Paris is experiencing a boom in tech startups recently fueled by the newly introduced policies of the Macron government to attract tech entrepreneurs and investors. Along with the growing discontent, rising living costs, and disparities in the tech circles of Silicon Valley, France is propping itself up to become the hub for tech in Europe.

Driving this shift is a growing contrast in France’s approach toward global tech innovations to the U.K. and the U.S., experts say. On the one hand, London’s status as a financial and innovation hub stands challenged by Brexit’s enduring uncertainties. And America and Britain are tightening up on immigration. On the other hand, the French government is aggressively courting tech entrepreneurs and investments — a strategy that’s showing results.

In 2017, the Emmanuel Macron government introduced a program that fast-tracks four-year residence visas for tech entrepreneurs and their families. Since then, French tech startups are witnessing a dramatic increase in funding: There were 743 French startups raising money in 2017, a 45 percent increase from 2016, according to CB Insights. Global giants are taking notice, with both Facebook and Google opening new AI research centers in Paris. Google has even announced plans to create local “hubs” to teach digital skills in other French cities, such as Rennes, with the goal of getting more people online (and using Google products).

Still though, Europe isn't necessarily riding a big wave when it comes to the technology industry unlike neighboring Asia where big tech companies are soaring because of increasing demand and purchasing power from its consumers as well as lower production costs among other investments needed to build and expand one's business. But this is an important first step.

With these initiatives, we might see an increasing need for Europe to open itself up to the business of tech and perhaps relaxing their stringent policies with regard to the internet and doing business through digital platforms. It might also be great for having collaboration and diversity in an industry which has been criticized for its inequality and toxic corporate culture.

We have yet to see how these efforts will make the tech industry as a whole flourish and encourage more innovation that would benefit society at large without incurring the ills of what Silicon Valley turned out to be, but at the very least this is a promising start.

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Being out on the battlefield, soldiers risk their lives every day for their country. Apart from psychological trauma and other possible damage done to them while in the line of service, there are also seemingly minor injuries which could debilitate their daily lives. Hearing damage is one of them.

Hundreds of veterans are now claiming that the earplugs issued to them caused hearing loss. They have filed lawsuits against 3M, the manufacturer of the "dual-ended combat arms earplugs" issued to them.

Hundreds of soldiers are now claiming that the earplugs didn’t work, and they’ve suffered hearing loss as a result. The defective design allegedly causes hearing loss, tinnitus and a loss of balance. By the end of the fiscal year 2015, there were 2.6 million veterans receiving disability benefits for tinnitus and hearing loss, according to a Veterans Administration study.

However, originally the manufacturer of the earplugs had been a company named Aearo Technologies which was subsequently purchased by 3M in 2008. It seems that Aearo had been aware of the defects that their products exhibited according to the Department of Justice. 3M denies that these earplugs were the cause of hearing damage saying that they had conformed to the design and specifications required by the military.

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It is a very rare occurrence for the aurora borealis to appear in places below the Arctic Circle but scientists said that several parts of the US will get to see them this week.

Following a significant release of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's corona, the Space Weather Prediction Center announced a geomagnetic storm watch for this week.

During that time, the prediction center says the northern lights may appear over parts of the contiguous United States. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and most of New England all fall within the projected aurora zone.

(Image credit: SSgt. Joshua Strang/Dept. of Defense/US military; Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

In any story, whether it is in a video game platform or other forms of media, there are certain narrative devices that writers and designers include to make the experience more engaging. These also serve to establish the premise of the world in which the characters move.

Particularly in survival horror games, deception is a crucial device. From the perception of the world and its structure or environment to the role that a character plays in that world, deception plays an important part to make it more enjoyable and at times, to push the story further.

A key narrative element of survival horror games is deception: making the player think or believe something that isn’t necessarily true. Many horror games – with Prey being no exception – rely on the narrative hook of the player-character (in this case, Morgan Yu) having some form of amnesia. This amnesia is a convenient trope which allows and motivates the player to uncover the chain of events that led to the starting point of the game (for more on this, see Kirkland, 2009).

Samantha Webb analyzes these narrative devices in survival horror games which give players not just a visceral but a cerebral experience of the game. You may read more of her study on First Person Scholar.

(Image credit: BerzekerLT/Fandom; Bethesda)

From the dawn of time, humans have found games as the fundamental means for entertainment. It involves strategic thinking, teamwork, foresight, and a whole lot of fun among other skills that it takes for one to enjoy a game. Yes, enjoying a game requires us to actually be good at it.

Games aren't limited within one space alone. We often associate games nowadays with the digital platforms as video games have become widely available through smartphones and PCs. But we can find games or its principles in economy, politics, society, and other aspects of life: competition, limited resources, interaction with other players.

Games aren’t just at the origins of our social order. They also lie at the origins of our digital order. Kids these days still fall in love with computers by playing with them.

The writers in this issue describe finding their way into computers through games. Some gamers are just in it for fun, while others get into managing gamer communities, and even go pro. Some gamers discover that the game isn’t what they expected—or that play is something different than what the game’s designers intended.

Sometimes, though, gaming gets serious. Games can embody a set of assumptions, even an ideology. Playing a game about cities, for example, you can absorb assumptions about how cities are supposed to be run.

Explore the different dimensions of "play" and how our lives, our culture, and our world can actually be shaped by it. From the perspective of a game, we delve deeper into the underlying mechanisms that make our world run and the different rules, contexts, assumptions, and scenarios that happen. How we respond and act will largely depend on the way we "play these games".

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I don't remember all the things I experienced as a child even if I tried but there are certain memories that stick with us even into our adulthood. These may be significant events that happened, things that left an emotional mark or they could just be the mundane things of daily life.

Childhood memories are unparalleled in their perfection and purity because you have seen so little of the world that every new experience comes with this luminosity, this ferocity, this sense of wonderment that adulthood eventually robs of you.

For parents, it may not be as clear to their children everything they did for them. But there will be moments which children will take with them. It's usually the small things, the little memories that sneak into the back of our minds that leave the most significant impact on our lives.

But all the same, whether children remember the things their parents did for them or not, what counts is how those things will mold them and make them into the people they want to be.

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We all have the right to protest which is enshrined in the constitutions of liberal nations. But perhaps, no other nation takes this right as seriously as the French. They even have a dedicated website that shows which demonstrations are scheduled for the day and where it will happen.

Protesting has become part of the French culture which is no surprise since it is widely noted that the French Revolution changed the game entirely from the public to the private arena. The people found their voice and they chose to let them be heard. 

And I think, in part, that's why protests in France are a more common sight than other places in the world. The people are spurred to action for the causes in which they believe and they take to the streets whenever they see any injustices being done. On the other hand, other countries also see their fair share of protests but perhaps not as vigorous as those of the French.

Back in the US, we have our share of demonstrations, but they tend to be, for lack of a better term, wimpier. Americans might take to the streets for a day or two, but they can’t match the work ethic of those French men and women who, every morning, don their uniform of protest and trudge dutifully to the picket lines. The participation rates are staggering. Adjusting for population, a Parisian-scale protest would equal six million descending on Washington.

Of course, one other thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the impact of these protests. Being an ordinary occurrence, the question is whether the government, businesses, or whatever institution or policy the demonstrators protest against will respond to these concerns with urgency.

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Though many people, especially media executives in traditional media, think that the new generation of children and teenagers have very short attention spans and simply flip through their smartphones not caring about the kind of content they consume, that's not necessarily the case.

Kids of today crave for high quality shows and content too. The only thing is that there are limited shows catering to these demographics with the kind of quality that say something like the MCU has.

Most shows oriented toward teenagers have the same boring tropes. And those that try to shake things up, have skewed perceptions of what teenagers of today are really like, what they value, what their habits are, and what kind of content they want to consume.

Fishman thought teenage girls were being fed “empty calories” rather than high-quality narrative shows. Historically, they were limited to shows by Nickelodeon and Disney — geared toward younger eyes — while MTV skewed older, says Carter Hansen, who founded Different Entertainment and previously worked at Generation Z media company Awesomeness. And for a generation increasingly literate with social platforms and distant from traditional TV channels, there was “nobody creating content in ways they wanted to consume it” back in the early 2010s, Hansen adds.

People assume Gen Zers have 20-second attention spans, content to flick through Instagram feeds and watch stories that disappear. Fishman diagnosed them differently: If you serve a whole generation with disposable assets, he argues, you’ll train them to throw things away. This climate spurred Fishman to launch Brat, a YouTube-first digital production company, in 2017, with partner Darren Lachtman.

The concept of Brat's shows has been modeled after the MCU, in which characters' storylines overlap with other shows such that viewers can get to see them interact with each other. This would also let them expand the direction in which they take the narratives.

Despite casting social media influencers without any acting experience, Brat has seen quite some success with at least 4 billion minutes consumed by the audience on Youtube to date. Each episode has at least 50,000 concurrent viewers while the channel itself has garnered 3.1 million subscribers.

The shows are meant to occupy the space between casual vlogs and scarcer high-budget Netflix series — as Brat seeks a piece of the fast-declining traditional television market, with its nearly $70 billion in ad dollars.

Now, this is not to say that Brat won't be facing any challenges. Though it is true that Youtube's platform has good reach, that doesn't mean Brat has dominance over the market. And they still have to contend with traditional media and streaming services like Netflix who have also been churning out good original shows aggressively.

Brat is operating in an increasingly crowded, or “unprecedentedly fragmented” space, as Napoli puts it. And Brat’s use of influencers is hardly breakthrough, as other media companies like Awesomeness — founded years earlier in 2012 — leveraged already-popular YouTubers.

We are yet to see whether Brat's strategy will pay off in the long run.

(Image credit: Zoe Valentine/Brat)

Recent books published by Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz chronicle their life stories from when they were starting out in the world of corporate America to making it big and eventually moving on to loftier goals such as holding public office.

Ben Fountain from The New York Review of Books takes a dive into these memoirs by these billionaires and tries to deconstruct the different aspects particularly their politics and reality.

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Art and life has its way of coming together once again as is reflected in a "once in a lifetime" chance to portray several paintings, drawings, and prints by the artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder which will be exhibited at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

For 450 years, these works have been separated - some stolen, others seized, and still others went missing - but now, under the auspices of the KHM, the Bruegels will be reunited once more.

Of the original six Seasons, one found its way to the Prince of Lobkowicz, another was seized during the Napoleonic Wars and ended up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a third was lost forever. For many of the paintings, this year’s exhibition was a homecoming. The Lobkowicz family, having reclaimed its collections after the Velvet Revolution, generously lent Haymaking, uniting four of the five surviving Seasons (the Met deemed The Harvesters too fragile to send).

(Image credit: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in the collection Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte; Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

We are seeing a tremendous shift in the political climate of major powers of the world. The sentiments of the public lean toward and long for the old days when they felt governments were more stable.

Far from innocuous, the infatuation with a mythicized past is shaping politics in risky ways. Nostalgia induces citizens to find comfort in a time when the world was less flat and governments (apparently) had the power to protect their citizens from external threats.

This nostalgia affects everyone. Perhaps, we can't prevent people from looking back to "happier" times when things felt secure and there were less uncertainties plaguing their daily lives. But I wouldn't say that applies to all.

Though there are people throughout the world who remember better times in the early 20th century, there is an equal number of people whose identities were forged through suffering and hardship which led to reforms that enable the newer generations to enjoy freedoms which their predecessors did not.

Despite its Romantic flavor, nostalgia is actually a malaise—and should be treated as such. From a purely psychological point of view, nostalgia represents a coping strategy for dealing with moments of deep uncertainty and radical discontinuity.

It removes its victims from an unpleasant present and throws them into a familiar past, reinforcing their self-esteem and the self-confidence, which are needed to navigate periods of sustained stress. But nostalgia is usually accompanied by amnesia. It depicts the past in such an idealized way that some details, often not irrelevant, are lost.

Which is why in an age of nostalgia, people need to be more aware and proactive in imparting the truth of history to their children. Of course, we can only share those which we know and given that we live in a world of disinformation, let us just be sure that we know what happens in reality.

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Plans for lunar settlements aren't the only things that NASA has in its sleeves. There are possibilities of further advancing national security through developments in space exploration.

NASA estimates that these projects would require at least $1.6 billion to fund. These funds will be allocated for the production of lunar landers, development of technology in exploration, and other missions that the space agency will conduct in preparation for the Moon Plan. However, they would take some of those funds away from the lunar Gateway.

The Trump administration has prioritized an acceleration of America’s space exploration program, with the ambitious vision of returning astronauts to the moon’s South Pole by 2024 and establishing a sustainable human presence by 2028 using NASA’s new deep space exploration systems, the powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion crew vehicle.

With a renewed emphasis on space, the Trump administration is reasserting American leadership in an area that is not necessarily front of mind as a strategic concern. Fortunately, the administration’s efforts are bolstered by the fact that Congress has a history of acting in a bipartisan manner to protect and strengthen America’s interests in space.

(Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls, Flickr; CC by SA 2.0)

In the case that a doomsday asteroid hits Earth, researchers say that we have the assurance that life on Earth will bounce back or rather, fall back to Earth after the initial impact.

Steinn Sigurdsson and colleagues conducted a computer simulation of a massive asteroid said to potential wipe all life on Earth. But hold your horses because this doesn't necessarily mean all life will become extinct and the Earth would be blasted to oblivion.

"If you have a sterilizing impact — if you have a beyond dinosaur killer, something that’s going to flash fry the entire planet — there is a significant probability that some biota is ejected and returns to the planet, hopefully gently, fast enough to reseed the planet," he added.

The existence of such "space refuges" is supported by computer simulations Sigurðsson and his colleagues recently performed, which tracked the trajectories of rock blasted off Earth and the other rocky planets into orbit around the sun.

They added that what caused the dinosaurs' extinction 66 million years ago might have been a global firestorm that blazed through the surface of the Earth as the rocks were falling back to Earth.

(Image credit: TBIT/Pixabay)

She is one of many role models for women in science who advocated for better treatment of women in the workplace. She was also a brilliant aerospace engineer who worked on Pioneer, Apollo, and the Hubble missions.

(Image credit: Neil Siegel/USC Viterbi School)

For books to sell, they don't just need to have great content. In fact, it all starts before the reader even picks up the book and flips through it. The moment a book catches your eye is the most critical.

Otherwise, no matter how well-researched, entertaining, or wonderfully captivating your story or text is, it won't achieve its purpose since nobody even takes notice of it.

Everything from the content to the book's design i.e. how the pages and text are presented, the aesthetic elements of the book cover and even the type of paper, and most importantly a title that piques someone's interest from the get-go.

In this respect, I think having a title in three words or less may be the most effective as a rule of thumb, and perhaps, boldly stating the title of your book in a single word would be most intriguing.

Merriam-Webster talked to 11 authors on how they came up with their one-word titles. Here's one example:

A.S. Byatt, Possession

The book began with a word - the title - Possession. Earlier novels have begun with characters, or themes, but Possession began when I was watching the great Canadian Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, working in the British Museum and thought - "she cannot have had a thought that was not his thought for the last 30 or 40 years." And then I thought - "and what I know about him is mediated through her - she edited all his notebooks, checked the sources of the quotations, etc."

And then I thought, "I could write a novel called Possession about the relationship between a dead poet and a living scholar." And the word possession would have all sorts of senses - daemonism, ownership, obsession……

-via Kottke

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