In 1997, three Looking Glass designers broke off on their own to set up shop in Boston. Their first game proved more successful than they’d dared to hope, and after development wrapped on System Shock 2 they scattered to the winds. Levine stayed in Boston to captain the ship that eventually shored at BioShock. Robert Fermier returned to Texas to join Ensemble and is now lead programmer at Robot, makers of Orcs Must Die and Hero Academy. Jonathan Chey, meanwhile, moved to Australia to set up a new division of the company - Irrational Canberra.
For the next ten years, there was an Irrational in both hemispheres. Levine commanded the Boston team while Chey headed up Canberra’s. Some projects were developed independently, others collaboratively. The Australian Irrational led development on Tribes: Vengeance, two Freedom Forces and a SWAT 4 expansion, before both teams were sucked into a black hole named BioShock. Each studio had its own strengths and weaknesses, and were able to help each other out during those most frequent of times in game development - times of need.
When 2K Boston reclaimed the name Irrational in 2010, however, its Canberra wing stayed behind. Chey isn’t sure what his old studio’s name is anymore, but it was last seen merging with 2K Marin to work on a new XCOM.
I’m still thinking about Freedom Force, though - the squad-based, isometric superhero game rooted in the earnest cheese and cold war rhetoric of Silver Age comic books. Every aspect of Freedom Force’s design screamed niche, but it was possessed of a sort of mechanical-thematic cohesion that only great games possess. I see the same qualities in Chey’s new game.
Card Hunter is a turn-based tactics game. It has grids. It features a party of adventurers, to be levelled up via an experience system. It has a world map. It has an inspired 2D art style, gleaned from the idealised fantasy heroes and monsters that populated the first-edition books of Dungeons and Dragons.
I tell Chey that Card Hunter strikes me as precisely the sort of mid-level PC game Irrational might have made ten years ago, now made impossible by the spiralling costs of running a AAA developer.
“That’s exactly right. I know Ken really likes those kind of games too - both Ken and I are big fans of strategy games,” he says. “We originally wanted to make Freedom Force a turn-based game, but even at the time it wasn’t really possible to sell publishers on the idea of a turn-based PC game. Card Hunter is the game I’ve always wanted to make and never been able to convince anyone else to pay for. Ultimately I’ve taken on that burden myself, and I guess we’ll find out who was right.
If Chey sounds flippant about Card Hunter’s chances of monetary success, that’s because he can afford to be. I get the impression that where Jonathan Chey, Breadwinner of Irrational Canberra was shrewd and careful, Jon Chey, Indie Developer is uncompromising and entirely design-focused, emboldened by the knowledge that he can “roll the dice at least once or twice”.
“I sort of don’t worry about [the market] too much, because I’m just trying to make a game that I think is fun, that I will be happy with,” he explains. “I kind of have the luxury to do that because I’m running this off money I made off selling my last business. If it doesn’t work out I’ll just go and work for somebody else again.”
Player numbers don’t worry Jonathan Chey. And yet I expect Card Hunter will draw in the crowds regardless. It’s a game designed from the ground up to remove any and all barriers that might prevent a PC gamer with a passing interest from becoming a player. When it launches next year, the game will be free-to-play and browser-based - two words that remain all but slurs for a large portion of its intended audience.
“Right. You don’t think quality when you hear those terms,” laughs Chey. “We picked browser because I wanted to make a game as accessible as possible. Somebody who really doesn't have any knowledge about the game can just click on a link and play it, without having to download gigabytes and install it, which is actually quite a big leap of faith.
Everything in-game is represented by a geographical location - hence the somewhat wonderful ‘Axes and Things’. New areas will be revealed as you progress through the campaign, tackling adventures as you go.
Each adventure will be made up of a series of battles. Battles will last 10-15 minutes, cut down from 45 or so thanks to a slick, contemporary UI and animations that are uncharacteristically economic for the genre (Explains Chey: “I’m quite impatient. I like things to move along quickly when I’ve made my decision.”). They’re fought with a party of adventurers, whose experience points and equipment are carried from one scuffle to the next. Chey says Blu Manchu are influenced by RPGs “too numerous to mention”, but proceeds to mention Baldur’s Gate, Dungeon Master and the Gold Box engine games anyway.
“There’s definitely a very large influence from paper-and-pencil, old-school fantasy role-playing games,” he says. “And that’s carried over into the visual style of the game.”
The debt to DnD lends Card Hunter a degree of abstraction that Chey is very keen on. “It’s not trying to present itself as a realistic portrayal of fantasy combat, whatever that would mean. There’s nothing in the game that explores what it would be like to be a real dwarf bezerker exploring a dungeon. Really it’s trying to explore playing miniature tabletop battles without having to assemble people to play with you.”
I bring up Sinister Design blogger Craig Stern and his game, Telepath Tactics. Stern is a champion of the determinism grid- and turn-based games can offer, and more specifically the scope to plan a strategy and see it come to fruition without too much randomisation muddying the waters. Chey seems similarly enthusiastic. He’s Googled the name before I manage to finish my question.
I couldn’t agree more,” he enthuses. “I think digitizing things, whether it’s time or space, can make your decisions much clearer. A game I think of a lot when I think about that is the original Prince of Persia. It’s not displayed, but everything in that game is laid out in a grid. That means that you kind of know whether you can make a jump or not. So you can make puzzles where you can’t make this jump before you do something else - like opening another door or going up to a higher level.
As you might imagine, Chey has been playing a lot of Firaxis’ XCOM, which he believes “trod a very difficult line” and kept its balance. Its success means that Blu Manchu find themselves in a strange, possible future: one where PC gamers are buying turn-based tactics games on a fairly mass scale.
“I think that’s the natural order of things,” says Chey. “Turn-based games got a bum rap for a long time. Everybody out there grew up playing some kind of card game or Monopoly. Turn-based games are much more accessible than real-time games. Real-time games are really quite forbidding, I think, because you have to react under pressure. In turn-based you can sit down and screw around, click things on the interface and take your time.
“The most popular games in the world I think are turn-based. Whether it’s Minesweeper or Chess or Scrabble or whatever.”
Jon Chey doesn’t need Card Hunter to become the most popular game in the world, though. All he wants is to make a game that has hitherto existed only in his head.
That said, this generational shift in parenting methodologies is put on comedic display as Alice and Phil Simmons (Tomei and Scott) who are a world-class pair of Type-A helicopter parents. Only now, Phil is up for an award and they need to leave town so he can collect his well-deserved kudos, and they can get away for a much-needed vacation. So they tap Alice’s folks Artie and Diane to look after the three kids while they are away. However, problems arise when the kids’ 21st century behaviors collide with Artie and Diane’s old-school, 20st century parenting methods.
Artie, who has just been given the bozack from his gig as a radio announcer for a minor-league baseball team is accustomed to calling the shots. However, he has really come up against it when he and his eager-to-finally-connect-with-her-grandchildren wife agree to the babysitting gig. Only there is old helicopter mom who can’t quite seem to let go, and finagles a way to stay behind to “work” on a “last minute” project from a client. Further complicating this task is the new-age methodology employed by Alice and Phil on their kids.
2012年12月29日星期六
Encouraging the sick to be keen observers
DOCTOR Catherine Crock knows better than most that hospitals can be dangerous places. The leading physician has seen her fair share of medical errors in a 31-year career, including some she has made and learnt from.
When Crock was admitted to hospital recently for a small procedure, she couldn't help focusing on routine safety measures such as staff washing their hands between patients, checking identification tags before taking blood, and keeping medical histories up to date so crucial changes are detected in a timely fashion.
''Some of these things weren't being done, and at one stage I even saw a mix-up with two patients' histories. I kept noticing things in the area I was sitting and I thought, 'Should I mention it to them or not?' It made me nervous about my safety,'' she said.
Crock was also worried about signs of tension between staff whizzing through their work to get to the next patient needing attention. Having worked in teams, she knew how crucial collaboration was for safe and efficient care, so even minor bickering among the staff bothered her.
''It's a bit like watching people [working] in a restaurant. If they're fighting, you start wondering if the coffee's going to be cold,'' she said. ''How can you trust them if their house is not in order?''
The coffee example may seem slight, but the restaurant analogy is appropriate, given the common fear that you will be punished for sending back an unsatisfactory order. Complaining about minor medical mistakes may seem similarly fraught, but the consequences of such disharmony in the health system can be dire. Every year, at least one in 10 Australian patients will experience an adverse event in hospital - unwanted and usually harmful incidents that must be acknowledged if staff are to prevent them from happening again.
Extreme incidents that have been widely reported include surgeons operating on the wrong body part, or a pregnant woman having disinfectant accidentally injected into her spine instead of an epidural. Hundreds of thousands of others receive no publicity, such as a prescription error that resulted in a child receiving chemotherapy eight months longer than they should have, or an elderly person who picked up a life-threatening infection from a bed sore that would never have happened with more thorough care.
The most common cause of these errors is a breakdown in communication between patients and staff, or among staff themselves during clinical handovers, of which there are millions every year during shift changes. According to the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, about half of all medication errors occur during these transitions in care.
The possibilities are endless and often so subtle that they would be untraceable if someone tried to work out where things went wrong. A hurried conversation, for example, might make a patient skip over some crucial details when a doctor asks about their symptoms to make a diagnosis.
While hospitals are already using many proven methods such as checklists and peer reviews to prevent errors, there is a growing feeling in the health sector that patients can and should play more of a role in their care to prevent mishaps.
Crock, who has worked in adolescent health and haematology at the Royal Children's Hospital for many years and who also directs the Australian Institute for Patient and Family Centred Care, says an increasing number of hospitals around the world are preventing errors by empowering patients and their families to participate more. Some are inviting patients to check their medications, for example, or have their family members measure their temperature or how much water they are drinking to ensure it is being done. Others are telling patients to ask their carers if they have washed their hands before they touch them. There has also been a move to put patient representatives on hospital committees, including those that make decisions about health professional job applicants.
After all, Crock says, patients and their families are well placed to see things that work and don't work. While hospital staff are usually thinking about dozens of patients at the same time, as well as their colleagues and what is happening in their private life, patients and their families are sitting around for hours on end noticing look-alike medication bottles and inconsistent advice from different doctors. ''The patient and family are the constant across all changes of care and location within the system. Collectively, they are a significant resource of valuable information that the healthcare system needs to tap into,'' she says.
One hospital that has achieved results from mobilising patients is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the US. A few years back, staff decided to encourage patients to cross-check their care more often and speak up if they noticed anything wrong. A campaign was run with the slogan ''Check, Ask, Notify'' on posters to remind people to participate.
When staff surveyed more than 2000 patients about their experience, they found a strong link between active participation and fewer adverse events. The survey asked patients about their illness, how often they spoke with doctors and nurses about it, whether they had relatives or a friend to help them make decisions and express their wishes, and if they ever checked things such as the medication they were being given. When the researchers looked at their medical records, they found that patients who scored highly on these measures had half the rate of adverse events in hospital compared with others.
Victoria's Health Services Commissioner, Beth Wilson, has seen many cases where patients or their families may have been able to prevent problems in the health system. She often hears about incidents where people saw missed opportunities.
''I've heard people say, 'I knew my baby was sick, I just knew it' after something has gone horribly wrong … It's powerful stuff. In some cases they felt afraid to speak up or they did speak up and were ignored.''
Wilson says most people feel disempowered by a paternalistic culture in hospitals and clinics where doctors have always known best. There are visible hierarchies everywhere. Surgeons and senior medical specialists boss junior doctors around, who in turn tell nurses and administrative staff what to do.
Wilson says the culture not only makes people scared to speak up out of fear that they will offend or embarrass someone, but they also think they might be punished for it or get someone sacked.
''I frequently see people telling me about an incident but not wanting to make a complaint because they don't want to get people into trouble,'' she said. ''We need to change the culture, and culture is often created by the language that is used. I've noticed that some healthcare workers are now being told not to call patients names like 'sweetie,' 'dear' or 'mate'. I'm sympathetic to that because I don't want someone calling me 'sweetie' while they put a suppository in me. If you're calling someone 'sweetie' or 'dear', you're talking down to them. Health professionals need to think carefully about the way they communicate with people. It needs to be respectful.''
Wilson says the paternalistic culture is also undermining the law of informed consent, which says people should be told as much as is necessary for them to be able to make an informed choice about their care.
''It does not happen anywhere near enough. A lot of hospitals seem to think that a signature on a form is informed consent. I've noticed in hospitals that where consent used to be a noun, it is now a verb, so people will say, 'Has she been consented yet?' Consent was something you used to give, but now it's something that is done for you. That practice is quite different to what the law says.''
When Crock was admitted to hospital recently for a small procedure, she couldn't help focusing on routine safety measures such as staff washing their hands between patients, checking identification tags before taking blood, and keeping medical histories up to date so crucial changes are detected in a timely fashion.
''Some of these things weren't being done, and at one stage I even saw a mix-up with two patients' histories. I kept noticing things in the area I was sitting and I thought, 'Should I mention it to them or not?' It made me nervous about my safety,'' she said.
Crock was also worried about signs of tension between staff whizzing through their work to get to the next patient needing attention. Having worked in teams, she knew how crucial collaboration was for safe and efficient care, so even minor bickering among the staff bothered her.
''It's a bit like watching people [working] in a restaurant. If they're fighting, you start wondering if the coffee's going to be cold,'' she said. ''How can you trust them if their house is not in order?''
The coffee example may seem slight, but the restaurant analogy is appropriate, given the common fear that you will be punished for sending back an unsatisfactory order. Complaining about minor medical mistakes may seem similarly fraught, but the consequences of such disharmony in the health system can be dire. Every year, at least one in 10 Australian patients will experience an adverse event in hospital - unwanted and usually harmful incidents that must be acknowledged if staff are to prevent them from happening again.
Extreme incidents that have been widely reported include surgeons operating on the wrong body part, or a pregnant woman having disinfectant accidentally injected into her spine instead of an epidural. Hundreds of thousands of others receive no publicity, such as a prescription error that resulted in a child receiving chemotherapy eight months longer than they should have, or an elderly person who picked up a life-threatening infection from a bed sore that would never have happened with more thorough care.
The most common cause of these errors is a breakdown in communication between patients and staff, or among staff themselves during clinical handovers, of which there are millions every year during shift changes. According to the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, about half of all medication errors occur during these transitions in care.
The possibilities are endless and often so subtle that they would be untraceable if someone tried to work out where things went wrong. A hurried conversation, for example, might make a patient skip over some crucial details when a doctor asks about their symptoms to make a diagnosis.
While hospitals are already using many proven methods such as checklists and peer reviews to prevent errors, there is a growing feeling in the health sector that patients can and should play more of a role in their care to prevent mishaps.
Crock, who has worked in adolescent health and haematology at the Royal Children's Hospital for many years and who also directs the Australian Institute for Patient and Family Centred Care, says an increasing number of hospitals around the world are preventing errors by empowering patients and their families to participate more. Some are inviting patients to check their medications, for example, or have their family members measure their temperature or how much water they are drinking to ensure it is being done. Others are telling patients to ask their carers if they have washed their hands before they touch them. There has also been a move to put patient representatives on hospital committees, including those that make decisions about health professional job applicants.
After all, Crock says, patients and their families are well placed to see things that work and don't work. While hospital staff are usually thinking about dozens of patients at the same time, as well as their colleagues and what is happening in their private life, patients and their families are sitting around for hours on end noticing look-alike medication bottles and inconsistent advice from different doctors. ''The patient and family are the constant across all changes of care and location within the system. Collectively, they are a significant resource of valuable information that the healthcare system needs to tap into,'' she says.
One hospital that has achieved results from mobilising patients is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the US. A few years back, staff decided to encourage patients to cross-check their care more often and speak up if they noticed anything wrong. A campaign was run with the slogan ''Check, Ask, Notify'' on posters to remind people to participate.
When staff surveyed more than 2000 patients about their experience, they found a strong link between active participation and fewer adverse events. The survey asked patients about their illness, how often they spoke with doctors and nurses about it, whether they had relatives or a friend to help them make decisions and express their wishes, and if they ever checked things such as the medication they were being given. When the researchers looked at their medical records, they found that patients who scored highly on these measures had half the rate of adverse events in hospital compared with others.
Victoria's Health Services Commissioner, Beth Wilson, has seen many cases where patients or their families may have been able to prevent problems in the health system. She often hears about incidents where people saw missed opportunities.
''I've heard people say, 'I knew my baby was sick, I just knew it' after something has gone horribly wrong … It's powerful stuff. In some cases they felt afraid to speak up or they did speak up and were ignored.''
Wilson says most people feel disempowered by a paternalistic culture in hospitals and clinics where doctors have always known best. There are visible hierarchies everywhere. Surgeons and senior medical specialists boss junior doctors around, who in turn tell nurses and administrative staff what to do.
Wilson says the culture not only makes people scared to speak up out of fear that they will offend or embarrass someone, but they also think they might be punished for it or get someone sacked.
''I frequently see people telling me about an incident but not wanting to make a complaint because they don't want to get people into trouble,'' she said. ''We need to change the culture, and culture is often created by the language that is used. I've noticed that some healthcare workers are now being told not to call patients names like 'sweetie,' 'dear' or 'mate'. I'm sympathetic to that because I don't want someone calling me 'sweetie' while they put a suppository in me. If you're calling someone 'sweetie' or 'dear', you're talking down to them. Health professionals need to think carefully about the way they communicate with people. It needs to be respectful.''
Wilson says the paternalistic culture is also undermining the law of informed consent, which says people should be told as much as is necessary for them to be able to make an informed choice about their care.
''It does not happen anywhere near enough. A lot of hospitals seem to think that a signature on a form is informed consent. I've noticed in hospitals that where consent used to be a noun, it is now a verb, so people will say, 'Has she been consented yet?' Consent was something you used to give, but now it's something that is done for you. That practice is quite different to what the law says.''
2012年12月27日星期四
Where to invest in 2013
Thanks to a wealth of natural resources, industry and agriculture are thriving in pockets across Africa. This economic growth is creating stable and prosperous societies with a rapidly growing, youthful population and a wealthy middle class with the desire and ability to buy property.
Housing supply cannot keep up, however, and local demand put together with the requirements of international executives, the shortage becomes almost a drought in countries such as Angola, Uganda and Ghana.
A good example can be found in Uganda’s capital Kampala where it is estimated that in this city alone an additional 34 000 homes need to be built every year to keep up with the demand of the local population.
It has taken almost four years but at last it seems the US housing market is on the road to recovery with house prices beginning to rise again, sales increasing, foreclosures falling and construction activity moving positively.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency has shown the largest growth in house prices since September 2006 and the US Census Bureau shows that in August 2012 the median sales price of new homes in the US increased by 17% year on year.
In real terms, property prices in the US today are back to where they were around the turn of the millennium, with prices in some states up to 70% below their 2006 peak and around 50% of current rebuild cost. Many US states are in recovery, but ones to watch are Buffalo, Rochester, Baltimore, Cleveland, the Eastern states of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. It is in these locations that large quantities of repossession stock can be bought, refurbished and rented out or resold, all within a short time-frame.
Although price rises have slowed in central London over the last two quarters of 2012, and may stay flat for 2013, we predict they will rise again in 2014 and more dramatically in 2015.
As for the rest of the country, prices in many areas have either stayed static during 2012 or dropped a little.
This has led to slow market movement although in many areas houses are starting to sell due to prices being realigned to reality with many properties now selling for anything from 10-20% below the asking price.
Going forward into 2013/14 it looks like location as ever will be the key. As prices in many areas of London have risen by up to 70% in the last two years, the difference between London and the countryside is the greatest it has ever been meaning that good commutable areas and beauty spots outside central London are going to fare well as families take advantage of this window of opportunity.
As the wealth of Brazil expands so does the growth of the middle classes and with demand outstripping supply in all the major cities and urban hubs, housing at all levels and price points is proving an exciting asset class offering both excellent rental potential and capital appreciation.
House prices in Rio de Janeiro rose by almost 20% between July 2011 and July 2012 (just under 14% when adjusted for inflation) and in S?o Paulo rose by over 18% during the same period
With two huge international sporting events coming to Brazil in the near future — the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Olympics and Para-Olympics — the world’s eyes will be on the cities of this exceptional success story.
A second Cuban revolution is about to play out some 54 years after Fidel Castro famously took control of this picturesque Caribbean country. Now under the rule of his brother Raul, Cuba is slowly moving towards capitalism and with it the chance for locals to own Cuban real estate for the first time in decades.
Until 2011 it was illegal in Cuba to sell property on the open market (the only way to move was to swap your home for another), but now that has all changed and Cubans can buy and sell on the open market. As a result this young booming economy is considered by some to be one of the top five emerging global markets in the world.
2013 should also see a further relaxation on the ownership of property by foreigners. Although at this stage ownership will be limited to upmarket holiday complexes and existing homes currently owned by foreigners, we are hoping there will be a wealth of new opportunities in the pipeline.
Google was full of surprises in 2012. It outdid Apple easily in mobile OS features. It rolled out a whole line of Nexus Android devices that are undeniably top notch. And it launched the Knowledge Graph, a watershed moment between the keyword-searching past of the Web and a future Web that understands whole concepts.
2012 was also the year that Google unified its offerings under a single privacy policy, a move that freaked out lots of people, but which was totally rational from Google's perspective. If we're going to have a data-driven future offering pervasive, free technologies in exchange for better targeting of advertisements, we'll have to accept that companies like Google have an eerily accurate, real-time profile of us.
The most important Google story this year was the launch of the Knowledge Graph. This marked the shift from a first-generation Google that merely indexed the words and metadata of the Web to a next-generation Google that recognizes discrete things and the relationships between them.
Now, when you search Google for certain kinds of things, you get an answer or an explanation in return, rather than a link to a Web page containing the answer. That's made possible by Google's new semantic intelligence. Google learned how to learn from the Web and its vast oceans of linked information, but now it's figuring out how to put the information itself to work for its users.
Housing supply cannot keep up, however, and local demand put together with the requirements of international executives, the shortage becomes almost a drought in countries such as Angola, Uganda and Ghana.
A good example can be found in Uganda’s capital Kampala where it is estimated that in this city alone an additional 34 000 homes need to be built every year to keep up with the demand of the local population.
It has taken almost four years but at last it seems the US housing market is on the road to recovery with house prices beginning to rise again, sales increasing, foreclosures falling and construction activity moving positively.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency has shown the largest growth in house prices since September 2006 and the US Census Bureau shows that in August 2012 the median sales price of new homes in the US increased by 17% year on year.
In real terms, property prices in the US today are back to where they were around the turn of the millennium, with prices in some states up to 70% below their 2006 peak and around 50% of current rebuild cost. Many US states are in recovery, but ones to watch are Buffalo, Rochester, Baltimore, Cleveland, the Eastern states of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. It is in these locations that large quantities of repossession stock can be bought, refurbished and rented out or resold, all within a short time-frame.
Although price rises have slowed in central London over the last two quarters of 2012, and may stay flat for 2013, we predict they will rise again in 2014 and more dramatically in 2015.
As for the rest of the country, prices in many areas have either stayed static during 2012 or dropped a little.
This has led to slow market movement although in many areas houses are starting to sell due to prices being realigned to reality with many properties now selling for anything from 10-20% below the asking price.
Going forward into 2013/14 it looks like location as ever will be the key. As prices in many areas of London have risen by up to 70% in the last two years, the difference between London and the countryside is the greatest it has ever been meaning that good commutable areas and beauty spots outside central London are going to fare well as families take advantage of this window of opportunity.
As the wealth of Brazil expands so does the growth of the middle classes and with demand outstripping supply in all the major cities and urban hubs, housing at all levels and price points is proving an exciting asset class offering both excellent rental potential and capital appreciation.
House prices in Rio de Janeiro rose by almost 20% between July 2011 and July 2012 (just under 14% when adjusted for inflation) and in S?o Paulo rose by over 18% during the same period
With two huge international sporting events coming to Brazil in the near future — the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the 2016 Olympics and Para-Olympics — the world’s eyes will be on the cities of this exceptional success story.
A second Cuban revolution is about to play out some 54 years after Fidel Castro famously took control of this picturesque Caribbean country. Now under the rule of his brother Raul, Cuba is slowly moving towards capitalism and with it the chance for locals to own Cuban real estate for the first time in decades.
Until 2011 it was illegal in Cuba to sell property on the open market (the only way to move was to swap your home for another), but now that has all changed and Cubans can buy and sell on the open market. As a result this young booming economy is considered by some to be one of the top five emerging global markets in the world.
2013 should also see a further relaxation on the ownership of property by foreigners. Although at this stage ownership will be limited to upmarket holiday complexes and existing homes currently owned by foreigners, we are hoping there will be a wealth of new opportunities in the pipeline.
Google was full of surprises in 2012. It outdid Apple easily in mobile OS features. It rolled out a whole line of Nexus Android devices that are undeniably top notch. And it launched the Knowledge Graph, a watershed moment between the keyword-searching past of the Web and a future Web that understands whole concepts.
2012 was also the year that Google unified its offerings under a single privacy policy, a move that freaked out lots of people, but which was totally rational from Google's perspective. If we're going to have a data-driven future offering pervasive, free technologies in exchange for better targeting of advertisements, we'll have to accept that companies like Google have an eerily accurate, real-time profile of us.
The most important Google story this year was the launch of the Knowledge Graph. This marked the shift from a first-generation Google that merely indexed the words and metadata of the Web to a next-generation Google that recognizes discrete things and the relationships between them.
Now, when you search Google for certain kinds of things, you get an answer or an explanation in return, rather than a link to a Web page containing the answer. That's made possible by Google's new semantic intelligence. Google learned how to learn from the Web and its vast oceans of linked information, but now it's figuring out how to put the information itself to work for its users.
'Zero Dark Thirty's' compound challenges
First-time feature production designer Jeremy Hindle admits to some dicey feelings while taking director Kathryn Bigelow on an initial walk-through of "Zero Dark Thirty's" key set. But they weren't rookie jitters.
"I remember telling her, 'You're going to feel insanely creepy. You're going to feel like he lived here,'" Hindle says.
The verisimilitude Bigelow demanded for all aspects of the film was particularly important to the re-creation of the compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs last year. "We walked through, and the detail … it felt like someone had lived there; six years of never leaving," Hindle says. "We knew what his bed looked like from photographs. We knew he had an AK-47 hanging over it. We knew he was a pack rat. The hallway was just jammed full of every newspaper he could get his hands on."
Using primarily open-source intelligence from news reports and the like, and enhanced by Oscar-winning writer-producer and military journalist Mark Boal's research, the production constructed a full-scale, fully operational replica of Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.
"You can scale quite a lot off photographs," Hindle says. "We had a company called Frame Store in London model it in 3-D for us. Once you have the photographs and video, it's all a big math equation. It was a couple weeks of math, really.
"We built it for real out of stone and steel. We flew real Black Hawks in; there was a Black Hawk 50 feet over that set with Kathryn and every actor inside it. So the compound was 21/2 times over-engineered," he says, noting the set had to withstand the crash of one of the helicopters [hanging by a crane]. "There were 9-foot caissons underground, steel, cinder blocks; it was a bunker. It would be hard to blow that place up."
Hindle made the jump to feature film work from commercials — on which he had worked with such directors as Spike Jonze, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González I?árritu — in part due to the recommendation of "Zero Dark's" cinematographer, Greig Fraser.
"Kathryn hates wild walls [which can be removed for ease of filming]. Because [our] walls don't move, some cinematographers would have had a heart attack. Greig's not like that. We've worked together before; I've boxed him into places before. He loves that kind of style. He knows it creates a certain energy. It's difficult to shoot in when it's 120 degrees, but I said, 'I'm not going to make it easy for you to shoot; I'm going to make it great so you can shoot it.'
"You're cramming everyone in the room; it makes it so real. It's not a way that anyone else [but Bigelow] would make this film. [Normally,] you'd just say, 'Let's go to a stage … break it down, each floor.' But it's real. It was engineered, architecturally drawn up, and we built the thing in 10 weeks."
Scouting and construction of meticulously authentic locations on several continents and the design and assembly of approximations of stealth Black Hawk helicopters happened very quickly.
"I got hired the 25th of November, and we started shooting Feb. 28. It was mind-blowingly fast," Hindle says. "Every one of those military bases [seen in the film] didn't exist. We built all those. The Islamabad embassy, that's an engineering school in India. That was after scouting in Jordan for months."
But Hindle had concerns beyond making his timeline. Safety became an issue as the replica of Bin Laden's compound was built and shot in Jordan.
"It was haunting, for sure," Hindle says. "There were bomb-sniffing dogs checking the set before you walked on. There was a lot of security. We were 30 miles from Syria and three miles from Israel. For the first half of [building] the structure, nobody knew what it was. And then the helicopters came in, hanging from cranes … it was like, 'Huh. We're about a mile from the Dead Sea.'"
Like the hundreds of windows that make up its shiny facade, Carleton University’s new River Building is the result of many smaller victories, says university president Roseann Runte.
Opened this fall, the $55-million building is symbolic of how committed the federal and provincial governments, as well as individual donors, are to funding higher education, she says.
The reliance on sustainable construction practices — the building has a bio-wall and green roof — and its location near the Rideau River signify Carleton’s connection to the community and its concern for the natural environment.
But Runte says its greatest symbol is inside the building, in the form of a giant sculpture carved from the wood of an oak tree that stood in Old Ottawa South for more than 200 years.
The impressive sculpture, called Sailing Through Time, shows a tree upside down, its branches pointing toward the ground and its roots in the sky.
“To me, that is a symbol of what happens at university — that people learn new ways of thinking, new ways of opening their eyes to the world,” Runte said in selecting the River Building’s opening as the single most important achievement at Carleton in 2012.
With baccalaureates largely seen now as only the first step toward entering the workforce, Runte says, Carleton must make getting such a degree as enriching as possible.
A few years ago, the school started giving students a co-curricular record upon graduation, which is essentially a transcript of all the volunteer work, internships and international work they did outside of class during their time at Carleton.
Co-op placements are also a big deal, Runte says, adding they’re not just for science and engineering students any more. All arts departments at Carleton offer co-ops now.
In terms of reforming the post-secondary sector as a whole, Runte said stable government funding and a greater adoption of technology on campuses provincewide are key.
It might soon become commonplace to have some courses taught on campus and others offered strictly online, for example. “I think that will become the norm,” she said. “There will be a greater mixture of how that is done, and that will bring greater collaboration among institutions.”
Collaboration is something else she’d also like to see more of.
Runte used the example of a unique joint program it offers in conjunction with Algonquin College called the Bachelor of Information Technology. Students attend both schools concurrently, getting both the theory and the practical, and graduate in four years with both a degree and a diploma.
That means entering the workforce two years earlier and saving thousands of dollars on tuition.
Runte said the two schools are currently looking at other programs to do this with, and added that other Ontario campuses appear interested in doing the same.
Although calm has been restored now, this year’s Quebec student protests and ongoing concerns about rising tuitions have put the issue of access and affordability front and centre.
Runte says the current model requires a balance to be struck between what proportion government and individuals each contribute, though there is not currently a formula to set these amounts.
"I remember telling her, 'You're going to feel insanely creepy. You're going to feel like he lived here,'" Hindle says.
The verisimilitude Bigelow demanded for all aspects of the film was particularly important to the re-creation of the compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs last year. "We walked through, and the detail … it felt like someone had lived there; six years of never leaving," Hindle says. "We knew what his bed looked like from photographs. We knew he had an AK-47 hanging over it. We knew he was a pack rat. The hallway was just jammed full of every newspaper he could get his hands on."
Using primarily open-source intelligence from news reports and the like, and enhanced by Oscar-winning writer-producer and military journalist Mark Boal's research, the production constructed a full-scale, fully operational replica of Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.
"You can scale quite a lot off photographs," Hindle says. "We had a company called Frame Store in London model it in 3-D for us. Once you have the photographs and video, it's all a big math equation. It was a couple weeks of math, really.
"We built it for real out of stone and steel. We flew real Black Hawks in; there was a Black Hawk 50 feet over that set with Kathryn and every actor inside it. So the compound was 21/2 times over-engineered," he says, noting the set had to withstand the crash of one of the helicopters [hanging by a crane]. "There were 9-foot caissons underground, steel, cinder blocks; it was a bunker. It would be hard to blow that place up."
Hindle made the jump to feature film work from commercials — on which he had worked with such directors as Spike Jonze, Nicolas Winding Refn and Alejandro González I?árritu — in part due to the recommendation of "Zero Dark's" cinematographer, Greig Fraser.
"Kathryn hates wild walls [which can be removed for ease of filming]. Because [our] walls don't move, some cinematographers would have had a heart attack. Greig's not like that. We've worked together before; I've boxed him into places before. He loves that kind of style. He knows it creates a certain energy. It's difficult to shoot in when it's 120 degrees, but I said, 'I'm not going to make it easy for you to shoot; I'm going to make it great so you can shoot it.'
"You're cramming everyone in the room; it makes it so real. It's not a way that anyone else [but Bigelow] would make this film. [Normally,] you'd just say, 'Let's go to a stage … break it down, each floor.' But it's real. It was engineered, architecturally drawn up, and we built the thing in 10 weeks."
Scouting and construction of meticulously authentic locations on several continents and the design and assembly of approximations of stealth Black Hawk helicopters happened very quickly.
"I got hired the 25th of November, and we started shooting Feb. 28. It was mind-blowingly fast," Hindle says. "Every one of those military bases [seen in the film] didn't exist. We built all those. The Islamabad embassy, that's an engineering school in India. That was after scouting in Jordan for months."
But Hindle had concerns beyond making his timeline. Safety became an issue as the replica of Bin Laden's compound was built and shot in Jordan.
"It was haunting, for sure," Hindle says. "There were bomb-sniffing dogs checking the set before you walked on. There was a lot of security. We were 30 miles from Syria and three miles from Israel. For the first half of [building] the structure, nobody knew what it was. And then the helicopters came in, hanging from cranes … it was like, 'Huh. We're about a mile from the Dead Sea.'"
Like the hundreds of windows that make up its shiny facade, Carleton University’s new River Building is the result of many smaller victories, says university president Roseann Runte.
Opened this fall, the $55-million building is symbolic of how committed the federal and provincial governments, as well as individual donors, are to funding higher education, she says.
The reliance on sustainable construction practices — the building has a bio-wall and green roof — and its location near the Rideau River signify Carleton’s connection to the community and its concern for the natural environment.
But Runte says its greatest symbol is inside the building, in the form of a giant sculpture carved from the wood of an oak tree that stood in Old Ottawa South for more than 200 years.
The impressive sculpture, called Sailing Through Time, shows a tree upside down, its branches pointing toward the ground and its roots in the sky.
“To me, that is a symbol of what happens at university — that people learn new ways of thinking, new ways of opening their eyes to the world,” Runte said in selecting the River Building’s opening as the single most important achievement at Carleton in 2012.
With baccalaureates largely seen now as only the first step toward entering the workforce, Runte says, Carleton must make getting such a degree as enriching as possible.
A few years ago, the school started giving students a co-curricular record upon graduation, which is essentially a transcript of all the volunteer work, internships and international work they did outside of class during their time at Carleton.
Co-op placements are also a big deal, Runte says, adding they’re not just for science and engineering students any more. All arts departments at Carleton offer co-ops now.
In terms of reforming the post-secondary sector as a whole, Runte said stable government funding and a greater adoption of technology on campuses provincewide are key.
It might soon become commonplace to have some courses taught on campus and others offered strictly online, for example. “I think that will become the norm,” she said. “There will be a greater mixture of how that is done, and that will bring greater collaboration among institutions.”
Collaboration is something else she’d also like to see more of.
Runte used the example of a unique joint program it offers in conjunction with Algonquin College called the Bachelor of Information Technology. Students attend both schools concurrently, getting both the theory and the practical, and graduate in four years with both a degree and a diploma.
That means entering the workforce two years earlier and saving thousands of dollars on tuition.
Runte said the two schools are currently looking at other programs to do this with, and added that other Ontario campuses appear interested in doing the same.
Although calm has been restored now, this year’s Quebec student protests and ongoing concerns about rising tuitions have put the issue of access and affordability front and centre.
Runte says the current model requires a balance to be struck between what proportion government and individuals each contribute, though there is not currently a formula to set these amounts.
2012年12月25日星期二
Wednesday marks anniversary of Dakota War hangings
They were Dakota warriors. They met their fates with courage 150 years ago. The 38 condemned men, their hands bound behind them, rushed to the gallows that had been specially built for them on the edge of the Minnesota River in Mankato. They danced in place as the rough-hewn nooses were pulled over their heads. All wore white muslin caps with flaps on them, pulled down to obscure faces adorned with ceremonial paint.
According to an eyewitness report in The New York Times of the largest mass execution in American history, most of the men on the scaffold sang a slow Indian death song. Some of the condemned, including a few of mixed blood who had embraced Christianity, sang a song of their faith. Several had worked their hands free, and clasped a final grip with the man next to them.
Meanwhile, about 4,000 people watched. They were being monitored by more than 1,400 uniformed soldiers in the Minnesota Sixth, Eighth and Ninth regiments, there to ensure the warriors died of hanging and not of a mob attack.
Just after 10 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 26, 1862 — 150 years ago Wednesday — a drum was sounded three times. Capt. William Duley stood ready with a knife at the base of the platform.
Duley had been wounded, had lost three children during the conflict, and his pregnant wife and two other children had been taken hostage. Laura Duley later said she was repeatedly assaulted and lost the child she was carrying during captivity, he would learn when they were reunited.
As the final drumbeat echoed, Duley severed the heavy rope on his second try, releasing the traps beneath the warriors’ feet. All plunged down from the 20-foot-high platform.
Some died instantly, their necks snapped. Others writhed in agony as they choked to death. One man, known as Rattling Runner, plummeted to the ground, the rope around his neck having broken.
As he was brought back to the platform and a second rope placed around his neck, the crowd — and the soldiers — cheered long and loud when they saw all 38 bodies swinging in the frigid morning air.
One little boy, who reportedly had lost his parents in the 1862 Dakota War, was heard to shout, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” according to The New York Times report.
That mass hanging was the culmination of the 1862 Dakota War, also known as the Dakota Conflict, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, and Little Crow’s War, among other names. The executions were held after weeks of attacks, skirmishes and battles between white settlers and soldiers and Indians angry about the loss of their homeland and being denied access to food.
Hundreds, many of them settlers who were surprised by sudden attacks, died in August and September 1862. The Mankato hangings were intended to put the war to rest, but it has remained a heated topic among many Indians and some whites for 150 years, while others, even some who live in the region, are completely unaware of the bloody late summer of 1862.
Lyle W. Miller Sr., a Crow Creek teacher and 1993 Dakota Wesleyan University graduate, spoke on the 1862 Dakota War during a Dec. 14 presentation at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village.
“When I think about that time in 1862, and I think about the reasons why it started — it had to happen,” Miller said. “A lot of people think war isn’t ever supposed to happen, but at this time, let’s put it this way: There’s no good about a war, but sometimes it has to happen. The little ones were starving. What do you do when you’re faced with a position like that?”
This month, dozens of American Indians, along with other supporters and friends, have ridden horses across South Dakota and into Minnesota. They are scheduled to arrive Tuesday in Mankato and will take part in a solemn ceremony at the site of the executions.
Wilfred Keeble is taking part in the ride. The 54-year-old Keeble, a former Crow Creek tribal chairman, said he views the ride as a chance to connect with younger people, teach them their history, and guide them to reconciliation with white people.
But he also understands why the Dakota attacked the settlers and soldiers.
“I see the boys back then as being forced into it,” Keeble said. “I see justification for what happened.”
He joined the effort to encourage reconciliation shortly after it was started in 2005 by Jim Miller.
Miller had a dream in the spring of 2005 that he was riding horseback, headed to Minnesota. He said at the time that he had never heard of the 1862 Dakota War, or of the mass execution.
In the documentary “Dakota 38,” he explained what happened then.
“When you have dreams, you know when they come from the creator. … As any recovered alcoholic, I made believe that I didn’t get it. I tried to put it out of my mind, yet it’s one of those dreams that bothers you night and day.”
He is not on the ride this year, but he has taken part in past 330-mile journeys from Lower Brule to Mankato. Miller said it’s an opportunity for his people to move on, and that’s what he wants the ride to symbolize.
“We can’t blame the wasichus (greedy newcomers) anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. We’re selling drugs. We’re killing our own people,” he said. “That’s what this ride is about, is healing.”
By 1862, the Indians had surrendered most of southwest Minnesota in a pair of 1851 treaties, and still more land was lost after Chief Little Crow and other Indians leaders went to Washington, D.C., in 1858 to ask for explanations on why they were being cheated.
In the 1850s, two reservations were carved along the Minnesota River from what was once the Dakotas’ land. They were named the Upper Sioux Agency, with headquarters in Granite Falls, Minn., and the Lower Sioux Agency, based in Redwood, Minn.
The Mdewakanton and Wahpeku te bands of the Dakota, also known as the Santee Sioux, primarily resided in the Lower Sioux Agency. They were angry about lower-than-promised annuities, and often felt cheated by the traders who were supposed to provide them with food and supplies.
The loss of the land where they and their ancestors had hunted, fished and gathered wild rice and other food made the situation more desperate. At the same time, many Indians were following coverage of the Civil War in newspapers at the trading posts, and they saw that the North was losing, and calling for more men from its states.
As more and more settlers poured into Minnesota, and statehood was granted in 1858, once cordial relations between the Indians and the whites became increasingly strained. All that was needed for an inferno of violence was a spark.
Enter Andrew Myrick, a blunt-talking trader who was mistrusted by the Indians.
During a dispute over access to a warehouse packed with grain and other food on Aug. 15, 1862, a loud argument broke out between Indians and whites, including Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith, who was also a state senator. The Civil War was raging, and the attention, and dollars, of the federal and state government were focused on that war.
The treaty payments were late, again, and this time the traders were unwilling to extend credit. This caused a battle of words.
Myrick reportedly said this: “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
The Indians who heard this were deeply offended and shouted in anger. While the heinous statement has long been credited with sparking the war, it was just one of many factors. But it did have an impact on the warriors who were told of his remarks.
“Don’t take them, for they belong to a white man and we may get into trouble,” one of the Indians said to the others, according to an 1894 interview with Chief Big Eagle, who fought in the war and later served three years in a Minnesota prison
The would-be thief called his friend a coward and said he was afraid of white men. He promised to show them he was not afraid. That youthful boast started a deluge of slaughter that would roll across the southwest corner of Minnesota.
The four young men killed Robinson Jones, his son-in-law Howard Baker and his wife and their 14-year-old daughter, and a Mr. Webster that night. The attack was sudden and unexpected.
The young warriors, fresh from the kill, then returned to their village and explained what they had done. Some of their people were excited, while others said the murders would lead to disaster for the Dakota. The Indians asked Chief Little Crow, who was in his 60s and weary of battle, to lead them against the whites in an effort to reclaim their land.
Little Crow at first rejected the idea, telling the warriors that they were doomed, since he had seen the vast eastern cities during his trip to and from Washington, D.C., four years earlier.
But he also knew many of the white men were away, fighting in the Civil War. Perhaps they could win, the chief said, but he knew the odds were against them. He also realized the young men’s blood was up, and they were ready, even eager, for battle.
“You will die like rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon,” Little Crow said, and he then used his Indian name to inspire the warriors. “Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.”
According to an eyewitness report in The New York Times of the largest mass execution in American history, most of the men on the scaffold sang a slow Indian death song. Some of the condemned, including a few of mixed blood who had embraced Christianity, sang a song of their faith. Several had worked their hands free, and clasped a final grip with the man next to them.
Meanwhile, about 4,000 people watched. They were being monitored by more than 1,400 uniformed soldiers in the Minnesota Sixth, Eighth and Ninth regiments, there to ensure the warriors died of hanging and not of a mob attack.
Just after 10 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 26, 1862 — 150 years ago Wednesday — a drum was sounded three times. Capt. William Duley stood ready with a knife at the base of the platform.
Duley had been wounded, had lost three children during the conflict, and his pregnant wife and two other children had been taken hostage. Laura Duley later said she was repeatedly assaulted and lost the child she was carrying during captivity, he would learn when they were reunited.
As the final drumbeat echoed, Duley severed the heavy rope on his second try, releasing the traps beneath the warriors’ feet. All plunged down from the 20-foot-high platform.
Some died instantly, their necks snapped. Others writhed in agony as they choked to death. One man, known as Rattling Runner, plummeted to the ground, the rope around his neck having broken.
As he was brought back to the platform and a second rope placed around his neck, the crowd — and the soldiers — cheered long and loud when they saw all 38 bodies swinging in the frigid morning air.
One little boy, who reportedly had lost his parents in the 1862 Dakota War, was heard to shout, “Hurrah! Hurrah!” according to The New York Times report.
That mass hanging was the culmination of the 1862 Dakota War, also known as the Dakota Conflict, the Sioux Uprising of 1862, and Little Crow’s War, among other names. The executions were held after weeks of attacks, skirmishes and battles between white settlers and soldiers and Indians angry about the loss of their homeland and being denied access to food.
Hundreds, many of them settlers who were surprised by sudden attacks, died in August and September 1862. The Mankato hangings were intended to put the war to rest, but it has remained a heated topic among many Indians and some whites for 150 years, while others, even some who live in the region, are completely unaware of the bloody late summer of 1862.
Lyle W. Miller Sr., a Crow Creek teacher and 1993 Dakota Wesleyan University graduate, spoke on the 1862 Dakota War during a Dec. 14 presentation at the Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village.
“When I think about that time in 1862, and I think about the reasons why it started — it had to happen,” Miller said. “A lot of people think war isn’t ever supposed to happen, but at this time, let’s put it this way: There’s no good about a war, but sometimes it has to happen. The little ones were starving. What do you do when you’re faced with a position like that?”
This month, dozens of American Indians, along with other supporters and friends, have ridden horses across South Dakota and into Minnesota. They are scheduled to arrive Tuesday in Mankato and will take part in a solemn ceremony at the site of the executions.
Wilfred Keeble is taking part in the ride. The 54-year-old Keeble, a former Crow Creek tribal chairman, said he views the ride as a chance to connect with younger people, teach them their history, and guide them to reconciliation with white people.
But he also understands why the Dakota attacked the settlers and soldiers.
“I see the boys back then as being forced into it,” Keeble said. “I see justification for what happened.”
He joined the effort to encourage reconciliation shortly after it was started in 2005 by Jim Miller.
Miller had a dream in the spring of 2005 that he was riding horseback, headed to Minnesota. He said at the time that he had never heard of the 1862 Dakota War, or of the mass execution.
In the documentary “Dakota 38,” he explained what happened then.
“When you have dreams, you know when they come from the creator. … As any recovered alcoholic, I made believe that I didn’t get it. I tried to put it out of my mind, yet it’s one of those dreams that bothers you night and day.”
He is not on the ride this year, but he has taken part in past 330-mile journeys from Lower Brule to Mankato. Miller said it’s an opportunity for his people to move on, and that’s what he wants the ride to symbolize.
“We can’t blame the wasichus (greedy newcomers) anymore. We’re doing it to ourselves. We’re selling drugs. We’re killing our own people,” he said. “That’s what this ride is about, is healing.”
By 1862, the Indians had surrendered most of southwest Minnesota in a pair of 1851 treaties, and still more land was lost after Chief Little Crow and other Indians leaders went to Washington, D.C., in 1858 to ask for explanations on why they were being cheated.
In the 1850s, two reservations were carved along the Minnesota River from what was once the Dakotas’ land. They were named the Upper Sioux Agency, with headquarters in Granite Falls, Minn., and the Lower Sioux Agency, based in Redwood, Minn.
The Mdewakanton and Wahpeku te bands of the Dakota, also known as the Santee Sioux, primarily resided in the Lower Sioux Agency. They were angry about lower-than-promised annuities, and often felt cheated by the traders who were supposed to provide them with food and supplies.
The loss of the land where they and their ancestors had hunted, fished and gathered wild rice and other food made the situation more desperate. At the same time, many Indians were following coverage of the Civil War in newspapers at the trading posts, and they saw that the North was losing, and calling for more men from its states.
As more and more settlers poured into Minnesota, and statehood was granted in 1858, once cordial relations between the Indians and the whites became increasingly strained. All that was needed for an inferno of violence was a spark.
Enter Andrew Myrick, a blunt-talking trader who was mistrusted by the Indians.
During a dispute over access to a warehouse packed with grain and other food on Aug. 15, 1862, a loud argument broke out between Indians and whites, including Indian Agent Thomas Galbraith, who was also a state senator. The Civil War was raging, and the attention, and dollars, of the federal and state government were focused on that war.
The treaty payments were late, again, and this time the traders were unwilling to extend credit. This caused a battle of words.
Myrick reportedly said this: “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.”
The Indians who heard this were deeply offended and shouted in anger. While the heinous statement has long been credited with sparking the war, it was just one of many factors. But it did have an impact on the warriors who were told of his remarks.
“Don’t take them, for they belong to a white man and we may get into trouble,” one of the Indians said to the others, according to an 1894 interview with Chief Big Eagle, who fought in the war and later served three years in a Minnesota prison
The would-be thief called his friend a coward and said he was afraid of white men. He promised to show them he was not afraid. That youthful boast started a deluge of slaughter that would roll across the southwest corner of Minnesota.
The four young men killed Robinson Jones, his son-in-law Howard Baker and his wife and their 14-year-old daughter, and a Mr. Webster that night. The attack was sudden and unexpected.
The young warriors, fresh from the kill, then returned to their village and explained what they had done. Some of their people were excited, while others said the murders would lead to disaster for the Dakota. The Indians asked Chief Little Crow, who was in his 60s and weary of battle, to lead them against the whites in an effort to reclaim their land.
Little Crow at first rejected the idea, telling the warriors that they were doomed, since he had seen the vast eastern cities during his trip to and from Washington, D.C., four years earlier.
But he also knew many of the white men were away, fighting in the Civil War. Perhaps they could win, the chief said, but he knew the odds were against them. He also realized the young men’s blood was up, and they were ready, even eager, for battle.
“You will die like rabbits when the hungry wolves hunt them in the Hard Moon,” Little Crow said, and he then used his Indian name to inspire the warriors. “Taoyateduta is not a coward: he will die with you.”
A huge collection of odd TV stuff needs a home
James Comisar is the first to acknowledge that more than a few have questioned his sanity for spending the better part of 25 years collecting everything from the costume George Reeves wore in the 1950s TV show "Superman" to the entire set of "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson."
Then there's the pointy Spock ears Leonard Nimoy wore on "Star Trek" and the guns Tony Soprano used to rub out a mob rival in an episode of "The Sopranos."
"Along the way people thought I was nuts in general for wanting to conserve Keith Partridge's flared pants from 'The Partridge Family,'" the good-natured former TV writer says of the 1970s sitcom as he ambles through rows of costumes, props and what have you from the beginnings of television to the present day.
"But they really thought I needed a psychological workup," Comisar, 48, adds with a smile, "when they learned I was having museum curators take care of these pieces."
A museum is exactly where he wants to put all 10,000 of his TV memorabilia items, everything from the hairpiece Carl Reiner wore on the 1950s TV variety program "Your Show of Shows" to the gun and badge Kiefer Sutherland flashed on "24" a couple TV seasons ago.
Finding one that could accommodate his collection, which fills two sprawling, temperature-controlled warehouses, however, has sometimes been as hard as acquiring the boots Larry Hagman used to stomp around in when he was J.R. on "Dallas." (The show's production company finally coughed up a pair after plenty of pleading and cajoling.)
Comisar is one of many people who, after a lifetime of collecting, begin to realize that if they can't find a permanent home for their artifacts those objects could easily end up on the trash heap of history. Or, just as bad as far as he's concerned, in the hands of private collectors.
"Some of the biggest bidders for Hollywood memorabilia right now reside in mainland China and Dubai, and our history could leave this country forever," says Comisar, who these days works as a broker and purchasing expert for memorabilia collectors.
What began as a TV-obsessed kid's lark morphed into a full-fledged hobby when as a young man writing jokes for Howie Mandel and Joan Rivers, and punching up scripts for such producers as Norman Lear and Fred Silverman, Comisar began scouring studio back lots, looking for discarded stuff from the favorite shows of his childhood. From there it developed into a full-on obsession, dedicated to preserving the entire physical spectrum of television history.
"After a couple years of collecting, it became clear to me," he says, "that it didn't much matter what TV shows James watched in the early 1970s but which shows were the most iconic. In that way, I had sort of a curator's perspective almost from the beginning."
In the early days, collecting such stuff was easy for anyone with access to a studio back lot. Many items were simply thrown out or given away when shows ceased production. When studios did keep things they often rented them out for small fees, and if you lost or broke them you paid a small replacement fee. So Comisar began renting stuff right and left and promptly losing it, acquiring one of Herman Munster's jackets that way.
These days almost everything has a price, although Comisar's reputation as a serious collector has led some people to give him their stuff.
If he simply sold it all, he could probably retire as a millionaire several times over. Just last month someone paid $480,000 for a faded dress Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz." What might Annette Funicello's original Mickey Mouse Club jacket fetch?
"I've spent 25 years now reuniting these pieces, and I would be so sick if some day they were just broken up and sold to the highest bidder," he says.
He, and every other serious collector of cool but somewhat oddball stuff, face two major obstacles, say museum curators: Finding a museum or university with the space to take their treasures and persuading deep-pocketed individuals who might bankroll the endeavor that there's really any compelling reason to preserve something like Maxwell Smart's shoephone.
"People hold television and popular culture so close to their hearts and embrace it so passionately," says Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment collections for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, who calls Comisar's collection very impressive. "But they don't put it on the same platform as military history or political history."
When the Smithsonian acquired Archie Bunker's chair from the seminal TV comedy "All in the Family," Bowers said, museum officials took plenty of flak from those offended that some sitcom prop was being placed down the hallway from the nation's presidential artifacts.
The University of California, Santa Cruz, took similar heat when it accepted the Grateful Dead archives, 30 years of recordings, videos, papers, posters and other memorabilia gifted by the band, said university archivist Nicholas Meriwether.
"What I always graciously say is that if you leave the art and the music aside for one moment, whatever you think of it, what you can say is they are still a huge part of understanding the story of the 1960s and of understanding the nation's counterculture," says Meriwether.
Comisar sees his television collection serving the same purpose, tracing societal changes TV shows documented from the post-World War II years to the present.
The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation looked into establishing such a museum some years back, and Comisar's collection came up at the time, said Karen Herman, curator of the foundation's Archive of American Television.
Instead, the foundation settled on an online archive containing more than 3,000 hours of filmed oral history interviews with more than 700 people.
While the archive doesn't have any of Mr. Spock's ears, anyone with a computer can view and listen to an oral history from Spock himself, the actor Leonard Nimoy.
Comisar, meanwhile, believes he's finally found the right site for a museum, in Phoenix, where he's been lining up supporters. He estimates it will cost $35 million and several years to open the doors, but hopes to have a preview center in place by next year.
Mo Stein, a prominent architect who heads the Phoenix Community Alliance and is working with him, says one of the next steps will be finding a proper space for the collection.
Then there's the pointy Spock ears Leonard Nimoy wore on "Star Trek" and the guns Tony Soprano used to rub out a mob rival in an episode of "The Sopranos."
"Along the way people thought I was nuts in general for wanting to conserve Keith Partridge's flared pants from 'The Partridge Family,'" the good-natured former TV writer says of the 1970s sitcom as he ambles through rows of costumes, props and what have you from the beginnings of television to the present day.
"But they really thought I needed a psychological workup," Comisar, 48, adds with a smile, "when they learned I was having museum curators take care of these pieces."
A museum is exactly where he wants to put all 10,000 of his TV memorabilia items, everything from the hairpiece Carl Reiner wore on the 1950s TV variety program "Your Show of Shows" to the gun and badge Kiefer Sutherland flashed on "24" a couple TV seasons ago.
Finding one that could accommodate his collection, which fills two sprawling, temperature-controlled warehouses, however, has sometimes been as hard as acquiring the boots Larry Hagman used to stomp around in when he was J.R. on "Dallas." (The show's production company finally coughed up a pair after plenty of pleading and cajoling.)
Comisar is one of many people who, after a lifetime of collecting, begin to realize that if they can't find a permanent home for their artifacts those objects could easily end up on the trash heap of history. Or, just as bad as far as he's concerned, in the hands of private collectors.
"Some of the biggest bidders for Hollywood memorabilia right now reside in mainland China and Dubai, and our history could leave this country forever," says Comisar, who these days works as a broker and purchasing expert for memorabilia collectors.
What began as a TV-obsessed kid's lark morphed into a full-fledged hobby when as a young man writing jokes for Howie Mandel and Joan Rivers, and punching up scripts for such producers as Norman Lear and Fred Silverman, Comisar began scouring studio back lots, looking for discarded stuff from the favorite shows of his childhood. From there it developed into a full-on obsession, dedicated to preserving the entire physical spectrum of television history.
"After a couple years of collecting, it became clear to me," he says, "that it didn't much matter what TV shows James watched in the early 1970s but which shows were the most iconic. In that way, I had sort of a curator's perspective almost from the beginning."
In the early days, collecting such stuff was easy for anyone with access to a studio back lot. Many items were simply thrown out or given away when shows ceased production. When studios did keep things they often rented them out for small fees, and if you lost or broke them you paid a small replacement fee. So Comisar began renting stuff right and left and promptly losing it, acquiring one of Herman Munster's jackets that way.
These days almost everything has a price, although Comisar's reputation as a serious collector has led some people to give him their stuff.
If he simply sold it all, he could probably retire as a millionaire several times over. Just last month someone paid $480,000 for a faded dress Judy Garland wore in the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz." What might Annette Funicello's original Mickey Mouse Club jacket fetch?
"I've spent 25 years now reuniting these pieces, and I would be so sick if some day they were just broken up and sold to the highest bidder," he says.
He, and every other serious collector of cool but somewhat oddball stuff, face two major obstacles, say museum curators: Finding a museum or university with the space to take their treasures and persuading deep-pocketed individuals who might bankroll the endeavor that there's really any compelling reason to preserve something like Maxwell Smart's shoephone.
"People hold television and popular culture so close to their hearts and embrace it so passionately," says Dwight Bowers, curator of entertainment collections for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, who calls Comisar's collection very impressive. "But they don't put it on the same platform as military history or political history."
When the Smithsonian acquired Archie Bunker's chair from the seminal TV comedy "All in the Family," Bowers said, museum officials took plenty of flak from those offended that some sitcom prop was being placed down the hallway from the nation's presidential artifacts.
The University of California, Santa Cruz, took similar heat when it accepted the Grateful Dead archives, 30 years of recordings, videos, papers, posters and other memorabilia gifted by the band, said university archivist Nicholas Meriwether.
"What I always graciously say is that if you leave the art and the music aside for one moment, whatever you think of it, what you can say is they are still a huge part of understanding the story of the 1960s and of understanding the nation's counterculture," says Meriwether.
Comisar sees his television collection serving the same purpose, tracing societal changes TV shows documented from the post-World War II years to the present.
The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Foundation looked into establishing such a museum some years back, and Comisar's collection came up at the time, said Karen Herman, curator of the foundation's Archive of American Television.
Instead, the foundation settled on an online archive containing more than 3,000 hours of filmed oral history interviews with more than 700 people.
While the archive doesn't have any of Mr. Spock's ears, anyone with a computer can view and listen to an oral history from Spock himself, the actor Leonard Nimoy.
Comisar, meanwhile, believes he's finally found the right site for a museum, in Phoenix, where he's been lining up supporters. He estimates it will cost $35 million and several years to open the doors, but hopes to have a preview center in place by next year.
Mo Stein, a prominent architect who heads the Phoenix Community Alliance and is working with him, says one of the next steps will be finding a proper space for the collection.
2012年12月23日星期日
Woman becomes advocate for husband's return
Before they were to be separated by thousands of miles, the last words her husband said to her were, "I love you. Have faith in God."
Linda Cedillos had turned the corner on her way home from dropping off her daughter, Victoria Morales, from school on Jan. 26. She hit the brakes when she saw black cars with ICE written on the side parked outside her house. Three agents wearing bullet-proof vests had positioned themselves around her property where her husband, Roberto Cedillos, lay sleeping.
When Linda read the letters branded across the black cars, her heart dropped. She knew the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, agents had come to deport her husband back to Honduras. The next moments with Roberto would be her last.
According to Linda, the agents followed her up to the bedroom as she awoke her husband and watched him get dressed. After wondering whether they should post outside the back door in case Roberto tried to escape, the agents were surprised at the couple's cooperation.
"My husband is a Christian. He is not going out the window. He's going out the front door," Linda told the agents.
When Roberto arrived in the United States in 2005, he turned himself into ICE agents at the Dallas airport, seeking temporary protective status. Such status is granted to some immigrants who are unable to safely return to their homes. Though Roberto was not granted protective status, he was given permission to stay in the country on the condition that he would appear in court six months later.
"The court notice to appear gives you the opportunity to explain why you are here without inspection," said Dean Wanderer, Linda's immigration lawyer.
Roberto's failure to appear in court because he lost his court documents triggered his removal orders. Roberto moved to Virginia in 2006 and met Linda in 2007 when he worked at a restaurant in Dinwiddie County. After the couple was married in 2008, Linda paid $1,495 in fees to file paperwork in a bid to keep her husband in the country as a lawful permanent resident. Yet she did not know that those forms were useless because Roberto's removal orders remained. Instead, filing the forms in 2011 would have made ICE aware of his location, according to an ICE official.
Roberto was deported back to Honduras in March, two months after being detained in several ICE holding facilities.
Deported immigrants are typically given a five-year ban before they can attempt to re-enter the country. Roberto's ban was extended to 20 years after he was caught trying to re-enter the country illegally in July. Linda said that Roberto slept on trains and walked through the desert for five weeks to get back to her when she needed him.
"He's my life, and I'm his," Linda said. "I was having a partial hysterectomy at the time, and no woman wants to go through that without her husband."
Even though Roberto's successful return to Colonial Heights would have meant the family would go into hiding, Linda said she was glad he tried to get back to her.
Roberto, 31, now lives with his mother in Honduras in a one-room tin-roof house. He works as an industrial mechanic in a nearby factory, earning $2.30 per hour.
The majority of Linda's income from Right at Home, where she cares for the elderly, goes towards supporting Roberto and his mother, who both suffer from medical problems. Linda also helps support Roberto's daughter, who lives in Honduras, to go to private school.
But Linda does not think twice before she signs the checks and mails them to Honduras. For her, Roberto was a gift from God.
"Everybody that met him loves him. No one can believe that he was deported ... especially when there has been people here that have gotten DUIs, and they have been allowed to stay," she said.
Roberto's lack of a criminal record made Wanderer wonder why ICE was so intent to deport him.
"Normally, people that get in removal proceedings are those that are picked up for a crime. Roberto's case is remarkable in that he has no criminal record, he came to improve his lot in life, and Linda has been desperate to get him back," Wanderer said. "He is different in that I don't have to deal with traffic violations or alcohol-related offenses."
ICE officials did not respond to requests for information about this specific case.
ICE statistics indicate that Roberto was one of 174,880 non-criminal immigrant violators to be removed from the country by August 2012. Nearly 191,400 convicted criminal immigration violators were deported by ICE by August 2012.
Most days, Roberto, Linda and Victoria would attend Victoria's soccer games or go fishing at Lakeview Park. Roberto would take bag lunches to the homeless with Linda when she worked for the state health department and comfort 13-year-old Victoria, his stepdaughter, on nights that she would have nightmares.
In the four years that they were married, Linda drove her husband wherever he needed to go because he was not allowed to obtain a license.
"[The ICE agent] asked me why my husband and me never drove. And I told him because my husband didn't have a license. We were trying to do things the legal way, the right way," Linda said.
Her husband's deportation despite his lack of a criminal record, the fact that he turned himself in, and filing the appropriate forms has made Linda believe there is something wrong with the system.
"When you try to do the right thing then you are punished by your own government," she said. "The government has separated us, and it's not fair."
Roberto's failure to appear in court coupled with his attempt to re-enter the country illegally has made his chances of obtaining an immigrant visa slim. An immigrant visa would allow Roberto to travel to the United States and apply for permanent residency.
Because her husband's immigrant visa application will most likely be denied, Linda and her lawyer are submitting waivers to rescind Roberto's 20-year ban on the grounds that his removal has caused extreme hardship on an American citizen.
Every night, Linda holds Roberto's iPod up to her ear. She listens to a recording of him singing in Spanish to God to drown out the numbers in her head. In addition to the $10,000 in lawyer fees, Linda faces nearly $2,000 in waiver fees and thousands in doctor bills. Linda said that now that her daughter's stepfather is gone, Victoria suffers from migraines brought on by stress. Linda, 42, has moved back into her parent's house, and her things are packed away in a storage facility.
"People talk about how immigrants go on welfare and Medicaid. We weren't on Medicaid before, and we paid taxes," Linda said. "Now, I'm on Medicaid, I'm on food stamps."
And every day her husband lives in Honduras is another day Linda doesn't know if he will survive.
"Everybody says, at least he's not dead. But with death, you have closure. With my husband deported, I don't know what the future is going to hold," Linda said. "God didn't mean for it to be that way."
Linda said that even if she had the money to visit her husband in Honduras, she would not go because it is too dangerous. A week after Roberto returned to his mother's home, Linda said his friend was shot for refusing to join a gang. Gang violence and political turmoil caused the 158 Peace Corps volunteers to evacuate Honduras within weeks of Roberto returning to his home country.
Linda Cedillos had turned the corner on her way home from dropping off her daughter, Victoria Morales, from school on Jan. 26. She hit the brakes when she saw black cars with ICE written on the side parked outside her house. Three agents wearing bullet-proof vests had positioned themselves around her property where her husband, Roberto Cedillos, lay sleeping.
When Linda read the letters branded across the black cars, her heart dropped. She knew the U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement, or ICE, agents had come to deport her husband back to Honduras. The next moments with Roberto would be her last.
According to Linda, the agents followed her up to the bedroom as she awoke her husband and watched him get dressed. After wondering whether they should post outside the back door in case Roberto tried to escape, the agents were surprised at the couple's cooperation.
"My husband is a Christian. He is not going out the window. He's going out the front door," Linda told the agents.
When Roberto arrived in the United States in 2005, he turned himself into ICE agents at the Dallas airport, seeking temporary protective status. Such status is granted to some immigrants who are unable to safely return to their homes. Though Roberto was not granted protective status, he was given permission to stay in the country on the condition that he would appear in court six months later.
"The court notice to appear gives you the opportunity to explain why you are here without inspection," said Dean Wanderer, Linda's immigration lawyer.
Roberto's failure to appear in court because he lost his court documents triggered his removal orders. Roberto moved to Virginia in 2006 and met Linda in 2007 when he worked at a restaurant in Dinwiddie County. After the couple was married in 2008, Linda paid $1,495 in fees to file paperwork in a bid to keep her husband in the country as a lawful permanent resident. Yet she did not know that those forms were useless because Roberto's removal orders remained. Instead, filing the forms in 2011 would have made ICE aware of his location, according to an ICE official.
Roberto was deported back to Honduras in March, two months after being detained in several ICE holding facilities.
Deported immigrants are typically given a five-year ban before they can attempt to re-enter the country. Roberto's ban was extended to 20 years after he was caught trying to re-enter the country illegally in July. Linda said that Roberto slept on trains and walked through the desert for five weeks to get back to her when she needed him.
"He's my life, and I'm his," Linda said. "I was having a partial hysterectomy at the time, and no woman wants to go through that without her husband."
Even though Roberto's successful return to Colonial Heights would have meant the family would go into hiding, Linda said she was glad he tried to get back to her.
Roberto, 31, now lives with his mother in Honduras in a one-room tin-roof house. He works as an industrial mechanic in a nearby factory, earning $2.30 per hour.
The majority of Linda's income from Right at Home, where she cares for the elderly, goes towards supporting Roberto and his mother, who both suffer from medical problems. Linda also helps support Roberto's daughter, who lives in Honduras, to go to private school.
But Linda does not think twice before she signs the checks and mails them to Honduras. For her, Roberto was a gift from God.
"Everybody that met him loves him. No one can believe that he was deported ... especially when there has been people here that have gotten DUIs, and they have been allowed to stay," she said.
Roberto's lack of a criminal record made Wanderer wonder why ICE was so intent to deport him.
"Normally, people that get in removal proceedings are those that are picked up for a crime. Roberto's case is remarkable in that he has no criminal record, he came to improve his lot in life, and Linda has been desperate to get him back," Wanderer said. "He is different in that I don't have to deal with traffic violations or alcohol-related offenses."
ICE officials did not respond to requests for information about this specific case.
ICE statistics indicate that Roberto was one of 174,880 non-criminal immigrant violators to be removed from the country by August 2012. Nearly 191,400 convicted criminal immigration violators were deported by ICE by August 2012.
Most days, Roberto, Linda and Victoria would attend Victoria's soccer games or go fishing at Lakeview Park. Roberto would take bag lunches to the homeless with Linda when she worked for the state health department and comfort 13-year-old Victoria, his stepdaughter, on nights that she would have nightmares.
In the four years that they were married, Linda drove her husband wherever he needed to go because he was not allowed to obtain a license.
"[The ICE agent] asked me why my husband and me never drove. And I told him because my husband didn't have a license. We were trying to do things the legal way, the right way," Linda said.
Her husband's deportation despite his lack of a criminal record, the fact that he turned himself in, and filing the appropriate forms has made Linda believe there is something wrong with the system.
"When you try to do the right thing then you are punished by your own government," she said. "The government has separated us, and it's not fair."
Roberto's failure to appear in court coupled with his attempt to re-enter the country illegally has made his chances of obtaining an immigrant visa slim. An immigrant visa would allow Roberto to travel to the United States and apply for permanent residency.
Because her husband's immigrant visa application will most likely be denied, Linda and her lawyer are submitting waivers to rescind Roberto's 20-year ban on the grounds that his removal has caused extreme hardship on an American citizen.
Every night, Linda holds Roberto's iPod up to her ear. She listens to a recording of him singing in Spanish to God to drown out the numbers in her head. In addition to the $10,000 in lawyer fees, Linda faces nearly $2,000 in waiver fees and thousands in doctor bills. Linda said that now that her daughter's stepfather is gone, Victoria suffers from migraines brought on by stress. Linda, 42, has moved back into her parent's house, and her things are packed away in a storage facility.
"People talk about how immigrants go on welfare and Medicaid. We weren't on Medicaid before, and we paid taxes," Linda said. "Now, I'm on Medicaid, I'm on food stamps."
And every day her husband lives in Honduras is another day Linda doesn't know if he will survive.
"Everybody says, at least he's not dead. But with death, you have closure. With my husband deported, I don't know what the future is going to hold," Linda said. "God didn't mean for it to be that way."
Linda said that even if she had the money to visit her husband in Honduras, she would not go because it is too dangerous. A week after Roberto returned to his mother's home, Linda said his friend was shot for refusing to join a gang. Gang violence and political turmoil caused the 158 Peace Corps volunteers to evacuate Honduras within weeks of Roberto returning to his home country.
Django Unchained
Set two years before the American civil war in the deep South of the USA, the titular Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave from a plantation in Texas. He fell foul of his masters when he married another slave Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) in secret – regarding as crime within the plantation culture. The couple are punished with a bullwhip and separated by their sadistic charges – both to be sold to new owners.
On his way to a slave auction in a chain gang, a broken Django crosses paths with Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German bounty hunter who is posing as a dentist – who’s business is killings rather than fillings. Schultz is after the bounty for Django’s former masters who have fallen foul of the law and Django is the only one who can identify them for him. Schultz makes a deal with Django – if he helps Schultz’s to find and kill the bounty, then Schultz will buy his freedom and help him to find and free his wife. The deal is simple, but it leads to an epic quest which will require Django to learn the tools of the bounty hunting trade.
If stripped down, the story of Django Unchained is a relatively straightforward one – a simple tale of good versus evil. What makes this story a little different is the subject matter of slavery, an issue which given America’s history will always run the risk of courting controversy. As such, quite often cinema has handled this powerful issue a little too dryly and blandly – focussing on the legal and political overtures. Neither are adjectives that will ever be applicable to Tarantino, so his focus is on entertaining first and foremost but in a grounded context and setting. In the film’s production notes Tarantino explains “It can’t be more nightmarish than it was in real life. It can’t be more surrealistic than it was in real life. It can’t be more outrageous than it was in real life”
That’s not to say that he holds back on this film compared to his previous work, he still has a lot of fun and in one of his favourite genres. The spaghetti western has been a staple ingredient in the Tarantino recipe from the very start and elements of it creep into all his films. So there’s no new ground being broken really, just a chance for some extra revelry and enthusiasm on an epic scale from an already passionate director doing something that he does well. And therein lies the strength of this movie, it’s not a broken record but a favourite one that just being played loudly. All of the Tarantino trademarks are present and correct – great dialogue, interesting characters, a funky soundtrack, dark humour and plenty of blood’n’guts. But it’s all bigger!
What does feel a little different with this larger scale is the pace of this film, there is very much the sense that the director has taken his time with this one. The 165 minute run time is his longest film to date, but that’s only eleven minutes longer than Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Inglorious Basterds. It’s more that this story is told in an entirely linear fashion without being episodical – so it unravels at a steadier pace and with a feeling of greater depth.
Even from a technical point of view the approach is slower, in particular with the cinematography. Gone are the trademark tightly framed close-ups with fast cuts, and instead we get long static wide shots which soak up the stunning vistas of the American landscape or the intoxicating atmosphere in the room/location.
Providing and feeding the latter, is a cast that are all exceptional. And they needed to be, because on screen there are potential scene stealers everywhere. So what we get is chemistry rather than competition from the actors.
As Django, Jamie Foxx provides a measured and mature performance as his character’s story arc takes him from forsaken victim to focussed avenger. And while the story is a good versus evil framework, his character is not so cut and dry - which is what makes him and the performance that much more interesting. Django isn’t some kind of black Spartacus, he’s a man who’s only priority is getting his wife back, and he’ll do anything he can to achieve that – even if it’s morally reprehensible. Foxx manages to capture that magnificently.
The reprisal of an on screen partnership with Kerry Washington as his wife (she also starred in Ray with him), also helps to get the best out of him and indeed her. As Broomhilda, Washington has some of the more difficult and emotive scenes within the film, but she handles them perfectly.
Some mud has already been thrown at Christoph Waltz for his role as Dr King Schultz playing a little too close to his Oscar winning turn as Hans Landers in Inglorious Basterds. There’s no getting round it, the accent and a lot of the delivery is incredibly similar – but the characterisation is distinct enough for Waltz to make the role a successful one. Both are effortlessly charismatic, but the menace of Landers is replaced by the humanity of Schultz. The director had faith in his star from the start, by attaching him to the project from an early stage and sharing the early drafts of the script. In my opinion, the faith is justified.
Unfamiliarity rather than faith was the case when Leonardo DiCaprio was added to the cast list, in his first outing as an on screen villain as the despicable plantation owner Calvin Candie. Audiences should delight in his performance – which could not be further from his role in Titanic which made him an A-lister – but they shouldn’t be entirely surprised by it, considering the consistent high quality of his work over the years. There’s certainly a suggestion that DiCaprio enjoyed working with Tarantino, so hopefully another future collaboration is in the pipeline – preferably with DiCaprio playing another rotter.
Viu routes is the new ad-free Android app that allows users to track their travel routes and other mobile assets on their smartphone. Developed by German telematics company, ENAiKOON, inViu routes is part of the “inViu touch” family of apps that connects to inViu web, ENAiKOON’s backend web portal server. It is the only app in the market today that combines GPS photos, maps, routes, POIs, and location-based alerts all in one comprehensive app.
The idea behind inViu routes is to be able to record travel routes just like a GPS device using an off-the-shelf Android phone. Users can add other inViu routes mobile users and GPS devices to track on their phone. The tracked mobile phones and routes can be viewed as well on inViu web, a free web-based smartphone and asset tracking software. The new app allows users to find locations on OpenStreetMap, set geofences, and take photos with embedded GPS coordinates that could be assigned to certain Points of Interest (POIs) or routes. The geo-notes feature incorporates text and voice reminders to specific geofences, allowing users to create location-based notifications. Routes, POIs, and photos can be emailed as a map image, GPX, or KML file to share with friends and family. Routes, POIs, and photos can also be shared through any other installed app on the user’s phone, including social media apps.
This software will attract travel, geocaching, and outdoor sport enthusiasts as it can record favourite trip routes and save POIs with exact GPS coordinates along those routes. On-the-go users can benefit from geo-notes as it can be effectively used for location-based reminders. As tracking software, it can be particularly useful for families, allowing them to keep a close eye on children, seniors, and pets to monitor their safety. Family members equipped with an Android phone with inViu routes can be easily monitored as their GPS coordinates will show in real time on inViu web. Anyone with an account or subaccount can access the online software.
On his way to a slave auction in a chain gang, a broken Django crosses paths with Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German bounty hunter who is posing as a dentist – who’s business is killings rather than fillings. Schultz is after the bounty for Django’s former masters who have fallen foul of the law and Django is the only one who can identify them for him. Schultz makes a deal with Django – if he helps Schultz’s to find and kill the bounty, then Schultz will buy his freedom and help him to find and free his wife. The deal is simple, but it leads to an epic quest which will require Django to learn the tools of the bounty hunting trade.
If stripped down, the story of Django Unchained is a relatively straightforward one – a simple tale of good versus evil. What makes this story a little different is the subject matter of slavery, an issue which given America’s history will always run the risk of courting controversy. As such, quite often cinema has handled this powerful issue a little too dryly and blandly – focussing on the legal and political overtures. Neither are adjectives that will ever be applicable to Tarantino, so his focus is on entertaining first and foremost but in a grounded context and setting. In the film’s production notes Tarantino explains “It can’t be more nightmarish than it was in real life. It can’t be more surrealistic than it was in real life. It can’t be more outrageous than it was in real life”
That’s not to say that he holds back on this film compared to his previous work, he still has a lot of fun and in one of his favourite genres. The spaghetti western has been a staple ingredient in the Tarantino recipe from the very start and elements of it creep into all his films. So there’s no new ground being broken really, just a chance for some extra revelry and enthusiasm on an epic scale from an already passionate director doing something that he does well. And therein lies the strength of this movie, it’s not a broken record but a favourite one that just being played loudly. All of the Tarantino trademarks are present and correct – great dialogue, interesting characters, a funky soundtrack, dark humour and plenty of blood’n’guts. But it’s all bigger!
What does feel a little different with this larger scale is the pace of this film, there is very much the sense that the director has taken his time with this one. The 165 minute run time is his longest film to date, but that’s only eleven minutes longer than Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Inglorious Basterds. It’s more that this story is told in an entirely linear fashion without being episodical – so it unravels at a steadier pace and with a feeling of greater depth.
Even from a technical point of view the approach is slower, in particular with the cinematography. Gone are the trademark tightly framed close-ups with fast cuts, and instead we get long static wide shots which soak up the stunning vistas of the American landscape or the intoxicating atmosphere in the room/location.
Providing and feeding the latter, is a cast that are all exceptional. And they needed to be, because on screen there are potential scene stealers everywhere. So what we get is chemistry rather than competition from the actors.
As Django, Jamie Foxx provides a measured and mature performance as his character’s story arc takes him from forsaken victim to focussed avenger. And while the story is a good versus evil framework, his character is not so cut and dry - which is what makes him and the performance that much more interesting. Django isn’t some kind of black Spartacus, he’s a man who’s only priority is getting his wife back, and he’ll do anything he can to achieve that – even if it’s morally reprehensible. Foxx manages to capture that magnificently.
The reprisal of an on screen partnership with Kerry Washington as his wife (she also starred in Ray with him), also helps to get the best out of him and indeed her. As Broomhilda, Washington has some of the more difficult and emotive scenes within the film, but she handles them perfectly.
Some mud has already been thrown at Christoph Waltz for his role as Dr King Schultz playing a little too close to his Oscar winning turn as Hans Landers in Inglorious Basterds. There’s no getting round it, the accent and a lot of the delivery is incredibly similar – but the characterisation is distinct enough for Waltz to make the role a successful one. Both are effortlessly charismatic, but the menace of Landers is replaced by the humanity of Schultz. The director had faith in his star from the start, by attaching him to the project from an early stage and sharing the early drafts of the script. In my opinion, the faith is justified.
Unfamiliarity rather than faith was the case when Leonardo DiCaprio was added to the cast list, in his first outing as an on screen villain as the despicable plantation owner Calvin Candie. Audiences should delight in his performance – which could not be further from his role in Titanic which made him an A-lister – but they shouldn’t be entirely surprised by it, considering the consistent high quality of his work over the years. There’s certainly a suggestion that DiCaprio enjoyed working with Tarantino, so hopefully another future collaboration is in the pipeline – preferably with DiCaprio playing another rotter.
Viu routes is the new ad-free Android app that allows users to track their travel routes and other mobile assets on their smartphone. Developed by German telematics company, ENAiKOON, inViu routes is part of the “inViu touch” family of apps that connects to inViu web, ENAiKOON’s backend web portal server. It is the only app in the market today that combines GPS photos, maps, routes, POIs, and location-based alerts all in one comprehensive app.
The idea behind inViu routes is to be able to record travel routes just like a GPS device using an off-the-shelf Android phone. Users can add other inViu routes mobile users and GPS devices to track on their phone. The tracked mobile phones and routes can be viewed as well on inViu web, a free web-based smartphone and asset tracking software. The new app allows users to find locations on OpenStreetMap, set geofences, and take photos with embedded GPS coordinates that could be assigned to certain Points of Interest (POIs) or routes. The geo-notes feature incorporates text and voice reminders to specific geofences, allowing users to create location-based notifications. Routes, POIs, and photos can be emailed as a map image, GPX, or KML file to share with friends and family. Routes, POIs, and photos can also be shared through any other installed app on the user’s phone, including social media apps.
This software will attract travel, geocaching, and outdoor sport enthusiasts as it can record favourite trip routes and save POIs with exact GPS coordinates along those routes. On-the-go users can benefit from geo-notes as it can be effectively used for location-based reminders. As tracking software, it can be particularly useful for families, allowing them to keep a close eye on children, seniors, and pets to monitor their safety. Family members equipped with an Android phone with inViu routes can be easily monitored as their GPS coordinates will show in real time on inViu web. Anyone with an account or subaccount can access the online software.
2012年12月19日星期三
Generations Fall of Cybertron - Deluxe Figure
In 2006 Classics Starscream was released, to the immediate delight of many. Problem is, the mold's engineering was outdated even when the toy was brand new. And then the mold kept getting released every year since. Spread among Hasbro, Takara, and Fun Publications, it has been redecoed and/or remolded at least two dozen times in six years. That has got to put it in the running for most reused mold-family. And I may still be missing an instance or two!
A new Classics-friendly Starscream has been on my wishlist for a long time. What's more, I really wanted something based on the Cybertron toy's design, but with better poseability. It took a few years, but it seems like thanks to Fall of Cybertron, I may have gotten exactly what I wished for. ...and in doing probably consigned myself to gradually amassing a whole new seeker collection. Aw, cripes, this really was a monkey's paw...
By this point, making a toy to look like Starscream should be no big deal. And here that's quite true, where the toy hits the basic familiar elements. Intakes rising out above the shoulders, wings flared upward from the back, torso dominated by the cockpit canopy, itself flanked by the square chest vents, and engines forming the "boot heels". The big missing element from most classic iterations of Starscream is the null rays, with this Starscream left bare-armed. But even so, in these colors you just can't look at this toy and not recognize it as Starscream. The visible sculpted detail is on the simplistic side, largely just representing basic panel lines. The shoulder, elbow, and hip joints have some extra added to give a stronger impression of being mechanical elements, but Starscream is for the large part just smooth and clean looking. One noteworthy exception can be found within the torso, where one of the structural pieces has much more complicated detail sculpting implying parts of Starscream's internal structure. In execution it even feels like these components are being safely hidden by the outer armor. A similar case is found with the forearms, where simple mechanisms peek out between two "armor" surfaces. Small touches like that help to build the thought that the low detail surfaces visible are just armor panels hiding the vital working components of the body. This again uses small, simple steps to build the idea that this is a (model of a) living, working thing.
I really like the sculpt work on Starscream's head. The helmet has all the typical elements, but the "ear vents" are slimmed down and kept closer to the helmet, so the head ends up looking more tall than wide. This trait carries in the face, which tapers from filling the front of the helmet around the eyes, down to a point at the chin. A little unusual, but it feels really right for a Starscream, much the way that Transformers: Prime Starscream's face is designed. I like that visual trait carrying over a little in to an otherwise unrelated Starscream's toy. Starscream is one of what seems like an increasingly few toys designed with light-piping eyes that actually keeps them all the way to final production. And the amber color of the clear plastic does an absolutely beautiful job of capturing the light. The yellow-orange glow is very powerful under just semi-direct light, and the eyes will still appear to be illuminated even with completely indirect room lighting. Very, very nice. By the way, thanks to not having a jet's nosecone hanging off the back, this Starscream's head has an unrestricted range in which it can swivel. A ball joint actually would have been a little nicer, provided it would have had range enough to let Starscream look downward, but that's a mildly specific request.
Starscream's articulation is on the high side relative to how the FOC Generations have been going, much like the Optimus/Magnus mold. And in comparison to the Classics seeker, it's a huge leap forward. Some of the more advanced aspects like the double-hinge elbows are just as much for transformation necessity as poseability, but it does the job just as well. Without arm-mounted weapons, the wings don't hinder the articulation much at all, and if they should, they're able to angle back a little bit to allow extra clearance. Of course, the shoulders and the wings share a common hinge so you may find the two moving around the hinges together. But the arms have a fantastic overall range of movement with very little restriction. The legs aren't as unusual, and with their basic 90-degree single hinge knees they're actually pretty square in the average category. But The hips move freely which is a definite plus, and there's an ankle tilt for the sake of having an ankle tilt. They put a good, solid hinge joint in there to serve that function, and the ankles rock smoothly a few degrees to either side of center. As many figures just have the tilt of the ankle predetermined, it's nice to see one get a joint that does nothing but that. Starscream may not do anything amazing or different in poseability, but it's really just nice to get one in this style that's even able to get a solid range of basic poses.
Starscream ends up using quite a bit of paint. All of the blue on the figure is a product of paint applications, there's no blue plastic at all. Most blue surfaces look like they've had full spray coverage, where looking up the bottom of the feet it's easy to see where the spray didn't quite reach and the coverage fades inside. It's a really good job, managing to get the right amount of blue in the colorscheme while relying on paint to fill it all in and still not seem to have anything really obviously missing from the deco elsewhere. The only spot I'd have asked for paint to be added is the intake posts on the shoulders, which for Starscream should be red. Still, it's not a big deal as it sits, and they did a heck of a job with a limited array of plastic colors.
Changing Starscream to vehicle mode is kind of like anti-challenge. The arms fold under the body and the legs peg in pointed backward and that's about it. You need to remember to turn the head backward or else Starscream's face will be looking up in jet mode, but there's not enough going on in the process to really say there's any sort of tricks between modes. But then, I like simple transformations I can pull off in a matter of seconds rather than knowing I need to block out several minutes to unorigami something between modes.
It's not exactly the Cybertron Starscream lookalike I would have asked for, but the themes are similar enough I'm really satisfied with this style of Cybertronian aircraft. The design works out such that the undercarriage actually raises in the middle instead of being a solid block of folded robot bits under a jet "skin". The variations kind of make it look like the legs are oversized engines mostly integrated in to a more full jet body. It would still make an absolutely terrible aircraft, but it's a nice change of pace from how so many Deluxe size jets turn out. Part of the benefit afforded by an aircraft body plan is to exaggerate the size of the vehicle somewhat. Deluxe cars these days tend to be miserably small since they represent the most compact rectangular form the parts can collapse in to. But Starscream looks and feels a lot bigger than a current standard Deluxe vehicle since the wings increase the visible surface area, and the nose and cockpit extend beyond the core structure of the vehicle.
The color layout of the vehicle mode is pretty good, though I think it uses red too much as a primary color as the front half feels pretty dominated by it. Though I'm sure the amount of blue paint already present was pushing things, I'd have liked to see the tip of the nose done in blue, to help balance the appearance. With the nose red, it looks less like a grey fuselage with red elements than it does a red fuselage with the canopy trimmed grey. The Decepticon symbols on the wings really could have used either outlining, or to be done in a different paint color entirely, like silver. The contrast is rather poor between the red plastic of the wings and what I'm pretty sure is the same pink used for glow effects elsewhere (it's hard to tell the exact color against that red, which probably proves my point right there), and it needs something to be different to stand out better.
Through the amber canopy, you can see a pilot's seat inside the cockpit. Odd, given this is a Cybertronian vehicle form. Starscream doesn't have any kind of landing gear, because in practice it wouldn't be necessary anyway. But the toy will sit stably and level thanks to part of the robot's structural support that creates a base along with the flat side of the legs. Finally, if such things amuse you, you can flip up the robot head behind the cockpit and Starscream can look around in vehicle mode. Gives me happy memories of Beast Machines Vehicons!
Starscream comes with a pair of mirrored triple-barrel cannons. The barrels rotate, albeit stiffly by using a ridged thumb wheel at the base of the barrels. Each gun has two 5mm pegs, so you can choose which orientation Starscream holds them. Starscream does have a range of 5mm ports, including on the forearms, but I definitely recommend against using those. I tried attaching the guns on the arms once and both peg holes stressed, and one actually cracked from having the peg inserted. Even if that wouldn't be a problem, the guns sit very low down the length of the arms and it looks pretty awkward. There's hardpoints under the wings and along the robot legs, to allow attachment for vehicle mode. These will stress too, but in my experience the leg ports do so worse than the wings, so you'll probably want to stick with keeping the guns directly under the wings in vehicle mode. It's also the method that looks the best overall.
The two cannons can be tabbed together to make a double triple barrel cannon. When combined, the ridges on the thumb wheels interlock and both sets of barrels will rotate as gears. Again, this would be more fun if the movement was a little less stiff. Like this, Starscream basically has to hold the weapon from either side or just carry it sideways. There's no centered peg to use in the combined form, although combining them does produce a new 5mm port on the top if you want to add another weapon on. The combined form can't mount to the vehicle, either.
They're a nice design, based on the Neutron Assault Rifle from Fall of Cybertron. As executed here, it's easy to imagine them as a dual-function system. Individually they're the triple barrel cannon, but combined, the space between the individual barrels looks more like big gun barrels themselves, so your hand-carried vulcan cannons turn in to one double barrel energy cannon. Sounds like a perfectly sensible upgrade progression to me! One really nice design touch was including false gear elements below the base of the barrels, so when the barrels are rotated, it turns as well. One more bit of making these things look more like functioning machinery.
A new Classics-friendly Starscream has been on my wishlist for a long time. What's more, I really wanted something based on the Cybertron toy's design, but with better poseability. It took a few years, but it seems like thanks to Fall of Cybertron, I may have gotten exactly what I wished for. ...and in doing probably consigned myself to gradually amassing a whole new seeker collection. Aw, cripes, this really was a monkey's paw...
By this point, making a toy to look like Starscream should be no big deal. And here that's quite true, where the toy hits the basic familiar elements. Intakes rising out above the shoulders, wings flared upward from the back, torso dominated by the cockpit canopy, itself flanked by the square chest vents, and engines forming the "boot heels". The big missing element from most classic iterations of Starscream is the null rays, with this Starscream left bare-armed. But even so, in these colors you just can't look at this toy and not recognize it as Starscream. The visible sculpted detail is on the simplistic side, largely just representing basic panel lines. The shoulder, elbow, and hip joints have some extra added to give a stronger impression of being mechanical elements, but Starscream is for the large part just smooth and clean looking. One noteworthy exception can be found within the torso, where one of the structural pieces has much more complicated detail sculpting implying parts of Starscream's internal structure. In execution it even feels like these components are being safely hidden by the outer armor. A similar case is found with the forearms, where simple mechanisms peek out between two "armor" surfaces. Small touches like that help to build the thought that the low detail surfaces visible are just armor panels hiding the vital working components of the body. This again uses small, simple steps to build the idea that this is a (model of a) living, working thing.
I really like the sculpt work on Starscream's head. The helmet has all the typical elements, but the "ear vents" are slimmed down and kept closer to the helmet, so the head ends up looking more tall than wide. This trait carries in the face, which tapers from filling the front of the helmet around the eyes, down to a point at the chin. A little unusual, but it feels really right for a Starscream, much the way that Transformers: Prime Starscream's face is designed. I like that visual trait carrying over a little in to an otherwise unrelated Starscream's toy. Starscream is one of what seems like an increasingly few toys designed with light-piping eyes that actually keeps them all the way to final production. And the amber color of the clear plastic does an absolutely beautiful job of capturing the light. The yellow-orange glow is very powerful under just semi-direct light, and the eyes will still appear to be illuminated even with completely indirect room lighting. Very, very nice. By the way, thanks to not having a jet's nosecone hanging off the back, this Starscream's head has an unrestricted range in which it can swivel. A ball joint actually would have been a little nicer, provided it would have had range enough to let Starscream look downward, but that's a mildly specific request.
Starscream's articulation is on the high side relative to how the FOC Generations have been going, much like the Optimus/Magnus mold. And in comparison to the Classics seeker, it's a huge leap forward. Some of the more advanced aspects like the double-hinge elbows are just as much for transformation necessity as poseability, but it does the job just as well. Without arm-mounted weapons, the wings don't hinder the articulation much at all, and if they should, they're able to angle back a little bit to allow extra clearance. Of course, the shoulders and the wings share a common hinge so you may find the two moving around the hinges together. But the arms have a fantastic overall range of movement with very little restriction. The legs aren't as unusual, and with their basic 90-degree single hinge knees they're actually pretty square in the average category. But The hips move freely which is a definite plus, and there's an ankle tilt for the sake of having an ankle tilt. They put a good, solid hinge joint in there to serve that function, and the ankles rock smoothly a few degrees to either side of center. As many figures just have the tilt of the ankle predetermined, it's nice to see one get a joint that does nothing but that. Starscream may not do anything amazing or different in poseability, but it's really just nice to get one in this style that's even able to get a solid range of basic poses.
Starscream ends up using quite a bit of paint. All of the blue on the figure is a product of paint applications, there's no blue plastic at all. Most blue surfaces look like they've had full spray coverage, where looking up the bottom of the feet it's easy to see where the spray didn't quite reach and the coverage fades inside. It's a really good job, managing to get the right amount of blue in the colorscheme while relying on paint to fill it all in and still not seem to have anything really obviously missing from the deco elsewhere. The only spot I'd have asked for paint to be added is the intake posts on the shoulders, which for Starscream should be red. Still, it's not a big deal as it sits, and they did a heck of a job with a limited array of plastic colors.
Changing Starscream to vehicle mode is kind of like anti-challenge. The arms fold under the body and the legs peg in pointed backward and that's about it. You need to remember to turn the head backward or else Starscream's face will be looking up in jet mode, but there's not enough going on in the process to really say there's any sort of tricks between modes. But then, I like simple transformations I can pull off in a matter of seconds rather than knowing I need to block out several minutes to unorigami something between modes.
It's not exactly the Cybertron Starscream lookalike I would have asked for, but the themes are similar enough I'm really satisfied with this style of Cybertronian aircraft. The design works out such that the undercarriage actually raises in the middle instead of being a solid block of folded robot bits under a jet "skin". The variations kind of make it look like the legs are oversized engines mostly integrated in to a more full jet body. It would still make an absolutely terrible aircraft, but it's a nice change of pace from how so many Deluxe size jets turn out. Part of the benefit afforded by an aircraft body plan is to exaggerate the size of the vehicle somewhat. Deluxe cars these days tend to be miserably small since they represent the most compact rectangular form the parts can collapse in to. But Starscream looks and feels a lot bigger than a current standard Deluxe vehicle since the wings increase the visible surface area, and the nose and cockpit extend beyond the core structure of the vehicle.
The color layout of the vehicle mode is pretty good, though I think it uses red too much as a primary color as the front half feels pretty dominated by it. Though I'm sure the amount of blue paint already present was pushing things, I'd have liked to see the tip of the nose done in blue, to help balance the appearance. With the nose red, it looks less like a grey fuselage with red elements than it does a red fuselage with the canopy trimmed grey. The Decepticon symbols on the wings really could have used either outlining, or to be done in a different paint color entirely, like silver. The contrast is rather poor between the red plastic of the wings and what I'm pretty sure is the same pink used for glow effects elsewhere (it's hard to tell the exact color against that red, which probably proves my point right there), and it needs something to be different to stand out better.
Through the amber canopy, you can see a pilot's seat inside the cockpit. Odd, given this is a Cybertronian vehicle form. Starscream doesn't have any kind of landing gear, because in practice it wouldn't be necessary anyway. But the toy will sit stably and level thanks to part of the robot's structural support that creates a base along with the flat side of the legs. Finally, if such things amuse you, you can flip up the robot head behind the cockpit and Starscream can look around in vehicle mode. Gives me happy memories of Beast Machines Vehicons!
Starscream comes with a pair of mirrored triple-barrel cannons. The barrels rotate, albeit stiffly by using a ridged thumb wheel at the base of the barrels. Each gun has two 5mm pegs, so you can choose which orientation Starscream holds them. Starscream does have a range of 5mm ports, including on the forearms, but I definitely recommend against using those. I tried attaching the guns on the arms once and both peg holes stressed, and one actually cracked from having the peg inserted. Even if that wouldn't be a problem, the guns sit very low down the length of the arms and it looks pretty awkward. There's hardpoints under the wings and along the robot legs, to allow attachment for vehicle mode. These will stress too, but in my experience the leg ports do so worse than the wings, so you'll probably want to stick with keeping the guns directly under the wings in vehicle mode. It's also the method that looks the best overall.
The two cannons can be tabbed together to make a double triple barrel cannon. When combined, the ridges on the thumb wheels interlock and both sets of barrels will rotate as gears. Again, this would be more fun if the movement was a little less stiff. Like this, Starscream basically has to hold the weapon from either side or just carry it sideways. There's no centered peg to use in the combined form, although combining them does produce a new 5mm port on the top if you want to add another weapon on. The combined form can't mount to the vehicle, either.
They're a nice design, based on the Neutron Assault Rifle from Fall of Cybertron. As executed here, it's easy to imagine them as a dual-function system. Individually they're the triple barrel cannon, but combined, the space between the individual barrels looks more like big gun barrels themselves, so your hand-carried vulcan cannons turn in to one double barrel energy cannon. Sounds like a perfectly sensible upgrade progression to me! One really nice design touch was including false gear elements below the base of the barrels, so when the barrels are rotated, it turns as well. One more bit of making these things look more like functioning machinery.
It’s What’s for Dessert
Alice Cronin-Golomb knows a lot about the human brain. Her research into vision problems resulting from neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s has improved thousands of lives.
A dedicated professor, she has also found a highly creative and playful way to inspire her students to unlock the mysteries of the brain. And it all has to do with Jello, which she uses to create realistic-looking brains.
How did Cronin-Golomb, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of psychology and director of the Vision and Cognition Laboratory and the Center for Clinical Biopsychology, come about such arcane culinary knowledge?
Back in 1996, her former student, Tracy Dunne,now a CAS lecturer in psychology, made a brain out of Jello for Cronin-Golomb’s tenure party. Cronin-Golomb liked the idea so much she started making her own from a recipe she found on the internet. The key, she says, is using a proper brain-shaped mold and a mixture of watermelon Jello and light evaporated skim milk, to give the organ a realistic gray color.
Two years ago, she decided to take her experiments with brain-themed cooking to a new level, by getting her students involved. It began when she asked her two daughters for ideas to improve her Neuropsychology 338 course, which explores the relationship between brain disorders resulting from head injuries, strokes, and degenerative diseases and abnormal behavior. Cronin-Golomb was looking for ways to build more interactivity into the class, to keep pace with a generation that is less tolerant of pure lecturing. Her then-15-year-old daughter, Lucy, asked, “Why don’t you let them bake brain cakes?”
When she heard the group’s reasoning for not pursuing the Gage skull replica, Cronin-Golomb was pleased. “I was very excited that the reason they stopped was not because it would have been hard to make,” she says, “but because recent research that the students read about has called into doubt the traditionally accepted trajectory of the rod through Gage’s brain, and that would have led their brain cake to be anatomically inaccurate.”
Cronin-Golomb’s class helps lay the foundation for many students’ careers in psychology and neuroscience. Students study neuroanatomy and learn how to make connections between psychological traits and the functioning of the brain. They also examine various neurological and psychological disorders and how they are diagnosed and treated.
Andy Brewster (Rogan) is a chemist who developed a natural cleaning product from renewable resources. He’s sunk his last pennies into the project and has been making the rounds of large retailers hoping to sell it.
He’s about to go on one last cross country sales trip before throwing in the towel. After flying to New Jersey, Andy is staying at his mother’s home and plans to leave from there on the eight-day journey. At the last minute, he invites his widowed mom, Joyce (Streisand), to accompany him.
And there you have the template for what no doubt was intended to be a heart-warming voyage of discovery, where mother and son find common bond and understanding. But “The Guilt Trip” breaks the mold — and not in a good way.
Both Brewsters are caricatures rather than full blown characters. As a result, what the press notes describe as “mashugana situations” are cringe-inducing affairs. What else would you call an early scene where Joyce tells her son that his father was a rebound? Her true love was a man named Andrew Margolis, who wasn’t interested in getting married. So when Andy’s dad proposed, she accepted — and named her only son after her former suitor.
The entire plot revolves around that unlikely revelation. Andy locates the man in California, discovers he’s still single and asks his mom to accompany him, though keeping secret his plan to reunite the pair.
Along the way the two have road trip misadventures — the “mashugana situations” that are presumably intended to be funny. For example, the first night when they check into a motel the desk clerk assumes they are a couple. Streisand looks good for a woman her age —70 — but not that good.
Don’t let the fact that Joyce’s last name is Brewster or that she named her son to honor a living person fool you. She is definitely Jewish. This is, in part, why I so much wanted to like ” The Guilt Trip.” I come from that environment and rarely see it portrayed with the affection and humor hinted at in the trailer.
But Joyce isn’t just a stereotypically annoying, overbearing, suffocating coupon-loving Jewish mom. She’s an annoying, overbearing, suffocating coupon-loving Jewish mom totally oblivious to her actions which defy logic and common sense. Sitting in a business office, not even my mother would spit on her hand and fix a cowlick on my hair. And that’s saying something.
Andy is no better. It’s possible that a person with a masters degree in organic chemistry smart enough to develop an FDA-approved cleaning product is ignorant about marketing. (Does the FDA really approve cleaning products?) It’s possible that he would pay to manufacture 10,000 bottles without a customer in sight, and that he would give the same pitch over and over again, knowing no one laughs at his jokes and that buyers’ eyes glaze over when he begins. But is it really possible that he would give pitch after pitch without once demonstrating how his product cleans?
Very few things these caricatures do are organic to the story, and destroy what little momentum the film has. So who’s to blame?
The most obvious target is screenwriter Dan Fogelman, but that’s a bit too easy. Fogelman based the film on a cross-country trip he took with his own mom, who coincidentally was named Joyce. But I am willing to bet that the screenplay he wrote is not the one that you see on the screen.
A dedicated professor, she has also found a highly creative and playful way to inspire her students to unlock the mysteries of the brain. And it all has to do with Jello, which she uses to create realistic-looking brains.
How did Cronin-Golomb, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of psychology and director of the Vision and Cognition Laboratory and the Center for Clinical Biopsychology, come about such arcane culinary knowledge?
Back in 1996, her former student, Tracy Dunne,now a CAS lecturer in psychology, made a brain out of Jello for Cronin-Golomb’s tenure party. Cronin-Golomb liked the idea so much she started making her own from a recipe she found on the internet. The key, she says, is using a proper brain-shaped mold and a mixture of watermelon Jello and light evaporated skim milk, to give the organ a realistic gray color.
Two years ago, she decided to take her experiments with brain-themed cooking to a new level, by getting her students involved. It began when she asked her two daughters for ideas to improve her Neuropsychology 338 course, which explores the relationship between brain disorders resulting from head injuries, strokes, and degenerative diseases and abnormal behavior. Cronin-Golomb was looking for ways to build more interactivity into the class, to keep pace with a generation that is less tolerant of pure lecturing. Her then-15-year-old daughter, Lucy, asked, “Why don’t you let them bake brain cakes?”
When she heard the group’s reasoning for not pursuing the Gage skull replica, Cronin-Golomb was pleased. “I was very excited that the reason they stopped was not because it would have been hard to make,” she says, “but because recent research that the students read about has called into doubt the traditionally accepted trajectory of the rod through Gage’s brain, and that would have led their brain cake to be anatomically inaccurate.”
Cronin-Golomb’s class helps lay the foundation for many students’ careers in psychology and neuroscience. Students study neuroanatomy and learn how to make connections between psychological traits and the functioning of the brain. They also examine various neurological and psychological disorders and how they are diagnosed and treated.
Andy Brewster (Rogan) is a chemist who developed a natural cleaning product from renewable resources. He’s sunk his last pennies into the project and has been making the rounds of large retailers hoping to sell it.
He’s about to go on one last cross country sales trip before throwing in the towel. After flying to New Jersey, Andy is staying at his mother’s home and plans to leave from there on the eight-day journey. At the last minute, he invites his widowed mom, Joyce (Streisand), to accompany him.
And there you have the template for what no doubt was intended to be a heart-warming voyage of discovery, where mother and son find common bond and understanding. But “The Guilt Trip” breaks the mold — and not in a good way.
Both Brewsters are caricatures rather than full blown characters. As a result, what the press notes describe as “mashugana situations” are cringe-inducing affairs. What else would you call an early scene where Joyce tells her son that his father was a rebound? Her true love was a man named Andrew Margolis, who wasn’t interested in getting married. So when Andy’s dad proposed, she accepted — and named her only son after her former suitor.
The entire plot revolves around that unlikely revelation. Andy locates the man in California, discovers he’s still single and asks his mom to accompany him, though keeping secret his plan to reunite the pair.
Along the way the two have road trip misadventures — the “mashugana situations” that are presumably intended to be funny. For example, the first night when they check into a motel the desk clerk assumes they are a couple. Streisand looks good for a woman her age —70 — but not that good.
Don’t let the fact that Joyce’s last name is Brewster or that she named her son to honor a living person fool you. She is definitely Jewish. This is, in part, why I so much wanted to like ” The Guilt Trip.” I come from that environment and rarely see it portrayed with the affection and humor hinted at in the trailer.
But Joyce isn’t just a stereotypically annoying, overbearing, suffocating coupon-loving Jewish mom. She’s an annoying, overbearing, suffocating coupon-loving Jewish mom totally oblivious to her actions which defy logic and common sense. Sitting in a business office, not even my mother would spit on her hand and fix a cowlick on my hair. And that’s saying something.
Andy is no better. It’s possible that a person with a masters degree in organic chemistry smart enough to develop an FDA-approved cleaning product is ignorant about marketing. (Does the FDA really approve cleaning products?) It’s possible that he would pay to manufacture 10,000 bottles without a customer in sight, and that he would give the same pitch over and over again, knowing no one laughs at his jokes and that buyers’ eyes glaze over when he begins. But is it really possible that he would give pitch after pitch without once demonstrating how his product cleans?
Very few things these caricatures do are organic to the story, and destroy what little momentum the film has. So who’s to blame?
The most obvious target is screenwriter Dan Fogelman, but that’s a bit too easy. Fogelman based the film on a cross-country trip he took with his own mom, who coincidentally was named Joyce. But I am willing to bet that the screenplay he wrote is not the one that you see on the screen.
2012年12月16日星期日
It powers your life - but not for free
It was Saturday night, and Coy Bailey, a Sunday School teacher from Huntsville, Ala., had a dilemma. A friend was offering a free ticket to a concert by country singer Jason Isbell, but the lesson on Noah’s Ark that Bailey and another friend were teaching the next morning wasn’t finished.
Bring the work along, the friend with the ticket suggested. And so Bailey, a 28-year-old gas company employee, grabbed his iPhone.
To and from the concert and in spurts during it, Bailey remotely shared an evolving lesson plan with his co-instructor. He accessed Bible-related sites – including the interactive GloBible – to mine for facts and verses. The other teacher did the same.
“Through the music and crowd I continued to watch text magically appear on my phone or disappear,” Bailey says. Though “slightly distracted” during the show, they “shared some more bullet points and questions, added more scriptures” until they were satisfied.
Welcome to your everyday world of “Big Data,” the infinite sea of facts, products, books, maps, conversations, references, opinions, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys – all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, estimates that humans now create in two days the same amount of data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create.
Micro-bursts of technological innovation over the past decade have created a supernova of new data and a virtually limitless capacity to create and store it, shaping everyday lives across the planet. What may be most fascinating, experts agree, is that this change has come so quietly and seamlessly.
“An extraordinary knowledge revolution (is) sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, health care and everyday life,” says Rick Smolan, co-creator of a new book, The Human Face of Big Data.
Think cloud computing. Or niche health care. Or even sites like Facebook and Twitter that further shrink the nearly 7-billion-people planet. All arrived because of increasingly sophisticated, and inexpensive, computer-and-sensing technologies, along with scientific breakthroughs like the Human Genome Project.
Lotto-Belisol stars Jürgen Roelandts and Jurgen Van Den Broeck are both looking forward to getting the 2013 season started, as they attend the team’s first real training camp of the winter in Mojacar, southern Spain. The two riders will be aiming at very different targets in the season, with the former targeting the Classics and the latter the Tour de France, but both have unfinished business from 2012; again, for different reasons.
“A training camp is important for different reasons, explained Roelandts. “First of all there is the climate, which differs day and night with the weather in Belgium. Apart from that we train here in group, which is always very motivating.
“The trainings are balanced perfectly, in function of the start of the season. And you are living on a perfect cycling rhythm. Every year I look forward to the training camp in December. I find this one the most fun, because everyone is here, you get to see everyone again after a pretty long time. I will ride the Tour Down Under, so I won’t go to the training camp in January.”
Roelandts appearance in the Santos Tour Down Under this January ended his 2012 spring campaign, as he crashed in the opening stage. A fractured cervical vertebra meant that he was unable to race until the Tour of Belgium in May; a strong late-season saw him win the Circuit Franco-Belge in late September, but he crashed again in Binche-Tournai-Binche a few days later and ended the season with a broken collarbone.
“Of course the Flemish classics will be my first goal,” he explained. “I call it my playground, and I had to miss it past season, which really hurt. Lars Bak was the second of our leaders who was injured, so I guess we will be stronger at the start in 2013.”
Lotto-Belisol has seen very little activity in the transfer market this winter, with only Iranian Mahdi Sohrabi and a late-departing Gianni Meersman leaving the team, and Dirk Bellemakers a last minute revival. This continuity in the Belgian squad should serve the Belgian team well, thinks Van Den Broeck.
“We are here for the second year in a row; this location is perfect, there isn’t a lot of traffic on our training route, which is important when you are here with such a big group,” he said. “The atmosphere is relaxed, which differs from during the season and this is the ideal opportunity to enlarge the team spirit. There hasn’t changed much to the team, but everyone is again very motivated and stronger than a year ago. And the most important: we already know each other very well.”
Van Den Broeck’s 2012 season was his best to date, as he matched the fourth place in the Tour de France that he had taken in 2010 [after the disqualification of Alberto Contador - ed]. While he will be aiming for success everywhere - largely to prevent Lotto-Belisol facing WorldTour uncertainty at the end of next season as it has this - Belgium expects, and he will once again be setting his sights on the Tour podium.
“The focus will indeed be on the Tour, but every race is important. Each time I’ll start, I will be motivated to set a result as good as possible. You can win points everywhere.
Bring the work along, the friend with the ticket suggested. And so Bailey, a 28-year-old gas company employee, grabbed his iPhone.
To and from the concert and in spurts during it, Bailey remotely shared an evolving lesson plan with his co-instructor. He accessed Bible-related sites – including the interactive GloBible – to mine for facts and verses. The other teacher did the same.
“Through the music and crowd I continued to watch text magically appear on my phone or disappear,” Bailey says. Though “slightly distracted” during the show, they “shared some more bullet points and questions, added more scriptures” until they were satisfied.
Welcome to your everyday world of “Big Data,” the infinite sea of facts, products, books, maps, conversations, references, opinions, trends, videos, advertisements, surveys – all of the sense and nonsense that is literally at your fingertips, 24-7, every day from now on. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, estimates that humans now create in two days the same amount of data that it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to create.
Micro-bursts of technological innovation over the past decade have created a supernova of new data and a virtually limitless capacity to create and store it, shaping everyday lives across the planet. What may be most fascinating, experts agree, is that this change has come so quietly and seamlessly.
“An extraordinary knowledge revolution (is) sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, health care and everyday life,” says Rick Smolan, co-creator of a new book, The Human Face of Big Data.
Think cloud computing. Or niche health care. Or even sites like Facebook and Twitter that further shrink the nearly 7-billion-people planet. All arrived because of increasingly sophisticated, and inexpensive, computer-and-sensing technologies, along with scientific breakthroughs like the Human Genome Project.
Lotto-Belisol stars Jürgen Roelandts and Jurgen Van Den Broeck are both looking forward to getting the 2013 season started, as they attend the team’s first real training camp of the winter in Mojacar, southern Spain. The two riders will be aiming at very different targets in the season, with the former targeting the Classics and the latter the Tour de France, but both have unfinished business from 2012; again, for different reasons.
“A training camp is important for different reasons, explained Roelandts. “First of all there is the climate, which differs day and night with the weather in Belgium. Apart from that we train here in group, which is always very motivating.
“The trainings are balanced perfectly, in function of the start of the season. And you are living on a perfect cycling rhythm. Every year I look forward to the training camp in December. I find this one the most fun, because everyone is here, you get to see everyone again after a pretty long time. I will ride the Tour Down Under, so I won’t go to the training camp in January.”
Roelandts appearance in the Santos Tour Down Under this January ended his 2012 spring campaign, as he crashed in the opening stage. A fractured cervical vertebra meant that he was unable to race until the Tour of Belgium in May; a strong late-season saw him win the Circuit Franco-Belge in late September, but he crashed again in Binche-Tournai-Binche a few days later and ended the season with a broken collarbone.
“Of course the Flemish classics will be my first goal,” he explained. “I call it my playground, and I had to miss it past season, which really hurt. Lars Bak was the second of our leaders who was injured, so I guess we will be stronger at the start in 2013.”
Lotto-Belisol has seen very little activity in the transfer market this winter, with only Iranian Mahdi Sohrabi and a late-departing Gianni Meersman leaving the team, and Dirk Bellemakers a last minute revival. This continuity in the Belgian squad should serve the Belgian team well, thinks Van Den Broeck.
“We are here for the second year in a row; this location is perfect, there isn’t a lot of traffic on our training route, which is important when you are here with such a big group,” he said. “The atmosphere is relaxed, which differs from during the season and this is the ideal opportunity to enlarge the team spirit. There hasn’t changed much to the team, but everyone is again very motivated and stronger than a year ago. And the most important: we already know each other very well.”
Van Den Broeck’s 2012 season was his best to date, as he matched the fourth place in the Tour de France that he had taken in 2010 [after the disqualification of Alberto Contador - ed]. While he will be aiming for success everywhere - largely to prevent Lotto-Belisol facing WorldTour uncertainty at the end of next season as it has this - Belgium expects, and he will once again be setting his sights on the Tour podium.
“The focus will indeed be on the Tour, but every race is important. Each time I’ll start, I will be motivated to set a result as good as possible. You can win points everywhere.
2012年12月12日星期三
In search of critical mass
The piece, called Critical White, posed a series of personally reflective questions from a rider on the nature of the event. For those who don't know, Critical Mass sees about 1,000 suburbanites cycle through the city on the last Friday night of the month. The JHBLive story questioned the racial dynamic inherent in the demographic profiles of Critical Mass riders and city residents, and veered off into the author's observations on Africa's colonial past. That's right, the big C word.
Amidst the backlash and debate one thing became apparent. Many of the Critical Mass riders were hurt by the notion that the good will and engagement they perceived to be part of their venture into the city might not be returned by the city itself – by the idea that, from the view of many city residents and workers, Critical Mass is just another one of those weird things large hordes of mlungus seem to get off on. It's not like the city and its people hate the riders or anything – let's just call the word on the street amused disdain, and leave it at that.
Whilst laughing at the hyper-sensitive Critical Mass cyclists it occurred to me that I shouldn't laugh too hard. That, metaphorically speaking, we all end up in this position at one time or another. And that I am actually in the middle of it myself, right now.
Our art gallery has been running for about a decade without funding or support – even though we've always done a lot of development work. We rode away from the private and public sector funders like Jozi's suburbanites turned their back on the city all those years ago. We decided we didn't need them, or want them, and we could do just fine on our own. Which we did for many years, until things changed. Now, post-recession, the world is different, we do far more pro bono than we used to, and we can't carry on without funding and blah blah blah – you know the story.
So we took our decisions and decided to seek support. We rode back into city. Only to find, well, nothing.
“You've been giving free internet to artists?” the capitalist shakes his head, almost amused.
“Well let me tell you, the major decision you need to make is in your heads. This idea that giving things away helps anyone...” He shakes again, gives us the parental eye and moves on to explain that there is no sin in earning a “decent living” off an NGO, and that an operation that can't sustain itself is nothing more or less than a “failed business”.
We get that reaction from executives every time we mention free internet for artists. You can see the image rising in their minds: hordes of young punks, blunts blazing (if not in their hands, then certainly in their red eyes) while they pillage the ADSL for music and movies and arty porn...
The reality, of course, is a little duller. We have an office with four or five machines operating. My wife and I access the ADSL account at home. Then there's a tired old laptop we make available for artists – it sits in the corner and does incredible open source duty, hour after hour. If someone is so inclined and equipped, they are welcome to tap into our wireless with their mobile device. The grand total for this socialist extravagance is between R270 – R350 per month, and 90% of that cost is absorbed by the office and our home use. We must use our gigs in 30 days, so effectively we're letting the artists eat our scraps; megabytes which would go in the bin anyway.
That old laptop has changed many young lives and careers. Not in a flashy, “Ooh, we must put this in our annual report” kind of way, but in a very quiet way. Lives slowly change as young adults discover the power of email and social media. As they create Facebook accounts and load their art onto their pages and start to get reactions. As they discover what image resolution is, and how to crop and resize pictures and so on. As they realise that open source software exists. The change occurs from the daily habit, the slight shift in lifestyle, not from any particular intervention.
But we are not able to explain this to a venture capitalist or a CEO. Free is bad. It's irresponsible. It's typical of these little arties to be so flippant with profit and loss. And now they come to us for money. As usual.
As we continue to engage with the hard silver edges of Sandton, we have started to just leave that stuff out. It's easier. And, let's face it, funders and bosses need, more than anything, to guide. To tell the young muppets what to do, and how to do it. They do not need to be told anything. It's the golden rule – the man with the gold makes the rules.
From our side of Mandela Bridge, there are perceptions that are never expressed. That can seldom, if ever, find voice. Here's one (there are many others): we perceive an assumption of innate self-wisdom among corporates that would be amusing if it didn't stick in the gullet so much. Yes, there might be great skill in spending the budget and marshalling the staff and establishing the brand and so on, but at the same time one surely has to consider, when assessing the superhuman strategic and operational powers of executives, factors like blind luck, and the fortunate juggernaut momentum of the large organisation. One never hears executives hailing how lucky they were to be born into the suburbs and an easy BComm. The funder will never tell you how nice it is to be able to write off “those few tricky years” by cranking up the leverage.
Yes, the CEO laughs at our arty na?veté. But we know that if we had to drop that executive at Noord at 10 at night, armed only with R12 and series of unlikely dreams (as we do with our young artists week in, week out), he'd be hurtling down Jeppe dressed only in tears and his g-string within minutes. We think (but seldom say) that all skills are relative. From the chairman of the board to the beat boxer and suburban late night cyclist, our position is that everyone has strengths, and weaknesses – and that many of the abilities people think are so strong in themselves are actually the benefits of choosing the right parents.
From our perspective, the private sector and funders should be very lucky to have us. We've run this ship for a decade with our own money – many within our community have invested heavily, from their own piggy banks and time banks. We've been to the dark side of the budgetary force so often they don't even ask for our passports any more. We bring skills and knowledge, a special kind of fiscal survivor instinct and education, etc., etc., etc.
But the critical funding mass we seek eludes us. No matter how good we think we are, we really suck at transitioning from a private thing to a funded thing. Is this Sandton's fault? Should we blame the funders and the suits we eschewed for so long? Or should we admit that it has been our own failure to engage “the system” that has put us in this position?
And so we leave 2012 slightly wounded, just like the Critical Mass riders. We are not being received in the same spirit as we are offering ourselves. Yes, white corporate horses of rescue are appearing on the horizon, but there are no guarantees – we realise there is a good chance that next year we will have to watch the boat sink.
Even if it does sink, however, I believe it's important that we all recognise that the end may not be failure. That it might just be the end. We've poured money and time in, and what we got out (aside from revenue for artists) was a beautiful decade of planned failures and accidental successes. Maybe we haven't ultimately got what we would have liked, and maybe we won't be able to flash the profitable sustainability that thrills the fat guys so, but what we do have is a true understanding that great things can happen when people choose to try. When we buy (or hire) the bike and ride on into that city, even if it doesn't seem to want us.
And ultimately, that's my message to the Greenside massive. Keep riding, okes. Just because people laugh and tell you you're socio-politically deranged doesn't mean what you're doing is bad, or stupid, or silly. Maybe it will just take them a while to see you as you see yourselves. And Jozi does need engagement, of all sorts. It needs your engagement. Our city would surely be worse off if you weren't disregarding most of the basic rules of the road in bright spandex once a month on a Friday night.
Amidst the backlash and debate one thing became apparent. Many of the Critical Mass riders were hurt by the notion that the good will and engagement they perceived to be part of their venture into the city might not be returned by the city itself – by the idea that, from the view of many city residents and workers, Critical Mass is just another one of those weird things large hordes of mlungus seem to get off on. It's not like the city and its people hate the riders or anything – let's just call the word on the street amused disdain, and leave it at that.
Whilst laughing at the hyper-sensitive Critical Mass cyclists it occurred to me that I shouldn't laugh too hard. That, metaphorically speaking, we all end up in this position at one time or another. And that I am actually in the middle of it myself, right now.
Our art gallery has been running for about a decade without funding or support – even though we've always done a lot of development work. We rode away from the private and public sector funders like Jozi's suburbanites turned their back on the city all those years ago. We decided we didn't need them, or want them, and we could do just fine on our own. Which we did for many years, until things changed. Now, post-recession, the world is different, we do far more pro bono than we used to, and we can't carry on without funding and blah blah blah – you know the story.
So we took our decisions and decided to seek support. We rode back into city. Only to find, well, nothing.
“You've been giving free internet to artists?” the capitalist shakes his head, almost amused.
“Well let me tell you, the major decision you need to make is in your heads. This idea that giving things away helps anyone...” He shakes again, gives us the parental eye and moves on to explain that there is no sin in earning a “decent living” off an NGO, and that an operation that can't sustain itself is nothing more or less than a “failed business”.
We get that reaction from executives every time we mention free internet for artists. You can see the image rising in their minds: hordes of young punks, blunts blazing (if not in their hands, then certainly in their red eyes) while they pillage the ADSL for music and movies and arty porn...
The reality, of course, is a little duller. We have an office with four or five machines operating. My wife and I access the ADSL account at home. Then there's a tired old laptop we make available for artists – it sits in the corner and does incredible open source duty, hour after hour. If someone is so inclined and equipped, they are welcome to tap into our wireless with their mobile device. The grand total for this socialist extravagance is between R270 – R350 per month, and 90% of that cost is absorbed by the office and our home use. We must use our gigs in 30 days, so effectively we're letting the artists eat our scraps; megabytes which would go in the bin anyway.
That old laptop has changed many young lives and careers. Not in a flashy, “Ooh, we must put this in our annual report” kind of way, but in a very quiet way. Lives slowly change as young adults discover the power of email and social media. As they create Facebook accounts and load their art onto their pages and start to get reactions. As they discover what image resolution is, and how to crop and resize pictures and so on. As they realise that open source software exists. The change occurs from the daily habit, the slight shift in lifestyle, not from any particular intervention.
But we are not able to explain this to a venture capitalist or a CEO. Free is bad. It's irresponsible. It's typical of these little arties to be so flippant with profit and loss. And now they come to us for money. As usual.
As we continue to engage with the hard silver edges of Sandton, we have started to just leave that stuff out. It's easier. And, let's face it, funders and bosses need, more than anything, to guide. To tell the young muppets what to do, and how to do it. They do not need to be told anything. It's the golden rule – the man with the gold makes the rules.
From our side of Mandela Bridge, there are perceptions that are never expressed. That can seldom, if ever, find voice. Here's one (there are many others): we perceive an assumption of innate self-wisdom among corporates that would be amusing if it didn't stick in the gullet so much. Yes, there might be great skill in spending the budget and marshalling the staff and establishing the brand and so on, but at the same time one surely has to consider, when assessing the superhuman strategic and operational powers of executives, factors like blind luck, and the fortunate juggernaut momentum of the large organisation. One never hears executives hailing how lucky they were to be born into the suburbs and an easy BComm. The funder will never tell you how nice it is to be able to write off “those few tricky years” by cranking up the leverage.
Yes, the CEO laughs at our arty na?veté. But we know that if we had to drop that executive at Noord at 10 at night, armed only with R12 and series of unlikely dreams (as we do with our young artists week in, week out), he'd be hurtling down Jeppe dressed only in tears and his g-string within minutes. We think (but seldom say) that all skills are relative. From the chairman of the board to the beat boxer and suburban late night cyclist, our position is that everyone has strengths, and weaknesses – and that many of the abilities people think are so strong in themselves are actually the benefits of choosing the right parents.
From our perspective, the private sector and funders should be very lucky to have us. We've run this ship for a decade with our own money – many within our community have invested heavily, from their own piggy banks and time banks. We've been to the dark side of the budgetary force so often they don't even ask for our passports any more. We bring skills and knowledge, a special kind of fiscal survivor instinct and education, etc., etc., etc.
But the critical funding mass we seek eludes us. No matter how good we think we are, we really suck at transitioning from a private thing to a funded thing. Is this Sandton's fault? Should we blame the funders and the suits we eschewed for so long? Or should we admit that it has been our own failure to engage “the system” that has put us in this position?
And so we leave 2012 slightly wounded, just like the Critical Mass riders. We are not being received in the same spirit as we are offering ourselves. Yes, white corporate horses of rescue are appearing on the horizon, but there are no guarantees – we realise there is a good chance that next year we will have to watch the boat sink.
Even if it does sink, however, I believe it's important that we all recognise that the end may not be failure. That it might just be the end. We've poured money and time in, and what we got out (aside from revenue for artists) was a beautiful decade of planned failures and accidental successes. Maybe we haven't ultimately got what we would have liked, and maybe we won't be able to flash the profitable sustainability that thrills the fat guys so, but what we do have is a true understanding that great things can happen when people choose to try. When we buy (or hire) the bike and ride on into that city, even if it doesn't seem to want us.
And ultimately, that's my message to the Greenside massive. Keep riding, okes. Just because people laugh and tell you you're socio-politically deranged doesn't mean what you're doing is bad, or stupid, or silly. Maybe it will just take them a while to see you as you see yourselves. And Jozi does need engagement, of all sorts. It needs your engagement. Our city would surely be worse off if you weren't disregarding most of the basic rules of the road in bright spandex once a month on a Friday night.
Tech out the gifts
For a gadget lover, there's nothing like a new tech toy. And you don't need to break the bank to pick up one of these gifts for a loved one - or for yourself. Here's a look at some of the top tech toys of the year, ranging in price from $15 to just over $500.
Touch screen tablets and e-books are the hottest products. These super-thin, lightweight computers turn on instantly, are a cinch to use and last all day on a single charge.
Apple's fourth-generation iPad is best-in-class for its stunning 9.7-inch touch screen, powerful processor, dual cameras, 10-hour battery life and with more than 700,000 downloadable apps to customize your tablet. The new iPad mini is smaller, thinner, lighter and less powerful, but with many of the same features.
Microsoft's Surface tablet runs the new Windows RT. platform. This versatile 10.6-inch tablet is ideal for consuming media and creating content. It supports an optional case that doubles as a keyboard and stand. Surface boasts large, colourful tiles that show info at a glance, such as new Facebook pictures, appointments and weather.
For Android fans, Google's Nexus 7 is a smaller and more affordable tablet. The seven-inch device includes access to many Google services, with preloaded music, a movie and an e-book and a $25 credit for the Google Play store.
Another extraordinary Android-powered tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 ($449.99 for the 32 GB model). Featuring a powerful 1.4GHz quad-core processor, this 10.1-inch tablet also includes Samsung's S Pen, allowing you to write, sketch or draw on the screen when you prefer a stylus.
E-book readers such as the Kobo products range in price from $79.99 to $199.99. These lightweight readers are ideal for bookworms. They hold more than a 1,000 titles on a device thinner than most magazines. Integrated Wi-Fi lets you download e-books, magazines and newspapers in seconds.
If you're not in the market for a Smart TV - today's much-talked about Internet-connected televisions - turn your existing HDTV into a smarter one with a small Wi-Fi-enabled media player like the Apple TV or the Roku 2 XS.
Each product lets you play all your media and access apps that take you to online content.
Or consider the new Slingbox 500 , a Wi-Fi-enabled media streamer that lets you access all of your local television programming, anywhere in the world you've got an Internet connection. Whether you tune in on a laptop , smart-phone or tablet, you can access HD programming from afar, change channels as if you were at home, and even pull up all your pre-recorded content on a personal video recorder.
Nintendo's Wii U video game console is the first to ship with a wireless 6.2-inch touch screen controller. Gamers can control content with the Wii U GamePad's screen or buttons and see complementary information on the second screen that tells you where to go on your big-screen adventure. And the Wii U will play older Nintendo Wii games, too.
Shopping for a couch potato? Logitech's latest universal remote is available just in time for the holidays. The Logitech Harmony Touch is an advanced remote with an intuitive colour touch screen that lets you swipe and tap to access all your activities, such as watching a DVD or playing content from your PVR. You can control up to 15 different home theatre devices and personalize the remote by selecting up to 50 favourite channels from your TV provider.
Pick up a gift for the whole family that links your favourite board games with modern tabZAPPEDchnology. Hasbro's ZAPPED editions of The Game of Life, Monopoly and Battleship use an iPad in the middle of the board for added functionality and interactivity. Prices range from $19.99 to $29.99.
If a quirky gift is more your speed, the Swann mp3 DJ Doorbell is the first product to let you customize the sound of your doorbell with clips from your music collection.
Gelaskins are high-quality decorative skins that stick to a smartphone's backside. Download free matching wallpaper to display on your phone's home or lock screen, or, upload your own design to create a custom skin, such as a family portrait, pet, company logo or favourite sports team. Toronto-based Gelaskins are also sold for tablets, e-book readers and laptops.
Ideal for the chilly winter months, the affordable Slide 'Em gloves let smartphone and tablet users access their favourite touch screen devices without needing to take the gloves off. Whether it's for work or play, these lined winter gloves - with silver-plated material in all 10 fingertips - are available in kids and adult sizes, have two-way stretch microfleece for added flexibility and padding for extra warmth.
Despite its tiny size, HMDX's Jam Wireless Portable Speaker delivers impressively loud and clear audio when wirelessly paired with a nearby smart-phone or tablet. Available in multiple colours, this small speaker works up to 30 feet away from the Bluetooth-enabled source.
Also consider the funky-looking Jambox and Big Jam-box speakers, which use Bluetooth connectivity to play music from nearby devices. If a call comes in, the devices become hands-free speaker phones.
The recent Supreme Court decision followed by the re-election of President Obama guarantees that the Affordable Health Care Act will be with us long into the future. As each day passes we have learned more about the law, what is contained in the bill and how states will play a major role in the implementation and funding of many portions of program. The Affordable Health Care Act requires everyone to have coverage but at a cost to be determined.
The ACA will not change your situation if you are currently in an employer-provided program (not exceeding 9.5 percent of a person’s income) or if you are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare.
The ACA will require you to purchase insurance through the Health Insurance Exchange program if you’re an individual or family with income between 139 percent-400 percent of the federal poverty level and your employer does not provide health care coverage.
Delaware has chosen the Blue Cross-Blue Shield Small Group plan as the benchmark for certification of Qualified Health Plans offered by insurers who wish to compete in the exchange that is being set up by the state. Coverage under this plan will be very basic, as determined by the insurance company as long as it meets the chosen standard. At this time, cost has not been determined. Delaware will receive 100 percent funding from the federal government through 2016. After that, Delaware’s share for newly eligible enrollees will be 5 percent in 2017, increasing to 10 percent in 2020 and beyond. Individuals who fail to have or purchase insurance will then be subject to a tax, as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court. Many experts have reported that it will be cheaper to pay the tax then to purchase insurance.
As the Affordable Care Act ultimately plays out, we know two things for certain: Millions and millions of Americans will remain uncovered; and it will leave the for-profit insurance industry in charge of prices and life-and-death treatment decisions.
Touch screen tablets and e-books are the hottest products. These super-thin, lightweight computers turn on instantly, are a cinch to use and last all day on a single charge.
Apple's fourth-generation iPad is best-in-class for its stunning 9.7-inch touch screen, powerful processor, dual cameras, 10-hour battery life and with more than 700,000 downloadable apps to customize your tablet. The new iPad mini is smaller, thinner, lighter and less powerful, but with many of the same features.
Microsoft's Surface tablet runs the new Windows RT. platform. This versatile 10.6-inch tablet is ideal for consuming media and creating content. It supports an optional case that doubles as a keyboard and stand. Surface boasts large, colourful tiles that show info at a glance, such as new Facebook pictures, appointments and weather.
For Android fans, Google's Nexus 7 is a smaller and more affordable tablet. The seven-inch device includes access to many Google services, with preloaded music, a movie and an e-book and a $25 credit for the Google Play store.
Another extraordinary Android-powered tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 ($449.99 for the 32 GB model). Featuring a powerful 1.4GHz quad-core processor, this 10.1-inch tablet also includes Samsung's S Pen, allowing you to write, sketch or draw on the screen when you prefer a stylus.
E-book readers such as the Kobo products range in price from $79.99 to $199.99. These lightweight readers are ideal for bookworms. They hold more than a 1,000 titles on a device thinner than most magazines. Integrated Wi-Fi lets you download e-books, magazines and newspapers in seconds.
If you're not in the market for a Smart TV - today's much-talked about Internet-connected televisions - turn your existing HDTV into a smarter one with a small Wi-Fi-enabled media player like the Apple TV or the Roku 2 XS.
Each product lets you play all your media and access apps that take you to online content.
Or consider the new Slingbox 500 , a Wi-Fi-enabled media streamer that lets you access all of your local television programming, anywhere in the world you've got an Internet connection. Whether you tune in on a laptop , smart-phone or tablet, you can access HD programming from afar, change channels as if you were at home, and even pull up all your pre-recorded content on a personal video recorder.
Nintendo's Wii U video game console is the first to ship with a wireless 6.2-inch touch screen controller. Gamers can control content with the Wii U GamePad's screen or buttons and see complementary information on the second screen that tells you where to go on your big-screen adventure. And the Wii U will play older Nintendo Wii games, too.
Shopping for a couch potato? Logitech's latest universal remote is available just in time for the holidays. The Logitech Harmony Touch is an advanced remote with an intuitive colour touch screen that lets you swipe and tap to access all your activities, such as watching a DVD or playing content from your PVR. You can control up to 15 different home theatre devices and personalize the remote by selecting up to 50 favourite channels from your TV provider.
Pick up a gift for the whole family that links your favourite board games with modern tabZAPPEDchnology. Hasbro's ZAPPED editions of The Game of Life, Monopoly and Battleship use an iPad in the middle of the board for added functionality and interactivity. Prices range from $19.99 to $29.99.
If a quirky gift is more your speed, the Swann mp3 DJ Doorbell is the first product to let you customize the sound of your doorbell with clips from your music collection.
Gelaskins are high-quality decorative skins that stick to a smartphone's backside. Download free matching wallpaper to display on your phone's home or lock screen, or, upload your own design to create a custom skin, such as a family portrait, pet, company logo or favourite sports team. Toronto-based Gelaskins are also sold for tablets, e-book readers and laptops.
Ideal for the chilly winter months, the affordable Slide 'Em gloves let smartphone and tablet users access their favourite touch screen devices without needing to take the gloves off. Whether it's for work or play, these lined winter gloves - with silver-plated material in all 10 fingertips - are available in kids and adult sizes, have two-way stretch microfleece for added flexibility and padding for extra warmth.
Despite its tiny size, HMDX's Jam Wireless Portable Speaker delivers impressively loud and clear audio when wirelessly paired with a nearby smart-phone or tablet. Available in multiple colours, this small speaker works up to 30 feet away from the Bluetooth-enabled source.
Also consider the funky-looking Jambox and Big Jam-box speakers, which use Bluetooth connectivity to play music from nearby devices. If a call comes in, the devices become hands-free speaker phones.
The recent Supreme Court decision followed by the re-election of President Obama guarantees that the Affordable Health Care Act will be with us long into the future. As each day passes we have learned more about the law, what is contained in the bill and how states will play a major role in the implementation and funding of many portions of program. The Affordable Health Care Act requires everyone to have coverage but at a cost to be determined.
The ACA will not change your situation if you are currently in an employer-provided program (not exceeding 9.5 percent of a person’s income) or if you are enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare.
The ACA will require you to purchase insurance through the Health Insurance Exchange program if you’re an individual or family with income between 139 percent-400 percent of the federal poverty level and your employer does not provide health care coverage.
Delaware has chosen the Blue Cross-Blue Shield Small Group plan as the benchmark for certification of Qualified Health Plans offered by insurers who wish to compete in the exchange that is being set up by the state. Coverage under this plan will be very basic, as determined by the insurance company as long as it meets the chosen standard. At this time, cost has not been determined. Delaware will receive 100 percent funding from the federal government through 2016. After that, Delaware’s share for newly eligible enrollees will be 5 percent in 2017, increasing to 10 percent in 2020 and beyond. Individuals who fail to have or purchase insurance will then be subject to a tax, as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court. Many experts have reported that it will be cheaper to pay the tax then to purchase insurance.
As the Affordable Care Act ultimately plays out, we know two things for certain: Millions and millions of Americans will remain uncovered; and it will leave the for-profit insurance industry in charge of prices and life-and-death treatment decisions.
订阅：
博文 (Atom)