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Netflix has famously resisted traditional film distribution, where films hit the silver screen first. It's something that's bothered the film establishment, most notably when Cannes Film Festival told the streaming giant in 2017 it would need to show in French cinemas if it wanted to be considered for future festivals.  Netflix fired back by pulling out of Cannes this year. But now, it's releasing three of its films in select cinemas for a short run before people can watch them on the service. Why? Awards. SEE ALSO: Help, the 'Riverdale' cameo on Netflix's 'The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' makes zero sense Read more... More about Entertainment , Film , Movies , Netflix , and Streaming Services from Mashable https://ift.tt/2RugWOu

It's already nerve-wracking answering questions at the border, and some ports in the European Union are taking it to another, kinda worrying level. They're installing an artificial intelligence-powered system called iBorderCtrl , which aims to speed up the processing of travellers, but also to determine if they're lying.  SEE ALSO: Amazon pitched facial recognition tech to ICE despite employee objections According to New Scientist , a six-month trial will take place at four border crossing points in Hungary, Greece and Latvia.  During pre-screening, users will upload their passport, visa, and proof of funds, then answer questions asked by a computer-generated border guard to a webcam.  Read more... More about Tech , Artificial Intelligence , Immigration , European Union , and Border from Mashable https://ift.tt/2OjEUKf

Scientists Find Link Between Parkinson's Disease and the Appendix Published on November 01, 2018 at 09:00AM An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Scientists have found further evidence that the gut, or more specifically the appendix, might play a role in the development of Parkinson's disease. The international team of scientists reviewed two datasets, including a large registry from Sweden, and found that removal of the appendix was associated with a decreased risk of developing Parkinson's disease. They also found that the human appendix contains clumps of a protein called alpha-synuclein in a form associated with the disease. There's more work to be done, and the authors are not advocating that people preemptively remove their appendixes, but they hope that the research could provide a pathway towards treatment. The study found that of the 1,144,745 Swedes who did not have appendectomies, 1,608 had Parkinson's, but of the 551,003 who had, only 644 h...

Can a Robot Learn a Language the Way a Child Does? Published on November 01, 2018 at 07:35AM MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. "The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects," ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. "It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots." From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associ...

For us mere follower-less mortals, making money as a social media influencer seems dead easy. Like for Grown-ish actor Luka Sabbat, who was paid by Snapchat's public relations agency PR Consulting (PRC) to promote Spectacles with posts on Instagram.  But now he's being sued for allegedly not doing his job. SEE ALSO: Snap is still losing users, blames its Android app According to a complaint filed in the New York Supreme Court on Tuesday, Sabbat was paid $45,000 upfront in an influencer marketing deal worth $60,000 for four unique posts. Sabbat, who has 1.4 million Instagram followers, was to deliver one Instagram feed post, and three Instagram stories of him at New York, Milan or Paris fashion weeks. One of these posts would include a provided swipe up link to Snap's Spectacles , smart sunglasses that can record short videos for Snapchat. Read more... More about Tech , Influencers , Influencer Marketing , Spectacles , and Snap from Mashable https://ift.tt/2QbG...

Justin Trudeau's family is at it again with another year of delightful Halloween costumes. Canada's prime minister dressed up as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's beloved character Sherlock Holmes for the spooky holiday, donning the fictional detective's signature deerstalker hat, pipe, and clue-hunting magnifying glass. SEE ALSO: This little boy's Star Destroyer Halloween costume is out of this world But Trudeau wasn't alone in his costumed festivities, with his whole family joining in: We’re dressed and ready to go... or should I say, the game is afoot! #HappyHalloween pic.twitter.com/uOCp0oJd95 — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) November 1, 2018 Read more... More about Halloween , Justin Trudeau , Halloween Costumes , Halloween 2018 , and Halloween 2018 from Mashable https://ift.tt/2P6odHy

Spinal Implant Helps Three Paralyzed Men Walk Again Published on November 01, 2018 at 06:55AM Doctors in Switzerland have used an electrical device to help three paralyzed men walk again. The device was inserted around the men's spines to boost the signals from their brains to their legs. The study has been published in the journal Nature. The BBC reports: The first patient to be treated was 30-year-old Swiss man David M'zee, who suffered a severe spinal injury seven years ago in a sporting accident. David's doctor said he would never walk again. However, thanks to an electrical implant developed by a team at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), he can walk more than half a mile with the implant turned on. Two other men have also managed to walk again, to varying degrees. Gertan Oskan, a 35-year-old engineer from the Netherlands, was knocked over by a car seven years ago. His doctors told him on his birthday that he would be paralyzed for life. He is now begin...

The Average Cable Bill Has Increased More Than 50 Percent Since 2010 Published on November 01, 2018 at 06:15AM According to new research, the average cost households pay for cable is now up to $107 a month -- that's a 50% increase since 2010 when cable bills were $71.24 a month. When compared to last year, it's only a 1% increase, "thanks in large part to increasing fees for things like regional sports licensing and taxes," reports Streaming Observer. From the report: Leichtman Research Group's data was gathered through a telephone survey of 1,152 households from throughout the United States. The research found that 78% of American households still subscribe to a paid TV subscription. That percentage is down from 86% in 2013, 87% in 2008, and 81% in 2004, but 78% is still a pretty high figure given how high cable costs continue to rise each year and how affordable streaming video services are in comparison. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Netflix dropped a Halloween surprise by releasing a very brief first look at Justice League star Henry Cavill in the TV adaptation of The Witcher video game. But the real journey was not the 10 seconds of footage with no dialogue — it was the memes we made along the way. SEE ALSO: 'The Witcher' turns 10 and it all gets very emotional Cavill has the thankless job of being the live-action embodiment of a video game character. Which, in the case of Geralt, means wearing the most 1995 Dungeons and Dragons wig you've ever seen on a human man. The jokes came in hot, silvery, and with the accuracy of arrow to the face. Namely, in how closely he resembles Christopher Lambert from another video game adaptation, 1995's Mortal Kombat . Read more... More about Watercooler , Entertainment , Netflix , Henry Cavill , and Web Culture from Mashable https://ift.tt/2qla1vh

Group costumes are the very soul of Halloween. Group costumes are always awkward, though, because someone gets to be the cool main character while everyone else in the group has to dress up as the side characters who nobody remembers. But one gang of friends found a way around the group costume dilemma: they base their costumes around an actor's iconic characters instead.  SEE ALSO: This Bill Murray group costume sets the Halloween bar high So far the group has covered Bill Murray, Robin Williams, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, and Will Ferrell.  This year, the they outdid themselves by dressing up as seminal Tom Hanks characters. From Woody from Toy Story to David S. Pumpkins from the Saturday Night Live haunted elevator skit, the group covered seven versions of America's dad.  Read more... More about Reddit , Halloween , Tom Hanks , Culture , and Web Culture from Mashable https://ift.tt/2QbrwJY

Alaska's Universal Basic Income Doesn't Increase Unemployment Published on November 01, 2018 at 05:33AM With Alaska's gubernatorial election coming up, Business Insider brings up a report from earlier this year which finds that the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend -- the only large-scale universal basic income program in the U.S. -- doesn't increase unemployment like many feared. An anonymous reader shares the report: The vast majority of Alaska's roughly 740,000 citizens support the dividend, which gives virtually every citizen an annual check of about $1,000 to $2,000 (that's $4,000 to $8,000 for a family of four), and both political parties in the state are in favor. Alaskans' feelings about this universal cash transfer are supported by the findings of a working paper published in February that was written by University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy professor Damon Jones and University of Pennsylvania School of Public Policy and Practice profe...

Fox News Breaking News Alert Trump, at Florida rally, bashes 'far-left media' for trying to 'push people apart' after Pittsburgh slayings 10/31/18 4:54 PM

E-scooter company Lime is cautioning riders and contract workers about malfunctioning batteries and other issues with some of its scooters. Lime uses Segway Ninebot scooters in many of its cities, but after an August report about battery issues in "several" units, faulty scooters are being pulled from the fleet. What Lime calls a manufacturing defect sometimes led to smoldering batteries, which would then catch fire. Lime called these "isolated instances." Back in August, Lime worked with Segway Ninebot to digitally monitor batteries for faulty units, which would then prompt a scooter deactivation. Lime says this affected scooters in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Lake Tahoe.  Read more... More about Scooters , Battery , Segway , Lime , and Tech from Mashable https://ift.tt/2ADPnMO

Scientists Warn That World's Wilderness Areas Are Disappearing Published on November 01, 2018 at 04:50AM Scientists are warning that if human beings continue to mine the world's wildernesses for resources and convert them into cities and farms at the pace of the previous century, the planet's few remaining wild places could disappear in decades. From a report: Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago. The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world's remaining wildernesses -- and the image is bleak. "We're on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic," said James R. Allan, one of the study's auth...

This post is part of Hard Refresh , a soothing weekly column where we try to cleanse your brain of whatever terrible thing you just witnessed on Twitter. Prepare for your heart to explode. Between the pictures of your friends having fun without you and the barrage of creepily specific ads, who even wants to scroll through Instagram anymore? But among the Boomerangs and #foodporn, here's the wholesome escape from reality: Sarper Duman's piano videos.  SEE ALSO: Let this husky playing in fallen leaves be the cure to your autumn blues The Istanbul-based musician and animal rescuer is the proud father of 19 (yes 19 ) cats. His videos of himself playing soothing piano compositions while his cats lounge on his keyboard will cure whatever stress you have.  Read more... More about Instagram , Cats , Hard Refresh , Culture , and Web Culture from Mashable https://ift.tt/2ACQRXB