firehose

The Coca-Cola Company is beginning to set up one-stop shops for vital resources inside of developing communities. The shops, called Ekocenters, will supply resources like clean water, power, internet, vaccines, cooked meals, and — of course — Coke products, to areas that don't have access to them. By the end of 2015, Coca-Cola plans to have set up between 1,500 and 2,000 Ekocenters in 20 total countries, which span across Africa, Asia, North America, and Latin America.

The business model hasn't been determined

The Ekocenters' business model hasn't been finalized, reports The New York Times, and it isn't clear which — if any — of their services will be offered for free. But the centers' basic goal appears to be promoting access to water, power, and health supplies, and presumably those major services would be free or priced in an obtainable manner. At least one center has been operational as a pilot in South Africa, and Coca-Cola has been talking about the program since at least last year, when it announced its plans to bring clean water to developing communities.

Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent says that each of the Ekocenters will be run by a woman, and that they'll hopefully become the center of communities without access to power and water. The centers' are constructed from repurposed shipping containers, and each one will have a water purification system and solar panels built in. Right now, the Times reports that the Ekocenters cost over $100,000 each, but Coca-Cola is hoping that they'll come down to below $2,000 as they begin building them in volume.

Fox News has just unveiled a breathtakingly ridiculous newsroom, complete with novelty-sized Windows-based touchscreens, a Twitter wall, and a wannabe Minority Report style display, which it hopes will connect it with generations of viewers who use smartphones and apps.

In a video that could be mistaken for a College Humor or Saturday Night Live parody, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith walks viewers through the network's new setup, which includes workstations with 55-inch touchscreen monitors. In the video, journalists swipe through pages and apps, presumably collecting information for live reporting. "We call these BATs," Smith notes. "Big area touchscreens."

"For instance, I can take this lady who's been evacuating from a hurricane zone and move it over here."

Smith later demonstrates a gigantic 38-foot long video wall with a device "never been used in broadcast television before." It's a remote control that allows Smith to shuffle a giant image carousel. "For instance, I can take this lady who's been evacuating from a hurricane zone and move it over here," Smith says.

Fox says the new "news deck" is designed to appeal to viewers who are "non linear" -- those who sift through news all day on their phones and computers. "Just like you, we get our news from multiple platforms," Smith says. "And this is the place where viewers can watch us sort it all out as it happens." In other words, Fox's new newsroom will serve as a fact-checking machine for Twitter's firehose.

Of course, despite its insistence that its new news room represents a cutting-edge way of gathering and reporting news, Fox isn't the first to use Twitter and other social channels to guide and fill its unremitting news cycle. Smith says his team has spent "weeks" training to use its new software — but we'll have to wait and see if Fox has managed to algorithmically translate its "fair and balanced" reporting.

Watch the latest video at <a href="http://redirect.viglink.com?key=11fe087258b6fc0532a5ccfc924805c0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.foxnews.com" mce_href="http://redirect.viglink.com?key=11fe087258b6fc0532a5ccfc924805c0&u=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.foxnews.com">video.foxnews.com</a>

War has laws; why can't war games reflect them?

It's a simple question that the International Committee of the Red Cross has been weighing for nearly two years.

Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross is mandated to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflict. During the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Geneva in 2011, a committee discussed whether the Geneva and Hague conventions should be applied to the fictional recreation of war in video games. In other words, they wanted video war games to better reflect the realities of modern combat.

Last summer, the International Review of the Red Cross published an article that more deeply examined the issue. The takeaway was that video games are an important method for disseminating information and that they can be used to raise awareness of war crimes, but often don't reflect the realities of war.

"Beyond the Call of Duty: why shouldn't video game players face the same dilemmas as real soldiers" was published alongside articles about about drone strikes, cyber war and autonomous weapons.

In the article, written by Ben Clarke, Christian Rouffaer and Francois Senechaud, the trio ask if video games can be a positive medium of influence to reinforce understand and respect for the laws of war.

"Why can't players be rewarded for compliance with the rules governing the use of force as well as the treatment of persons in the hands of the enemy and sanctioned for violating the same?"

The authors found that four of the five causes for violations of International Humanitarian Law during real war are reflected in many video games about war. That includes creating a perception that battlefields are always devoid of civilians, and thus an open shooting range, that virtual commanders behave in inhumane ways and that war is lawless and fought against demonized, dehumanized enemies.

That video games often represent the worst in war isn't really a contentious idea; the question is whether that is meaningful and what to do about it.

In the report, the conclusion that the authors come to is that video games often don't allow players options when asked to make decisions about humanitarian law violations or that video games' lack of nuance, be it the dearth of civilians in combat or inability to take prisoners, can lead to a misunderstanding of the realities of war.

Execution of a captive in Modern Warfare 2. Photo by ICRC

But so what? Aren't video games entertainment?

The report argues that while video games may not teach bad behavior, they can most certainly trivialize war crimes. They can also lead to a general misperception of what is and isn't lawfully allowed in war.

The big question, ultimately, is what to do about it.

The report is clear that the Red Cross isn't asking for government intervention. Instead  they authors are calling for the game industry to be willing to spend the time to create more realistic video games.

And they've already seen some success. Members have met with the industry a few times over the past year, including talking to the developers behind war game Arma 3.

The authors of the report say they hope to see some of the fruits of that labor by this December.

International Committee of the Red Cross spokesman Bernard Barrett told Polygon that while the issue has been examined, there is no dedicated group working on it.

"There are the authors of the aforementioned article and a few others who have an interest in this issue," he said. "They are part of a unit here in Geneva which works on implementation of the law of armed conflict, be it through meetings and working with military training officials, universities or other groups of interest. There is no official ICRC report on the topic, aside from the study in the Review."

And the ICRC has no plans to try and study the impact video games might have on behavior, he said.

"We do know that video games are used as recreation by many off-duty military and also by young men and women who could be recruited," Barrett added. "But they are also widely used by the general public. We do not want to influence how people perceive of war so much as to influence the understanding that there are laws governing conflicts. We certainly believe that the widespread use of video games can affect public perceptions. We do not want to censor video games nor do we believe that video games should be sanitized to eliminate any act that contravenes the law of arm conflict. We suggest that game developers themselves incorporate scenarios that reward compliance with the law and punish virtual breaches.

"The ICRC has the mandate (in the Geneva Conventions ratified by all states in the world) to encourage the awareness, implementation and the respect of these Conventions. This is an essential part of its mandate."

Good Game is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Brian Crecente is a founding News Editor of Polygon.

Critical comments about Twitter’s lack of women in prominent positions prompted a bizarre public Twitter exchange this weekend, in which CEO Dick Costolo both pointed to larger societal issues driving the lack of diversity in tech, and knocked his most outspoken critic for "hyperbole."

The exchange, reported by BuzzFeed, stems from a Friday New York Times report cataloguing the makeup of the nearly-public company’s board. The report quotes Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, who calls Twitter's case emblematic of "the same male chauvinistic thinking," categorizing its record as "the elite arrogance of the Silicon Valley mafia, the Twitter mafia." And when faced with the entirely valid criticism about a lack of diversity at Twitter (albeit liberally sprinkled with mafias), rather than write a response, CEO Costolo chose to take a swing at Wadhwa instead.

The response lead to a back-and-forth with writer and consultant Anil Dash before Wadhwa himself joined in the fray. Ultimately, not much was resolved — Costolo acknowledged that the lack of female board members was a problem while appearing to dispute the meaningfulness of "checking a box" by taking on a female board member, while Wadhwa insisted that Twitter needed to take a leading role in the industry. Regardless of the points raised on both sides of the fence, it’s strange to see Costolo resort to name-calling in his first response to the New York Times report, particularly given Twitter’s leadership in areas like freedom of speech.

New York and Airbnb continue to clash over when residents should be able to rent out their apartments. The state's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, has now subpoenaed data about all Airbnb hosts within New York, the rental service says. According to New York Daily News, Airbnb must turn over the data by today. But Airbnb says that it's hoping not to have to do that. "This demand is unreasonably broad and we will fight it with everything we've got," David Hantman, Airbnb's head of global public policy, writes in a blog post yesterday.

Airbnb says New York is just targeting bad hosts

For Airbnb, releasing user records could reveal just how many hosts are violating New York law, which currently prohibits renting out complete apartments. Since around half of New York rentals may fall under that category, Airbnb's data could give the state the fodder it needs to continue a crackdown. After managing to overturn a fine one of its New York hosts received earlier this year, Airbnb has already begun moving to prevent future issues. It says that it's receptive to adding rental taxes that traditional hotels see, so long as its service can operate legally.

Though New York ostensibly wants to continue its broader fight against Airbnb, which has been butting up against a law that targets illegal hotels, Airbnb claims that the state is merely hoping to weed out the few bad hosts who are actively abusing the system. "We believe the Attorney General is only seeking to target an incredibly small number of bad actors who abuse the Airbnb platform ... like illegal hotel operators and slumlords," Hantman writes. Accurate or not, Hantman says that Airbnb will continue its discussions with Schneiderman's office, writing that, "We are confident we can reach a solution that protects your personal information."