Playable Toadette! More than 70 levels! And lots of Super Mario 3D World stuff like the Cherry stages/puzzles. Watch the video after the break:
How did this become the best thing.
PREORDER Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, upcoming games
By Konstantinos Dimopoulos on October 10th, 2014 at 11:00 am.
Freeware gardening aside, I really am not much of a gardener in real life. I’d love to, but I don’t have a garden. Anyway. Seems like virtual space gardening could make for quite the substitute. Despite not being certain as to how such things would work on a real, very physical and appropriately deadly planet that’s not Earth, the terrific Space Gardener makes it sound like a lovely prospect.
Space Gardener casts you as gardener in a proper-though-pixelated spacesuit and is as relaxing as a game-y experience can get. It is, exactly as the tin implies, all about creating and tending an extraterrestrial garden. All about turning alien environments into nice flowery places. A peaceful, soothing and creative affair that, and please trust me on this one, is 13 times more relaxing than the best of your digital aquariums.
Working on that space garden of yours involves digging up blocks; that’s a lot of two dimensional landscape architecture and a lot of harvesting blue, rocky blocks that can be processed by a special machine, which will convert them into pots. Said pots contain plants that grow to look lovely and produce seeds, which when converted themselves, reward players with a harder shovel and the potential to unlock more goodies and make a more beautiful garden.
Yes, it’s simple and slow, but it’s lovely. Play it with the music on and a cup of whiskey masquerading as tea and you’ll simply love it.
flower arranging, free, Freeware Garden, like100bears, Space Gardener.
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LITERALLY ALL OF EUROPE CAN ENTIRELY SUCK IT:
For decades, the only evidence of ancient cave art was in Spain and southern France. It led some to believe that the creative explosion that led to the art and science we know today began in Europe.
But the discovery of paintings of a similar age in Indonesia shatters this view, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
Read more Literally All Of Europe Can Entirely Suck It at The Toast.
Online advertising—the business that powers much of the internet—has a fundamental problem. And Facebook thinks it has a solution.
Online ads were built on a beguiling promise: For the first time, advertisers would know exactly how many people saw their ads, how many bought something as a result, and thus, how well the ads were working. The Economist in 2006 summed up the optimism: “Thanks to the power of the internet, advertising is becoming less wasteful and its value more measurable.”
Today, advertisers are back to complaining that they don’t know where they money goes or whether it works. Half the ads on the internet are never seen by a human. And the rise of mobile is making it harder to track people, because mobile apps don’t accept cookies—the small files your web browser saves when you visit a website, which the website then uses to identify you on your next visit.
Measuring ads’ effectiveness is also becoming harder as display advertising grows. Unlike direct-response ads (the ones that show up when you do a web search, for instance), display ads aren’t necessarily meant to be clicked on, but rather—like ads on TV or in magazines—to make you aware of a brand or product. Unless there is a direct click, however, how can you prove that an ad for a new book made someone buy it? What if he did it on another day, or using a different computer, or even went into a bookstore? And such display ads will grow at nearly 15% a year in the US and over 10% a year in Europe, according to Forrester.
Facebook has already solved this problem for its own social network. And last week it launched a new and improved version of Atlas, an ad-serving platform it bought from Microsoft for $100 million last year, with which it proposes to solve the problem for the internet at large.
Here’s an example of the problem in action. While lounging on the couch at home, browsing Facebook on your phone, you see an ad for some shoes. A couple of weeks later at work, you suddenly remember the shoes, log on at your work computer, and buy them. In most cases, the ad server has no idea that the person who bought the shoes was the same person who saw the ad. From the shoe-seller’s point of view, the ad was useless.
But Facebook has the one thing, at scale, that no other web firm barring Google can boast: your identity. When you log into Facebook on a phone or computer, Facebook associates that device with your Facebook ID (a long number such as 444654488901592, Quartz’s Facebook ID). If you then use that device to visit a website that uses Facebook login or embeds a Facebook tracker, Facebook knows. Among sites that let you log in using a social network, Facebook is the leader:
What Atlas does is let sites read your Facebook ID even if they don’t use Facebook login, as long as Atlas is serving their ads. Facebook and Atlas also pool the data with other sources—store loyalty cards, for example—through a data broker to match up those who have made purchases in stores. Facebook calls it “people-based marketing.” (Facebook stresses that the data are aggregated and anonymized, and that third parties do not see who has bought what.)
“Using the Facebook ID will tell us whether a woman 16-34 actually saw or interacted with the ad,” says Stefan Bardega, the chief digital officer at ZenithOptimedia, a media agency. Existing methods, he says, are technically difficult and expensive.
Solving the problem of measurement is essential for Facebook to grow. Google’s direct-response ads fulfil a demand: When you perform a search for “cheap mobile phone,” Google knows you want to spend money and shows you ads accordingly. It’s easy for Google to show the ads worked: It just counts how many people clicked on them. Facebook, by contrast, must convince media planners—the people who buy ads—that its display ads create demand. The new measurement systems with Atlas help it prove that. As one Facebook marketing bigwig recently declared (paywall) to the New York Times, “We want to hold ourselves accountable for delivering results.”
Atlas is a direct challenge to Google. Not only does Google dominate in direct-response ads; through its subsidiary Doubleclick, it runs the dominant ad network on the internet, taking one in every three dollars on digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. Facebook’s share is just under 8%. But Facebook is growing fast. Its share has doubled in the past two years, while Google’s has stagnated.
Advertisers are excited about it. “They [Facebook] know your age and gender,” says Jonathan Nelson, who runs the digital arm of Omnicom, one of the largest advertising holding companies in the world. “So even just having those two bits of information is a huge step forward for people like us.” Ed Chater of Lithient, an ad tracking firm, says Atlas is “potentially a game changer.” Bardega calls it a “real win” for advertisers.
But there are caveats. The success of Atlas depends on Facebook’s reach. If 80% or more of the audience in any market use Facebook, Bardega says, the data it provides to Atlas can be considered robust. But in places like Russia, Facebook has a smaller share. “So for global businesses this may not be the right solution,” he says.
Moreover, advertisers are wary about backing an ad platform that depends on Facebook’s data to work, even though it’s run independently. By contrast, DoubleClick doesn’t rely on people continuing to use Google search in order to serve them ads and report the results.
There are other limitations too. Facebook’s new ad server “can only be used to view media tracked by Atlas, requiring the advertiser to switch to Atlas as their ad server,” points out Adit Abhyankar of VisualIQ, an online attribution firm. Moreover, he adds, the results are limited to people who use Facebook across a variety of devices. And the reports are incomparable with those from other ad servers. Indeed, the lack of standards in online advertising remains a big headache for media buyers and ad networks alike.
“In the near term, I don’t anticipate seeing businesses flee in droves from Google DoubleClick to Facebook,” says Patrick Salyer, who runs Gigya, an identity management platform. “There will be a lot of interest, however, and once we start seeing results from early adopters, more businesses will start coming over and Google may very well start leaking revenue as a result.”
Google isn’t taking it lying down. The day after Facebook’s announcement, Google published a blog post announcing something not unlike what Atlas offers: “estimated cross-device conversions for display ads,” which works by using data from people who have previously signed in to Google, something the company is keen to promote.
But Google will find it tougher going than Facebook. It’s already facing a regulatory backlash over its privacy practices; the day of its announcement about cross-device conversions, a regulator in Germany ruled (paywall) that the company “has not been willing to abide by the legally binding rules and has refused to substantially improve the user’s controls” when it comes to combining user data to build a profile. Facebook has yet to face such a backlash, though it might yet.
Nor is Facebook Google’s only challenger. Twitter, which has until now reported underwhelming results from its ad products, is also making a big push into the identity game. According to The Information (paywall), a tech trade publication, Twitter plans to make it easier for app developers to allow users to log in with Twitter, giving it access to their movements outside the platform. Called Twitter Fabric, the product “reflects Twitter’s desire to be at the center of online ‘identity’,” writes Amir Efrati.
But the rise of centralized, powerful ad networks owned by companies that also control vast amounts of data worries some (paywall). “Advertisers are nervous about giving all their data to their main media providers,” says Lithient’s Chater. Startups are working on the problem too. These aren’t perfect, he says, but it suggests that the field is wide open and “has a lot more innovation to come.”
In other words, internet users are about the become embroiled in a giant battle to see who can best track their every move.
Jon Stewart Does The Math For AIG, Comes Up With 'Go F**k Yourself' Huffington Post (satire) Jon Stewart wants to know when was the last time you got angry about the 2008 government bailout because on Thursday night's "Daily Show," he offered up a new outrage that's bound to get you mad all over again. Hank Greenberg, who at the time of the ... and more » |
Japan Court Orders Google to Delete Search Results NDTV A Japanese court has ordered Google to delete search results linking the claimant to a crime he did not commit, the latest in a series of rulings around the world on what search engines should tell users. The Tokyo District Court this week placed a provisional ... and more » |
During the early 1970s, amid increasing violence in Northern Ireland, British military intelligence agents deliberately sought to create panic about Satanic cults, black masses and witch covens as a way to discredit paramilitary groups.
On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued an apology on his personal Twitter account after making comments about the gender pay gap at a women-in-technology conference, and he followed that up with a lengthy internal Microsoft memo.
Re/code published the memo, which saw Nadella acknowledge his mistakes during a conversation with Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe (herself a Microsoft board member). "Toward the end of the interview, Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises," Nadella wrote. "I answered that question completely wrong."
His memo continued by acknowledging industry-wide initiatives meant to "close the pay gap," then added, "when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask."
Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Make a Day of the Dead light up skull brooch for Halloween. via instructables
Picture of ETextile felt skull brooch
In this tutorial I will show how to sew your own skull brooch that lights up by touching between its eyes. Firstly we will sew the felt skull, and afterwards, a felt battery holder with metal snap buttons on the backside.Materials
– Skull pattern
– Felt
– Lining and wadding
– metal snap buttons
– 2 leds (3mm)
– 100 Ohm resistor
– 3V battery
– Conductive thread
– Conductive fabric
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Each weekday this month we’ll be bringing you ideas and projects for an Electronic Halloween! Expect wearables, hacks & mods, costumes and more here on the Adafruit blog! Working on a project for Halloween this year? Share it with us on Google+, in the comments below, the Adafruit forums, Facebook, or Twitter– we’d love to see what you’re up to and share it with the world (tag your posts #ElectronicHalloween). Tune in to our live shows, Wearable Electronics with Becky Stern, 3D hangouts with Matt, Pedro, and Noe, and Ask an Engineer, featuring store discount codes, ideas for projects, costumes, and decorations, and more!
Kailash Satyarthi and 17-year-old Malala Yousafzay have won this year's Nobel Peace Prize "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education." The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the decision at a press conference today in Stockholm, Sweden. Satyarthi, an Indian, and Yousafzay, from Pakistan, will share an award of 8 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million). With today's award, Yousafzay — widely referred to simply as Malala — becomes the youngest to ever win the Peace Prize.
"The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism," the organization said in a statement Friday morning.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee received 278 nominations for this year's Peace Prize, a record number. Malala was widely touted as a favorite to win last year, before the Committee awarded the honor to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
Developing...
burn these statistics into your mind. never forget who it is experiencing the brunt of the prison system’s violence
The pox (foxing).
From p. 102-3 of Lessons from the History of Medical Delusions by Worthington Hooker (1850). Original from Princeton University. Digitized January 26, 2009.
Today kicks off New York Comic Con which seems grow in size and importance every year. Too bad it is still hosted at the armpit known as the Javits Center.
Over the last few years given the show’s importance I have tracked the diversity of its comics guests. It’s been a pretty grim story.
This year? Read on.
“327 comic guests at NYCC and 32 of them identify as female”
“207 featured guests of which 13 identify as female”
"for every 7 male guests they add they add 1 female”
firehose'“It will come back to our archives at the Bostonian Society,” Roscio said of the box. “I’ll slowly start the process of removing things and spreading them out, getting an inventory of what’s there, stabilizing the materials by putting them in acid-free folders.” '
VOXXI |
1901 Boston time capsule opened VOXXI Historians and restorers opened the copper box that has been hidden for more than a century inside the statue which has been sitting atop Boston's Old State House. Discovered inside the box were a hardcover book along with papers from when the time ... and more » |
firehosestupid fucking new yorkers
