VFX Vet Jeff Barnes Joins Bent Image Lab

Visual effects vet Jeff Barnes — co-founder of CafeFX and The Syndicate and past Digital Domain vp — has formed a partnership with Portland, Ore.-based digital production and animation studio Bent Image Lab through which he will oversee the company’s new Digital Media Group.

In his role, Barnes will work with the Bent team to create content for cell phones, tablets and touch screens as well as special venue experiences implementing augmented reality, pixel mapping and other developing technologies. He also will manage the company’s visual effects division, whose credits include NBC’s Grimm and IFC’s Portlandia.

Bent began as a stop-motion, mixed-media and CGI studio and is expanding its new media division. “It is a whole new world of opportunity for unique ways of telling stories and promoting products through alternative viewing spaces,” Barnes said in a statement, adding that he has “known the team at Bent for years and has always been impressed with their high level of creativity and unique approaches to production.”

A past chair of the Visual Effects Society, Barnes co-founded The Computer Café Group in 1993 and oversaw the operations of its feature film visual effects division, CafeFX, and commercial studio, The Syndicate. He also provided management and development input for Sententia Entertainment, the company’s feature film production division. He most recently served as a vp/general manager at the Digital Domain Media Group.

Barnes has worked on roughly 85 films, including Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man, Spider-Man 3, Pan’s Labyrinth and Sin City.

Said Bent CEO Ray Di Carlo of Barnes: “His experience and reputation in the visual effects space is among the highest in the industry. He will be invaluable to our studio for both the new venture and our growing visual effects efforts."

E-mail: Carolyn.Giardina@THR.com

Twitter: @CGinLA

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/business/~3/wHMJNg5g8r8/story01.htm
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Premiere: See Yeasayer's New Music Video Shot in the World's Trippiest Laboratory

The tower of Naturalis in the Dutch province of Leiden is like something sprung from the mind of Terry Gilliam: seven stories of shelves lined with preserved animals, insects, and fossils. Row upon row of jars containing discomfiting specimens. The tower houses the largest collection of natural history objects in Holland, and it’s sealed from the public — unless you’re Ruben van Leer, and you want to film the music video for the latest Yeasayer single, “Glass of the Microscope.” In which case you get the whole place to yourself.

“For a moment, among these scientific objects, we felt the entire history of the city,” van Leer, a Dutch filmmaker and artist, told WIRED. “We wanted to fuse that history with ideas of an evolutionary future. After technology saves the world — as Silicon Valley wants us to believe — what then?”

The last track on Yeasayer’s acclaimed 2012 album Fragrant World, “Glass of the Microscope” is heavy with the band’s characteristic silky synths and torpid melodies. There’s a post-apocalyptic vibe in the video that is subtle but persistent, imagining band members Chris Keating, Ira Wolf Tuton, and Anand Wilder as scientists struggling to find a cure for an unnamed global affliction. In addition to the Naturalis tower, the band filmed in molecular biologist Hans Tanke’s lab at Leiden University, one of the oldest research universities in Europe and the place where the 17th-century Dutch microbiologist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek developed an early prototype of the electron microscope.

Van Leer specializes in the refraction of the scientific through art. His in-progress opera film, Symmetry, was the first project selected by the arts@CERN program in Geneva, where he spent time shooting film at the Large Hadron Collider and thinking about how concepts in high-energy particle physics inform narratives of bodies in motion on a macroscopic scale.

“Through technology, we can observe our world from an increasing number of perspectives, and interact with its data,” said van Leer. “In this way, storytelling becomes a part of reality. Pop culture becomes science becomes culture again.”

There’s a tension between analog and digital — as well as the scientific and the philosophical — throughout the new video, which layers film shot through microscopes with 3-D computer animation created using a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor camera. As objects preserved in jars merge with objects pressed between plates of glass beneath the microscope, human bodies dance through those same microscopic images.

“What if the causes of certain material manifestations that seem so big in our world can be found on a microscopic scale within ourselves?” asked van Leer. “Through the pressure and response of our environment, we’ll be forced to think in more symbiotic ways.” In the end, this cure for what ails the world is “left to the imagination of the audience.”

A final, delicious fact about van Leer: his father is the lead vocalist and guitarist for the prog-rock group Focus, whose instrumental cut “Hocus Pocus” blew up in the U.S. in the early ’70s. As a kid, van Leer says he would ask his father why he became a musician, and his dad would reply, “I make music for the spheres.” Van Leer is similarly enigmatic when he speaks about his own work and what he hopes to achieve with it. “The power of art, for me, lies in aspiration,” he said. “We already have the power to create. What world will we make?”

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661370/s/328744bd/sc/38/l/0L0Swired0N0Cunderwire0C20A130C10A0Cyeasayer0Eglass0Emicroscope0Evideo0C/story01.htm
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2 parties bicker over blame for parks shutdown

Tourists visit the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, in New York. The Statue of Liberty reopened to the public after the state of New York agreed to shoulder the costs of running the site during the partial federal government shutdown. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Tourists visit the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, in New York. The Statue of Liberty reopened to the public after the state of New York agreed to shoulder the costs of running the site during the partial federal government shutdown. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

This image provided by the National Park service shows Arizona Governor Jan Brewer holding a check for $426,500 dollars presented to her by the town of Tusayan, Ariz., as partial payment to the park, Saturday Oct. 12, 2013 at Grand Canyon National Park, Ariz. Also shown, from left, Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Dave Uberuaga; Brewer; Tusayan, Ariz., Mayor Greg Bryan and Tusayan Councilman, Craig Sanderson, rear. The National Park Service announced that it has entered into an agreement with the State of Arizona that will allow Grand Canyon National Park to re-open and temporarily operate during the government shutdown. (AP Photo/ National Park Service, Michael Quinn)

Jackson Blendowski, 6, of New Hampshire, peers up at the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, in New York. The Statue of Liberty reopened to the public after the state of New York agreed to shoulder the costs of running the site during the partial federal government shutdown. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

WASHINGTON (AP) — As congressional leaders raced to seal a deal that would reopen the government, lawmakers from both parties jabbed at one another Wednesday over who was to blame for the most high-profile casualties of the 16-day shutdown: the national parks.

At a House hearing, members of Congress focused on the World War II Memorial on the National Mall, where veterans were initially denied access after the government closed on Oct. 1. A crowd that included Republican lawmakers converged on the memorial Sunday, pushing past barriers to protest the site's closure.

The memorial and other national park units have become a political symbol as lawmakers bicker over blame for the park closings.

Republicans say many parks and open-air monuments did not need to be closed, but Democrats said the GOP had only itself to blame for the shutdown, after Republicans demanded that measures to defund the new health care law be included in bills to keep the government open.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., held up a mirror at the hearing and invited Republicans to look at it to find the cause of the shutdown.

Governors in at least five states have reopened national parks such as the Grand Canyon and Statue of Liberty in recent days, but Republicans say the measures were too little, too late.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., said the National Park Service appears to have intentionally made the shutdown "as painful and visible as possible."

Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis denied that, saying that turning away visitors "is not in our DNA."

Jarvis called the agreements with governors that have allowed some parks to reopen "a practical and temporary solution that will lessen the pain for some businesses and communities — a Band-Aid until Congress passes an appropriations bill."

Jarvis, who appeared at the hearing only after being issued a subpoena, urged Congress to reopen the government so his agency can reopen all 401 national park units.

Republicans, including Hastings and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said the Park Service acted in a political and provocative manner when it set up barricades at open-air monuments such as the World War II Memorial and placed traffic cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore and other parks.

Hastings heads the House Natural Resources Committee, while Issa leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The committees held the joint hearing.

Jarvis defended placement of barricades at the World War II Memorial and other sites, saying that all but a dozen park service employees who work at the National Mall have been furloughed. Given the limited staff resources during the shutdown, "prudent and practical steps were taken to secure life and property at these national icons where security has become increasingly complex in a post-9/11 world," he said.

Contrary to the assertion of several Republican lawmakers, Jarvis said the Park Service allowed veterans and their families to visit the World War II Memorial.

"We know that visits of America's World War II veterans to the memorial are pilgrimages that many of them will only make once," he said. "Throughout the shutdown, we have worked diligently to try and ensure that no Honor Flight group, veteran, or their family has been turned away from visiting the veterans' memorials."

An organization called the Honor Flight Network brings World War II veterans to Washington.

Other visitors also are allowed at the memorial under an exception that allows First Amendment activities, Jarvis said.

Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., was not impressed. He said Jarvis's decision to set up barricades at the Lincoln and World War II memorials was "wrong" and mean-spirited.

"You besmirched (the Park Service's) reputation and soured relations with Congress," Lamborn told Jarvis. "In my opinion you have failed."

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., denounced Lamborn's comment and called Jarvis an "exemplary" public servant. Connolly called the hearing a "theater of the absurd" and "an audacious attempt by the majority to deflect responsibility and blame for the real-world consequences of a government shutdown."

GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, along with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, were among those at the World War II Memorial on Sunday. Cruz, Lee and other tea party-backed lawmakers refused to keep the government operating unless President Barack Obama agreed to defund the nation's health care overhaul.

___

Follow Matthew Daly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC

Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-16-Shutdown-National%20Parks/id-5573dd33bc4c4d9387da516034ae0486
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Coho Data looks to reinvent storage

October 15, 2013

Coho Data is a startup that's been operating largely under the radar, working on a new way of thinking about enterprise storage. Today the company is announcing general availability of its new storage framework, Coho Datastream.

What makes Coho's approach different? Unlike other storage plays, it makes use of software-defined networking (SDN) in its core solution. In fact, the company's initial products ship with a 52-port 10G OpenFlow switch that runs software tied into the actual storage hardware. In this way, Coho is actually leveraging SDN to deliver storage services -- which should enable customers to scale out easily while maintaining high performance.

The hardware itself is based on commodity servers and uses PCIe flash storage alongside traditional disk. Each node in the solution can handle internal storage tiering between flash and disk, and uses the OpenFlow switch to handle load balancing and other tasks. This allows the storage to be considered as a whole, rather than individual nodes. Adding new storage is as easy as adding more arrays. Initial hardware platforms will come as dual-node arrays in a 2U chassis, with two 10G ports per node, six 3TB disks, and Intel 910 PCIe SSDs.

At first, Coho DataStream will deliver NFS services alone. There are no iSCSI, FCoE, or even CIFS protocols available at launch, as the initial focus is on virtualization infrastructures, where NFS is a major player. Behind the NFS presentation layer is an object-based storage layout that can be configured with definable replication parameters.

SDN and OpenFlow, while still at an early phase, have taken the networking world by storm. Coho is one of the first to take the core SDN concept and extend it to storage networking.

This story, "Coho Data looks to reinvent storage," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/t/storage/coho-data-looks-reinvent-storage-228783?source=rss_infoworld_blogs
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This Isn't Your Granny Smith's Harvesting Technology

In West Michigan, it's apple harvest time. That may conjure up images of picturesque orchards and old-fashioned fun: growers harvesting apples and then selecting them by hand.

Think again.

Robotic arms, computer vision and high-resolution photography are helping Michigan growers wash, sort and package apples at top speeds in the business — think 2,000 apples per minute.

With this modern technology, farmers are expanding production and getting Galas and Ginger Golds from Michigan orchards to grocery stores faster and more cheaply.

That's especially important during bumper crop years like 2013, when Michigan apple growers are expected to bring in a potentially record-setting 30 million bushels.

Rob Steffens, an apple grower on West Michigan's fertile "fruit ridge," has about 280 acres of orchards northwest of Grand Rapids. He packs 800 to a 1,000 apple trees into each acre, which is about three times as many trees as his father grew on the land.

With so many new trees, Steffens and other Michigan growers needed a way to process all those extra apples faster and more cheaply.

So Steffens pooled his resources with six other farmers to build a $7 million apple packing plant. It's where his apples are sorted, washed, waxed and readied for shipping to grocery stores.

Wooden crates with "Steffens" stamped on them stack up against one wall in the warehouse. A machine picks up the crates and dumps the apples onto a sort of water conveyor belt. The three-foot-wide river of bobbing apples moves quickly, as a machine sorts the fruit.

Then the apples go through a tunnel filled with flashing lights.

"Really, this is the brains of that," Steffens says, as he points to the tunnel. "This takes a picture of each apple — I think it's between 25 and 29 times a second."

The computer then forms a 3D model of each apple so it can figure out the fruit's size, color and quality. The apples are sorted by weight and color in a fraction of a second. Bruised or misshapen apples are rejected.

"See, and it's kicking out fruit like this," Steffens says as he points to a blemish no bigger than a dime on the skin of one of the rejected apples.

The high-tech machine means the growers can process and pack way more fruit with the same amount of workers. On a typical day, the machine can scan almost 2,000 apples a minute.

"It's processing at an astonishing rate," says horticulturist Randy Beaudry, at Michigan State University.

But this new technology, he says, is what Michigan apple growers need to compete with other states.

"If, for instance, a large box store says, 'OK, we want fruit that are between 2.5 and 2.75 inches.' And they want them 80 percent red with coloration. And they want zero defects — Michigan growers can get that fruit," he says. "And they can do it within a few hours time."

Each year, Michigan is typically only behind Washington and New York state in terms of apple bushels. That has a lot to do with good weather and luck. But it's also because growers have been changing their orchards. Growers have been ripping out older, taller apple trees and replacing them with smaller ones, Beaudry says.

"The trees are shorter. They're closer together," he says. "We create what we call fruiting walls. That's a relatively recent innovation, but it's part of a long-term trend to reduce the size of apple trees, so that they're harvested more easily and more efficiently. So we don't need as much labor."

More and more technology is needed to move labor-intensive agricultural products like apples efficiently to market, Beaudry says.

Fortunately for us, the end result still tastes like an old-fashioned Michigan apple in October.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/10/15/232235993/this-isnt-your-granny-smiths-harvesting-technology?ft=1&f=1019
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Fla. bullying case: girls aged 12 and 14 charged

WINTER HAVEN, Fla. (AP) — After 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick committed suicide last month, one of her tormenters continued to make comments about her online, even bragging about the bullying, a sheriff said Tuesday.

The especially callous remark hastened the arrest of a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old girl who were primarily responsible for bullying Rebecca, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said. They were charged with stalking and released to their parents.

"'Yes, I bullied Rebecca and she killed herself but I don't give a ...' and you can add the last word yourself," the sheriff said, quoting a Facebook post the older girl made Saturday.

Police in central Florida said Rebecca was tormented online and at school by as many as 15 girls before she climbed a tower at an abandoned concrete plant and hurled herself to her death Sept. 9. She is one of at least a dozen or so suicides in the past three years that were attributed at least in part to cyberbullying.

The sheriff said they were still investigating the girls, and trying to decide whether the parents should be charged.

"I'm aggravated that the parents aren't doing what parents should do," the sheriff said. "Responsible parents take disciplinary action."

About a year ago, the older girl threatened to fight Rebecca while they were sixth-graders at Crystal Lake Middle School and told her "to drink bleach and die," the sheriff said. She also convinced the younger girl to bully Rebecca, even though they had been best friends.

The girls repeatedly intimidated Rebecca and called her names, the sheriff said, and at one point, the younger girl even beat up Rebecca at school.

Both girls were charged as juveniles with third-degree felony aggravated stalking. If convicted, it's not clear how much time, if any at all, the girls would spend in juvenile detention because they did not have any previous criminal history, the sheriff said.

The sheriff's office identified the two girls, but The Associated Press generally does not name juveniles charged with crimes.

The bullying began after the 14-year-old girl started dating a boy Rebecca had been seeing, the sheriff said.

A man who answered the phone at the 14-year-old's Lakeland home said he was her father and told The Associated Press "none of it's true."

"My daughter's a good girl and I'm 100 percent sure that whatever they're saying about my daughter is not true," he said.

At their mobile home, a barking pit bull stood guard and no one came outside despite shouts from reporters for an interview.

Neighbor George Colom said he had never interacted with the girl but noticed her playing roughly with other children on the street.

"Kids getting beat up, kids crying," Colom said. "The kids hang loose unsupervised all the time."

A telephone message left at the 12-year-old girl's home was not immediately returned and no one answered the door.

Orlando attorney David Hill said detectives may be able to pursue contributing to the delinquency of a minor charge for the parents, if they knew their daughters' were bullying Rebecca yet did nothing about it.

But it "will be easy to defend since the parents are going to say, 'We didn't know anything about it,'" said Hill, who is not involved in the case.

Perry Aftab, a New Jersey-based lawyer, told AP last month that it is difficult to bring charges against someone accused of driving a person to suicide, in part because of free-speech laws.

The case has illustrated, once more, the ways in which youngsters are using the Internet to torment others.

In a review of news articles last month, AP found about a dozen suicides in the U.S. since October 2010 that were attributed at least in part to cyberbullying. Aftab said she thought the number was at least twice that.

Before her death, Rebecca changed one of her online screen names to "That Dead Girl" and she messaged a boy in North Carolina: "I'm jumping." Detectives found some of her diaries at her home, and she talked of how depressed she was about the situation.

Last December, Rebecca was hospitalized for three days after cutting her wrists because of what she said was bullying, according to the sheriff. Later, after Rebecca complained that she had been pushed in the hallway and that another girl wanted to fight her, Rebecca's mother began home-schooling her in Lakeland, a city of about 100,000 midway between Tampa and Orlando, Judd said.

This fall, Rebecca started at a new school, but the bullying continued online, authorities said.

"Rebecca's mother went above and beyond to create interventions. The one issue that Rebecca's mom said to us was, 'I just didn't want to have her not like me, so I wanted to give her access to her cell phone so she could talk to her friends,'" Judd said. "Rebecca's family is absolutely devastated by this. Quite frankly, we're all devastated by this."

___

Kay reported from Miami.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fla-bullying-case-girls-aged-12-14-charged-221950204.html
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Support Unclear For GOP's Plan To End Shutdown

Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approximately 9:00 a.m. ET.

 

House Republicans were expected to announce their own plan Tuesday to end the partial government shutdown and avert a default on the national debt. But House Speaker John Boehner came to the microphones and kept things very vague.

Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

NPR's business news begins with the latest on the deadlock here in Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GREENE: We've been following the story all this hour: House Republicans have been expected to announce their own plan to end the partial government shutdown and avert a default on the national debt. But House Speaker John Boehner came to the microphones a short while ago and kept things very vague.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: There are a lot of opinions about what direction to go. There have been no decisions about what exactly we will do. But we're going to continue to work with our members on both sides of the aisle.

GREENE: Let's bring our congressional correspondent Tamara Keith in. Tam, when we spoke earlier this hour, you had said that there might not be enough Republican support for a plan that Boehner was coming up with. Is that what might have happened here?

TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: That's exactly what it looks like happened. He went in with a plan. He came out with: We've got a lot of ideas, here. And that was basically the vibe I got from California Republican Darrell Issa. When he was exiting the meeting, I asked him what the support level was among House Republicans, and whether it was unanimous.

REPRESENTATIVE DARRELL ISSA: Unanimous would be Democratic Party. We're the Republican Party, so we're nearly unanimous, at best.

KEITH: At best. And there have been just a - House Republicans are really struggling with how to move forward, here.

GREENE: House Speaker John Boehner in a position that is becoming all too familiar. But let's just step back, if we can, Tamara. We had a Senate plan. There was talk of a bipartisan deal to avert the default on the debt and the government shutdown, or this Republican plan, maybe not enough support for it. Are we any closer to a compromise on these two issues today?

KEITH: The Senate is still moving forward, and there's this idea that sometimes it's darkest before the light. Sometimes when there's total chaos here in the capital and you don't know which way is up, ultimately, that leads to something emerging that will actually work. And this could be part of Boehner telling his members that they just have to go with Democratic support or go with the Senate plan.

GREENE: All right. We'll be following that story all day long on NPR News. That's our congressional correspondent, Tamara Keith. Thanks, Tamara.

KEITH: You're welcome.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/15/234752361/support-unclear-for-gops-plan-to-end-shutdown?ft=1&f=3
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