot like the old waterfall-vs. agile debate, but which the authors give a fancy title: The "Boyd Loop."
Other than calling out a couple policies it dislikes -- the CFPB's remittance transfer rule and screening requirements that place high fees on overseas transactions -- Paypal doesn't say what this new regulatory regime should look like. It just says that it would like the regulators to basically throw out their traditional ways of doing things in order to come up with it.
Mark Egerman, who used to oversee mobile payments at the CFPB before leaving to start a mobile payments company of his own, points out that his former agency is doing a lot of these things already -- incorporating data, running trials, inviting innovation, getting input from a wide range of players, etc. But he thinks Paypal's opus is a forward-thinking, realistic piece of work -- not something they would've put out a few years ago.
"Paypal is maturing," Egerman says. "Old Paypal was the Peter Thiel, cyberpunk, let's be our own nation state, forget banks. New Paypal is a multibillion dollar company. They want the rules to be reasonable, clear, and responsive. And who could argue with them?"
Having totally reasonable ideas is one thing. Getting the Fed to change centuries-old habits, of course, is entirely something else.
It was bound to happen sooner or later. The first documented case of a ticket being given to a driver wearing Google Glass.
Cecilia Abadie, a California woman, shared her story on Google+ Tuesday night, where she posted a photo of the recent speeding ticket she received in San Diego. In addition to going 10 miles over the speed limit, the officer also cited Abadie for violating a California law that forbids computer or television monitors from being on and visible to drivers while a car is in motion.
On the citation, the officer has clearly identified "Google Glass" as the offending device.
There are exceptions to the monitor law that Abadie is accused of violating. Obviously GPS and mapping displays are allowed, both of which are tasks Glass is capable of performing. Screens are also allowed to be in the front seat if they have an "interlock device" that disables them while driving, which Glass also possesses.
Abadie insist Glass was not on while she was driving, despite the officer's claims that it was "blocking my view." Many of her Google+ followers are encouraging her to fight the ticket in court.
The social news site Reddit is divided into thousands of interest-specific communities, called subreddits. Thousands of these groups—ranging from broad topics, like music, to very specific and off-the-wall interests, like My Little Pony porn—manage to unite the site's millions of users under several umbrellas. The idea is for redditors to explore and discuss their wide berth of interests without ever leaving the familiarity of the site.
On October 28, Michigan State University graduate research assistant Randy Olson, with the assistance of sociologist Dr. Zachary Neal, released "redditviz," a study of how each of Reddit's individual subreddits are connected to one another. Olson had previously graphed Reddit's gradual shift from a social news site to a massive imageboard.
"This network visualization is my first stab at creating a tool for users to discover subreddits on their own," Olson explained to the Daily Dot. "Search your interests on the network, zoom in and see what other subreddits are related to that subreddit, and explore from there."
On redditviz, the subreddits with the most connections—and thus the most active—are represented with red dots. Naturally, all of the current and former default subreddits fall into this category.
"I had to prune many of the connections for some of the larger subreddits, otherwise they draw in all the other subreddits into the center like a black hole," Olson said. "Some of the defaults are 'related' to as many as 500 other subreddits!"
Olson concluded that former default subreddit /r/politics was the most connected community on the site.
"It had thousands of new users joining it every day that then went on to find other subreddits more suited to their interests. Beyond that, it seems that redditors—regardless of their interests—are drawn into discussing U.S. politics in one way or another."
He also noticed that many subreddits for U.S. cities and states were connected to the broader subreddit /r/sports, surmising that "the biggest thing folks have in common within a state is their love of sports."
Of course, there are subreddit connections that are a little stranger.
"The link between /r/gonewild and /r/guns is a little odd," he said. "There are some niche subreddits that have a surprisingly broad reach. For example, /r/Minecraft, /r/sex, /r/skyrim, /r/gonewild, and /r/gameofthrones are all related to hundreds of other subreddits somehow. I guess people from all walks of life love sex, games, and crying themselves to sleep because [George] R.R. Martin killed their favorite character."
Interestingly, Olson believes that the Reddit communities built up around My Little Pony best exemplify what a healthy Reddit community should look like.
"It's focused on a fairly specific interest, has a primary subreddit that serves as the entry point to the community (/r/MyLittlePony), and has an active and welcoming community (and wiki) that helps newcomers find their way into the niche subreddits built around that primary subreddit. All of those factors added together produce a healthy and growing Reddit community."
But what about the other end of the spectrum? Subreddits represented by blue dots that lie far from the bright red nucleus are very, very interest-specific—and often inactive. Examples include r/spiral_knights, a 1,000-subscriber-strong community that discusses nothing other than the MMORPG Spiral Knights. Also, r/scientology.
"Unless they become closely linked to a healthy (red) subreddit, they're likely to die out soon enough due to inactivity," Olson said.
With such subreddits sticking out like sore thumbs, could this be detrimental to the idea of Reddit being a common gathering place for all interests? Is there no place for you on Reddit if your primary interests do not lie in well-connected communities?
Olson believes that Reddit has taken the necessary steps toward welcoming potential redditors from all walks of life.
If Reddit truly wishes to expand its reach—and become more than an imageboard where people share memes and celebrities shamelessly promote themselves—it should continue implementing such measures.
Stockholm creative agency Doberman has designed a mental health first aid kit to raise awareness of mental illness in Sweden.
The wall mounted kit contains a physical first aid pack and a mental health self evaluation test. Questions are designed to highlight early symptoms of stress, anxiety or other mental health issues, asking readers how often they experience common symptoms of stress, avoid social situations or have trouble concentrating or enjoying themselves.
The kit also includes a QR code which links to a mental health information site, cards displaying the questionnaire and the phone number for a mental health helpline. Launched in partnership with mental health awareness group Campaign Hjärnkoll, it's designed to help prevent long term sick leave as a result of mental health problems by encouraging workers to discuss the issue and spot symptoms early.
The project started last summer, when Doberman asked local students to research different tools and initiatives that might help prevent long term absences from work. One of the proposals suggested was a psychological first aid kit, so Doberman decided to develop the idea after consulting psychologists, behavioural scientists and people who have experienced mental health problems in the past. The agency also received funding from private businesses in Sweden.
The kit is designed to be noticeable but discrete and look like a traditional first aid kit, says design director Kristina Carlander. “We chose blue instead of the usual green as it's quite a calming, approachable colour but one that's easy to read and still stands out,” she adds. The kit is being tested in 1000 workplaces around Stockholm and if it proves successful, will be rolled out nationwide.
“Everyone we've held workshops with and spoken to about it so far has been very positive and thinks it's a great idea. I hope it will make mental health a little easier to talk about and less taboo,” says Carlander.
It's the first mental health awareness project Doberman has worked on, but Carlander says the agency is keen to do more. It's a simple, low cost idea and one that should be introduced in more countries around the world - coupled with a strong campaign, it could help ease the stigma surrounding an incredibly common but rarely talked about subject, which is the top cause of long term sick leave in Sweden and affects one in four people in the UK.
“I don't expect it to immediately lead to less people being off sick but hopefully it will encourage a conversation about it, and that's very important,” adds Carlander.
What makes a significant other different from a very dear friend?
Well, besides that.
Facebook data scientists have developed a novel method for identifying who among a user's friends is that person's partner—and their work puts an empirical stamp on something that is perhaps intuitive: A significant other occupies a unique place in a person's social network, one characterized not by "embeddedness"—the standard way of measuring a tie's proximity—but by what the researchers call "dispersion."
Here's what that means: The number of mutual friends ("embeddedness") is a reliable indicator of how close two people are. Simply put: You have more friends in common with your closest friends than with your acquaintances.
It might seem reasonable then if "embeddedness" could be used to predict people's plus-ones. But that's not what researchers Lars Backstrom of Facebook and Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University found. In a new paper, they write that embeddedness is an at best mediocre predictor of that special something. Relying on embeddedness, they were able to accurately predict Facebook users' significant others 24.7 percent of the time.
Another measure fared much better: "dispersion," or how many different networks of theirs a person's friend shares. In other words, your significant other won't just share many friends with you, but friends from all walks of life: your colleagues, your high school buds, your college friends, your family, and so on. Using dispersion, Backstrom and Kleinberg doubled their accuracy: 50 percent of the time, a person was romantic partners with the person who was the most dispersed across his or her social network. For married people, their accuracy rose to 60 percent, a figure which they say is more than 30 times higher than random guessing would produce (everyone in their sample had at least 50 friends).
The researchers were able to work with their findings to produce a telling observation about the health of a given relationship: The more dispersion a relationship demonstrated, the more likely it was that that relationship would still be around 60 days later (the researchers excluded married couples from this analysis, though that would be quite interesting to see too). This is not necessarily causal (no, you can't get your girlfriend to stick around by bringing her to the company holiday party), but couples who are building a life together, as demonstrated by their multiple and interconnected social circles, seem to have more staying power. (Presumably, though no measurement tools have been developed yet, the breakups of such relationships are also the most painful.)
For now, researchers relied on looking at Facebook users who identify their partners on the site, but, as this sort of analysis gets refined, it's easy to see how they could use their methodology to detect a relationship which is not quote-unquote "Facebook official." Such information will be useful to Facebook in prioritizing certain people in your newsfeed, showing you those—and especially the one—you care most about.
Those of us who regret being stuck on Earth can count on astronauts on the International Space Station sharing their experiences over social media. From Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s use of Twitter to current space-station astronaut Karen Nyberg’s amazing photos on Pinterest, what people are up to in orbit is always captivating.
NASA decided to take this connection to a new level over the last few months with the help of astronaut Rick Mastracchio, the flight engineer for the next space-station mission, Expedition 38. Mastracchio offered people a unique way to join him during his training and on his trip to the station through a trivia contest.
Since March, Mastracchio has been running the contest on his Twitter account by asking monthly questions about his mission and the training he’s been undergoing in preparation for it. People could find the answers in his daily tweets. Those that answered correctly were then asked to send their photos to NASA, so the pictures could be sent to the space station with Mastracchio. Once in space, he plans to photograph the 7 winners’ pictures with the Earth in the background and tweet them. He’ll call each person a "virtual crewmember" on the mission.
“We were thinking of ways people could get more involved in the mission and not just by offering info, so we decided to go with a Twitter contest and ask trivia,” Mastracchio told the Daily Dot from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. “The response has been great. It’s been a lot of fun for me! Folks are excited to have their picture flown into orbit.”
#ISSFE7 – Question 7 - To what temperature can the Space Station Freezer (MELFI) chill samples?
Don’t think enthusiasm for the space program has waned over the years. The buzz has spread to Twitter. A look at the hashtag #ISSFE7, which was used for the contest, shows there is still a lot of excitement around these missions. The hashtag has been used not just for the contest, but by people who want to chat about the upcoming mission.
Mastracchio, a veteran of three space shuttle flights, also has a Facebook page, but he thinks Twitter is the best social network for maximizing contact with people curious about what astronauts and NASA are doing.
“Twitter is a great way for NASA to give a behind-the-scenes look of what our training is like. [We do] so many interesting things on a daily basis that I enjoy sharing with Twitter followers,” he said.
Mastracchio said he isn’t sure he’ll be able to keep up with the rate of other astronauts who update their social media from the space station, but he plans to tweet at least once a day for now to share some of the exciting things he’ll be doing up there. His expedition will be taking part in hundreds of experiments across fields, including biology and physical science, during their 6 months on the space station.
While there are no solid plans to continue the trivia contest when Mastracchio reaches space, he said they are thinking about it and other ways to keep people engaged on Twitter. He said all astronauts should use social media as a way to connect with people and get them excited about space exploration.
“Part of NASA’s responsibility is to educate the public, the American people, about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it,” he explained. “The people are paying taxes and providing money to do these things. It’s very important to inform the public in as many avenues as possible.”
Mastracchio will leave for the International Space Station aboard Soyuz 37 on November 6 with Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Mikhail Tyurin of the Russian Federal Space Agency.
Nintendo of America president and COO Reggie Fils-Aime is trying a novel technique to help the Wii U, taking on the role of a travelling salesman. Fils-Aime recently revealed via Twitter that he'll be heading out to select cities through a series of "tweetups" to play games with Nintendo fans, presumably to help drum up excitement around the struggling console. The COO then posted a picture of him playing the upcoming Super Mario 3D World with a group of gamers. No schedule has been revealed for when and where Fils-Aime will be making appearances, but you can get details as they come up on Nintendo of America's Twitter account.
While the tour may not make a huge difference, the Wii U can use all the help it can get. Despite a...
The Ouya Android console will be coming to all Target stores this month, with a major promotion deal coming over the next several months, Polygon reports. The Ouya launched with a surprisingly large retail presence, selling at GameStop, Best Buy, and Target, but those stores hadn't yet committed to putting the consoles in all locations. Now, Target will start selling the Ouya in all its roughly 1,800 locations, letting Ouya run nationwide ad campaigns with the knowledge that people will be able to buy them just about anywhere. It's part of a larger push for expansion: the Ouya is launching in parts of Europe and the Middle East at the end of October, and once the consoles are in Target stores nationwide, it will start aggressively...
