BEVERLY, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 12, 2023--

British chip designing giant Arm has launched the process for a public stock listing in New York, in what could be the biggest...

On a gameplay livestream with Kai Cenat, xQc made the surprising revelation that he does not pay his Twitch moderators

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from

WhatsApp might be getting ads, according to its boss. The company has categorically ruled out that it would be put advertising in the inbox. But it might come elsewhere in the app, such as WhatsApp’s “Status” feature, which works like Instagram stories. WhatsApp has long resisted introducing ads to any part of its platform. That sets it apart from other Meta platforms, such as Instagram and Facebook, which heavily integrate advertising. WhatsApp has long been rumoured to be considering putting ads into its app, with rumours stretching back as long as five years ago. But it has largely resisted the temptation, in part because of worries about whether it would concern privacy-conscious users, whom WhatsApp has particularly targeted. In September, the Financial Times reported that it was looking at changing that. The company was evaluating whether it would work to show ads in the conversation list, the paper reported. Meta outright denied that it had been testing or working on that feature, or that it planned to. “We aren’t doing this,” WhatsApp head Will Cathcart said on Twitter. But in an interview with Brazilian newspaper Folha De S.Paulo, Mr Cathcart was asked whether the app would continue to be free and not show ads. And he said that some ads might come to other parts of the platform. The app will not put ads within the “messaging experience”, such as the inbox or chats themselves. Instead, it could come in other parts of the app, such as the Status feature as well as the new Channels tool that allows people to subscribe to messages from creators. The company could also introduce the option to charge people to subscribe to those channels, he said. That could also be advertised within those Channels. He did not give any firm information about when the feature would arrive, or any commitment that it would actually be introduced. Read More Political ads on Instagram and Facebook can be deepfakes, Meta says Instagram working to let people make AI ‘friends’ to talk to Big tech poses ‘existential threat’ to UK journalism, survey of editors finds

League of Legends Ranked 2024 changes were announced including start dates, three splits and much more.

After 'accidentally' going live on Twitch while making a private phone call, xQc appeared to have disclosed his contact information

xQc came across a post from a user claiming to have found the streamer in an OnlyFans video

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.”

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By Jonathan Allen LAHAINA, Hawaii (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Hawaii on