Kung fu explainer

Many directors and actors have been associated with the kung fu genre, Hong Kong cinema’s most unique creation, but no one compares to Lau Kar-leung (1937–2013) as a purist of the genre and the kung fu form. Associate curator La Frances Hui explores the history of the kung fu films, the actors and filmmakers associated with the genre like Bruce Lee, Gordon Liu, and Jackie Chan, and why Lau Kar-leung has been hailed as the grandmaster of kung fu films.

Neuropolitics

Does measuring people’s spontaneous reactions to a TV ad or a stump speech tell you how they will ultimately vote, however? “On the applied side, it’s pretty unclear, the hype from the reality. It’s easy to over-believe the ability of these tools.” So far cognitive tests have had mixed results. Contrasting studies have shown that implicit attitudes both do and don’t predict how people vote. Democracy assumes the presence of rational actors, capable of digesting information from all quarters and coming to reasoned conclusions. If neuroconsultants are even 50% as good as they claim at probing people’s innermost thoughts and shifting their voting intentions, it calls that assumption into question.

Miso Robotics

Flippy is the world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant that can learn from its surroundings and acquire new skills over time. Flippy is portable, collaborative, adaptable + designed for working kitchens. Flippy is designed to operate in an existing commercial kitchen layout and serve along with kitchen staff to safely and efficiently complete cooking tasks.

Solar System Destinations

Poor old Europa isn’t out to kill you, per se. It’s a big oceanic world, after all, just waiting for us to find life. It seems to have all the right ingredients for it hiding under a thick ice shelf.

The problem comes in when you consider Europa’s location: firmly within the radiation belts of Jupiter. Io and Europa are bombarded with lethal amounts of radiation. The future Europa Clipper mission even avoids orbiting Europa directly to lengthen the craft’s lifetime. If you landed Europa’s surface, the radiation dose would kill you—and anything else—within days.

FB Stories

Stories potentially have significant value for Facebook beyond strategic positioning. First and foremost, the fact that users find Stories even more engaging than the News Feed suggests there is at least the possibility to create even more engaging advertising as well. This is in fact another way to look at that chart about the top 200 advertisers: the biggest spenders are brand advertisers, and while it is to Facebook’s credit that they serve the long tail, there remains a significant opportunity the company has mostly not tapped into, and oh-by-the-way, those are the advertisers best equipped to spend the money to make an effective Stories ad; after all, they’re already spending the money on TV.

Android fork consequences

Those modifications lead to headaches, though, including the well-established problem of delays in shipping security updates. They can also, as Stavrou and his team have uncovered, result in firmware bugs that put users at risk. “The problem is not going to go away, because a lot of the people in the supply chain want to be able to add their own applications, customize, add their own code. That increases the attack surface, and increases the probability of software error. They’re exposing the end user to exploits that the end user is not able to respond to.”

Ancient Greece colors

Once upon a time, long before wars, natural disasters and erosion took hold of the ancient Greek statues, these ivory gems vibrated with color. Ancient Greek sculptors valued animated and pulsating depictions as much as they valued perfection and realism, and it has finally become fact that these artists utilized color in their creations. The stark white Parthenon once breathed in blues, yellows and reds, and—though it took 1000s of years for this to be solidified in art historical circles—now, scholars are finally able to display the ancient world with the same rainbow vitality it once possessed.