Saturday 17 September 2016
5 Best Songs on Usher’s ‘Hard II Love
It’s been four years and a lot of personal heartache between Usher’s seventh studio album Looking 4 Myself and his newest release Hard II Love, which arrived today (September 16). It’s clear in that span of time Usher has not only done a lot of soul searching, but has also explored some of the newer musical styles that have emerged since his last project.
That’s not to say Hard II Love doesn’t come with straight up Usher moments. But, rather, the 15-track album feels split right down the middle. The first half shows off new sides to the artist, who is clearly dipping his toe into more contemporary styles, while the latter half sees him to return to form with a series of songs that show Usher doing what Usher does best: make people sensual as hell. Here are the five best songs on Hard II Love.
“Tell Me”
At a staggering 8:29, “Tell Me” doesn’t feel like it should fit on an album already packed with other tracks. It’s a slow, winding jam that begins with Usher crooning in his distinctive falsetto while a languid beat keeps pace in the background. This is a pure bedroom track like the kind Usher rose to fame on, and it builds into a passionate crescendo that shows off his vocal range. “Tell Me” isn’t about a booty call, it’s not about a millennial hookup, this is the kind of grand sexual love classics like Al Green and Marvin Gaye sang about. “Tell me that you wanna make love,” Usher insistently sings on the chorus, as spacey synths take this not only to another level, but another universe.
“No Limit” featuring Young Thug
The album feels like it walks a line between sexy songs and sexier songs, but on “No Limit” Usher and Young Thug tag team listeners with a fun R&B number that picks up the pace, ditches confessions of love or loss, and deals instead with big baller business. With the meter set up to create a fun staccato delivery when Usher sings “I see Mama murder that,” the track uses his vocal prowess to accentuate the song’s rhythm and uses the song’s rhythm to accentuate his vocal prowess. When it comes to spending big, “No Limit” is this generation’s answer to making it rain.
“Downtime”
This song is a curious one. From Usher’s very first lyric, he sounds like he’s stretching himself to borrow from Drake’s current style. His affected way of singing–which sounds as though he’s parroting a Caribbean accent not his own–and the way the song’s production doubles certain words to accentuate the beginning of a lyric feels straight out of Drake’s current wheelhouse. As a result, it feels foreign to Usher’s repertoire. And yet, even though he’s wearing clothes that aren’t necessarily his own that doesn’t mean he can’t make them look good. It’s slow and moody and builds in all the right places.
“Bump”
Move over “Bump and Grind.” Usher is clearly scouting out a future spot on the sexy booty songs list. He’s contributed songs to this kind of style before between “You Make Me Wanna” and “Love in this Club,” but with “Booty” he’s making a strong case as to why it’s time to rethink grinding songs. So many entail silky vocals and a strong, slow beat, but with “Bump,” Usher offers listeners a bigger bounce feel. The song samples Luke’s “I Wanna Rock (Doo Doo Brown),” splicing and slicing it so it’s nearly unrecognizable, but paired with Usher’s updated beat and his quick paced delivery, listeners are sure to find a new favorite in this track.
“Crash”
There’s a reason “Crash” was the first single Usher premiered off Hard II Love before he announced any other details. Not only is it a powerful lyrical song that details the heartache Usher experiences from a doomed relationship, but melodically and rhythmically it beautifully conveys all that pain as well. Usher’s voice, of course, is right there, breaking and cracking and straining against the struggle, attempting to fight his human nature but failing with every turn. “Would you mind if I hold onto/ You so that I won’t crash?” he sings on the chorus. Usher somehow makes heartbreak feel sexy.
Thursday 15 September 2016
Here’s how to watch Thursday Night Football on Twitter tonight
Twitter's huge day is at last here. This evening is the primary night of NFL's Thursday Night Football, which will be spilled all season on Twitter (and in addition CBS and NFL Network as link accomplices).
Twitter apparently beat out organizations like Facebook and Amazon for the selective portable stream, and at the time it was a major win for the organization under the then new CEO Jack Dorsey. Presently it's an ideal opportunity to check whether the move will pay off and bring the stage new clients who are desiring the football and not as a matter of course for Twitter itself.
So in what manner would you be able to really watch the amusement today evening time? To discover the stream you can go to the Moments tab inside the application, or you can go to tnf.twitter.com to get to it straightforwardly and from the web.
The organization likewise dispatched an Apple TV, Fire TV and Xbox One application yesterday for clients who need to steam the amusement on their real TVs. While the amusement will be accessible to watch on link, Twitter would clearly incline toward these viewers utilize their stream, so is propelling these applications to make it less demanding.
The review expierence is basically what individuals expected with a video stream at the highest point of the page, and live timetable of football-themed tweets underneath. There's likewise a spot to sort in your own tweet which Twitter is consequently metal populating with a #TNF hashtag.
American Horror Story: Roanoke’ Ratings Steady With 2015’s ‘Hotel’ In Debut
Coordinating the demo execution of the last quantities of the season finale of America's Got Talent on NBC, the 6th portion debut of the FX arrangement from Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk caught 3.572 million viewers among grown-ups 18-49 for a 2.8 rating. The Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding, Jr. driven Chapter 1 scene likewise advertisement 5.14 million aggregate viewers for its 10 PM airing. Not just does that make AHS: Roanoke the top of the line show on link the previous evening additionally tied for the first class show of Wednesday night in both communicate and link.
Maybe all the more essentially, even with Lady Gaga M.I.A. for the previous evening's presentation, as my associate Anthony D'Alessandro put it so well, Roanoke was consistent in the key demo with the October 7, 2015 opener of the Golden Globe wining American Horror Story: Hotel. Wednesday's AHS plunged only 7% from Hotel's presentation.
Viewershipwise, Roanoke's introduction was down 11% from the 5.81 million who watched the opening of Hotel. To include some connection, that is the most noticeably awful an AHS opener has done in general viewers since the 3.85 million who watched the introduction of the Asylum second portion of the compilation arrangement back on October 17, 2012.
One type to a totally different type AKA finale-to-introduction, the previous evening's AHS: Roanoke debut was up 154% in the 18-49s from the January 13 finale of Hotel, which was an AHS season ender low. In general viewers, the previous evening's introduction was up 124% over the 2.24 million who viewed the Hotel finale toward the start of the year.
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Obviously, FX says 'thank you, in particular' however these numbers don't mean much to us. Concentrated on Live + 3 numbers, where AHS has demonstrated momentous advanced the great beyond quality, the cabler will hold its festival until the principal set of deferred survey comes about come in one week from now.
For instance, the hour and a half long Hotel opener wound up conveying 12.17 million viewers on straight and non-direct stages in Live + 3 numbers. Adding to treat, 3.7 million of those viewers were in the key demo – a sweet result regardless of the possibility that down from the Live + 3 quantities of 2014's AHS: Freak Show debut.
Monday 12 September 2016
Sammy Watkins' foot causing severe discomfort, could miss weeks
The Buffalo Bills' offense didn't exactly light up the scoreboard in their season-opening loss to the Baltimore Ravens. Buffalo was held to 160 yards of total offense, its lowest total since 2006, when the Bears held them to 145 yards of offense. It was the 25th time in Buffalo's franchise history it recorded 160 total yards or fewer, per Pro-Football-Reference.
If you thought that was the worst news of the day, you're wrong. According to areport from the New York Daily News, Bills receiver Sammy Watkins (who finished with four catches for 43 yards) was experiencing "severe discomfort" in his foot during and after the game, and needed to have it X-rayed afterward to ensure it wasn't broken again (which it wasn't). He initially broke the foot back in April, though it wasn't reported until May. The discomfort is reportedly so bad that it could knock Watkins out for several weeks, depending on how it feels over the next few days.
Per CBS Sports NFL Insider Jason La Canfora, doctors have advised Watkins that there is no procedure he can undergo and it is a simply pain threshold issue related to the screws he had inserted in his foot. He is experimenting with different types of cleats to try to alleviate the problem but it is something that continues to dog him. In a short week -- Buffalo plays the Jets on Thursday -- team sources say the Bills will likely rest him a few days and then assess his condition midweek to determine Watkins' level of discomfort.
In a Buffalo offense not exactly teeming with playmakers, Watkins is the best option they have. He's Tyrod Taylor's clear No. 1 wideout and likely the best overall player on the offense. LeSean McCoy is a big-play threat as well out of the backfield, but there's nobody that threatens defenses on the outside in the manner Watkins does. Losing him for any period of time would be a huge blow to a team that really needs its offense to cover up for the disastrous offseason the defense had.
The Bills lost several players from their for extended periods due to injury and suspension (Shaq Lawson, Reggie Ragland, Marcell Dareus) and are already coming off a poor defensive season. With a schedule that sees them play the Jets on Thursday and then the Cardinals and Patriots the two weeks after that, the Bills need their offense to be firing on all cylinders to keep up. If Watkins is out or limited in any way, that may prove tougher than expected.
LinkedIn courts users in India with LinkedIn Lite, online job placement tests, business tools
As LinkedIn continues to wait for the close of its $26.2 billion acquisition by Microsoft, it continues to build out its business, with the latest developments on the international front. Last week, LinkedIn announced that it had hit 100 million users in Asia Pacific (around one-quarter of its total), and today at an event in Bengaluru, India, it unveiled three new products it’s rolling out in India, where it has 37 million users, that it hopes will now get them (and others) using the site more.
LinkedIn Lite is a new pared-down mobile version of LinkedIn that is designed to work on lower-end handsets and those that are accessing the site with limited or very expensive mobile data services. It will be rolling out in the next couple of weeks, a spokesperson tells me.
Meanwhile, the company has also launched a service called LinkedIn Placements to provide an online test for users and help place them in jobs. And for businesses, it’s launched LinkedIn Starter Pack to set up and run their profiles on the social platform.
LinkedIn Lite. Today at the event in Delhi, CEO Jeff Weiner said that LinkedIn Lite would be rolling out to users in the country in the next few months. As with other “lite” versions made for mobile, LinkedIn’s service does away with things like extra graphics and rich media to download four times faster than LinkedIn’s basic mobile site. The company claims the homepage only takes up 150 KB of data, and further pages 70 KB.
From the looks of the screenshots here, it appears the Lite version may simply be turned on by default in situations where bandwidth might be tight: as you can see the URL is LinkedIn’s basic linkedin.com.
LinkedIn Lite is a late entrant into a market that has seen a number of other attempts to grow usage numbers in India by meeting their mobile data demands: while the vast majority of people in India (which is the world’s second largest smartphone market after China) use mobile phones rather than PCs to access the internet, more generally data is very expensive for the average user, and connectivity is not as fast.
Facebook has been offering pared-down versions of its own social network for years now aimed at developing markets. They include Facebook Lite, an Android applaunched in 2015. And Zero, a text-only version introduced in 2010. Controversially, it’s also worked with carriers to launch free versions of its site, too, under the Basics brand: many complained, however, that the service violated net neutrality rules and iteventually got shut down in India. Twitter has also worked on ways of developing itsown lighter versions and specific services for markets like India.
LinkedIn Placements. While Lite is designed to get people using LinkedIn more on a daily basis, Placements is a service aimed at making LinkedIn more practical and useful for them.
Here, LinkedIn has partnered with HackerRank, as well as Aspiring Minds, Co-cubes and Wheebox, to develop an online test for users to show off their skills and interests, which are then matched up with a number of jobs being advertised on the site. You then proceed with the usual job finding process that involves interviews, references and more. There are some 50 jobs already up for Placements through the scheme in areas like software development, marketing and finance. (The emphasis initially seems to be software: HackerRank, which powers the first test, specialises in engineering and programming skills tests.)
Placements is an interesting development that touches several parts of LinkedIn’s bigger business strategy. The company has been moving very aggressively into online education services, spearheaded perhaps most obviously with its acquisition of Lynda.com, and this is an interesting development that ties in another way of using the online testing format to help boost another part of LinkedIn’s business.
That other part, of course, is recruitment advertising, which today is the company’s biggest revenue driver. Right now, while LinkedIn is spreading the word about the Placement service to would-be jobseekers, it’s also encouraging businesses to place their ads on the platform to match up those people with positions.
In a market that may have a lot of self-taught programmers and others, it provides one way of trying to circumvent the normal course of students graduating from a particular university, or otherwise be overlooked in the job market. This also potentially gives LinkedIn a more central place in how it believes its platform can influence what Weiner has described as the “economic graph” of our society.
The other area where Placements will help LinkedIn’s bigger business is in getting more users to give it more information. Part of the scheme involves updating and filling out your own profile on the site before you take the online test, which will give LinkedIn a new opportunity to pick up fresh and accurate data about you.
Starter Pack. The last of these is less obvious for consumer users but is an interesting compendium to how LinkedIn hopes to grow its profile as a directory for businesses online, and potentially develop those relationships, too. The promise for the companies that build profiles on LinkedIn’s platform is that they can market themselves better: “Grow your Brand. Grow your Team. Grow your Influence,” is how LinkedIn describes it. More practically, it will give LinkedIn an avenue to court these companies for more recruitment and other ads; and perhaps down the line, after the deal with Microsoft closes, it will give it an avenue to sell more Microsoft products to them, too.
“India is a vital market for LinkedIn, as we work towards realising our vision of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce,” said Akshay Kothari, Country Manager and Head of Product, LinkedIn India, in a statement. Kothari joined LinkedIn when the company acquired Pulse, the newsreading app he co-founded. “It’s already one of the world’s most important economies, and continues to experience strong GDP growth. While LinkedIn has grown multiple folds in India since we started operating here 6 years ago, there’s so much more we want to do here. We are committed to India and to boosting our ability to deliver value to even more members and be a part of their professional growth journey, by investing and innovating locally.”
Oxford English Dictionary adds 'YOLO,' 'moobs,' 'splendiferous'
You know, some yogalates could tackle those splendiferous moobs.
Confused? Then turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has included the words among more than 1,000 revisions and updates for its latest update.
"Splendiferous," meaning full of or abounding in splendor, joins "yogalates," a fitness routine combining pilates exercises with the techniques of yoga, and "moobs," unusually prominent breasts on a man, as new entries to the 150-year-old dictionary's collection of 600,000 words.
Other words and phrases in the latest edition include the "Westminster Bubble" of supposedly insular British politicians and civil servants, "gender-fluid," meaning a person with a fluid or unfixed gender identity, and "YOLO" — an acronym for "you only live once."
The Oxford English Dictionary is updated every three months, and September's revamp marks the centenary of the birth of children's book author Roald Dahl. It is littered with vocabulary described by another newly added word: "Dahlesque."
Besides "splendiferous," Dahl-inspired vocabulary in the new edition includes an updated entry for the word "gremlins," the meddlesome imps that sabotaged airplanes in Dahl's first children's book in 1943, and "human bean" — a humorous alteration or mispronunciation of human being.
"Other horrors created by Dahl including snozzcumbers, the cannibalistic Bloodbottler, and the ferocious Vermicious Knid remain confined to the Dahl universe ... for now," Jonathan Dent, the dictionary's senior assistant editor, wrote on its website.
No. 99: Marshawn Lynch
Who had a better summer than Marshawn Lynch? The retired Seahawks running back practiced in full pads with the Cal football team in Australia, helped build homes in Haiti, and dropped some of all-time quotes in a conversation with SI’s Jon Wertheim. (“You ate cereal before?”) Lynch’s successful BeastMode clothing line and his reported thriftiness should serve as an example to current and aspiring NFL players.
Sunday 11 September 2016
$122million in cash is found at home of Russian anti corruption chief during police raid
The money was reportedly so much that they had to pause in order to find boxes large enough to hold the cash. After coming away with the huge sum, $2.2million of which was in Euros, he was arrested on suspicion of abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and accepting bribes.
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