Certain places in the western state of Gujarat have said that these devices are too “distracting” for girls and single women.
A number of villages in Gujarat, a state in the western part of India, have now banned single women and girls from owning and using mobile phones, as the village leaders claim that these devices will distract them from being able to focus on their studies.
The bans have gone into effects over recent weeks and have drawn the attention of the international community.
The banning of mobile phones for girls and single women is most prevalent in the villages located in Gujarat’s Mehsana and Banaskantha districts. That said, it appears as though additional villages will also be joining this campaign, according to the president of the district council of Mehsana, Ranjit Singh Thakor. This ban stops unmarried women and girls under the age of 18 from being able to own and use the mobile devices.
Thakor stated that “The girls don’t study properly if they have mobile phones, and they can get into all sorts of bad situations.”
This was quoted during a phone interview with the Thompson Reuters Foundation. Thakor also added, “Let them study, get married, then they can get their own phones. Until then, they can use their fathers’ phones at home, if necessary.”
Other villages in India had already taken this kind of step in banning mobile devices among female users , though it didn’t capture as much attention as is the case with this latest addition. On the eastern side of the country in the state of Bihar, a similar ban had been put into place a few years ago. In that case, they explained that the use of the mobile devices was encouraging women to elope and was therefore “debasing the social atmosphere.”
Activists have been protesting the decisions made by the towns, saying that banning females of any age or social status from using mobile phones is an assault on their freedom and it could potentially deny those women and girls the access they need access to protection, potentially placing them in harm’s way.
The supercomputer is going to be converting an anime from a book series into a huge multiplayer online game.
The Japanese division at IBM has now turned its attention to creating a VR game out of an anime called “Sword Art Online: The Beginning” with the assistance of its Watson artificial intelligence supercomputer.
The project is meant to turn the book series into a virtual reality multiplayer game available online.
The team at IBM is using Watson’s cognitive computing, in conjunction with the cloud service from SoftLayer, as a part of a partnership with Namco Bandai. They intend to be able to test the new VR game in Tokyo, in March. In order to be able to play the virtual reality game, players will need to wear VR headsets so they will be capable of viewing the world in the role of their 3D avatar. In this way, the player doesn’t use a controller in order to participate in the game. They actually become the controller.
The VR game will support the HTC Vive, while it also looks as though Occulus Rift and SlashGear will be supported.
Aside from some introductory basics, there hasn’t been much in terms of details that have been revealed, so far. Moreover, at the time of the writing of this article, IBM hadn’t provided an immediate response to comment requests.
The anime, in question, Sword Art Online, was first launched in 2012 and was based on a 2009 light series of Japanese novels. The story includes a considerable focus on virtual reality and opens up a tremendous opportunity for multiplayer role-playing games (RPGs).
The series that will become a VR game first ran in 2012 in Tokyo, but it has since streamed on Hulu and Crunchyroll. In 2013, it arrived in North America, where it is also now available on Netflix. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC), IBM announced that it would be bringing the IBM Cloud together with the Apple Swift runtime package. The goal result is to have a enterprise app development based on cloud tech, that would function with Swift. The MobileFirst platform can also be leveraged by customers, meaning it’s possible for them to use hybrid app versions for managing mobile from one platform.
This was quoted during a phone interview with the Thompson Reuters Foundation. Thakor also added, “Let them study, get married, then they can get their own phones. Until then, they can use their fathers’ phones at home, if necessary.”