Dan Jones

Avengers Family Tree

 

We previously posted graphic designer/illustrator Joe Stone's X-Men Family Tree & Star Wars Family Tree, well here is his Avengers Family Tree! It shows a lot more than just family though, it includes offspring, romantic relationships, significant battles, apprentice/master relationships, friendships and more...

[Click on the images for a larger view...]


By: Joe Stone - source

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March 24 2015

Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous.

With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.

Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.

To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser, typically taking about eight seconds to load. Facebook thinks that this is too much time, especially on a mobile device, and that when it comes to catching the roving eyeballs of readers, milliseconds matter.

In addition to hosting content directly on Facebook, the company is talking with publishers about other technical ways to hasten delivery of their articles.

Even marginal increases in the speed of a site, said Edward Kim, chief executive of the analytics and distribution company SimpleReach, generally mean big increases in user satisfaction and traffic. So it is likely, he said, that Facebook’s plan focuses on those small improvements, rather than on getting money from deals with media companies.

“But there are a lot of implications for publishers,” he added. “It really comes down to how Facebook structures this, and how they can ensure this is a win on both sides.”

The issue is also pressing, he said, because some media companies have seen a drop in traffic from Facebook that could be attributed to the company’s prioritizing of video — a much more lucrative medium for ad sales.

Video has become increasingly popular with Facebook users and advertisers, and at its developer conference that begins on Wednesday, the company is expected to introduce expanded tools to place video ads inside non-Facebook applications.

Like Facebook, media companies also want improved user experiences. Still, they are treading carefully. While BuzzFeed has an overt policy of spreading its content outside of its own site, The Times uses a subscription model that provides a growing portion of the company’s revenue. It would have to weigh the benefits of reaching Facebook’s users — and the ad revenue that comes with them — against the prospect of giving away its content and losing the clicks on its own site that would instead stay within Facebook.

Some news organizations have reacted coolly to the proposal. Several Guardian employees, for example, have informally suggested to colleagues at other publications that publishers should band together to negotiate deals that work for the whole industry, and should retain control of their own advertising, whether content is hosted on Facebook or not, a person with knowledge of the discussions said.

Representatives for The Times and BuzzFeed declined to comment on Monday. The Guardian and National Geographic did not immediately respond to questions about talks with Facebook.

The Huffington Post and the business and economics website Quartz were also approached. Both also declined to discuss their involvement.

Facebook declined to comment on its specific discussions with publishers. But the company noted that it had provided features to help publishers get better traction on Facebook, including tools unveiled in December that let them target their articles to specific groups of Facebook users, such as young women living in New York who like to travel.

The company recognizes that the new plan, championed by Chris Cox, the top lieutenant to Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, on product matters, would remove the usual ads that publishers place around their content. Although the revenue-sharing ideas are still in flux, one would allow publishers to show a single ad in a custom format within each Facebook article, according to one person with knowledge of the discussions.

Facebook has not historically done any kind of revenue-sharing with content publishers. Essentially, its position has been “Put your content on Facebook and we’ll send you traffic.” But lately Facebook has been experimenting with revenue-sharing options. In December, it began showing N.F.L. clips sponsored by Verizon. Verizon paid for the clips to be sent to people’s news feeds and ran an ad at the end of them. The N.F.L. and Facebook split the revenue.

The new proposal by Facebook carries another risk for publishers: the loss of valuable consumer data. When readers click on an article, an array of tracking tools allow the host site to collect valuable information on who they are, how often they visit and what else they have done on the web.

That data might instead go to Facebook, which like many companies uses that information itself to target and track consumers more effectively for advertisers (and which has been subject to criticisms over its privacy policies). It has not been disclosed how much of that data Facebook would be willing to share.

And if Facebook pushes beyond the experimental stage and makes content hosted on the site commonplace, those who do not participate in the program could lose substantial traffic — a factor that has played into the thinking of some publishers. Their articles might load more slowly than their competitors’, and over time readers might avoid those sites.

And just as Facebook has changed its news feed to automatically play videos hosted directly on the site, giving them an advantage compared with videos hosted on YouTube, it could change the feed to give priority to articles hosted directly on its site.

Over the long term, said Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, all publishers are likely to have to allow their content to range more freely outside of their own sites.

“But in the short term,” he said, “it’s a scary proposition because publishers want to control their brand, and their audience and their advertising dollars.”

Facebook, on the other hand, he said, can only benefit from it. “It enhances user satisfaction, keeps users on its site and has better content which allows it to sell advertising at better rates,” Mr. Mutter said.

By Allen Weiner on March 22nd, 2015

For decades I’ve told friends and some family that I met my wife through a friend. Not just any friend, mind you, but a “good friend.” No one questioned me, chalking up my good fortune to clean living and a decent amount of annual charitable giving.

But after 32 years, I must finally admit that I met my wife online—or, to be a little more precise, via the technology that would power online dating for decades.

I met my wife of more than 31 years via a computer-based Jewish dating service in Seattle.

Back then, circa 1982, before everyone had a PC, smartphone, tablet, or watch that told them where they were and connected them to the untethered world, online dating was in its embryonic stage. We’re talking punch cards and computers the size of bank vaults. If you went to college in the ’70s, you can recall waiting in line to hand in your stack of chad-laced three-by-eight cards to some wonderfully caring soul late at night in the school’s computer center.

I met my wife of more than 31 years via a computer-based Jewish dating service in Seattle.

Baby boomers were in the formative stages of their careers during this era. And when it came to meeting your soulmate, many of us had little time or inclination to frequent the disco pick-up scene. (“Love to Love You Baby” was the anthem of the times.) There are only so many people you can meet through your friends and family. Personal ads were becoming popular, limited to the back pages of alternative weekly newspapers. Even back then, entrepreneurs recognized the intersection between technology and a legion of love-starved introverts.

The process began in the spring of 1982. I saw an ad in the local Jewish community newspaper for a new computer dating service for Jews that was fairly direct in promising to jumpstart your dating life. The cost was around $99, and I was guaranteed three printouts with several (equally eager) women whose profiles matched mine.

A questionnaire came in the mail (yes, delivered by a real mailman) that had a series of questions you would answer by filling in the appropriate radio button alongside the correct response. It was, for all intents and purposes, the SATs for love. Instead of asking the difference between an artist and an artisan, I was queried about my age, degree of observance (that means Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox), whether I was divorced, had children, and some things that—while foggy in my memory—were meant to determine what I was looking for in a mate.

From April to September 1982, I received my three printed tallies (sans pictures), each with the names and phone numbers of somewhere between four and six women. These days, that info alone could have launched a Google search to get the intangible details, but back then… no such luck. There was no prescribed protocol about who was supposed to call whom, but in a bygone age of nearly lost chivalry, I did the nervous, initial contact. I went in to the computer-blind-dating world with no game plan. I was armed only with the idea of meeting for coffee to break the ice and see if there was any chemistry.

It was, for all intents and purposes, the SATs for love.

Here is what I remember 32 years later and am willing to share.

On the first draw, I met a nice woman, and a lengthy phone call led to a movie date. We saw a movie shot in Seattle and had a cup of coffee afterwards. I drove her home, and there was a reasonable enough attraction to warrant a second shot. A week later, as I drove her home after another movie date, this seemingly normal woman informed me she heard voices that told her to drive off the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. And so, that budding romance came to an end.

Next I met a chef who informed me over a decadent dessert at Dilettante Chocolates that she was engaged. I tried not to take it personally, but my un-date suggested I call her sister who was an up-and-coming local TV personality. In this same batch, there was a woman who talked about her wretched first marriage during our trial meetup and a physician who timed her pager to go off midway through a Sunday brunch. I imagine that these days, escape plans are easier to pull off via text and faux emergency cellphone calls.

Round one: Zero for four. Feeling hopeless but willing to trudge along. Round two: I was reluctant but remained cautiously optimistic. From the final printout, one woman popped out on the list, notably because she had a first name not common for Jewish women (the same name as a famous Christian saint, in fact). After asking my sister for advice, I called the number to see where she worked, and I learned she was gainfully employed. That’s a good start. Putting past misfires aside, I built up my nerve, and the following weekend, I called her.

We had a light and easy phone conversation for two hours and decided to meet for coffee two days later. With her own list of dating horror stories, the plan was for a one-hour date where we could quickly diagnose any glaring red flags. Struck, for some reason, with a case of the butterflies, I called her and asked if we could push our date up by a day. She agreed, and the following day, we met at a nice café on the top of Queen Anne Hill.

At last count, the online dating world drives $2 billion a year in the U.S. with no end in sight.

And there she was: tall, dark curly hair, with a sweet smile and a welcoming warmth. I have absolutely no idea what we talked about, but I do remember that moment—the one you have once in your life, if you are lucky. As I walked my date to her rather odd white (non-vintage) Pontiac Firebird, we stopped, and I looked her in the eyes, and we hugged. Pick your favorite rom-com and insert that memorable scene there.

While we could have boarded a plane for Vegas that evening and tied the knot, we bowed to family pressure and were hitched 11 months later in a rather nontraditional religious ceremony. (If you’d like to come over and watch it, we have a VHS tape we drag out to liven up boring dinner parties.)

Three decades passed. The technological threads that churned out those cards got tied together into the Internet revolution—a sandbox for clever, business-savvy entrepreneurs who understood the power of the Web to bring people together. Mailmen were replaced by phone lines and then broadband. Since the mid-’90s, the online dating industry has evolved from predictable, general-purpose sites such as Match.com to niche cimmunities such as Latino People Meet or mass-appeal hookup apps like Tinder. At last count, the online dating world drives $2 billion a year in the U.S. with no end in sight.

The more I look at sites like Match.com and those specifically targeting Jewish people, I wonder if updated algorithms and a larger pool of suspects would have produced the same results. Checking a possible date’s Facebook profile, LinkedIn litany, and Instagram trail has little appeal to someone who grew up in a time when the move from rotary phone to one with push buttons made you the envy of the neighborhood. (It also helped win a bunch of radio contests.) Still, dating sites that target specific groups, from the LGBT community to those with strong religious beliefs, are going strong.

I wonder if updated algorithms and a larger pool of suspects would have produced the same results.

So, I posed the question to JDate, which bills itself as the premier destination for Jewish singles online: Have things changed from the time a computer paired me with my wife? And furthermore, have things changed since online dating became popular more than 20 years ago?

“The first, and most pertinent, [change] is the rise of mobile technology,” Laura Seldon, managing editor of Spark Networks, the parent company of JDate, told me. “Once upon a time, dating meant finding the right person to share a lifetime of love and laughter. Today, it means finding someone who will swipe ‘Yes.’”

She added: “Singles—especially those in their 20s and 30s—don’t seem to want to create lengthy profiles with endless essay questions anymore. They want to peruse profiles quickly, tap on a profile pic that grabs their attention, and then chat with that person in real time.”

Whether via a primitive computer assessment more than 30 years ago or a carefully vetted screening based on zero degrees of separation, there’s a large part of the population that has trouble finding their perfect match. For folks lacking success in the dating world, there may be a formula for relationship success. It looks something like this: one part technology, one part chemistry, one part timing, and five parts fate.

For those venturing into the online dating world, I wish you the same good fortune I was lucky enough to have—32 years ago.

Illustration via J. Longo

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Geeky Superhero & Villain Candy Bowl Holders

 

WANTS! Check out all these funny geeky Superhero & Villain Candy Bowl Holders! There's a ton of them from Marvel & DC comics, Star Wars and horror movies as well, here are some of our favs...





































Geeky Superhero & Villain Candy Bowl Holders available here!


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March 20 2015

Google’s plans for a wearable that would zap harmful particles in the body are shaping up.

In a recently issued patent application, Google provided details on a novel medical treatment that would involve sending tiny magnetic particles into patients’ bloodstreams. The magnetic particles, activated by a smart wristband, would attack cancer cells and pathogens linked to other diseases. The patent was filed in September 2013 by Andrew Conrad, head of Google’s life sciences division.

The patent appears similar to a treatment Google described in October, but the company did not immediately return BuzzFeed News’ requests for confirmation.

A patient would first inject, ingest, inhale, or absorb tiny magnetic particles into their bloodstream. These nanoparticles, as they’re also known, would be designed to selectively bind with or recognize the targeted molecules. For example, they might be designed to stick to proteins that appear to foster the development of Parkinson’s disease, according to documents.

The patient would wear a wristband a few millimeters from an artery or vein, although it could also be worn on the ankle, waist, chest, or elsewhere on the body, according to the patent. The device would then transmit energy, such as a radio frequency pulse, that would cause the magnetic particles to vibrate and heat up, and destroy or handicap the targeted pathogen.

While it sounds wild, Google isn’t one to shy away from ideas straight out of science fiction. Researchers in its experimental lab, Google[x], are also cooking up driverless cars, a smart contact lens for diabetics, and a network of high-altitude balloons that provide internet access. And like all of those projects, the nanoparticle treatment would have to clear a litany of technical and regulatory hurdles before it became reality. A product that doctors could use is at least five years away, industry experts have said.

The wearable, as described in the patent, wouldn’t just zap pathogens. It could also include sensors for measuring blood pressure, pulse rate, and skin temperature. It’d also display the time and date — as if this were just another ordinary watch.

 ★ 

While Microsoft has dropped hints that the Internet Explorer brand is going away, the software maker has now confirmed that it will use a new name for its upcoming browser successor, codenamed Project Spartan. Speaking at Microsoft Convergence yesterday, Microsoft's marketing chief Chris Capossela revealed that the company is currently working on a new name and brand. "We’re now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10," said Capossela. "We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing."

Internet Explorer will still exist in some versions of Windows 10 mainly for enterprise compatibility, but the new Project Spartan will be named separately and will be the primary way for Windows 10 users to access the web. Microsoft has tried, unsuccessfully, to shake off the negative image of Internet Explorer over the past several years with a series of amusing campaigns mocking Internet Explorer 6. The ads didn't improve the situation, and Microsoft's former Internet Explorer chief left the company in December, signalling a new era for the browser.

The Internet Explorer will likely have Microsoft in the name

Capossela also detailed the power of using the Microsoft brand over just Windows or Internet Explorer, and showed off some research data on a new name for the company’s browser vs. Internet Explorer. Putting Microsoft in front of the new secret name increased the appeal to some Chrome users in the UK. "Just by putting the Microsoft name in front of it, the delta for Chrome users on appeal is incredibly high," says Capossela.

Microsoft is clearly testing names with market research, but it’s unclear when the company plans to unveil the final name for its Internet Explorer successor. Judging by Microsoft’s own research, it’s obvious the company will move as far away from Internet Explorer as possible, and it’s likely Project Spartan will have the Microsoft name attached to it.

Elsewhere in Capossela’s talk, the Microsoft executive also discussed the ways the company will make money in future, and clever ways the company is making use of social media. Microsoft has started to use artists to respond to Twitter users with personalised images, and at least one from the Xbox team was successful at creating attention with an impressive 35,000 retweets. It’s all part of improving Microsoft’s brand perception, and a general admission from the company that it’s ready to be loved again.

The Evolution of the Batman Films Fan Art

 

Artist Jeff Victor drew this awesome series of the entire Batman theatrical movie saga evolution! We've posted some of his "Evolution" fan art in the past, but this is his biggest ever! It features not only Batman, but the main baddies from each film as well! It is even available as a limited edition print with all the characters on it, measuring 18x24...



Artist: Jeff Victor - Print Store

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March 15 2015

source: NickMom

source: Dakota McFadzean