PIKETON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2023--

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been approved by the UK regulator.

Today’s Google Doodle is a reminder that some human beings are truly extraordinary. The design, which you’ll see if you head to the search engine’s homepage, is a celebration of Dr Mohamed “Mod” Helmy – a man who risked his life to save Jewish people during the Second World War. Dr Helmy was born in Khartoum, Sudan, on 25 July, 1901, to an Egyptian father and a German mother. At the age of 21, he moved to Germany to study medicine, swiftly proving his skills as a talented physician and becoming head of urology at Berlin’s Robert Koch Hospital (now known as Krankenhaus Moabit). Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was to turn his happy life upside down. Dr Helmy was forced to watch, powerless, as his Jewish colleagues were all fired from the hospital. And whilst he was initially kept on, he was soon subjected to discrimination and persecution for being a North African, and lost his job, too. He was also banned from marrying his German fiancée Annie Ernst (although, we’re pleased to say, he was able to do so some years later). In 1939 and again in 1940, the doctor was arrested along with other Egyptian nationals. And although the Nazis released him when he became gravely ill, he was under strict instruction to report to the police twice a day as proof he was unfit for internment. Despite being targeted by the regime himself, Dr Helmy continued to speak out against Nazi policies and, after being demoted to the role of doctor’s assistant, he made the most of his limited position by writing sick notes to help innocent people escape hard labour. He also repeatedly risked his life to help his Jewish friends. When Berlin’s deportation of the Jews began and his family friend Anna Boros was in need of a hiding place, Dr Helmy brought her to a cabin he owned in the neighbourhood of Buch. This became her safe haven until the end of the war, as Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Center, notes in its biography of the doctor. At times of danger, when he was under police investigation, Dr Helmy would arrange for Boros to hide elsewhere. “A good friend of our family, Dr Helmy…hid me in his cabin in Berlin-Buch from 10 March until the end of the war,” she wrote after the war. “As of 1942 I no longer had any contact [with] the outside world. The Gestapo knew that Dr Helmy was our family physician, and they knew that he owned a cabin in Berlin-Buch. “He managed to evade all their interrogations. In such cases he would bring me to friends where I would stay for several days, introducing me as his cousin from Dresden. When the danger would pass, I would return to his cabin. “Dr Helmy did everything for me out of the generosity of his heart and I will be grateful to him for eternity”. Dr Helmy also helped protect Boros’ mother, Julianna, her stepfather, Georg Wehr, and her grandmother, Cecilie Rudnik. Thanks to his courage and resourcefulness, all four of them survived the Holocaust. He remained in Berlin until his death in 1982. In 2013, Yad Vashem posthumously bestowed its Righteous Among the Nations award on Dr Helmy. He was the first Arab rescuer to be awarded the prestigious title. The Google Doodle artwork was created by Berlin-based artist Noa Snir to honour his Egyptian and German background and capture his open-hearted nature. Speaking about her work on the project, Snir told a Google Q&A: ": I found the story of Mod Helmy very moving. I come from a Jewish background, and the thought of individuals outside of the Jewish community risking their lives to help others during WW2 is something that personally gives me hope about humanity. "I think Helmy's case is an especially interesting one as he himself suffered persecution due to his background and ethnicity, and that still didn't stop him from helping as many people as he could. It's unfathomable to me, this type of courage and integrity." She added that she hoped people would view her Doodle and reflect on the fact that "even in one of the darkest moments in world history, there were truly remarkable people who made acts of extreme courage and solidarity". "I think we should all aspire to be the Mod Helmy's of the world, or ask ourselves how we can take example from him in whatever small way we can," she said. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

PERTH, Australia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 28, 2023--

The Apex Legends Uprising Collection Event features new skins for Valkyrie, Bangalore, and more, as well as the Loba Prestige skin, releasing on Dec. 5.

Google Meet will now let an AI attend a meeting for you. The company is rolling out its “Duet AI” which integrates artificial intelligence into Google Meet, its video chat service. It brings a whole host of features with it: it can automatically improve the look, lighting and sound of a video caller, for instance, and detect people’s faces so that they do not appear far away in meeting rooms. It will automatically generate captions in 18 languages, detecting what is being spoken and showing translation in real time. But perhaps most notable is a system that can use artificial intelligence to watch meetings and then recap them. Users can delegate note taking, so that an automatically generated summary of a meeting is sent to attendees when a meeting is over. And if someone arrives late to a meeting, they will be able to see a “summary so far” that will catch them up with everything that has been said. If they do not want to attend the meeting at all, they can choose “attend for me”, sending the AI to the meeting in behalf, passing on any message or input and then sending a recap after it is over. Artificial intelligence in meetings has proven controversial in recent weeks. A new change to Zoom’s rules led to fears that it was using private calls to train its AI systems – and while the company denied it, it caused a run of concern about whether meetings were really private. Google said that when using the Duet tool “no other user will see your data and Google does not use your data to train our models without your permission”. All interactions with the Duet AI are “private to you”, Google said. Read More Behind the AI boom, the armies of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’ AI can detect Parkinson’s up to seven years before symptoms appear, study finds AI poses a profound threat – but could also help save us, experts agree

Tyler1's imposing build may give the impression that he towered over others but that is not true

One expert believes he’s “solved” the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. Channel 5’s documentary, Secrets of the Bermuda Triangle, featured an interview with mineral prospector Nick Hutchings. Hutchings said that geology could explain the disappearances of planes and boats. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Bermuda Triangle is in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean and “has captured the human imagination with unexplained disappearances of ships, planes, and people.” The region has also been referred to as ‘The Devil’s Triangle’, with reports of disappearances in the area date as far back as the middle of the 19th century. Reports of distress signals or wreckages resulted in crews and passengers never being heard from again. Many have come up with conspiracy theories in an attempt to explain the bizarre occurrences that happen in and around the Bermuda Triangle. Some believe the lost city of Atlantis is responsible, others think it has something to do with rogue waves, and few go as far to suggest it is a portal to another space and time. But Hutchings has a different theory. This one involves rocks. “Bermuda’s basically a sea mountain - it’s an underwater volcano. 30 million years ago, it was sticking up above sea level,” Hutchings explained. “It has now eroded away and we’re left with the top of a volcano. We have a few core samples, which have magnetite in them. It’s the most magnetic naturally occurring material on Earth.” Using only a small piece of rock and a compass, Hutchings conducted an experiment during the documentary to demonstrate what this meant for ships sailing through the area. When the compass was passed over the rock its needle went berserk, ultimately resulting in the navigational device being completely useless. “You can just imagine the ancient mariners sailing past Bermuda,” he explained. “It would be very disconcerting.” In other words - people travelling through simply got lost. Whilst the Bermuda Triangle may seem to be this mysterious location, scientist at Sydney University, Karl Kruszelnicki, claims the percentage of missing planes and boats is similar to any other high-traffic part of the ocean. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Far be it from us to judge how you spend your money, but if you

Ana Navarro shared a meme that read, 'Selling gays a cake is participating in marriage, but selling a gun to a shooter isn’t participating in murder?'

MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 27, 2023--

Male characters in role-playing video games have 50% more dialogue than females, highlighting a “stark gender imbalance” in the gaming genre, scientists have said. In role-playing games (RPGs), the gamer controls one or more characters undertaking quests or missions in an imaginary world. Researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Cardiff analysed the dialogue of 50 RPGs from 1986 to 2020, including Final Fantasy, Skyrim and Mass Effect. This encompassed 6.2 million spoken words from 13,000 characters. The results, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, suggest 94% of the games studied had more male dialogue than female dialogue, including ones with multiple female protagonists such as Final Fantasy X-2 or King’s Quest VII. They also found that the proportion of female dialogue is slowly increasing in RPGs at a rate of 6.3 percentage points per decade – from a mean of about 18% in the 1980s to about 40% by 2020. While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games - just three of 50 - had more than 50% female dialogue Dr Stephanie Rennick, University of Glasgow However, the researchers said that if this rate were to continue, gender balance would not be reached until 2036. Dr Stephanie Rennick, research associate in philosophy, school of humanities at the University of Glasgow, said: “While we expected to find a larger proportion of male dialogue overall, we were surprised to discover how few games – just three of 50 – had more than 50% female dialogue. “I was also surprised that the lack of female characters compared to their male counterparts persisted at every level, from main player characters through to background NPCs (non-player characters).” For the study, the researchers obtained the transcripts of dialogue used in the games and identified which character said what. Dr Sean Roberts, lecturer at the school of English, communication and philosophy at Cardiff University, said: “We categorised the gender of each character, not assuming binary gender. “This allowed us to count how many words were available for each gender in each game. “For example, we can compare the number of words spoken by female characters to the number of words spoken by male characters.” The researchers found only 35% of words were spoken by female characters and they were more likely to apologise, hesitate or be polite, compared with their male counterparts. They said the proportion of female dialogue ranged from 6% (King’s Quest VI) to 80% (King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella). They discovered one game, Monkey Island, did not pass the Bechdel test, which requires two named female characters to talk to each other about something besides a man. Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers Dr Sean Roberts, Cardiff University The team also found examples of stereotyped gendered behaviour. The researchers said that in Stardew Valley, characters respond differently depending on the player character’s gender. For example, they said, female players are offered a salad, wine, repeatedly described as beautiful and assumed to have little experience of video games, while male players are offered pasta, ale, described as “full of energy” and are assumed to be good video game players. Analysis also showed only 30 out of 13,000 characters belong to the non-binary gender categories, which is about half as much as in real life, the researchers said. Dr Roberts said: “Around half of gamers are female, but they experience a lot of abuse and exclusion. “More diverse representation is being called for by players and developers. “So we hope that developers will consider addressing the imbalances we found in order to create more inclusive games.”