xonen - Slashdot User

Submission + - YouTube is ending its community captions feature (theverge.com)

Submitted by xonen on Saturday August 01, 2020 @05:00AM

xonen writes: YouTube plans to discontinue its community captions feature, which allowed viewers to add subtitles to videos, because it was “rarely used and had problems with spam/abuse,” the company announced. It says it’s removing the captions and will “focus on other creator tools.” The feature will be removed as of September 28th. “You can still use your own captions, automatic captions and third-party tools and services,” YouTube said.

But deaf and hard-of-hearing creators say removing the community captions feature will stifle accessibility, and they want to see the company try to fix the issues with volunteer-created captions, rather than doing away with them entirely.

Submission + - Thousands of black holes in Milky Way's Center (npr.org)

Submitted by xonen on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:26AM

xonen writes: For decades, scientists have thought that black holes should sink to the center of galaxies and accumulate there. But scientists had no proof that these exotic objects had actually gathered together in the center of the Milky Way.
Isolated black holes are almost impossible to detect, but black holes that have a companion — an orbiting star — interact with that star in ways that allow the pair to be spotted by telltale X-ray emissions. The team searched for those signals in a region stretching about three light-years out from our galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
What they found there: a dozen black holes paired up with stars. Finding so many in such a small region is significant, because until now scientists have found evidence of only about five dozen black holes throughout the entire galaxy.
What they've found should help theorists make better predictions about how many cosmic smashups might occur and generate detectable gravitational waves.

https://www.nature.com/article...

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