Proximity

Back to Living Room TV

Sep 6, 2016 | ,

So cute and so white!

Despite the fact that television is embracing multiscreen, the living room TV set is how most viewers watch today. Adobe’s TV Everywhere report for Q2 2016 showed that TV connected devices (TVCDs) have become staples within households for TVE consumption. When we looked at TVE viewing and the change in time spent by device for instance, TVCDs grew 149% year-over-year (YoY), topping browsers, Android and iOS.

Source: TV Everywhere is Coming Back to the Living Room — Adobe Primetime Blog

Embrace Ad Blockers

Sep 5, 2016 | ,

The advertising industry is wringing its hands and shaking its fist at the use and growth of ad-block technology, but I am not above temptation. I installed it. I love it and probably won’t ever fully abandon it. So instead of excoriating people for using them, it’s time we reflect on how we got here, what its inevitability means and whether this might even be a trend worth embracing.

Source: Why the advertising industry needs to embrace AdBlock | TechCrunch

Comcast Bucks Cord-Cutting Trend

Sep 5, 2016 |

Some may wonder if there is a disconnect with Comcast and the rest of its brethren in the cable industry, or if the cable giant has a trick up its sleeve. According to Ian Olgeirson, a principal analyst with SNL Kagan,  “Comcast has invested more into its video platform with its X1 than its peers. It has a better interface and is loaded with more features than its competitors.”

 

Source: Comcast Bucks the Cord-Cutting Trend; What Gives?

It’s all about the ‘surroundie’

Sep 5, 2016 | , ,

 

“Surroundie” – a term coined by CCS Insight analyst Ben Wood – refers to a selfie taken with a 360 degree camera. Wood, the chief of research at CCS, believes that the time is now for this form of content to take off.

Source: Forget the selfie, it’s all about the virtual reality ‘surroundie’ now for millennials

 

Darwinian Algorithms

Sep 4, 2016 | ,

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  • Visual analytics turn pattern discovery into a process that does not necessarily require programming, although automation often helps. These tools empower data scientists to explore massive data lakes of history and match up models that can be used in real time to analyze conditions.
  • Analytic applications put simple point-and-click interface atop sophisticated math so non-data scientists can visualize the effects of, for example, clustering customers with a variable importance algorithm.
  • Streaming analytics inject algorithms directly into streaming data as it flows into or across a company to continuously monitor live conditions like watching for patterns of fraud as transactions happen.
  • Predictive analytics networks help data scientists crowdsource the best algorithms that, when checked in real time, can help reduce billions of events to the few that matter. The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) repository of more than 7,800 R packages helps crowdsource expert statistical and graphical techniques.
  • Continuous streaming data marts can be used to monitor an algorithm’s behavior in real time, with feedback used to tweak their behavior.
  • Machine learning helps accelerate the fitting of models and continuously retrains analytics to constantly refine parameters, allowing the analysis to always improve.

Source: The emerging Darwinian approach to analytics and augmented intelligence | TechCrunch

Your Brain Stores Way More Data than the Internet

Sep 4, 2016 |


Harvard University neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman, who is attempting to map the human brain, has calculated that several billion petabytes of data storage would be needed to index the entire human brain. The Internet is currently estimated to be 5 million terabytes (TB) of which Google has indexed roughly 200 TB or just .004% of its total size. The numbers involved are astounding especially when considering the size of the human brain and the number of neurons in it.

Source: Knowledge Doubling Every 12 Months, Soon to be Every 12 Hours – Industry Tap

The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel

Sep 3, 2016 |

The media decided what millennial culture and values would be decades ago, before some of us were even born. William Strauss and Neil Howe, a popular-historian duo, coined the term “millennial” in 1987, to refer to the children who would graduate high school in the year 2000. And in their book Millennials Rising, published in 2000, they saw fit to describe the character of this newborn generation.

Source: The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel | New Republic

Why Aliens Will Never Ever Invade Earth

Aug 24, 2016 |

Proxima b is 4.3 light-years away—the distance that light, moving at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, travels in 4.3 years. That means the Proxima b detectable today is the exoplanet as it existed 4.3 years ago, when those light rays left its surface. Such is the weirdness of space-time that residents of Proxima b could say the same about Earth. If they aimed their radio telescopes our way, they’d find Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” climbing up the Billboard charts and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” fading away.

Source: An Exoplanet Too Far – The New Yorker


 

Snapchat Hell

Aug 23, 2016 | ,

Snapchat intensifies this kind of guttural pain by putting you in someone else’s present. And then, mimicking reality, converts the moment from something you can experience to a memory. Different from networks of the past and even its contemporaries, Snapchat’s organizing principle is ephemerality. As Snapchat consultant Nathan Jurgenson explored in a 2014 blog post, most social media is organized around a permanent media object—like a photo or block of words—and communication happens only in service of it. The media object is a kind of precious trophy that leads people to do things like stand on a chair above their dinner just to get the perfect shot.

Source: Why Snapchat is hell for the brokenhearted | Fusion

VR Does the Movies

Aug 22, 2016 | , ,

Viewers watch the virtual reality movie “Born into Exile,” about two pregnant women who are due to deliver in Za’atari refugee camp, Jordan, during a major women’s health and rights conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 17, 2016. While short VR films exist today, consumers who want to watch a full-length movie in virtual reality will have to wait.

Source: Virtual Reality Has Arrived, But Not for Full-length Movies
See also:  Google Recruiting Web Stars, Hulu for Virtual Reality Push

Man Talk @ Baltimore Comic-Con

Aug 22, 2016 |

Looking back now as a social scientist interested in linguistic anthropology, I can see the convention experience, and the discourse surrounding it, in a completely different light. Linguist Robin Lakoff developed what she called the Politeness Principle. In her analysis of women’s gendered conversation, she noted that females, in their interactions, had to adhere to rules that men didn’t. Most notably, this principle speaks to the fact that women must do three things: “Don’t impose, give the receiver options, and make the receiver feel good.”

Source: Con-Men: Understanding the Gendered Language of the Comic Book Convention | The Geek Anthropologist
See also: Baltimore Comic-Con,  “Language and Woman’s Place”