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Batman: Arkham Knight
In this game for Xbox One, PC and PS4, Batman must battle the Scarecrow, Penguin, Two-Face and Harley Quinn. The game features Rocksteady’s newly designed Batmobile, which is drivable for the first time in these games. The game is set to be released June 2.
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture
Created by Sony, the game is compatible with the PS4 and allows users to be scientists trapped in the rapture. It has no exact release date yet.
Tech communities are booming all over Africa, says Nairobi-based Juliana Rotich, co-founder of the open-source software Ushahidi. But it remains challenging to get and stay connected in a region with frequent blackouts and spotty Internet hookups. So Rotich and friends developed BRCK, offering resilient connectivity for the developing world.
Source: Ted
This probably sounds like I’m reaching, but reach with me.
The Harry Potter franchise has enough fans to gross over twenty-four billion dollars worth of revenue. I know that millions of kids across the country were waiting for their letter to Hogwarts and that many of those kids grew into adults dedicatedly waiting in line or online for the final books of the series. Harry Potter told a whole generation that anything is possible, that hard work pays off and friendships are valuable and last lifetimes. It was a story about the underdog, about privilege, about choosing the person you become. Harry Potter taught a generation that magic was real.
Harry Potter’s popularity paved the way for the Young Adult literature craze. Thanks to Harry Potter, Twilight took off, Hunger Games took off and thanks to those books, Vampire Diaries and Divergent are thriving on the shelves and on screen. It brought tremendous visibility to Speculative Fiction and YA Fantasy is now a genre that both children and adults are voraciously consuming. JK Rowling and her characters are household names.
Now imagine if Harry, Ron or Hermione was a child of color (and nothing particularly significant about the story changes). Then brown kids and non-brown kids would have spent their childhoods understanding that you don’t need blue eyes and blonde hair to save the day. They would’ve learned that it’s okay to form friendships with people who don’t look exactly like you.
It may have inspired a Black or Latino main character in Twilight. It may have meant the Black kids in Hunger Games could’ve lived. It might even mean that Divergent’s main character Beatrice could’ve been dark skinned. If JK Rowling had dared to write the other more boldly than just Dean Thomas or Padma and Parvati Patil, her readers could’ve grown up and fought the adults twitter slamming Hunger Games for making Rue Black. This generation could’ve avoided the xenophobia running rampant behind the Michael Brown case.
Children are a blank slate. The more we expose them, the more diverse they become. We could expose them with textbooks, conferences and lectures, or we could write more books with Dominican dragon riders, gender non-conforming aliens and asexual sword wielding princesses.
Let’s be honest about which one sounds more awesome.
Currently, there are colleges teaching Harry Potter, which is amazing. Fantasy fiction holds one of the many keys to shutting down racism.
Read more from Cairo Amani at blackgirlnerds.com
In the midst of a serious diversity problem plaguing the tech industry, DigitalUndivided founder Kathryn Finney is bringing perhaps the rarest demographic for the tech space into the field: Black women.
In an industry that not only fails to deliver on racial diversity but gender diversity as well, Black women are extremely rare in the technology space. But DigitalUndivided is fighting to put an end to that.
“We want to see more urban entrepreneurs, especially Black women, in tech,” Finney told Atlanta Blackstar. “Through our FOCUS Fellows program, we provide Black and Latino women founders and co-founders with the networks and knowledge to build successful companies.”
That’s exactly what DigitalUndivided is all about—making sure urban entrepreneurs have the skills and access to resources they need to achieve great things in the tech space.
Members of the FOCUS Fellows program have gone on to obtain “leadership positions at companies as diverse as Uber, Facebook and Chicago Infrastructure Trust,” she said.
For quite some time, DigitalUndivided has been helping the tech space become more diverse while embarking on a mission to increase the amount of urban tech entrepreneurs. It’s a mission about which Finney herself has good reason to be passionate.
As an African-American woman, she has experienced first-hand what it’s like to be the rare breed in such an important field of work.
“All the companies I’ve started have been because of personal need,” Finney said before explaining her extensive history in the tech and digital media space. “…In 2006, I was looking to capitalize on my platform and join one of New York’s first tech incubators. There I learned first-hand the challenges that people of color, especially women, face if they want to break into the tech space.”
While Finney’s career has led her to a ton of firsts—first style blogger to get a book deal, one of the first style bloggers to be accredited for Fashion Week, first time appearing on a national morning show—diving into the tech space introduced her to a different kind of first.
“It was the first time in my life that I was in a community where I was expected to be ‘less than’ solely because of my race and gender,” she said. “I had white male colleagues tell me that I couldn’t relate to other Black women because I had an accountant.”
That experience is exactly what turned into the nationally recognized brand that Finney is the head of today.
“That experience stuck with me,” she said. “…So I formed DigitalUndivided in 2012 and we held our first project FOCUS100, in October 2012.”
DigitalUndivided is the type of business that has the potential to revolutionize the tech industry and change the face of an industry that has been dominated by white males for years.
Of course, the work is far from being done. Finney said people of color will have to be more assertive when it comes to breaking down the barriers to an industry that has shunned them for years.
“As people of color we often want people to ‘invite’ us into spaces and spend a lifetime waiting for that invitation,” she said as she shared her advice for other Black people looking to become tech entrepreneurs. “Success comes to those who show up, with or WITHOUT, an invite.”
She also encouraged aspiring tech entrepreneurs to embrace failure, cultivate relationships and forget all about the naysayers who don’t believe in their talent.
Movie trailers are an art and a science, and they’ve been used to sell science fiction movies for decades. The greatest movies of all time started out as trailers. You probably don’t need to be convinced to watch movies like E.T. and Star Wars, but they all had to sell themselves to audiences for the first time. Let’s travel back in time and watch the original trailers for ten classics of sci-fi.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Released in 2001, starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and William Sylvester, humanity finds a mysterious, obviously artificial, object buried beneath the Lunar surface and, with the intelligent computer H.A.L. 9000, sets off on a quest.
Alien
Released in 1979, starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt and John Hurt, the commercial vessel Nostromo receives a distress call from an unexplored planet. After searching for survivors, the crew heads home only to realize that a deadly bioform has joined them.
Margaret Keane’s life and artwork is so extraordinary that she is the focus of the Tim Burton film Big Eyes. The rich and famous had to have an original Keane painting on their walls. Burton, the director of Big Eyes, had a Keane portrait done of his girlfriend, actress Lisa Marie. Keane paintings of most celebrities are a good likeness of them, but the one of Michael Jackson with huge tearful eyes on the pop star’s celebrity paintings are not what Keane is known for. Millions of people around the world are more familiar with Keane paintings of big-eyed children. These paintings became internationally famous, and you didn’t have to be rich to own one. Priced for the average person, there were Keane postcards and prints that could be purchased at local stores. This brilliant marketing strategy was due to Keane’s husband, Walter.
Why did the world fall in love with paintings of sad-looking, big-eyed children in the 1960s? Miss Keane stated that the appeal of the paintings was that many people, including herself, wondered why the world was so evil and searched for answers. The eyes of the children reflected this confusion and yearning for peace the artist felt.
The popularity of big-eyed paintings produced imitators and influenced the artwork in cartoons and comic books. For example, the big-eyed Powerpuff Girls had a teacher named Miss Keane, which was, of course, an acknowledgment of Margaret Keane’s paintings.
Keane painted big-eyed children of every race and color, and her paintings of African-American females are eye-catching. One painting, titled Black Lavender, features a playful, big-eyed little Black girl in a lavender sweater. The Black girl in Sunday Best is the opposite. An angelic, serious-looking Black girl sits in a wooden chair. The child’s dress is a colorful mix of bright orange and red polka dots and stripes. It’s her most elegant dress, so she’s wearing it to church. One painting of an African or African-American woman titled Afro-Keane simply looks beautiful. That the painting of the Black woman is titled Afro-Keane is amusing since, in the 1960s and beyond, young Blacks sprayed a product called Afro Sheen on their hair before combing. The Afro-Keane painting captures the dignity and beauty of its Black subject, and the deep-brown skin color is realistic-looking.
Read more from Demetrius Sherman at blackgirlsnerds.com
E-Personal Assistants
Apple’s Siri will influence many new products to develop digital assistants. Adding an e-personal assistant to support an existing product and/or service will create many new careers. It also means that people can be digital assistants as businesses move on the Internet.
Advanced Robotics and Automation
Artificial Intelligence and Siri-like voice communications will create many new career opportunities from design, programming and installation to service and maintenance, to name just a few. Robots are now in the sky as drones and in the surgery room.
Pepper is a humanoid robot by Aldebaran Robotics and SoftBank Mobile designed with the ability to read emotions. It was introduced in a conference on June 5 and has been showcased to the public at Softbank Mobile stores in Japan since June 6. It will be available in February 2015 at a base price of JPY 198,000 ($1,931) at Softbank Mobile stores. Pepper’s emotion comes from the ability to analyze expressions and voice tones.
Source: Conscious AI
Thanks to BMW, each of us may be closer to living out our inner James Bond. BMW is currently developing technology that would allow consumers to park their car with nothing more than a smartwatch.
BMW’s i3 car, which will be on display at the 2015 International CES in Las Vegas in January, will integrate smartwatch technology with the vehicle and allow it to park itself without crashing—most of the time.
The “Remote Valet Parking Assistant” will operate through an app that will send the car on its way to park itself while the car’s owner goes on about their way.
The car is still just a prototype for now, but it already shows great promise for the future of hi-tech luxury vehicles.
Lasers on the car will scan the surrounding environment to help the vehicle avoid any nasty collisions but BMW warns that right now that feature isn’t full proof just yet.
The car had its fair share of minor bumps and scrapes during test runs and the company’s press release said that “entirely collision-free driving” is still only a “possibility.”
While possibilities of a collision will still be something consumers have to worry about, the press release promises that the car won’t be running into large columns or other cars.
“If the vehicle approaches a wall or a column too quickly, the system brakes automatically to prevent the threat of collision,” the press release said. “The vehicle is brought to a standstill very precisely with centimeters to spare.”
This isn’t the first time BMW has been showing off cars that can essentially drive themselves.
In both 2009 and 2011 they tested “highly automated” cars, and they are now getting closer to making that a reality – although it will certainly take quite a few years before consumers are running errands without even having to take a glance at the road.
The futuristic i3 is also sporting other impressive features such as a navigation system that will not rely on GPS signals, 360-degree collision avoidance, and an early version of an Emergency Stop Assistant that will detect if the driver has collapsed from a medical emergency and steer itself safely off to the side of the road and initiate an emergency call.
