Disney might be experiencing a disturbance in the Force.
With the Oct. 24 exit of Star Wars: Episode VII writer Michael Arndt, the studio is under the gun to keep the film on course for a 2015 release despite a script that several insiders say isn't close to ready.
According to those close to the project, producer Kathleen Kennedy and most of the film's creative team have asked Disney to push the release to 2016, but studio CEO Robert Iger is adamant that Episode VII -- perhaps the franchise's most anticipated installment since 1999's The Phantom Menace -- not budge. That has created enormous pressure on all involved, with director J.J. Abrams stepping in to take over scripting duties with Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote 1980's Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, considered the best film in the series.
For his part, Arndt worked exclusively on Episode VII for most of the past year and already had penned a 40- to 50-page treatment before Lucasfilm was sold to Disney in October 2012. But as one of Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriters, who can command more than $300,000 a week doing rewrites, the Oscar-winning scribe (Little Miss Sunshine) was ready to move on to other projects.
Some sources say Abrams has become autocratic in recent months, wresting some casting control from Kennedy. But others disputed that notion, saying Abrams and Kennedy both have been involved in casting sessions. Unlike Kennedy, Abrams is said to be more in sync with Iger's desire to meet the 2015 release target -- which allows zero margin for error -- at all costs.
Although the 2015 schedule already is full of tentpoles including Disney/Marvel's Avengers: Age of Ultron, Warner Bros.' Superman-Batman mashup and Lionsgate's final Hunger Games, Iger has crafted a Star Wars game plan that hinges on Episode VII hitting the big screen that summer. The studio is expected to roll out Episodes VII, VIII and IX over a six-year period, with at least two spinoffs -- penned by a team including Kasdan and Simon Kinberg -- interspersed between.
Still, another project insider dismisses talk of problems and what the writer shuffle means for what is perhaps Hollywood's most valued franchise. "It's nothing out of the ordinary," says the insider. "Almost every big movie changes writers at some point. There's no drama here."
Enter the phrase "Chinese fire drill" into YouTube and you'll find page upon page of videos of a classic car prank that's been popular since the 1960s.
For the uninitiated, a "Chinese fire drill" can be described as a form of vehicular musical chairs. Here's how it works: A car full of people, usually teenagers, stops at a red light. Everyone then gets out and runs around the car until just before the light changes back to green, with all participants jumping inside the closest door. Anyone who fails to get back into the car is left behind as the rest zoom off. One of the most famous pop culture references to the game appears in the opening of the early seasons of the classic 1970s sitcom Happy Days, in which Richie Cunningham and friends can be seen racing around his car, holding up traffic in the process.
As car culture reached its height in the 1950s and 1960s, the expression "Chinese fire drill" developed two meanings. The first was the aforementioned prank. The second was a reference to a traffic accident that a December 1962 issue of American Speech described as "an accident scene of great confusion, such as a school-bus or cattle-truck upset."
But the question remains: What exactly is "Chinese" about either of these definitions? While a 1996 post on the Random House Word of the Day blog states that "Chinese here is not necessarily a racial sentiment," its hard to see how that's true. Starting around World War I, the descriptor "Chinese" began to be frequently added to phrases to describe situations that were confusing, incomprehensible and messy.
These included a "Chinese ace," which referred to an incompetent pilot; "Chinese national anthem," to describe an explosion; and "Chinese landing," which was used by pilots to refer to bumpy, dangerous touchdowns because the aircraft had "one wing low" (a cringeworthy joke about what Asian languages sound like that should sound a bit familiar). Interestingly, Chinese landing and the one wing low pun were both so entrenched in military lingo that they were included in the 1944 edition of The Official Guide To The Army Air Forces.
Note how all of the above phrases refer to things that are negative and inferior in some way. It's also important to remember that anti-Asian sentiments had existed in the United States for decades before World War I and that the United States government did everything it could to keep Chinese and other Asian immigrants off American shores. In fact, the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Usage traces the first pejorative use of "Chinese" to around 1880.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese laborers like the ones who built the Transcontinental Railroad from immigrating to the United States for 10 years, and several other laws that followed were aimed at preventing Chinese people from entering the country. By 1924, these laws had extended to all Asians (a rule that was upheld until the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act).
After the two world wars, "Chinese" continued to be used as a descriptor to indicate things that were hasty, cheap or amateur. The late New York Times columnist William Safire noted in his book I Stand Corrected that in the 1940s and '50s "Chinese home runs" referred to home runs that were either high pop-ups or ones that exited the park just along the foul line. And schoolchildren used to play "Chinese whispers" instead of the game Telephone because the messages would quickly become garbled and lost along the way.
The phrase "Chinese fire drill" became popular once again with the military during the Vietnam War. In fact, several books written by former soldiers after the war used the phrase in their titles or descriptions of combat. In his 1967 book The New Legions, which was sharply critical of the war, Donald Duncan quotes a fellow soldier as saying, "It must have looked like a Chinese Fire Drill back on the river as the shooting started." A veteran quoted in Craig Howes' Voices of the VietnamPOWs also used the phrase while describing a particularly chaotic battle in August 1964. And the mystery writer Michael Wolfe titled his 1986 thriller about Vietnam-era POWs The Chinese Fire Drill.
Aside from the occasional reference to the car prank, the phrase "Chinese fire drill" has mostly faded from everyday use today. Perhaps it is time to rename the 1960s-era prank? Suggestions are welcome in the comments.
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked a judge's ruling that found the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy was discriminatory and took the unusual step of removing her from the case, saying interviews she gave during the trial called her impartiality into question.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the rulings by U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin will be stayed pending the outcome of an appeal by the city.
The judge ruled in August the city violated the Constitution in how it carried out its program of stopping and questioning people. The city appealed her findings and her remedial orders, including a decision to assign a monitor to help the police department change its policy and the training program associated with it.
During arguments, lawyers in the case said the police department hasn't had to do anything except meet with a monitor since the judge's decision. But the city said police officers are afraid to stop and frisk people now and the number of stop-and-frisks has dropped dramatically.
The three-judge appeals panel, which heard arguments on the requested stay on Tuesday, noted that the case might be affected in a major way by next week's mayoral election.
Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio, who's leading in polls, has sharply criticized and promised to reform the NYPD's stop-and-frisk technique, saying it unfairly targets minorities. He said he was "extremely disappointed" in Thursday's decision.
The appeals court said the judge needed to be removed because she ran afoul of the code of conduct for U.S. judges in part by compromising the necessity for a judge to avoid the appearance of partiality. It noted she had given a series of media interviews and public statements responding to criticism of the court. In a footnote, it cited interviews with the New York Law Journal, The Associated Press and The New Yorker magazine.
The judge said Thursday that quotes from her written opinions gave the appearance she had commented on the case in interviews. But she said a careful reading of each interview will reveal no such comments were made.
The 2nd Circuit said cases challenging stop-and-frisk policies will be assigned to a different judge chosen randomly. It said the new presiding judge shall stay all proceedings pending further rulings by it.
After a 10-week civil trial that ended in the spring, Scheindlin ruled that police officers violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people by wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men with the stop-and-frisk program. She appointed an outside monitor to oversee major changes, including reforms in policies, training and supervision, and she ordered a pilot program to test body-worn cameras.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented plaintiffs in the case, said it was dismayed that the appeals court delayed "the long-overdue process to remedy the NYPD's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices" and was shocked that it "cast aspersions" on the judge's professional conduct and reassigned the case.
The city said it was pleased with the federal appeals court ruling. City lawyer Michael Cardozo said it allows for a fresh and independent look at the issue.
Stop-and-frisk, which has been criticized by civil rights advocates, has been around for decades, but recorded stops increased dramatically under Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to an all-time high in 2011 of 684,330, mostly of black and Hispanic men. A lawsuit was filed in 2004 by four men, all minorities, and became a class action case.
About 5 million stops have been made in New York in the past decade, with frisks occurring about half the time. To make a stop, police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime is about to occur or has occurred, a standard lower than the probable cause needed to justify an arrest. Only about 10 percent of the stops result in arrests or summonses, and weapons are found about 2 percent of the time.
Supporters of changes to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program say the changes will end unfair practices, will mold a more trusted police force and can affect how other police departments use the policy. Opponents say the changes will lower police morale but not crime.
The judge noted she wasn't putting an end to the stop-and-frisk practice, which is constitutional, but was reforming the way the NYPD implemented its stops.
Contact: Kim Martineau kmartine@ldeo.columbia.edu 646-717-0134 The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Parts of pacific warming 15 times faster than in past 10,000 years
A recent slowdown in global warming has led some skeptics to renew their claims that industrial carbon emissions are not causing a century-long rise in Earth's surface temperatures. But rather than letting humans off the hook, a new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment. In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.
"We're experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it's going to come back out and affect climate," said study coauthor Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It's not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change."
In its latest report, released in September, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming. While global temperatures rose by about one-fifth of a degree Fahrenheit per decade from the 1950s through 1990s, warming slowed to just half that rate after the record hot year of 1998. The IPCC has attributed the pause to natural climate fluctuations caused by volcanic eruptions, changes in solar intensity, and the movement of heat through the ocean. Many scientists note that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year even by modern standards, and so any average rise using it as a starting point would downplay the longer-term warming trend.
The IPCC scientists agree that much of the heat that humans have put into the atmosphere since the 1970s through greenhouse gas emissions probably has been absorbed by the ocean. However, the findings in Science put this idea into a long-term context, and suggest that the oceans may be storing even more of the effects of human emissions than scientists have so far realized. "We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy," said study lead author, Yair Rosenthal, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. "It may buy us some time how much time, I don't really know. But it's not going to stop climate change."
Ocean heat is typically measured from buoys dispersed throughout the ocean, and with instruments lowered from ships, with reliable records at least in some places going back to the 1960s. To look back farther in time, scientists have developed ways to analyze the chemistry of ancient marine life to reconstruct the climates in which they lived. In a 2003 expedition to Indonesia, the researchers collected cores of sediment from the seas where water from the Pacific flows into the Indian Ocean. By measuring the levels of magnesium to calcium in the shells of Hyalinea balthica, a one-celled organism buried in those sediments, the researchers estimated the temperature of the middle-depth waters where H. Balthica lived, from about 1,500 to 3,000 feet down. The temperature record there reflects middle-depth temperatures throughout the western Pacific, the researchers say, since the waters around Indonesia originate from the mid-depths of the North and South Pacific.
Though the climate of the last 10,000 years has been thought to be relatively stable, the researchers found that the Pacific intermediate depths have generally been cooling during that time, though with various ups and downs. From about 7,000 years ago until the start of the Medieval Warm Period in northern Europe, at about 1100, the water cooled gradually, by almost 1 degree C, or almost 2 degrees F. The rate of cooling then picked up during the so-called Little Ice Age that followed, dropping another 1 degree C, or 2 degrees F, until about 1600. The authors attribute the cooling from 7,000 years ago until the Medieval Warm Period to changes in Earth's orientation toward the sun, which affected how much sunlight fell on both poles. In 1600 or so, temperatures started gradually going back up. Then, over the last 60 years, water column temperatures, averaged from the surface to 2,200 feet, increased 0.18 degrees C, or .32 degrees F. That might seem small in the scheme of things, but it's a rate of warming 15 times faster than at any period in the last 10,000 years, said Linsley.
One explanation for the recent slowdown in global warming is that a prolonged La Nia-like cooling of eastern Pacific surface waters has helped to offset the global rise in temperatures from greenhouse gases. In a study in the journal Nature in August, climate modelers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that La Nia cooling in the Pacific seemed to suppress global average temperatures during northern hemisphere winters but allowed temperatures to rise during northern hemisphere summers, explaining last year's record U.S. heat wave and the ongoing loss of Arctic sea ice.
When the La Nia cycle switches, and the Pacific reverts to a warmer than usual El Nio phase, global temperatures may likely shoot up again, along with the rate of warming. "With global warming you don't see a gradual warming from one year to the next," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the research. "It's more like a staircase. You trot along with nothing much happening for 10 years and then suddenly you have a jump and things never go back to the previous level again."
The study's long-term perspective suggests that the recent pause in global warming may just reflect random variations in heat going between atmosphere and ocean, with little long-term importance, says Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with joint appointments at Columbia's Earth Institute and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a lead author on the latest IPCC report. "Surface temperature is only one indicator of climate change," he said. "Looking at the total energy stored by the climate system or multiple indicators--glacier melting, water vapor in the atmosphere, snow cover, and so onmay be more useful than looking at surface temperature alone."
The study's third author, Delia Oppo, is a climate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
###
The study, "Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years," is available from the authors, or Science, scipak@aaas.org.
Kim Martineau Science Writer Lamont-Doherty kmartine@ldeo.columbia.edu 646-717-0134
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Is global heating hiding out in the oceans?
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kim Martineau kmartine@ldeo.columbia.edu 646-717-0134 The Earth Institute at Columbia University
Parts of pacific warming 15 times faster than in past 10,000 years
A recent slowdown in global warming has led some skeptics to renew their claims that industrial carbon emissions are not causing a century-long rise in Earth's surface temperatures. But rather than letting humans off the hook, a new study in the leading journal Science adds support to the idea that the oceans are taking up some of the excess heat, at least for the moment. In a reconstruction of Pacific Ocean temperatures in the last 10,000 years, researchers have found that its middle depths have warmed 15 times faster in the last 60 years than they did during apparent natural warming cycles in the previous 10,000.
"We're experimenting by putting all this heat in the ocean without quite knowing how it's going to come back out and affect climate," said study coauthor Braddock Linsley, a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "It's not so much the magnitude of the change, but the rate of change."
In its latest report, released in September, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted the recent slowdown in the rate of global warming. While global temperatures rose by about one-fifth of a degree Fahrenheit per decade from the 1950s through 1990s, warming slowed to just half that rate after the record hot year of 1998. The IPCC has attributed the pause to natural climate fluctuations caused by volcanic eruptions, changes in solar intensity, and the movement of heat through the ocean. Many scientists note that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year even by modern standards, and so any average rise using it as a starting point would downplay the longer-term warming trend.
The IPCC scientists agree that much of the heat that humans have put into the atmosphere since the 1970s through greenhouse gas emissions probably has been absorbed by the ocean. However, the findings in Science put this idea into a long-term context, and suggest that the oceans may be storing even more of the effects of human emissions than scientists have so far realized. "We may have underestimated the efficiency of the oceans as a storehouse for heat and energy," said study lead author, Yair Rosenthal, a climate scientist at Rutgers University. "It may buy us some time how much time, I don't really know. But it's not going to stop climate change."
Ocean heat is typically measured from buoys dispersed throughout the ocean, and with instruments lowered from ships, with reliable records at least in some places going back to the 1960s. To look back farther in time, scientists have developed ways to analyze the chemistry of ancient marine life to reconstruct the climates in which they lived. In a 2003 expedition to Indonesia, the researchers collected cores of sediment from the seas where water from the Pacific flows into the Indian Ocean. By measuring the levels of magnesium to calcium in the shells of Hyalinea balthica, a one-celled organism buried in those sediments, the researchers estimated the temperature of the middle-depth waters where H. Balthica lived, from about 1,500 to 3,000 feet down. The temperature record there reflects middle-depth temperatures throughout the western Pacific, the researchers say, since the waters around Indonesia originate from the mid-depths of the North and South Pacific.
Though the climate of the last 10,000 years has been thought to be relatively stable, the researchers found that the Pacific intermediate depths have generally been cooling during that time, though with various ups and downs. From about 7,000 years ago until the start of the Medieval Warm Period in northern Europe, at about 1100, the water cooled gradually, by almost 1 degree C, or almost 2 degrees F. The rate of cooling then picked up during the so-called Little Ice Age that followed, dropping another 1 degree C, or 2 degrees F, until about 1600. The authors attribute the cooling from 7,000 years ago until the Medieval Warm Period to changes in Earth's orientation toward the sun, which affected how much sunlight fell on both poles. In 1600 or so, temperatures started gradually going back up. Then, over the last 60 years, water column temperatures, averaged from the surface to 2,200 feet, increased 0.18 degrees C, or .32 degrees F. That might seem small in the scheme of things, but it's a rate of warming 15 times faster than at any period in the last 10,000 years, said Linsley.
One explanation for the recent slowdown in global warming is that a prolonged La Nia-like cooling of eastern Pacific surface waters has helped to offset the global rise in temperatures from greenhouse gases. In a study in the journal Nature in August, climate modelers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that La Nia cooling in the Pacific seemed to suppress global average temperatures during northern hemisphere winters but allowed temperatures to rise during northern hemisphere summers, explaining last year's record U.S. heat wave and the ongoing loss of Arctic sea ice.
When the La Nia cycle switches, and the Pacific reverts to a warmer than usual El Nio phase, global temperatures may likely shoot up again, along with the rate of warming. "With global warming you don't see a gradual warming from one year to the next," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who was not involved in the research. "It's more like a staircase. You trot along with nothing much happening for 10 years and then suddenly you have a jump and things never go back to the previous level again."
The study's long-term perspective suggests that the recent pause in global warming may just reflect random variations in heat going between atmosphere and ocean, with little long-term importance, says Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with joint appointments at Columbia's Earth Institute and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and a lead author on the latest IPCC report. "Surface temperature is only one indicator of climate change," he said. "Looking at the total energy stored by the climate system or multiple indicators--glacier melting, water vapor in the atmosphere, snow cover, and so onmay be more useful than looking at surface temperature alone."
The study's third author, Delia Oppo, is a climate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
###
The study, "Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years," is available from the authors, or Science, scipak@aaas.org.
Kim Martineau Science Writer Lamont-Doherty kmartine@ldeo.columbia.edu 646-717-0134
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A tunnel designed to smuggle drugs from Tijuana, Mexico, to San Diego is equipped with electricity, ventilation and a rail system, U.S. authorities said Thursday, making it one of the more sophisticated secret passages discovered along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Authorities seized more than 8 tons of marijuana and 325 pounds of cocaine in connection with the discovery, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. Three suspects were in U.S. custody.
The tunnel links warehouses in Tijuana and San Diego's Otay Mesa industrial area. The area is filled with nondescript warehouses, making it easier to conceal trucks being loaded with drugs.
The tunnel was found Wednesday and completed only recently, ICE said. Authorities did not say exactly when it was built or whether drugs are believed to have gotten through undetected.
As U.S. border security has heightened on land, Mexican drug cartels have turned to ultralight aircraft, small fishing boats and tunnels. More than 75 underground passages have been discovered along the border since 2008, designed largely to smuggle marijuana.
The tunnels are concentrated along the border in California and Arizona. San Diego is popular because its clay-like soil is easy to dig. In Nogales, Ariz., smugglers tap into vast underground drainage canals.
The tunnel is the eighth major passage discovered in San Diego since 2006, a period during which Mexico's Sinaloa cartel has solidified its hold on the prized smuggling corridor. ICE said Wednesday's tunnel was the first in the San Diego area that was found to be used for cocaine.
U.S. and Mexican authorities did not disclose the dimensions of the tunnel.
In November 2011, authorities found a 600-yard tunnel that resulted in seizures of 32 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border, with 26 tons found on the U.S. side, accounting for one of the largest pot busts in U.S. history. The tunnel was equipped with electric rail cars, lighting and ventilation. Wooden planks lined the floor.
On Thanksgiving Day of 2010, authorities found a roughly 700-yard passage equipped with rail tracks that extended from the kitchen of a Tijuana home to two San Diego warehouses, netting about 22 tons of marijuana on both sides of the border.
Today's smartphones are getting more powerful with every release cycle, and cutting-edge hardware is becoming less expensive as newer components are made available. But not everyone needs cutting-edge hardware. If you're looking for something that will keep some cash in your pocket, T-Mobile's least expensive smartphone, the Alcatel One Touch Evolve ($27.99 up front plus $3/month for 24 months or $99.99) is worth a serious look. It doesn't offer all the bells and whistles of T-Mobile's flagship phone—and our Editors' Choice—the Samsung Galaxy S4, but it's also nowhere near as expensive. It does, however, play games, take photos, and have a modern look and feel, making it a good first smartphone for teens and frugal adults.
Design A svelte, all-black handset, the Evolve measures 4.78 by 2.52 by 0.46 inches (HWD). A chrome band runs around the phone, and it has an angled bottom edge that looks slick and even makes it a little easier to slide the phone in your pocket. The Evolve may be inexpensive, but it doesn't feel that way. The removable plastic (T-Mobile-branded) back panel has a matte black finish with a cutout for the speaker and a minuscule rim that protects the 5-megapixel camera from scratches. Underneath, there's a removable 1400mAh battery covering the full-size SIM card and a microSD slot that supports cards up to 64GB.
On the top of the phone to the right is the Power button, next to the headphone jack in the center. On the right side, near the top, is the volume rocker. Opposite the rocker on the right side of the phone is the micro USB port, no doubt there because of the angled bottom. It's an inconvenient placement if you're right-handed and use the Evolve in landscape mode, as the cable when plugged into the phone is in the way of your fingers underneath it as they try to naturally handle the phone.
The Evolve's 4-inch, 480-by-800 TFT LCD is bright enough to be used outdoors, and images looked vibrant and well-saturated. At 233 pixels per inch, the screen serves up easily readable text. Letters look clear and crisp. Compared with Alcatel's more expensive ($169) T-Mobile phone, the Fierce, its 960-by-540 4.5-inch TFT LCD, and its 244 pixels per inch, the display on the Evolve is a lot sharper and just as bright. The viewing angles aren't great, however. If you're watching video with a friend, make sure your heads are close together.
Included with the Evolve is a micro USB cable and a larger-than-usual wall charger.
Connectivity, Call Quality The One Touch Evolve integrates 802.11 b/g/n dual-band Wi-Fi, A-GPS, and Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, but there's no LTE. You'll get 3G speeds with HSPA on the GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and UMTS 850/1900/AWS bands.
In my tests, call quality wasn't bad, but it wasn't amazing either. My voice sounded clear but synthetic, with a light static over everything. Noise cancellation wasn't particularly effective outside on a busy New York City street. The person on the other end of the call complained about traffic noises interrupting my speech. My call partner's voice came through loud and clear, but was a little harsh. The speakerphone doesn't get very loud, and can be difficult to use outside in noisy environments.
T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling lets you make phone calls over Wi-Fi networks when you're low on minutes, or when T-Mobile cellular service is less than stellar or unavailable.
Battery life was in line with other phones in this price range. In our talk tests the One Touch Evolve lasted 5 hours and 13 minutes. The Fierce, to compare, lasted 7 hours and 55 minutes.
OS, Performance The phone runs on an 1GHz ARM Cortex A9 single-core processor and 512MB of RAM. There's 4GB of onboard storage, but only 1.03GB is available for the user. More than a couple of apps or music albums will quickly fill that, so a microSD card is strongly recommended.
Though it's running a not terribly aged Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean, many of the icons have been altered by Alcatel, and look a little more childish. There can always be less bloatware, but it's not horrible here: You get Lookout Security as well as T-Mobile's Mobile Hotspot, My Account, T-Mobile Name ID, T-Mobile TV, and Visual Voicemail apps, none of which are removable. There's no word from Alcatel on whether the Evolve with receive any updates OS updates.
The on-screen keyboard defaults to Swype, which allows you to drag your finger across the keyboard, for quicker letter entry. It's an easy-to-use feature and a nice time saver. Also included is an FM radio app, where you can save your favorite station and even record audio.
The Evolve played almost every media file I could throw at it, including FLAC, OGG, and WAV, but there's no support for 1080p video. It's capped at 720p. The rear-mounted speaker sounds tinny and doesn't provide much volume, but that's to be expected from a phone of this caliber. My headphones got plenty loud, even on the lowest volume level.
In our graphical performance tests—Nenamark and Taiji—the Evolve scored 23.5 and 9.14 frames per second, respectively. Not great scores, but good enough for an inexpensive phone. Popular games like Temple Run 2 and Fruit Ninja ran smoothly, though I suspect some of the more intense graphical games in the Google Play Store will choke the Evolve. Web browsing was very smooth, and switching between games and other apps was quick and fluid.
Camera The 5-megapixel camera takes decent, but not great photos. Most lack proper exposure and show washed-out colors, and indoor photos are noisy, but they're not unusable. The camera is fast, though, offering quick continuous shooting when you hold down the shutter button or volume rocker. The lack of flash really limits the low-light photos you can take, and, of course, you can't use your phone as a flashlight.
The phone records 720p video and is able to keep its frame rate consistent no matter the light levels. Your footage will suffer from the lack of image stabilization, and graininess when shooting indoors, but again, for a budget phone, it's not bad. The VGA-quality front-facing camera is just that: VGA-quality. You won't see any detail unless your subject is very well lit.
Conclusion The Alcatel One Touch Evolve isn't the best Android phone on T-Mobile. That's the Galaxy S4. But for $100 total, it's not a bad deal at all, offering good performance and features for the price.
If you need a physical keyboard you can try the free-on-contract myTouch Q, but it runs an ancient version of Android. For about $70 more, you can grab the Evolve's 4.5-inch counterpart, the Alcatel One Touch Fierce, which packs a quad-core processor and 1GB or RAM, but still lacks LTE. If you're on T-Mobile and are looking to enter the Android ecosystem with little investment, the Evolve worth a look. It's cheap, can run apps like Facebook and Candy Crush Saga, and it looks good doing it.
Reporting for another day of duty, Chloe Moretz showed up on the set of “If I Stay” in Vancouver, Canada on Wednesday (October 30).
The “Kick-Ass 2” cutie looked pretty intense as she filmed scenes on an outdoor location along with costar Mireille Enos. “If I Stay” is about a fatal car accident involving a 17-year-old musician and her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, Miss Moretz’s new flick “Carrie” is scaring the hell out of audiences the world over, and it sounds like she poured her all into the gig.
Chloe told press, "The role of Carrie is an incredibly emotional role. It's probably the most vulnerable I've ever been as an actor, so in some ways it's kind of terrifying for people to see it, but at the same time it's very exciting and kind of an awakening for me because it's something I've never done before."
The quarterfinals ended with a bang on Wednesday night's episode of The Ultimate Fighter 18. Despite being Team Tate's No. 1 male pick, Cody Bollinger pulled a Gabe Ruediger and failed to make weight -- in rather dramatic fashion, I might add -- which led Team Rousey's Anthony Gutierrez to advance to the semis by default. Then Team Tate's Sarah Moras evened the score at four wins apiece, overpowering Peggy Morgan en route to first-round armbar victory.
Now just one fight stands between the remaining eight fighters and a spot in November's live finale. On the men's side it's Chris Holdsworth (Tate) vs. Michael Wootten (Rousey) and Anthony Gutierrez (Rousey) vs. David Grant (Rousey), while on the women's side it's Raquel Pennington (Tate) vs. Jessica Rakoczy (Rousey) and Sarah Moras (Tate) vs. our own Julianna Pena (Tate).
If you have any questions for Pena, feel free to drop them in the comments below and she'll answer you during next week's TUF Mailbag. Now without further ado, let's gets to it.
Al-Shatti: So right off the bat, I want to ask because I wasn't sure, did Cody Bollinger get kicked off the show?
Pena: Yep.
Al-Shatti: Wow. I know you and him didn't exactly get along, so how did you feel as everything was going down?
Dana White confronts Cody Bollinger
Pena: It's not like I was over the moon happy, but I wasn't crying or upset or anything like that. I felt like he had been rude to me and caused me a lot of problems earlier on in the season.
But I think (him being kicked off) was merited. On The Ultimate Fighter show, if you don't make weight, you go home.
Al-Shatti: So walk me through this. He was Team Tate's No. 1 male pick. How exactly did something like this happen?
Pena: I wasn't watching him too closely. I just remember one time him eating ice cream and being like, ‘Oh, I'll burn this off in 15 minutes in the sauna. It's not even a big deal.' We were all kinda like, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And he was just, ‘Bah, child's play. This is only a few minutes in the sauna.' He'd read the label and be like, ‘Oh, only 150 calories for a quarter of a cup? Child's play. I'll burn this off in 10 minutes in the sauna.'
I just think that he was wrapped up in being friends with everybody and wrapped up in eating all the food that he wanted. He wasn't taking into account how much he was going to have to lose and he wasn't being very intelligent when it comes to weight cutting. The pressure of being No. 1 pick was probably too much. I wouldn't say that it was a direct result as to why he left, but it's definitely a lot of pressure when you're the No. 1 pick. You automatically have a target on your back and you're trying to go out there and prove why you were picked No. 1. It's a lot to deal with.
Al-Shatti: Cody quit more than a few times during the cut. What was the reaction around the team as he kept repeating that feeling?
Pena: I think everybody couldn't believe it. Nobody could believe that was actually happening. At least, I couldn't. Like, are you kidding me?
We just couldn't believe the fact that somebody would give up and not try to make weight, just throw in the towel when there was so much riding on the line.
Al-Shatti: Cody might have screwed up bad, and that's probably an understatement, but do you respect the way he owned up to it and didn't make excuses?
Pena: He wouldn't have told Dana (White) if he didn't have to. He got called out. Do I respect him for owning up to it? I mean, what else can you do? Deny it?
Al-Shatti: True. Okay, last thing on this and then we'll move on. Anthony Gutierrez ended up getting a choice between a free pass to the semis or having to cut weight all over again and fight. He chose the free pass. I'm just curious, if you were in that situation, would you do the same?
Pena: I'd probably have done the same thing. (You have to do) whatever advances you further on into the competition without risking getting hurt or risking putting your body on the line an extra time when you wouldn't need to.
Al-Shatti: Fair enough. So next up, in the season's last quarterfinal Sarah Moras made short work of Peggy Morgan. She's next in your sights. Were you impressed by her performance?
Pena: I completely predicted it! I sat there doing my makeup -- they didn't show it -- but I'm like, ‘Yeah, it's going to be an armbar in the first round, for sure.'
Al-Shatti: Wow, nicely done. What made you think that?
Pena: Once we caught rumors of who the list was going to be for the cast, who was going to maybe make it and get a chance to compete for the elimination fights, Peggy Morgan's name was on there. I remember watching a couple fights she'd been a part of, studying her ground game a little bit, and [analyzing] her as a fighter.
Because I've already fought Moras before, and judging from the fights that I'd seen online of Peggy, I just knew that Moras' ground game was world class, and Peggy, she wasn't going to have an answer. And she didn't. Moras proved it.
Al-Shatti: You've been a team-first cheerleader the entire season. So be honest with me, after everything that happened, it had to be sweet satisfaction for you Team Tate girls to go 3-1 against Rousey, right?
Full Fight: Peggy Morgan vs. Sarah Moras
Pena: Absolutely! I was absolutely happy. On top of the world. I wanted our team to win. I'm always the first one screaming in the mic. During every fight you can see me in background standing up and cheering. I can always hear myself screaming and yelling for my team. So yeah, I was very happy when that happened.
Al-Shatti: Well now we've finally reached the semis, and bam, you're fighting Sarah Moras, who's not just a teammate, but also the girl who handed you your first professional loss. What's going through your mind when Dana White announces those match-ups?
Pena: It completely threw a wrench into what I'd been preparing for. The thing is, I knew I wasn't going to get (Jessica) Rakoczy. Me and Moras had already fought before, and Moras had already fought Raquel (Pennington) before. We knew that one of us was going to have to fight a teammate, and so since Sarah had already fought both me and Raquel, we were thinking they'd give Sarah the match-up against Rakoczy, so that she could have somebody she's never fought before. I was mentally (preparing for that).
Then Dana changed it last second. When they said I was fighting Moras, I was like, What? What just happened? I wasn't expecting that at all.
Al-Shatti: You're so competitive though. Was it a pleasant surprise? I mean, you get a chance to avenge a loss on national TV.
Pena: When I was in the interview to get into the house, they asked me, ‘So, Moras is here. You lost to her. How's that going? What happened there?' I was like, ‘Man, I'll fight her right here, right now, for free. Where is she? I'll do it right now.' (Laughs.) When I fought Moras the first time, it hit me hard. I'd just got hit by a car, then fought up a weight class and took my first loss. I was just devastated. It took me a long time to come back from martial arts after that. I pretty much hid under a rock and died. I'd never experienced a loss before, so to get another opportunity to fight her, it was like, I've been waiting for this.
TUF MAILBAG
@wrestling_1000 asks: Favorite music before a fight?
Pena: That's tough, because when I first started, I would only listen to classical music before I'd fight. Like, straight classical music. But then I switched it up because one time I remember listening to classical music, then going out there and just getting rocked within the first 30 seconds, and being like, the music didn't pump me up enough. I would've never got hit like that if I was listening to some Kayne! So now I like to listen to anything with a good, fast beat. Something that gets me revved up, something that makes me hot and angry and ready to throw down. I love a lot of music, and so anything that just gets the blood boiling.
Bboyawall asks: Julianna as we head into semifinals, is it getting harder not to slip on the results of who made it to the finals? Also I feel like a little kid at work when I see my questions being answered. It's awesome, thank you!!!
Pena: (Laughs.) Absolutely! It's my pleasure to answer your questions. Thank you for taking the time to ask a question and for caring. That means a lot to me and makes me happy.
And yeah, it is (tough). Everybody wants to know the answers! It really sucks because you want to be like, just watch the show, dangit! I haven't told anybody. I was sworn to secrecy on a $5 million contract and I take that very seriously. (Laughs.)
superfknmario__ asks: 1. Who wins in a Rousey/Cyborg fight? 2. Hablas español?
Pena: 1. Cyborg. TKO/KO.
2. Si habla español un poquito. Si me español es muy mal. Yo entiendo un poquito.
Do you have a question for Julianna Pena? Ask it in the comments below and she'll answer you next week. The Ultimate Fighter 18 airsevery Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET on FOX Sports 1. Portions of this interview have been edited for concision.
Time Inc. Inks Deal With Flipboard: PEOPLE and InStyle First To Launch; TIME And FORTUNE Coming In December
With a digital footprint of 68MM across desktop, smartphones and tablets,Time Inc. will be the largest publisher to join Flipboard's platform.
NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Time Inc. has reached an agreement with Flipboard to make its branded content available on the platform. PEOPLE and InStyle will be the first Time Inc. titles to launch this week, followed by TIME and FORTUNE in December.
With a digital footprint of 68MM across desktop, smartphones and tablets, Time Inc. will be the largest publisher to join Flipboard's platform. PEOPLE's content will focus on celebrity news and red carpet moments and InStyle will feature the latest celebrity looks, fashion trends and beauty how-tos.
The content on Flipboard has been paginated and designed to reflect each title's unique brand experience. Inside of the pages of PEOPLE, InStyle, TIME and FORTUNE on Flipboard will also be full page beautiful advertising inventory for brands around the world interested in reaching these readers. Time Inc. will offer its advertisers sharable full page ads within its Flipboard content. Gucci has signed on as a launch partner to InStyle on Flipboard.
"The demand for Time Inc.'s mobile content has grown exponentially this year, from celebrity and style content to breaking news," said Fran Hauser, President, Digital, Time Inc Style & Entertainment Group. "If you look at the enormous built-in following and influence our brands carry, and combine it with Flipboard's ability to showcase our content and photography so beautifully and make it more discoverable, this is a great place for us to be."
"With this deal the iconic publications of PEOPLE, InStyle, TIME and FORTUNE will bring the important stories, amazing visuals, analytical pieces and pop culture trends of the day to the millions of people on Flipboard. We are very proud to be a part of Time Inc.'s strategy to reach readers everywhere," said Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO.
About Time Inc. Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, is one of the largest branded media companies in the world reaching more than 130 million Americans each month across multiple platforms. With influential brands such as TIME, PEOPLE, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, InStyle, and REAL SIMPLE, Time Inc. is home to celebrated events and franchises including the FORTUNE 500, TIME 100, PEOPLE's Most Beautiful and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S Sportsman of the Year.
About Flipboard Flipboard is your personal magazine. It's the most popular way to catch up on the news you care about, discover amazing things from around the world, or stay connected to the people closest to you. Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboard is designed so you can easily flip through the stories, videos and images on just about any topic imaginable. Start reading your magazine by downloading Flipboard at www.flipboard.com.
Intel has been talking about 4G LTE in mobile devices for a while, but now the chipmaker is walking the walk with its first multi-mode 4G LTE modem.
Asian and European versions of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3 will be the first to feature Intel’s new ZMM 7160 processor.
The ZMM 7160 model will allow phones and tablets—presumably those with Intel chips inside—to connect to 4G LTE networks in North America, Asia, and Europe. The chip will first appear in the Asia and Europe versions of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 3, and Intel says it’s now commercially available to other vendors as well.
This isn’t Intel’s first 4G LTE modem, but a previous single-mode chip was unable to fall back on older 3G and 2G networks. The ZMM 7160 can connect to both GSM and HSPA networks, so it’s a much better fit for wireless carrier support.
Still, Intel has one disadvantage over ARM-based rival Qualcomm: The modem itself is a discrete chip, not integrated with Intel’s application processors. Integrated modems allow for longer battery life, so perhaps no surprise that the first product to feature the ZMM 7160 is a tablet, which should be better than a smartphone at absorbing any hits to battery life.
So far, Intel hasn’t made any commitments on integrating the modem with its application processors. “We will do it when the time is right,” Herman Eul, general manager for Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, said during an August preview of multimode LTE chips.
For now, having 4G LTE and older network support all rolled into a single modem could clear the way for more Bay Trail-powered Windows tablets with mobile broadband support. As for laptops, Intel is introducing a PCIe module with support for 4G and older networks. Intel says we’ll see connected Ultrabooks as well as laptops with this module next year.
58.com, the online classifieds marketplace often referred to as the “Craigslist of China,” will hold its initial public offering of 11 million American Depository Shares (ADS) at $17 each on the New York Stock Exchange today. The shares will be listed under the ticker “WUBA.”
Hurst Lin, general partner of DCM, 58.com’s lead investor, tells me that the company will use proceeds from its IPO to focus on product development, especially mobile apps, and launch more verticals. Products that have proven especially successful for 58.com include short-term job classifieds for blue-collar workers. The company plans on developing location-based mobile apps for those listings in order to quickly connect job searchers with nearby opportunities. 58.com was founded in 2005 and booked $107 million in sales during the twelve-months ending in June 2013.
E-commerce giant Alibaba might also opt for a U.S. listing in an IPO that could potentially value the company at an impressive $75 billion. Alibaba had originally planned to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, but reportedly decided not to because the HKSE’s rules prohibit dual classes of stock and other corporate structures that would make it easier for minority shareholders to hold onto control of a company.
If Alibaba does indeed pursue a U.S. IPO, it may lead the way for other Chinese companies to return to U.S. stock exchanges.
On Saturday, Oct. 26, the first-time parents-to-be were spotted enjoying a Kanye West concert at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the pair hung out (and boogied with!) Sudeikis' Saturday Night Live chum Kristen Wiig.
Wilde, 29, and Sudeikis, 38, first met in May 2011 during the season finale of SNL. Us exclusively broke the news in December of that year that the two were dating. "She's come to the [SNL] studio at Rockefeller Center, and they've gone out to dinner after rehearsals," an insider told Us during the budding romance.
And things went very, very well! Over a year later, in January 2013, a spokeswoman for the Change-Up actress confirmed that the two were engaged. "Thanks for all the sweet congratulatory love, friends!" Wilde tweeted at the time. "And may I compliment your savvy use of that nifty engagement ring emoticon."
Earlier this year, the brunette beauty gushed about one day starting a family with her future husband. "I am not trying to have kids now – there's no strict plan for anything in my life. What happens, happens," she said during an interview with Marie Claire for its April issue. "He's so good with kids...I've never before experienced looking at someone and thinking, 'That's who I want to raise a child with.'"
The two also have quite the love life -- behind closed doors, that is. In October 2012, Wilde admitted she's "blissfully, hopefully, wildly in love" during These Girls, an evening of monologues hosted by Glamour mag. Even more so, the two "have sex like Kenyan marathon runners."
This will be the first child for both Wilde and Sudeikis. The Horrible Bosses actor was previously married to Pitch Perfect screenwriter Kay Cannon from 2004 to 2010. Wilde was married to documentarian Tao Ruspoli for eight years before divorcing in 2011.
A few months ago I found myself fawning all over this outfit Nicole Richie was rocking while she was shopping in NYC. This girl just… slays sometimes. Thursday night she hosted Who What Wear and Cadillac’s 50 Most Fashionable Women of 2013 event and she looked great. She rocked a black Dilek Hanif dress with black Roberts Jeans leather skinnies, and Christian Louboutin pumps. But I’m absolutely in love with these friggen couture bunny ears, aren’t you? Peep the gallery for more! Other than the fact that I kind of wanna gift her my baby weight, I think she looks bomb.
A Stanford MBA named Roy Raymond wants to buy his wife some lingerie but he's too embarrassed to shop for it at a department store. He comes up with an idea for a high-end place that doesn't make you feel like a pervert. He gets a $40,000 bank loan, borrows another $40,000 from his in-laws, opens a store, and calls it Victoria's Secret. Makes $500,000 his first year. He starts a catalog, opens three more stores, and after five years he sells the company to Leslie Wexner and the Limited for $4 million. Happy ending, right? Except two years later, the company's worth $500 million and Roy Raymond jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. Poor guy just wanted to buy his wife a pair of thigh-highs.
—Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) to Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) in The Social Network (2010)
In this scene, Zuckerberg has just asked Parker why his girlfriend looks so familiar; turns out the woman on Parker’s arm is a Victoria’s Secret model. Parker, founder of Napster (and the first president of Facebook), is impressing upon young Zuckerberg that the true genius behind what he calls a “once-in-a-generation-holy-shit idea” isn’t necessarily the idea itself, but the insight, drive, and perseverance to see just how far the idea can go. There’s no better example to prove his point than the story of Raymond, Wexner, and Victoria’s Secret.
In the mid-1970s, Roy Raymond did indeed walk into a department store to buy his wife lingerie, only to find ugly floral-print nightgowns—made even uglier under harsh fluorescent lights—and saleswomen who made him feel like a deviant just for being there. Realizing that other male friends felt the same way, the 30-year-old saw an opportunity to create a market where none existed: A lingerie store designed to make men feel comfortable shopping there.
Raymond imagined a Victorian boudoir, replete with dark wood, oriental rugs, and silk drapery. He chose the name “Victoria” to evoke the propriety and respectability associated with the Victorian era; outwardly refined, Victoria’s “secrets” were hidden beneath. In 1977, with $80,000 of savings and loans from family, Raymond and his wife leased a space in a small shopping mall in Palo Alto, Calif., and Victoria’s Secret was born.
To understand how novel Raymond’s idea was, it helps to have a little context. In the 1950s and ’60s, underwear was all about practicality and durability. For most American woman, sensual lingerie was reserved for the honeymoon trousseau or the anniversary night; Frederick’s of Hollywood was the granddaddy of the specialty lingerie retailers. When the women’s movement of the late 1960s and ’70s called for women to liberate themselves from the bondage of bras, the intimate apparel industry responded with new designs that they claimed would give women the natural look they desired without the embarrassment of a sagging bustline. But for the most part, underwear remained functional, not fun.
Victoria’s Secret changed all that, and in the Bay Area, its sales continued to boom—thanks in large part to its catalog, which reached customers across the country. Within five years, Raymond had opened three more stores in San Francisco. By 1982, the company had annual sales of more than $4 million—yet something in Raymond’s formula was not working. According to management experts Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske’s book Trading Up, Victoria’s Secret was nearing bankruptcy.
Enter Leslie Wexner, the man who had ushered in the mass-market sportswear boom with a store he called The Limited. While still in his 20s, Wexner had recognized that women were forgoing dresses for separates and casual wear. So in 1963, he opened a store “limited” just to sportswear. Wexner’s foresight paid off. The Limited grew to 11 stores by 1970, and 188 by 1977, according to a Forbes profile published that year. Wexner, now 40, was worth $50 million.
Smuggling-saga conventions are freshened somewhat by family-drama angle.
Venue
Hamptons International Film Festival (Phase 4)
Cast
Anna Paquin, Drea de Matteo, Cam Gigandet, Liana Liberato, Lloyd Owen, Jeff Hehpner, Yvette Yates, Ava Acres
Director-screenwriter
Shana Betz
THE HAMPTONS, NEW YORK — A loving portrait of a mother many would say deserves a much more critical eye, ShanaBetz's Free Ride casts Anna Paquin as a roman-a-clef version of her own mother, a single woman who works as a drug smuggler in late-70s Florida while raising two daughters. Paquin's name will draw attention to the picture, whose parenting themes go only so far in making a familiar tale of the high life's perils feel novel.
Betz's debut feature presents her younger self (here named Shell, and played by Ava Acres) as a bystander who witnesses her mother's bad life choices but isn't old enough, as teen sister MJ (Liana Liberato) is, to have her coming-of-age shaped by the conflict they engender. We meet the family in Ohio, where Paquin's Christina, being regularly abused by her partner, picks the girls up from school one day and cheerfully declares they're driving straight to Florida.
There, a friend (Drea deMatteo's Sandy) has promised to set Christina up in a job doing light housekeeping at a mansion owned by her boss, "The Captain" (Lloyd Owen). The job's just a tryout for more illicit work: While it's not clear how Christina demonstrates her aptitude while dusting the mantel, she's soon being asked to ride along on boat charters that pick up bales of pot and bring them to the U.S..
Though she's told that her new job's central rule is not to have relationships within the organization, the gig is largely social: Smuggling trips are disguised as pleasure outings, and the party continues back ashore in bars where Christina and Sandy dance provocatively for their male coworkers. The captain moves the family out of their cheap motel and into a spacious farmhouse, complete with a horse for MJ. The barn doubles as a drug warehouse, and Mom makes her go-along values clear to a teen whose face betrays moral qualms, or at least fear of getting in trouble: "Wanna keep the horse? Then be cool."
The plot follows a familiar arc, with montages of hedonistic good times (including some druggy, gropey parties that are witnessed by the kids) leading to menacing turns of events and inevitable encounters with the Feds. Betz and her cast have a firm grip on the domestic side of things, with MJ's confused responses threatening to break the family up before the law can intervene, but the film's generosity toward Christina's decision-making is, however true to life, dramatically unsatisfying. A coda offers the director's actual mother, in voiceover, saying "you do what you can to take care of your family," a sentiment that may earn sneers from single mothers in the audience who've found less hazardous ways to make ends meet.
Production Company: Casm Films
Cast: Anna Paquin, Drea de Matteo, Cam Gigandet, Liana Liberato, Lloyd Owen, Jeff Hehpner, Yvette Yates, Ava Acres
Director-Screenwriter: Shana Betz
Producers: Susan Dynner, Cerise Hallam Larkin, Anna Paquin
Executive producers: Dan Keston, Mark Larkin, Stephen Moyer, Wendy Williams
Research confirms bottom-feeding behavior of humpback whales
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Beth Potier beth.potier@unh.edu 603-862-1566 University of New Hampshire
DURHAM, N.H. Humpback whales are known for the complexity of their feeding techniques, which include "trapping" krill and other prey within bubble nets they produce and gulping up to two-thirds their weight in prey-laden water. Now, scientists have confirmed that humpback whales in the southern Gulf of Maine are spending more feeding time on the ocean floor than in any of these other feeding behaviors. Because entanglement in fishing gear is a major risk to humpbacks, these findings have implications on bottom-set gear like those used in lobster traps.
"Humpbacks have not been known as bottom-feeders, yet this is their dominant feeding mode in this region," says University of New Hampshire professor of data visualization Colin Ware, lead author of a paper published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. "You've got this prominent species, and until now nobody knew how they were doing most of their feeding."
Ware, of UNH's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, and his collaborators, including David Wiley of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Ari Friedlaender of Duke University Marine Laboratory and Pratt School of Engineering, gathered data from 52 humpback whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and the Great South Channel near Cape Cod, Mass.
By affixing DTAGs synchronous motion and acoustic recording tags to the whales' backs via four suction cups, the researchers could track for the first time the movements of the whales below the ocean's surface. TrackPlot, a custom software tool developed by Ware, translated the tags' data into a three-dimensional ribbon that illustrated the whales' paths as they repeatedly dove to the bottom of the ocean, rolled onto their sides, tilted their heads down, and feasted on sand lance, a favorite food that is abundant there.
From this data, collected between 2004 and 2009, Ware and his collaborators identified three distinct types of behavior during what they call bottom side-roll feeding: simple side-rolls, side-roll inversions, and repetitive scooping. The tag data confirms the bottom-feeding that scientists had suspected from visible scarring along some whales' jaws.
Not only did the data show that these humpbacks, "by far the most acrobatic of all baleen whales," Ware says, were performing bottom side-rolls and seafloor scooping, it indicates that this bottom feeding does not include lunging, previously assumed to be the humpbacks' primary feeding behavior.
In lunge feeding, whales accelerates to propel water full of prey into their enlarged mouths; they then filter the water out through the hair-like filaments of their baleens and retain the prey. Tag data showed that the bottom-feeding humpbacks were moving at too low a speed to characterize this behavior as lunge feeding.
While a Crittercam a National Geographic Society video camera that gives a whale's-eye view -- attached to a humpback provides additional insight into the whales' time at the seafloor, Ware cautions that there's plenty to learn about what the whales are doing in the deep.
"The big mystery is we still don't know exactly how they're feeding. We don't know the mechanism," he says.
###
The study, "Bottom side-roll feeding by humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the southern Gulf of Maine, U.S.A," was first published online in Marine Mammal Science in July 2013. In addition to Ware, Wiley and Friedlaender, co-authors are Mason Weinrich of the Whale Centre of New England, Elliott L. Hazen of Duke and NOAA SWFSC, Alessandro Bocconcelli of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Susan E. Parks of Syracuse University, Alison K. Stimpert of the Naval Postgraduate School, Mike A. Thompson of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and Kyler Abernathy of National Geographic Television.
Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research (ONR N0014091601 for TrackPlot development and N00014-08-0630 for field work and analysis), NOAA (NA05NOS4001153), the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 12,300 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.
Photograph available to download: http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/news/press/2013/whale_scrape.jpg
Caption: Humpback whale with a scrape on its jaw. Scientists say injuries such as this one are sometimes a result from bottom-feeding.
Credit: NOAA/Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary
Image available to download: http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/news/press/2013/trackplot.jpg
Caption: In this 3D computer visualization from UNH's Data Visualization Research Lab, the roller coaster-like movement of a tagged humpback whale in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is captured over a nearly two-hour period. The whale traveled at depths ranging from 30 to 150 feet deep. The red and blue triangles along the ribbon show the whale's powerful fluke, or tail fin, strokes that propel it through the water. The yellow sections along the ribbons indicate where bottom side-roll feeding occurs.
Credit: Colin Ware, University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping
Watch the Crittercam video: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/animals-news/humpback-whales-bottom-feeding-vin/?source=videomostwatched
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Research confirms bottom-feeding behavior of humpback whales
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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]
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Contact: Beth Potier beth.potier@unh.edu 603-862-1566 University of New Hampshire
DURHAM, N.H. Humpback whales are known for the complexity of their feeding techniques, which include "trapping" krill and other prey within bubble nets they produce and gulping up to two-thirds their weight in prey-laden water. Now, scientists have confirmed that humpback whales in the southern Gulf of Maine are spending more feeding time on the ocean floor than in any of these other feeding behaviors. Because entanglement in fishing gear is a major risk to humpbacks, these findings have implications on bottom-set gear like those used in lobster traps.
"Humpbacks have not been known as bottom-feeders, yet this is their dominant feeding mode in this region," says University of New Hampshire professor of data visualization Colin Ware, lead author of a paper published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. "You've got this prominent species, and until now nobody knew how they were doing most of their feeding."
Ware, of UNH's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, and his collaborators, including David Wiley of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Ari Friedlaender of Duke University Marine Laboratory and Pratt School of Engineering, gathered data from 52 humpback whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and the Great South Channel near Cape Cod, Mass.
By affixing DTAGs synchronous motion and acoustic recording tags to the whales' backs via four suction cups, the researchers could track for the first time the movements of the whales below the ocean's surface. TrackPlot, a custom software tool developed by Ware, translated the tags' data into a three-dimensional ribbon that illustrated the whales' paths as they repeatedly dove to the bottom of the ocean, rolled onto their sides, tilted their heads down, and feasted on sand lance, a favorite food that is abundant there.
From this data, collected between 2004 and 2009, Ware and his collaborators identified three distinct types of behavior during what they call bottom side-roll feeding: simple side-rolls, side-roll inversions, and repetitive scooping. The tag data confirms the bottom-feeding that scientists had suspected from visible scarring along some whales' jaws.
Not only did the data show that these humpbacks, "by far the most acrobatic of all baleen whales," Ware says, were performing bottom side-rolls and seafloor scooping, it indicates that this bottom feeding does not include lunging, previously assumed to be the humpbacks' primary feeding behavior.
In lunge feeding, whales accelerates to propel water full of prey into their enlarged mouths; they then filter the water out through the hair-like filaments of their baleens and retain the prey. Tag data showed that the bottom-feeding humpbacks were moving at too low a speed to characterize this behavior as lunge feeding.
While a Crittercam a National Geographic Society video camera that gives a whale's-eye view -- attached to a humpback provides additional insight into the whales' time at the seafloor, Ware cautions that there's plenty to learn about what the whales are doing in the deep.
"The big mystery is we still don't know exactly how they're feeding. We don't know the mechanism," he says.
###
The study, "Bottom side-roll feeding by humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in the southern Gulf of Maine, U.S.A," was first published online in Marine Mammal Science in July 2013. In addition to Ware, Wiley and Friedlaender, co-authors are Mason Weinrich of the Whale Centre of New England, Elliott L. Hazen of Duke and NOAA SWFSC, Alessandro Bocconcelli of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Susan E. Parks of Syracuse University, Alison K. Stimpert of the Naval Postgraduate School, Mike A. Thompson of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and Kyler Abernathy of National Geographic Television.
Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research (ONR N0014091601 for TrackPlot development and N00014-08-0630 for field work and analysis), NOAA (NA05NOS4001153), the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
The University of New Hampshire, founded in 1866, is a world-class public research university with the feel of a New England liberal arts college. A land, sea, and space-grant university, UNH is the state's flagship public institution, enrolling 12,300 undergraduate and 2,200 graduate students.
Photograph available to download: http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/news/press/2013/whale_scrape.jpg
Caption: Humpback whale with a scrape on its jaw. Scientists say injuries such as this one are sometimes a result from bottom-feeding.
Credit: NOAA/Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary
Image available to download: http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/news/press/2013/trackplot.jpg
Caption: In this 3D computer visualization from UNH's Data Visualization Research Lab, the roller coaster-like movement of a tagged humpback whale in Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is captured over a nearly two-hour period. The whale traveled at depths ranging from 30 to 150 feet deep. The red and blue triangles along the ribbon show the whale's powerful fluke, or tail fin, strokes that propel it through the water. The yellow sections along the ribbons indicate where bottom side-roll feeding occurs.
Credit: Colin Ware, University of New Hampshire Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping
Watch the Crittercam video: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/animals-news/humpback-whales-bottom-feeding-vin/?source=videomostwatched
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