You don’t have to wait until March 12 to find out whether David Bowie’s first album in a decade is more Tin Machine than Low; the long-awaited The Next Day is already available, streaming in full on iTunes for a limited period pre-release.The stream continues Bowie’s current interest in previewing content from the album for free online before release; videos for both...
Feb
20
Secret Lives of Wild Animals Captured by 1 Million Camera-Trap Images
Label: Technology Thanks to motion-triggered digital camera traps, scientists have a powerful tool for studying reclusive animals in remote, inaccessible areas -- and also for generating animated .gifs of gorillas scratching their stomachs. Okay, scratching gorillas aren't the point of camera-trap research. But they're a very fun byproduct, along with up-close-and-personal photographs...
Feb
19
Watch a Robot Interview <em>Portlandia'</em>s Fred Armisen
Label: Technology Here at Wired we don’t fear losing our jobs to robots – in fact, we advocate for it.So when Fred Armisen stopped by the Wired office after the SF Sketchfest tribute to his Peabody Award-winning show Portlandia, we decided to let our robot Rob-EE do the talking. Armisen and Rob-EE even had a heart-to-android-heart. Rob-EE also managed to get some dirt about Armisen’s...
Wired Science Space Photo of the Day: Ancient Water Flows on Mars
Label: TechnologyHigh-Resolution Stereo Camera nadir and colour channel data taken during revolution 11497 on 13 January 2013 by ESA’s Mars Express have been combined to form a natural-colour view of the region southeast of Amenthes Planum and north of Hesperia Planum. The region imaged, which lies to the west of Tinto Vallis and Palos crater, is centred at around 3°S and 109°E, and has a ground resolution of about 22 m per pixel.
The image features craters, lava channels and a valley from which water may have once flowed. Dark wind-blown sediments fill the valleys and the floors of the craters.
Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) [high-resolution]
Caption: ESA
The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California
Label: TechnologyTeam Truckee entered the competition late, after Team Russia was unable to get visas in time. Their sculpture: "Rising Tide."
The weekend at Northstar ski resort in Truckee, California, is beautiful, sunny, and in the 30s. For eight teams of snow carvers from around the world, though, it’s terrible — the melty snow is sloppy, hard to carve, and even dangerous.
Teams of three from Finland, Japan, Germany, Canada, and the U.S. were selected from more than 40 applicants for the inaugural Carve Tahoe, a five-day competition to hew works of art from 14-foot-high, 20-ton blocks of snow. But despite the bad snow, the teams rely on decades of experience, handcrafted tools, and creative techniques to fashion their massive sculptures. The team members are sculptors and artists and designers, but also doctors and lawyers. Though they spend weeks each year carving, nobody makes a living doing it.
“Everyone seems to have their own method of doing things,” says Team Wisconsin’s Mark Hargarten. “It’s amazing how different they are.”
The Wisconsin team uses a grid system for their carving — a Native American wearing an eagle costume, its feathers turning to flames, called “Dance of the Firebird.” The polyurethane model they built is scaled so 1/2 inch equals one foot on the finished snow sculpture. They cut a copy of the model in four, and covered each section with clay, sectioned in 1/2 inch increments. They etch corresponding lines in the snow, one foot to a side, and they peel off one piece of clay, carve the part of the sculpture they can see, and move on to the next.
“You never get lost using the method,” says Dan Ingebrigtson, a professional sculptor from Milwaukee. “Three or four guys can work from different angles, and meet in the middle.”
Wisconsin’s got several other strategies behind their carving as well. From the south, it looks like they haven’t even started; they left the southern side of the block intact to protect the rest of it from the sun, and the wall has been decimated by the heat. More than 20 percent of its thickness has melted by Sunday night, three days in. After the sun goes down, the team is hollowing out the interior of the structure, so it will freeze faster overnight.
Other teams are relying on nighttime freezing as well. A team partly from the U.S. and partly from Canada carves spires from blocks they removed from the sculpture, and plans to attach them to the top of their sculpture, “The Stand,” which incorporates four interwoven trees. They’ll use melty snow pulled from the middle of the block right when the sun goes down to cement the tops onto the trees, says team member Bob Fulks from the top of a stepladder as he cuts away at the sculpture with an ice chisel.
Fulks’ team is leaving Tahoe after the competition to go straight to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, for another competition, where he anticipates no problems with warm weather.
“It’s a good gig, you can travel all over the world doing it,” he says. “You go around and see the same people.”
Many of the carvers know each other from previous competitions.
“We’ve sculpted with almost everybody here before,” says Team Idaho-Dunham’s Mariah Dunham, who is working on “Sweet House (of Madness)” with her mother, Barb. The creation is a beehive, with the south side as the exterior, and the north side (intentionally placed out of the sun) as a representation of the comb, including hexagonal holds that perforate all the way to the hollow interior.
Though Carve Tahoe is new, snow carving is not. Many of the sculptors have been at it for more than 20 years, traveling around the world and meeting and competing against many of the same people — though each competition demands unique new designs from all the sculptors. Kathryn Keown discovered snow carving while Googling something completely different, and decided she wanted to host an international event.
“First we fell in love with the sculptures, then we fell in love with the sculptors,” says Keown, who founded the competition with Hub Strategy, the ad agency where she works.
Keown contacted several ski areas before Northstar, but the resort was on board right away; its owner, Vail Resorts also owns Breckenridge, where one of the biggest and most prestigious snow carving competitions is held.
But Keown wanted to commit to the design of the competition, not just the sculptures. Applicants submitted their designs last summer, and Keown enlisted Lawrence Noble, chair of the School of Fine Art at the Academy of Art University to help choose modern, complex, realist designs. She wanted no artsy, kitschy snowmen.
Then she chose a design-friendly logo and judges. In addition to Noble, the panel of judges features a sushi chef from Northstar, two interior designers, a photographer from nearby Squaw Valley, and Bryan Hyneck, vice president of design at Speck, which makes cases for mobile devices and was one of the event’s sponsors.
“The level of complexity and sophistication in this type of sculpture is just amazing,” says Hyneck, who has judged industrial and graphic design competitions, but never snow carving. “It’s amazing how organic some of the shapes can be.”
As a judge, Hyneck says he’ll focus on the craft and the execution of the sculptures, and how the sculptors use particular techniques to take advantage of the snow’s properties. But he adds that subject matter, point of view, message, and relationship to a theme are all important points as well.
“Anybody that is really going to push the limits of the capabilities of the media is going to get a lot of my attention,” he says.
For some, like the Germans, that means suspending massive structures made completely of snow. Their sculpture, titled “Four Elements”, features four large spires encircled by a tilted disc. Despite a trickle of melted snow dripping off the bottom edge, one — or even two — of the German carvers frequently stand atop the sculpture, using saws or chisels to shape the towers.
Sunday evening, after the sun has gone down and the temperature dropped, Josh Knaggs, bearded, with a cigarette in his mouth, is sitting in the curve made by the largest bear from the Team Idaho-Bonner’s Ferry sculpture, “Endangered Bears.” Wearing a blue event-issued jacket, he’s brushing out the hollow loop made by mama and papa bear.
Three days later, the judges award Knaggs and his team third prize, with Japan’s modern work, “Heart to Heart” coming in second and Germany’s gravity-defying “Four Elements” taking first. The teams disperse, and after a few more sunny days, Northstar tears down the structures before they get too soft and fall — all except the German piece, which can’t bear its own weight and collapses after judging is complete. But the ephemeral nature of the snow is part of what attracts the competitors.
“It’s for the moment, and it’s a beauty all in itself, creating something that’s gonna be disappearing, you know, it’s okay that it disappears,” says Team Truckee’s Ira Kessler. “We are making it for the moment.”
All Photos: Bryan Thayer/Speck
Where Will All the Female <em>Star Wars</em> Characters Go?
Label: TechnologyYes, Princess Leia was a smart, resourceful woman who had action hero chops of her own. She wasn’t just a princess waiting around in a castle for men to save her — despite the infamous scene where she ended up in a metal bikini as a sexy slave to a giant space slug.
But the fact remains: If you count up all the significant female characters who appear in the original Star Wars trilogy, the list reads as follows … Princess Leia. The only other two women with names and speaking parts in all three movies are Aunt Beru, and that Rebel Alliance representative at the end (who no one remembers until they’re forced to come up with more women).
As great a character as Leia was, however, she was functionally the lone representative of the female gender in a larger Star Wars universe where every other character moving the plot forward was a man. It’s even sadder when you consider that the dearth of women who play important roles (or any role at all) in the classic George Lucas films from the late ’70s and early ’80s echoes a problem we still have today: Women are dramatically under-represented in films and media.
And they’re even more poorly represented in roles where they are driving forces, not just ancillary characters or love interests for male heroes.
If you’ve never really noticed the absence of women in Star Wars (or movies at large), consider yourself living proof of how the limiting narratives of culture and media can warp our expectations. To the point where the presence of one woman in a cast of dozens of memorable male characters can seem like perfect equality.
Women accounted for a mere 33 percent of the roles in the top 100 Hollywood films in 2011, according to a study commissioned by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. When it came to the leading characters, women were even more dramatically under-represented, comprising only 11 percent of identifiable protagonists.
It gets even worse when you look at all-ages entertainment. Women — who, by the way, make up half the human population — comprised only 28 percent of speaking roles in top-grossing family films last year. And when women did appear, they were far less likely to hold roles of power or influence: making up only 3 percent of executive portrayals, for example, compared to 25 percent in real life.
Consider also how many Hollywood films — including the original Star Wars trilogy — fail the Bechdel Test, which asks only that a film contain two women who talk to each other at some point about something besides a man.
While not necessarily an indicator of quality, the Bechdel Test recognizes another uncomfortable truth: that women are most often portrayed in media primarily in terms of how they relate to men. I doubt the people who made these movies don’t believe they don’t value women as discrete human beings independent of men. But it’s the story the media shows if not tells.
It’s the narrative we’re all exposed to, over and over, whether we realize it or not.
Just look at the formidable female character Amidala, portrayed by Natalie Portman in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. She takes the throne of Naboo as queen at the age of 14, knows her way around a blaster to lead and win a war, and later steps into the role of a wise and far-seeing senator.
But ultimately, her narrative arc proves far less empowering than that of her daughter’s. Where Leia at least remained the same powerful, determined woman from beginning to end — and won Han’s heart regardless — Amidala crumbled emotionally and physically in Episode 3 after the loss of Anakin. She died not because of medical complications during childbirth or Anakin’s Force-choking domestic abuse, but because (according to the droid doctor) “she lost the will to live” after Anakin turned to the Dark Side. A reason so lame that it sounds like a futuristic version of “the vapours.”
Criticisms about representations of gender (or race and other diversity) are often countered in fandom by sociological or scientific analyses attempting to explain why the inequality happens according to the internal logic of the fictional world. As though there is any real reason that anything happens in a story except that someone chose to write it that way.
Fiction is not Darwinian.
Fiction is not Darwinian: It contains no impartial process of evolution that dispassionately produces the events of a fictional universe. Fiction is miraculously, fundamentally Creationist. When we make worlds, we become gods. And gods are responsible for the things they create, particularly when they create them in their own image.
Science fiction in particular has always offered a vision of the world not myopically limited by the world as it exists, but liberated by the power of imagination. Perhaps more than any genre of storytelling, it has no excuse to exclude women for so-called practical reasons — especially when it has every reason to imagine a world where they are just as heroic, exceptional, and well-represented as men.
More than any genre of storytelling, science fiction has no excuse.
Yes, many franchises are locked into demographic and historical legacies that make it difficult to introduce new characters that develop the iconic power or fan following of characters like Superman or Spider-Man. This makes women unlikely to play big roles in the important stories, and more likely to be killed, de-powered, or demoted. But the good news for Star Wars is that while these grandfathered gender dynamics may weigh heavy on stories that are still trapped in the past, they need not hinder the future.
Close your eyes, for a moment, and imagine a version of the Star Wars universe full of rich female characters who play diverse roles ranging from Jedi warriors to military leaders to bounty hunters.
Here’s the exciting news: It already exists. It’s called the Star Wars Extended Universe, a world developed through the officially licensed novels and other media outside the feature films. And it’s rife with excellent female characters who have already been embraced by Star Wars fandom, notably: Mara Jade, who appears at different times as an assassin, smuggler, Jedi Master (and Luke Skywalker’s wife); and Jaina Solo, a Rogue Squadron fighter pilot and Jedi Knight (and, you guessed it, Leia’s daughter with Han).
With a brand new film trilogy on the way from new Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy and director J.J. Abrams — famous not only for his sci-fi success with the Star Trek reboot but also female-lead TV fare like Alias — there’s no reason new Star Wars movies can’t aspire to achieve what the Extended Universe already has. A world where the other half of the human race is not only visible to movie-goers of all genders and ages, but equally capable of astonishing and inspiring feats of heroism.
<cite>The Monitor</cite> Heads to a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Label: TechnologyNot sure if you noticed, but it’s Star Wars Week on Wired. We’ve already dealt with the old movies and what the new movies will need, but it’s time to leave the big screen and get a handle on the best of the ancillary Star Wars products out there. To that end, we’ve got a new comic book that takes place between installments of the Original Trilogy, and two analog (or at least analog-inspired) games to take you back to your childhood. Beware, because we are descending to levels of Deep Nerd heretofore unplumbed.
Tasting notes for this week’s show:
- Brian Wood, the writer of Dark Horse’s new Star Wars ongoing comic, is also the man behind The Massive — the trade paperback of which is coming out next month. Highly recommended.
- Game publisher Fantasy Flight, maker of X-Wing Miniatures, also has a card game that’s pretty great. It’s a “living” card game rather than a conventional collectible game, meaning that you don’t have to pay through the nose chasing the best cards (though expansion packs are released periodically).
- A minute isn’t really enough to get across a full description of all the tables in Zen Studios’ new Star Wars Pinball, so here’s a deeper rundown.
Working on the Play section and editing features, Peter handles Wired magazine‘s pop culture and entertainment coverage: movies, TV, music, videogames, comic books and anything else that is absolutely integral to the survival of our species.
Read more by Peter Rubin
Follow @provenself on Twitter.
Giveaway: Win a <em>Robot & Frank</em> DVD and Programmable Rover 'Bot
Label: TechnologyThe unlikely futuristic heist flick Robot & Frank has a quirky premise: The son of a former cat burglar gets his aging father a robot companion, which the dad decides to train in the art of thieving.
It’ a dry comedy with a crime-thriller twist and a bit of romance, with star power from players like Frost/Nixon’s Frank Langella (the Frank of the movie’s title), 30 Rock’s James Marsden (Frank’s son), Susan Sarandon, and Liv Tyler. But the true fun of director Jake Schreier‘s Robot & Frank is conceiving of what our future might entail if everyone begins to live the dream of having their own ‘droid — and then programs them to do mundane, everyday tasks like make food and help old men shave (or, you know, steal jewels). Hey, it beats trying to figure out who is a Cylon and who isn’t.
Win a Copy of Robot & Frank and a ReCon Rover ‘Bot
To commemorate the release of the film on DVD, Wired is giving away a copy Robot & Frank as well a ReCon Rover programmable robot. Five runners-up will receive a copy of the film on DVD. To register for the giveaway watch the exclusive clip from the film above. Then hit the comments to answer the question: If you could program a robot to do whatever you wanted, what would it be?
Deadline to enter is 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Feb. 15, 2013. One randomly selected winner will be notified by e-mail or Twitter. Winners must live in the United States.
Note: If you do not have an e-mail address or Twitter handle associated with your Disqus login, you must include contact information in your comment to be eligible. Any winner who does not respond to Wired’s notification within 72 hours will forfeit the prize.
A Shockingly Mediocre Backpack and Battery Combo
Label: TechnologyThe North Face has been making mountaineering and hiking gear for years, so you’d think its product designers would know their way around a backpack, right? Well, they do — provided the backpack in question is aimed at folks headed into the wilderness.
But The North Face’s new Surge II Charged Daypack is meant for carrying a laptop instead of a pair of crampons; it can simultaneously protect and charge USB-powered hardware, thanks to a built-in battery pack. Unfortunately, if the time I spent with the Surge II is any indication, the company’s approach to the charge-while-you-schlep concept could use some tinkering.
It can hold 41 liters’ worth of stuff, more than enough space for overnight trip. Or, if you were headed into work, you could fit your lunch, attaché, gym clothes and your laptop and tablet. Its wide, well-padded straps mitigate weight well. No matter what I stuffed into the Surge II Charged Daypack over the week that I tested it, I never felt like the straps were digging into my shoulders.
On the outside of the bag, you’ll find a couple of horizontal stash pockets, a water bottle pocket and a zippered pocket that’s about the right size for a sunglasses case. For the safety-first set, there’s a reinforced loop near the base for a rear bike light, and the chest strap buckle doubles as a rescue whistle.
The Surge II Charged Daypack’s roomy interior is subdivided into three main sections: a laptop/tablet compartment, a central carry-all area, and an compartment full of a gazillion small pockets that also contains the aforementioned removable battery pack (more on that in a bit).
The bag’s laptop compartment can accommodate computers up to 17 inches. In the front of the laptop compartment, there’s an extra smaller sleeve which I found could hold a Nexus 10 tablet snugly. Sounds good right? Well, it would be, if there were adequate padding to protect your hardware from getting knocked around on your commute, or dinged by the rest of the crap in your bag.
The section of bag next the laptop compartment? It’s roomy, and I could fit a change of clothes and a dopp kit into it. But a lack of padding between the interior compartments means any hard or heavy gear you jam into it could wind up damaging your laptop or tablet.
The final large, zippered compartment is taken up by a ton of small pockets sized to accommodate smartphones, cables and the like. I get what The North Face was trying to do here, but unfortunately these pockets are too small to allow for much customization. So if you want to stash anything larger than an iPhone 5 or a small external drive, you’re hosed.
One of these frustratingly small pockets is designed to hold the backpack’s Joey T1 battery: a 5.5-ounce, 5-volt 13Wh lithium polymer battery pack that the company claims can charge a smartphone battery twice, or give a life-extending boost to your tablet or digital camera. (This is the same battery pack Timbuk2 and other bag-makers are using in their charging packs.)
While it was able to power my tablet as advertised, it only managed to charge my iPhone 5′s battery 1.25 times. Not cool. Also, while there’s plenty of cable management for your devices’ charging cables, the Joey T1 battery pack has its own long USB cable for charging it up, and there’s nothing to hold it in place. Opening the pack from the top, I found the cable often got in the way of taking my stuff out of the bag.
I wanted to like the Surge II Charged Daypack, but The North Face made that impossible. Conceptually, it’s a time-tested pack design from a reputable company. But the lackluster aftermarket battery pack seems to have been added as an afterthought, and the interior appears to have been arranged with very little thought at all. Anyone looking for a new bag and battery to carry and power their gear would be better off buying them separately.
WIRED Comfortable, even when carrying heavier loads. 41 liters is more space than most people will ever need on their daily commute or an overnight trip.
TIRED Minimal padding to protect laptops and tablets. Small interior pockets make the pack less versatile than it could be. Battery implementation feels tacked on, because it is.
Mouse Maker Scurries Away From PCs Toward iPad Future
Label: TechnologyThe struggles of personal computer giants like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Intel to adapt to a world driven by smartphones and tablets can be viewed clearly through slumping sales and falling share prices. But if you go out one orbit, to a company like Logitech, which makes the add-ons for PCs – the mice, keyboards and speakers – the rapid decline of the personal computer ecosystem is especially stark.
In the past two years the California and Switzerland-based company has seen its stock slide 62 percent in value. Sales in the most recent quarter, which ended December 31, were down 14 percent as Logitech posted an operating loss of $180 million. “Continued weakness in the global PC market was the primary factor in our disappointing Q3 results,” is how newly installed CEO Bracken Darrell summed it up.
Not exactly the way you want to kick off your first earnings call as the boss of the $2.3 billion company. But even as Darrell, the former head of Whirlpool’s business in Europe, has been busy paring down business lines, he’s surprisingly upbeat about what he plainly describes as a Logitech turnaround. And in what he’s dropping and what he’s kept, you can see where Darrell believes Logitech and consumer tech is headed.
First, what is gone. Darrell plans to wind down Logitech’s Harmony remote control, digital video security gear, speaker docks and console gaming peripherals by the end of this year. He doesn’t think consoles are going away, but he is more enamored of the premium prices that gamers pay for high-end gaming mice and other gadgets. Clearly Darrell believes speaker docks have been supplanted by Bluetooth speakers, and Logitech is pushing hard there with its UE (Ultimate Ear) boom box offerings.
As to remote controls and video security gear, both its Harmony business and security business never reached a size that could make a dent in Logitech’s bottom line. More importantly, Darrell says, neither remotes nor video security plugged easily into the distribution and scale advantages Logitech has in the PC world – and as grim as the news from PC-land is, Logitech is staying in the game.
Darrell argues that while consumers are flocking to tablets and smartphones for all kinds of computing tasks, at work you are still going to need either a desktop or notebook PC. “The PC industry will always be important to us,” Darrell says. “It’s not going to be something for us to brag about, but it’s going to be a profitable thing for us to do.”
The things Darrell does want to brag about he pulls from a canvas bag. There is a mobile-friendly version of the UE Bluetooth boom box, a metal and rubber-clad competitor to Jawbone’s Jambox.
Next, there is an ultrathin keyboard cum cover that clips magnetically to an iPad mini. Its standard iPad-sized counterpart has been a hit, and Darrell expects the same from the smaller version.
Clad in aluminum, the mini version has a fit and finish that pairs well with Apple’s sleek hardware. Design has to be a differentiator for Logitech going forward, Darrell says, but so does speed – especially when you are operating in Apple’s world. Logitech’s first ultrathin keyboard for the standard iPad took 13 months to develop and get to store shelves. The mini version took three months, Darrell says. Certainly Logitech learned a fair bit from the first iteration that it could apply to the second, but Darrell has also made changes, moving a core team of designers and engineers closer to manufacturing in Asia, for example, to speed things up.
The team anticipates the dimensions of follow-up Apple products, following rumors and its own gut to guess at thinness, width and length. As much as it can, it preps a product for manufacture, and then waits on Apple. “I don’t know about other companies, but Apple doesn’t share anything with us in advance,” Darrell says. “We have to have these workarounds, and just be ready to hit the start button as fast as we can. I think we can get down to a three-week turnaround with our current approach.”
When asked whether some manufacturing for Logitech could move to the United States, as Apple’s Tim Cook has suggested Apple will be looking to do more of, Darrell pauses. At Whirlpool, and before that Procter & Gamble, Darrell has spent a career shifting manufacturing to the lowest cost parts of the globe. “But then General Electric put water heater manufacturing back in Kentucky,” Darrell says. “I put G.E. into that business years ago, and I never would have guessed it was coming back to the United States, but it did. I honestly don’t know what to think about where manufacturing is headed next.”
Darrell does know where he’s taking Logitech next, deep into a design-driven world that revolves around smartphones and tablets. And while he’s not boastful, he’s confident in Logitech’s chances. “We are in the biggest revolution in computing since (Steve) Jobs and (Bill) Gates,” Darrell says. “Ultrabooks, notebooks, tablets, they are all going to blend together. But at the end of the day, all those devices are going to need some kind of keyboard, and that starts to look like a world we know.”
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