Brits won't have to wait long to get their hands on the HTC One Max. Vodafone UK says that it will be offering the gigantic smartphone this week as a carrier exclusive in the country; customers can pick it up for �49 if they're willing to subscribe to a �47 monthly plan. An unlocked version is also ...It's a role play based off the warriors cats books
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BEIRUT (AP) — A general director of Doctors Without Borders called Tuesday for greater access for humanitarian aid to Syrians suffering in their country's civil war, and urged the international community to show the same urgency to help them as it did to address dismantling Syria's chemical weapons stockpile.
The Syrian conflict, which began as a largely peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad in March 2011, has triggered a humanitarian crisis on a massive scale, killing more than 100,000 people, driving nearly 7 million more from their homes and devastating the nation's cities and towns. With the country now carved up into rebel- and regime-controlled areas, providing desperately needed food and medical aid has become a colossal — and dangerous — task.
"You have an industrial-scale war, but you have a very kind of small-scale humanitarian response," said Christopher Stokes, a general directors for Doctors Without Borders. "There is a recognition that greater humanitarian access is needed for life-saving assistance, but at the same time we don't see the mobilization."
The United Nations Security Council issued an appeal in early October for immediate access to all areas of the country to deliver humanitarian aid, including across conflict lines. Still, organizations that provide assistance continue to struggle to reach all the people who need it.
Stokes said the aid community has long been told that it's impossible to grant full access to all regions affected by the fighting, and that "one side is always blaming the other" for the impasse.
But the recent agreement to grant international inspectors unfettered access to every site linked to Syria's chemical weapons program "has shown is that it is possible, if the international political willingness is there, to grant access and free movement to aid agencies to go into these enclaves," Stokes said.
"Cease-fires could be organized as was done to allow chemical weapons inspectors in, they could be organized to allow in medical convoys," he said.
Doctors Without Borders says it currently runs six field hospitals in rebel-held areas, and supports 70 medical facilities in contested areas of the country and regions controlled by the government or the rebels.
The Syrian government has not granted the group permission to work in the country, so it is forced to bring in supplies surreptitiously — a high-risk job that Stokes said has become harder.
In the past, it would take a few days to get supplies brought in from abroad into the clinics, he said, whereas now it can take weeks. "There are more checkpoints, and it's harder and harder to get supplies in," he said.
On the ground, the conflict has shown no sign of easing, even on Tuesday as Muslims celebrated the holiday known as Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice.
In the village of Yabroud, several dozen miles north of the capital, assailants detonated explosives on the roofs of Our Lady's Church and the Church of Helena and Constantine, Syria's SANA state news agency reported.
The explosions damaged the crosses, SANA said. It said attempts to detonate more bombs outside the two churches were foiled.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights activist group confirmed that several explosions went off, damaging the churches.
There was no claim of responsibility, though SANA blamed "terrorists," the regime's term for rebels. Assad has drawn support from Syria's ethnic and religious minorities, including Christians. The rebel movement is dominated by Sunni Muslims, who are a majority in Syria.
In regime attacks, warplanes bombed targets in the village of Latamneh in the central province of Hama, killing at least three children, the Observatory said. The government also bombed areas of the Eastern Ghouta district, near Damascus, and the southern city of Daraa.
As the fighting continued, Assad attended holiday prayers in a Damascus mosque. Syrian state TV showed him sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the front row of worshippers. Assad continues to appear in public, apparently to send a message of "business as usual" even as large parts of Syria lie in ruins.
Meanwhile, Syrian refugees marked a subdued holiday in the Zaatari tent camp in Jordan. The camp is home to more than 120,000 refugees and has turned into Jordan's fifth-largest city.
A few children bought toys from shops in the camp, as is customary during the holiday, and men attended special Eid prayers, though the refugees said there's no joy in the holiday.
"We feel bad, we feel bad because everyone here has lost his home and family members and his money," said Ibrahim Oweis, a refugee from Damascus.
___
Associated Press writers Maamoun Yousef in Cairo and Jamal Halaby in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.
Kickstarter's world conquest continues: following a Canadian launch in the summer, the crowdfunding service is now available in Australia and New Zealand. Creators in both countries can start building their projects today, and launch as soon as November 13th. Locals can accept pledges from anywhere on the planet, although their backers will have to pay through the Kickstarter website rather than Amazon Payments. If you're eager to learn the ropes, the company is hosting its first workshops for the region between October 27th and November 5th. There's no word of expansion to other countries, but it's clear that Kickstarter's international rollout is gathering steam.
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Could popcorn be the best ad-blocker?
COLOGNE, Germany – Chewing popcorn while watching cinema ads could make us immune to the brand message.
That's the finding of a new study by researchers at Cologne University, who tested the impact of cinema advertising on popcorn-munching moviegoers.
STORY: Shutdown Special: AMC Will Hand Out Free Popcorn to Federal Employees
The researchers invited participants to watch a film in a cinema preceded by a series of ads for new, unknown products. Half the audience was given free popcorn to eat during the ads; the others got a small sugar cube that dissolved in their mouths within a minute.
A week after the screening, the researchers tested the participants to analyze the effect of the cinema ads.
While viewers who only received sugar were more likely to recognize and purchase one of the new brands presented in the movie commercials, the popcorn munchers were less likely to do so.
The effect was significant. Only 40 percent of popcorn eaters chose to buy one of the newly advertised products a week later, while fully 65 percent of the non-chewers did so.
Published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology under the title "Popcorn in the Cinema: Oral Interference Sabotages Advertising Effects," the study is based on a new psychological theory about how the brain absorbs brand messages.
STORY: Analyst: Movie Theater Chains Should Focus on Customer Satisfaction, Not Popcorn Profits
According to the theory, when we are introduced to a new brand name, our lips and tongue begin to subconsciously simulate the pronunciation of the name. Each time the brand is mentioned, our brain practices the name with a sort of “inner speech,” going through the motions the mouth would need to pronounce the name.
Chewing, the researchers found, disrupted this inner speech.
“The brain is so busy with the act of chewing that it does not have the space to do this subconscious articulation,” Sascha Topolinski, one of the study's researchers, told THR. “The brand name gets blocked out.”
The findings suggest popcorn machines and candy counters in cinema foyers could be counterproductive. “Selling candy in theaters undermines advertising effects, which contradicts present marketing strategies,” Topolinski said.
But he added that the “popcorn effect” only applies to new brands.
“An ad for Marlboro, for example, is fine,” he said (cigarette ads are still legal in Germany), “because the brand name is well known and the ad just conveys a certain feeling about the brand, the Wild West or whatever. But novel brands, say for Internet companies with odd names like Zalando -- it could be a problem.”
He suggests advertisers should try to prevent candy and popcorn being sold until after the ad roll.
So far, however, there's been no response from the advertising industry to the Cologne study.
“I guess they just need time to digest it,” Topolinski said.
Elephants understand the human gesture of pointing, new research suggests.
The ability is even more impressive given that the animals received no training to understand the gesture and have never been domesticated.
"By showing that African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, without any training to do so, we have shown that the ability to understand pointing is not uniquely human but has also evolved in a lineage of animal very remote from the primates," study co-author Richard Byrne of the University of St Andrews said in a statement.
The new finding gives elephants membership in a select club that includes dogs, cats and bottlenose dolphins. Chimpanzees that have lived with humans can be trained to follow a point, but wild chimps typically fare worse than dogs at understanding human gestures. [5 Animals With a Moral Compass]
Byrne and his colleague Anna Smet, also of St. Andrews, studied a group of 11 African elephants that took tourists on rides near Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The animals had been trained to follow vocal commands, but had never learned pointing.
The team hid tasty morsels of food in several containers, then pointed to the correct bin to direct elephants to the food.
The elephants went to the correct food container two-thirds of the time, significantly above chance. All told, five out of 11 of the elephants consistently went to the right container. In contrast, 1-year-old children typically get it right about 70 percent of the time.
Even more impressive, many of the pachyderms chose the correct bin from the first try.
"What really surprised us is that they did not apparently need to learn anything. Their understanding was as good on the first trial as the last, and we could find no sign of learning over the experiment," Byrne said.
Those elephants born in captivity or bred for more human contact performed no better at the task.
Though elephants make other gestures with their trunks, no one knows whether those gestures are parallel to pointing.
The findings suggest that elephants' ability to follow a point may arise from their social natures. Elephants live in large groups and display many emotional behaviors, including marking the gravesites of lost pack members and weeping for their dead. Elephants also recognize themselves in a mirror, a hallmark of animals with sociality and empathy.
"What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy, and help for others are critical for survival. It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or, more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it," Byrne said.
The research was published today (Oct. 10) in the journal Current Biology.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, we have Greylock’s newest partner, Simon Rothman, joining us in the studio. You can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.
Rothman, who was recently promoted from EIR to Partner on Greylock’s consumer investment team, was formerly at eBay. He joined eBay in 1999 when it was still a small, U.S. collectibles auction business and helped scale eBay to nearly 200 million users generating over $40 billion in merchandise sales. While at eBay, Rothman led U.S. operations and also founded eBay Motors, which he built into a $14 billion a year global business. Following eBay he also founded Glyde, an e-commerce marketplace for electronics and more. And Rothman served as a board member of and adviser to Tesla Motors.
With Greylock’s new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, we’re curious to hear where Rothman is bullish when it comes to networks.
Please send us your questions for Rothman here or put them in the comments below!
Simon joined Greylock in 2011 as an Executive-in-Residence and was promoted to Partner in 2013. He invests in entrepreneurs building consumer networks and platforms. His area of focus includes network effects businesses, transaction-based startups, and mobile apps with a specialty around marketplaces. He has served as an advisor to many marketplaces and networks including Lyft, Wanelo, Poshmark, Tango, and others. Simon is also leading Greylock’s $100 million commitment to marketplace investments. Simon is an early pioneer of online...
Greylock partners with entrepreneurs to help them build market-leading businesses. Over the past 45 years the firm has worked with hundreds of companies, 150 of which have gone on to IPOs and 100 of which have gone on to profitable M&A events. Such companies include Ascend Communications, CheckFree, CipherTrust, Constant Contact, Continental Cable, Decru, Data Domain, DoubleClick, Farecast, Internet Security Systems, Ikanos, Legato, Media Metrix, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Openwave, Open Market, OutlookSoft, Polyserve, Red Hat, RightNow Technologies, Success Factors, Tellabs,...
The British National Crime Agency has secured its first conviction following an investigation by the agency's National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU).
Launched last week as a replacement for the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, the NCA is being positioned as a single law enforcement agency that will be responsible for leading the national response to organized crime—this covers everything from cross-border criminal networks to cybercrime, as well as tracking down child sex abusers using the Internet to target children.
The NCCU is a combination of the cybercrime-fighting function that was built up under SOCA and the Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit, which was brought in under the NCA's control after building up a strong reputation in recent years.
Olukunle Babatunde, 27, of Croydon, South East London, was sentenced to serve five years and six months at Inner London Crown Court, after pleading guilty to a number of offenses including conspiracy to defraud banks, financial institutions, and their customers.
He was arrested in connection with an ongoing operation, investigating the distribution of stolen financial data obtained by means of "organized international crime." Babatunde sent out rogue phishing emails in the hope that customers would give up their banking details—which could be sold on the black market or used directly.
The agency has said that if Babatunde had been successful in his phishing operation he could have stolen nearly $1.2 million.
"This is an excellent result built on the joint working of precursor agencies and has involved the examination of a large number of data, resulting in 765 victim accounts being identified," said Andy Archibald, head of the NCCU."The National Crime Agency will continue to share information and intelligence with regards to serious and organized cyber crime, ensuring those who pose a threat to the public are identified and held accountable for their actions."
