Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 46
July 21, 2018
Mission To Mars : Year 2030, Space Travel, And Our Destiny Beyond Earth
Everyone seems to be thinking about Mars nowadays. NASA plans to have humans on Mars by 2030 while SpaceX wants to do it sooner, by 2024. Mars is a common theme in Hollywood. There are movies like The Martian and Life that speculate how life may be on the red planet. None of these movies, however, seems to address the elephant in the room—how will humans survive long-term on Mars? The Mars atmosphere is mostly comprised of carbon monoxide and its surface is too cold for human life. The gravity is 38% that of Earth. This leaves the question of how a human being can survive such an environment. Traveling to Mars is an easy task, as the journey will only take 260 days when the two planets are closest to each other. After arriving, the challenge is landing on the surface. What landing system is safe for colonists and astronauts? By 2007, scientists had four landing suggestions; the Legged Standing System, Sky-Crane Landing System, Airbag Landing System and lastly, the Touchdown Sensing. As of 2017, scientists had already come up with more ways for landing such as diving into the Martian atmosphere and skirting closer to the surface. NASA is already thinking of the kind of habitation that will help colonists survive on Mars. In 2016, six companies had started designing possible habitat prototypes. All these prototypes are likely to be similar in a few ways—they should be self-sustaining, able to support life for a long period of time without help from Earth, and have a seal against Mars’s thin atmosphere.
The Authors Who Love Amazon
For most of Prime Day, Amazon’s annual sales bonanza, an unfamiliar face topped the site’s Author Rank page: Mike Omer, a 39-year-old Israeli computer engineer and self-published author whose profile picture is a candid shot of a young, blond man in sunglasses sitting on grass. He was—and at the time of this writing, still is—ranked above J.K. Rowling (No.8), James Patterson (No. 9), and Stephen King (No. 10) in sales of all his books on Amazon.com. His most recent book is ranked tenth on Amazon Charts, which Amazon launched after The New York Times stopped issuing e-book rankings, and which measures sales of individual books on Amazon. (The company does not disclose the metrics behind Author Rank, which is still in beta.)
Omer is one of a growing number of authors who have found self-publishing on Amazon’s platform to be very lucrative. While he may not be as familiar a name as the big authors marketed by traditional publishing houses, and may not have as many total book sales, Omer is making an enviable living from his writing. Sales of his first e-book, Spider’s Web, and its sequels, allowed him to quit his job and become a full-time author. Now, he makes more money than he did as a computer engineer. “I’m making a really nice salary, even by American standards,” he said.
After the success of Omer’s first book series, Thomas & Mercer, an Amazon imprint, published his most recent book, a mystery called A Killer’s Mind, which was also promoted on Amazon’s First Reads, a new subscription service in which the company recommends a handful of books and allows subscribers to download them before their official publication date. Omer told me he has now sold more than 10,000 books through Amazon, and that his books have also been borrowed more than 10,000 times on Kindle Unlimited, the subscription service in which readers pay $9.99 a month to access over 1 million titles on Amazon. “What made this possible is Amazon,” he told me. “It can expose me to millions, or tens of millions of readers.” (Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder of Codex Group, which consults with the publishing industry, told me that Amazon’s rankings and sales information are not reliable because they also count books that are borrowed, like Harry Potter books, which are consumed in a different way than books that are bought.)
For decades, self-publishing was derided as an embarrassing sign that an author couldn’t cut it in the “real” publishing industry—“the literary world’s version of masturbation,” as Salon once put it. And Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce site, with its bookstore-beating prices, was painted as an enemy to authors. But now its self-publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), has made it easy for people to upload their books, send them out into the universe, and make money doing so. Its store has created a place for readers to go and easily find inexpensive self-published books. The site that got its start by radically changing where books are sold is now reshaping how books are published and read.
This is, of course, threatening to the traditional publishing industry, which seems to be in a state of everlasting free-fall. Industrywide, self-publishing is gaining readers as traditional publishers are losing them, according to Author Earnings, a site produced by an anonymous marketing analytics expert who calls himself Data Guy. The self-published share of paid US e-book units increased to 46.4 percent from 44.7 percent between the second quarters of 2017 and 2018, Data Guy told me in an email, while the traditionally published share of paid e-book units decreased to 43.2 percent from 45.5 percent. (His data takes into account self-published and Amazon imprint-published books, which many traditional data sources do not.)
Central to Amazon’s gambit—and authors’ pay—is Kindle Unlimited. Launched in 2014, the feature was a response to other companies that were trying to create a Netflix for books, such as Oyster, which shut down in 2015, and Scribd, which is slowly gaining acceptance from the Big Five publishing houses. Authors can choose to participate in KDP Select, which automatically puts a book into Kindle Unlimited, and which can be highly lucrative. Amazon sets aside a pot of money every month that it divvies up among KDP Select authors, based on how many of their pages have been read each month by Kindle Unlimited subscribers and readers from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which allows Prime members to borrow one book a month for free. The payment ends up being a little less than half a penny per page, authors told me, but those who are read the most can also get monthly bonuses as high as $25,000. Last year, Amazon paid out more than $220 million to authors, the company told me. Regardless of participation in KDP Select, authors who self-publish on Amazon through KDP also earn a 70 percent royalty on books priced between $2.99 and $9.99, and a 35 percent royalty on books that cost more or less than that.
Kindle Unlimited works in the same way as Amazon’s other big subscription service, Prime: Just as Prime users often think of shipping as free, even though they’re paying a monthly or annual fee for it, Kindle Unlimited readers may begin to think of books as free, even though they’re paying a monthly fee, because each additional book they read in Kindle Unlimited doesn’t cost them anything extra. This can be a boon for new authors: Readers who might not be willing to pay outright for books by unknown writers will read those books on Kindle Unlimited, where they feel “free.”
“I truly believe that people would not read as many of my books were I not on Kindle Unlimited,” Samantha Christy, who decided to try writing romance novels in 2014, told me. Christy’s Amazon writing career has been so successful that it supports her four children and husband, who quit his job two years ago to manage her IT, taxes, and publishing business. Christy, who typically writes three books a year, talked to me from Hawaii, where she was vacationing with her family before they were headed to Comic-Con International in San Diego to speak on a panel about self-publishing.
Kindle Unlimited has its downsides. Amazon demands exclusivity from its KDP Select authors, meaning they can only sell their books on the Kindle Store, and not on any other digital bookstores, or even on their own websites. The payment structure means that authors who produce a lot of pages, even if they’re not particularly good pages, earn more money than authors who write succinctly. Almost since the launch of Kindle Unlimited, Amazon has been battling “book stuffers,” authors who publish hundreds of pages of content in Kindle Unlimited, some of which is gibberish, some of which tricks readers into flipping to the last page of the book, so the book will count as read and they’ll get paid. Self-publishing on Amazon’s platforms benefits authors in some genres—including romance and mystery, where readers tear through books and writing them might not take a long time—over those who spend years writing novels, or who do deeply researched nonfiction books, Mary Rasenberger, the executive director of the Author’s Guild, told me.
And authors on Kindle Unlimited have to work hard to promote themselves and attract new readers in a crowded marketplace; one, I.T. Lucas, told me she works 12-hour days, seven days a week. Part of that is writing—she has published 21 full-length novels in three years—and part is marketing. “You have to be willing to run a business at the same time,” Rasenberger said. Christy tries to answer every message she receives on Facebook, does a lot of free giveaways, and frequently holds Q&As and other events. Many authors buy ads on Amazon, effectively paying their employer to get more customers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...
‘Glass’ Looks Like M. Night Shyamalan’s Most Complex Film Yet
Universal Pictures unveiled the first major trailer of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con on Friday with a full look at M. Night Shyamalan’s highly anticipatedGlass. Shyamalan, a filmmaker known for his clever twists, delivered his greatest one yet at the end of 2016’s Split. The James McAvoy starrer was revealed to be a follow-up to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable (2000) and went on to gross $278.5 million worldwide on a $9 million budget.
Shyamalan’s plans for a concluding chapter became clear after Split’s success, and moviegoers were rewarded with the knowledge that a trilogy many once believed would never come to fruition would finally be complete. While Unbreakable wasn’t met with the instant success of his previous film, The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan’s deconstruction of the American superhero/villain complex by way of an intricate and restrained thriller has become a cult classic over the years. In the midst of the current explosion of superhero movies, Shyamalan’s films are more prescient than ever. Uniting the casts of Unbreakable and Split, Glass sees Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy team up for what may be Shyamalan’s most complex film yet.
True to form, Shyamalan’s trailer opens by grounding us in the real world. The film’s stakes are introduced by a character new to Shyamalan’s world, Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), a psychologist who specializes in treating patients with delusions of being superheroes and villains. She says that it’s a growing field, and we learn that her patients are none other than Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy) and David Dunn (Bruce Willis). When we last saw Crumb and Dunn, both men were free, seemingly headed toward an inevitable conflict with each other. How they end up in the care of Dr. Staple remains to be seen. Given that Shyamalan is known for his aesthetics and telegraphing his themes through visuals, it’s worth noting that Crumb is placed between Price and Dunn, not only highlighting Split’s placement within the trilogy, but also Crumb’s psychological predicament of being caught between heroism and villainy as a result of his multiple personalities.
Via Hollywood Reporter
July 16, 2018
Aston Martin’s Autonomous Flying Car Concept Is Sleek And Sexy
In the age where companies like Terrafugia and Opener are actually building and testing flying cars, putting out a concept design and video can seem a bit cheeky.
But when it’s Aston Martin, we can’t help but drool a little. The company just oozes a classical style that is always nice to see in any vision of the future.
The concept is a departure from the effort to build a hybrid flyer that many others are focused on developing. The Volante Vision concept is pure VTOL aircraft with room for three.
According to Aston Martin, the design is about urban and “inter-city” luxury transport. It’s also an autonomous hybrid-electric design, so should it come to life the passengers won’t be in need of a pilot license to take the controls.
We’re loving the head-up display concept that would be overlaid on the windscreen, and the deep curve on that window design feels like it would give you an amazing view as you cruise above the worries of the world below.
If there’s a complaint we get the feeling those rear seats offer less legroom than even the most budget economy class airline out there. But if it’s for trips of around an hour or less we suppose we could cope if someone offered us a free lift.
Lift. It does give that phrase a fresh new meaning.
With companies like Uber currently working on plans to have flying fleets of on-demand transport hitting cities by 2020, now’s the time for Aston Martin to turn these concepts into real working prototypes. 2020 is only 18 months away after all!
How humans and technology conspired to spoil the World Cup Final
Goal-line technology — available in tennis since the turn of the century — finally meant that all the goals scored would actually count.
Moreover, the Video Assistant Referee was there to make sure that referees on the pitch blew their whistles in the right direction.
Mostly, it worked. Except, that is, when it came to Sunday’s final.
The greatest World Cup Final referees are the ones you never notice. They let the game flow and, when they have to make a call, they make the right one.
Surely, this time Argentinian referee Nestor Pitana would be papally infallible.
Not only was he greatly experienced, but he had the blissful backup of technological help — an Italian referee staring at multiple screens in a small Russian room, ready to warn him of things he might have missed.
How woefully it all worked.
In the first half, Croatia was by far the better team.
Yet, in the 18th minute France launched a rare foray forward and French striker Antoine Griezmann cheated.
There’s no more appropriate word for it.
He sought out an opponent’s foot and attempted to deliberately trip over it.
This was a moment when technology could have helped.
One whisper from the video referee to the one on the field would have told him that Griezmann deserved a yellow card.
Instead, the referee on the field gave France a free-kick — the previous action was deemed not reviewable, according to the current rules — from which a goal ensued.
It got worse.
Croatia got back into the game and scored a wonderful goal.
It might have had a couple more.
And then, near the end of the the first half, the ball came across, France’s Blaise Matuidi mis-headed it and it hit the hand of Croatian striker Ivan Perisic.
Perisic has his hands in a perfectly normal position. The referee decided there was no foul, yet the French players started whining.
And then the video referee asked Pitana to take a look at the replay.
For all the world (well, me), this was no penalty. The criterion for handball is that it’s supposed to be deliberate. Perisic didn’t have time to do anything but let the ball hit his hand.
It is, for sure, a gray area in soccer, but technology is supposed to turn that gray to black-and-white. Or at least a much more defined shade of gray.
The problem, however, was that Pitana being alerted to watch it again (and again) — rather than being told one way or the other what the decision was — told him that he might have made a mistake.
Already, he was in troubling territory. Then he had to watch the replay in front of all the world, with French players and fans shrieking in his ears.
Amazon employees are using Prime Day to push for better working conditions
Seth King worked in an Amazon warehouse in Chesterfield, Virginia, for just two months last fall. But it was long enough for him to realize such “grueling, depressing” work conditions were bringing him to “the lowest point in my life.”
“You spend 10 hours on foot, there’s no windows in the place, and you’re not allowed to talk to people — there’s no interactions allowed,” King told Vox.
Plus, he added, the paycheck wasn’t even enough to cover his bills — he had to take a second job as a security guard to make enough money.
“I got a sense in no time at all that they work people to death, or until they get too tired to keep working,” he said. “After two months, I felt I couldn’t work there and maintain a healthy state of mind.”
King plans to speak out against Amazon Monday night in an event Sen. Bernie Sanders is organizing, CEOs vs. Workers Town Hall. King will join employees of Disney, McDonald’s, American Airlines, and Walmart to discuss the treatment of the companies’ workers.
And he’s not the only person criticizing Amazon. Amazon workers all across Europe are striking at warehouses. Shoppers are organizing boycotts.
Combined, these efforts are an attempt to draw attention to working conditions at Amazon on Prime Day — the annual shopping event that brings in more than $2 billion for the company. Amazon has come under fire for years over accusations of poor work conditions, and this year, employees all across Europe are determined to capitalize on publicity around Prime Day to push for change at their workplace.
