Friday, March 14, 2014

Veronica Mars 2014 - pics, trailer, article

A Local Girl Who Made It Returns

‘Veronica Mars’ Returns, on the Big Screen This Time

By MANOHLA DARGISMARCH 13, 2014

The current cultural directive to give the people what they want explains the existence of the“Veronica Mars” movie, a likable, unmemorable, feature-length footnote to the admired television series that became a cause when it was canceled in 2007. A sleuth from the fictional, filthy rich town of Neptune, Veronica traversed high school and college for three seasons, solving mysteries while cracking wise about the privileged locals. She looked like a Southern California cheerleader and alternately talked like Sam Spade and Noam Chomsky, a combo that made her television’s very own Little Miss Sunshine and Noir.

Veronica is back, having been resurrected by her creator, Rob Thomas, and its star, Kristen Bell, again in the title role, through aKickstarter campaign that drew on the largess of its fans. Some 91,000 contributors, perhaps hungry for closure, ponied up the cash to bankroll a movie, raising $2 million in (pant, pant) under 12 hours on the way to $5.7 million. That may be chump change to Warner Bros., which owns the rights to “Veronica Mars” (and threw in more money), but the campaign makes a nice story even if legions of fans will be paying a multinational corporation dearly to see an old friend. As of Friday, the movie will be in some theaters but also a video on demand, so for $14.99 or $19.99 in HD — about twice an average movie ticket — they and everyone else can watch it the way that it should be seen: on TV.

Kristen Bell in "Veronica Mars."CreditRobert Voets/Warner Bros. Pictures

That the theatrical release feels like a wrong move isn’t about the nominal limitations of television, but rather its strengths. The original series hasn’t aged; rather, like all good TV it feels perfectly preserved, like a butterfly in amber. That’s principally because of the timeless righteousness of Veronica, who embodies the struggle of right over wrong and who, with wit and charmingly breezy cool, fights the mean girls and boys, the Botoxed queens and murderous kings of her neo-Versailles.

Yet while Veronica walks and talks the hard-boiled line she can be a soft touch. With her father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni, back too), she takes on cases for pay but also because she cares. Like Buffy Summers, her sister in bantam blond awesomeness, Veronica was born to do this.

Specifically, she was born to do this once upon a time week after week, with introductory teasers, a wry voice-over, narrative complications and those mini-cliffhangers called act outs or act breaks that precede commercials. The movie is something of an advertisement for itself in some franchise form or another, and while it doesn’t exactly have act outs, Mr. Thomas, who wrote and directed, remains fond of mini-climaxes.

The story involves Veronica’s returning to Neptune to help out Logan (Jason Dohring), her onetime adversary and old boyfriend, who’s suspected of killing his rock-star girlfriend. Mr. Thomas’s appreciation for over-the-top, prime-time-soap-opera-style entanglements — he went to school in Austin, Tex., and surely studied the florid TV show “Dallas” — also remains intact.

Sweet oven-baked grits and millet with pecans and maple syrup

It’s nice to see Ms. Bell and some of the other “Veronica Mars” regulars making the rounds in Neptune, including her former sidekick, Wallace (Percy Daggs III), and her gal-pal Mac (Tina Majorino), the hacker who once conned the high school elite. Yet even without another episode to look forward to — and then another and another — their homecoming never sits right. Everything feels forced, from Veronica’s almost compulsive snappy patter to a class reunion that includes a sex tape and a brawl. A story thread involving Veronica and her current squeeze, Piz (Chris Lowell), is especially unpersuasive because it dies the moment that Logan appears before Veronica in his ill-fitting Navy whites and she name-checks “An Officer and a Gentleman,” a joke made unfunny by its obvious narrative telegraphing.

What does Veronica want? Mr. Thomas suggests that even after graduating from law school — and with a seductive big-city job dangling before her — she yearns for Neptune and its sordid intrigues. The problem is that Mr. Thomas can’t make the case or his story convincing. It’s clear why he and Ms. Bell are back, and there’s Logan’s murder rap, of course. But it’s hard to believe that Veronica, having matured into the totally together woman you always knew she would become, would honestly want to return to this pitiful small town other than for a visit with Dad.

She might want to extend that trip and nostalgically break out the Taser. She might even want to tie up some of the ends that have remained loose for the last seven years. But why would you want to go home again when you could just stream it on Amazon?

“Veronica Mars” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Violence, fisticuffs and a high school reunion.

Missing Malaysia Airlines flight was hijacked - govt official

Updated5:53 PM Saturday Mar 15, 2014

A candlelight vigil for passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Photo / AP

Investigators have concluded that one or more people with significant flying experience hijacked the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, switched off communication devices and steered it off-course, a Malaysian government official involved in the investigation said Saturday.

No motive has been established and no demands have been made known, and it is not yet clear where the plane was taken, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media. The official said that hijacking was no longer a theory.

"It is conclusive," he said.

He said evidence that led to the conclusion were signs that the plane's communications were switched off deliberately, data about the flight path and indications the plane was steered in a way to avoid detection by radar.

The Boeing 777's communication with the ground was severed just under one hour into a flight March 8 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian officials previously have said radar data suggest it may have turned back toward and crossed over the Malaysian peninsula after setting out on a northeastern path toward the Chinese capital.

Earlier, an American official told The Associated Press that investigators are examining the possibility of "human intervention" in the plane's disappearance, adding it may have been "an act of piracy."

While other theories are still being examined, the US official said key evidence suggesting human intervention is that contact with the Boeing 777's transponder stopped about a dozen minutes before a messaging system on the jet quit. Such a gap would be unlikely in the case of an in-flight catastrophe.

The Malaysian official said only a skilled aviator could navigate the plane the way it was flown after its last confirmed location over the South China Sea. The official said it had been established with a "more than 50 per cent" degree of certainty that military radar had picked up the missing plane after it dropped off civilian radar.

Why anyone would want to do this is unclear. Malaysian authorities and others will be urgently investigating the backgrounds of the two pilots and 10 crew members, as well the 227 passengers on board.

Some experts have said that pilot suicide may be the most likely explanation for the disappearance, as was suspected in a SilkAir crash during a flight from Singapore to Jakarta in 1997 and an EgyptAir flight in 1999.

A massive international search effort began initially in the South China Sea where the plane's transponders stopped transmitting. It has since been expanded onto the other side of the Malay peninsula up into the Andaman Sea and into the Indian Ocean.

The plane had enough fuel to fly for at least five hours after its last know location, meaning a vast swath of South and Southeast Asia would be within its reach. Investigators are analyzing radar and satellite data from around the region to try and pinpoint its final location, something that will be vital to hopes of finding the plane, and answering the mystery of what happened to it.

Can You Learn to be Creative?

(Thinkstock)

Is creativity magical? Not according to those now teaching it as a skill, discovers Colin Barras. Are there really secrets to unlocking your imagination?

Is it possible to be learn what it takes to be creative? If you look at great artists, musicians or entrepreneurs, it can seem that creativity is a gift possessed by the lucky few. It’s something the rest of us can only admire.

Yet in recent years, there have been growing calls to nurture and teach creativity from an early age in schools and universities. While the secret to unlocking creative genius remains elusive, research suggests that it’s possible to prime the mind for creative ideas to emerge. And creativity is even taught as an academic discipline in some places. So, what are the ways teachers are drawing out that creative spark? And should these techniques be taught more in schools?

The belief that schools are failing to nurture creative skills has grown in recent years. The educator and author Ken Robinson, for example, argued in an influential TED talk in 2006 that current education practices crush student’s innate creative talents. Robinson clearly touched a nerve – this became the most watched TED talk of all time (see below).

Is it true that creativity is being hampered, though? The evidence is mixed. Sandra Russ, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, has spent 23 years studying the way children in the US play when they are given two puppets and three building blocks. She has found that the scenarios the children act out with the toys are more imaginative today than at any time since the 1980s.

Then again, levels of creativity are falling in formal classroom settings. Children are routinely assessed using the Torrance Tests of creative thinking – for instance, they may be asked to think up alternative uses for an object such as a book or tin can. Test scores today are lower than they were in the 1990s. This may be because standardised testing encourages children to conform rather than value the trait of thinking differently.

Some studies suggest there may be something to these conformity fears. Jack Goncalo at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, has found that people primed to stand out from their peers subsequently performed much better on a creativity test than those that had been encouraged to conform to a group. “The environments where people are taught to fit in and not stand out – we should intervene on that,” says Goncalo.

Gerard Puccio at Buffalo State College in New York argues that it’s never been more important to arm people with the skills for creative thinking. “It’s no longer a luxury. It’s about survival,” he says. Industries rise when creativity thrives, and fall when it doesn’t – contrast the growth of Silicon Valley with the decline of Detroit’s automobile industry, for example.

Puccio chairs the International Center for Studies in Creativity, which was the world’s first university department of its type. It owes its roots to Alex Osborn, an advertising executive who worked on New York’s Madison Avenue in the mid-20th Century. Osborn co-founded BBDO – theinspiration for advertising agency Sterling Cooper in the TV series Mad Men. To get better ideas from his staff, Osborn began experimenting with methods to provoke creative thinking: one of the most famous he popularised was brainstorming.

Brainstorming ideas without being critical may be counterproductive, some studies suggest (Thinkstock)

When he retired, Osborn realised it made more sense to boost people’s creativity while they were still in education, and this led to forming the creativity department at Buffalo State College. Today, there are creative studies courses available in various universities around the world.

What kinds of techniques are taught? Puccio teaches his students that creativity comes in four stages – clarifying, ideating, developing and implementing. Clarifying is ensuring you’re asking the right question; ideating is about exploring as many solutions as possible; developing and implementing are making sure the idea is practical and convincing to others.

Of the four, ideating is perhaps the stage that most obviously involves innovative thinking. It’s here that the familiar brainstorming technique comes into play. The idea, says Puccio, is to force the brain out of a purely analytical state in which it tends to focus on one solution and ignore other options. A de-focused mind is more likely to make the unusual connections that just might suggest a novel solution to the problem.

One of Puccio’s ideating methods is to ask students to brainstorm a problem and then present them with an object at random, insisting they find a way to connect it to the discussion. “It’s about forcing the brain to give up old patterns and search for new ones. That’s often what happens when inventors make a breakthrough,” he says.

Lying on your back in a relaxed mood primes the mind to think creatively, researchers have found (Thinkstock)

Scientific research supports the idea that certain activities can prime the mind to come up with less obvious solutions than would emerge otherwise. Psychologists call it “divergent” thinking. For example, Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths University in London has shown that people in a relaxed mood are more likely to arrive at creative solutions when problem-solving. And another study by Australian researchers showed people are more likely to solve puzzles lying on their back than standing up. Perhaps it’s because when people are mellow, their wandering mind encourages them to review a diverse array of ideas, rather than get stuck in a more focused, narrow mode of thought.

As well as teaching divergent thinking skills, Puccio also argues that successful creativity involves ensuring ideas are practical and convincing – the “developing” and “implementing” stages of his four-step approach. “Creativity is not a licence to be bizarre,” he says.

This flies in the face of some common wisdom about how to encourage creativity. Take brainstorming. Many believe it works best when no idea, however far-fetched, will be criticised. “That always bothered me,” says Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at the University of California in Berkeley. She found that encouraging people to debate ideas and even criticise them during a brainstorm generates more useful ideas than when criticism is off the table.

This isn’t about criticising for the sake of it, says Nemeth. But if there are genuine problems with an idea they should be discussed. “On balance this will stimulate better decisions and more creative problem solving,” she says.

Should schools encourage unfettered creative activities among pupils? (Thinkstock)

So what does all this mean for schools? Should we throw out the textbooks and rote learning that are used to prepare students for standardised tests? Encourage children to let their minds wander rather than concentrate in the classroom? It’s easy to be cynical about some of the findings emerging from the study of creativity – although, as Nemeth’s work shows, discussing genuine problems while implementing these ideas in the classroom is probably a useful exercise. For instance, no one in creativity research argues that children should give free rein to their imagination at the cost of understanding a subject. After all, you can’t think outside the box until you fully understand what’s inside the box. But with 21st Century firms emphasising the value of creativity in their employees, it’s important that teachers are allowed to value the trait in their students too – which is something that today’s curriculums often discourage, says Puccio.

It’s also important to note that these creativity techniques are not going to turn an average kid into a young Einstein or Picasso – everyone accepts that you can’t teach genius. It’s more about encouraging the day-to-day creative thinking that can make students and an adult workforce more productive. Puccio calls it creativity with a little “c” – and he’s convinced it’s a talent we all possess. “You’re human and you have an imagination,” he says. “You are wired to be creative.”

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Is Pee Power Really Possible? - will you be able to charge your iPhone when you go to the toilet? YES!

(Science Photo Library)

Over one billion of the world’s population still lack access to basic electricity. Could tech that tries to generate power from urine be the answer?

Today, over seven billion people populate our planet, which means on average around 10.5 billion litres (2.8 billion gallons) of human urine is produced and wasted each day. It’s the equivalent of 4,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools, if anyone was counting. In fact, some scientists are – and if they have their way, our human waste will be wasted no more.

With around one-seventh of the population lacking access to basic electricity, and as our global supply of oil slowly dwindles and coal continues to add to mounting greenhouse gases, scientists have rushed to find solutions to power the world in more renewable and sustainable ways. One answer could lie in methods being developed to generate power from perhaps an unlikely source.

Last year, a group of researchers at Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK proved they could power a mobile phone with human urine. Their device uses what’s known as microbial fuel cells, or MFCs, to generate enough energy for a smartphone to text, browse the internet and make short phone calls. But they believe, in time, it could eventually help power houses, buildings, and maybe even entire off-grid villages.

A microbial fuel cell is essentially an energy converter, which uses bacteria found in nature to breakdown organic matter, and in turn produce electrons that are converted into energy. It’s a self-renewing system, because the more waste the microbes eat, the more energy the system can generate and for longer.

MFCs hold such promise because they are currently one of the most efficient means of converting waste to energy. According to Ani Vallabhaneni, co-founder of Sanergy, a start-up that converts human waste to energy and fertiliser in Kenya’s slums, common biogas digesters (which convert waste into mostly methane gas) are around 35% efficient in terms of capturing energy inside the waste. It’s claimed MFCs have upwards of 85% efficiency.

UK researchers have shown they can power a mobile phone with human urine (Bristol Robotics Laboratory)

Research into MFCs is nothing new – they first appeared over a century ago, and methods have advanced in fits and starts ever since. In the 1960s, Nasa began looking at using microbial fuel cells in space to generate power from rice husks. In the 1980s scientists started investigating whether these cells could help power developing countries. But it’s only after 2000 that this research area has really exploded – born of a growing need and increasing opportunity for renewable-energy sources.

Ioannis Ieropoulos, the lead researcher behind Bristol’s pee-powered phone charger, and his team have been working on this technology since 2002; their recent breakthrough has come from adopting a new approach. Other scientists in this field are trying to improve the efficiency of single cells, so that they produce more electrons, explains Carl Hensman at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds Ieropolous’ research. But the Bristol team’s approach stacks a series of small-scale microbial fuel cells together. “[Ieropoulos] is redesigning the fuel cell to make it smaller, and put more cells in there to get more electrons coming out,” says Hensman.

The process is similar to what researchers found when attempting to generate more electricity from the old potato light-bulb experiment. By boiling and then cutting the potato into thin slices to form a parallel series (instead of just using a bigger potato or trying to speed up the chemical reaction inside the potato) they increased the energy output 10-fold.

Electric jolt

Microbial fuel cells may be promising, but they aren’t only one way of unlocking the energy inside our urine.

Urine consists of approximately 98% water, and 2% urea, which is made up of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Gerardine Botte, a researcher at Ohio University, recently developed the GreenBox, a device that extracts the hydrogen from urea through a process called microbial electrolysis. Electrolysis uses a jolt of electricity to split the urea into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and then captures the hydrogen to produce energy. The nitrogen can be used for artificial fertilisers.

Unlike Ieropoulos’ MFC system, which simply generates electricity from natural bacteria, Botte’s process requires a constant source of power – the jolt to split the molecules and produce hydrogen.

“If you had a building of 300 people, you are probably going to need a box of about 1 kilowatt of power to clean the water,” explains Botte. “You cannot get more energy than the energy you put in. Hydrogen is only going to have about 40% efficiency – you’re recovering 40% of the energy you use to clean urine.”

As a result, this process is more about capturing the previously untapped energy in pee during the purification process, than creating an entirely new renewable source of power. Still, to get fuel-grade hydrogen while decontaminating (removing the ammonium) wastewater can save tremendous energy costs – so the potential benefits are clear.

“The most important contribution is deploying these boxes in water treatment facilities,” Botte says, “where we’re already using energy to clean the water.”

Water works

So could pee-power really be the energy of the future? And can it be a solution not just for developed nations, but for the billion people around the world who lack access to electricity?

The biggest hurdles are currently cost, scale, and output. At the commercial level, these systems could be applied to wastewater treatment plants, saving tremendous energy costs by effectively recovering energy during the process of treating urine, and feeding it back into the system.

For smaller-scale home or office use, they still don’t quite produce enough electricity from urine to justify the space and expense. For places without big industrial systems – but in need of both energy and clean water, it’s another story.

“There’s a lot of basic research still going on, a lot to be developed. I believe it can make it, but the cost has to be really low,” says Korneel Rabaey, president of the International Society for Microbial Electrochemistry and Technology.

It's hoped that mrcrobial fuel cells will be a much more efficient option than common biogas digesters, which convert waste into mostly methane gas.(Sanergy)

Rabaey estimates that if a one-cubic-metre box containing a microbial fuel cell system was installed in a village of 2,500 people – and all their urine was constantly funnelled through that box – you could generate a constant current of around 500 watts. This would equal around 12 kilowatt hours of energy per day, or enough to run only one standard 50-watt bulb for around 240 hours.

Presently, this kind of system would cost between $5,000-$10,000. While that’s a hefty price tag, it would last for an incredibly long time, says Rabaey, “because these organisms inside are self-renewing. As long as you feed it waste water, the bacteria is happy.”

While today’s solar panels could certainly deliver more power per unit at that cost, they wouldn’t last for as long – or be able to clean wastewater.

The Bristol Robotics Lab researchers are aiming to crack this price-per-unit issue. They built their mobile phone-charging prototype for just a few hundred pounds – and in two years they hope to have a cheaper prototype that can be made from locally available materials, anywhere in the world.

“We have to be realistic,” says Ieropoulos, “we cannot be promoting a technology which is not feasible to be implemented in a poor country.” Rabney agrees. “You cannot expect a chemical engineer to be present in every village. It has to be simple, robust, long-lived, and self-reporting,” he says.

So even if answering nature’s call can actually help us make calls for the first time in history, don’t expect your next toilet to come with built-in phone chargers – at least, not just yet.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Australian Snake eats Crocodile after Battle

The snake curls itself around the crocodile at Lake Moondarra on 2 March 2014 — The snake coiled itself around the crocodile, residents said

A snake has won a lengthy battle with a crocodile in northern Queensland, wrestling it, constricting it and then finally eating it.

The incident at Lake Moondarra, near Mount Isa, was captured on camera by local residents on Sunday.

The 10-ft snake, thought to be a python, coiled itself around the crocodile and the two struggled in the water.

The snake later brought the dead crocodile onto land and ate it.

The snake begins eating the crocodile at Lake Moondarra on 2 March 2014 — The snake then began to eat the crocodile, surprising residents

The snake, pictured after eating the crocodile at Lake Moondarra on 2 March 2014 — After the feast, the outline of the crocodile could be seen inside the snake

"[The crocodile] was fighting at the start, it was trying to keep its head out of water and survive," Tiffany Corlis, who took these pictures, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"But as the morning progressed you could tell both of them were getting a little weaker as the struggle was going on, finally the croc sort of gave in."

Her husband, Travis, told AFP news agency that the two adversaries had "quite a struggle" in the water.

"It was an ongoing battle," he said. "We were just standing there in amazement watching it."

Another witness, Alyce Rosenthal, told local media that the two creatures fought for about five hours. By the end, they appeared exhausted, she said.

"It's not something that you see every day," she said.

Friday, March 14, 2014

VIDEO|1:14

Movie Review: 'Veronica Mars'

Missing Malaysia Airlines flight was hijacked - govt official

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Monday, March 3, 2014