domingo, 30 de diciembre de 2012

The Scientific Reason Why Reindeer Have Red Noses Read



Some reindeer really do have red noses, a result of densely packed blood vessels near the skin’s surface. Image courtesy of Kia Krarup Hansen
In 1939, illustrator and children’s book author Robert May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The character was an instant hit—2.5 million copies of May’s booklet were circulated within a year—and in the coming decades, Rudolph’s song and stop-motion TV special cemented him in the canon of cherished Christmas lore.
Of course, the story was rooted in myth. But there’s actually more truth to it than most of us realize. A fraction of reindeer—the species of deer scientifically known as Rangifer tarandus, native to Arctic regions in Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Russia and Scandinavia—actually do have noses colored with a distinctive red hue.
Now, just in time for Christmas, a group of researchers from the Netherlands and Norway have systematically looked into the reason for this unusual coloration for the first time. Their study, published yesterday in the online medical journal BMJ, indicates that the color is due to an extremely dense array of blood vessels, packed into the nose in order to supply blood and regulate body temperature in extreme environments.
“These results highlight the intrinsic physiological properties of Rudolph’s legendary luminous red nose,” write the study’s authors. “[They] help to protect it from freezing during sleigh rides and to regulate the temperature of the reindeer’s brain, factors essential for flying reindeer pulling Santa Claus’s sleigh under extreme temperatures.”
Obviously, the researchers know reindeer don’t actually pull Santa Claus to deliver gifts around the world—but they do encounter a wide variation of weather conditions on an annual basis, accounting for why they might need such dense beds of capillary vessels to deliver high amounts of blood.
To come to the findings, the scientists examined the noses of two reindeer and five human volunteers with a hand-held video microscope that allowed them to see individual blood vessels and the flow of blood in real time. They discovered that the reindeer had a 25% higher concentration of blood vessels in their noses, on average.
They also put the reindeer on a treadmill and used infrared imaging to measure what parts of their bodies shed the most heat after exercise. The nose, along with the hind legs, reached temperatures as high as 75°F—relatively hot for a reindeer—indicating that one of the main functions of all this blood flow is to help regulate temperature, bringing large volumes of blood close to the surface when the animals are overheated, so its heat can radiate out into the air.

In an infrared image, a reindeer’s nose (indicated by arrow) is shown to be especially red, a reflection of its temperature-regulating function. Image via Ince et. al.


Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2012/12/the-scientific-reason-why-reindeer-have-red-noses/#ixzz2GXo3bVaX 
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sábado, 29 de diciembre de 2012

Are video games really the villains in our violent age?


Two Boys Playing Video Game
Video games can be force for good, despite what their detractors say. Photograph: Corbis RF/Alamy
The number of aliens you kill may directly contribute to an improvement in your brain. This may not sound like a typical scientific discovery, but it has come from some of the world's finest neuroscience laboratories. In fact, it is the genuine outcome of studies on how action video games can improve your attention, mental control and visual skills. We're talking here about fast-moving titles such as HaloCall of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, which demand quick reflexes and instant decision-making. They're often portrayed as the most trashy, vapid and empty-headed forms of digital entertainment, but it looks as if they may be particularly good at sharpening your mental skills.
This may come as a surprise if you read much of the popular press, which is often obsessed with technological scare stories. Scientific evidence has been less media-friendly but considerably more convincing. We now have numerous studies on how playing action computer games, as opposed to puzzle or strategy titles such as The Sims or Tetris, leads to an improvement in how well we pay attention, how quickly we react, how sensitive we are to images and how accurately we sort information. Crucially, these studies are not just focused on people who already play a lot of video games, but are testing whether action video game training genuinely leads to improvements.
The studies use randomised controlled trials. It is a method normally used to test medications, but it can be applied to anything. In this case, a group of people are randomly assigned to one of two groups. Half get the "treatment", perhaps blasting away at enemy combatants in Medal of Honor, while the others get the "placebo" – for example, managing a digital family in The Sims 3. Reliably, those assigned to play the fast-moving action games show improvements on neuropsychological tests that measure the ability to process quickly and react to visual information. It's worth saying that these conclusions were thrown into doubt in 2011 when several scientists, led by Walter Boot from Florida State University, suggested that these findings may be due to poor experimental design, but subsequent and better planned studies have continued to find a positive effect.
Another aspect of the game debate concerns the impact of violent video games. This has become a matter of public anxiety again in light of the tragic Sandy Hook killings after the gunman was identified as being a fan of first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty. It's worth saying that such appalling events are not a good basis for science, simply because the popularity of this form of entertainment makes it difficult to attribute any form of link between their use and statistically rare individuals. This does not, however, mean that the issue itself is not important and worthy of study – and it has, in fact, been researched widely.
Also using randomised controlled trials, research has found that violent video games cause a reliable short-term increase in aggression during lab-based tests. However, this seems not to be something specific to computer games. Television and even violence in the news have been found to have a similar impact. The longer-term effects of aggressive gaming are still not well studied, but we would expect similar results from long-term studies of other violent media – again a small increase in aggressive thoughts and behaviour in the lab.
These, however, are not the same as actual violence. Psychologist Christopher Ferguson, based at the Texas A&M International University, has examined what predicts genuine violence committed by young people. It turns out that delinquent peers, depression and an abusive family environment account for actual violent incidents, while exposure to media violence seems to have only a minor and usually insignificant effect. This makes sense even in light of horrifying mass shootings. Several of the killers did play video games, but this doesn't distinguish them from millions of non-violent young men. Most, however, had a previous history of antisocial behaviour and a disturbed background, something known to be much more common in killers.
Perhaps the most telling effect of video games concerns not what they involve but how much time someone spends playing them. A helpful study on the effect of giving games consoles to young people found that, while the gaming had no negative impact on core abilities, school performance declined for those kids who put aside homework for screen entertainment. Similarly, a significant amount of research has found that putting aside exercise for the physical inactivity of video games raises the risk of obesity and general poor health.
And while "addiction" is now the pop psychology label of choice for anything that someone does to excess (sex, video games, shopping), the same behaviour could just as easily, and more parsimoniously, be described as a form of avoidant or unhelpful coping. Rather than dealing with uncomfortable life problems, some people avoid them by absorbing themselves in other activities, leading to an unhelpful cycle where the distractions end up maintaining the problems because they're never confronted. This can apply as easily to books as video games.
The verdict from the now considerable body of scientific research is not that video games are a new and ominous threat to society but that anything in excess will cause us problems. The somewhat prosaic conclusion is that moderation is key – whether you're killing aliens, racing cars or trying to place oddly shaped blocks that fall from the sky.
Vaughan Bell is a clinical and research psychologist based at King's College, London

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/30/games-first-person-shooter-vaughan-bell

miércoles, 26 de diciembre de 2012

A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths

japan july23 p.jpg
A Tokyo "gun" shop owner, who mostly sells air rifles, displays one of Japan's relatively few licensed rifles. (Reuters)

I've heard it said that, if you take a walk around Waikiki, it's only a matter of time until someone hands you a flyer of scantily clad women clutching handguns, overlaid with English and maybe Japanese text advertising one of the many local shooting ranges. The city's largest, the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club, advertises instructors fluent in Japanese, which is also the default language of its website. For years, this peculiar Hawaiian industry has explicitly targeted Japanese tourists, drawing them away from beaches and resorts into shopping malls, to do things that are forbidden in their own country. 

Waikiki's Japanese-filled ranges are the sort of quirk you might find in any major tourist town, but they're also an intersection of two societies with wildly different approaches to guns and their role in society. Friday's horrific shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater has been a reminder that America's gun control laws are the loosest in the developed world and its rate of gun-related homicide is the highest. Of the world's 23 "rich" countries, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is almost 20 times that of the other 22. With almost one privately owned firearm per person, America's ownership rate is the highest in the world; tribal-conflict-torn Yemen is ranked second, with a rate about half of America's. 

But what about the country at the other end of the spectrum? What is the role of guns in Japan, the developed world's least firearm-filled nation and perhaps its strictest controller? In 2008, the U.S. had over 12 thousand firearm-related homicides. All of Japan experienced only 11, fewer than were killed at the Aurora shooting alone. And that was a big year: 2006 saw an astounding two, and when that number jumped to 22 in 2007, it became a national scandal. By comparison, also in 2008, 587 Americans were killed just by guns that had discharged accidentally. 

Almost no one in Japan owns a gun. Most kinds are illegal, with onerous restrictions on buying and maintaining the few that are allowed. Even the country's infamous, mafia-like Yakuza tend to forgoguns; the few exceptions tend to become big national news stories.

Japanese tourists who fire off a few rounds at the Royal Hawaiian Shooting Club would be breaking three separate laws back in Japan -- one for holding a handgun, one for possessing unlicensed bullets, and another violation for firing them -- the first of which alone is punishable by one to ten years in jail. Handguns are forbidden absolutely. Small-caliber rifles have been illegal to buy, sell, or transfer since 1971. Anyone who owned a rifle before then is allowed to keep it, but their heirs are required to turn it over to the police once the owner dies. 

The only guns that Japanese citizens can legally buy and use are shotguns and air rifles, and it's not easy to do. The process is detailed in David Kopel's landmark study on Japanese gun control, published in the 1993 Asia Pacific Law Review, still cited as current. (Kopel, no left-wing loony, is a member of the National Rifle Association and once wrote in National Review that looser gun control laws could have stopped Adolf Hitler.) 

To get a gun in Japan, first, you have to attend an all-day class and pass a written test, which are held only once per month. You also must take and pass a shooting range class. Then, head over to a hospital for a mental test and drug test (Japan is unusual in that potential gun owners must affirmatively prove their mental fitness), which you'll file with the police. Finally, pass a rigorous background check for any criminal record or association with criminal or extremist groups, and you will be the proud new owner of your shotgun or air rifle. Just don't forget to provide police with documentation on the specific location of the gun in your home, as well as the ammo, both of which must be locked and stored separately. And remember to have the police inspect the gun once per year and to re-take the class and exam every three years.

Even the most basic framework of Japan's approach to gun ownership is almost the polar opposite of America's. U.S. gun law begins with the second amendment's affirmation of the "right of the people to keep and bear arms" and narrows it down from there. Japanese law, however, starts with the 1958 act stating that "No person shall possess a firearm or firearms or a sword or swords," later adding a few exceptions. In other words, American law is designed to enshrine access to guns, while Japan starts with the premise of forbidding it. The history of that is complicated, but it's worth noting that U.S. gun law has its roots in resistance to British gun restrictions, whereas some academic literature links the Japanese law to the national campaign to forcibly disarm the samurai, which may partially explain why the 1958 mentions firearms and swords side-by-side.

Of course, Japan and the U.S. are separated by a number of cultural and historical difference much wider than their gun policies. Kopel explains that, for whatever reason, Japanese tend to be more tolerant of the broad search and seizure police powers necessary to enforce the ban. "Japanese, both criminals and ordinary citizens, are much more willing than their American counterparts to consent to searches and to answer questions from the police," he writes. But even the police did not carry firearms themselves until, in 1946, the American occupation authority ordered them to. Now, Japanese police receive more hours of training than their American counterparts, are forbidden from carrying off-duty, and invest hours in studying martial arts in part because they "are expected to use [firearms] in only the rarest of circumstances," according to Kopel.

The Japanese and American ways of thinking about crime, privacy, and police powers are so different -- and Japan is such a generally peaceful country -- that it's functionally impossible to fully isolate and compare the two gun control regiments. It's not much easier to balance the costs and benefits of Japan's unusual approach, which helps keep its murder rate at the second-lowest in the world, though at the cost of restrictions that Kopel calls a "police state," a worrying suggestion that it hands the government too much power over its citizens. After all, the U.S. constitution's second amendment is intended in part to maintain "the security of a free State" by ensuring that the government doesn't have a monopoly on force. Though it's worth considering another police state here: Tunisia, which had the lowest firearm ownership rate in the world (one gun per thousand citizens, compared to America's 890) when its people toppled a brutal, 24-year dictatorship and sparked the Arab Spring.


Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/07/a-land-without-guns-how-japan-has-virtually-eliminated-shooting-deaths/260189/

sábado, 22 de diciembre de 2012

A letter from a century ago


Tim Thorpe
Tim Thorpe with the letter from his great-great-grandfather Guy Wood
For as long as Tim Thorpe can remember, he has known about the "12.12.12" letter. When he was a boy in the 1970s, his family would talk about his great-great-grandfather's ambitious message to people "belonging to me" 100 years into the future and, eventually, Thorpe received his own photocopy of the handwritten letter. The power of Guy Wood's message from beyond the grave, written on 12 December 1912, continues to fascinate his descendants, and for some, such as Thorpe, it sparked an interest in history that has shaped their lives and careers.
"This is the time of Flying Machines and Motor Cars only in their infancy. I often try to picture to myself what things will be like in 12.12.2012," wrote Wood, who was 51 and nearing the end of his working life as "head attendant" of an asylum. "I am writing this today to put on one side so that some of my offspring may perhaps read it."
Despite having little formal education, Wood read newspapers avidly and fearfully predicted the rise of Germany and the invention of "death dealing machines" that would kill people in their thousands. What he could not foresee was that his letter would become a treasured heirloom, and he would be delighted to know his words were still being read by his great-great-grandchildren when 12.12.2012 came to pass.
"It's written in a very dramatic way and gives an insight into the times in a very exciting way, and it really helped foster my interest in history," says Thorpe, 47, who is now collections officer at Lynn museum in Norfolk.
"This is the year of the greatest shipwreck ever known," wrote Wood of the sinking of the Titanic. "Said by the builders to be unsinkable owing to her watertight compartments, as she was sinking the Band played Nearer My God To Thee and then all was over."
Wood's letter next described how "a Great War is raging between the Balkan allies Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece against the Turks who have persecuted them for over 500 years". This turmoil was, of course, to resurface with the breakup of Yugoslavia some eight decades later.
Interestingly, while mass immigration was another anxiety of Edwardian times to be replayed today, Wood worried about the consequences of thousands of English people emigrating "every week to Canada, Australia and New Zealand", which led him to fear for the future of his country in 2012. "England I suppose will still be in existence although it looks sometimes as if we should be swallowed up by Germany or some other country the way they are spending money on warships, both for sea and air."
Wood's own views of the futility of war are clear. "It seems to me doctors are spending money and time in trying to cure and save life. Others are inventing guns and different kinds of death dealing machines to kill people by thousands all for greed and to conquer others," he wrote.
As Thorpe observes, the letter is reminiscent of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, published 14 years earlier. Like Wells, Wood was a socialist and read the Daily Herald, a new daily paper for the working man. Nevertheless, it is strikingly unusual for someone to sit down and seriously consider a time 100 years from now, and write a letter to people not yet born, even in an era of great uncertainty when writers were creating the first science fiction. What compelled Wood to do so?
"He wanted some way of putting down his fears and anxieties on paper and the date came along. Did he do it out of a feeling of frustration at his powerlessness and his inability to change these great events?" says Thorpe. The letter reveals how historical events can affect the perceptions of an ordinary working person but it does not reveal much about Wood's personal life. And yet by writing his letter and reaching across the generations, he did something that any one of us could do, but don't – and marked himself out as a truly remarkable ancestor.
His descendants know relatively little about him, except that his life was scarred by bereavement. Born in Batley, Yorkshire, in 1861, Wood married Sophia, but four of their sons, who shared a bedroom, died of TB. After this tragedy, the family moved south and Wood got a job at Cane Hill asylum (latterly hospital) in Surrey. His daughter, Florence, survived, as did one son, Harry, who left school at 11 and became a "hall boy" at Cane Hill. It appears his parents continued to worry that he too would succumb to TB, and he was encouraged to work in warmer climes, on a cruise ship – where he played the violin – when he was 17. Later, Harry became the first Labour county councillor in Essex.
Does Thorpe wish his great-great-grandfather had written more personally about his family? "He probably didn't see that as important – he's not boasting about his own life," he says. "In many ways it is personal, in that his hopes and fears are expressed very well." In fact, Wood lived to see the logical conclusion of many of the trends he identified in 1912. After his wife died, Wood decided he would be looked after by his son Harry and his family. "My nanny remembers him arriving at her front door complete with a huge box of piano and violin music, and he said, 'You're going to look after me now,'" says Thorpe.
His mother, Daphne, recalls that, when she was a child in the 40s, Wood wore a smoking jacket and a fez, and lived in glorious isolation in her grandfather's front room, where he took his meals and smoked his pipe. Before lunch and dinner, Daphne would be told to go and speak to her great-grandfather. "She would have a quick chat with him before he took his lunch," says Thorpe. "I think he was quite a grumpy old man by then – he was in his 80s," says Thorpe. Wood died in 1946, aged 85.
Wood's letter demonstrates the transformations of a century, but also shows the great constant of human nature and our unchanging hopes and fears. His observations also prove how difficult it is to know what is to come. Votes for women is a "great rage" he observed, in which "100s of women congregate together and smash windows and other kinds of outrageous deeds on purpose." With hindsight, the political emancipation of women seems inevitable, but Wood's verdict – "I don't know if they will get votes or not" – shows it was far from a foregone conclusion at the time. Thorpe first read Wood's letter when he was a child. "In the 70s, when we imagined 2012 we thought of an Arthur C Clarke world of space exploration and science fiction."
Thorpe knows of no other family mementoes of his great-great-grandfather except one photograph, but Wood's fascination with the future, and the window he created into the past, has had an enduring legacy. Daphne became a history teacher and Thorpe says the letter inspired his fascination with modern history, which he studied at university before choosing a career working in museums.
Thorpe is certain that his great-great-grandfather's letter will survive for another 100 years, and he and his two brothers will pass it on to their children. Has Thorpe considered writing his own updated version? "Where do you start? How do you imagine what life is going to be like 100 years from now?" he says.
"It's fascinating to have this direct line of communication from him, otherwise he'd just be a name on a census list. Now he'll always be thought of as a real living human being who was very thoughtful and caring and sent us this direct line from the past. I'm so grateful. We feel it's a real gift to us, his great-great grandchildren. It's such a magical message to receive."
• This article was updated on 22 December 2012 to include an image of Tim Thorpe with the letter from his great-great-grandfather Guy Wood

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/dec/22/letter-from-a-century-ago

El Gordo jackpot brings joy and austerity relief to thousands in Spain


El Gordo
Lucky number: celebrations in Grañén, north Spain, after the traditional Christmas Gordo lottery. Photograph: Jose Jordan/AFP
Spaniards facing yet another year of economic misery found relief in the world's biggest lottery payout on Saturday, the traditional Christmas Gordo, or Fat One, which spread €2bn in prize money around the country.
Champagne corks popped in towns, cities and villages across Spain as tens of thousands of winners took home enough money to keep their families going through the dark days of 2013 and beyond.
"Yesterday we were both on the dole, but today we are winners," said one happy couple who danced in front of television cameras in Alcalá de Henares, a university town 20 miles from Madrid, after collecting €400,000.
That was the prize handed out to each of the 1,800 people who bought shares known as décimos – priced at €20 each – in the winning lottery number. Most lived in a working-class neighbourhood of the town though the winning number 76058 was sold in 40 places around the country.
One family walked away with €4m after Antonio Ortega Sánchez bought a total of 10 winning décimos and gave them away to his children and siblings. "My dad, brother and uncle have all got tickets as well," said his daughter. "I'll be buying a decent house and a car."
First held in 1812, the Christmas lottery has become a tradition with Spaniards spending an average of more than €70 a head on it. That amounts to almost €3bn, with around two-thirds handed back in prizes that vary from 20,000 times the original bet to simply getting money back.
The rest is held on to by the state lottery fund to cover costs and boost Spain's exchequer – with sales income from the Gordo reducing the country's deficit by the equivalent of 0.1% of GDP. Spaniards are glued to television sets, radio and the internet every 22 December as the lottery numbers are picked out at a Madrid theatre by schoolchildren.
This year, however, the event was interrupted by workers from the publicly owned Madrid regional television station Telemadrid – where some 900 people face the sack in 2013. Other protesters at the event complained about the health cuts that form part of prime minister Mariano Rajoy's austerity measures as Spain struggles with recession, 26% unemployment and fast-growing debt.
This is the last year that Gordo winners can enjoy their money tax-free. The government is imposing a new tax on winnings of more than €2,000 next year. It has also tried to privatise the state lottery – which holds weekly draws but earns half of its income on the Gordo – but eventually decided it could generate more income by keeping it in public hands.
Superstitious Spaniards had this year sought numbers coinciding with everything from the supposed Mayan date for the end of the world to the day on which an elderly, amateur art restorer called Cecilia Jiménez became world famous with her botched restoration of the Ecce Homo painting at a church in Borja, central Spain.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/22/el-gordo-jackpot-spain

jueves, 20 de diciembre de 2012

Walking in The Air




Before Robert Zemeckis "Polar Express" there was everyone's favorite heart warming animated adventure "The Snowman" (1982) about a young English boy who makes a snowman one Christmas Eve, only for it to come to life that night and take him on a magical adventure to the North Pole to meet Santa Claus. 
The title comes from an animated cartoon, which is shown on TV every Christmas day in Britain and has become something of a tradition in the manner of the Queen's Christmas Day Speech to the Nation. Maybe the cartoon has been shown in the USA - I don't know? It's about a little redheaded boy who builds a snowman on his front lawn. Like most young children he's very reluctant to leave the snowman when his mother calls him in after dark. At midnight on Christmas Eve he peeps from his window and finds that the snowman he built that day has magically come to life. He then runs downstairs and dances with the snowman. 

The Snowman takes him on his back on a magical journey, flying across many countries to the North Pole where every Christmas Eve there's a convention of snow people from all lands. They wing their way together to an icy landscape where they meet Father Christmas. There's much dancing and jollity. Eventually the tired out little boy flies back home to England on the snowman's back and goes back to bed. The snowman resumes his position in the garden.

Upon awakening next morning, the little boy rushes to his bedroom window to see his friend. Alas, you've already guessed the sight that meets his eyes. The sun has melted the snowman all away. All that remains is his hat and carrot nose. I always cry at this point, no doubt with millions of others. The soundtrack music is hauntingly beautiful.

Raymond Briggs' picture book is irresistibly brought to life in this wordless, animated tale. Probably best known for the soundtrack (which features "Walking in the Air" sung by Aled Jones) this charming film avoids the over-sentimentality which could have spoilt it and touches the heart in a delightful way. The music perfectly complements the animation, especially during the flying scenes, where the landscape unfolds in rolling images like waves. This is animation for all ages and nationalities, not only because it has no dialogue, but also because it carries an underlying message about life and love - and it also features a great old-fashioned Father Christmas.
The content of the film is poignant and has a bittersweet ending which could be upsetting to some young children. In this capacity it is more of an adult film than a children's animation, as adults have the ability to look back and understand what the film is saying and what it says about our own lost childhoods. But for children it will simply be a magical tale of excitement and friendship. In a day and age where most children's entertainment seems to revolve around violence, this is a truly charming and heartwarming short film.


We're walking in the air
We're floating in the moonlit sky
The people far below are sleeping as we fly
I'm holding very tight
I'm riding in the midnight blue
I'm finding I can fly so high above with you
Far across the world
The villages go by like dreams
The rivers and the hills, the forests and the streams
Children gaze open mouthed
Taken by surprise
Nobody down below believes their eyes
We're surfing in the air
We're swimming in the frozen sky
We're drifting over icy mountains floating by
Suddenly swooping low
On an ocean deep
Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep
And walking in the air
We're dancing in the midnight sky
And everyone who sees us greets us as we fly
We're walking in the air
We're walking in the air


Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31mjvrydaLM

miércoles, 12 de diciembre de 2012

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Review


The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey sees many actors from the Ring trilogy return, including Andy Serkis as Gollum. Photograph: Warner Bros/AP

"Unexpected" is right, for a couple of reasons. Peter Jackson, the man who brought Lord Of The Rings to the big screen to eardrum-shattering acclaim 10 years ago, is now taking just the same approach to Tolkien's much slighter, slimmer children's book The Hobbit. It's getting expanded into three movie episodes of which this whoppingly long film is the opener.

The second unexpected point is the look of the thing. Jackson has pioneeringly shot The Hobbit in HFR, or High Frame Rate: 48 frames a second, as opposed to the traditional 24, giving a much higher definition and smoother "movement" effect. But it looks uncomfortably like telly, albeit telly shot with impossibly high production values and in immersive 3D. Before you grow accustomed to this, it feels as if there has been a terrible mistake in the projection room and they are showing us the video location report from the DVD "making of" featurette, rather than the actual film.
So Tolkien's gentle tale is going to be a triple box-office bonanza, occupying the same amount of space as the mighty Rings epic, an effect achieved by pumping up the confrontations, opening out the backstory and amplifying the ambient details, like zooming in on a Google Middle Earth.


There can be no doubt that Jackson has made The Hobbit with brio and fun, and Martin Freeman is just right as Bilbo Baggins: he plays it with understatement and charm. But I had the weird, residual sense that I was watching an exceptionally expensive, imaginative and starry BBC Television drama production, the sort that goes out on Christmas Day, with 10 pages of coverage in the seasonal Radio Times, and perhaps a break in the middle for the Queen's Speech.
Well, it grows on you. The HFR style has immediacy and glitter, particularly in the outdoor locations, where the New Zealand landscapes, in all their splendour, are revealed more sharply and clearly, and there is an almost documentary realism to the fable. Indoors though, it's not quite the same story.
We approach the drama via its mythic setup: the terrifying dragon Smaug appropriates the Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor. The older hobbit, played with maundering geniality by Ian Holm is presented to us; then it's back in time to meet our unlikely hero, the gentle Bilbo Baggins, younger but still a somewhat donnish, bookish bachelor figure like Tolkien and CS Lewis. He is contacted by the charismatic Wizard Gandalf The Grey — and it's a pleasure to see Ian McKellen back in the cloak, whiskers and pointy hat, bringing a sparkle of life and fun to the part, and stealing the scene with ruminative little smiles and eyebrow-raisings.
Under Gandalf's influence, Bilbo is forced to confront his destiny as a hobbit of action, and acquaints himself with the robust warrior class of dwarves. There's a nice performance from Ken Stott as Balin, with an outrageous big purple-ish nose, as if he's spent his time in exile drinking malt whisky. They are led by the mighty and taller warrior Thorin, played by Richard Armitage.
And so the quest begins, and the questers come across such familiar figures as Galadriel – a seraphic and almost immobile Cate Blanchett – and Saruman, played with impassive dignity and presence, of course, by Christopher Lee. But soon they must tackle the evil Orcs.
There are explosively dramatic battles, with a lot of 3D plunging from vertiginous heights. But the crux comes with Bilbo's meeting with the ineffably creepy Gollum, played in motion-capture once again by Andy Serkis. It is a terrific scene, a contest of nerves, a duel of wits, and the one moment in the film where the drama really comes alive and Freeman's (admirable) underplaying of the role works well against Serkis's animal paranoia.
There is also something quietly affecting in Gandalf's moral strategy in recruiting Bilbo: "I found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it is because I'm afraid, and he gives me courage."
And the rest of the film offers an enormous amount of fun, energy and a bold sense of purpose. But after 170 minutes I felt that I had had enough of a pretty good thing. The trilogy will test the stamina of the non-believers, and many might feel, in their secret heart of hearts, that the traditional filmic look of Lord of the Rings was better. But if anyone can make us love the new epically supercharged HFR Hobbit, it's Peter Jackson.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/09/hobbit-an-unexpected-journey-review

Assassin's Creed III Review




We've blasted through every front of World War II, pointed-and-clicked our way through the trenches of World War I, and have fought countless battles that haven't even happened yet. Yet we've never stepped foot in the Revolutionary War. Are the alternate realities of the animus fertile ground to experience the ultimate uprising in Assassin’s Creed III?
Just like in prior games, Assassin’s Creed III features several stories that intertwine. First you have the present day with Desmond Miles and crew. Continuing immediately after Revelations, the group has set up camp inside a lost temple, hoping to find a way to unseal a massive door that will lead to the answers to centuries-old mysteries. Once Desmond drops into the animus, he lives out the life and times of Connor, an Iroquois who is only concerned with protecting the interests, and lands, of his people. The massive temple door needs a key, and Connor is the conduit for Desmond to find it.The story inside the animus starts out almost painfully slow as it seeks to develop the characters, circumstances, and locales. This pays dividends later on as major plot twists come with the appropriate impact. Connor has no dog in this fight, and regularly plays off both the revolutionists and British to ensure his tribe's safety. Mix in the ancient rivalry between the assassins and the templars with the plight of the first civilization and you have a maze of intrigue that manages to go well below the surface. As Desmond struggles to come to grips with his father’s neglect, Connor also grapples with his heritage.
The prose has its share of implausible moments and it shares some common elements with a certain sci-fi movie franchise, but to have so many conflicted people all mingling with the American Revolution takes no small amount of ingenuity. You’ll be asked to make some tough decisions with extreme repercussions, and you’ll be forced to do some things you’ll regret. It's a satisfying tale with plenty of closure.
Assassin’s Creed is known as an open-world series, and while you get that here, it takes several hours before things crack open. Essentially held to a restrictive story track while things are established and Connor grows from boy to man, it comes out of the gate marauding as a typical action adventure. Eventually the lands are opened to Connor's travels and it becomes obvious that the areas outside the cities hold much more sway than before.
Labeled the frontier, these wooded locales provide a lot of opportunities to get into scraps with roving companies and hunt wildlife. Any pelts that you procure can be sold or used to craft items, and any enemies that you fell can be looted for coins and goodies. The forge system where you would rebuild each city has been removed in favor of the homestead; a small tract of land that includes Connor's home, his assassin trainer Achilles, and any weapons and tools that he's acquired. As you adventure you'll come across folks who need help. Help them and a new shop will spring up in the area. Recruiting and training assassins is still present, but it's much more subdued and rarely pops up organically throughout the campaign. The cities themselves are much smaller and shorter, but there’s still plenty of towers to climb to synchronize areas and unveil densely-populated objectives. Mission variety is great and they're mixed up pretty well--keeping the pace brisk after the sluggish first act.
Back in present day, Desmond is challenged with collecting artifacts from around the globe that can be used to power up the temple. The temple itself is a level that he must navigate between trips abroad, and you spend a lot more time under his hoodie in general. You can drop in and out of the animus at will, giving you some flexibility in how you balance Desmond's present day objectives with those from the 1700s.
Ubisoft has really gone all out to improve the multiplayer, with the big addition a hybrid of horde mode and Resident Evil's mercenaries dubbed wolfpack. Here, you and three pals join forces to try and assassinate as many targets as possible under a time limit with more time awarded for each kill and bonus time achieved by synchronizing kills with teammates. While it's refreshing to play as a squad within the AC framework, the time limit inspires a lot of reckless abandon.
The rest of the multiplayer essentially mirrors that of prior games. Which is to say, it's a completely unique experience that wears thin a little too quickly. Aside from the series' take on capture the flag, each mode plays out basically the same. Players slowly walk around the map waiting for their target meters to fill. Once it does they try to take out their target before they get wise and try to counter. Unlocks happen at a glacial pace, and while there's a certain amount of mind games to it, results still feel too random. While the social options and leveling system are deep, they're mired by a messy interface, and some of the modes take away the compass and special abilities Whether you've loved it or loathed it in the past, there's nothing here that's going to alter your opinion.
Assassin's Creed III is a massive game. You can finish the campaign in around 20 hours and before even experiencing 60 percent of its content. Completionists will obsess over every Ben Franklin almanac page and feather, but it rarely forces things on you--allowing you to uncover its depth at your own pace. The smaller cities ensure that there's something to see or do around every corner and the hills are truly alive in the frontier. Its fast travel system is a little clunky and loading is a bit excessive, but these are just nitpicks of a game that is great at giving you as much or little as you want.
The combat in Assassin's Creed has always been about methodically thinning out herds of thugs with counter kills as they stand around waiting for their turn to taste your blade. Some enemies are still a little reluctant to enter a scrap, but they're much more apt to block and force you to adapt. This ensures you'll experience the exhilarating two-handed combat that lets you string together multiple kills about as fluent and cinematic as possible. After we finished the campaign we dropped back into the world just to buy weapons and see what they could do. Using the new rope dart simply never gets old.
Parkour and free running return, but this time you can take on the uneven terrain of the frontier. Vaulting through trees is just as easy as clambering buildings thanks to plenty of context-sensitive animations to keep things flowing. Large trees can be confusing to climb and there are a few too many right angles for a forest, but for the most part, it handles an irregular job with regularity. Weather patterns and seasons come and go, with snow depth affecting navigation.
The most surprising addition to the gameplay is undoubtedly the naval element. Giving you complete control over the steering, sails, and weapons, it's far more deep--and fun--than we ever imagined. Simply navigating dangerous waters in a wind-driven ship supplies its own rewards, and the free-roaming battles with other craft are some of the best moments in the entire game. Manipulating the wind to get the drop on an enemy boat or using bolo shot to disable a ship's sails so that you may board it are extremely rewarding. You can even upgrade the vessel to make it more formidable.
Hunting on the frontier is the final main gameplay element. Using your eagle vision you can find clues to help you track your prey, but knowing where they are and actually killing them are two entirely different things. The larger grazers take two gunshots to fell and just getting close enough without spooking them is like a chess match. Larger carnivores practically require that you complete quicktime events to finish them off. Just trying to track and slay every species in an area is a game unto itself. Aside from the fundamentals, ACIII is loaded with side activities. There's a little bit of everything, and pretty much all of it is accessible and intuitive. One minute you're commanding troops on horseback, the next you're dumping tea overboard into Boston Harbor. The game finds clever ways to interact with historical moments without making Connor seem out of place.
There are nerve-wracking stealth missions, bombarding formations of soldiers with a cannon, board games, and many moments that will stick with you long after you've stopped playing. Some of the eavesdropping missions are a drag and enemy pathfinding could be smarterF, but otherwise, we enjoyed just about every gameplay style we encountered.
Assassin's Creed III is running on a new revision of the Anvil engine, but the parts of the presentation that impress the most have nothing to do with tech specs. As always, the animation is absolutely stellar, and walking through the formative stages of major US cities with bustling citizens chattering about the concerns of the day will teach you more than any history book. Coming topside after a 70-day trip across the Atlantic to find the entire crew hacking and coughing reminds you of just how brave these pioneers were. Small touches like this permeate every pore of the game.
There are some hiccups, however. The voice actor for Connor doesn't turn in a particularly strong performance, which is a shame because the rest of the cast is great. There's also graphical draw-in, a camera that has problems following some skirmishes, and other blemishes like poor lip syncing and missing sound effects. Yet the game should be commended for its authenticity, and if anything, it demonstrates that we've probably reached the technical zenith with the current generation of hardware for these types of games.
While it's a little slow to get going, Assassin's Creed III is a rewarding, elegant game on many levels. It understands that everyone plays open-world games differently, and provides plenty of incentive for players to tackle its quandaries how they see fit. The sheer variety, overall quality, brisk pacing, massive amount of content, and satisfying story make it easy to forget its few rough spots. Heady and well-informed, Assassin's Creed III is the polar opposite of a guilty pleasure.

Source: http://www.gametrailers.com/reviews/3q6b21/assassin-s-creed-iii-review

No Teachers, No Class, No Homework. Would You Send Your Kids Here?

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A.S. Neill in a Summerhill classroom. The image is undated. (Associated Press)


In Massachusetts farm country, not far from Boston, a group of about 200 students of all ages are part of a radical experiment. These students don't take any classes they don't specifically ask to have taught. They can spend their time doing whatever they want, as long as it's not destructive or criminal -- reading, playing video games, cooking, making art. There are 11 adults, called "staff members"; no one technically holds the title of "teacher." The kids establish rules and mete out punishments by a democratic process whereby each member of the community has one vote -- which means the adults are "outnumbered" by the kids almost 20 to one. Unlike at most private schools, students are admitted without regard to their academic records. 

Sudbury Valley School will this spring find itself one focus of a book by the psychologist and Boston College professor Peter Gray, whose own son attended Sudbury Valley in the 1980s. At the time, Gray was a professor and neurobiology researcher whose work focused on the basic drives of mammals. At his lab, he worked with rats and mice. The experience of his young son, who was struggling in school, convinced him to entirely shift the focus of his career.

"He clearly was unhappy in school, and very rebellious," Gray said of his son in a phone interview. In fourth grade, the son convinced his parents to send him to Sudbury. It was obvious early on that he was "thriving" there, but his father "had questions whether someone could graduate from such a radical school and go on to higher education."

Gray wound up becoming a developmental and learning psychologist in order to do a study of Sudbury outcomes. The results impressed him. Gray described his son as "precocious and articulate"; his problem was not with mastering the material, but with the "waste of time" that normal schooling, with its average pace and rigid structures, entailed.

But not all of Sudbury's students and alumni were precocious learners: "Some had been diagnosed with learning disorders." And while some came from privileged backgrounds with supportive parents who had deliberately sought out alternative education, other parents had been desperate. (Gray notes that most students when he did his study came from public school, not from another private school.) But most seemed to do well at the school, and alumni reported high satisfaction later in life. How was it that students who followed such an out-there program appeared to become relatively well adjusted adults? Gray began to inquire into why.

***
Nothing enrages parents like the idea that their kids might be educated to do or say or think things they don't agree with, by people they don't trust. Yet as different as parents might be, most could nonetheless probably agree on some things. Many would agree that schools should teach values and behaviors -- like sharing, thinking critically, or empathizing with others -- and not just specific skills. Most would approve a program that teaches personal responsibility. A pretty large number would probably also say it's important to foster creativity and allow the student to discover his or her own interests.

There are schools that purport to directly teach those values. They're called democratic schools, and most parents would never consider sending their kids to one. That's because they're run, in great part, by the kids themselves.

While democratic schools vary greatly, the basic concept is the same. When it comes to governing the school -- whether it's deciding what lessons will be taught or setting curfew -- the decision-making rule is "one person, one vote." A teacher's vote counts the same a student's, whether that student is six or 16. And since, at most schools, the body of faculty is smaller than the body of students, the kids ultimately do have it when it comes to making decisions.
Of the democratic schools that exist today, the oldest is Summerhill, a co-ed boarding school founded in 1921 by the British educator A.S. Neill. It opened at a time when a lot of experiments in bohemian education methods were sprouting -- and failing -- in England. But Summerhill still thrives, with a student body of about 100 and a large international population. The school went through a rough patch in 1999 and 2000 when it was nearly shuttered due to a conflict with Ofsted, Britain's national school accreditation body, over what inspectors described as the rude and unruly behavior of students. After a long legal battle, the school was saved, and by 2007, it had beenaccredited for the first time in its history. Inspectors gave it a stand-out review, praising the students as "well-rounded, confident and mature."
Sudbury Valley is to some extent America's Summerhill, although it is less well known here than its British counterpart is in the UK. The "free school" movement in the U.S. was at its peak in the late 1960s and the 1970s. To a great extent, its ideals meshed with the aims of the anti-war movement, black power, and other ideologies of the era. So did the schools' countercultural, vaguely anarchic vibe. It was in this context, in 1968, that a professor of the history of science at Columbia decided to leave his university teaching post and found a free school in rural Massachusetts. For the past four-plus decades, it has quietly and effectively graduated generations of students. The school is little-known outside education circles, but it has spawned about 20 schools around the world that are run on Sudbury (that is, democratic) principles.

When Gray began studying Sudbury, the school had been around for just long enough to have graduated its first students. Yet the the findings from his Sudbury study, limited though they were, inspired Gray to shift his research focus to the study of learning, play, and education. He has been a firm backer of both the unschooling movement and the Sudbury schools, both of which are prominently featured in his forthcoming book Free to Learn. In particular, he stresses the value of the Sudbury schools' age-mixed communities -- where children as young as four and as old as 18 regularly interact. "Young kids learn from older kids. They learn to read by playing games that involve reading with older kids who can read. They play complicated card games with older kids that they could never play by themselves." Older students benefit too: "They learn how to care, to nurture. They get a sense of their own maturity." 

For the younger kids, age mixing replaces the teacher-student dynamic. Both traditional education and Sudbury work to some extent because they take advantage of the "zone of proximal development": the category of things that a child can do with help but not without it. Children learn, according to some theories, when they work with a more skilled person to master activities in their zone of proximal development.

Theoretically, a school doesn't have to be democratic to allow age mixing, and some Montessori schools (for instance) allow a limited amount of it. But as Gray notes, the rigid, age-tracked curricula that are used in most schools make meaningful age mixing almost impossible. Conversely, a Sudbury school where all the kids were the same age "simply wouldn't work."

In some ways, it's the democratic meeting that allows the school to run: It takes a potentially lawless and chaotic setup and gives it structure. It's a mechanism for dealing with bullying (which is almost nonexistent at Sudbury) and with disruptive behavior when just a warning from another student won't do. It's also a way of evolving sophisticated laws for the community. "The school," says Gray, "has a very thick rulebook."

He gives an example. "A number of years ago, there was a new teenage student who was coming to school in a black leather jacket with a swastika on it. And so, because it was offensive, it led to a desire to make a rule in the school meeting saying that you could not display a swastika on your clothing in the school." The proposed rule provoked a discussion over the limits of free speech that was, in Gray's view, "worthy of the Supreme Court."

Students quickly hit on the fact that there was a tension between limiting speech and the democratic values of the school. "There were all sorts of people taking part, mostly teenagers and staff, but every once in a while a young kid would say something too. And those who weren't talking were listening, rapt, learning about history, about Nazism, about why wearing a swastika might be exceptional, why it might be different, say, than wearing a hammer and sickle." The meeting ultimately decided to pass the rule, and it led in time to a larger rule prohibiting hate speech at the school, and distinguishing between hate speech and regular speech. 

***
Most of the major democratic schools that exist today have good track records. Sudbury's founders have been eager to tout their students' success at meeting the demands of the "real world." Gray tells me his research indicated that about 75 percent of Sudbury graduates went on to college, and that those who didn't reported fulfilled lives.

The measure of success partly depends on what you consider a good life outcome. When Summerhill -- the famous UK free school -- celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2011, the Guardian ran reflections from a handful of its alumni. (The British, who have a tradition of strictly hierarchical boarding schools, have been fascinated by Summerhill practically since its founding.) Among the group were several artists, a dentist, and a writer, and many commented that their education had made them "like being themselves." 
As Gray admitted in our interview, it's hard to know whether other factors apart from school influence these students' success. Parents involved enough to research and send their children to such an unusual school probably already give their kids a leg up, compared to less attentive parents who expend less energy on school choice or have less time to focus on it. And with a yearly tuition of $7,800 (prorated if multiple children attend), many students who attend Sudbury are relatively privileged economically.
Writers like Jonathan Kozol have asserted that low income kids stand to benefit from alternative education methods as much as wealthy ones. The question of implementation, however, is vexed, and data on the efficacy of democratic schools are heavily anecdotal and therefore subjective. Since democratic schooling has never been tried at scale with kids from low-income or troubled backgrounds, it's difficult to know exactly how it would work for them.

As with all schooling, whether democratic school appeals to you may depend on what you value more. Would you rather your child be prepared to advance economically and socially, or would you rather he be an idiosyncratic thinker? Would you rather teach your child to operate successfully in the bureaucratic structures of the real world, or would you prefer that she learn to participate in a near-perfect democracy? It isn't an either-or choice, but democratic schools heavily stress the latter values. Even some parents and teachers who consider themselves progressive think the schools lack balance. The Sudbury model could be criticized for not teaching kids the basics they need to learn to function as adults, though proponents say most kids wind up teaching themselves the skills they need to function anyway. You could also argue that, on a more abstract level, a certain shared basic knowledge helps makes us human (or American), and that Sudbury students lose that. (This is the ethos behind core curricula at universities, for instance -- and one totally opposed to the Sudbury philosophy.)

Sudbury survived, but most of the democratic schools founded in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s failed. In an article Gray co-authored in 1986, he and Sudbury staff member David Chanoff asked themselves why:

It is true that numerous so-called free schools were started in the 1960s and the 1970s and that most of them failed as institutions. ... People do not want to take chances with their children. When parents and teachers see that children, genuinely given a choice, do not choose to engage in the kinds of activities that everyone thinks of as "school activities," they understandably become nervous. "What if my child falls behind and can't catch up? Maybe he is being spoiled in this school, developing lazy habits, lack of discipline. Perhaps he will be unable to get into college, get a job, keep a job. His life may be ruined." In many ways, conventional schooling may not be appealing, but at least it is known, and the known is less frightening than the unknown. The fact is that in the United States today we have virtually no models of people who have "made it" without conventional schooling. Consequently, we have a nagging feeling that such schooling, whatever its defects, must be one of the essential ingredients of success. ...
And so when an alternative school begins to look not at all like school, that is, when it becomes a real "alternative," it is seen by the adults (and many children too) as failing and is either closed or modified.

Many agree that the generation of Americans now in their teens and 20s had some of the most over-supervised and over-structured childhoods in U.S. history. It will be interesting to see whether these trends will continue, or whether these next-generation parents react to their own disciplined upbringings by becoming more hands-off. If they grow to resent the way they were raised, democratic schools may come to look like a pretty appealing option for their own children.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/no-teachers-no-class-no-homework-would-you-send-your-kids-here/265354/