Casio's F-91W watch: the design favourite of hipsters ... and al-Qaida

The built-in longevity of this humble 1991 timepiece makes it the weapon of choice for both the retro and the righteous

Justin McGuirk guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 April 2011 14.40 BST larger | smaller Article history

Big time ... Casio's F-91W – the preferred choice of wristwatch everywhere from Shoreditch to al-Qaida training camps. Photograph: Roger Tooth
There is one accessory de rigueur with both skinny jeans on the streets of Shoreditch and an orange jumpsuit and black hood in the searing heat of Guantánamo Bay. The latest WikiLeaks dump has revealed that a disproportionate number of terrorism suspects in America's most notorious prison were apprehended wearing a Casio F-91W, a plastic digital watch you can buy for £8.99 from Argos. Beloved of hipsters and jihadis alike, the model has a rare and divergent customer loyalty that suggests we are in the realm of great design. But are these latest revelations the kiss of death for Casio or marketing gold?

The Casio F-91W was launched in 1991 and remains unchanged 20 years later. Since the 1974 launch of its first wristwatch, the Casiotron, this Japanese calculator maker has come to dominate the digital watch market, rebranding the conventional timepiece as an "information device for the wrist". Casios famously include not only stopwatches and alarm clocks but calculators and calendars. Their calculator versions, with fiendishly small buttons, epitomised the Japanese passion for miniaturisation. But the F-91W was a simpler model, stripped back both in its form and its multifunctionality.

That simple form no doubt accounts for its enduring popularity. In an age when the technological convergence of the "information device" has migrated to the smartphone, the watch is something of an anachronism, worn as much as a fashion statement or status symbol as for its time-telling properties.

The F-91W features the classic seven-segment numerical display on a grey LCD screen. It's a trusty timepiece: water-resistant, extremely durable and accurate to within 30 seconds a month. And while it is possible to buy luxury watches at 10,000 times the price that tick with atomic accuracy, doing so for precision reasons is functionalist logic taken to its absurd extreme.

By contrast, the F-91W's popularity with the young, cool set follows a converse logic that is no less a form of snobbery. On the one hand, the model is consistent with a diehard 80s revivalism, the wrist-based equivalent of a pair of Ray–Bans and a taste for Kraftwerk – and, yes, there is even the requisite touch of irony in sporting a 20-year-old digital watch alongside an iPhone 4. But it's more than that: unlike supplicants in the temple of the luxury Swiss watch, hipsters treat their ability to pull off cheapness as a mark of sartorial confidence.

What, then, do terrorists see in this watch? With 28 inmates of Guantánamo found to have had one in their possession, the F-91W and its metallic twin, the A168WA, were described earlier this week as "the sign of al-Qaida". According to testimony given by one prisoner, the model was useful because it was water-resistant: Muslims wash their arms up to their elbows before prayers. Another, more hapless inmate cited the built-in compass that enabled him to pray towards Mecca. His interrogators will have smelled a rat: there is no compass in an F-91W.

In fact, the model is al-Qaida's equipment of choice as the timing device for improvised exploding devices (IEDs). They're handed out in terrorist training camps, where junior jihadis learn how to wire them up to a circuit board, a couple of 9V batteries and a wodge of plastic explosive. This nasty package is concealed in a standard electrical outlet box, with the F-91W a macabre calling card – programmable up to 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, it allows the bombers to put ample distance between themselves and their targets. In truth any cheap, reliable digital watch would do, and it may be an accident of fate that led to the F-91W gaining notoriety: some flunky gets packed off to an electronics shop in Peshawar to bulk-buy cheap digital watches, likes the blue rim around the face of that Casio number and lumps a donkey-load of them over the Afghan border.

When I approached Casio's PR team for some information about their bestselling model, I got a curt email response saying: "Casio is not making any further comment on the F-91W watch at this point in time." Is this a case of too much negative publicity? Is the fact that Osama Bin Laden himself wears an F-91W bad for the brand's street cred? Yes and no. Arguably, it is a ringing endorsement of the product's lethal reliability. Many brands would embrace that cult status.

All of this is a colourful distraction from what is truly remarkable about the F-91W – the fact that it is a digital product that has remained unchanged for 20 years. How many other devices can we say that of, apart from the even more anachronistic calculator? Casio's mainstay comes from a parallel world where designed obsolescence – the sales strategy that has cursed everything from our lightbulbs to our computers – doesn't exist. We desire no improvements or embellishments: it just works. In that first flush of affordable consumer electronics, I'm sure no one dreamed that in two decades the F-91W would still be popular and still relevant – just as in the 1990s, when futurists thought videophones were just around the corner, no one imagined a technology as archaic as texting would take off. We are intoxicated by technological potential, but it's the primitive devices we reward with longevity.

Should we – in solidarity with those Guantánamo inmates who are innocent, and in the spirit of resistance to an illegal detention centre – flock to Argos to buy Casios and flood the obtuse immigration counters of American airports with our F-91W-appointed wrists in an "I am digi-Spartacus" moment? No thanks – life looks a lot better through a pair of retro Ray-Bans than it does through a black hood.

New Evidence on Origin of Supernovas

ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2011) — Astronomers may now know the cause of an historic supernova explosion that is an important type of object for investigating dark energy in the universe. The discovery, made using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, also provides strong evidence that a star can survive the explosive impact generated when a companion star goes supernova.

The new study examined the remnant of a supernova observed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. The object, dubbed Tycho for short, was formed by a Type Ia supernova, a category of stellar explosion useful in measuring astronomical distances because of their reliable brightness. Type Ia supernovas have been used to determine that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, an effect attributed to the prevalence of an invisible, repulsive force throughout space called dark energy.

A team of researchers analyzed a deep Chandra observation of Tycho and found an arc of X-ray emission in the supernova remnant. Evidence supports the conclusion that a shock wave created the arc when a white dwarf exploded and blew material off the surface of a nearby companion star.

"There has been a long-standing question about what causes Type Ia supernovas," said Fangjun Lu of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. "Because they are used as steady beacons of light across vast distances, it is critical to understand what triggers them."

One popular scenario for Type Ia supernovas involves the merger of two white dwarfs. In this case, no companion star or evidence for material blasted off a companion should exist. In the other main competing theory, a white dwarf pulls material from a "normal," or sun-like, companion star until a thermonuclear explosion occurs. Both scenarios may actually occur under different conditions, but the latest Chandra result from Tycho supports the latter one.

In addition, the Tycho study seems to show the remarkable resiliency of stars, as the supernova explosion appears to have blasted very little material off the companion star. Previously, studies with optical telescopes have revealed a star within the remnant that is moving much more quickly than its neighbors, hinting that it could be the missing companion.

"It looks like this companion star was right next to an extremely powerful explosion and it survived relatively unscathed," said Q. Daniel Wang of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. "Presumably it was also given a kick when the explosion occurred. Together with the orbital velocity, this kick makes the companion now travel rapidly across space."

Using the properties of the X-ray arc and the candidate stellar companion, the team determined the orbital period and separation between the two stars in the binary system before the explosion. The period was estimated to be about 5 days, and the separation was only about a millionth of a light year, or less than a tenth the distance between the Sun and Earth. In comparison, the remnant itself is about 20 light years across.

Other details of the arc support the idea that it was blasted away from the companion star. For example, the X-ray emission of the remnant shows an apparent "shadow" next to the arc, consistent with the blocking of debris from the explosion by the expanding cone of material stripped from the companion.

"This stripped stellar material was the missing piece of the puzzle for arguing that Tycho's supernova was triggered in a binary with a normal stellar companion," said Lu. "We now seem to have found this piece."

The shape of the arc is different from any other feature seen in the remnant. Other features in the interior of the remnant include recently announced stripes, which have a different shape and are thought to be features in the outer blast wave caused by cosmic ray acceleration.

These results will appear in the May 1st issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The other authors of the paper include M.Y. Ge, J.L. Qu, S.J. Zheng and Y. Chen from the Institute of High Energy Physics, and X.J. Yang from Xiangtan University. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Neurorobotics Reveals Brain Mechanisms of Self-Consciousness

ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2011) — A new study uses creative engineering to unravel brain mechanisms associated with one of the most fundamental subjective human feelings: self-consciousness. The research, published in the April 28 issue of the journal Neuron, identifies a brain region called the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) as being critical for the feeling of being an entity localized at a particular position in space and for perceiving the world from this position and perspective.

Recent theories of self-consciousness highlight the importance of integrating many different sensory and motor signals, but it is not clear how this type of integration induces subjective states such as self-location ("Where am I in space?") and the first-person perspective ("From where do I perceive the world?"). Studies of neurological patients reporting out-of-body experiences have provided some evidence that brain damage interfering with the integration of multisensory body information may lead to pathological changes of the first-person perspective and self-location. However, it is still not known how to examine brain mechanisms associated with self-consciousness.

"Recent behavioral and physiological work, using video-projection and various visuo-tactile conflicts showed that self-location can be manipulated in healthy participants," explains senior study author, Dr. Olaf Blanke, from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. "However, so far these experimental findings and techniques do not allow for the induction of changes in the first-person perspective and have not been integrated with neuroimaging, probably because the experimental set-ups require participants to sit, stand, or move. This makes it very difficult to apply and film the visuo-tactile conflicts on the participant's body during standard brain imaging techniques."

Making use of inventive neuroimaging-compatible robotic technology that was developed by Dr. Gassert's group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Dr. Blanke and colleagues studied healthy subjects and employed specific bodily conflicts that induced changes in self-location and first-person perspective while simultaneously monitoring brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging. They observed that TPJ activity reflected experimental changes in self-location and first-person perspective. The researchers also completed a large study of neurological patients with out-of-body experiences and found that brain damage was localized to the TPJ.

"Our results illustrate the power of merging technologies from engineering with those of neuroimaging and cognitive science for the understanding of the nature of one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind: self-consciousness and its neural mechanisms," concludes Dr. Blanke. "Our findings on experimentally and pathologically induced altered states of self-consciousness present a powerful new research technology and reveal that TPJ activity reflects one of the most fundamental subjective feelings of humans: the feeling that 'I' am an entity that is localized at a position in space and that 'I' perceive the world from here."

Sony: Credit data at risk in PlayStation hacking

Network shut down; info on 77 million users said compromised. The Japan Times.

LOS ANGELES — Sony Corp. said Tuesday that the credit card data of PlayStation users around the world may have been stolen in a hack that forced it to shut down its PlayStation Network for the past week, disconnecting 77 million user accounts.

Some players brushed off the breach as a common hazard of operating in a connected world, and Sony said some services would be restored in a week. But industry experts said the scale of the breach was staggering and could cost the company billions of dollars.

"Simply put, one of the worst breaches we've seen in several years," said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer for Application Security Inc., a New York-based company that is one of the country's largest database security software makers.

Sony said it has no direct evidence credit card information was taken, but said, "we cannot rule out the possibility."

It said the intrusion was "malicious" and the company had hired an outside security firm to investigate. It has taken steps to rebuild its system to provide greater protection for personal information and warned users to contact credit agencies and set up fraud alerts.

"Our teams are working around the clock on this, and services will be restored as soon as possible," it said in a blog post Tuesday.

The company shut down the network last Wednesday after it said account information, including names, birth dates, e-mail addresses and log-in information was compromised for certain players in the days prior.

Sony says people in 59 nations use the PlayStation network. Of the 77 million user accounts, about 36 million are in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Americas, 32 million in Europe and 9 million in Asia, mostly in Japan.

Purchase history and credit card billing address information may also have been stolen, but the intruder did not obtain the three-digit security code on the back of cards, Sony said. Spokesman Satoshi Fukuoka said the company has not received any reports yet of credit card fraud or abuse resulting from the breach.

Shaul said that not having direct proof of credit card information theft should not instill a sense of security, and could mean Sony just didn't know what files were touched.

"They indicated that they're worried about it, which is probably a very strong indication that everything was stolen," he said.

If the intruder successfully stole credit card data, the heist would rank among the biggest known thefts of financial data.

Recent major hacks included some 130 million card numbers stolen from payment processor Heartland Payment Systems. As many as 100 million accounts were lifted in a break-in at TJX Cos., the chain that owns discount retailers T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, and some 4.2 million card numbers were stolen from East Coast grocery chain Hannaford Bros. Those attacks allegedly involved a single person: Albert Gonzalez, a Miami hacker who was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison for the attacks.

The Ponemon Institute, a data-security research firm, estimated that the cost of a data breach involving a malicious or criminal act averaged $318 per compromised record in 2010, up 48 percent from the year earlier.

That could pin the potential cost of the PlayStation breach at more than $24 billion.

Alan Paller, director of research for the SANS Institute, a security training organization, said that even if credit numbers weren't stolen, knowing someone's name, e-mail address and which games he or she likes can lead to expertly crafted scam e-mails. Knowing billing histories can be even more harmful, since they can identify big spenders.

Jobs Tries to Calm iPhone Imbroglio .

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES. The Wall Street Journal.

Apple Inc. is scaling back how much information its iPhones store about where they have been and said it will stop collecting such data when consumers request it, as the company tries to quell concerns it was tracking iPhone owners.

But Apple's statements, after a week of silence on the growing controversy, raised new questions and criticism about its data-handling practices. Rep. Joe Barton (R., Texas) said Apple apparently "lied" to him and another lawmaker last year when it said its phones don't collect and transmit location-based data when location services such as mapping are turned off.

Apple defended the process it uses to gather location information via the iPhone and unveiled a software update to scale back such practices.
.Apple said Wednesday it would fix software "bugs" that let each phone build a database of locations stretching back months, even when related services are disabled by the user.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who is on medical leave, was unapologetic in his defense of his company's actions. "Your precise location is never transmitted to Apple," he said in an interview.

Rather, Mr. Jobs said, Apple gathers information from the phone about nearby cellphone towers and local wireless, or Wi-Fi, networks. Apple uses that information to supplement the Global Positioning System already employed on most phones.

Apple and Google Inc., which makes the key software for Android phones, are facing scrutiny from lawmakers and consumers for the way they gather and handle data on the location of smartphones.

WSJ.com Senior Technology Editor Julia Angwin reports Apple's iPhone and Google's Android regularly transmit user location data back to those companies, based on data analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.
.Researchers last week said Apple's iPhones store unencrypted databases containing months of location information. Tests conducted by the Journal and independent researcher Samy Kamkar found these databases were updated—and some information sent to Apple—even when the location services were turned off.

That contradicts what Apple told Rep. Barton in a letter last July. "When a member of Congress asks a straightforward question, reputable members of the business community should give a straightforward answer," Mr. Barton said in an interview. "Apparently, they lied to us."

In the interview, Mr. Jobs said Apple in recent days had discovered software "bugs" in how the phones capture and store data. "We were surprised by them and it took us a few days to figure out what was going on," he said.

Beyond the information stored on the phone, the Journal has reported that iPhones, Android phones and some personal computers regularly transmit information about their locations to Apple and Google. Apple said Wednesday an individual can't be located using the Wi-Fi and tower data and that the data are anonymous. It said it discloses the collection practices in privacy policies.

The company said it would release software in coming weeks that would reduce how much location data are stored on the phone to about seven days. The new software will delete the data when location services are turned off. In the next major release of its mobile operating system, the database would also be encrypted, Apple said.

Mr. Jobs said Apple planned to testify at an upcoming congressional hearing. Google said it would testify at a hearing set for May 10.

Other lawmakers said they weren't satisfied with Apple's response. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said he still has questions about what Apple was doing and what it told users.

"This has raised larger questions of how the locations of mobile devices are tracked and shared by companies like Apple and Google, and whether federal laws provide adequate protection as technology has advanced," Mr. Franken said.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) expressed concern in a separate letter, saying it was essential to have "full and accurate information about the privacy risks" as Congress considers updates to federal privacy laws.

Among other makers of cellphone software queried by Congress, Nokia Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have said they only enable location services with a user's consent. Officials at Research In Motion Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. didn't respond.

A Google spokesman said it collects information anonymously and provides "users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location" on Android phones.

In a press release, Apple said the cellphone towers it uses to establish a phone's location could be more than 100 miles from a user's phone. But tests conducted for the Journal by Mr. Kamkar, the researcher, found the addresses of nearby Wi-Fi networks can easily be used to establish a phone's location within 100 feet.

Apple Inc. announced plans Wednesday morning to launch its long-delayed white iPhone 4. Dan Gallagher and Marcelo Prince discuss with Simon Constable on digits.
Apple disclosed Wednesday it is using the information to build a "traffic database" that within a few years will offer traffic-congestion information to iPhone users. Google already uses location data, which Android phones collect every few seconds, to provide such a service.

Other applications routinely use—and share—location data. The Journal reported in December that some of the most popular apps widely share location data and other personal information with outside companies. Twenty-six of 51 popular iPhone apps tested by the Journal shared their location with outsiders.

Scott Forstall, Apple senior vice president of iPhone software, said the company doesn't allow apps, including its own, to use location data without the user's consent.

He said the company allows users to turn location features on and off by app and shows them which ones have used location in the last 24 hours. "We are vigilant about making our location use completely transparent," he said.

Apple acknowledged it was partly responsible for users' concerns because it has not provided enough education about these issues. "We're going to start thinking about that right away and the time to do it is when it's on people's minds," said Mr. Jobs. He added other phone makers needed to make those efforts too.

Write to Yukari Iwatani Kane at yukari.iwatani@wsj.com

Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray published

Over 120 years after it was condemned as 'vulgar' and 'unclean', an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is published by Harvard University Press

Alison Flood guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 April 2011 16.46 BST larger | smaller Article history

'Objectionable' material cut from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has finally been restored in a new uncensored version. Photograph: Corbis
Revised after it was condemned in the British press over 130 years ago as "vulgar", "unclean", "poisonous" and "discreditable", an uncensored version of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray has finally been published.

Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this bookWilde's editor JM Stoddart had already deleted a host of "objectionable" text from the novel before it made its first appearance in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in June 1890, cutting out material which made more explicit the homoerotic nature of artist Basil Hallward's feelings for Dorian Gray and which accentuated elements of homosexuality in Gray himself.

Deciding that the novel as it stood contained "a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to", and assuring his employer Craige Lippincott that he would make the book "acceptable to the most fastidious taste", Stoddart also removed references to Gray's female lovers as his "mistresses". He went on to cut "many passages that smacked of decadence more generally," said Nicholas Frankel, editor of the new edition, for Harvard University Press.

The public outcry which followed the novel's appearance – "it is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction," wrote the Daily Chronicle – forced Wilde to revise the novel still further before it appeared in book form in 1891.

"It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman," Hallward tells Dorian, in one passage which was changed. The censored version read: "From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me".

Frankel, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University said "the time is ripe for the publication of Wilde's novel in its uncensored form … It is the version of the novel that Wilde, I believe, would want us to be reading in the 21st century … I'm bringing it out of the closet a little more."

Harvard University Press said the differences between Wilde's original text and the published version of the novel "have until now been evident to only the handful of scholars who have examined Wilde's typescript".

Among other restored passages, Hallward describes the feelings which had driven his portrait of Gray. "There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion". Another restored line describes Gray walking the street at night; "A man with curious eyes had suddenly peered into his face, and then dogged him with stealthy footsteps, passing and repassing him many times." Gray also reflects on Hallward's feelings for him. "There was something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and sterile".

In another instance, the question; "Is Sybil Vane your mistress ?" was altered to "What are your relations with Sibyl Vane ?" – one of three references to Gray's "mistresses" that were cut by the editor.

But critics and academics in the US have not been universal in their praise of the uncensored version. Reviewing the new edition, author and columnist Brooke Allen wrote on the Barnes and Noble website that "whether the original text is actually 'better' than the book version published in 1891 is a moot point".

"Some of Wilde's original material may have been lost in the latter … but much was gained, too," she wrote. "This annotated version, though a treasure for scholars and for anyone with a serious interest in Wilde, the 1890s, and Aestheticism, should serve as a supplement to the standard text rather than a replacement."

Arte efímero en lugar insospechado

Triunfan los 'speed shows', fugaces eventos creativos para tiempos convulsos
ROBERTA BOSCO - Barcelona - 28/04/2011

Vota Resultado 6 votos . .Los grandes retratos en blanco y negro cuelgan como si fueran ropa de las galerías de un viejo palacio de Roma, célebre por haber sido escenario de diversas películas neorrealistas. La exposición, organizada por la galería Mondrian Suite, dura solo una noche, lo cual incrementa la curiosidad e interés de la gente. Se trata del estreno de CorpusTrip, un proyecto del fotógrafo Luca Donnini, que ha decidido reunir 65 retratos realizados entre 2007 y 2010 en una serie de muestras itinerantes y extemporáneas. Con su furgoneta llena de imágenes, recorrerá unos 10.000 kilómetros a través de Europa durante dos meses, montando exposiciones de una noche, siempre en espacios no expositivos, en las 20 ciudades donde previamente realizó los retratos. Tras pasar por Barcelona y Madrid, continuará por Burdeos, París, Londres, Maastricht, Ámsterdam, Praga y Ljubljana, entre otras.

Luca Donnini está recorriendo Europa para mostrar sus retratos unas horas
Para estar al tanto de las fechas y lugares habrá que seguir la web (http://corpustrip.com) y el blog, donde se relatará la aventura en tiempo real. "En museos y galerías las obras están esperando a que alguien entre y las mire y el espectador ya sabe lo que se va a encontrar. Yo quiero crear situaciones inesperadas, quiero que la gente se encuentre con las piezas también por casualidad", explica Donnini. "Queremos que la gente nos ayude a encontrar los sitios, que se implique con esta muestra-happening, que nunca durará más de una noche. Luego las obras se abandonarán a su destino", añade el fotógrafo, que trabaja con una Rolleiflex analógica. No es la primera vez que Donnini deja el desmontaje de sus muestras al público. De hecho sus piezas tienen una doble vida: las imágenes impresas en el cuarto oscuro o pintadas a mano por el autor son destinadas al mercado del arte, mientras que las copias blueback se utilizan para proyectos como CorpusTrip, que el cineasta Alessio Maximilian Schroder documentará y convertirá en una película.

Los speed shows, exposiciones relámpagos, se multiplican. Domenico Quaranta, que fue comisario de la sección de arte digital de la última edición de la feria ArcoMadrid, acaba de celebrar uno en un cibercafé de Barcelona, en el marco del festival "de guerrilla de la comunicación" Influencers.

Para la rapidísima exposición Raise your flag, que ha durado tan solo un par de horas, Quaranta ha alquilado todos los ordenadores del cibercafé y en sus pantallas ha reunido obras creadas para Internet, "un entorno radical, donde realizar proyectos y experimentos imposibles en otros soportes, basados en la creación de relaciones, donde el arte se convierte en diálogo, intercambio, manipulación colectiva de imágenes, datos, archivos y mitos", indica el comisario.

La fórmula fue creada por el artista alemán Aram Bartholl, autor del Speed Show Manifiesto, donde explica que concibió este formato con la idea "de revisitar el fenómeno del Net.art ahora que las redes sociales han desplegado todo su poder y se han convertido en parte de la vida de cientos de millones de personas".

A pesar de que nacieron con y para las obras online -incluso performance y obras en vivo, siempre que se retransmitan a través de programas de comunicación preinstalados como la teleconferencia o el videochat- las muestras relámpago se han difundido rápidamente desde los países del norte de Europa por todo el mundo, encontrando partidarios entre artistas de diversas disciplinas y en diferentes versiones: desde los que abren su taller para una noche hasta los que modifican y contaminan los espacios públicos con obras que pasan como meteoritos.

Deutsche Börse prize for photography goes to chronicler of displaced people

Jim Goldberg - part of a photo from Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Jim Goldberg/Magnum

Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg has documented refugees and immigrants in across the world since 1983

O'Hagan guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 April 2011 20.14 BST larger | smaller Article history

Jim Goldberg has won this year's £30,000 Deutsche Börse prize for photography, in a ceremony hosted by the Photographers' Gallery in London.

The Magnum photographer, who has documented the experiences of refugees, immigrants and displaced people from Africa, the Middle East and eastern Europe since 1983 in a project titled Open See, triumphed over a shortlist that included fine art photographer Thomas Demand, whom many insiders considered the favourite. Goldberg, who lives in San Francisco, and won the 2007 Cartier- Bresson Prize for an earlier version of the same project, describes himself as a documentary storyteller.

Open See was shown to great acclaim at the Photographers' Gallery last year. It features polaroids, video stills, found images and hand-written text often using the words of his subjects.

The chair of the jury, Brett Rogers, praised Goldberg's "timely and inventive approach to documentary practice … allowing these individuals to tell their own stories."

The "Guggenheim dilemma"

Thomas Hirschhorn and Paul Pfeiffer ruffled feathers during a panel discussion at the opening of the Daskalopoulos collection at the Guggenheim Bilbao earlier this month by voicing concern over construction workers' conditions at the museum's Abu Dhabi branch, which is being built on Saadiyat Island. Speaking of a petition he had signed calling on artists to boycott the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Hirschhorn described the predicament as his "Guggenheim dilemma", adding: "My signature only makes sense if I have a price to pay for it." Daskalopoulos was quick to defend the institution in front of a packed auditorium that included Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, saying: "If we have a dilemma, we are on the same side. The Guggenheim is not the perpetrator, we are the agents of change."

Published online 21 Apr 11. The Art Newspaper.

Yes, but is it drawing? London 2011 Biennial Fundraiser

Grayson Perry's Chapel de St Claire is one of more than 200 drawings being auctioned by the not-for-profit space at a starting price of £250. Photograph: Grayson Perry/Drawing Room



The best works auctioned at east London's Drawing Room, by Turner prizewinners and younger artists alike, are self-regarding, silly, and muse on the nature of drawing itself

Adrian Searle guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 April 2011 21.00 BST larger | smaller Article history

Grayson Perry's Chapel de St Claire is one of more than 200 drawings being auctioned by the not-for-profit space at a starting price of £250. Photograph: Grayson Perry/Drawing Room
Every two years the Drawing Room in east London holds a fundraising exhibition, sending artists a sheet of A4 paper and inviting them to return it with an original drawing. Anyone can bid at the silent auction on 18 May for works by Turner prize contenders and winners, younger artists and well-known names such as Tacita Dean, Richard Long, Grayson Perry and Paula Rego, all with a starting price of £250.

A not-for-profit gallery focusing on drawing and housed in a canalside studio block in Hackney, the Drawing Room is a good thing.

The Biennial Fundraiser is democratically arranged, with more than 200 drawings hung up in plastic sleeves three-deep, and there is always a lot of humour. Mark Wallinger has supplied a self-portrait reduced to nothing but his pair of spectacles, which are as distinctive as Eric Morecambe's.

Michael Landy's self-portrait is a cartoon of a council rubbish bin. Gavin Turk has just written his signature with a bit of charcoal stuck on the end of a long stick, emulating Henri Matisse, who drew in similar fashion on the ceiling when bed-ridden in the last years of his life.

There is a lot of writing-as-drawing. Goshka Macuga's just says Transubstantiation, while Bob and Roberta Smith (aka Patrick Brill) has copied out his raging manifesto against the arts cuts.

Is a photograph of a bird's nest a drawing? You wonder whether nests are drawings anyway. Maybe they're sculpture. Tania Kovats, who supplied the photograph, recently wrote a book about drawing, so maybe she knows.

Heather Deedman has copied the cover of Adrian Hill's What Shall We Draw, a 1960s TV spin-off teach-yourself book, and Fiona Banner has painstakingly copied the worn, plain cover of Life Drawing by George B Bridgman. There is a lot of interesting anxiety about what drawing is or isn't.

The good stuff really declares itself among the dots and scribbles, the self-regarding and the silly. Here's a drawing of a yellow duster, there's some mad calligraphic nonsense produced under hypnosis by Matt Mullican.

All works can be bid for online. I covet Angela de la Cruz's sketch of a figure in a pile of boxes, and a hermaphroditic photo-collage by John Stezaker. But I might change my mind on the night.

Until 18 May, Drawing Room, Tannery Arts, London E2

Iphone collects and stores location information even when location services are turned off.

By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES. The Wall Street Journal.

Apple Inc.'s iPhone is collecting and storing location information even when location services are turned off, according to a test conducted by The Wall Street Journal.

The location data appear to be collected using cellphone towers and Wi-Fi access points near a user's phone and don't appear to be transmitted back to Apple. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Still, the fact that the iPhone is collecting and storing location data—even when location services are turned off—is likely to renew questions about how well users are informed about the data being gathered by their cellphones. The fact that the iPhone stores months' worth of location data was disclosed by two researchers last week.

The discovery of an unencrypted location file on the iPhone created an uproar among people concerned that their phones could be searched and their location data used against them. On Saturday, Rep. Edward Markey (D., Mass.) called for a congressional investigation into the iPhone location storage, saying that unprotected location information on the phone could put children at risk from predators who hack their phones.

The discovery of the iPhone location file comes amid growing concern about cellphone tracking overall.

Last week, the Journal reported that Apple's iPhone and cellphones powered by Google Inc.'s Android software transmitted their locations back to Google and Apple, respectively.

And last year, a Journal investigation showed that many of the most popular cellphone "apps" go even further, sharing location data and other personal information with third-party companies without a user's knowledge or consent.

Apple and Google have both previously said that the data they receive is anonymous and that users can turn it off by disabling location services.

However, it appears that turning off location services doesn't disable the storage of location data on iPhones. The Journal tested the collection of data on an iPhone 4 that had been restored to factory settings and was running the latest version of Apple's iOS operating system.

The Journal disabled location services (which are on by default) and immediately recorded the data that had initially been gathered by the phone. The Journal then carried the phone to new locations and observed the data. Over the span of several hours as the phone was moved, it continued to collect location data from new places.

These data included coordinates and time stamps; however, the coordinates were not from the exact locations that the phone traveled, and some of them were several miles away. The phone also didn't indicate how much time was spent in a given location. Other technology watchers on blogs and message boards online have recorded similar findings.

NHK hopes for a home run with new anime

High school baseball club manager Minami observes her team. (C) NATSUMI IWASAKI·DIAMOND/NHK·NEP·IG


The Japan Times. By TOMOKO OTAKE Staff writer

It's a quintessential scene of Japanese youth: Young boys out in baseball uniforms jog across their school grounds, the white and maroon of their gear contrasting with a clear blue sky. In the bleachers, an earnest-looking high school girl named Minami, in a jersey that matches the team's uniforms, eyes them with a book held tightly to her chest.


The book is not a practice journal for the boys' baseball club, it's a copy of "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices," a popular business book penned in 2001 by the late Peter F. Drucker.

So begins "Drucker in the Dug-Out," a 10-part animated series showing weeknights on NHK starting April 25, whose Japanese title is "Moshidora." On the surface, the anime looks to be your standard television fare, but for viewers watching for the usual dramatic subplots of team solidarity and friendship, "Drucker in the Dug-Out" will also throw viewers a curve ball.

The anime depicts how Minami bucks the usual duties of a manējā, which is a Japanese rendering of the English term "manager." Unlike the English version, the Japanese role is almost always filled by girls who perform menial work such as serving tea and washing dirty uniforms. But the young girl sets out to foment a revolution in the management of the school's struggling baseball team by using Drucker's book.


Managing a hit: Atsuko Kashiwagi doesn't claim to be an expert on baseball or management theory, but she knew NHK would score with their new animated series "Drucker in the Dug-Out." TOMOKO OTAKE PHOTO

The TV series is based on Natsumi Iwasaki's 2009 fictional book "Moshi Kōkōyakyū no Joshi Manējā ga Dorakkā no Manejimento wo Yondara (If a high school baseball team's female manager read Drucker's 'Management')." The lengthy title is better known by its abbreviation "Moshidora." The book has sold more than 2 million copies thus far, making it Japan's best-selling book last year.

Atsuko Kashiwagi, general manager of the animation division at NHK Enterprises, a TV production company under the national broadcaster NHK group, was quick to recognize the story's appeal.

"I read the book soon after it was published, when it had not even sold 100,000 copies," Kashiwagi tells The Japan Times. Although she had worked on various other NHK projects that included "Major," an anime based on a manga about a baseball player who pursues his dream of playing in the major league, she says she was no expert on baseball. She also admits she wasn't an expert on management theory, and had only vaguely remembered hearing Drucker's name before. However, she felt "Moshidora" was easy to relate to.


Smells like team spirit: NHK's new animated series is adapted from Natsumi Iwasaki's best-selling book, "Moshidora." (C) NATSUMI IWASAKI·DIAMOND/NHK·NEP·IG
"At that time, I myself had just become manager of the animation division (at NHK Enterprises)," Kashiwagi says. "It's a small section, but it has about 10 people and I remember realizing how hard it was to manage them. So when I read the book (which is filled with actual quotes from Drucker's 'Management'), all of the messages hit very close to home. For example, one of his beliefs is that 'People are your greatest asset.' Another one states, 'People who take risks make mistakes.' It really felt like he was talking about me having had a smooth ride in my life (by avoiding taking risks)."

Drucker, who died in November 2005 at the age of 95, is considered one of the most influential thinkers on management theory and practice in the 20th century. His teachings and writings are said to have inspired many top-tier business leaders, including Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, and former Procter & Gamble CEO Alan George Lafley. Drucker also has a sizable following in Japan that includes Tadashi Yanai, founder of the global apparel retail chain Uniqlo Co.

Iwasaki took Drucker's message further. Before writing "Moshidora," he was a TV scriptwriter and had worked with idols such as AKB48. When he came up with the idea to put such an influential thinker's ideas into a fictional format, he essentially took a piece of knowledge that had been confined to the domain of the business world's most powerful players and made it understandable to a broader audience.

"I think the book has been read by many people because so many people are questioning the way things are managed," Iwasaki was quoted as saying in a July 2010 press release issued by publisher Diamond Co. "Another thing I've realized is that entertainment or fiction is a very effective tool for communicating one's message."

Kashiwagi adds that the anime should appeal to an even wider spectrum of viewers, as well as the book's core readership of businesspeople.

"As Drucker himself has said, the book is not really about business management, but about the management of any organization," she says. "And it revolves around the story of a high school baseball manager. So it would be useful for students interested in joining extracurricular clubs, or people around the age of 18 who are about to enter the corporate world.

"In many ways, the story also betrays the expectations of viewers, like how it's not just about Drucker and in fact deals a lot with friendship between two high school girls. In that sense, even those who are in junior high school can enjoy it. It can be viewed as a tale of team spirit, friendship or tips on managing an organization. Such a diversity of angles is what makes the story interesting to viewers on a personal scale."

"Moshidora" has turned out to be a huge money maker for publisher Diamond, which has long specialized in business books, and for whom "Moshidora" was its first million-seller. The book has also helped the sales of the Japanese version of the Drucker book, which was edited by Japanese Drucker expert Atsuo Ueda. That book, also marketed by Diamond, has clocked up 41 print runs and sold more than 700,000 copies.

With the launch of NHK's anime series, the book's sales are expected to rise further. On top of that, a separate manga version is currently being run in the bi-monthly Super Jump magazine, and a live-action movie is set for a June 4 release with AKB48's Atsuko Maeda in the lead role. All this buzz is sure to boost "Moshidora" even further, in a blitz that Drucker couldn't have planned better himself.

"Drucker in the Dug-Out" airs on NHK General weeknights at 10:55 p.m. from April 25 till May 6. It will be rebroadcast Thursday nights at 12:15 a.m. For details, visit www9.nhk.or.jp/anime/moshidora. For information about the film, visit ?www.moshidora-movie.jp.

Astronaut's Wife Reveals Hidden Life After Launch

Lena De Winne and Yulia Romanenko, both married to astronauts in the simulator of the Soyuz space vehicle.

21 April 2011
The Moscow Times. By Joy Neumeyer

In May 2009, Lena De Winne stood on a barren steppe in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, as she watched her husband, Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne, launch into space. Struggling to remain the composed wife amid cameras and a crowd of observers, she alighted on an unexpected source of emotional support: 1980s power ballad “The Final Countdown,” which she played on her iPod as the shuttle disappeared into the atmosphere.

“I created for myself an alternative reality, because if you take it too seriously, you can go completely crazy,” she said.

Russia’s recent celebrations commemorating the 50th anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s first human spaceflight gave little hint of the wives who watch astronauts back on Earth. According to De Winne, women’s absence from the most recent reprisal of the country’s love affair with cosmonautics is unsurprising. As she recounts in her new book “My Countdown: The Story Behind My Husband’s Space Flight,” the Russian space program has long failed to take into account the human relationships that ground cosmic achievements.

“In the Russian space tradition women aren’t welcomed. They’re marginally tolerated,” she said. Frank De Winne’s flight marked the first time that wives were allowed to attend the launch at Baikonur.

The book is the first time an astronaut’s wife has opened up about her experiences.

“No one has ever shared these impressions, no one had the strength for it,” said Yulia Romanenko, who is married to Frank’s crewmate Roman Romanenko. “[The wives] always lived through this in a very small group and didn’t want to share those worries they had to encounter during their husbands’ flight.”

Even astronauts themselves haven’t always been privy to their wives’ perspectives. “I understood the worries of our relatives and dear ones … but it was a male point of view,” said Gennady Padalka, another of Frank’s crewmates.

Lena, who grew up in Moscow, didn’t plan on marrying a man whose job involved periodic stints away from Earth. “I’m not a space fan. I haven’t been since the age of 7,” she said. At that time, like all her school friends, she idolized the Soviet Union’s space program and its great hero, Gagarin. She went on to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Moscow’s Power Engineering University, and later an MBA in the Netherlands and a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States.

She met Frank in 2000 at the European Space Agency in Holland, where she was working as an interpreter. She tends to shrug off the aura of celebrity surrounding her husband’s profession, which brings frequent requests for autographs and eager questions of how astronauts urinate in space.

“It’s an industry like any other,” she said. “They are intelligent people, they’re focused people, they’re capable people, they’re healthy people, but they’re humans nevertheless.”

After all, Frank “can fix computers, but he can’t change a roll of toilet paper,” she said.

For Lena the idea of shedding light on her and fellow wives’ experiences came as she video-chatted with her husband one day while he was on board the International Space Station. As she complained about a writing project she was working on, Frank’s crewmate Bob Thirsk “floated by” the screen and suggested that she try writing about the mission.

“And you don’t say ‘no’ to an astronaut in space,” she said.

Lena notes that being married to an astronaut is not necessarily the most difficult of “long-suffering spouse” positions. “To my mind [being the wife of] a submarine captain is much worse, because they disappear for six months and you can’t even be in touch.” During his mission, Frank says he and Lena talked on the phone “several times a day,” in addition to once-weekly family videoconferences and e-mails.

Video also allowed the crew and their families to enjoy morale-boosting events such as a call with actor Patrick Stewart, stalwart captain of the Starship Enterprise on the television series “Star Trek.” But frequent communication brought its own difficulties.

For some of the crew’s wives, daily routines served as the best antidote to fear or loneliness. “The thing is, I have two children, so I had no time to miss [Roman]. I also have an interesting job,” said Yulia Romanenko, who heads the economic planning department at Star City.

But no spouse could fully relax until the entire mission had been completed. For Yulia, the most worrisome moment of the voyage was the landing, which her husband told her was “the most crucial moment”: “My heart simply jumped out of my chest.”

For Lena, the most difficult experience was not takeoff or landing, but the disregard she says the families received from Russian authorities in the days before the launch. At Baikonur, the couples were housed in different hotels and allowed little contact beyond stiff news conferences. Officials justify such separation as a necessary precaution against germs and distraction, but in the book Lena likens it to “emotional rape.”

“The whole attitude towards families is that it’s something to the side,” she said. “According to the Russian mentality, they’re all heroes, and when you’re a hero you need to suffer.”

Lena and Yulia see wives’ recent attendance at Baikonur as a hopeful sign that Russia is beginning to acknowledge the earthly women behind its cosmic idols.

“Maybe in the future we’ll even be able to live together,” Yulia said, laughing. “But there’s little chance of that.”

Taking a Zoological Approach to Chairs

April 24, 2011
The New York Times. By ALICE RAWSTHORN

LONDON — The 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin was so eminent a scientist that some 120 species, an Australian city and a mountain in the Andes have been named in his honor, but among his other accomplishments is a modest footnote in design history for an unsung contribution to furniture design.

Darwin designed the earliest known example of the wheeled chairs that millions of people now sit or slouch on in offices all over the world. He customized a wooden armchair in his family home in the English countryside during the 1840s by removing the legs and replacing them with a set of cast-iron bed legs mounted on casters. Darwin then literally rolled around his study to scrutinize specimen after specimen.

This early example of what is now called “design hacking” or “co-design” has won Darwin a bit part role in “A Taxonomy of Office Chairs,” a new book by the American industrial designer and design researcher Jonathan Olivares.

Deriving from the Ancient Greek words “taxis” and “nomia,” which translate as “arrangement” and “method” respectively, a “taxonomy” is a system of classification. This word alone suggests that Mr. Olivares has taken an unusually thoughtful and rigorous approach to his subject, and distinguishes his book from the usual run of image-heavy, fact-lite coffee table-crushing design tomes.

So it should. His book contains three different forms of classification. The first section is a chronological catalog of 142 office chairs, which Mr. Olivares considers to have been particularly innovative. The second is a taxonomy that charts the development of different parts of the chair, including the headrest, backrest, armrest, seat, stem and base. Some 11 types of backrest alone are identified: single spine, split single spine, single spine with armrest connections, and so on. A third section is devoted to milestones in the movement of office chairs: from the 360-degree tilt of the stem in the 1849 Centripetal Spring Chair, to the sideways tilt of the backrest in the 2009 ON Chair.

Each section is packed with facts and illustrated frugally, by a photograph of the silhouette of each chair in the chronology, and simple line drawings of parts in the taxonomy and catalog of movement. Mr. Olivares has also devised a reader-friendly means of cross-referencing the information on each chair in all three sections using the page numbers. The result shares the clarity and ingenuity of another recently published book “I swear I use no art at all” in which the Dutch book designer Joost Grootens described his work through a series of maps, grids, charts, indices and other visual devices.

Mr. Olivares’s original objective wasn’t to analyze the office chair specifically, but to trace the evolution of an industrial product as thoroughly and as objectively as biologists and zoologists have studied nature. As he admits, the book could just as easily have been a taxonomy of toasters or automotive engines, but he plumped for office chairs because they combine mechanical complexity with a close relationship to the human body.

He chose well. The most compelling design histories of objects are invariably of things that are any or (ideally) all of the following: a) familiar enough for everyone to recognize, even people who don’t use them; b) sufficiently challenging in terms of their structure or operating system to persuade the ablest designers and manufacturers to produce them; and c) reflective of their time, particularly of social, economic, cultural and behavioral changes.

Very few objects check all of those boxes, but the office chair does. It has the additional advantage of being used so intensively by the tens of millions of people who spend most of their working days sitting on one that the quality of its design has a significant impact on their health and wellbeing. Back pain anyone?

Yet another boon, at least in terms of its literary pulling power, is the unusually high degree of technology even in relatively unsophisticated office chairs. If you don’t believe me, just try to work out how to adjust one by reading the sort of incomprehensibly convoluted instruction manuals you’d expect to find on Space Shuttle Endeavour. Like sneakers, an office chair is an everyday object that has often been engineered out of all proportion to its size or function.

All of these elements make for a rattling design history, which Mr. Olivares tells with relish. He charts how the office chair developed from customized 19th-century contraptions like Darwin’s as the expansion of the office furniture market enabled manufacturers to invest in increasingly sophisticated technology. Though he is always at pains to contextualize the application of new materials and production processes by showing how their adoption was often driven by external factors, mostly economic pressures.

Take ergonomics, or making chairs more comfortable for the people who use them. It became fashionable among designers in the 1970s, but wasn’t embraced by major manufacturers until the 1980s when European safety regulations were tightened and the cost to U.S. companies of insuring themselves against employees’ legal claims rocketed. A similar set of financial considerations is now driving the efforts to develop sustainable office furniture.

Mr. Olivares attributes the rise of the “status symbol” chair in the 20th century to the popularity of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 theory of “scientific management.” By encouraging companies to adopt hierarchical structures, Taylor unwittingly prompted their employees, especially senior ones, to expect the cost and complexity of their chairs to reflect their rank. It took until 1994 for the U.S. manufacturer Herman Miller to usher in a more democratic era by introducing the Aeron chair, which was designed specifically for computer users, in one style, one color and three sizes, determined by body shape, not status.

The weakness of Mr. Olivares’s book is that, like the coffee table-crushers, it tends to concentrate on design successes, and ignores the failures that can also be influential. That’s a minor flaw compared to the strengths of a book, which interrogates its subject with such enthusiasm and vigor. You’ll never look at an office chair in quite the same way again.

With ‘Coolest Job Ever’ Ending, Astronauts Seek Next Frontier

By KENNETH CHANG. The New York Times

What happens when you have the right stuff at the wrong time?

Members of NASA’s astronaut corps have been asking just that, now that the space shuttle program is ending and their odds of flying anywhere good anytime soon are getting smaller. The Endeavour is scheduled to launch this week, and the Atlantis is supposed to fly the last shuttle mission in June — and all the seats are spoken for.

“Morale is pretty low,” said Leroy Chiao, a former astronaut who now works for a company that wants to offer space flights for tourists. “This is a time of great uncertainty.”

Under President Obama, NASA’s human spaceflight program has been curtailed. The Ares I and Constellation programs, which were meant to succeed the space shuttles and take astronauts to the moon, were canceled, and NASA is instead hiring outside companies to devise alternatives.

So when the Obama family heads to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week to sit with Gabrielle Giffords, the injured Arizona congresswoman, as she watches her husband, Capt. Mark E. Kelly of the Navy, take off for the International Space Station, it will be one of the last spectacles of its kind for a while. Over the next few years, American astronauts will be competing for a handful of slots on the International Space Station, flying there on Russian Soyuz capsules.

“We hope we will overcome this hurdle and continue to explore,” said Peggy A. Whitson, the head of NASA’s astronaut office, whose job includes selecting the astronauts who will fly each space mission. While people’s spirits are a little down, she said, “we’ll have to see — NASA has gone through different phases like this before.”

The current situation may not dampen the career aspirations of the elementary school set, but last year alone, 20 astronauts left NASA’s active-duty roster; today, 61 remain, down from a peak of about 150 in 2000. Back then, NASA was gearing up to staff the International Space Station and the shuttles that supplied it.

The shift has made a big difference to people like John M. Grunsfeld, the Dr. Fix-It of the Hubble Space Telescope, who has flown five missions for NASA. After his last flight, in May 2009, he asked Dr. Whitson about his chances of returning to space. “She was honest,” Dr. Grunsfeld said. “Slim to none.”

If Dr. Whitson had dangled even a small chance at a plum assignment, like commanding the International Space Station, “I probably would have stayed,” said Dr. Grunsfeld, 52. But she did not. So in January 2010, he left NASA to become deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which operates the Hubble.

Another astronaut for whom the new realities presented a problem was Capt. Scott D. Altman of the Navy, who has flown four missions for NASA. But at 6-foot-4, he does not fit into a Soyuz capsule.

After his last shuttle flight in 2009, Captain Altman, 51, saw the writing on the wall. As he wrestled with the decision over whether to leave NASA, the Obama administration made the decision to scrap Constellation and Ares I. He announced last August that he would depart.

Leaving NASA “was the right decision,” Captain Altman said, but “there are some regrets from time to time.” He now works for ASRC Research and Technology Solutions in Maryland, which does engineering work for NASA and other federal agencies.

NASA will still be hiring astronauts, though not people of Captain Altman’s vintage. In the next year or two, as more people leave or retire, the agency will recruit a new class of 6 to 12 astronauts, Dr. Whitson said. If NASA decides to reduce tours of duty at the space station from six months to four, that would mean a need for even more astronauts.

“We briefed the entire office on what to expect,” said Dr. Whitson, who is herself an astronaut.

Meanwhile, opportunities for astronauts outside of NASA are small but growing.

Virgin Galactic, part of Richard Branson’s empire, is seeking three space pilots for its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which may begin space tourism trips next year. While SpaceShipTwo will take suborbital hops that provide only a few minutes of weightlessness, other companies — like Boeing and the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX — are developing spacecraft that will be able to fly to the International Space Station and elsewhere.

Garrett E. Reisman, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, left NASA last month for SpaceX, which was founded by the Internet entrepreneur Elon Musk. Dr. Reisman had logged more than three months in space and done work on the space station’s robotic arm.

“Being an astronaut is the coolest job ever,” said Dr. Reisman, 43. “It was very, very difficult to voluntarily leave.”

If Dr. Reisman had stayed at NASA, he would have had a chance to fly again, but he decided to move on. Now he is working on a rocket (the Falcon 9) and a spacecraft (the Dragon) that are meant to take passengers and cargo to the space station.

“It’s an engineer’s dream to design a spaceship,” he said. “To me, it seems like we’re on the verge of a golden age of spaceflight — that’s where I wanted to be.”

For every astronaut who quits NASA because of age or a lack of opportunity, there are any number of young people aspiring to fill their shoes.

The job is still as romantic as the standards are stringent. According to NASA’s Web site, astronaut candidates must be able to swim three lengths of a pool in a flight suit and tennis shoes; an advanced degree in science or math is a plus.

The requirements are even stricter for people who want to work in the space station: you must speak Russian, know robotics, be trained for spacewalks and be healthy enough to spend six months in space.

This formidable checklist has helped NASA nudge some astronauts aside. But it has not dulled anyone’s memories.

“Being in space is like being someplace magic,” said Col. Pamela Ann Melroy of the Air Force, the second female astronaut to command a shuttle mission. She left NASA in 2009, knowing that there would be intense jockeying by astronauts seeking to command one of the few remaining flights.

“I didn’t really want to get into situation where I was hanging around hoping that I would get one of them,” she said.

Colonel Melroy is still wistful about the lost prospect of flying on the Ares I. “That would have been a hoot,” she said.

Analogue artists defying the digital age

Naomi Kashiwagi with her 78rpm discs and gramophones. Photograph: Howard Barlow for the Observer

Dusty vinyl records, vintage film cameras, rickety typewriters and antiquated recording equipment … these are the creative tools being used by some emerging artists. Pure nostalgia? Or a laudable refusal to escape the speed and sanitised perfection of contemporary digital culture?
Sean O'Hagan The Observer, Sunday 24 April 2011 larger | smaller Article history

With indecent haste, the digital revolution has consigned many of our once-cherished artefacts to the dustbin of history. Though enthusiasts and obsessives have stayed loyal to pre-digital formats, for the rest of us it feels like the vinyl record, the photographic print, the Polaroid camera, the analogue recording studio and the darkroom have been cast aside, rendered all but obsolete by a digitally driven culture that devours all that preceded it. Soon, we are told, the newspaper and the book may share the same fate.

The young artists featured here – a poet who composes on a typewriter, a musician who has built an entirely analogue recording studio, a photographer who shuns digital for manual vintage cameras and an artist who DJs on a gramophone – are all, in their different ways, reacting to digital culture's fast-forward momentum. Are they driven by nostalgia for a past they did not live though and in retreat from a present that makes them uneasy as it makes everything easier?

This is a common reaction. In 1970, sociologist Alvin Toffler coined the phrase "futureshock" to describe a psychological state for those faced with "too much change in too short a period of time". Today, for instance, there is a creeping anxiety about the ways in which the internet is rewiring our brains and, some experts have argued, making us less literate and less able to concentrate for long periods on a single subject. Nowness is everything, reflection seems old fashioned; opinion is dominant; scholarship and expertise seem scarcely to matter.

The work of these artists is born of a dissatisfaction with digital culture's obsession with the new, the next, the instant. It values the hand-made, the detailed and the patiently skilful over the instantly upgradeable and the disposable. In his book The Craftsman, American thinker Richard Sennett warns that we are in danger of losing ourselves if we turn our backs on the learnt skills and craftsmanship that helped give our lives meaning. Instead of constant distraction, he celebrates modes of creativity that involve slowness, attentiveness and contemplation. Today, though, our lives are so taken up with tweeting, blogging, browsing and networking that the time it takes to master a trade or a musical instrument, or read a discursive book like Sennett's, is time many of us think we can no longer afford.

What also unites these four is a willingness to slow down, to run counter to the furious momentum of digitised contemporary culture, its speed and its pursuit of sanitised perfection – of sound, image and format.

In the age of [computerised music producing platform] Pro-Tools, where every miscue, dropped beat and fluffed syllable can be corrected digitally, musician Lewis Durham, perhaps the most obsessive champion of all things analogue, has constructed a recording studio in which a resurrected Elvis would feel at ease. "It's not about the era," insists Durham, "more the quality of the equipment made."

For Durham, and his rockabilly group, Kitty, Daisy & Lewis, though, authenticity is all: the sound of the recording matching the cut of the period clothes, the curve of a vintage guitar, the propulsive thump that only a stand-up bass can produce.

For artist Naomi Kashiwagi, old technologies are simply a means to new and surprising ends. She customises mechanical musical hardware – gramophones, shellac records – then plays them to create live sound that allows for, and thrives on, the accidental: distortion, repetition, amplified crackles, rumbles and echoes. She calls up the ghosts in these old, supposedly obsolete machines, then exorcises them with a gleeful conceptual flourish.

For Daniel Grendon, a photographer who uses vintage film cameras, and Claire Askew, who composes poetry on a typewriter rather than a laptop, the process of creating art seems as important as the end result. Again, it is the hands-on approach that matters, the care and attention needed in both the preparation and execution of a work.

In 1936, philosopher Walter Benjamin published his influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in which he suggested that a painting possessed a certain "aura" which a photograph or a film did not. The aura was to do with its uniqueness, its originality and, thus, its authenticity. He did not mourn the loss of this aura in art; instead, he mused on what might arrive in its place and what kinds of collective experience might replace the solitary appreciation of a piece. Who knows what he would have made of the digital age in all its dazzling possibility, its endless capacity for distraction as well as its thus far underused capacity for inculcating knowledge rather than disseminating information. However much we resist the digital tide, we're all caught up in its undertow. It is time someone updated Benjamin's essay for the digital age.

To read de entire article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/apr/24/mavericks-defying-digital-age/print

Functioning Synapse Created Using Carbon Nanotubes: Devices Might Be Used in Brain Prostheses or Synthetic Brains

ScienceDaily (Apr. 22, 2011) — Engineering researchers the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in the use of nanotechnologies for the construction of a synthetic brain. They have built a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests reproduces the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain.

The team, which was led by Professor Alice Parker and Professor Chongwu Zhou in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, used an interdisciplinary approach combining circuit design with nanotechnology to address the complex problem of capturing brain function.

In a paper published in the proceedings of the IEEE/NIH 2011 Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop in April 2011, the Viterbi team detailed how they were able to use carbon nanotubes to create a synapse.

Carbon nanotubes are molecular carbon structures that are extremely small, with a diameter a million times smaller than a pencil point. These nanotubes can be used in electronic circuits, acting as metallic conductors or semiconductors.

"This is a necessary first step in the process," said Parker, who began the looking at the possibility of developing a synthetic brain in 2006. "We wanted to answer the question: Can you build a circuit that would act like a neuron? The next step is even more complex. How can we build structures out of these circuits that mimic the function of the brain, which has 100 billion neurons and 10,000 synapses per neuron?"

Parker emphasized that the actual development of a synthetic brain, or even a functional brain area is decades away, and she said the next hurdle for the research centers on reproducing brain plasticity in the circuits.

The human brain continually produces new neurons, makes new connections and adapts throughout life, and creating this process through analog circuits will be a monumental task, according to Parker.

She believes the ongoing research of understanding the process of human intelligence could have long-term implications for everything from developing prosthetic nanotechnology that would heal traumatic brain injuries to developing intelligent, safe cars that would protect drivers in bold new ways.

For Jonathan Joshi, a USC Viterbi Ph.D. student who is a co-author of the paper, the interdisciplinary approach to the problem was key to the initial progress. Joshi said that working with Zhou and his group of nanotechnology researchers provided the ideal dynamic of circuit technology and nanotechnology.

"The interdisciplinary approach is the only approach that will lead to a solution. We need more than one type of engineer working on this solution," said Joshi. "We should constantly be in search of new technologies to solve this problem."

The Really Smart Phone

Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.
By ROBERT LEE HOTZ
Photo-illustration by Adam Magyar

Apple and Google may be intensifying privacy concerns by tracking where and when people use their mobile phones—but the true future of consumer surveillance is taking shape inside the cellphones at a weather-stained apartment complex in Cambridge, Mass.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

"We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for."

Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to forms of behavior that shape us in common.

As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person, and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

To read the entire article and play related videos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704547604576263261679848814.html?mod=WSJEUROPE_hpp_MIDDLESecondNews

Radiation: A Literary Analysis

By MATTHEW L. WALD
Nevada is home to the largest nuclear bomb test site, and the proposed host for a nuclear waste repository. The scientists and engineers, the corporate executives, the lawyers and the elected officials have all had years to chew over how and why Nevada was selected, but now comes a new analysis, from an English major.

The cover of the book “Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert.”“Bombast: Spinning Atoms in the Desert,” published late last year by a nonprofit group in Reno, the Black Rock Institute, is a trip through what the author, Michon Mackedon, calls “nuclear colonialism.” Ms. Mackedon, of Fallon, in northern Nevada, is a former co-chairman of the Nevada Commission on Nuclear Projects, a state agency appointed to fight off the waste dump. She is also a professor emeritus of English at Western Nevada College.



Photo:Michon Mackedon

Michon Mackedon.Outsiders with a global or national agenda – like preparing for nuclear war with the Soviet Union or finding a disposal site for the civilian and military wastes piling up around the country – began by devaluing their chosen site, whether atolls in the South Pacific or the deserts of New Mexico or southern Nevada, she asserts in the book.

And Nevada, she said, is barren and quirky; in the popular mind, why not throw the mushroom clouds and the million-year waste repository in with the state’s “casino culture,” she asked.

“Images of the American West and its people produced stereotypes of emptiness and wasteland,’’ she writes. If Nevada never quite embraced that view of itself, it did express some pride; in the early 1980s, the sidewalk in front of the Las Vegas City Hall had an inlaid design of a mushroom cloud.




The Priscilla above ground test on June 24, 1957.As fallout from atmospheric detonations at the Nevada Test Site was killing sheep and cattle of the area’s ranchers, and quite possibly people as well, popular culture embraced the bomb, connecting it with two staples of popular culture, sex and alcohol. Bartenders served an “atomic cocktail,” in a martini glass, of equal parts Champagne, vodka and brandy, with a splash of sherry. In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission was trying to detonate a nuclear weapon in a test code-named “Operation Cue,” but high winds forced many postponements, so, according to contemporary accounts, military personnel took to calling it “Miscue.” Some of those personnel crowned a showgirl from the Sands Hotel as “Miss-Cue,” with a tiara topped with a mushroom cloud.

Courtesy of the Black Rock InstituteAnd she notes the names chosen for the tests themselves, including hearthside games like “Chess,” “Rummy Draughts,” “Hearts” and “Backgammon,” and homey ones like “Cottage,” “Farm,” “Garden” and “Puddle Grove,” all of them efforts to tame the image of destruction by naming it something more comfortable.

Nuclear testing ended in 1992 but by that time the effort was under way to build a waste repository in a spot on the edge of the test site, Yucca Mountain. “We yearn for a modern Hercules to clean up the wastes,” she writes. “However, the quandary of nuclear Augean stables would stump even Hercules.”



The book was published before the Fukushima Daiichi accident in March, but that event has refocused attention on the problem of spent nuclear fuel. “It could increase the political momentum to get it away from power plants to what is perceived as a safe site,’’ she said. And that, she said, is likely to mean attention turning to Yucca Mountain.

Paul Graham: Smoke and mirrors

From dole offices to ominous fields, Paul Graham's pictures have an unsettling emptiness. So when we look at them, are we really seeing ourselves?

Adrian Searle guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 April 2011 21.30 BST larger | smaller Article history

Paul Graham's exhibition at London's Whitechapel gallery is filled with people who are just looking. We observe their rapt attention, their lostness, absorbed in things that we can't see. They stare at TVs beyond the frame, their faces caught in the glow of the screen; they look out of cafe windows, distracted by the passing traffic. They wait in dole offices whose grimness is an insult to the eye.

In the corners of nightclubs, people stand with their eyes closed, engulfed in music, or booze, or drugs. In Belfast, a woman squints at the smoke from the cigarette she's dragging on. A pensive Galician girl casts her eyes downwards in Vigo. People stare at the pavement. They gaze at the floor. Wretched walls return their vacant looks. Sometimes they don't seem to see the world at all, their thoughts engaged elsewhere. We see their interiority and distraction, but cannot penetrate it. Sometimes they see nothing because they really are blind.

Sometimes we are blinded, too, and the picture goes almost blank, too full of glare for us to see. There's something going on in there, but the detail has been blanched out. This is a whited-out view of America, black neighbourhoods bleached to the point of erasure, just like the affliction visited on everyone in José Saramago's 1995 novel Blindness, in which Graham discovered a telling affinity with his own work. Made between 1998 and 2002, American Night juxtaposes these over-exposed images with over-rich, colour-saturated shots of sturdy homes in affluent suburbs, and often shadowy shots of black people on America's streets. As a photographic essay, American Night is as much conceptual as it is social critique, as perversely poetic as it is observational.

It is difficult not to regard all of Graham's projects as metaphor, not least for the photographer and his subject, for engagement itself: looking at photographs and at the world; looking at other people looking, seeing and not seeing. The camera sees more than the photographer – or rather, it sees something different. We see with the mind more than the eye, while the camera itself is only an eye, wherever the photographer directs it. When I look at Graham's photograph of the view from the bridge over the Archway Road at Highgate in north London, I see things from my past that Graham can't possibly know, and which aren't actually in the picture. The past, and your own life, comes tumbling in.

The same is true of the wretched pictures he took in employment offices during the early 1980s. I have sat in at least two of these self-same DHSS offices, waiting for my number to be called. Graham waited, too, not only to take sly shots, but to sign on himself. Beyond Caring remains Graham's best-known series; laminated versions of these photographs were toured by the old Greater London Council to TUC conferences in order to lobby MPs for better conditions in these desolate waiting rooms and interview booths. They remain often appalling and dehumanising places, for claimants and staff alike. But there's more to Beyond Caring than social documentary and observation, or even political commitment or outrage against Thatcherism. There's a terrible emptiness in them, a blight that goes beyond the economic.




In a larger sense, this is the subject of his series New Europe (1988-1992), showing us often desultory and seemingly insignificant places and moments in Germany, Spain and elsewhere. A one-armed man (how did he lose it?) stares across a wasteland toward the city beyond, this picture paired with a second image that shows the interior of a bleakly anonymous, glass-walled room, lit by a circular fluorescent light. The glass wall reflects shimmering chandeliers (maybe it's the interior of one of Spain's casinos). In another pairing, one shot shows a laughing young woman – perhaps outside a nightclub. This is coupled with the arresting image of fresh globs of spit, spattering Franco's gravestone at the grandiose Valle de los Caídos (the Valley of the Fallen), west of Madrid. Many visitors must have made the journey for the sole satisfaction of spitting on the dictator's grave. The site was closed to the public two years ago. The past and present collide in all these images, though frequently in ways that aren't all that obvious.

Looking for trouble

Graham's colour photography began, he has said, as a "mash-up" of William Eggleston and Robert Adams. Eggleston, the pioneer of colour photography, of rooms and streets and people, and Adams, primarily a photographer of landscape, are an unlikely pairing. Graham has also been inspired by photographers and artists as diverse as Jeff Wall's constructed and posed photographs, and the elegiac, black-and white (though mostly grey) work of the brilliant Berlin photographer Michael Schmidt. In Graham's work, conceptualism, social critique and the wandering eye of a man who would travel America's roads (like a latter-day Robert Frank) with a camera but nothing much in mind, collide. Odd corners, the insignificant, a guy mowing grass or a man carrying a big carton of Pepsi through a winter day, another guy smoking – these all come from a series of books Graham made called A Shimmer of Possibility. And it is often in books that I like looking at Graham's work best. His photographs, after all, are often meant to be seen as extended essays as much as as individual shots.

Graham's exhibition fills three of the Whitechapel's spaces and takes us from 1981 to 2006. Even though it is a large exhibition, it feels incomplete, or perhaps just too brief. It isn't that the photographs are too empty, or lacking in detail – some, like the images he took in early works such as Troubled Land, a tour of Northern Ireland during the conflict, are all about the details. A Union flag waving at the crown of a tree in a field, a distant soldier running across a roundabout in a neat suburbia, the helicopter hovering over the South Armagh hedgerows, the watchtower over the hill. Often, we have to search out the telling incident in the shot. Is it the cows grazing in a distant field? Is it the paint spatters on the road? Where is the republican parade mentioned in the title of this view of Strabane, with the rain coming in over the church spires, the distant bridge over the river? It takes a while to spy the line of tiny figures, almost obscured by the grasses in the foreground.

Graham went back to Ireland in April 1994, when the ceasefire had been announced, and just pointed his camera at the sky. The photographs in Ceasefire show nothing but the passing weather. The veiled sun glimmers through cloud in Ballymurphy. More dark clouds lower in Newry, and weather moves in over Shankhill. Like peace itself, these cloud studies are a kind of sublime abstraction. The indifferent weather, we also understand, respects no borders or allegiances, whatever Ian Paisley once said about never forsaking "the blue skies of Ulster for the grey mist of an Irish Republic".

It is in the accumulation and juxtaposition of details and moments and runs of images that the evolving narrative of Graham's varied, complex art unfolds. Somehow this show feels just too well-tempered – too edited, too neat – even across several of the Whitechapel's spaces, to let its cumulative effect take hold. Like the world itself, Graham's art is messier than this.