· Your shopping habits reveal even the most personal information — like when you’re going to have a baby. InformationWeek.com: News, analysis and research for business technology professionals, plus peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Engage with our community.

GTA Online's New Battlegrounds- Style Mode Is A Lot of Fun. Wonderful World Full Movie Part 1. With GTA Online’s July update, Rockstar has added a new mode that seems partially inspired by Battlegrounds, some new (and REALLY expensive) skins, and a super car.

In the new game mode, Dawn Raid, players are split into two teams who have to track down a supply crate and deliver it to a capture point. Like Battlegrounds, players fly into matches on helicopters, and scrounge the terrain for supplies. The maps are all set at night by default, so players are outfitted with night vision and thermal goggles. While these matches only take a few minutes, they feel more tactical than previous GTA Online adversary modes. If players happen to die in Dawn Raid, they will respawn on the helicopter and jump out again. This simple mechanic turns this mode into something incredibly fun and tense. At one point during one of my matches, I was covering a teammate carrying the supplies, when a friend started firing above me.

• Around the same time, two of my other close friends also lost parents. Like me, they experienced the same phenomenon. We all desperately needed help and support, and.
• With GTA Online’s July update, Rockstar has added a new mode that seems partially inspired by Battlegrounds, some new (and REALLY expensive) skins, and a super car.
• It’s increasingly difficult to do anything on your phone nowadays without sharing your geolocation information. Certain Snapchat filters, Facebook status updates.
• Love makes people do dumb stuff. But there are practical, easy steps we can take to maintain our privacy during romantic relationships, and changing one simple.
• A temporary Independence Day celebration in Watch Dogs 2 was suspended early on July 4 because it was enraging too many people who still play Ubisoft’s late 2016.

I looked up and saw two enemy players quickly gliding down, opening fire on me. As I took cover behind a rock, another enemy player tried to land behind me, except he came down too fast and died. As I laughed, I was shot in the head and killed. Fortunately, dying in Dawn Raid isn’t frustrating: having the opportunity to jump out of the helicopter again means you get to decide where to land. Do you want to try and sneak up on someone? Or do you help teammates by picking off enemies from a vantage point? Spawning in via parachute and frantically looking for supplies while dodging hard- to- see players with sniper rifles reminded me of the incredibly popular Battlegrounds.

Coincidence? Hard to say. The new 4th of July update also adds some new weapon skins, but they are some of the most expensive items in the game. The last major update for GTA Online, Gunrunning, added “Mk.

II” weapons upgrades, and to celebrate the 4th of July, Rockstar added American flag skins for those weapons. At first, the cost might not seem like much: each of the new American flag skins cost $9. Or at least it seems like they only cost that much. There are hidden costs. Before you can buy these new skins, you need to spend $7.

Mk. II version. And before you can do that, you need a mobile operations center with a weapon workshop. These large and heavily- armored mobile command bases aren’t cheap.

Total cost for the basic Mo. C with weapon workshop will set you back $2,4. But before you can even buy that huge mobile base you will need a decommissioned military bunker. The cheapest one is all the way up north in Paleto Bay and it costs $1,1. Buying a bunker requires you to be VIP, CEO or Biker Leader.

The cheapest of these options is becoming a VIP, which only requires players to have $5. So once you have become a VIP or CEO, bought a bunker, bought a mobile operations center, upgraded that mobile center to have a weapon workshop, then upgrade a weapon to Mk. II the total cost of that “$9.

If you don’t want to grind for that cash, it would cost you $6. Shark Cards to purchase everything needed to buy one of these new skins. By contrast, The Dewbauchee Vagner, the new car added this week, costs only costs $1.

You could buy two fancy cars with the money it would take to get an American flag on your gun. For the players who have already bought everything in the Gunrunning update, another $9. Still, the price tags attached to new GTA Online items continues to be kinda silly. Expensive weapon skin aside, the new Dawn Raid mode is fantastic. Given that the game is paying out double XP until July 1.

GTA Online. Zach Zwiezen is a a writer living in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written for Gamecritics, Killscreen and Entertainment Fuse.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets. The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e- mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said.

We want to know everything we can.”Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Watch Road Hard Online Facebook. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.

In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

Almost every major retailer, from grocery chains to investmentbanks to the U. S. Postal Service, has a “predictive analytics” department devoted to understanding not just consumers’ shopping habits but also their personal habits, so as to more efficiently market to them. But Target has always been one of the smartest at this,” says Eric Siegel, a consultant and the chairman of a conference called Predictive Analytics World. We’re living through a golden age of behavioral research. It’s amazing how much we can figure out about how people think now.”The reason Target can snoop on our shopping habits is that, over the past two decades, the science of habit formation has become a major field of research in neurology and psychology departments at hundreds of major medical centers and universities, as well as inside extremely well financed corporate labs.

It’s like an arms race to hire statisticians nowadays,” said Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon. Mathematicians are suddenly sexy.” As the ability to analyze data has grown more and more fine- grained, the push to understand how daily habits influence our decisions has become one of the most exciting topics in clinical research, even though most of us are hardly aware those patterns exist. One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision- making, shape 4.

This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N. F. L. to the Super Bowl by focusing on how his players habitually reacted to on- field cues.

Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill overhauled a stumbling conglomerate, Alcoa, and turned it into a top performer in the Dow Jones by relentlessly attacking one habit — a specific approach to worker safety — which in turn caused a companywide transformation. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its “chief scientist” to figure out how to trigger new voting patterns among different constituencies.

Researchers have figured out how to stop people from habitually overeating and biting their nails. They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell. Inside the brain- and- cognitive- sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7- year- old surgeons.

Inside those shrunken O. R.’s, neurologists cut into the skulls of anesthetized rats, implanting tiny sensors that record the smallest changes in the activity of their brains. An M. I. T. neuroscientist named Ann Graybiel told me that she and her colleagues began exploring habits more than a decade ago by putting their wired rats into a T- shaped maze with chocolate at one end. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click.

The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn’t figure out how to find it. There was no discernible pattern in the rat’s meanderings and no indication it was working hard to find the treat. The probes in the rats’ heads, however, told a different story. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal’s head exploded with activity. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed.

And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic — as it became a habit — the rats started thinking less and less.

This process, in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine, is called “chunking.” There are dozens, if not hundreds, of behavioral chunks we rely on every day. Watch Big Brother Season 18 Episode 6. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth.