Conventional wisdom about coin flips may have been turned on its head. A global team of researchers investigating the statistical and physical nuances of coin tosses worldwide concluded (via Phys.org) that a coin is 50.8% likely to land on the same side it started on, altering one of society’s most traditional assumptions about random decision-making that dates back at least to the Roman Empire.

The team appeared to validate a smaller-scale 2007 study by Stanford mathematician Persi Diaconis, which suggested a slight bias (about 51 percent) toward the side it started on. The authors of the new paper conducted 350,757 flips, using different coins from 46 global currencies to eliminate a heads-tail bias between coin designs. (They also used a variety of people to rule out individuals with biased flipping techniques corrupting the results.) Regardless of the coin type, the same-side outcome could be predicted at 0.508, which rounds up perfectly to Diaconis’ “about 51 percent” prediction from 16 years ago.

The researchers found no evidence of a heads-tail bias when excluding its starting position from the data. In other words, if you pay no attention to which side the coin is on pre-flip, the odds of the outcome are equally likely to be heads or tails. 

Reuters Photographer / reuters

Coin flippers in the study selected their starting position randomly (or according to an algorithm), flipped the coin, caught it in their hand and recorded the landing position. (If they flipped it over in their palm before revealing it, the opposite side it started on had 50.8% odds.) All participants videotaped and uploaded recordings of their flips to simplify collection and coding errors. “Our data therefore provide strong evidence that when some (but not all) people flip a fair coin, it tends to land on the same side it started,” the authors wrote.

The paper notes there was a high degree of variability between coin flippers. “Some people appear to have little or no same-side bias, whereas others do display a same-side bias, albeit to a varying degree.” But taken on the whole, it leads to those 50.8% odds favoring the starting side. 

The findings could even lead to (slight) financial gains. The researchers say that if you bet $1 on 1,000 separate coin flips, always betting on the side it starts on (and catching the coin rather than letting it roll on a surface or flipping it over in your palm), you’d make a $19 profit. The authors note that this is better odds than a casino’s built-in advantage for six-deck blackjack against a high-level player. They suggest that anyone making a high-stakes decision based on a coin flip would be wise to conceal its starting position.

Uber Eats is making it easier to fulfill your cravings, even if they're impossible to get from a single store or restaurant. The food delivery service has introduced a multi-store ordering feature, which lets you purchase food from two different merchants at the same time without having to pay additional delivery fees. It could be the answer for when your taste buds are looking for Vietnamese pho and ice cream, or if you and your housemate couldn't decide on whether to get tacos or pizza. 

Previously, Uber Eats could only ask if you want to bundle your order with items from convenience stores like 7-11 during the checkout process. The company said that after testing out that feature, it received feedback from consumers asking for the capability to build one order from two different merchants instead. To bundle two orders, start by adding items from one store's menu to your cart and then tapping "bundle another store" at the bottom of the screen. You can then add items from the second store's selection before you check out. 

An Uber Eats spokesperson told us that the service will recommend nearby merchants whose orders can be conveniently bundled with the first place you choose, most likely so you can still get your food while it's still fresh and hot. It also won't limit the stores it recommends based on what kind of place they are, so you can add items from a second restaurant, a convenience store or even a merchant that sells liquor. 

After Disney releases a new film in English, the company will go back and localize it in as many as 46 global languages to make the movie accesible to as wide an audience as possible. This is a massive undertaking, one for which Disney has an entire division — Disney Character Voices International Inc — to handle the task. And it's not like you're getting Chris Pratt back in the recording booth to dub his GotG III lines in Icelandic and Swahili — each version sounds a little different given the local voice actors. But with a new "AI dubbing" system from ElevenLabs, we could soon get a close recreation of Pratt's voice, regardless of the language spoken on-screen.   

ElevenLabs is an AI startup that offers a voice cloning service, allowing subscribers to generate nearly identical vocalizations with AI based on a few minutes worth of audio sample uploads. Not wholly unsurprising, as soon as the feature was released in beta, it was immediately exploited to impersonate celebrities, sometimes even without their prior knowledge and consent. 

The new AI dubbing feature does essentially the same thing — in more than 20 different languages including Hindi, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Polish and Arabic — but legitimately, and with permission. This tool is designed for use by media companies, educators and internet influencers who don't have Disney Money™ to fund their global adaptation efforts.

ElevenLabs asserts that the system will be able to not only translate "spoken content to another language in minutes" but also generate new spoken dialog in the target language using the actor's own voice. Or, at least, a AI generated recreation. The system is even reportedly capable of maintaining the "emotion and intonation" of the existing dialog and transferring that over to the generated translation.

 "It will help audiences enjoy any content they want, regardless of the language they speak," ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski said in a press statement. "And it will mean content creators can easily and authentically access a far bigger audience across the world."

The rumor that X, formerly known as Twitter, is going to integrate more paid services continues to persist, with Bloomberg reporting that the company’s testing a trio of subscription tiers to help solve its financial woes. Details are scant, but it looks like these paid subscription options will impact the number of ads you see when using the platform.

A developer and leaker with the X handle @aaronp613 dived into the source code of the app’s most recent iOS update and discovered some information on these proposed subscription tiers, though the information has been trickling out for the past week. It looks like it’ll break down into Basic, Standard and Plus, as indicated by the Bloomberg report. Basic users will continue to see the regular amount of ads, labeled or not, while standard users will see half of the ads, which is equivalent to a current perk exclusive to the folks who plunk down $8 each month for a blue check. Plus users will see no ads whatsoever, providing them unfettered access to whatever conspiracy theory is snaking around the Internet on any given day. 

We don't have any idea how much these tiers would cost. Meta's reportedly making a similar move in Europe, as it could charge users up to $17 each month for an ad-free experience on Instagram and Facebook. 

Other than the ad stuff, which hasn’t been confirmed by the company, nobody knows what additional perks these subscription tiers would provide paying users. It also remains to be seen if this indicates a push toward mandatory subscriptions to use the service. However, with the paid basic plan reportedly displaying the current level of ads, it’s hard to see what a free account would experience. Twice the ads? Three times the ads? Elon Musk coming to your home to blame the company’s financial decline on the Anti-Defamation League? It’s anybody’s guess, though the rumor that X was going full on pay-to-play comes from an off-hand comment made by Musk during a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So it doesn’t look like this is part of any move to force people to pay for the service but it does look like Twitter/X is continuing to throw monetization ideas at the wall to see what sticks as part of its overarching plan to become the “everything app.” It’s hard to imagine that a reduction in the frequency in ads would be enough to entice many users to send a monthly stipend to one of the world’s richest men, so let’s wait and see what other perks the team cooks up for the three proposed subscription tiers.

As for the company’s financials, Bloomberg reports that CEO Linda Yaccarino recently told bank lenders that advertisers have been returning to the platform, albeit with reduced budgets. On the other hand, Reuters just reported that X’s US ad revenue has plummeted each and every month since Musk’s acquisition, with the latest figures showing a 60% year-over-year decline as of August.

Ahead of its Prime Big Deal Days starting next week, Amazon is having a sale on the Apple Watch Series 8 and thanks to a coupon, it's down to the lowest price we've seen to date. You can grab the 41mm model in red for just $225, for a savings of $175 off the regular $400 price (44 percent off). That's a deal that's hard to resist, considering that the next-gen Series 9 only came out two weeks ago. 

The Series 8 isn't a huge update over the Series 7, but it does carry some useful new features. The main one is a temperature sensor tied to women's health, giving female users an estimate on when they may be ovulating. It's meant to be used overnight, sampling your wrist temperature every five seconds so you can see shifts from your baseline

The other is Crash Detection. Much as current watches can detect a fall, the Series 8 can detect car crashes via a pair of new accelerometers. It works in concert with other sensors to detect four different types of crashes, including rollovers, front impact, back impact and side impact. And of course, all of these Series 8 models have a cellular function, giving you internet connectivity, calls and texts for running, hiking and other activities that don't require a smartphone. 

Finally, like other Apple Watches, you can use it to unlock your Mac, find your other Apple devices and pay with Apple Pay. The main improvements with the Series 9 are the Double Tap and Raise to Speak (Siri) features, so if you can live without those and are good with the red color, $225 is an incredible price. 

Uber is adding another service to its ride-hailing app: package returns. The company announced a new feature — dubbed ‘Return a Package’ — where customers can have a courier pick up their packages and have them dropped off at a local post office, UPS or FedEx. It will only be available for parcels that are sealed and prepaid, however.
Using this tool, you can track your package's movement in real-time in the Uber app and confirm when a drop-off is completed. This feature will have a flat rate fee of $5, or $3 for Uber One members. ‘Return a Package’ will be available starting today in the Uber and Uber Eats apps in nearly 5,000 cities throughout the United States.

This new service is similar to Uber's existing Connect feature, which allows users to ship goods to and from friends and family — the difference here is that the receiver will be another service worker instead. However, Return a Package is by no means breaking new ground. DoorDash has been offering a similar service since January of this year. The new offering comes ahead of the busy holiday season, when lots of online shoppers buy and return items.

Spotify has added a new feature for Premium subscribers meant for bookworms. Starting on October 4, subscribers in the UK and Australia will get access to a selection of more than 150,000 audiobooks without having to pay extra. US subscribers will also be able to enjoy the new perk sometime later this year. While they're getting access to a wide range of books and can choose to listen to as many as they want, the offering comes with a catch: Subscribers will only get 15 hours of free audiobook listening every month. The streaming giant told us that users can top up their listening hours to the tune of $11 for another 10 hours after the allocation.

That makes Spotify's service a lot more expensive than Audible's, which costs $8 a month and has no listening limit. The company first made audiobooks available on its platform back in September last year. It launched with 300,000 titles in its library, and users could purchase any of them from within the service. Spotify could have added audiobooks to Premium subscriptions as a way to get users hooked to consuming different types of media in one place. It's just a question of whether users would be willing to pay $11 for every 10 hours of listening after the first 15. That may sound lengthy to some, but for voracious readers (or audiobook listeners), that's nowhere near enough.

"We believe that offering personalized music, podcasts, and audiobooks on a single platform gives you a superior way to connect with your favorite artists, podcasters, creators, and authors — all in one spot," Spotify explained in its announcement.

That said, users can still purchase any title they want from Spotify's audiobook library, so there's no need to pay for additional hours if they have specific books in mind. The feature also comes with auto-bookmarking, preventing users from having to repeat pages and lose precious minutes of listening. Plus, if they activate Spotify Sleep Timer, they can fall asleep while listening to their books without having to rewind when they wake up. It's also worth noting that subscribers can download audiobooks for offline listening. 

At the moment, the new perk is only available for individual Premium subscribers and to plan managers of Family or Duo accounts, but Spotify says it plans to expand its availability in the future. 

Looks like Cities: Skylines II is truly going to be colossal. The console release of Cities: Skylines II has been delayed to spring 2024, and the game's minimum and recommended PC specs are now slightly more demanding. The PC version of the game will still land on October 24, 2023, as originally planned.

Anyone who pre-ordered the game on PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S should automatically receive a refund through those platforms. Developer Colossal Order is shutting down pre-orders of the console version for now. Cities: Skylines II is still coming to PC Game Pass on October 24, and it'll hit Xbox Game Pass next spring, alongside the console release.

The new minimum and recommended PC specs aren't wildly different than the original figures, but there are two notable changes. The recommended specs now call for an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X processor, rather than a Ryzen 5 5800X. The minimum specs start with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 graphics card (or AMD equivalent), an upgrade from the original GTX 780.

Colossal Order explained that the console delay and the PC update stem from the same root cause: This game is bigger and requires more optimization than they first thought. Here's how the studio explained the adjustment to the game's PC specs:

"Cities: Skylines II is a next-generation title and therefore has certain hardware requirements. The recommended specs were set when the game was still in development. After having done extensive testing with different hardware we made the decision to update the minimum/recommended specs for a better player experience."

It's been a rough year for PC games in general. The diversity baked into the PC market has always been a challenge for developers, but ninth-generation console hardware is now outstripping many common PC setups, leading to ambitious games with lots of bugs on PC. With today's Cities: Skylines II news, it seems like Colossal Order is attempting to insulate itself from this phenomenon.

Developers have also had a tough time offering parity between the Xbox Series X — the most technically powerful console this generation — and the Series S, Microsoft's cheaper and less powerful option. Microsoft requires all games to launch with the same features on both consoles, and this has led to a handful of delays, dropped features, and at least one accidental PS5 console exclusive. Microsoft recently allowed Baldur's Gate 3 creator Larian Studios to bend these rules, but the requirement remains in place generally.

Colossal Order has an FAQ about the changes to Cities: Skylines II right here.

If you missed last week's one-day-only deal on Blink cameras, here's another opportunity to add video security to your home's exterior. Amazon is selling two third-generation wireless outdoor cameras plus a video doorbell and Sync Module for just $100, but you'll need to be a Prime member to get the discount. The sale could be related to the upcoming October Prime Day event, though there's no indication whether this savings will stick around until then. Bought separately at full price, the bundle would run you $240. 

These aren't the latest generation Outdoor cameras, which were announced last month — those have a wider field of view and better low-light sensitivity. But these third-gen cameras can still deliver 1080p daytime footage and infrared video at night. Both the cameras and the doorbell let you see, hear and talk to whomever stands before them and a live feed goes directly to your phone or compatible smart display via the Blink app. The included Synch Module 2 lets you store footage locally and supports USB downloads. If you want to store clips in the cloud, you'll need a Blink subscription, which goes for $10 a month. You get one free month with this bundle so you can try it out — just remember to cancel if you decide you don't want it after that. 

Blink Outdoor cameras are one of our picks for the best smart home devices you can buy. We like the ease of setup and the battery efficiency (up to two years on a set of AA cells). The bundle's a good pick if you already use Alexa as your smart home assistant. However, if you prefer the Google Assistant or Siri and HomeKit to run your smart home, you'll probably want to go with a different brand, as Blink devices aren't natively compatible with those ecosystems. 

The doorbell is wireless, but if you want it to ring inside your home when the button's pressed, you'll either need to connect it to your existing doorbell wires or, if you opt for a wireless setup, buy a Blink mini indoor camera. This bundle does include mounting hardware, so at least you won't need to make an extra purchase for that. 

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Meta’s big product showcase for 2023 focused on its new headset, the Quest 3, which Mark Zuckerberg claims is “the first mainstream mixed reality headset,” hurting the feelings of the Quest 2, which preceded it.

The Meta Quest 3 has full color passthrough on its external cameras, able to blend augmented reality elements into your surroundings. It’s also the first consumer device that runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip, and Meta claims it delivers double the performance of the Quest 2. Expect higher resolution and a larger depth of field, thanks to upgrades to the screen and lenses. Meta has also revamped the Quest controllers, ditching the weird tracking rings and letting new sensors handle tracking instead.

Meta teased a handful of new games and experiences — mostly underwhelming — with an extra push towards fitness apps and upgrades. (You know Zuckerberg is hench now, right?) That said, Xbox Cloud gaming is coming to the Quest 3 in December, unlocking a bigger range of (admittedly non-VR) games with no need for a TV or monitor.

The event also revealed next-gen Ray-Ban smart glasses, AI updates and more – read on for those.

— Mat Smith

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Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses hands-on

New frames and major upgrades to the hardware.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses might actually do what you want smart glasses to do. They’re less clunky than the original Ray-Ban Stories, and now pack a 12-megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p 60 fps video — the bare minimum in 2023 — although they are restricted to 60 seconds. For longer things, you can now livestream footage while tethered to your phone, although Meta will calibrate video quality based on your connection speed.

Another major change is the addition of a second frame called the Headliner, alongside Wayfarers. As well as the shiny and matte black frames, there are three new semi-transparent colors: jeans, caramel and a smoky Rebel Black. There’s also the option to add polarized lenses or even prescription glass.

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Former Microsoft exec Panos Panay is the new head of Amazon hardware

Surprise!

Former Microsoft executive Panos Panay will take over as the head of Amazon’s Devices and Services division, the company confirmed. He’ll start his new role at the end of October, CEO Andy Jassy said. It emerged last week that Panay was leaving Microsoft after a 19-year run, most recently as the chief product officer, where he oversaw Surface devices and Windows 11 development. Rumors quickly suggested Panay would move to Amazon to lead the Alexa and Echo teams.

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Logitech’s new racing cockpit is a $299 foldable chair

You can fold the Playseat Challenge X up and stow it away.

Logitech

Logitech has introduced a $299 cockpit chair for racing sims. It worked with Playseat to release the Playseat Challenge X, a fold-up chair with room for pedals and even a gearshift mount. While the chair doesn’t include the actual accessories to play racing sims, it is compatible with Logitech’s G wheels and driving force shifters. I am also fully aware it looks like a baby seat.

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Disney+ cracks down on password sharing, starting in Canada

New password sharing restrictions will take effect this fall.

Disney+ will restrict its Canadian users from sharing accounts with people outside their households unless they’re willing to pay more, starting November 1. The company sent out an email to subscribers notifying them of the change, which Disney CEO Bob Iger foreshadowed in an earnings call back in August. Disney specifies a household includes only “the collection of devices associated with your primary personal residence,” used by the people who live there.

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