Week Eight : Pokemon Go

Pokemon Go appears to have done something its predecessors on Game Boy and Nintendo DS could not — attract a diverse fan base to the Pokemon universe.

A survey of 1,000 players of the enormously popular augmented reality game by mobile market research firm MFour shows that minorities and women are getting into Pokemon through the app.

Thirty-four percent of respondents said they had never played a Pokemon game before, but that number is higher among certain groups. For 49% of African-American respondents and 40% of Latino respondents, “Pokemon Go” is their first Pokemon game.

That’s compared with 32% of Caucasian respondents and 31% of Asian respondents.

About one-third of respondents were minorities. In general, race or ethnicity have no effect on who plays video games, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report. 

Thanks to “Pokemon Go,” more women are getting into the franchise as well. Of the 500 female respondents, 47% said they had never played Pokemon before the new mobile game. Among male players, just 21% of respondents were playing Pokemon for the first time. 

Pokemon’s move to new demographics could be good news for Nintendo, which owns a 32% stake in Pokemon Co., which licenses the Pokemon franchise.

Pokemon Go draws an overwhelmingly millennial crowd, with 83% of respondents aged 18 to 34.

Those who play the game aren’t breaking the bank for in-app purchases. Only 26% of respondents have spent on extra “Pokemon Go” features, 62% of whom have dropped $10 or less.  

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tn-pokemon-demographics-20160718-snap-story.html

Structure of the Lead：

WHO - Pokemon Go
WHEN - not given

WHAT - Pokemon Go attracts diverse crowd of gamers
WHY - Pokemon Go appears to have done something its predecessors on Game Boy and Nintendo DS could notWHERE - not given

HOW - people play the augmented reality game

Keywords：

1. predecessor : (n.) 前輩
2. diverse : (adj.) 不同的

3. augmented : (adj.) 增加的，擴增的
4. ethnicity : (n.) 種族
5. franchise : (n.) 公民權
6. demographic : (adj.) 人口統計學的
7. overwhelmingly : (adv.) 壓倒地
8. millennial : (adj.) 美滿的

Week Seven : 白頭盔

When a bomb comes crashing down on a building, leaving devastation in its wake, they rush towards the site instead of towards shelters. With their bare hands, they search for people in the rubble. They try to pull out survivors who are shocked and wounded, tormented by fear and, not least, the knowledge that civilians long ago stopped being collateral damage, and are precisely the target in this war. These rescuers are Syria’s White Helmets, a group of 3,000 local volunteers. Once tailors or carpenters or students or engineers, they are now dedicated to saving lives when fighter jets and helicopters drop barrel bombs, cluster explosives, phosphorus bombs and chlorine shells on neighbourhoods or hospitals. As the Nobel committee prepares to announce this year’s peace prize, the White Helmets deserve attention.

In Syria’s maelstrom of horrors, it is hard to find anything that points to respect for basic humanitarian principles or even human dignity. The Assad regime has unleashed untold levels of violence on the Syrian population and is being actively assisted by Russia’s military intervention as well as by Iranian-connected ground forces. Jihadi groups have grown, often filling voids left by less well-armed and well-resourced moderates. Civilians are trapped in the middle. In Aleppo, 300,000 people are exposed to a relentless barrage of airstrikes. The Syrian government and Russia now seem intent on crushing Aleppo, the opposition’s last stronghold, before a new American president takes office. Diplomacy has entirely collapsed, with acrimonious exchanges in the UN replacing attempts at a ceasefire.

This is the backdrop against which the White Helmets operate – a western-funded Syrian search-and-rescue organisation whose members put their lives at great risk to save civilians, receiving only a monthly stipend of $150. Danger is made worse by the fact those who bomb routinely resort to double-tap strikes, with fighter jets dropping ordnance and then returning to target rescue teams.

These volunteers know all too well that great power politics, alongside a tyrant’s brutal policies, have brought Syria to the abyss. They entertain no illusions that genuine measures will be taken swiftly to end massacres on a scale unprecedented in decades. The White Helmets do what they can, locally. It’s the very least the west can do to back them. No one should be surprised that Bashar al-Assad has compared these humanitarian activists to terrorists: that’s what he calls anyone who opposes him.

What the White Helmets accomplish may seem like a drop in the ocean, but what they represent is immense: resilience and bravery in the face of barbarism. They are a constant reminder that those targeted by Russia and the Assad regime’s massive bombing campaign in Aleppo are civilians, not terrorists. And they show that individual acts of courage can go a long way to fight indifference. They also embody a spirit of civic resistance – upholding some of the ideals of the peaceful, popular uprising of 2011 and exemplifying courage and solidarity in the face of state-sponsored terror. The international community has utterly failed Syrians, by failing to protect them from mass atrocities. No Nobel peace prize can erase that. But because symbols can be powerful, the White Helmets should be recognised with this award.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/05/the-guardian-view-on-the-nobel-peace-prize-give-it-to-syrias-white-helmets

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Week Six : 熊本地震

A more powerful earthquake has rocked the southern Japanese city of Kumamoto in the middle of the night, a day after an earlier tremor killed nine people.

The magnitude-7.3 quake hit at a depth of 10km (six miles) at 01:25 on Saturday (15:25 GMT on Friday) in Kyushu region. At least three people died and hundreds were injured.

A village has been evacuated after a dam collapsed, media reports say.

A tsunami warning was issued, and lifted some 50 minutes later.

Japan is regularly hit by earthquakes but stringent building codes mean that they rarely cause significant damage.

This new earthquake in Kyushu was much bigger and hit a wider area than the one that struck Kumamoto on Thursday night, says the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo.

In one town near the coast, the city hall has been so badly damaged there are fears it could collapse. A hospital has been evacuated because it is no longer safe.

Thousands of people have fled on to the streets and into parks - where they are huddled under blankets looking dazed and afraid, our correspondent says.

But there are numerous reports of people trapped inside buildings, including at least 60 inside an old people's home.

Public broadcaster NHK says the dam collapsed in the Nishihara village.

Television pictures showed thousands of people filling streets and parks, looking dazed across the region.

NHK had warned of sea waves of up to 1m (3ft).

Japan's nuclear authority said the Sendai nuclear plant was not damaged.

The quake was originally assessed as magnitude 7.1 but revised upwards to 7.3 later.

Gavin Hayes, a research geophysicist with the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Colorado, told the BBC that the latest earthquake would hamper the earlier rescue operation that was already under way.

He said more damage could be expected as the earthquake had been shallower and the fault-line had been much longer.

"The ground surface would have moved in the region of 4-5m. So, you are talking very intense shaking over quite a large area. And that's why we'll probably see a significant impact from this event."

The Associated Press news agency said guests at the Ark Hotel near the Kumamoto Castle, which was damaged, woke up and gathered in the lobby for safety.

Thursday's magnitude-6.2 quake caused shaking at some places as intense as the huge earthquake that hit the country in 2011, Japan's seismology office said.

That quake sparked a huge tsunami and nuclear meltdown at a power plant in Fukushima.

Most of those who died in Thursday's quake were in the town of Mashiki where an apartment building collapsed and many houses were damaged.

More than 1,000 people were injured.

Some 40,000 people had initially fled their homes, with many of those closest to the epicentre spending the night outside, as more than 130 aftershocks had hit the area.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-36059487

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