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Thursday, April 25, 2013

4 fab Lawrence moments from flubbed speech

By Randee Dawn, TODAY contributor

How is it possible for anyone to have as much self-possession and chutzpah as 22-year-old Jennifer Lawrence? Of course, it's a good thing she does -- the Oscar-winning actress does tend to fumble around a bit at awards ceremonies (who can forget her tumble at the Oscars) -- but thanks to her quick wit and inability to lose her cool she comes out on top.

The latest example to surface? Back in January, Lawrence accepted a best actress award for "Silver Linings Playbook" from the LA Film Critics, and the video of her speech had everyone cracking up -- but they were laughing with her, not at her. Here are four of the best moments from that less-than-four-minute speech:

Acknowledging her Bradley Cooper 'relationship'
"Silver Linings Playbook" co-star Cooper introduced Lawrence, then quickly scooted off the stage; her first comments were directed at him: "I just found out about our relationship in the tabloids today so I do think ... I think we should break up."

Sick of it
Lawrence was memorably ill during awards season; a flu she was battling at the Golden Globes blossomed into walking pneumonia by the SAG Awards. And during her speech, she's still coughing -- but joking about it. In the video, she's out of breath and coughing, apologizing to the crowd: "Sorry to everyone who I shook hands with, I'm sick so you're screwed."?

What a heel
Just after that apology, Lawrence is attempting to get back on track when she stumbles (despite not walking anywhere) and discovers the heel of her shoe has gone wonky: "God, sorry! I'm really not trying to like -- I'm sorry, I'm like all three of the Stooges right now. I'm on Sudafed, I'm sorry!"

Get back in the game
By the end of the speech, Lawrence is still holding on to her self-possession, but she's also starting to have trouble looking at the crowd. Fortunately, she's won them over and they're shouting back at her that she's "doing fine!" "Am I? I'm afraid to look at all of you. ... Shouldn't have looked at Bradley, that was a mistake," she says.

In the end, it's a primer on how not to get flustered during a speech. If Jennifer Lawrence can walk out in front of a roomful of critics, hopped up on cold medication and still remain this charming, anyone can. Go JLaw!?

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TokBox Brings WebRTC To The Cloud, Enables Multi-Party Video Chats & SIP Interop

Telefonica’s TokBox announced a huge upgrade to its OpenTok on WebRTC service today. TokBox’s new cloud-based Mantis media distribution framework is designed to overcome some of WebRTC’s limits with regard to video distribution. By default, WebRTC is a peer-to-peer platform, but that makes it hard to scale video chats beyond two participants. With Mantis, TokBox essentially puts its own cloud infrastructure in the middle of these calls and is then able to route and manage calls that include multiple participants without using a prohibitive amount of bandwidth and using a complicated mesh-based architecture. In the future, as TokBox CEO Ian Small told me earlier this week, this will also enable TokBox shape video streams according to the different users’ bandwidth conditions and the developers’ needs. “With Mantis, what we’re doing putting smarts into the WebRTC infrastructure,” Small said. “Today, we’re routing traffic. Tomorrow, we’ll shape traffic.” On cool feature Mantis already enables today is SIP interop, so developers will actually be able to write WebRTC-based apps that allow users to call in from their standard phone lines. This, for example, is useful for video conferencing services where you can now have a number of WebRTC-based video streams and a few participants on regular phone lines simultaneously. Currently, Small told me, the system scales well for chats with up to ten users. In a webinar setting where just one user is broadcasting, it can easily scale up to more than a hundred users. The company beta tested Mantis with the help of LiveNinja and Roll20. Current OpenTok developers won’t have to do anything to take advantage of the new system, given that TokBox already abstracts most of the WebRTC calls anyway. They will just have to create the topology they need for their apps (P2P, multi-party chat, etc.) and get started. It just “happens in the cloud automatically,” as Small noted, and now that it’s in the cloud, the company will be able to add many new features to its implementation in the near future. WebRTC, of course, is still in its early phases, something Small also acknowledged in our interview. In his view, we are not even in the early adopter phase right now. Instead, he believes, WebRTC is still in its experimentation and early mover phase. Once WebRTC arrives in the stable release channel of Firefox (it’s about to hit the developer channels soon and should be in the

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wTQ9fSe290c/

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Samsung Galaxy S4 Review: The S Stands For Super, Not Simple

The Galaxy S4 has an easy mode, and more importantly, the Galaxy S4 needs an easy mode. This necessity is a double-edged sword. It means that the technology built into Samsung's latest generation smartphone does things you've never seen before, and maybe couldn't even imagine. However, really using that technology isn't as simple as you might think, and could be downright overwhelming to a novice smartphone user. This is the theme I kept running into with the GS4. If you're technologically advanced enough to be excited for hovering gestures and optical readers and two cameras working at the same time, then yes, you should absolutely jump on the Galaxy S bandwagon. But for those of you who want a phone that works well, keeps you connected, and not much else, be forewarned that the S in Galaxy S4 certainly doesn't stand for simple.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/LmqkECsIC3M/

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Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift Mashup: Listen Now!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/demi-lovato-and-taylor-swift-mashup-listen-now/

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Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Mysterious Silly Putty Devours Innocent Magnets

If you're old enough to remember the movie The Blob, starring a gelatinous, oozing menace that gooped its way across floors, slid under doors, attached itself to an exposed foot, hand, arm and then devoured its screaming victim without making even a swallowing sound ... If you liked The Blob, then feast your eyes on this: Joey Shanks' Killer Silly Putty ... It's real ? and it eats magnets! (You don't have to watch the whole thing to get the idea ...)

Well, let's say it "swallows" magnets. What you have here is, in fact, Silly Putty, but doctored with a healthy sprinkling of mixed iron oxide powder. Iron, as you know, likes magnets. Iron and magnets attract. So when Joey Shanks who runs a production company in Chapel Hill was making this for Scott Lawson's YouTube Science and Engineering Channel he put a boron neodymium magnet next to the iron-rich Silly Putty. The magnet and the iron bits couldn't resist each other, and because Silly Putty is a fluid, it pretty much flows over the magnet and appears to "swallow it."

In real life, it does this rather slowly, taking a half hour, sometimes more, but Joey sped up the footage to create the illusion of a gelatinous monster devouring a hunk of metal (or in one poignant scene, an innocent happy-faced metal-boy).

What happens to the metal once it's inside the putty? Does it dissolve in a stew of putty digestive juices? No. Magnet lovers rest easy ? it's in there, whole, like Jonah inside the whale.

Does it sink to the bottom? Or stay near an edge, "hoping" to escape? Turns out, according to blogger Phil Plait, astronomer, lecturer, writing for Slate, ("It's Alive! ALIIIVVVEEE") the magnet keeps moving, deeper and deeper into belly of the puttyish mass until it reaches equilibrium, until there's roughly the same amount of iron top, bottom, left and right, holding it in place:

The process continued until the magnet was in the center, because it's only then that the forces are balanced. Newton's Second Law of Motion states that an unbalanced force on a mass will cause it to accelerate (though in this case that acceleration is itself balanced by the viscosity of the Silly Putty, leaving very slow but constant motion; it's like terminal velocity). As long as there's more iron on one side of the magnet than the other, it'll move. So eventually it reached the center of mass of the putty wad and stopped.

Which is wonderful, because now you can imagine yourself, being pretty much iron-free, grabbing onto the putty, ripping it open, reaching in, and heroically rescuing the magnet from its horrible fate ... like the hunter who rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandma by slicing open the Big Bad Wolf! This is a physics lesson where you get to be a superhero. Is there anything better?

Well, dark chocolate is better. But that's another post.

Update: Hey! Commenty people, I'm sorry some of you (well, one of you ? "Captain Dave") don't like dark chocolate. No need to get persnickety, though, because in the end, you lose. Without dark chocolate, life is a pale thing. But since you are all wonderful, chocolate-loving or no, I thought I'd share this ? which just happened. When NPR producer Linda Holmes (who you may know from NPR's Monkey See blog) saw this post, she realized that by some crazy chance she happened to have her own iron-rich Silly Putty and a magnet.

Why? Linda told my producer, Andrew Prince, that she got them from a TV company, but not being sure what to do with them, she kept them in a can magnetically attached to a metal file cabinet next to her desk. But on seeing the video, she thought, "Ah, that's what they're for!" So she pulled the magnet out of its Silly Putty wrapper and brought them separately to Andrew and here, freshly minted, is Andrew's version of the same experiment. This may not be as exciting for you as it is for us, but how often do you get to see something cool in a video and get to repeat it, with all the parts handed you for free ? on the very same day? Life, sometimes, is just wonderful.

Andrew Prince/NPR/YouTube

The dodo belongs to Andrew. It's extinct, I know, but it still loves dark chocolate.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/04/23/178615004/oh-the-horror-famished-silly-putty-devours-innocent-magnets?ft=1&f=1007

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New IU study: 'How' often is more important than 'why' when describing breakups

Public release date: 23-Apr-2013
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Contact: George Vlahakis
vlahakis@iu.edu
812-855-0846
Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Maybe rocker Greg Kihn was being prophetic in his 1981 hit, "The Breakup Song," with its chorus, "They don't write 'em like that anymore." An Indiana University professor's new paper looks at how people write to break up today, including through texts, emails and social media.

According to a new research article by Ilana Gershon, associate professor of communication and culture in IU's College of Arts and Sciences, part of what makes the breakup stories she collected into American stories is that the medium seems so important to the message when breaking off relationships.

"It wasn't until after I had collected many breakup stories that I realized my students had told me something quite revealing that would come up time and time again. ... American undergraduates focus on the 'how' of a breakup when describing their breakups, not the 'why' or the 'who,'" Gershon said.

Her paper, "Everytime We Type Goodbye: Heartbreak American Style," published in the journal Anthropology Now, discusses how the narratives of breakups in the United States differ from those in other countries.

Gershon also is the author of the 2010 book, "The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media" (Cornell University Press), which argued that Facebook and other forms of social networking have radically changed the playing field of dating today.

She interviewed 72 people at length for her paper, including 66 undergraduate college students who communicate frequently with new technologies. She found that when American college students tell their breakup stories, they consist of a string of conversations, and people always describe when anyone switched media to continue the conversations.

"The medium used for the conversation mattered enough to be almost always mentioned," Gershon said. "People would invariably mark when a different medium was used, explaining when communication shifted from voicemail to texting to Facebook and then to phone."

Her results differ from other ethnographic research done elsewhere, such as in Japan and Britain, where the story often focuses on justifying why the relationship had to end. Character was the emphasis overseas, not the method.

"The American undergraduates I interviewed were not discussing their breakups in terms of the right balance of dependence, or even the kind of people who might break up," Gershon added.

"The closest an interviewee came to describing herself as a particular type of person was a woman who decided not to show anyone else the text breakup message her ex had sent her. Even this example shows that U.S. undergraduates were using the 'how' of the breakup as the narrative frame to explore what an end of the relationship might mean for them."

In many cases, the young people Gershon interviewed were looking for validation that it had been a bad breakup and the medium was crucial evidence.

In the paper, Gershon cited one example of a breakup done through a text message. "Rebecca" wanted to talk on the phone with her former boyfriend to have what she considered a "proper ending to the relationship."

"As in most of the narratives I collected, the 'how' of the breakup was the central focus of Rebecca's story," Gershon said. "This 'how' stood in for other questions that haunted Rebecca as well -- namely why her ex-boyfriend decided to break off the relationship.

"Rebecca and others did not focus on the 'why' of the breakup or the 'who' of the breakup, although this course would come up in the narratives as secondary themes," she said. "By focusing on the 'how,' she was able to avoid these often unanswerable questions -- unanswerable questions like why the breakup had happened in the first place and who really was to blame."
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

New IU study: 'How' often is more important than 'why' when describing breakups Public release date: 23-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: George Vlahakis
vlahakis@iu.edu
812-855-0846
Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Maybe rocker Greg Kihn was being prophetic in his 1981 hit, "The Breakup Song," with its chorus, "They don't write 'em like that anymore." An Indiana University professor's new paper looks at how people write to break up today, including through texts, emails and social media.

According to a new research article by Ilana Gershon, associate professor of communication and culture in IU's College of Arts and Sciences, part of what makes the breakup stories she collected into American stories is that the medium seems so important to the message when breaking off relationships.

"It wasn't until after I had collected many breakup stories that I realized my students had told me something quite revealing that would come up time and time again. ... American undergraduates focus on the 'how' of a breakup when describing their breakups, not the 'why' or the 'who,'" Gershon said.

Her paper, "Everytime We Type Goodbye: Heartbreak American Style," published in the journal Anthropology Now, discusses how the narratives of breakups in the United States differ from those in other countries.

Gershon also is the author of the 2010 book, "The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media" (Cornell University Press), which argued that Facebook and other forms of social networking have radically changed the playing field of dating today.

She interviewed 72 people at length for her paper, including 66 undergraduate college students who communicate frequently with new technologies. She found that when American college students tell their breakup stories, they consist of a string of conversations, and people always describe when anyone switched media to continue the conversations.

"The medium used for the conversation mattered enough to be almost always mentioned," Gershon said. "People would invariably mark when a different medium was used, explaining when communication shifted from voicemail to texting to Facebook and then to phone."

Her results differ from other ethnographic research done elsewhere, such as in Japan and Britain, where the story often focuses on justifying why the relationship had to end. Character was the emphasis overseas, not the method.

"The American undergraduates I interviewed were not discussing their breakups in terms of the right balance of dependence, or even the kind of people who might break up," Gershon added.

"The closest an interviewee came to describing herself as a particular type of person was a woman who decided not to show anyone else the text breakup message her ex had sent her. Even this example shows that U.S. undergraduates were using the 'how' of the breakup as the narrative frame to explore what an end of the relationship might mean for them."

In many cases, the young people Gershon interviewed were looking for validation that it had been a bad breakup and the medium was crucial evidence.

In the paper, Gershon cited one example of a breakup done through a text message. "Rebecca" wanted to talk on the phone with her former boyfriend to have what she considered a "proper ending to the relationship."

"As in most of the narratives I collected, the 'how' of the breakup was the central focus of Rebecca's story," Gershon said. "This 'how' stood in for other questions that haunted Rebecca as well -- namely why her ex-boyfriend decided to break off the relationship.

"Rebecca and others did not focus on the 'why' of the breakup or the 'who' of the breakup, although this course would come up in the narratives as secondary themes," she said. "By focusing on the 'how,' she was able to avoid these often unanswerable questions -- unanswerable questions like why the breakup had happened in the first place and who really was to blame."
###

[ | E-mail | Share ]
?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/iu-nis042313.php
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Montana Democrat Baucus rules out 7th Senate term

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. leaves his committee office on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 23, 2013, saying that he was going to speak to the news media in his home state of Montana before discussing his retirement from the Senate. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2012 file photo, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. speaks reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. According to Democratic officials: The six-term Democratic Sen. Max Baucus plans to retire. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

FILE - In this April 17, 2013 file photo, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. According to Democratic officials: The six-term Democratic Sen. Max Baucus plans to retire. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Graphic profiles eight retiring U.S. senators

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus of Montana announced plans Tuesday to retire at the end of his term after a career of enormous power and notable independence, producing both collaboration and conflict with fellow Democrats on major tax and health care legislation.

"I don't want to die here with my boots on. There is life beyond Congress," the 71-year-old Baucus said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He became the eighth senator to announce retirement plans for 2014, and the sixth Democrat. One public poll recently suggested he would have faced a difficult challenge if he had sought a seventh term.

Republicans must gain six seats in 2014 to win a majority, and they said the retirement enhanced their prospects.

Yet Democrats were cheered when former Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who recently stepped down after two terms, swiftly expressed interest in the race.

In a brief statement, President Barack Obama said Baucus "has been a leader on a broad range of issues that touch the lives of Americans across the country."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and Baucus' frequent legislative partner, was complimentary, too. "We ran the Finance Committee for 10 years together, and every bill except for three or four was bipartisan," he said in a statement. "The Senate will be worse off as a deliberative body when Senator Baucus leaves."

In a written statement, Baucus sketched an ambitious agenda for the rest of his term, topped by an overhaul of the tax code.

"Our country and our state face enormous challenges - rising debt, a dysfunctional tax code, threats to our outdoor heritage and the need for more good-paying jobs," he said, adding several Montana-specific priorities as well.

Baucus, a fifth-generation Montanan, was elected to the Senate in 1978 after two terms in the House. He became the top Democrat on the Finance Committee in early 2001. He has held the position ever since on the panel ? which has jurisdiction over taxes, Medicare, Medicaid, health care and trade ? as chairman when his party held a majority and as senior member of the minority when Republicans were in power.

The panel has a long tradition of bipartisanship, but Baucus ascended to power in an era of increasing partisanship in Congress.

Many Democrats were unhappy when he worked with Republicans to enact the tax cuts that President George W. Bush won in 2001. And then again in 2004 when Congress pushed through a GOP plan to create a new prescription drug benefit under Medicare, a measure that most Democrats opposed as a giveaway to the large drug companies.

Baucus stood with fellow Democrats in 2005 when Bush proposed legislation to partially privatize Social Security, an epic battle that ended in defeat for the president's effort.

He played a central role in the enactment of Obama's watershed health care legislation in 2010, although some inside his party complained that precious momentum was lost while he spent months on bipartisan negotiations that ultimately proved fruitless.

More recently, Baucus has expressed opposition to Democratic proposals to use an overhaul of the tax code as a means of raising additional revenue. He was one of four members of his party to oppose the budget the leadership brought to the floor with a requirement to that effect.

On other issues large and small, Baucus' voting record reflected his rural state.

Most recently, he voted against legislation that Obama backed to expand background checks for gun purchasers.

During the debate on the budget, he was the only Democrat to vote for a proposal to reopen White House tours. Most members of his party viewed the GOP measure as an attempt to embarrass Obama, but it would also have meant more money for clearing snow from the entrances to Yellowstone National Park, a portion of which is in Montana.

For more than a decade, Baucus has sought federal assistance for the residents of Libby, Mont., where asbestos contamination from a vermiculite mine has been linked to deaths and illnesses.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said he learned of the retirement plans on Monday. He said Baucus told him he wanted to return to Montana, and noted that if he waited until the end of his next term he would be nearly 80.

Baucus, in the interview with the AP, said: "Been here 40 years. No regrets. It is time to do something different."

Maneuvering began almost instantly for the 2014 race.

"The opportunity to try and get the country moving again like we did in Montana, that's appealing," said Schweitzer, who outpolled Baucus in a hypothetical matchup in the recent poll. "I'm a fixer."

Possible Republican candidates include former Gov. Marc Racicot; former Rep. Denny Rehberg, who lost to Baucus in 1996 and to Tester last fall; former Rep. Rick Hill and Rep. Steve Daines. State Sen. Champ Edmunds of Missoula and former state Sen. Corey Stapleton, had already announced they would run against Baucus.

"Montana is a state where Republicans can and will do well," said Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, the GOP campaign committee chairman, pledging to provide the resources needed to turn the seat Republican.

The state twice voted against Obama in presidential races. Despite the president's presence on the ticket in 2012, Tester won a second term in a hotly contested challenge, and another Democrat, Steve Bullock, was elected governor.

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, touted last year's re-election of Tester and said, "We will continue to invest all the resources necessary to hold this seat."

Democrats will be defending 21 seats next year, compared with 14 for Republicans.

Baucus joined Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Carl Levin of Michigan in announcing his retirement plans.

Republicans Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and Mike Johanns of Nebraska also have decided not to seek re-election next year.

___

Gouras reported from Helena. Associated Press writers Matthew Brown in Billings, Andrew Taylor, Donna Cassata and Alan Fram in Washington and Carson Walker in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-23-US-Baucus-Retirement/id-4c21e6984de34ef281040385b4dd4f97

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