Friday, April 26, 2013

If Disney Princesses Were Sloths...

for The Mary Sue 2013-04-20 21:28:51 UTC

We’d have really slow moving Disney films, but those princesses would be 10 times cuter.

"A Facebook conversation occurred...I needed a break from finals...and this happened,” writes Phillip Light of this unique art pairing.

Check out what Snow White and Belle would look like as sloths. Who's your favorite sloth-princess? Tell us in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Tumblr, philliplight

This article originally published at The Mary Sue here

Topics: Comics, disney, Drawings, funny, humor, Pics, tumblr, Watercooler The Mary Sue is a Mashable publishing partner that hopes to be a place for two things: highlighting women in the geek world and providing a prominent place for the voices of geek women. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.

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3D Headset and Treadmill Combo Make Video Games Feel Real

Anita Li2013-04-20 22:00:46 UTC

Forget haptic feedback. When combined, two pieces of virtual-reality tech offer an immersive gaming experience that puts you in the middle of the action.

Texas-based startup Virtuix posted a YouTube video Thursday that demonstrates Omni, its treadmill-like "natural motion interface for virtual reality applications" that enables a user's in-game avatar to mimic his or her real-life movements. The video shows it being used along with the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset.

The result? Rather than sitting on the couch and clicking buttons on a controller, users must physically run and blast enemies with a gaming gun while playing, for example, a first-person shooter. They can walk, run, jump, step sideways and crouch (by bending over) in any direction on Omni's circular treadmill. Check out the video, above, to see the immersive action.

Would you use the Omni and the Ocular Rift headset to play video games? Tell us in the comments, below.

Image courtesy of Virtuix

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A Troll Is Causing You to Procrastinate

Matt Petronzio2013-04-20 15:53:38 UTC

Ever wonder why you procrastinate, even when you know you have to finish something important? Well, there may just be a magical reason behind it all.

In this comic, Josh Mecouch of Formal Sweatpants introduces us to Trolley, the procrastination troll. This explains everything.

Procrastination Troll Comic

Comic illustration by Josh Mecouch, Formal Sweatpants. Published with permission; all rights reserved.

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This Robot Was Involved In Apprehension of Boston Bombing Suspect

IrobotAlex Fitzpatrick2013-04-20 16:48:30 UTC

After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect in the Boston bombing case taken into custody last night, was discovered in a boat parked in a Watertown, Mass. backyard by its owner Friday, police enlisted the help of a robot to safely remove the tarp from the boat. While authorities did not specify exactly which robot was used to pull said tarp, Mashable has identified at least one robot that was on the scene.

In this photo, taken by an eyewitness near the house where Tsarnaev was hiding from police, a robot appears to be investigating a car authorities deemed suspicious. The car matches the description of a Honda which authorities were searching for Friday, but that alert was later canceled.

The robot in the photograph seems to match Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot's PackBot, a multi-purpose defense and security robot available in several different configuraitons, including EOD (explosive ordinance disposal):

Charlie Vaida, a spokesperson for iRobot, told Mashable the PackBot was used "by local law enforcement early yesterday to inspect the suspects' car," but he is still working with authorities to confirm any additional involvement. When contacted by telephone, a spokesperson for the Boston Police Department told Mashable to instead direct the question to a BPD email address and await a response, which has not yet arrived.

Update: Newly released aerial images of Friday's standoff appear to show the boat's tarp was removed with a tool attached to a specialized law enforcement vehicle, not a robot.

Update 2: Vaida emails: "Following up, While PackBot was used earlier in the day to inspect the car, it was not used when the suspect was apprehended. It appears the cover was pulled off by a vehicle equipped with a robotic arm."

Thousands of police and military organizations around the world use iRobot robots, Tim Trainer, general manager of the company's defense and security business unit, previously told Mashable.

A photograph from the Associated Press circulating Saturday showed another robot used by law enforcement in Cambridge, Mass. early Friday morning — not in Watertown late Friday night. Additionally, that robot did not appear to have any kind of appendage capable of grabbing or pulling.

Do you think the PackBot was the robot responsible for pulling the tarp? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image via iRobot

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Share Your Photos From Far, Far Away

Murad-2Nora Grenfell2013-04-20 19:08:56 UTC

Everyone sees the world differently.

While the countless photos of historic landmarks may seem redundant, they represent something more to travelers: an experience. And sometimes the most exceptional photos of the world are the most unexpected.

For this week's Mashable Photo Challenge Guest Series, we're asking for your most memorable photos from far, far away. These could be shots you snapped while on a globetrotting vacation or a brief road trip across your state or province. Send us your picture by following the steps below and be sure to let us know where it was taken. Our guest curator will pick some of the most inspired submissions to feature on Mashable.

Tweet your photo from far, far away to @mashablehq with the hashtag #MashPics OR

Instagram your photo with the hashtag #MashPics OR

Upload your photo in the photo widget below OR

Post the link to your photo in the comments below

This week's guest curator is Murad Osmann, a music video producer who has built up his following on Instagram by putting a unique spin on travel photography. Osmann's series "Follow Me," features his girlfriend leading him by the hand through the world's most iconic landmarks. He recommends selecting photos for the challenge by channeling your creativity.

In this photo, Osmann focuses on a quiet, empty street instead of a signature landmark:

Submit your photos by Monday, April 22, at noon ET. Osmann will choose the top submissions, and the winners will be featured on Mashable, as well as on our Facebook album and Pinterest board. We can't wait to see your photos!

BONUS: Photo Tips for the Digital Age

Screen-shot-2013-04-11-at-10-58-02-am Screen-shot-2013-04-11-at-11-08-30-am Screen-shot-2013-04-11-at-3-39-19-pm

Images courtesy of Murad Osmann

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Knicks Launch Instagram Microsite for NBA Playoffs

Knicksflickr2Sam Laird2013-04-20 21:03:35 UTC

The New York Knicks have launched an Instagram-specific microsite to collect fan photos from Madison Square Garden and around the world during the team's 2013 playoff run.

Found at Knickstagram.com, the site will aggregate and post all Instagram fan photos that include the #Knicks and #KnicksTape hashtags, which are popular among fans of the team. The photos will also be displayed on a digital map letting fans see where others are posting from in New York City's five boroughs and beyond.

Additionally, Madison Square Garden's in-house videoboards will show #KicksTape-tagged photos during breaks in the action at home games.

The Knicks started the playoffs with a home game against the Boston Celtics at 3 p.m. ET on Saturday afternoon.

The Knickstagram microsite is a cool innovation, and purports to be the first of its kind in the sports world. But it's also just the latest example of Instagram's rising popularity among sports teams, players, brands and fans. During last year's NHL playoffs, for example, the New York Rangers and Delta invited a small group of popular Instagram users to document a game. Puma, meanwhile, took a similar group to Abu Dhabi last year to document a leg of the Volvo Ocean Race.

Does this sound like a cool idea to you? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy Flickr, Keith Allison

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Reporter Covers China Earthquake In Her Wedding Dress

Alex Fitzpatrick2013-04-20 14:47:13 UTC

A 6.6-magnitude earthquake struck a rural area of southwestern China Saturday, claiming at least 100 lives and injuring approximately 2,000. The earthquake also happened to interrupt the marriage ceremony of a Chinese journalist, who got right to work reporting from the scene — still donned in her wedding dress and veil.

The reporter has been identified by the South Morning China Post as Chen Ying, an anchorwoman at a local news network. The footage has since gone viral on Chinese social media service Weibo, where users are praising her "professional spirit," according to the Post.

Many of those affected by the earthquake, news networks and official government agencies have also turned to Weibo to share news and photographs of the event and its aftermath:

China Earthquake

Saturday's earthquake has not been as deadly as a 2008 earthquake in a nearby region of China, which claimed nearly 70,000 lives, according to Reuters.

Image via STR/AFP/Getty Images

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Repost.Us Gives Publishers an Easy Way to Syndicate Articles Online

RepostSeth Fiegerman2013-04-20 02:19:25 UTC

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Repost.Us

One-Liner Pitch: Repost.Us helps publishers share and embed complete articles on the web, including the original publisher's advertising and branding.

Why It's Taking Off: The startup aims to make it as easy for publishers to share complete articles as YouTube makes it to share videos.

For years, people in the media have been debating the proper etiquette for re-posting portions of an article from one online publication to another. Now, one new startup is trying put this issue to rest once and for all.

Repost.Us, a free service that launched earlier this week, provides publishers with a platform to share and embed full articles in the same way that YouTube lets users embed video clips. Websites can add a Repost button to their articles, which others can click on to re-publish all of the content in the article — along with videos, the original publisher's advertising and branding, and any updates to the article that occur afterwards. Repost also provides a directory of content that publishers can search through and publish on their own website.

"The fundamental problem, we realized, is that it's really hard to share content on the Internet," John Pettitt, the company's founder and CEO, told Mashable in an interview. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I say that. It's easy to share a link, but if you want to share an article, you have to ask permission and manually copy it and make sure you get it right."

Pettitt, a serial entrepreneur who launched multiple companies in the '90s, had been quasi-retired from the tech world in recent years. Yet, he felt inspired to dive back in with Repost after seeing some of his friends struggle with trying to get permission to re-publish articles or, on the flip side, having their own articles lifted with little to no attribution.

"If you look at the history of syndication, you wrote content and sent it over the hill to the next place to run it," Pettitt says. But in recent years, he believes, publishers have chosen to believe in the power of links back rather than risk letting publications syndicate entire articles. "Everybody got stuck in this fiction that they're only one link away so they can come to me."

Much of this, of course, comes down to page views and ad revenue. Until now, if one website took another's article without linking back, the latter publication would be at risk of losing visitors and impressions. But according to Repost, even with a link, the vast majority of readers won't click through to the original website. With Repost, on the other hand, the original publisher can syndicate their content and still get page views and ad revenue from it.

In short, the goal for Repost, according to Pettitt, is to make it easy for big and small publishers to profit from sharing complete articles as it is for content producers to share and profit from videos using the embed code from websites like YouTube.

Repost currently has articles available to re-share from thousands of websites, including Fox Sports, PandoDaily and newspapers like the Times-Picayune. There are about 3.4 million articles in its system right now, with 20,000-40,000 more added each day.

Pettitt says his team has reached out to many publishers and has found that they tend to fall into one of two camps: there are those that get the concept and those that he describes as "Lord of the Rings publishers," which "treat their content as My Precious," and won't let it be sent out elsewhere. As Pettitt himself admits, Repost probably makes more sense for smaller publishers in need of exposure rather than bigger institutions like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal who may worry about "business cannibalization."

Repost has already received some praise from those in the journalism world. In an announcement for the public launch earlier this week, Repost quoted journalism professor Jeff Jarvis who said that the service "should end the wars over aggregation and copyright."

The startup has six employees and is privately funded, though Pettitt says he is looking to raise a Series A round of funding later this year. Repost generates revenue by placing an ad of its own in the stories that get embedded and by using its service to distribute marketing content.

Image courtesy of Repost

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It's Time for Truth on Social Media

Social-media-literacyEmily Banks2013-04-20 18:46:29 UTC

Mashable OP-ED

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” I heard those words early in my journalism career. Reporters are trained to verify information they receive by confirming with a trusted source, but the media landscape has changed, even since I first heard that adage.

With social networks like Facebook and Twitter, news flows faster than ever. And the news is no longer centrally controlled, making it potentially less trustworthy. Reporters have more access to information through social media, but it’s no longer just journalists delivering that information. The power of information-sharing now rests in the hands of everyday people — that means you.

In a Harvard Nieman Report, Mark Little, founder and CEO of social news agency Storyful, wrote:

Not too long ago, reporters were the guardians of scarce facts delivered at an appointed time to a passive audience. Today we are the managers of an overabundance of information and content, discovered, verified and delivered in partnership with active communities.

Any individual or media organization can instantly send a piece of news to the web. This makes things more competitive — in print, everyone always wanted to be first (and right). But social media and the speed of digital news raise the stakes.

We’ve been watching this play out all week, following the Boston Marathon bombings. For instance, reports from trusted news sources to individual Twitter users inaccurately stated authorities held a suspect in custody.

Georgetown political scientist Jonathan Ladd suggests the rise of the Internet and cable news, and the resulting diversification and fragmentation of the media, have caused a general distrust in the media. He writes in a blog post, “Because of technological changes, such as the rise of cable and the Internet, as well as regulatory changes, such as the end of the fairness doctrine, the media industry has become much more diverse and fragmented.”

He's right. But I'd take that one step further to include, specifically, social media's effect on fragmented news consumption.

And it’s not just the social media accounts of journalists and news organizations. Media consumers now have more opportunities to glean news straight from primary sources.

We saw Friday how Boston residents and reporters shared information on social networks about the manhunt for the bombing suspects. On social media, they shared real-time photos, videos and information about the circumstances they witnessed.

They also shared information they heard over police scanners. A decade ago, listening in on law enforcement chatter required expensive equipment, limiting police scanners' use mainly to hobbyists and journalists.

Today, you need nothing more than a smartphone. Apps like the 5-0 Radio Police Scanner browse scanners around the world, porting criminal activities and police information to you anywhere.

Immediately following the bombings Monday, I used 5-O on my iPhone to access information from Boston. But the whole time, I remained aware that the officers I heard weren't always aware of the facts. What they said wasn’t necessarily true or verifiable. And I couldn't verify it, I shouldn't report it.

The average person may not operate with that same filter, though. Unverified information heard over the scanner could turn into a tweet, which could get picked up by a media outlet and, thus, become a (potentially inaccurate) news report.

In his book Trust Me, I'm Lying, Ryan Holiday writes about the dangerous and exploitative practices of bloggers and social media users, which in turn, can spread like wildfire. It’s a pattern we’ve witnessed this week.

"The more immediate the nature of their publishing medium (blogs, then newspapers, then magazines), the more heavily a journalist will depend on sketchy online sources, like social media, for research," he writes.

This process relies on a "delegation of trust:" reporting what others are reporting. Because NPR is a "trusted" source, other news outlets reported its false claim that Gabrielle Giffords had been fatally shot.

When a trusted site or Twitter user publishes something, we assume they did their due diligence by confirming the veracity and authenticity of a claim, and therefore, the news is safe to repeat as fact. Not always so.

However, some more optimistic media professionals believe social media can help verify information and sources. We can follow the digital footprint of social media users.

In his book Hacking the Future, Cole Stryker writes,

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, one actually has more access to evidence with social media than traditional off-line sources."

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, one actually has more access to evidence with social media than traditional off-line sources."

In some instances, perhaps this is a good thing. But this week, that "evidence" became fodder for hasty accusation, as Redditors attempted to crowdsource the investigation and identification of the Boston Marathon bombers. As the week played out, it became apparent the Reddit search would not trump the one led by authorities.

Unfiltered information, without context or verification — usually the job of journalists — can be dangerous, as Storyful founder Little points out:

When I was a young TV journalist, the phrase ‘golden hour’ meant the early evening light that bathed faces and landscapes in a warm forgiving glow. As a social journalist, I've started to use the term in a different way. I now think of the golden hour as the time it takes social media to create either an empowering truth or an unstoppable lie, when a celebrity death trends on Twitter or an explosive video surfaces on YouTube. In other words, when journalism can matter most.

According to Little and the BBC, journalists should answer these questions when attempting to verify the truth behind user-generated content.

Can you speak to the original source of the material?

Can you geo-locate the photo or video? Can you correspond landmarks to those in Google Maps?

Do the streets look similar to those on Panoramio or Google Street View?

Does weather in the footage correspond to weather reports from that day?

Does the reported time of day correspond to where shadows should be at that time?

Do traffic signs and vehicle plates show the correct locale?

Does this footage look similar to that being uploaded by other users in the location?

Does the information or footage seem too good to be true?

Where did the material first appear online?

By leveraging technology resources, human knowledge and community history, journalists and individuals can seek to verify the authenticity of user-generated content.

More than two years ago, founder of Storify Burt Herman wrote for The New York Times: “A new class of gatekeepers has arisen, people whose reputations are built on their ability to highlight relevant information to their audiences. We are still looking for the right word to call these new gatekeepers, but so far ‘curator’ is what appears most appropriate.”

It's safe to say, today, that all social media consumers should be their own curators — consuming, verifying and disseminating what is accurate and relevant — because more information is easily available to us than ever before.

I still believe we can trust legacy institutions to provide us with the truth — most of the time. Still, we need to be smart media consumers by remembering that even the trusted institutions get stories wrong. And, as journalists, there's more than one side to a story, more than one truth. We must use the technologies at our disposal to determine which ones are accurate, and all social media users, including both content curators and content creators, must remember: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

Image via Darren McCollester/Getty Images

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