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Why FIFA Ultimate Team is often hated and very successful
FIFA 21 will no doubt make over $1 billion, as each entry in the series has in recent years. To legions of FIFA players the new title really signals the start of a fresh season of Ultimate Team. For the unfamiliar, FIFA Ultimate Team is the most popular feature in the game, and the one that's come to define the overall experience.
WildLeaks: The whistleblowing site for planet Earth
“Really, fuck fuck fuck fuck, fuck” Andrea Crosta tells the driver of the car he just got in. Crosta is the founder of WildLeaks, a whistleblowing site for environmental crime, and he’s just aborted an undercover operation with a prominent ivory trader in China. Crosta wasn’t alone, and his collaborator’s hidden camera was spotted after she conspicuously moved her purse in front of some illegal merchandise.
What’s the tech industry's place in a racial justice movement?
But what's the trillion dollar tech company supposed to do? When the protests first started, Sherrell Dorsey, founder of The Plug, which reports on the Black tech economy, started tracking every tech company’s statement addressing race with her team.
DeepMind and Oxford University researchers on how to 'decolonize' AI
In a moment where society is collectively reckoning with just how deep the roots of racism reach, a new paper from researchers at DeepMind — the AI lab and sister company to Google — and the University of Oxford presents a vision to “decolonize” artificial intelligence. The aim is to keep society’s ugly prejudices from being reproduced and amplified by today’s powerful machine learning systems. The paper, published this month in the journal Philosophy & Technology, has at heart the idea that you have to understand historical context to understand why technology can be biased.
The influencers of pandemic gardening
To the untrained eye, Kevin Espiritu’s garden is an overflowing hodgepodge of containers: stackable planters growing beans, herbs in traditionally narrow windowsill planters and a variety of trellises inside canvas grow bags. The front yard is packed tightly with raised vegetable beds made from sheets of corrugated metal, and a loquat tree sits in the corner, heavy with fruit. Getting a personal tour via Zoom feels like a treat after watching hours of Espiritu’s gardening tutorials, where he rarely features his front yard in its entirety.
K.K. Slider's fans span rock stars and remixers
Every Saturday night, pop-punk icon Mark Hoppus does exactly what you’d expect him to do: He goes to a concert.
Petit Depotto, 'Gnosia' and the new, obsolete game
Like most of tech culture, the mainstream gaming industry is constantly hungry for next-gen hardware, and for major studios like Epic Games, Blizzard and Ubisoft, there’s an ongoing competition to stay ahead. Last June, a small Japanese indie studio named Petit Depotto unveiled Gnosia -- a werewolf-style role-playing adventure -- on the aging PlayStation Vita, which Sony officially discontinued in March 2019. Adapted from the 1986 Russian social game Mafia, werewolf scenarios require ‘villagers’ to deduce the identity of a ‘werewolf’ hiding among them.
Is going to space truly essential during a pandemic?
That’s good, since interruptions in space are risky. It's been imbued into space since the first moon landing, in 1969. Last month, The Verge reported that Blue Origin was making employees prioritize a space tourism project over the Department of Defense-funded work that made it an essential business.
Every musician is basically a YouTuber now
Bands clunkily pivoting to livestream can look to YouTube stars as guiding lights.
Subscription services sell artisanal food, too
As consumers have more and more trouble getting to stores whose shelves are already barren, perhaps food subscription businesses have an opportunity to shine. A behavioral economist whose last company was acquired by recipe app Yummly, Merea's now all-in on food for babies.
Navigating the web while observing hijab
Not long ago, I was at home on YouTube watching a TED Talk by psychologist Amy Cuddy on building confidence and how body language shapes who we are. Beyond that, hijab is a mandate for maintaining modesty, which includes my mannerisms. It means that I should not be looking at anything indecent or unlawful as ordained by God in the Quran and explained in prophetic sayings.
The importance of Apple and Google’s rare collaboration on contact tracing
What is contact tracing, why are two rivals calling for a truce and who needs to know where we are all the time?
The virusbuster boom
Disinfecting services like Enviro-Master are having a moment, but how long will it last? Omar L. Gallaga joins the company as it cleans up a Chick-fil-A.
The aggravation of game-breaking bugs in esports
It was late one Sunday in September in Krakow, Poland, and Eric "Snip3down" Wrona was heated. He was a handful of points away from making the championship series of the Apex Legends Preseason Invitational and his only shot at progressing towards the grand prize of more than $100,000. Wrona is a notable battle royale and Halo competitor, who had placed second at the X-Games -- the only other major competitive Apex Legends event. Tucked away in Alvernia Studios, a series of dome production studios turned into an esports venue with a small audience of already-eliminated players, he was prepped to wreak havoc in his final game in the loser's bracket.
Using Lego therapy for autism
There is no cure for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which affects one out of every 59 children in the United States. One of its most common effects is difficulty with social interaction and everything it entails, like living independently and holding down a job. Children on the spectrum may avoid eye contact, have difficulty reading people's emotions via nonverbal signals and struggle to express their own emotions verbally.
Online-only platforms are going offline with permanent spaces
The retailpocalypse started in 2010. It followed the 2008 global recession, with the parallel birth and rise of social media adding fuel to the growth of online shopping. Suburban and rural malls sat empty, underutilized or poorly maintained as the most affected brands lost their customer base in the squeezed middle class. Meanwhile, online retailers thrived without the overhead costs of a physical space. Nearly a decade later, the online-only platforms that disrupted retail are choosing to pay rent as an additional, unnecessary expense. There are items available for purchase in each space, but the stores' ultimate goal is to offer a tangible experience offline to their users or consumers.
The making of a diverse game studio
The original name for Manveer Heir's new game studio that focused on stories of people of color was Big Mouth Games. The former BioWare and Raven Software designer embraces his loudness. Now, he's putting his money where his considerable mouth is.
Dehydrated food goes from hiking to haute cuisine
Ever since fifth grade, when I made beef jerky with Mrs. Swanagan in a trailer behind my elementary school, I've been fascinated by the process of creating inedible food out of perfectly good ingredients by removing all of their moisture. Dried fish, fruit leather -- the list is endless. However, in the past few years, chefs at high-end restaurants have been rescuing the technique of dehydration from River and Dawn's camping supplies and elevating it to haute cuisine. Take Il Fiorista, a new boutique and Mediterranean-inspired eatery in Manhattan that specializes in edible flowers (il fiorista means "the florist" in Italian). Everything on the menu incorporates flowers, whether it's geranium aioli or duck cappellacci with rose petal pasta.
The nicest shark in Eureka Park
A lot of people at CES know Mindy Zemrak. On Thursday, she strode no further than five meters into Eureka Park, the show's startup section, when someone heard her voice and turned around. It was Dmitri Love, founder of a crypto-investment platform called Bundil that appeared on the TV show Shark Tank two seasons ago and earned an investment from Kevin O'Leary. Zemrak is the head of casting, and hence the main gatekeeper, for Shark Tank. She has been with the show, where budding entrepreneurs make their best pitches to a panel of business giants, from its very first season until now, when it's preparing for its 12th. For the past few years, the start of every season's casting has begun here, with a trip to CES.
The teenager who's at CES to network
It's not that Alishba Imran isn't impressed by her tour of Zappos HQ, the Disneyland of corporate campuses, with its "zapponians" who earn "zollars" and play "zing zong" on breaks. But she might not see herself working at a big corporation like this. Her goal is to be "influential." She describes herself as a blockchain and machine learning developer and researcher and sees her future in health care and finance infrastructure. She chats about fractional ownership and the direction of 5G as well as stoicism and first principles. She is 16 years old.
