Friday Fun Blog: Robot Journalist Edition

You know it, you love it–it’s time again for everyone’s favorite time-wasting link dump, The Friday Fun Blog! This week’s Friday Fun Blog is brought to you by Capital One. Not really, but you’d think they are considering they send me thousands of credit card applications every day. There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and Capital One credit card applications being in my mailbox every day.

On to the links!

-Twitter is a place where you can express yourself in 140 characters, get breaking news, and share with the world around them. It’s also a place to create a fake account for a celebrity. Check out this article about the sheer amount of Will Ferrell accounts, which is weird, because Ferrell isn’t even on Twitter.

-Here’s a video of an orange exploding in slow motion. No other explanation is needed.

-Apparently the Associated Press has been using ROBOTS to write articles for them. They partnered with Automated Insights to develop a system that is able to automate and publish a story following the full AP Style Guide. You won’t tell the difference until you read at the bottom that it was automated by a robot. Rest assured that the Friday Fun Blog will never be published by a robot, even though I would really like one to.

-ESPN is the worldwide leader in sports (and the worldwide leader in idiotic sports personalities. Looking at you, Skip Bayless) and they are banking huge on being the first to have the best highlights and the first to have all the live sports stories. Check out this incredibly insightful article to get a little behind-the-scenes action on the future of sports broadcasting and how ESPN is battling the Internet.

-New app Minibar is trying to deliver alcohol to you. Finally, someone understands the desire of lazy people to get super drunk on their couch without moving.

-Despite society’s love of science and all the amazing stuff it has brought us (like that cellphone you stare into to ignore other humans), most US adults don’t see eye-to-eye with scientists and their discoveries. The Pew Research Institute released a new study showing the gigantic (and incredibly depressing) gap between what scientists (the scientists) believe and what the public (the not scientists) believes.

And finally…

-From the BBC comes this hauntingly beautiful video of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp from WW2 shot from a drone. It captures the amazing and depressing sense of scale, detail, and organization that the Nazi’s employed in the process of “exterminating” one million people who entered its grounds. The most chilling aspect of this video is of the entrance to Auschwitz, with the archway reading “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which translated reads, “Work Makes You Free”.

For more information contact The Colocation America Staff