Nikon goes after video pros with the D850 Filmmaker’s Kit

Nikon goes after video pros with the D850 Filmmaker’s Kit

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Until recently, Nikon had been wasting an opportunity to make its cameras more appealing to filmmakers. It doesn’t have a pro video camera lineup to cannibalize, unlike Canon and others, so by adding 4K and other video features to DSLRs, it could have made taken sales away from rivals. Thankfully it started to catch up with the D850, which features 4K with no cropping and 1080p,120fps slow motion. Now, Nikon has made its clearest pitch for videographers yet with the Filmmaker’s Kit.

For $5,500, you get the D850, AF-S Nikkor 20mm f/1.8, 35mm f/1.8 and 85mm f/1.8 lenses, an extra battery, the ME-1 stereo microphone, the ME-W1 wireless Bluetooth microphone, an Atomos Ninja Flame 4K external recorder/display.

That kit should make up for some of the D850’s weaknesses, namely the lack of focus peaking in 4K and poor contrast-detect autofocus for video. The Ninja Flame recorder supports focus peaking, and Nikon’s FX lenses offer excellent manual focusing with an automatic AF override when you grab the focus ring.

The kit should thus tempt videographers that might have been considering the Canon 5D Mark IV. The latter significantly crops 4K video, while the D850 doesn’t, using intelligent line skipping to minimize moire. On the other hand, the Canon 5D Mark IV has excellent video autofocus, and despite the D850’s excellent phase-detect photography AF, its contrast-detect video AF system is pretty bad.

In comparison to Sony’s A7R III, however, the D850 doesn’t hold up as well, as the A7R III has both a no-crop 4K option and decent autofocus system. Still, the D850 is currently the world’s best DSLR, and for photographers that also shoot a lot of video, the Filmmaker’s Kit is saves you around $700 over buying the parts separately.

Source: Nikon

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 20, 2018 at 09:06AM

Google just made paying for the news dead-simple

Google just made paying for the news dead-simple

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Good journalism is worth paying for, full stop. As part of a larger plan to help valuable reporting thrive in an age where content is a commodity, Google unveiled a new tool for publishers called Subscribe that makes it trivial to — what else? — subscribe to premium news services.

Now, Google isn’t exactly new to news subscriptions; the ability to buy monthly access to top-tier newspapers and magazines has been a part of the Google Play experience for years. Subscribe is special because it works directly in-browser. If you’ve hit your final free New York Times article for the month, you’ll be able to quickly set up a subscription with your Google account and pay with any card you’ve used with that account in the past. At its most effective, Google’s Subscribe takes a process that lasts a few minutes and involves scrounging around for your credit card and strips it down to a couple of taps. For better or worse (we’d argue better), Google turned premium news into an impulse buy.

Google says it’s working to get more publishers onboard with Subscribe, but the search giant’s initial list of partners is a who’s who of influential media organizations. The first wave includes Les Échos, Fairfax Media, Le Figaro, the Financial Times, Gannett, Gatehouse Media, Grupo Globo, The Mainichi, McClatchy, La Nación, The New York Times, NRC Group, Le Parisien, Reforma, la Republica, The Telegraph, and The Washington Post.

Once you’ve subscribed to any of these publications, you’ll start to see Google operate a little differently, too. Since Google looks at subscriptions as a sign of trust in an outlet, it will highlight articles from that outlet when they’re relevant to your search terms. Google was quick to say that those highlighted results won’t change "search ranking for the rest of the page," but that still means your trusted news providers get more web traffic than it otherwise might have. You get the news, your preferred publications get more money and better metrics — it all sounds great in theory, but it’ll be a while yet before Google’s system becomes ubiquitous.

Source: Google

Tech

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 20, 2018 at 11:12AM

Virus fished from pond cures man’s deadly antibiotic-resistant infection

Virus fished from pond cures man’s deadly antibiotic-resistant infection

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Enlarge /

Transmission electron micrograph of multiple bacteriophages attached to a bacterial cell wall.

In 2012, a 76-year-old Connecticut doctor had surgery to repair a life-threatening bulge in his aortic arch—the hulking bend that hooks the massive artery around the heart, routing oxygenated blood both upward and downward. Surgeons successfully used a synthetic graft to shore up the vital conduit. But soon after, a tenacious film of drug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa bacteria formed on the graft.

The doctor spent the next four years battling the infection, slipping in and out of the hospital. His surgeons and doctors at Yale deemed him too high risk for another operation and put him on mega-doses of antibiotics, prescribed indefinitely. The drugs couldn’t clear the infection, they merely knocked it back enough to keep it from killing him. But the chronic inflammation that ensued took its own toll. His team of doctors started to worry his immune system was chipping away at his aorta. With a bleak outlook, the man agreed in 2016 to an experimental treatment: a virus that researchers had fished out of a nearby pond.

The viral gamble paid off. The infection cleared and he went off antibiotics, according to a case study published recently by the Yale researchers and doctors in the journal of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.

Phages for the ages

The case is a clinical win for using viruses when antibiotics fail to kill bacteria. It’s an idea that has been around for decades. Viruses that exclusively infect and kill bacteria—called “bacteriophages” or just “phages”—have been used in former Soviet republics and some parts of Eastern Europe for nearly a century. Phages kill in the same way as many viruses; a phage infects a host cell, usurps its cellular machinery to make copies of itself, then the clone army bursts out, destroying the host cell in the process. And there are plenty of phages to harness for potential therapies. In water samples, for instance, some researchers have estimated that there are 10 phages for every bacterial/archaeal cell. To put that in perspective, the open ocean is estimated to contain 1.2 × 1029 bacterial and archaeal cells.

Tech

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

March 20, 2018 at 11:57AM

Epic Games CEO: AR glasses will “eventually replace smartphones”

Epic Games CEO: AR glasses will “eventually replace smartphones”

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The Magic Leap One is the first step to getting a billion people wearing AR glasses by 2025, according to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.

Tech

via Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com

March 20, 2018 at 12:08PM

Photograper Catches Superhero Action Figures as They Come to Life [Pics]

Photograper Catches Superhero Action Figures as They Come to Life [Pics]

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Photograper Catches Superhero Action Figures as They Come to Life [Pics]

Here is a series of cool photos by Japanese photographer Hot.Kenobi where the man brings superhero action figures to life using toys from Marvel & DC. Check ’em all out below!

[Source: Hot.Kenobi | Via GG]

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via [Geeks Are Sexy] Technology News http://ift.tt/23BIq6h

March 20, 2018 at 09:00AM

A Chinese Space Lab Will Soon Fall From The Sky. Where It Lands, No One Knows

A Chinese Space Lab Will Soon Fall From The Sky. Where It Lands, No One Knows

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A model of the Tiangong-1 space station at a Chinese airshow in 2010. The real Tiangong-1 will reenter the atmosphere around the end of March.

Kin Cheung/AP


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A Chinese space lab the size of a city bus will soon be falling back to Earth, and no one knows exactly where bits of it might crash down.

Current predictions say that the 19,000-pound lab should re-enter the earth’s atmosphere sometime in the last few days of March or the first few days of April.

The lab is called Tiangong-1, which means “heavenly palace.” China launched it into space in 2011. The outpost was briefly visited twice by Chinese taikonauts, including Wang Yaping, who beamed down a science lecture to schoolchildren.

Although Tiangong-1 has been called a Chinese “space station,” it actually is just a precursor to China’s planned space station, says Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the Naval War College.

Since 1992, she says, China has been following a methodical program “to demonstrate human space flight and culminate with a large space station.”

For that, China’s space agency needs to get experience with things like docking and long-term life support in space. Tiangong-1 and another lab in orbit called Tiangong-2, “have been technology test bed laboratories to do experimentation on all those different areas and more,” she explains.

Now, though, Tiangong-1 is headed back down. And even though space junk this size falls to Earth a few times a year, it’s usually something like a spent rocket stage — not a home-away-from-home for space travelers.

“These kinds of events are noteworthy and people in this business kind of watch to see what they can learn about how these things come apart as they come down,” says Bill Ailor of the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies.

Most of it, though not all, should burn up during the fiery re-entry.

“Somewhere between, say, 2,000 and 8,000 pounds might come down,” Ailor says.

The possible impact zone covers about two-thirds of the globe, including a lot of the continental United States. But exactly where and when is hard to predict because the vehicle will interact with the atmosphere, which is constantly changing.

Still, don’t worry about getting hit, says Ailor. “It’s just not a very likely event that a particular person would have a problem with it,” he says.

In 60 years of space exploration, only one person — an American woman named Lottie Williams — is known to have been struck by falling space junk, says Ailor, “and it was just like a piece of fabric material that kind of brushed her on the shoulder.”

He hopes that someone gets to see the bright streaks created by Tiangong-1 breaking up and burning.

“It would be a beautiful thing to watch,” says Ailor.

But since most of our planet is covered by oceans, he says the most likely scenario is that it will come down over the water and never be seen or heard from again.

News

via NPR Topics: News http://ift.tt/2m0CM10

March 20, 2018 at 11:57AM

Cambridge Analytica Is Finally Under Fire Because of Whistleblowers

Cambridge Analytica Is Finally Under Fire Because of Whistleblowers

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A year ago, The Intercept published a story about a Trump campaign affiliate that was circulating personality tests to collect Americans’ personal information. The company, called Cambridge Analytica, had already been unveiled by the Guardian in a chilling report that detailed its voter-targeting operation. There was every reason to be concerned. These revelations arrived in the midst of a year in which aggressive political campaigning, concerns over fake news, and the rise of bots that spread propaganda gave us reason to question the kinds of information we were handing over to third party applications, like Facebook, and how this freespun data deluge might come back to bite us in the ass.

But this awareness of Cambridge Analytica, and their covert manipulation of our data, didn’t coalesce into rage until late Friday night, when the words of a pink-haired, gay, vegan Canadian hit a cultural nerve. At 28, Christopher Wylie agreed to talk, he told The Guardian, out of a sense of guilt. Four years earlier, Wylie says he came up with the idea to pull big data and social media to fuel a form of information warfare: an idea that led to the creation of Cambridge Analytica. Coming forward involved breaking a nondisclosure agreement, yet Wylie did it, he explained, because he felt morally conflicted. “I assumed it was entirely legal and above board,” he told The Guardian. But he’d helped to create a weapon, and he was ready, as best he could, to participate in its dismantling.

Judging by content alone, Wiley’s reckoning doesn’t make for a huge news moment; the details he reveals about the inner workings of Cambridge Analytica have, for the most part, already been disclosed by investigative reporters. But Wiley triggered something that countless news stories weren’t able to: A latent rage that may lay the groundwork for a movement that demands accountability from Facebook.

The unchecked power of companies that harvest our data is a great problem—but it’s hard to get angry about an idea that’s so nebulous. Like climate change, the reaping of our data is a problem of psychology as much as business. We know that the accumulation of massive power in so few hands is bad, but it’s impossible to anticipate what terrible result might come of it. And if we could envision them, these consequences are imaginary: abstract and in the future. It feels so oppressively intractable it’s hard to summon the will to act.

Like climate change, the reaping of our data is a problem of
psychology as much as business.

Even if we could act, the options aren’t great. Except for the very very rich, or the extraordinarily poor, participating in the economy requires leaving a digital footprint. Most of us scroll through privacy terms on the sites we use without reading them, and accept updates without noticing or understanding the consequences. We all know we’ve been compromised already.

In a flash, Wylie’s story made the idea of misused big data concrete—and urgent. Unlike, say, Phillip Morris, which sold a product that directly caused people to get cancer, the problems of big tech are abstract enough that they require people to illustrate their impact. Wylie is just one in a small-but-growing cadre of digital whistleblowers who have come of age in the early decades of the Internet, and played a hand in helping tech companies and government institutions harness the power of the data that has emerged, and now regret their roles. Former CIA employee and government contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 because he said he was concerned about global surveillance techniques. Tristan Harris rose to become a design ethicist at Google before he left in 2016, and concerned that technology companies design addictive software applications, began a campaign to produce technology that is good for people. Former Facebook product manager (and current Wired columnist) Antonio Garcia Martinez helped develop advertising at Facebook; now he speaks out, after writing a book about his experience. Guillaume Chaslot, a former YouTube engineer, detailed his concerns about the platform’s recommendation algorithm to the Guardian earlier this year.

Wylie, like a lot of these whistleblowers, doesn’t come across great in the Guardian piece. He’s young. He’s silly. He used his new Twitter account, which he only just started Friday, to complain that now he’s been booted off Instagram. Like a lot of engineers, he didn’t really care much about ethics when he was creating programs that would redefine ethical boundaries. But that only enhances his case: it provides a window into how little oversight goes into making the tools that have influenced our political system, and by extension, shaken our democracy.

It’s difficult for any of us to understand where our information goes and how it’s used. Companies and governments are rarely transparent about collecting personal information. Even when they are, their data privacy measures can be lax. While Facebook told The Intercept last year that it had asked Cambridge Analytica to delete its data, Wylie said he’d received exactly one email from Facebook asking him to delete. “All I had to do was tick a box and sign it and send it back, and that was it,” Wylie told The Guardian. “Facebook made zero effort to get the data back.”

Wylie may follow in the footsteps of the Cassandras who’ve come before him, parlaying his moment of public attention into a book deal or public speaking platform that raises his own profile more than it helps force a reckoning. But Wylie will not be the last of these digital whistle-blowers. Indeed, his story will likely galvanize a group waiting in the wings. The challenge, however, is how to use this moment to summon the will to lean on governments and companies to better protect individuals before this moment passes completely, and we must wait for the next whistleblower to give us reason to pay attention.

The Data Wars

Tech

via Wired Top Stories http://ift.tt/2uc60ci

March 19, 2018 at 04:51PM