A triumph of production design but a pretty dull kill-'em-up otherwise, the post-World War II-set "Gangster Squad" comes from the director of "Zombieland," Ruben Fleischer. It's clear Fleischer, who also made "30 Minutes or Less," hadn't worked through his "Zombieland" jones by the time he got to his latest film. I liked "Zombieland," which made a strong case for its brand of viscera and wisecracks. But "Gangster Squad" is a different sort of picture, or should be.
It's based partially on the real-life 1940s square-off between a secret cadre of Los Angeles Police Department officers and their mobster nemeses, led by the notorious Mickey Cohen. In the opening scene, Cohen, played with scowling Neanderthal relish by Sean Penn, oversees the murder of a soon-to-be-ex-associate. We're up in the Hollywood hills, just behind the sign that still reads "Hollywoodland." The man is pulled apart. In half. Maybe it happened in real life, and maybe it didn't, but launching your gangster picture on such a ridiculous note of bloody excess is certainly a risk. A misguided one.
Josh Brolin, better than his material, narrates this highly fanciful bash, which denounces its heroes' methods of payback even as it celebrates the cinematic possibilities of gun-related violence. With the blessing of LA's valiant police chief (Nick Nolte), Brolin's character, Sgt. John O'Mara, back from the war, assembles a team to take out Cohen, who has made LA his playground too long.
Ryan Gosling, who never really seems to be acting in any period other than 2013, plays the lady-killer copper who falls for Cohen's mistress (Emma Stone). Robert Patrick and Michael Pena play a double act brought into the project; Giovanni Ribisi worms around as the electronics ace in charge of bugging Cohen's digs and providing what little moral conscience "Gangster Squad" accommodates.
Some of these characters are based on the record, others are made up, and most of the dialogue is made of wood, befitting such rejoinders as: Let's give him "a permanent vacation in a pine box!" The template for "Gangster Squad," based on Paul Lieberman's nonfiction account and goosed up by screenwriter Will Beall, is clearly Brian De Palma's "The Untouchables," written by David Mamet. Good template; weak variation.
The original cut of "Gangster Squad" featured a movie theater massacre, which was taken out and rewritten and re-shot in another location. You don't really notice the lurch in continuity, because although "Gangster Squad" boasts swell art direction (I love the nightclubs, Slapsy Maxie's and Club Figaro), it's really just a series of gory, impersonal tit-for-tat revenge killings. Only Penn's line readings feel completely fresh. He may be made up to look like Big Boy Caprice in "Dick Tracy." He may be playing a copy of a copy of a movie stereotype. But like Brolin, Penn seems to be living and breathing convincingly in another time, another place.
The need for community engagement in the provision of public services is at a peak.Legislation demands it, stakeholders insist on it and citizen journalism drives it. Waste management often sits at the heart of the debate.
Consultation on emotive subjects such as waste is difficult and can be combative. Getting it wrong can at best lead to significant delays to a scheme and, at worst, such schemes collapsing.
What is needed is meaningful engagement rather than passive consultation. If public bodies and commercial developers can engage in a meaningful way with their communities and discover what their concerns really are, then resources can be more effectively targeted.
The first step in a successful engagement programme is to listen. The sheer volume of noise created by tweeting, blogging, posting and videoing can often drown out people’s real opinions. The key to understanding is the ability to combine information from a variety of sources, and to use those findings to address issues of importance.
Lord Toby Harris, formerly of Haringey Council, says: “When I was council leader, keeping my finger on the pulse of public opinion was a difficult and arduous task. With current Freedom of Information requirements, a method of trawling all internal information would be helpful. Even better would be trawling outside sources to see if the research findings are still valid six, 12 or 18 months on.”
There are now technologies emerging, including the Symfonix platform, where tweets, emails, comments and other digital media information can be combined with an organisation’s existing data such as meeting minutes, letters, and research reports, and then plotted on a map. Such systems can even analyse the sentiment, location and volume of debate on any given issue.
But understanding what is important remains a challenge. To know that thousands of people have tweeted about an issue is not particularly helpful - content and sentiment are critical.
By casting a net wide to include, for example, blogs, pressure group websites, local media and online communities, a more complete picture will emerge. Understand-ing opinion can be the difference between backing or backlash.
Real insight is achieved only when knowledge is gleaned from various information sets, by understanding the strengths and limitations of those sources and then combining knowledge pools.
It is vital for both the private and public sectors to engage when introducing waste management schemes, tune out background noise and focus on those conversations that really matter. Time and tools are factors, but the cost of not engaging will be far higher.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Better Late Than Never
Millions across the country, still reeling from the worst mass shooting in the country’s history that killed 20 school children, just 6 years old, and six teachers, are hoping that 2013 may turn up to be a landmark year that Washington lawmakers pass meaningful legislation to curb the culture of gun violence in America.
US President Barack Obama avoided the issue of gun control during his first term but now calls for "meaningful action" saying that "As a country, we have been through this too many times". He established a gun violence task force, led by US Vice President Joe Biden that is to provide recommendations for legislation in January.
Senator Dianne Feinstein promised to introduce in January a de facto renewal of the assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004. She said her bill would, among others, stop the sale of more than 100 assault weapons, ban high-capacity clips and close the "gun show loophole," which allows people to buy weapons without background checks. Last week, on the first day of the 113th Congress, several lawmakers introduced ten bills to expand gun regulations.
There is gun violence all over the world but far less than in the United States and many countries have tightened their gun ownership laws in the wake of mass shootings.
England banned handguns after the 1987 Hungerford massacre that killed 16 people and wounded 14 others, and the 1996 Dunblane shooting that killed 16 school children and wounded 13 others. Australia passed stricter gun laws in 1996, after 35 people were killed and 21 wounded in Port Arthur, Tasmania.
Finland imposed restrictions on handgun ownership, in 2008, after 11 were killed in a college shooting. Last year, in Norway, a nation with a tight gun-control and licensing regime, a deranged man methodically gunned down 69 teenagers.
In the United States, there have been more than 30 mass shootings since the 1999 Columbine school massacre that killed 12 students and a teacher. Most notable are the 2007 slaughter of 32 people at Virginia Tech; assassination attempt on Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that critically injured her and killed six others; and the Aurora movie theatre shooting in July that killed 12 and injured 58.
Such massacres make headlines while thousands of other shootings go unnoticed. According to Washington Post, there have been 13 such attacks in 2012 which have failed to provoke change. New York Mayor Bloomberg said that "Gun violence is a national epidemic, a national tragedy" and he described it is a problem unique to the US.
Every year, about 100,000 Americans are gun violence victims, according to Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2010, 73,505 Americans were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds, and guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings. This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour.
The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, states "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Americans invoke this right to bear arms conveniently forgetting the fact it was written 220 years ago when a well regulated militia was indeed necessary to secure the borders, and it was passed at a time of single shot rifles and not automatic guns.
I think the constitutional right is abused. Last week, a Connecticut man was charged for having a cache of 161 weapons and crates of ammunition. People do not need semiautomatic guns — that kill many people in a matter of seconds — to secure their homes, for sport or to hunt. Outlawing automatic killing weapons would not infringe the constitutional right.
Past U.S. firearm legislation such as National Firearms Act of 1934 and Gun Control Act of 1968 never deterred gun violence. A case in point is Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the country yet, in 2012, had more than 440 school-age children shot and 60 killed. Since the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, over a million Americans have been killed with guns.
In 1994, following the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, Congress passed a federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and was never renewed. The Bill required background checks of anyone seeking to buy a firearm from a licensed dealer but people could easily circumvent the laws and buy guns from private sales and gun shows.
The debate is now raging as to why mass shootings keep occurring and whether gun control legislation alone could prevent these tragedies. While some call for tighter gun restrictions, others want to examine what motivates the culture of gun violence in America. Many question whether it is a result of violent movies and video games that idolise killings, or music and lyrics that glorify guns, rape and murder.
Most gunmen in mass shootings have claimed mental illness as a reason for their heinous crimes. Every unstable mind is not a danger to society but the States must ensure that the mentally ill have affordable access to treatment, and that they do not reach this destructive point in life.
Gun owners should prevent children and mentally unstable from having access to guns. Laws should be passed to limit gun ownership, and penalise gun owners who handle their weapons irresponsibly.
Opponents of gun control are 4 million members strong National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America with 300,000 members, politicians of all parties who take campaign money from the NRA, gun owners, and gun manufacturers which is big business in America.
Recently, NRA proposed to have armed guards in every school. This means more guns in the hands of people and more business to the gun industry. Mayor Bloomberg called it "a shameful evasion" of the gun crisis, and said that "they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."
Let’s not forget that we experience mass shootings in shopping malls, movie theatres, schools, colleges, places of worship, etc. It is not only costly to install metal detectors at the entrances of all public buildings with gun toting security guards but also would resemble mini fortresses all over the country. Make no mistake, a distorted mind will always find ways to cause mayhem.
According to published reports, some 270 million guns exist amid a U.S. population of 311 million. Even an absolute ban of gun ownership will not prevent mass killings – at least, not for many years – because these millions of guns can easily end up in the hands of convicted criminals or the mentally sick who are hell bent on wreaking mindless carnage.
Americans need to have a sense of what a civilisd society is or ought to be. It is time for a serious, non-partisan national conversation that leads to meaningful action. Let us hope that lawmakers take courage to prevent more tragedies that truly break our hearts.
US President Barack Obama avoided the issue of gun control during his first term but now calls for "meaningful action" saying that "As a country, we have been through this too many times". He established a gun violence task force, led by US Vice President Joe Biden that is to provide recommendations for legislation in January.
Senator Dianne Feinstein promised to introduce in January a de facto renewal of the assault-weapons ban that expired in 2004. She said her bill would, among others, stop the sale of more than 100 assault weapons, ban high-capacity clips and close the "gun show loophole," which allows people to buy weapons without background checks. Last week, on the first day of the 113th Congress, several lawmakers introduced ten bills to expand gun regulations.
There is gun violence all over the world but far less than in the United States and many countries have tightened their gun ownership laws in the wake of mass shootings.
England banned handguns after the 1987 Hungerford massacre that killed 16 people and wounded 14 others, and the 1996 Dunblane shooting that killed 16 school children and wounded 13 others. Australia passed stricter gun laws in 1996, after 35 people were killed and 21 wounded in Port Arthur, Tasmania.
Finland imposed restrictions on handgun ownership, in 2008, after 11 were killed in a college shooting. Last year, in Norway, a nation with a tight gun-control and licensing regime, a deranged man methodically gunned down 69 teenagers.
In the United States, there have been more than 30 mass shootings since the 1999 Columbine school massacre that killed 12 students and a teacher. Most notable are the 2007 slaughter of 32 people at Virginia Tech; assassination attempt on Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that critically injured her and killed six others; and the Aurora movie theatre shooting in July that killed 12 and injured 58.
Such massacres make headlines while thousands of other shootings go unnoticed. According to Washington Post, there have been 13 such attacks in 2012 which have failed to provoke change. New York Mayor Bloomberg said that "Gun violence is a national epidemic, a national tragedy" and he described it is a problem unique to the US.
Every year, about 100,000 Americans are gun violence victims, according to Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2010, 73,505 Americans were treated in hospitals for gunshot wounds, and guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings. This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour.
The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, states "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Americans invoke this right to bear arms conveniently forgetting the fact it was written 220 years ago when a well regulated militia was indeed necessary to secure the borders, and it was passed at a time of single shot rifles and not automatic guns.
I think the constitutional right is abused. Last week, a Connecticut man was charged for having a cache of 161 weapons and crates of ammunition. People do not need semiautomatic guns — that kill many people in a matter of seconds — to secure their homes, for sport or to hunt. Outlawing automatic killing weapons would not infringe the constitutional right.
Past U.S. firearm legislation such as National Firearms Act of 1934 and Gun Control Act of 1968 never deterred gun violence. A case in point is Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the country yet, in 2012, had more than 440 school-age children shot and 60 killed. Since the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, over a million Americans have been killed with guns.
In 1994, following the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, Congress passed a federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and was never renewed. The Bill required background checks of anyone seeking to buy a firearm from a licensed dealer but people could easily circumvent the laws and buy guns from private sales and gun shows.
The debate is now raging as to why mass shootings keep occurring and whether gun control legislation alone could prevent these tragedies. While some call for tighter gun restrictions, others want to examine what motivates the culture of gun violence in America. Many question whether it is a result of violent movies and video games that idolise killings, or music and lyrics that glorify guns, rape and murder.
Most gunmen in mass shootings have claimed mental illness as a reason for their heinous crimes. Every unstable mind is not a danger to society but the States must ensure that the mentally ill have affordable access to treatment, and that they do not reach this destructive point in life.
Gun owners should prevent children and mentally unstable from having access to guns. Laws should be passed to limit gun ownership, and penalise gun owners who handle their weapons irresponsibly.
Opponents of gun control are 4 million members strong National Rifle Association (NRA), Gun Owners of America with 300,000 members, politicians of all parties who take campaign money from the NRA, gun owners, and gun manufacturers which is big business in America.
Recently, NRA proposed to have armed guards in every school. This means more guns in the hands of people and more business to the gun industry. Mayor Bloomberg called it "a shameful evasion" of the gun crisis, and said that "they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe."
Let’s not forget that we experience mass shootings in shopping malls, movie theatres, schools, colleges, places of worship, etc. It is not only costly to install metal detectors at the entrances of all public buildings with gun toting security guards but also would resemble mini fortresses all over the country. Make no mistake, a distorted mind will always find ways to cause mayhem.
According to published reports, some 270 million guns exist amid a U.S. population of 311 million. Even an absolute ban of gun ownership will not prevent mass killings – at least, not for many years – because these millions of guns can easily end up in the hands of convicted criminals or the mentally sick who are hell bent on wreaking mindless carnage.
Americans need to have a sense of what a civilisd society is or ought to be. It is time for a serious, non-partisan national conversation that leads to meaningful action. Let us hope that lawmakers take courage to prevent more tragedies that truly break our hearts.
2013 brings a variety of new state laws
To ease the often overwhelming costs of higher education, select popular college textbooks are set to become available as free online downloads. More than 50 common textbooks for University of California, California State University and California Community College students should be posted in an online database by the start of the 2013-2014 school year.
Young undocumented Californians will be eligible for driver’s licenses beginning next year if they qualify for a new federal work program. Gov. Brown’s signing of the law followed in the steps of President Obama’s decision to stop deporting young undocumented immigrants if they meet certain requirements, including if they are 30 years old or younger and came to the United States by the age of 16.
For parents who decide not to have their children vaccinated, they’ll need a signed waiver from a doctor verifying that they were warned of risks and benefits associated with opting out of vaccinations before registering their children for school.
Homeowners on the brink of losing their homes gained stronger protections, with state legislators banning banks from practicing “dual tracking” — renegotiating mortgage payments with struggling homeowners while simultaneously pursuing foreclosure against the homeowner.
California will hold party bus operators to the same standards as limousine drivers, making them legally responsible for drinking by underage passengers. The law is named for Brett Studebaker, a 19-year-old from San Mateo who died in 2010 after drinking on a party bus and crashing his own vehicle while driving home later.
Juveniles sentenced to lifetime prison stints in California have a chance of release after serving 25 years if they show remorse and spend time in rehabilitation programs. Supporters of the bill argued that the United States is the only country in the world that sentences teenagers to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A new bill outlaws openly carrying shotguns and rifles on the streets and in the malls of California cities. A similar law last year banned the open carrying of handguns. The new bill does not apply to hunters, law enforcement personnel and others with specified licenses.
AB 1536 clarifies existing law by allowing drivers to dictate, send or listen to text-based communications while driving as long as they do so using technology specifically designed and configured to allow fully voice-operated, hands-free operation. Drivers under age 18 are still prohibited from using any electronic device while driving.
It seems it wasn’t purely coincidental that this happened at more-or-less the same time as French regulators began to delve into Free’s alleged degradation of YouTube traffic. An email sent to a journalist by Xavier Niel, founder of Free parent Iliad, strongly suggested that the ad-blocking was just a warning shot in an ongoing war with Google. Indeed, it appears that only Google ads were blocked.
So, with its ad-blocking turned off again, Free has done what it intended to do, namely to demonstrate to Google that it can hurt the company’s core activities in France. However, Free also managed to get the relevant government minister to come out in favor of net neutrality, which is precisely what the ISP is trying to do away with. In soccer terms, this was what you might call an own goal.
The case exposes a deep irony in the treatment Google has received in France. Bear in mind that, just months ago, the French government was siding with the nation’s publishers in a bid to get Google to pay licensing fees for reproducing snippets of text in Google News. As in Germany, opponents of that stance pointed out that publishers benefited from Google News, which sends traffic their way. Now the French government and publishers are effectively holding hands in defence of Google.
Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.
Undaunted, Gassée decided he would create a brand new computer platform from scratch, including both custom hardware and a new operating system. Gassée was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who had attempted the same thing in with NeXT in 1985 when he was ousted from Apple.
The BeBox was released in October 1995. It was a curious beast, sporting dual 66MHz PowerPC 603e processors, a “GeekPort” for attaching custom electronic devices, and vertical “Blinkenlights,” LED strips that showed CPU usage. Only 1,800 BeBoxes were sold in total before Be, Inc. discontinued all hardware manufacturing and concentrated on selling the operating system by itself, initially for PowerPC Macintoshes.
In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its failed “Copland” project, and for a while BeOS was at the top of the list (this list included both Windows NT and Solaris, neither of which would have been especially appetizing for Apple fans). While negotiating a sale price, Gassée, exuding his typical bombastic confidence, told a reporter that “we’ve got Apple by the balls and we’re going to squeeze until it hurts.” Someone at Apple got wind of this and phoned a guy, who phoned another guy... who phoned up Steve Jobs at NeXT. The rest is history. “C’est la vie,” said Gassée, and switched the focus of BeOS to x86-based PCs.
BeOS reached its pinnacle of success in 2000 when the R5 version was released as a free download. However, few people upgraded to the $99 “Professional” version, and a last-ditch attempt to save the company by bundling BeOS with the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance failed to bring in the necessary cash. Be, Inc. sold all its assets to Palm, Inc. in November 2001 for $11 million.
Since then, a German company, yellowTAB, released a “new” version of BeOS called Zeta in 2005 (which I reviewed). However, the company never confirmed whether or not it had access to the BeOS source code. The company discontinued Zeta in 2007, stating that sales failed to live up to expectations.
With the legal status of the BeOS source code in limbo, it was up to an open-source group of hackers to try to recently keep the BeOS dream alive. Their project was originally named OpenBeOS, but trademark issues forced a name change. Haiku was chosen as a callback to the old error messages in BeOS’s built-in Web browser, which were delivered (appropriately) in haiku form. Today, the Haiku group aims not only to rebuild that operating system, but to also run application binaries originally designed for BeOS. With the team recently releasing version R1/Alpha 4.1, Ars decided to take the OS for a test drive.
The latest iterations of the self-driving car have come to CES. Audi and Toyota are displaying cars that are self-driving at times, and showcase the building-block technologies available today that can assist drivers, especially on limited access roads or on crowded city streets. Audi is showing the Audi Pikes Peak TTS research car that has climbed Pikes Peak, and Toyota is exhibiting a gear-laden Lexus LS research vehicle. The building blocks help avoid accidents in urban areas; on limited access highways, they guide, correct and warn. Both automakers are also trying to control expectations for anywhere, anytime self-driving cars. Lexus likens its robocar to a “co-pilot” while Audi talks about “piloted driving,” as in auto-pilot functions on a plane.
Toyota’s Lexus division tricked out a Lexus LS sedan (pictured above) as an Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle with multiple sensors to “observe, process and respond to the vehicle’s surroundings.” In other words, it could be a self-driving car, but for now Lexus sees the components as assisting in specific tasks. Mark Templin, Lexus general manager, sounded the usual let’s-not-get-ahead-of-ourselves warning: “We believe the driver must be fully engaged … a driverless car is just a part of the story. Our vision is a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” Lexus calls it the Integrated Safety Management Concept as well as the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle.
The production LS you can buy as a 2013 model incorporates most of the tech available on high-end cars: lane keep assist (that is, lane departure warning plus steering corrections), blind spot detection, rear cross traffic alert (crossing vehicles when backing), and adaptive cruise control. Lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control are rudimentary self-driving tools.
Much of the Toyota/Lexus research is at the company’s nine-acre Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) proving grounds in Susona City, Japan. As you might guess from a test track the size of nine football fields, it replicates urban roads, not interstate highways. Toyota also does R&D in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Audi has already shown it can get a self-driving car packed full of electronics up the 152 turns of Pikes Peak (12.5 miles or 20 km) in 27 minutes. That’s about 28 mph or 45 kph. Not bad for a road with thousand-foot dropoffs and no guardrails. At CES, it’s showing off piloted driving and piloted parking. In a statement, Audi says, “The term ‘piloted’ is used advisedly, as Audi envisions motorists enjoying the convenience of allowing the car to handle mundane stop-and-go driving conditions, for example, while still being able to take control of the car when needed. In this way, the technology is similar to auto-pilot systems found on jetliners.”
Audi has most of the adaptive cruise and lane departure warning features found in the Lexus and the BMW-Cadillac-Mercedes competition. It’s also talking up piloted parking. Where Americans are learning to like the convenience of hands-off parallel parking, Audi is taking that one step further at CES. By that, Audi means you hop out of the car and it finds a space in a parking lot and eases in.
Audi also has been awarded the second license for road-testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in Nevada, after Google. Nevada is the ideal testbed for self-driving cars. Once you’re a few miles outside Vegas, there are miles and miles of uncrowded roads. It’s also close to California and the automaker R&D facilities there, and most of the state is snow-free year-round. Although the permit is for autonomous driving cars, for the most part there’s still a driver behind the wheel to take control in case something goes awry.
Young undocumented Californians will be eligible for driver’s licenses beginning next year if they qualify for a new federal work program. Gov. Brown’s signing of the law followed in the steps of President Obama’s decision to stop deporting young undocumented immigrants if they meet certain requirements, including if they are 30 years old or younger and came to the United States by the age of 16.
For parents who decide not to have their children vaccinated, they’ll need a signed waiver from a doctor verifying that they were warned of risks and benefits associated with opting out of vaccinations before registering their children for school.
Homeowners on the brink of losing their homes gained stronger protections, with state legislators banning banks from practicing “dual tracking” — renegotiating mortgage payments with struggling homeowners while simultaneously pursuing foreclosure against the homeowner.
California will hold party bus operators to the same standards as limousine drivers, making them legally responsible for drinking by underage passengers. The law is named for Brett Studebaker, a 19-year-old from San Mateo who died in 2010 after drinking on a party bus and crashing his own vehicle while driving home later.
Juveniles sentenced to lifetime prison stints in California have a chance of release after serving 25 years if they show remorse and spend time in rehabilitation programs. Supporters of the bill argued that the United States is the only country in the world that sentences teenagers to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A new bill outlaws openly carrying shotguns and rifles on the streets and in the malls of California cities. A similar law last year banned the open carrying of handguns. The new bill does not apply to hunters, law enforcement personnel and others with specified licenses.
AB 1536 clarifies existing law by allowing drivers to dictate, send or listen to text-based communications while driving as long as they do so using technology specifically designed and configured to allow fully voice-operated, hands-free operation. Drivers under age 18 are still prohibited from using any electronic device while driving.
It seems it wasn’t purely coincidental that this happened at more-or-less the same time as French regulators began to delve into Free’s alleged degradation of YouTube traffic. An email sent to a journalist by Xavier Niel, founder of Free parent Iliad, strongly suggested that the ad-blocking was just a warning shot in an ongoing war with Google. Indeed, it appears that only Google ads were blocked.
So, with its ad-blocking turned off again, Free has done what it intended to do, namely to demonstrate to Google that it can hurt the company’s core activities in France. However, Free also managed to get the relevant government minister to come out in favor of net neutrality, which is precisely what the ISP is trying to do away with. In soccer terms, this was what you might call an own goal.
The case exposes a deep irony in the treatment Google has received in France. Bear in mind that, just months ago, the French government was siding with the nation’s publishers in a bid to get Google to pay licensing fees for reproducing snippets of text in Google News. As in Germany, opponents of that stance pointed out that publishers benefited from Google News, which sends traffic their way. Now the French government and publishers are effectively holding hands in defence of Google.
Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.
Undaunted, Gassée decided he would create a brand new computer platform from scratch, including both custom hardware and a new operating system. Gassée was following in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, who had attempted the same thing in with NeXT in 1985 when he was ousted from Apple.
The BeBox was released in October 1995. It was a curious beast, sporting dual 66MHz PowerPC 603e processors, a “GeekPort” for attaching custom electronic devices, and vertical “Blinkenlights,” LED strips that showed CPU usage. Only 1,800 BeBoxes were sold in total before Be, Inc. discontinued all hardware manufacturing and concentrated on selling the operating system by itself, initially for PowerPC Macintoshes.
In 1996, Apple was searching for a new operating system to replace its failed “Copland” project, and for a while BeOS was at the top of the list (this list included both Windows NT and Solaris, neither of which would have been especially appetizing for Apple fans). While negotiating a sale price, Gassée, exuding his typical bombastic confidence, told a reporter that “we’ve got Apple by the balls and we’re going to squeeze until it hurts.” Someone at Apple got wind of this and phoned a guy, who phoned another guy... who phoned up Steve Jobs at NeXT. The rest is history. “C’est la vie,” said Gassée, and switched the focus of BeOS to x86-based PCs.
BeOS reached its pinnacle of success in 2000 when the R5 version was released as a free download. However, few people upgraded to the $99 “Professional” version, and a last-ditch attempt to save the company by bundling BeOS with the Sony eVilla Internet Appliance failed to bring in the necessary cash. Be, Inc. sold all its assets to Palm, Inc. in November 2001 for $11 million.
Since then, a German company, yellowTAB, released a “new” version of BeOS called Zeta in 2005 (which I reviewed). However, the company never confirmed whether or not it had access to the BeOS source code. The company discontinued Zeta in 2007, stating that sales failed to live up to expectations.
With the legal status of the BeOS source code in limbo, it was up to an open-source group of hackers to try to recently keep the BeOS dream alive. Their project was originally named OpenBeOS, but trademark issues forced a name change. Haiku was chosen as a callback to the old error messages in BeOS’s built-in Web browser, which were delivered (appropriately) in haiku form. Today, the Haiku group aims not only to rebuild that operating system, but to also run application binaries originally designed for BeOS. With the team recently releasing version R1/Alpha 4.1, Ars decided to take the OS for a test drive.
The latest iterations of the self-driving car have come to CES. Audi and Toyota are displaying cars that are self-driving at times, and showcase the building-block technologies available today that can assist drivers, especially on limited access roads or on crowded city streets. Audi is showing the Audi Pikes Peak TTS research car that has climbed Pikes Peak, and Toyota is exhibiting a gear-laden Lexus LS research vehicle. The building blocks help avoid accidents in urban areas; on limited access highways, they guide, correct and warn. Both automakers are also trying to control expectations for anywhere, anytime self-driving cars. Lexus likens its robocar to a “co-pilot” while Audi talks about “piloted driving,” as in auto-pilot functions on a plane.
Toyota’s Lexus division tricked out a Lexus LS sedan (pictured above) as an Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle with multiple sensors to “observe, process and respond to the vehicle’s surroundings.” In other words, it could be a self-driving car, but for now Lexus sees the components as assisting in specific tasks. Mark Templin, Lexus general manager, sounded the usual let’s-not-get-ahead-of-ourselves warning: “We believe the driver must be fully engaged … a driverless car is just a part of the story. Our vision is a car equipped with an intelligent, always-attentive co-pilot whose skills contribute to safer driving.” Lexus calls it the Integrated Safety Management Concept as well as the Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle.
The production LS you can buy as a 2013 model incorporates most of the tech available on high-end cars: lane keep assist (that is, lane departure warning plus steering corrections), blind spot detection, rear cross traffic alert (crossing vehicles when backing), and adaptive cruise control. Lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control are rudimentary self-driving tools.
Much of the Toyota/Lexus research is at the company’s nine-acre Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) proving grounds in Susona City, Japan. As you might guess from a test track the size of nine football fields, it replicates urban roads, not interstate highways. Toyota also does R&D in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Audi has already shown it can get a self-driving car packed full of electronics up the 152 turns of Pikes Peak (12.5 miles or 20 km) in 27 minutes. That’s about 28 mph or 45 kph. Not bad for a road with thousand-foot dropoffs and no guardrails. At CES, it’s showing off piloted driving and piloted parking. In a statement, Audi says, “The term ‘piloted’ is used advisedly, as Audi envisions motorists enjoying the convenience of allowing the car to handle mundane stop-and-go driving conditions, for example, while still being able to take control of the car when needed. In this way, the technology is similar to auto-pilot systems found on jetliners.”
Audi has most of the adaptive cruise and lane departure warning features found in the Lexus and the BMW-Cadillac-Mercedes competition. It’s also talking up piloted parking. Where Americans are learning to like the convenience of hands-off parallel parking, Audi is taking that one step further at CES. By that, Audi means you hop out of the car and it finds a space in a parking lot and eases in.
Audi also has been awarded the second license for road-testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in Nevada, after Google. Nevada is the ideal testbed for self-driving cars. Once you’re a few miles outside Vegas, there are miles and miles of uncrowded roads. It’s also close to California and the automaker R&D facilities there, and most of the state is snow-free year-round. Although the permit is for autonomous driving cars, for the most part there’s still a driver behind the wheel to take control in case something goes awry.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Remembering Murray Galinson
I first met Murray in 1976 when I wrote a story for San Diego Magazine about San Diego’s “connection” to newly elected Vice President Walter Mondale. Murray and Elaine were relatively fresh from Minnesota and I was instantly charmed by Murray’s grace, wit and generousity of spirit — not to mention his strong Democratic commitment.
San Diego was a “Very Red” town in those days and Murray managed to navigate the intricacies of local politics. I teased him relentlessly about his appointment by Pete Wilson to the Police Practices Commssion. He was, after all, a federal prosecutor. But, he played a very progressive role in helping to prod what had been a Redneck police force into a modern, community sensitive outfit.
In 1977, when I started Newsline, Murray was there at the very beginning. Advice. Financial support. Contacts. Assistance. We talked almost constantly during some periods. The Union and Tribune (we had 2 horrible dailies; as bad as Papa Doug on any day). Murray, along with other leading Democrats like Si Casady, Harvey Furgatch and Larry Lawrence, helped make Newsline “the” Democratic voice. Alan Cranston came to town and Murray arranged for an in-depth Newsline interview; and over the years Cranston became a Newline regular. Tom Bradley, then the Mayor of LA running for Governor. Murray made sure we had access. Evonne Burke. I could go on.
Every year, Murray was a principal sponsor of our annual fundraiser; and a great source of news, gossip and insight for our insider “TidBits” column.
Never a headline seeker, Murray preferred being behind the scenes. And he played a pivotal role in the single most important event that helped transform San Diego from Red to Blue.
Despite demographic changes, political power in San Diego was firmly in Republican hands well into the late 1980s. The key mechanism for preventing the election of Democrats and community-based candidates was the “at large” election scheme that forced Council candidates to compete for nomination in their District and then win a “citywide” run-off, where the power of GOP money and the Copley Press would dominate.
Murray helped every single effort to win District Elections, including the successful 3rd attempt in 1998 that was spearheaded by John Hartley (soon to be a Councilmember) and the Sierra Club’s Ruth Deumler – with political consulting provided by myself and Tom Shepard.
You see, Murray and I had started a “Democratic Lunch Bunch” in 1987. By then, Murray was running San Diego National Bank, and every month we’d meet in his board room to hear a speaker or discuss contemporary local political events and what to do. Throughout 1987-88, District Elections dominated our agenda.
Thanks to Murray, we pulled off one of the best “political press stunts” I have been a part of. Our argument in favor of District Elections was that it would cripple the power of Big Money to dominate city politics. We said that it cost what was then the astronomical sum of $200,000 to win a Council office under city-wide elections; which community-based candidates would never match. And we called a press conference to demonstrate that fact.
The clincher: we said we would “demonstrate” this discrepancy with $200,000 IN CASH at a press conference at the City Council chambers. Murray, of course, thanks to San Diego National Bank, provided the cash.
At the appointed time, the press were primed and ready. The armored car pulled up in front of city hall. The guards got out, their guns drawn. While two stood guard, the other two took out a dolly and unloaded bags of cash. Cameras rolling, they rolled the dolly, flanked by the guards, into city hall and up the elevators.
In front of the Council Chambers, we’d set up our stage. Mark Zerbe from Common Cause and a large scale to represent each side of a typical Council Election. The guards arrived on the Council floor and Mark unzipped the bags of money and piled the cash on the side of the table labeled ‘Special Interests’. The scale tilted that way (of course); and the other side, labeled ‘The Community’ clearly could not compete.
Murray, who was invited to attend the press conference itself, demurred. But I can tell you that he immensely enjoyed the coverage and, when District Elections triumphed in a close election, the result.
Our Lunch Bunch continued through 1990, with Murray among those helping to push the election of a series of Democrats to the Council and decisively break the Republican majority.
In the 90s and 2000s, he truly enjoyed the blossoming of Democratic power here and nationally. I remember going to Larry Lawrence’s Swearing In as Ambassador to Switzerland in 1993 in Washington, DC where VP Al Gore performed the honors. Larry treated his San Diego friends to a couple of days of parties and receptions, which Murray impishly called “Larry’s Bar Mitzvah”.
In the years he spent in La Jolla, working with Sol Price and most recently with Jack McGrory, I felt that Murray seemed to take a different kind of delight in politics.
Always insightful, funny, and a little jaundiced, Murray was, of course chagrined by Bush Jr., but very optimistic about the promise of Obama. He either sensed or hoped that America, by electing a Black president, had turned an important corner.
His insight as sharp as ever, his humor on a razor edge, I spoke with him before this last election where he particularly relished the conundrum Romney’s 47% remark had created for the GOP nominee. “Obama’s going to win,” he promised me. “It’s going to be all right.”
In addition to all his Democratic candidates and causes, Murray was a staunch supporter of the myriad school bond measures (MM, S and Z) that we ran over the years for San Diego Schools. Like the Greek proverb, Murray believed that a society truly grows great when old men and women plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.
San Diego was a “Very Red” town in those days and Murray managed to navigate the intricacies of local politics. I teased him relentlessly about his appointment by Pete Wilson to the Police Practices Commssion. He was, after all, a federal prosecutor. But, he played a very progressive role in helping to prod what had been a Redneck police force into a modern, community sensitive outfit.
In 1977, when I started Newsline, Murray was there at the very beginning. Advice. Financial support. Contacts. Assistance. We talked almost constantly during some periods. The Union and Tribune (we had 2 horrible dailies; as bad as Papa Doug on any day). Murray, along with other leading Democrats like Si Casady, Harvey Furgatch and Larry Lawrence, helped make Newsline “the” Democratic voice. Alan Cranston came to town and Murray arranged for an in-depth Newsline interview; and over the years Cranston became a Newline regular. Tom Bradley, then the Mayor of LA running for Governor. Murray made sure we had access. Evonne Burke. I could go on.
Every year, Murray was a principal sponsor of our annual fundraiser; and a great source of news, gossip and insight for our insider “TidBits” column.
Never a headline seeker, Murray preferred being behind the scenes. And he played a pivotal role in the single most important event that helped transform San Diego from Red to Blue.
Despite demographic changes, political power in San Diego was firmly in Republican hands well into the late 1980s. The key mechanism for preventing the election of Democrats and community-based candidates was the “at large” election scheme that forced Council candidates to compete for nomination in their District and then win a “citywide” run-off, where the power of GOP money and the Copley Press would dominate.
Murray helped every single effort to win District Elections, including the successful 3rd attempt in 1998 that was spearheaded by John Hartley (soon to be a Councilmember) and the Sierra Club’s Ruth Deumler – with political consulting provided by myself and Tom Shepard.
You see, Murray and I had started a “Democratic Lunch Bunch” in 1987. By then, Murray was running San Diego National Bank, and every month we’d meet in his board room to hear a speaker or discuss contemporary local political events and what to do. Throughout 1987-88, District Elections dominated our agenda.
Thanks to Murray, we pulled off one of the best “political press stunts” I have been a part of. Our argument in favor of District Elections was that it would cripple the power of Big Money to dominate city politics. We said that it cost what was then the astronomical sum of $200,000 to win a Council office under city-wide elections; which community-based candidates would never match. And we called a press conference to demonstrate that fact.
The clincher: we said we would “demonstrate” this discrepancy with $200,000 IN CASH at a press conference at the City Council chambers. Murray, of course, thanks to San Diego National Bank, provided the cash.
At the appointed time, the press were primed and ready. The armored car pulled up in front of city hall. The guards got out, their guns drawn. While two stood guard, the other two took out a dolly and unloaded bags of cash. Cameras rolling, they rolled the dolly, flanked by the guards, into city hall and up the elevators.
In front of the Council Chambers, we’d set up our stage. Mark Zerbe from Common Cause and a large scale to represent each side of a typical Council Election. The guards arrived on the Council floor and Mark unzipped the bags of money and piled the cash on the side of the table labeled ‘Special Interests’. The scale tilted that way (of course); and the other side, labeled ‘The Community’ clearly could not compete.
Murray, who was invited to attend the press conference itself, demurred. But I can tell you that he immensely enjoyed the coverage and, when District Elections triumphed in a close election, the result.
Our Lunch Bunch continued through 1990, with Murray among those helping to push the election of a series of Democrats to the Council and decisively break the Republican majority.
In the 90s and 2000s, he truly enjoyed the blossoming of Democratic power here and nationally. I remember going to Larry Lawrence’s Swearing In as Ambassador to Switzerland in 1993 in Washington, DC where VP Al Gore performed the honors. Larry treated his San Diego friends to a couple of days of parties and receptions, which Murray impishly called “Larry’s Bar Mitzvah”.
In the years he spent in La Jolla, working with Sol Price and most recently with Jack McGrory, I felt that Murray seemed to take a different kind of delight in politics.
Always insightful, funny, and a little jaundiced, Murray was, of course chagrined by Bush Jr., but very optimistic about the promise of Obama. He either sensed or hoped that America, by electing a Black president, had turned an important corner.
His insight as sharp as ever, his humor on a razor edge, I spoke with him before this last election where he particularly relished the conundrum Romney’s 47% remark had created for the GOP nominee. “Obama’s going to win,” he promised me. “It’s going to be all right.”
In addition to all his Democratic candidates and causes, Murray was a staunch supporter of the myriad school bond measures (MM, S and Z) that we ran over the years for San Diego Schools. Like the Greek proverb, Murray believed that a society truly grows great when old men and women plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.
Houston Texans beat Cincinnati Bengals
Watt swatted away passes, Arian Foster ran away from tacklers, and the Houston Texans did just enough to knock Cincinnati out of the playoffs for the second straight year.
Matt Schaub made his first postseason start a successful one when Foster’s 1-yard touchdown in the third quarter helped the Texans to a 19-13 AFC wild-card win over the Bengals on Saturday.
"The whole stadium knew we had to line up and run the ball and boy, he was at his best there at the end," Texans coach Gary Kubiak said of Foster. "He’s become a fine, fine player, and it just seems like the bigger it gets, the better Arian gets."
Now comes the big test. The Texans (13-4) move on to the second round on Jan. 13, when they visit the Patriots, who beat them, 42-14, in Week 14. This time, the Texans are 9?-point underdogs.
"It’s one step," Watt said of the win. "We know what it means, and we have bigger goals than that."
Shayne Graham kicked four field goals for the Texans, while Foster finished with 140 yards and became the first NFL player to rush for at least 100 yards in each of his first three playoff games.
Watt finished with a sack and swatted away two of Andy Dalton’s pass attempts, once wagging his finger at the Bengals quarterback after the play.
"I think it was a full defensive effort, everybody was flying around and we were getting off the field on third downs," Watt said.
The Texans’ defense smothered Dalton and the Bengals early. Their second drive ended when Connor Barwin tackled BenJarvus Green-Ellis for a 6-yard loss and Watt followed with a sack of Dalton.
Houston’s offense had the ball for almost 39 minutes as it ate up the clock with a season-high 32 carries from Foster.
"We controlled the line of scrimmage, and any time we do that it’s going to be hard to beat us," Foster said.
The Texans had trouble finishing drives and managed three field goals in the first half against the Bengals (10-7). Houston struck first after the break, with Foster scoring the game’s only offensive touchdown to make it 16-7.
Schaub, who missed last year’s playoffs with a foot injury, had an interception returned for a touchdown by Leon Hall before halftime.
"It was never easy," Schaub said. "Cincinnati is a great team. I made a turnover and gave them points. We just had to rally around each other and we did that."
Johnathan Joseph, an ex-Bengal, had an interception for the Texans, who kept Cincinnati without a playoff win since the 1990 season, the league’s longest current streak.
Houston had struggled on third downs lately. This time, the Texans didn’t let the Bengals convert a third down on nine tries.
The Texans rebounded from a terrible month in which they lost three of four games and the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs. The win came in front of a record crowd of 71,738, including former Oilers great Earl Campbell.
"We like to run the ball and play good defense," Foster said. "It only takes one week to turn things around in the NFL and we did that."
The Bengals couldn’t do anything offensively before the break, and were outgained, 250-53, in the first half. Dalton was 4 of 10 for 3 yards in the first half.
Schaub shook off his first-half miscue to finish 29 of 38 for 262 yards, and Dalton finished 14 of 30 for 127 yards.
The Bengals had a chance for a touchdown late in the fourth quarter, but Dalton’s pass sailed just out of reach of a diving A.J. Green in the end zone.
"The offense didn’t play as well as it could have," Dalton said. "You can always look back and say, ‘What if?’?"
Dalton’s 45-yard pass to Green got Cincinnati moving in the third quarter and set up Josh Brown’s 34-yard field goal. When Dalton tried to go to Green again, Joseph intercepted and got the Texans in scoring range again as the quarter ended.
In last year’s playoffs, the Texans routed the Bengals, 31-10, with Dalton throwing three interceptions.
The main difference in this one: Schaub was back in charge for Houston. Rookie T.J. Yates filled in for Schaub and got the Texans a win in their first playoff game, but couldn’t take them any further.
On their second possession, Schaub completed an 18-yard pass, Foster had a 17-yard run, and Keshawn Martin went 16 yards on a reverse, setting up Graham’s field goal.
It became a pattern — move the ball down the field, settle for 3 points. The fans started booing.
And then Schaub did the one thing he wanted to avoid — he let Cincinnati’s defense get its hands on the ball. Hall anticipated Schaub’s throw, stepped in front, and returned it untouched, high-stepping the last few yards, for the defense’s fourth touchdown in the last four games.
In that tragedy’s aftermath, I kept coming back to one inescapable thought: Once that cowardly shooter got inside the school, what’s the one thing — aside from him having an immediate, massive stroke right there on the spot — that I could have hoped for? Someone to stop him as quickly as possible, with a minimal loss of life. A trained police officer, preferably. But next best? Any sort of competent, caring adult who had been drilled in the use of firearms, had access to them and was willing to take on the grave responsibility of protecting innocent lives.
I hold in my hands “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” compiled by George Brainard Blodgette and published 1882-1887 by the Essex Institute Historical Collections. It was revised and published in 1933 by Amos Everett Jewett and reprinted in 1981 by New England History Press.
Researchers don’t need to know all that. My copy probably will go to a library eventually, but Maine genealogists will be interested in where they can see the book now, maybe even today.
Rowley is a bit northwest of the town of Gloucester, Mass., from which many people moved to Maine in after the Revolutionary War; the Rowley book is well worth a look, especially because its family sections are so well done. And yes, there is an index in the back of the 472-page volume.
Here are some of the surnames that have their own sections of family history: Bailey, Boynton, Bradstreet, Brocklebank, Browne, Burpee, Carleton, Chaplin-Clark, Dickinson, Dresser, Goodridge, Harris, Hazen, Hobson, Jewett, Johnson, Kilborne, Lambert, Mighill-Perley, Nelson-Payson, Parrat-Jewett, Pearson, Perley, Pickard, Pingry, Platts, Prime, Scott, Searle, Spofford, Stickney, Tenney and Todd.
There are many more names, and the index has more than 50 pages.
Keep in mind that many libraries do not let their genealogy and family history resources circulate. In some cases, the books are very rare, and the volumes really need to stay in the building so that they are accessible to all. Most libraries have photocopiers so that researchers can copy portions they need for their records unless the books are too fragile.
These days, it is too easy to rely solely on the Internet for doing family research. Sometimes it is hard to tell from looking at a webpage whether the information is well done.
Pick up a book such as “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” and you get a sense right off of its being well-done. The book is subtitled “A Genealogical Record of the Families Who Settled in Rowley before 1799 with Several Generations of Their Descendants.”
Here is another reason to go looking at a top-notch facility such as Bangor Public Library, where the genealogy resources in the Bangor Room are accessible by elevator
inside the children’s department through the entrance on the right. The Bangor Room has a table where there are several handouts about genealogy and family history resources.
Matt Schaub made his first postseason start a successful one when Foster’s 1-yard touchdown in the third quarter helped the Texans to a 19-13 AFC wild-card win over the Bengals on Saturday.
"The whole stadium knew we had to line up and run the ball and boy, he was at his best there at the end," Texans coach Gary Kubiak said of Foster. "He’s become a fine, fine player, and it just seems like the bigger it gets, the better Arian gets."
Now comes the big test. The Texans (13-4) move on to the second round on Jan. 13, when they visit the Patriots, who beat them, 42-14, in Week 14. This time, the Texans are 9?-point underdogs.
"It’s one step," Watt said of the win. "We know what it means, and we have bigger goals than that."
Shayne Graham kicked four field goals for the Texans, while Foster finished with 140 yards and became the first NFL player to rush for at least 100 yards in each of his first three playoff games.
Watt finished with a sack and swatted away two of Andy Dalton’s pass attempts, once wagging his finger at the Bengals quarterback after the play.
"I think it was a full defensive effort, everybody was flying around and we were getting off the field on third downs," Watt said.
The Texans’ defense smothered Dalton and the Bengals early. Their second drive ended when Connor Barwin tackled BenJarvus Green-Ellis for a 6-yard loss and Watt followed with a sack of Dalton.
Houston’s offense had the ball for almost 39 minutes as it ate up the clock with a season-high 32 carries from Foster.
"We controlled the line of scrimmage, and any time we do that it’s going to be hard to beat us," Foster said.
The Texans had trouble finishing drives and managed three field goals in the first half against the Bengals (10-7). Houston struck first after the break, with Foster scoring the game’s only offensive touchdown to make it 16-7.
Schaub, who missed last year’s playoffs with a foot injury, had an interception returned for a touchdown by Leon Hall before halftime.
"It was never easy," Schaub said. "Cincinnati is a great team. I made a turnover and gave them points. We just had to rally around each other and we did that."
Johnathan Joseph, an ex-Bengal, had an interception for the Texans, who kept Cincinnati without a playoff win since the 1990 season, the league’s longest current streak.
Houston had struggled on third downs lately. This time, the Texans didn’t let the Bengals convert a third down on nine tries.
The Texans rebounded from a terrible month in which they lost three of four games and the No. 1 seed in the AFC playoffs. The win came in front of a record crowd of 71,738, including former Oilers great Earl Campbell.
"We like to run the ball and play good defense," Foster said. "It only takes one week to turn things around in the NFL and we did that."
The Bengals couldn’t do anything offensively before the break, and were outgained, 250-53, in the first half. Dalton was 4 of 10 for 3 yards in the first half.
Schaub shook off his first-half miscue to finish 29 of 38 for 262 yards, and Dalton finished 14 of 30 for 127 yards.
The Bengals had a chance for a touchdown late in the fourth quarter, but Dalton’s pass sailed just out of reach of a diving A.J. Green in the end zone.
"The offense didn’t play as well as it could have," Dalton said. "You can always look back and say, ‘What if?’?"
Dalton’s 45-yard pass to Green got Cincinnati moving in the third quarter and set up Josh Brown’s 34-yard field goal. When Dalton tried to go to Green again, Joseph intercepted and got the Texans in scoring range again as the quarter ended.
In last year’s playoffs, the Texans routed the Bengals, 31-10, with Dalton throwing three interceptions.
The main difference in this one: Schaub was back in charge for Houston. Rookie T.J. Yates filled in for Schaub and got the Texans a win in their first playoff game, but couldn’t take them any further.
On their second possession, Schaub completed an 18-yard pass, Foster had a 17-yard run, and Keshawn Martin went 16 yards on a reverse, setting up Graham’s field goal.
It became a pattern — move the ball down the field, settle for 3 points. The fans started booing.
And then Schaub did the one thing he wanted to avoid — he let Cincinnati’s defense get its hands on the ball. Hall anticipated Schaub’s throw, stepped in front, and returned it untouched, high-stepping the last few yards, for the defense’s fourth touchdown in the last four games.
In that tragedy’s aftermath, I kept coming back to one inescapable thought: Once that cowardly shooter got inside the school, what’s the one thing — aside from him having an immediate, massive stroke right there on the spot — that I could have hoped for? Someone to stop him as quickly as possible, with a minimal loss of life. A trained police officer, preferably. But next best? Any sort of competent, caring adult who had been drilled in the use of firearms, had access to them and was willing to take on the grave responsibility of protecting innocent lives.
I hold in my hands “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” compiled by George Brainard Blodgette and published 1882-1887 by the Essex Institute Historical Collections. It was revised and published in 1933 by Amos Everett Jewett and reprinted in 1981 by New England History Press.
Researchers don’t need to know all that. My copy probably will go to a library eventually, but Maine genealogists will be interested in where they can see the book now, maybe even today.
Rowley is a bit northwest of the town of Gloucester, Mass., from which many people moved to Maine in after the Revolutionary War; the Rowley book is well worth a look, especially because its family sections are so well done. And yes, there is an index in the back of the 472-page volume.
Here are some of the surnames that have their own sections of family history: Bailey, Boynton, Bradstreet, Brocklebank, Browne, Burpee, Carleton, Chaplin-Clark, Dickinson, Dresser, Goodridge, Harris, Hazen, Hobson, Jewett, Johnson, Kilborne, Lambert, Mighill-Perley, Nelson-Payson, Parrat-Jewett, Pearson, Perley, Pickard, Pingry, Platts, Prime, Scott, Searle, Spofford, Stickney, Tenney and Todd.
There are many more names, and the index has more than 50 pages.
Keep in mind that many libraries do not let their genealogy and family history resources circulate. In some cases, the books are very rare, and the volumes really need to stay in the building so that they are accessible to all. Most libraries have photocopiers so that researchers can copy portions they need for their records unless the books are too fragile.
These days, it is too easy to rely solely on the Internet for doing family research. Sometimes it is hard to tell from looking at a webpage whether the information is well done.
Pick up a book such as “Early Settlers of Rowley, Massachusetts,” and you get a sense right off of its being well-done. The book is subtitled “A Genealogical Record of the Families Who Settled in Rowley before 1799 with Several Generations of Their Descendants.”
Here is another reason to go looking at a top-notch facility such as Bangor Public Library, where the genealogy resources in the Bangor Room are accessible by elevator
inside the children’s department through the entrance on the right. The Bangor Room has a table where there are several handouts about genealogy and family history resources.
Friday, January 4, 2013
Real-Time Mystery Alt-Minds Takes Root in Europe
Five brilliant young scientists collectively known as “MHD-6″ disappear from Belgrade University. Shortly after, a video of the kidnapping makes its way to the foundation that sponsored them. A mysterious person known only as “The Donetsk Voice” feeds bits and pieces of information relating to the disappearance of the MHD-6. As the investigation progresses, the Alvinson Foundation puts out a global call for help solving the mystery. Players who respond to the call are thrown headfirst into the European-based transmedia experience Alt-Minds, an eight week long paranormal mystery that incorporates puzzles, websites, geo-locative content, and a Facebook game.
French telecommunications corporation Orange joined the French game development studio Lexis Numérique to create the Alt-Minds experience, which launched on November 12th, in four languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. According to a press release by Orange, “Alt-Minds is a cohesive set of films, games, monitoring tools and web documentaries.” The story unfolds live over the game’s eight week span, using the web series format as the framework for players stepping into the role of investigator.
Lexis Numérique is no stranger to this kind of transmedia product. In 2004, the studio launched the game In Memoriam, published by Ubisoft. In Memoriam incorporated a network of websites, film footage, and real-time emails into its game play, where the player matched wits and interacted with a serial killer in order to achieve the game’s objectives. Those familiar with In Memoriam will easily spot its influence on the Alt-Minds game structure.
Alt-Minds allows players to choose whether to interact with the game through the main website or via their mobile devices, and those who are located in Europe can enter their mobile number for additional layers of interactivity. An Alt-Minds app for Android and Apple devices, available to European users, allows players to follow the story in real-time. Non-European users may also follow along, although their experience is limited to the website’s content.
Logging on to the main website, players access their dashboard, which shows their progress through the experience. Documents and videos are provided to the players to help them solve the puzzles and advance the content. The interfaces provide tools that players can use to analyze videos and documents, such as a zoom function or sliders that alter brightness, contrast, and saturation. Players may send puzzle solutions through the in-game messaging system, earning experience points in the game, or they may skip ahead to the next part of the narrative. As the game progresses, more content becomes available, such as the geo-locative content or the related Facebook game. Alt-Minds is also releasing a series of mini documentaries that explore some of the themes and questions raised by the narrative.
The creators of Alt-Minds have experimented with the “pay-to-play” model by offering the first week of story, puzzles, and clues for free, then charging a fee for each week following, much like buying episodes of a television series from week to week. The full series can be purchased for EUR 14.99 or per episode at EUR 2.59. After the live stream ends, the Alt-Minds experience will still be accessible by those who purchase episodes or the whole game, through the system’s “catch-up” mode that allows players to replay past episodes and events. According to the Alt-Minds FAQ, game play can exceed 50 hours if players opt to take on the secondary missions.
It's very difficult to really speculate at this moment what may be the outcome of these talks. On the one hand, I think it's good that the two parties meet. Its always good when confronting parties decide to try to find a negotiated solution which otherwise might quickly escalate into another armed conflict. But we have also seen since the past 9 months that the agreements lack the will to implement and so far neither the parties nor their international advisors nor the United Nations or the security council have found a convincing method to ensure that agreements are honored and implemented. I am very very doubtful that we will see sort of a breakthrough or that we see a major substantive change. According to my information I think we will see this round of negotiations but we will not see fundamental changes on the ground, which would means the parties whole heartedly commit to what they have agreed.
I think you are alluding to the internal leadership rivalries within the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). I don't think that we are seeing a major rift within the SPLM, I think it's the fundamental distrust which continues and which will not be resolved unless we have a political breakthrough which would include a resolution of the armed conflict of the Nuba mountains, Blue Niles and this areas. And we have more stability also in the border area. It is all highly fragile, and it depends on the time of the year, If you have the rainy season, if you have the dry season, the dry season is the fighting season and this is the way it has been going all along. So I am very skeptical that we are witnessing a major change as I said before I think we are seeing some cosmetics. Some tactical maneuvers but we are not seeing a major shift that we can say the North and the South are really determined to now make sure that the economic development is starting and people feel safe and secure. It's all highly highly fragile.
Santa's work may have been completed on Christmas Eve, but for Montezuma County birders it was Dec. 26 that offered an opportunity for making a list and checking it twice.
Despite a fresh layer of snow on the ground and frigid temperatures, 12 volunteers gathered at the Cortez Cultural Center last Wednesday to participate in the National Audubon Society's 113th Christmas Bird Count. The goal of the day was simple, albeit ambitious: count all the avian creatures visible in a 15-mile diameter circle centered on Totten Lake.
Local count organizer Carolyn Gunn met with volunteers to explain the purpose of the count and hand out route maps. She stressed the amateur nature of the count and the safeguards in place to protect against errors.
"The beauty of this count is it is built for amateurs," she said. "Every year we collect data and after decades any inaccuracies become such a small percentage of the total count they are basically weeded out. All the data is useful."
The count originated at the turn of the 20th century with what was called the Christmas "Side Hunt." People would choose sides, grab their favorite firearm and bring back to the table as many birds as they could bag. Over time, concern over conservation prompted avian enthusiasts to leave the guns at home and instead track the feathered friends with paper and pen.
"People would try to kill as many birds as they possibly could and then they tallied those numbers and that was supposed to be a good thing," Gunn said. "One hundred years ago that was the accepted thing, the idea that we need to kill birds to learn about them. Then, there came the realization that highly populated bird species were declining and we really needed to know what these birds were doing instead of shooting them. So people went out to count them instead of kill them."
Matis said he has always considered himself an environmentalist and the bird count affords an opportunity to be part of the science of the environment.
The two took their time looking for birds, and though the local preserve seemed an ideal location, only a few starlings, a junco, two sparrows and a Cooper's hawk were sighted. The two were somewhat disappointed as they packed up their gear, but expressed optimism that the next site may be home to numerous species, and perhaps even a rare sighting.
French telecommunications corporation Orange joined the French game development studio Lexis Numérique to create the Alt-Minds experience, which launched on November 12th, in four languages: French, German, Spanish, and English. According to a press release by Orange, “Alt-Minds is a cohesive set of films, games, monitoring tools and web documentaries.” The story unfolds live over the game’s eight week span, using the web series format as the framework for players stepping into the role of investigator.
Lexis Numérique is no stranger to this kind of transmedia product. In 2004, the studio launched the game In Memoriam, published by Ubisoft. In Memoriam incorporated a network of websites, film footage, and real-time emails into its game play, where the player matched wits and interacted with a serial killer in order to achieve the game’s objectives. Those familiar with In Memoriam will easily spot its influence on the Alt-Minds game structure.
Alt-Minds allows players to choose whether to interact with the game through the main website or via their mobile devices, and those who are located in Europe can enter their mobile number for additional layers of interactivity. An Alt-Minds app for Android and Apple devices, available to European users, allows players to follow the story in real-time. Non-European users may also follow along, although their experience is limited to the website’s content.
Logging on to the main website, players access their dashboard, which shows their progress through the experience. Documents and videos are provided to the players to help them solve the puzzles and advance the content. The interfaces provide tools that players can use to analyze videos and documents, such as a zoom function or sliders that alter brightness, contrast, and saturation. Players may send puzzle solutions through the in-game messaging system, earning experience points in the game, or they may skip ahead to the next part of the narrative. As the game progresses, more content becomes available, such as the geo-locative content or the related Facebook game. Alt-Minds is also releasing a series of mini documentaries that explore some of the themes and questions raised by the narrative.
The creators of Alt-Minds have experimented with the “pay-to-play” model by offering the first week of story, puzzles, and clues for free, then charging a fee for each week following, much like buying episodes of a television series from week to week. The full series can be purchased for EUR 14.99 or per episode at EUR 2.59. After the live stream ends, the Alt-Minds experience will still be accessible by those who purchase episodes or the whole game, through the system’s “catch-up” mode that allows players to replay past episodes and events. According to the Alt-Minds FAQ, game play can exceed 50 hours if players opt to take on the secondary missions.
It's very difficult to really speculate at this moment what may be the outcome of these talks. On the one hand, I think it's good that the two parties meet. Its always good when confronting parties decide to try to find a negotiated solution which otherwise might quickly escalate into another armed conflict. But we have also seen since the past 9 months that the agreements lack the will to implement and so far neither the parties nor their international advisors nor the United Nations or the security council have found a convincing method to ensure that agreements are honored and implemented. I am very very doubtful that we will see sort of a breakthrough or that we see a major substantive change. According to my information I think we will see this round of negotiations but we will not see fundamental changes on the ground, which would means the parties whole heartedly commit to what they have agreed.
I think you are alluding to the internal leadership rivalries within the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). I don't think that we are seeing a major rift within the SPLM, I think it's the fundamental distrust which continues and which will not be resolved unless we have a political breakthrough which would include a resolution of the armed conflict of the Nuba mountains, Blue Niles and this areas. And we have more stability also in the border area. It is all highly fragile, and it depends on the time of the year, If you have the rainy season, if you have the dry season, the dry season is the fighting season and this is the way it has been going all along. So I am very skeptical that we are witnessing a major change as I said before I think we are seeing some cosmetics. Some tactical maneuvers but we are not seeing a major shift that we can say the North and the South are really determined to now make sure that the economic development is starting and people feel safe and secure. It's all highly highly fragile.
Santa's work may have been completed on Christmas Eve, but for Montezuma County birders it was Dec. 26 that offered an opportunity for making a list and checking it twice.
Despite a fresh layer of snow on the ground and frigid temperatures, 12 volunteers gathered at the Cortez Cultural Center last Wednesday to participate in the National Audubon Society's 113th Christmas Bird Count. The goal of the day was simple, albeit ambitious: count all the avian creatures visible in a 15-mile diameter circle centered on Totten Lake.
Local count organizer Carolyn Gunn met with volunteers to explain the purpose of the count and hand out route maps. She stressed the amateur nature of the count and the safeguards in place to protect against errors.
"The beauty of this count is it is built for amateurs," she said. "Every year we collect data and after decades any inaccuracies become such a small percentage of the total count they are basically weeded out. All the data is useful."
The count originated at the turn of the 20th century with what was called the Christmas "Side Hunt." People would choose sides, grab their favorite firearm and bring back to the table as many birds as they could bag. Over time, concern over conservation prompted avian enthusiasts to leave the guns at home and instead track the feathered friends with paper and pen.
"People would try to kill as many birds as they possibly could and then they tallied those numbers and that was supposed to be a good thing," Gunn said. "One hundred years ago that was the accepted thing, the idea that we need to kill birds to learn about them. Then, there came the realization that highly populated bird species were declining and we really needed to know what these birds were doing instead of shooting them. So people went out to count them instead of kill them."
Matis said he has always considered himself an environmentalist and the bird count affords an opportunity to be part of the science of the environment.
The two took their time looking for birds, and though the local preserve seemed an ideal location, only a few starlings, a junco, two sparrows and a Cooper's hawk were sighted. The two were somewhat disappointed as they packed up their gear, but expressed optimism that the next site may be home to numerous species, and perhaps even a rare sighting.
Drying Out After a Storm, and Moving On
Tim Griffin was settling into his first full season in charge of the programming at the Kitchen theater and art gallery on West 19th Street in Chelsea, with hopes of re-establishing the space as an artists’ meeting place, when Hurricane Sandy flooded it with four feet of water from the Hudson River.
The damage came to about $450,000. On the casualty list: lighting fixtures that had been taken down to accommodate the Richard Maxwell play “Neutral Hero”; speaker systems and electronics; and the theater’s stage, a Masonite and plywood sprung dance floor.
“But we didn’t lose the piano,” said Mr. Griffin, the Kitchen’s executive director and chief curator. “The water came right up to the bed, right underneath it. But I think it, remarkably, stayed in tune.”
The Kitchen was able to reopen by the end of November for a few performances of Mr. Maxwell’s play and a benefit auction, and now its schedule is back in full swing. An avant-garde music-theater production called “Inflatable Frankenstein” — a show by the ensemble Radiohole and P.S. 122 that is part of the Coil Festival — begins on Saturday, and “Untitled,” an exhibition of art works by Jacob Kassay, opens on Wednesday.
Insurance is likely to cover less than half the loss from the storm. But grants from Time Warner and the Art Dealers Association of America, as well as from nonprofit organizations and foundations, have gone a long way toward making up the difference.
“You’d be shocked to know how far we take the dollar,” Mr. Griffin said in a recent interview at a coffee shop near the Kitchen, which has a $2 million annual budget. “If you look at how many productions we have coming in and out, it’s startling.”
From September 2011 to last July, that meant 52 projects (counting the openings of gallery shows, which usually run about six weeks, as well as theater, music or dance pieces) and 115 performances.
With life back to a semblance of normality, Mr. Griffin is looking to get back on track the Kitchen’s new L.A.B. series (the letters stand for language, art, bodies), which addresses one of Mr. Griffin’s most cherished hopes for his tenure. The L.A.B. programs, which got under way in September, are interdisciplinary discussions that Mr. Griffin wants to host as free events two to four times a month.
“The idea is to have people from different disciplines in a room at the same time,” Mr. Griffin explained, “discussing single words that have different meanings in different disciplines — hashing out the differences, in their respective contexts, and ideally, having them collaborate. I’m creating ambiguous events, at some level.”
For the inaugural L.A.B. discussion, Mr. Griffin asked the author Lynne Tillman to speak about the concept of “presence” as part of a panel that also included the rhetorician Shannon Jackson, the choreographer Tere O’Connor and the visual artist Elad Lassry.
“Tim recognizes the need for discussion about what we’re all making and seeing,” Ms. Tillman wrote in an e-mail, “and that discourse itself is a part of how we see and what we make.”
The Kitchen was started in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka in the kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel in Greenwich Village as an exhibition and performance space for their fellow video artists.
When the hotel collapsed in 1973, the Kitchen moved to SoHo, where it quickly became a headquarters for experimental music and early Minimalism, not least because the composer Rhys Chatham was appointed music director and brought in Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Maryanne Amacher and other experimental composers.
Another move, to its current location on 19th Street, just off 10th Avenue, in 1986, gave the Kitchen significantly more space. But there was a downside. In SoHo the Kitchen had become not only a thriving performance space, but a hangout as well. The move to Chelsea put it off the beaten path. Though it is less isolated now that Chelsea is a premier art world destination, the Kitchen has never quite regained that status.
Mr. Griffin would like to change that, and he comes to the job with the experience to speak to different kinds of artists in their own languages. Now 42, he worked as a musician (he played trumpet in several ensembles), a theater producer and an art curator before taking a detour into journalism, first as the art editor at Time Out New York, then as the editor of Artforum for seven years.
Mr. Lassry described Mr. Griffin as “quietly charismatic,” and added that under his leadership, the Kitchen has “this kind of looseness, where disciplines can meet without the conceptual compromise that often overwhelms interdisciplinary practice.”
Mr. Griffin has said that running the Kitchen is similar, in some ways, to editing a magazine “in the sense that one tries to put different pieces together in a way that will amplify the meaning of any one piece, and make its potential meanings proliferate.”
Mainly, he wants to turn the interdisciplinary exchanges of the L.A.B. programs into the dominant spirit at the Kitchen.
“There’s a cross-disciplinary impulse in the arts now,” he said, “but I feel that very often, things get programmed from above.” He added, “What I’m trying to figure out here is, how do you create a special place where artists will want to come and hang out, and where they will happen to see things that aren’t immediately related to their own medium.
According to Petersen, Sense Networks applies big science to mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising. The company receives streaming location data from mobile phones in real-time, processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and analyzes it to better understand human activity. They process 4 billion location points per day and have processed over 1 trillion location points. “The key is understanding context from the data—not only where you are, but what are you doing,” says Petersen. “We’re the neighborhood flyer of the 21st century.”
“We are insanely focused on one aspect of a problem—sifting through data from over one hundred million phone users to help local marketers better predict and influence buying behavior,” says Petersen. The quick serve restaurant business is a key market vertical for Sense Networks and it’s a large opportunity in itself: Over 200 million people in the U.S. have visited a quick serve restaurant in the past 30 days, according to Scarborough research. Sense Network’s predictive analytics are helping companies like regional bakery Swiss Bakers use mobile advertising to reach local customers and drive walk in traffic to any one of their 11 locations, driving up response 200% over the past three months.
Headquartered in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University. The company is funded by Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and investors from the hedge fund community. David was named CEO of the company in July 2010 and while he seems the perfect match for Sense Networks, his path to the CEO role is atypical for most technology start-ups. He’s not from the Stanford or Harvard MBA start-up crowd and doesn’t hail from Pal Alto or Cambridge. But he is “rabid about learning,” as he put it, having grown up in the world of math and academics.
Both his dad and grandfather were engineers with an academics bent. His Dad earned his PhD in electrical engineering, having been put through school as a lifetime employee at Bell Labs. They set him on path of what he thought would be a life in academics focused on economics, math and statistics. He earned his undergrad degree at Washington & Lee, an MA in Finance from Georgia State and later a PhD stint at the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Federal Reserve by day and worked on solving math problems at night. Later an analysts job at technology start-up Telephia in Silicon Valley provided the opportunity to learn more about the intersection of math and the mobile business.
Telephia turned into a proving ground for David, where his analytical skills were broadened across the company’s operations, sales activities, leading to a management role. “At Telephia, I volunteered to fill-in for a sales person. I was the quant guy and the move felt risky to me at the time, but it set me on a path of learning to stretch myself and to move out of my comfort zone,” said Petersen. He learned he was very capable of handling the roles that would ultimately lead to his current CEO position. Telephia was sold to Nielsen for $440 million in 2007, leading to a comfortable 7-figure pay-day for Petersen—enough to take a year off to take time with his young family and to decide on his next move. He was then recruited to take on the CEO role at Sense Networks.
The damage came to about $450,000. On the casualty list: lighting fixtures that had been taken down to accommodate the Richard Maxwell play “Neutral Hero”; speaker systems and electronics; and the theater’s stage, a Masonite and plywood sprung dance floor.
“But we didn’t lose the piano,” said Mr. Griffin, the Kitchen’s executive director and chief curator. “The water came right up to the bed, right underneath it. But I think it, remarkably, stayed in tune.”
The Kitchen was able to reopen by the end of November for a few performances of Mr. Maxwell’s play and a benefit auction, and now its schedule is back in full swing. An avant-garde music-theater production called “Inflatable Frankenstein” — a show by the ensemble Radiohole and P.S. 122 that is part of the Coil Festival — begins on Saturday, and “Untitled,” an exhibition of art works by Jacob Kassay, opens on Wednesday.
Insurance is likely to cover less than half the loss from the storm. But grants from Time Warner and the Art Dealers Association of America, as well as from nonprofit organizations and foundations, have gone a long way toward making up the difference.
“You’d be shocked to know how far we take the dollar,” Mr. Griffin said in a recent interview at a coffee shop near the Kitchen, which has a $2 million annual budget. “If you look at how many productions we have coming in and out, it’s startling.”
From September 2011 to last July, that meant 52 projects (counting the openings of gallery shows, which usually run about six weeks, as well as theater, music or dance pieces) and 115 performances.
With life back to a semblance of normality, Mr. Griffin is looking to get back on track the Kitchen’s new L.A.B. series (the letters stand for language, art, bodies), which addresses one of Mr. Griffin’s most cherished hopes for his tenure. The L.A.B. programs, which got under way in September, are interdisciplinary discussions that Mr. Griffin wants to host as free events two to four times a month.
“The idea is to have people from different disciplines in a room at the same time,” Mr. Griffin explained, “discussing single words that have different meanings in different disciplines — hashing out the differences, in their respective contexts, and ideally, having them collaborate. I’m creating ambiguous events, at some level.”
For the inaugural L.A.B. discussion, Mr. Griffin asked the author Lynne Tillman to speak about the concept of “presence” as part of a panel that also included the rhetorician Shannon Jackson, the choreographer Tere O’Connor and the visual artist Elad Lassry.
“Tim recognizes the need for discussion about what we’re all making and seeing,” Ms. Tillman wrote in an e-mail, “and that discourse itself is a part of how we see and what we make.”
The Kitchen was started in 1971 by Woody and Steina Vasulka in the kitchen of the Broadway Central Hotel in Greenwich Village as an exhibition and performance space for their fellow video artists.
When the hotel collapsed in 1973, the Kitchen moved to SoHo, where it quickly became a headquarters for experimental music and early Minimalism, not least because the composer Rhys Chatham was appointed music director and brought in Steve Reich, Glenn Branca, Maryanne Amacher and other experimental composers.
Another move, to its current location on 19th Street, just off 10th Avenue, in 1986, gave the Kitchen significantly more space. But there was a downside. In SoHo the Kitchen had become not only a thriving performance space, but a hangout as well. The move to Chelsea put it off the beaten path. Though it is less isolated now that Chelsea is a premier art world destination, the Kitchen has never quite regained that status.
Mr. Griffin would like to change that, and he comes to the job with the experience to speak to different kinds of artists in their own languages. Now 42, he worked as a musician (he played trumpet in several ensembles), a theater producer and an art curator before taking a detour into journalism, first as the art editor at Time Out New York, then as the editor of Artforum for seven years.
Mr. Lassry described Mr. Griffin as “quietly charismatic,” and added that under his leadership, the Kitchen has “this kind of looseness, where disciplines can meet without the conceptual compromise that often overwhelms interdisciplinary practice.”
Mr. Griffin has said that running the Kitchen is similar, in some ways, to editing a magazine “in the sense that one tries to put different pieces together in a way that will amplify the meaning of any one piece, and make its potential meanings proliferate.”
Mainly, he wants to turn the interdisciplinary exchanges of the L.A.B. programs into the dominant spirit at the Kitchen.
“There’s a cross-disciplinary impulse in the arts now,” he said, “but I feel that very often, things get programmed from above.” He added, “What I’m trying to figure out here is, how do you create a special place where artists will want to come and hang out, and where they will happen to see things that aren’t immediately related to their own medium.
According to Petersen, Sense Networks applies big science to mobile location data for predictive analytics in advertising. The company receives streaming location data from mobile phones in real-time, processes the data in the context of billions of historical data points, and analyzes it to better understand human activity. They process 4 billion location points per day and have processed over 1 trillion location points. “The key is understanding context from the data—not only where you are, but what are you doing,” says Petersen. “We’re the neighborhood flyer of the 21st century.”
“We are insanely focused on one aspect of a problem—sifting through data from over one hundred million phone users to help local marketers better predict and influence buying behavior,” says Petersen. The quick serve restaurant business is a key market vertical for Sense Networks and it’s a large opportunity in itself: Over 200 million people in the U.S. have visited a quick serve restaurant in the past 30 days, according to Scarborough research. Sense Network’s predictive analytics are helping companies like regional bakery Swiss Bakers use mobile advertising to reach local customers and drive walk in traffic to any one of their 11 locations, driving up response 200% over the past three months.
Headquartered in New York City’s Flatiron neighborhood, Sense Networks was founded in 2003 and incorporated in early 2006. The founding team is composed of top computer scientists from MIT and Columbia University. The company is funded by Intel Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and investors from the hedge fund community. David was named CEO of the company in July 2010 and while he seems the perfect match for Sense Networks, his path to the CEO role is atypical for most technology start-ups. He’s not from the Stanford or Harvard MBA start-up crowd and doesn’t hail from Pal Alto or Cambridge. But he is “rabid about learning,” as he put it, having grown up in the world of math and academics.
Both his dad and grandfather were engineers with an academics bent. His Dad earned his PhD in electrical engineering, having been put through school as a lifetime employee at Bell Labs. They set him on path of what he thought would be a life in academics focused on economics, math and statistics. He earned his undergrad degree at Washington & Lee, an MA in Finance from Georgia State and later a PhD stint at the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Federal Reserve by day and worked on solving math problems at night. Later an analysts job at technology start-up Telephia in Silicon Valley provided the opportunity to learn more about the intersection of math and the mobile business.
Telephia turned into a proving ground for David, where his analytical skills were broadened across the company’s operations, sales activities, leading to a management role. “At Telephia, I volunteered to fill-in for a sales person. I was the quant guy and the move felt risky to me at the time, but it set me on a path of learning to stretch myself and to move out of my comfort zone,” said Petersen. He learned he was very capable of handling the roles that would ultimately lead to his current CEO position. Telephia was sold to Nielsen for $440 million in 2007, leading to a comfortable 7-figure pay-day for Petersen—enough to take a year off to take time with his young family and to decide on his next move. He was then recruited to take on the CEO role at Sense Networks.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)