Nintendo has announced it’s set to release a black version of the 3DS XL on August 11.
This brings the number of shades North Americans can buy their 3DS XLs in up to four, with the others being blue, red and pink.
There were rumours that a black 3DS XL would be coming to America a couple of weeks ago, after an advert for Mario & Luigi: Dream Team on Cartoon Network displayed such a device.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at IGN Video Games
It has been nearly two months since The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong was published in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, meaning that soccer quants in North America have had to pay for international shipping if they wanted to get their hands on the book. The need for such expensive shipping ends on July 30th, 2013 when the book is published in both the United States and Canada. While the authors of the book, Chris Anderson and David Sally, have been very pleased with the book’s reception in Europe they are looking forward to what they hope is a slightly different reaction in North America. David Sally explained, “I think we are really glad with the reaction in the UK and The Netherlands where the book launched a few weeks ago. I think we’re hoping the reaction is going to be even stronger in the US because there is more of an appetite for statistics in sports. It’s a more natural audience. I think there is also the coolness and hipness factor to soccer. A lot of people are trying to understand the game more deeply, and we hope the books serves as a way to get even deeper into the game.” Chris Anderson believes North Americans’ appetite for numbers combined with soccer being a less popular sport than it is in Europe makes the book perfect learning material about a game that is rising in popularity. “[Dave and I] are Americans, and we love American soccer. We’d love to see the game grow in the US, so in whatever small way the book can tell them something about soccer they didn’t know but they wanted to know and will help them understand and make sense of what’s going on on the field when they’re watching or their kids are playing. If we can contribute to helping grow soccer in the US in whatever small way I’d personally be really excited about that.” The way Anderson and Sally approach learning about the game is by asking repeated, intelligent questions, answering them with the best available data, and then asking the next logical question that comes from the answer to the previous question. In laymen’s terms, they end up pealing back the layers of the soccer onion. The duo divides their examination of the game into three parts: Before the Match, which examines the larger patterns within the game that seem largely immutable: luck accounts for 50% of the outcome of a match, frequency of scorelines are relatively consistent between top leagues, and the rarity of goal scoring makes the game somewhat unpredictable and the value of goal scorers dependent upon when they score their goals versus the scoreline of the match. On the Pitch, which explains how the game is a balance of strategies. Preventing a goal is more important to earning points than scoring one, the game is about managing turnovers, and the game can be controlled by both tiki taka as well …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
By The Huffington Post News Editors
By Sean Treacy
The first humans to settle the Pacific islands left a wave of extinct bird species in their wake. But gaps in the fossil record make it difficult to determine just how massive the loss was. Now, a new modeling study accounts for those gaps, pegging the lost-species count at nearly 1000—about 10% of the bird species in the world.
Whenever humans settle a land mass for the first time, extinctions tend to follow. The victims are often land animals with enough meat to make them appealing hunting targets, such as mammoths and moas. Numerous large animals in Australia died out after the first human settlers arrived more than 40,000 years ago, and the first North Americans may also have rendered many big mammals extinct between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
When humans first arrived on remote Pacific islands such as Fiji and Hawaii between 3500 and 700 years ago, they found birds that had evolved to become flightless, plump, and vulnerable after living in ecosystems without major predators. Humans probably hunted many of these birds to extinction, and some species also lost their habitats when humans burned away swaths of trees to make way for agriculture. “You can imagine, when you don’t have chainsaws and things, the easiest way to clear forest is to set it on fire,” says conservation ecologist and lead author Richard Duncan of the University of Canberra.
Scientists see some of these extinct birds in the fossil record, but that record is notoriously incomplete. Rough estimates have placed the total bird extinction count from about 800 to more than 2000. Duncan and his colleagues wanted to get a well-developed picture of exactly how many bird species likely died off when humans arrived.
The team decided to look for nonpasserine land birds on 41 of the 269 larger islands in the eastern Pacific. Passerines are birds that perch, such as songbirds, whereas nonpasserines are everything else, including waterfowl, birds of prey, parrots, pigeons, and rails. The team focused on nonpasserine land birds because the same large bodies that made them appealing prey also make their bones easier for archeologists to find.
The researchers then used a statistical model to estimate the number of undiscovered, extinct, nonpasserine land birds by comparing their fossils to those of species that are still alive today. “The proportion of living birds that we know are missing from the fossil record gives you an idea of how many extinct species are [also] missing,” Duncan says.
When the researchers ran the fossil data through their model, they estimated that at least 983, and as many as 1300, nonpasserine land bird species went extinct across the Pacific islands as human civilization took root there, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That means the arrival of humans in the Pacific spelled doom for roughly 10% of the world’s bird species. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Huffington Post
