Nanotubes Seen as an Alternative to Silicon Circuits

SAN FRANCISCO — In the next decade or so, the circuits etched on silicon-based computer chips are expected to shrink as small as they can physically become, prompting a search for alternative materials to take their place.

Some researchers are putting high hopes on carbon nanotubes, and on Monday a group of researchers at Stanford successfully demonstrated a simple microelectronic circuit composed of 44 transistors fabricated entirely from the threadlike fibers.

The development, which was presented both as a paper and a working demonstration at a technical conference here, is the most striking evidence yet that carbon nanotubes may prove to be the material of the future when today’s silicon-based chips reach their fundamental physical limits.

I.B.M., which is one of the biggest proponents of nanotubes for microelectronic applications, has made clear its hope that carbon nanotube technology will be ready a decade from now, when semiconductors are expected to shrink to minimum dimensions of just 5 nanometers. But until now, researchers at universities and chip makers have succeeded in making only individual devices, like transistors, from carbon nanotubes.

The Stanford development is the first time a complete working circuit has been created and publicly demonstrated, suggesting that the material may indeed live up to its promise.

Silicon, a plentiful natural element which functions both as a conductor and an insulator, has already lasted decades longer than computer engineers originally expected, as generations of increasingly smaller transistors have been perfected. It is used by the computer chip industry to etch circuits much finer than the wave length of light, and engineers and scientists say they believe that the material will continue to scale down, at least until the end of the decade.

But sooner or later the shrinking of circuits made from the material will stop, ending the microelectronic era that has been defined by Moore’s Law, the 1965 observation by the Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip doubled at regular intervals.

The Stanford advance seems to hold promise for the belief that whenever the silicon era stalls, the scaling-down process will continue, and permit designers to increase power and capacity of computers far into the future.

The Stanford demonstration came during a session at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, held here annually. A graduate student, Max Shulaker, chose a wooden, human-size hand, connected to a simple motor and gear arrangement on a makeshift stand. Onstage, he threw a switch and the hand shook vigorously.

It was a simple demonstration, but the research group said its goal was to build an entire microprocessor from carbon nanotubes to confirm the potential of the material.

Besides their small size, carbon nanotubes use much less power and switch faster than today’s silicon transistors.

“The bottom line is you can expect an order of magnitude in power saving at the system level,” said Subhasish Mitra, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and director of the Robust Systems Group. That offers tremendous promise for effectively increasing the battery life in mobile consumer devices in the future, he said.

Other new materials and variations of silicon-based transistors are also being studied to see if they will shrink to smaller sizes. Intel, for example, last year began using a three-dimensional transistor called a FinFET. By turning the device on its side, the chip maker was able to pack transistors more densely on the surface of a chip.

“I’m not saying there is nothing else around,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a Stanford electrical engineering professor. “It’s just a matter of who wins when you scale down to really, really small dimensions.”

The challenge of carbon nanotubes in their type state is that they form a giant “hairball” of interwoven molecules. However, by chemically growing them on a quartz surface, the researchers are able to align them closely and in regularly spaced rows. They then transfer them to a silicon wafer, where they used conventional photolithographic techniques to make working circuits.

The technological hurdle has been to make reliable circuits even when a small percentage of the wires are misaligned. The Stanford group stated it had perfected a circuit technique that made use of redundancy to work around the imperfectly formed wires.

Dr. Mitra said that “99.5 percent looks very nice on a PowerPoint slide. But when you’re talking about 10 billion things, .5 percent of 10 billion is a really large number, and that completely messes things up.”

Beyond microelectronics, carbon nanotubes are showing promise in commercial applications like rechargeable batteries, bicycle frames, ship hulls, solar cells and water filters, according to an article in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Science.

Read More..

Jerry Buss dies at 80; Lakers owner brought 'Showtime' success to L.A.

Longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at the age of 80. Last week, it was revealed that he was hospitalized with an undisclosed form of cancer.

When Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, he wanted to build a championship team. But that wasn't all.

The new owner gave courtside seats to movie stars. He hired pretty women to dance during timeouts. He spent freely on big stars and encouraged a fast-paced, exuberant style of play.

As the Lakers sprinted to one NBA title after another, Buss cut an audacious figure in the stands, an aging playboy in bluejeans, often with a younger woman by his side.

PHOTOS: Jerry Buss through the years

"I really tried to create a Laker image, a distinct identity," he once said. "I think we've been successful. I mean, the Lakers are pretty damn Hollywood."

Buss, 80, died Monday of complications of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Lakers fans will remember Buss for bringing extraordinary success — 10 championships in three-plus decades — but equally important to his legacy was a sense of showmanship that transformed pro basketball from sport to spectacle.

Live discussion at 10:30: The legacy of Jerry Buss

"Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today," NBA Commissioner David Stern said. "Remember, he showed us it was about 'Showtime,' the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen."

His teams featured the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard. He was also smart enough to hire Hall of Fame-caliber coaches in Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.

"I've worked hard and been lucky," Buss said. "With the combination of the two, I've accomplished everything I ever set out to do."

A Depression-era baby, Jerry Hatten Buss was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 27, 1933, although some sources cite 1934 as his birth year. His parents, Lydus and Jessie Buss, divorced when he was an infant.

His mother struggled to make ends meet as a waitress in tiny Evanston, Wyo., and Buss remembered standing in food lines in the bitter cold. They moved to Southern California when he was 9, but within a few years she remarried and her second husband took the family back to Wyoming.

His stepfather, Cecil Brown, was, as Buss put it, "very tight-fisted." Brown made his living as a plumber and expected his children (one from a previous marriage, another son and a daughter with Jessie) to help.

TIMELINE: Jerry Buss' path

This work included digging ditches in the cold. Buss preferred bell hopping at a local hotel and running a mail-order stamp-collecting business that he started at age 13.

Leaving high school a year early, he worked on the railroad, pumping a hand-driven car up and down the line to make repairs. The job lasted just three months.

Until then, Buss had never much liked academics. But he returned to school and, with a science teacher's encouragement, did well enough to earn a science scholarship to the University of Wyoming.

Before graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, when he was 19 he married a coed named JoAnn Mueller and they would eventually have four children: John, Jim, Jeanie and Janie.

The couple moved to Southern California in 1953 when USC gave Buss a scholarship for graduate school. He earned a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1957. The degree brought him great pride — Lakers employees always called him "Dr. Buss."

Read More..

New Whale Species Unearthed in California Highway Dig

By Carolyn Gramling, ScienceNOW

Chalk yet another fossil find up to roadcut science. Thanks to a highway-widening project in California’s Laguna Canyon, scientists have identified several new species of early toothed baleen whales. Paleontologist Meredith Rivin of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center in Fullerton, California, presented the finds Feb. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“In California, you need a paleontologist and an archaeologist on-site” during such projects, Rivin says. That was fortuitous: The Laguna Canyon outcrop, excavated between 2000 and 2005, turned out to be a treasure trove containing hundreds of marine mammals that lived 17 million to 19 million years ago. It included 30 cetacean skulls as well as an abundance of other ocean dwellers such as sharks, says Rivin, who studies the fossil record of toothed baleen whales. Among those finds, she says, were four newly identified species of toothed baleen whale—a type of whale that scientists thought had gone extinct 5 million years earlier.

Whales, the general term for the order Cetacea, comprise two suborders: Odontoceti, or toothed whales, which includes echolocators like dolphins, porpoises, and killer whales; and Mysticeti, or baleen whales, the filter-feeding giants of the deep such as blue whales and humpback whales.The two suborders share a common ancestor.

Mysticeti comes from the Greek for mustache, a reference to the baleen that hangs down from their jaw. But the earliest baleen whales actually had teeth (although they’re still called mysticetes). Those toothy remnants still appear in modern fin whale fetuses, which start to develop teeth in the womb that are later reabsorbed before the enamel actually forms.

The four new toothed baleen whale species were also four huge surprises, Rivin says. The new fossils date to 17 to 19 million years ago, or the early-mid Miocene epoch, making them the youngest known toothed whales. Three of the fossils belong to the genus Morawanocetus, which is familiar to paleontologists studying whale fossils from Japan, but hadn’t been seen before in California. These three, along with the fourth new species, which is of a different genus, represent the last known occurrence of aetiocetes, a family of mysticetes that coexisted with early baleen whales. Thus, they aren’t ancestral to any of the living whales, but they could represent transitional steps on the way tothe toothless mysticetes.

The fourth new species—dubbed “Willy”—has its own surprises, Rivin says. Although modern baleen whales are giants, that’s a fairly recent development (in the last 10 million years). But Willy was considerably bigger than the three Morawanocetus fossils. Its teeth were also surprisingly worn—and based on the pattern of wear as well as the other fossils found in the Laguna Canyon deposit, Rivin says, that may be because Willy’s favorite diet may have been sharks. Modern offshore killer whales, who also enjoy a meal of sharks, tend to have similar patterns of wear in their teeth due to the sharks’ rough skin.

The new fossils are a potentially exciting find, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Although it’s not yet clear what Rivin’s team has got and what the fossils will reveal about early baleen whale evolution, he says, “I’ll be excited to see what they come up with.” Pyenson himself is no stranger to roadcut science and the rush to preserve fossils on the brink of destruction: In 2011, he managed, within a week, to collect three-dimensional images of numerous whale fossils found by workers widening a highway running through Chile’s Atacama Desert.

Meanwhile, Rivin says her paper describing the fossils is still in preparation, and she hopes to have more data on the three Morawanocetus, at least, published by the end of the year. As for the fourth fossil, she says, it might take a bit longer: There’s still some more work to do to fully free Willy from the rock.

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

Read More..

Personal Health: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “. . . toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer, than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average more than 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen in the United States from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in this country. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died so young if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

Read More..

DealBook: Reader's Digest Files for Bankruptcy, Again

Executives at Reader’s Digest must be hoping that the magazine’s second trip to bankruptcy court in under four years will be its last.

The magazine’s parent, RDA Holding, filed for Chapter 11 protection late on Sunday in another effort to cut down the debt that has plagued the pocket-size publication for years. The company is hoping to convert about $465 million of its debt into equity held by its creditors.

In a court filing, Reader’s Digest said it held about $1.1 billion in assets and just under $1.2 billion in debt. It has provisionally lined up about $105 million in financing to keep it afloat during the Chapter 11 case.

This week’s filing is the latest effort by the 91-year-old publisher, whose magazine once resided on many American coffee tables, to fix itself in a difficult economic environment.

“After considering a wide range of alternatives, we believe this course of action will most effectively enable us to maintain our momentum in transforming the business and allow us to capitalize on the growing strength and presence of our outstanding brands and products,” Robert E. Guth, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Reader’s Digest last filed for bankruptcy in 2009, emerging a year later under the control of lenders like JPMorgan Chase.

That reorganization substantially cut the publisher’s debt, and afterward the company worked to further shrink its footprint. It jettisoned nonessential publications in a series of deals, including the $180 million sale of Allrecipes.com and the $4.3 million sale of Every Day With Rachael Ray, both to the Meredith Corporation.

Most of the money from those transactions went to pay down a still significant debt burden. But the company remained pressured by what it described in a court filing as steep declines that still bedevil the media industry. Last year, the publisher began negotiating with its lenders, including Wells Fargo, about amending some of its debt obligations. That process eventually led to a “pre-negotiated agreement” with creditors, which will be put into effect by the bankruptcy filing.

This time, Reader’s Digest is hoping to spend even less time in court. Mr. Guth said in a court filing that the publisher aims to emerge from bankruptcy protection in about four months.

The company’s biggest unsecured creditors include firms represented by Luxor Capital. The Federal Trade Commission also contends that it is owed $8.8 million in a settlement claim.

Reader’s Digest is being advised by Evercore Partners and the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Reader's Digest bankruptcy petition (2013) by

Declaration by Reader's Digest Chief Executive by

Read More..

Hollywood directs its star power toward a campaign closer to home

A stylish crowd waited beneath a flashing marquee outside the Fonda Theatre. "Appearing tonight!" the sign read. "Eric Garcetti 4 Mayor."

In a city where political campaigns are typically waged at neighborhood meetings, not Hollywood concert halls, last week's star-studded fundraiser for Garcetti highlighted the entertainment industry's outsized role in this year's mayoral race. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel started the show with a stand-up routine and musician Moby got the crowd of several hundred dancing. Actress Amy Smart urged everyone to tweet about the campaign, and actor Will Ferrell beamed in via video to pledge that if Garcetti is elected, every resident in the city will receive free waffles.

Hollywood is taking to City Hall politics like never before, veterans say, with power players such as Steven Spielberg leading a major fundraising effort and celebrities such as Salma Hayek weighing in via YouTube. A Times analysis of city Ethics Commission records found that actors, producers, directors and others in the industry have donated more than $746,000 directly to candidates, with some $462,000 going to Garcetti and $226,000 to City Controller Wendy Greuel.

Several of Greuel's big-name celebrity supporters, including Tobey Maguire, Kate Hudson and Zooey Deschanel, recently hosted a fundraiser for her at an exclusive club on the Sunset Strip. She is getting extra help from Spielberg and his former partners at DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, who have given at least $150,000 and are raising more for an independent group funding a TV ad blitz on her behalf.

The burst of support is coming from an industry often maligned for paying little attention to local politics.

While Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is often photographed at red carpet events and former Mayor Tom Bradley was famously close to actor Gregory Peck, serious Hollywood money and star power has tended to remain tantalizingly out of reach for local politicians. "It's no secret that the entertainment industry has never really focused on the city that houses it," said Steve Soboroff, who ran for mayor and lost in 2001.

Political consultant Garry South, who has worked on mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns, recalled having to pay celebrities to appear at fundraisers in the past. Hollywood has long embraced candidates in presidential and congressional elections, South said, in part because they have more influence over causes favored by celebrities.

"The mayor of L.A. is not going to get us out of Afghanistan. The mayor of L.A. is not going to determine whether or not gay marriage is legal," South said. "The local issues are just not as sexy."

But this year, if you're a part of the Hollywood establishment, chances are you've gotten invitations to fundraisers for Greuel, Garcetti or both.

The difference this time is that both candidates have worked to cultivate deep Hollywood connections, observers say. Garcetti has represented Hollywood for 12 years, overseeing a development boom and presiding over ceremonies to add stars — Kimmel recently got one — on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Greuel is a former executive at DreamWorks, where she worked with the moguls who founded the studio. She has also served for 10 years on the board of the California Film Commission.

City Councilwoman Jan Perry and entertainment attorney Kevin James have reaped far less financial support from the industry, records show, although each claims a share of celebrity endorsements. Dick Van Dyke sponsored a fundraiser for Perry and Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black has given to James.

Agent Feroz Taj, who attended Garcetti's Moby concert, said a flurry of activity around the race, involving friends and colleagues, piqued his interest. He said he's never been involved in a political campaign, but now when he receives invites to Greuel events, he says he is supporting Garcetti.

Industry insiders have been buzzing about a letter they say is being circulated by an advisor to Spielberg and Katzenberg, urging people to give $15,000 to an independent group supporting Greuel. The DreamWorks founders have made a difference for Greuel in previous elections. In 2002, financial support from the studio executives and their allies helped her squeak out a victory in one of the closest City Council races in history.

This time around, billionaire media mogul Haim Saban is getting involved, providing his Beverly Hills estate for a Greuel fundraiser featuring U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). Greuel has also received contributions from Tom Hanks and actresses Mariska Hargitay and Eva Longoria, neither of whom have given to a local political campaign before, according to records.

Garcetti, on the other hand, has picked up contributions from former Disney Chief Executive Michael Eisner, as well as newcomers to local politics Jake Gyllenhaal and Hayek, who once traveled with Garcetti on a global warming awareness mission to the South Pole. The actress released a video endorsing Garcetti and thanking him for helping her find her wallet in the snow.

Campaign consultant Sean Clegg linked the industry's burgeoning interest in mayoral politics to President Obama's election, which he said had "a catalyzing effect on Hollywood." Indeed, many Greuel and Garcetti supporters were Obama backers. Hayek hosted a fundraiser for Obama and Longoria served as a co-chair of his reelection campaign.

Clegg is a consultant for Working Californians, an independent campaign committee that hopes to raise and spend at least $2 million supporting Greuel, with donations from Spielberg and others in Hollywood, as well as the union representing Department of Water and Power employees.

Generally, Clegg argued, Hollywood money is different than the special-interest funding campaigns collect. "Money is coming out of the entertainment industry more on belief and less on the transactional considerations," he said.

But Raphael Sonenshein, director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at Cal State L.A., said Hollywood's new interest in local elections may be tied to growing concerns about film production being lured elsewhere by tax incentives.

Garcetti and Greuel have both pledged to reverse job losses tied to runaway television and film production, with Garcetti touting a recent proposal to eliminate roughly $231,000 in annual city fees charged for pilot episodes of new TV shows. The number of pilots shot locally has dropped 30% in recent years, but city budget analysts say the tax break would have a minimal effect because city fees represent only a small portion of production costs.

On the council, both candidates voted to eliminate filming fees at most city facilities. Greuel tells audiences she has an insider's perspective on the industry's needs and says she will create an "entertainment cabinet" to help it thrive. "I have sat with studio heads," she said in a recent interview. "They want a city . . . that is a champion for film industry jobs in Los Angeles."

Greuel may have Garcetti beat on experience in the studio front office, but he is the only candidate with his own page on IMDb.com — a closely watched industry website that tracks individuals' film and television credits.

The councilman, a member of the Screen Actors Guild, has made several television appearances, including one for the cable police drama "The Closer." He played the mayor of Los Angeles.

kate.linthicum@latimes.com

Times staff writer Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

Read More..

<cite>Halo</cite> Creator Unveils Its Next Masterpiece, a Persistent Online World

"Citadel": Concept art from Bungie's Destiny.

BELLEVUE, Washington — Destiny, the new game from the creator of Halo, isn’t just another shooter. It’s a persistent online multiplayer adventure, designed on a galactic scale, that wants to become your new life.

“It isn’t a game,” went the oft-heard tagline at a preview event on Wednesday. “It’s a world where the most important stories are told by the players, not written by the developers.”

This week, Bungie Studios invited the press into its Seattle-area studio to get the first look at Destiny. Although the event was a little short on details — Bungie and Activision didn’t reveal the launch date, handed out concept art instead of screenshots, and dodged most of my questions — it gave an intriguing glimpse at what the creator of Halo believes is the future of shooters.

Bungie was acquired by Microsoft in 2000, and its insanely popular shooter was the killer app that put the original Xbox on the map. Bungie split off from its corporate parent in 2007, and Microsoft produced Halo 4 on its own last year. The development studio partnered up with mega-publisher Activision for its latest project, which was kept mostly secret until now.

Destiny, slated for release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, isn’t exactly an MMO. Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg called it a “shared-world shooter” — multiplayer and online, but something less than massive.

“We’re not doing this just because we have the tech,” Hirshberg said. “We have a great idea, and we’re letting the concept lead the tech.”

Built with new development software created specifically for Destiny, this new game is set in Earth’s solar system and takes place after a mysterious cataclysm wipes out most of humanity. The remaining survivors create a “safe zone” underneath a mysterious alien sphere called “The Traveler.”

The enigmatic sphere imparts players with potent weapons, magic-like powers and defensive technology. Thanks to these gifts, people have begun reclaiming the solar system from alien invaders that moved in while humanity was down.

Bungie fired off a list of design principles that guide Destiny’s creation: Create a world players want to be in. Make it enjoyable by players of all skill levels. Make it enjoyable by people who are “tired, impatient and distracted.” In other words, you don’t have to be loaded for bear and pumped for the firefight of your life every time you log on to Destiny.

After this brief overview, writer/director Joseph Staten used concept art and narration to outline an example of what a typical Destiny player’s experience might be.

Beginning in the “safe zone,” a player would start out from their in-game home and walk into a large common area. From here, the player would be able to explore their surroundings and meet up with friends. Then, they might board their starships and fly to another planet, let’s say Mars, in order to raid territory held by aliens.

During this raid, other real players who traveled to the same zone (like visiting a particular server on an MMO) would be free to come and go as they please. For example, a random participant could simply walk on by. They could stop and observe. Or they could get involved in the fight. In this instance, Staten suggested that a passerby would join the raid and then break off from the group after the spoils were divvied up without any user interface elements to fuss with. Walk away, and it’s done.

Bungie made a point of saying several times over that Destiny will not have any “lobby”-type interfaces, or menus from which to choose from a list of quests. Instead, players will simply immerse themselves in the world and organically choose to participate in whatever activities they stumble upon. Bungie promised solo content, cooperative content, and competitive content, though it provided no further examples of these.

The developer said that by employing very specialized artificial intelligence working entirely behind the scenes, players will encounter other real players who are best suited for them to interact with, based on their experience levels and other factors.

Staten didn’t say how many players would be able to exist in the world at the same time, but said that characters will be placed in proximity to each other based on very specific criteria, not simply to “fill the world up.”

Bungie showed off three distinct character classes throughout the day’s presentations: Hunter, Titan and Warlock. Although no differences were outlined between them apart from the Warlock being able to use a kind of techno-magic, the developer was keen to emphasize the idea that each character in Destiny would be highly customized and unique, and will grow with the player over an extended period of time.

While many games make the same promise, Destiny’s vision of “an extended period of time” isn’t 100 hours. It’s more like 10 years.

Bungie’s plan is for the Destiny story to unfold gradually over the course of 10 “books,” each with a beginning, middle and end. Through this will run an overarching story intended to span the entire decade’s worth of games, although like many other topics covered during the day, Bungie gave little detail about how this will work.

The developer spent a lot of time emphasizing its claim that no game has been made at this scale before. Bungie says it has a whopping 350 in-house developers working on Destiny.

Senior graphics architect Hao Chen gave examples of the sort of impenetrable mathematics formulas that allow Bungie to craft environments and worlds at a speed that it claims was previously impossible.

Bungie’s malleable team system was also said to increase its output. With the ability to co-locate designers, artists, and engineers at any time, Bungie says it can go through exceptionally rapid on-the-spot iteration and improvement for each facet of the game.

Apart from highly improved technology and the basic concept of humanity taking back the solar system, there’s just not a lot of hard information on Destiny at the moment. One thing that was made quite clear is that the game will not be subscription-based. Every presenter was clear in stating that players will not pay a monthly fee to participate in this persistent world.

While fees may not be required, a constant connection to the Internet will be. Since the core concept of Destiny is exploring a world that exists outside of the player’s console and is populated by real people at all times, it “will need to be connected in order for someone to play,” said Bungie chief operating officer Pete Parsons.

Representatives from both Bungie and Activision gave vague answers when Wired pressed for further details, often stating that they “were not ready” to discuss specifics. Whether that means those things are still being kept from the press, or whether they have not yet been determined by the development team, was unclear.

Questions currently unanswered: How will players communicate? How will players interact with each other outside of combat? What content exists in the non-combat “safe zones”? Subscriptions may be out, but what about in-app purchases? Will player versus player combat be available? Will the game ship on a disc or be download only? Will its persistent world allow Xbox and PlayStation gamers to play together? What content and interactions will be possible via smartphones and tablets (which Bungie alluded to)? Will the fancy new tools be licensed to other developers?

And so on.

For now, Bungie is asking us to take it for granted that it will execute on a bold 10-year plan for a very different sort of shooter. In the history of the always-changing gaming industry, no one’s ever been able to pull off a 10-year plan for anything. Can Bungie do it?

Hey… they made Halo, right?

Read More..

S.E.C. Inquiry Into China Film Trade Unnerves Hollywood

LOS ANGELES — Hunkered down. Lawyered up. Looking over your shoulder for the prosecutors.

That is a not a comfortable way to do business. But it may become business as usual for those who have been struggling to make China both a customer for Hollywood films and a partner in the production of them.

Last March, word reached several studios of a confidential inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by people or companies involved in the China film trade. Since then, executives and their advisers have been waiting for some public sign of the scope or focus of the government’s interest.

So far, there has been none.

But official silence has not kept the investigation from casting a chill over dealings between Hollywood and China. At a discussion in August sponsored by the Beverly Hills Bar Association, some panel members said deal-making had been complicated by the investigation. This concern was repeated in recent interviews by people involved in the Chinese-American film trade, though only on the condition of anonymity to avoid attracting the attention of regulators.

The legal concern is arising precisely as Chinese consumers — once presumed to be an easy audience for American-made films like “Skyfall” or “The Dark Knight Rises” — have been showing a preference for homegrown, Chinese-language blockbusters.

Those include the comedy “Lost in Thailand,” which surpassed American films to collect more than $200 million in China’s theaters after it opened last year, and the action-fantasy “Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons,” which had sales of $50 million in its first four days this month, according to the China Film Biz blog.

Asked last week about the corrupt practices inquiry, spokesmen for the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission declined to comment. All the major studios, in addition to DreamWorks Animation and Marvel Entertainment, which have extensive dealings in China, either did not respond or declined to comment.

Last April, people briefed on the inquiry said virtually every Hollywood company with significant dealings in China had been notified in prior weeks of the inquiry into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which forbids American companies from making illegal payments to government officials or others to ease the way for operations abroad.

Last week, a government official close to the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order not to prejudice the investigation, said the inquiry was continuing.

Bethany L. Hengsbach, a lawyer in Los Angeles versed in China dealings, said last week that she could not discuss the action because she had been retained by an involved party.

At the Beverly Hills Bar Association panel in August, Ms. Hengsbach spoke publicly of indications that federal officials were involved in “an industry sweep of the studios,” while warning that it was rare for such investigations “to turn up nothing.”

In the meantime, business has moved forward on projects like “Kung Fu Panda 3,” a Chinese coproduction from DreamWorks Animation, and “Iron Man 3,” which Marvel, a Walt Disney Company unit, has shot partly in China.

Thomas E. McLain, the chairman of the Asia Society Southern California, said he had not seen evidence that deals were being put on the back burner until the inquiry was resolved. But he acknowledged that the investigation was a topic of conversation at the society’s annual U.S.-China Film Summit. The event was held here last October, and drew some important figures from the Chinese film industry, including Han Sanping, the chairman of the China Film Group.

To keep Washington focused less on fears of corruption than on the possible benefits of film trade with China — where the growing box office reached $2.7 billion last year — the U.S.-Asia Institute, a policy-oriented nonprofit, has begun including movie operations among the stops made by lawmakers and their staff on institute-sponsored trips to China.

Kent A. Lucken, the institute’s president, said in an interview last week, “They need to see that there are American companies operating in China, fully regulated and under the law, conducting business, and thriving.”

Some who are involved in Hollywood’s entry into China are privately expressing hope that the Justice Department inquiry will be resolved before they run out of time on what one of them last week called a “ticking clock,” as Chinese consumers outgrow their receptivity to Hollywood fare.

The squeeze started last year when they began to spend more money on some homegrown films than on the American blockbusters.

But Michael W. Emmick, who was formerly a prosecutor with the Justice Department, and now focuses on the corrupt practices cases, among other things, in his private law practice, said a resolution could be a long time coming.

“This is still early in the game,” he said.

While Mr. Emmick is not representing clients in the investigation, and said he had no direct knowledge of it, he said that regulators sometimes use such industrywide inquiries as a “cost effective” way of putting an entire business sector — like the pharmaceuticals industry or the portion of the financial industry dealing in sovereign debt — on notice.

“Sometimes, they’re trying to send a message, to make companies keep their records, beyond the usual document retention policy,” Mr. Emmick said. He cautioned against characterizing the Hollywood action as a “sweep,” which he said might indicate imminent civil suits or arrests.

In a summary published this month, lawyers for the WilmerHale law firm said that new foreign corrupt practices enforcement cases by the S.E.C. and the Justice Department declined to just 27 last year, after spiking to a recent high of 90 in 2010, though violations of the act remain a stated priority for both agencies.

Looking ahead at the rest of the year, the lawyers predicted the “continuation and outcome” of industrywide government examinations of “financial institutions’ dealings with sovereign wealth funds, movie studios’ operations in China, and oil and gas companies’ business in Libya.”

Asked to elaborate on his expectations for the film industry investigation, Roger M. Witten, one of the authors of the report, in an e-mail last week echoed what those hunkered-down studio representatives have been saying for the last year.

“Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to talk about this on or off the record,” he said.

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Edward Wyatt from Washington.

Read More..

Deasy wants 30% of teacher evaluations based on test scores

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy announced Friday that as much as 30% of a teacher's evaluation will be based on student test scores, setting off more contention in the nation's second-largest school system in the weeks before a critical Board of Education election.

Leaders of the teachers union have insisted that there should be no fixed percentage or expectation for how much standardized tests should count — and that test results should serve almost entirely as just one measure to improve instruction. Deasy, in contrast, has insisted that test scores should play a significant role in a teacher's evaluation and that poor scores could contribute directly to dismissal.

In a Friday memo explaining the evaluation process, Deasy set 30% as the goal and the maximum for how much test scores and other data should count.

In an interview, he emphasized that the underlying thrust is to develop an evaluation that improves the teaching corps and that data is part of the effort.

"The public has been demanding a better evaluation system for at least a decade. And teachers have repeatedly said to me what they need is a balanced way forward to help them get better and help them be accountable," Deasy said. "We do this for students every day. Now it's time to do this for teachers."

Deasy also reiterated that test scores would not be a "primary or controlling" factor in an evaluation, in keeping with the language of an agreement reached in December between L.A. Unified and its teachers union. Classroom observations and other factors also are part of the evaluation process.

But United Teachers Los Angeles President Warren Fletcher expressed immediate concern about Deasy's move. During negotiations, he said, the superintendent had proposed allotting 30% to test scores but the union rejected the plan. Deasy then pulled the idea off the table, which allowed the two sides to come to an agreement, Fletcher said. Teachers approved the pact last month.

"To see this percentage now being floated again is unacceptable," the union said in a statement.

Fletcher described the pact as allowing flexibility for principals, in collaboration with teachers, first to set individual goals and then to look at various measures to determine student achievement and overall teacher performance.

"The superintendent doesn't get to sign binding agreements and then pretend they're not binding," Fletcher said.

When Deasy settled on 30%, his decision was in line with research findings of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has examined teacher quality issues across the country. Some experts have challenged that work.

The test score component would include a rating for the school based on an analysis of all students' standardized test scores. Those "value-added" formulas, known within L.A. Unified as Academic Growth Over Time, can be used to rate a school or a teacher's effectiveness by comparing students' test scores with past performance. The method takes into account such factors as family income and ethnicity.

After an aggressive push by the Obama administration, individual value-added ratings for teachers have been added to reviews in many districts. They make up 40% of evaluations in Washington, D.C., 35% in Tennessee and 30% in Chicago.

But Los Angeles will use a different approach. The district will rely on raw test scores. A teacher's evaluation also may incorporate pass rates on the high school exit exam and graduation, attendance and suspension data.

Deasy's action was met Friday with reactions ranging from guarded to enthusiastic approval within a coalition of outside groups that have pushed for a new evaluation system. This coalition also has sought to counter union influence.

Elise Buik, chief executive of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said weighing test scores 30% "is a reasonable number that everyone can be happy with."

The union and the district were under pressure to include student test data in evaluations after L.A. County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant ruled last year that the system was violating state law by not using test scores in teacher performance reviews.

A lawsuit to enforce the law was brought by parents in Los Angeles, with support from the Sacramento-based EdVoice advocacy organization.

If the "actual progress" of students is taken into account under Deasy's plan, "it's a historic day for LAUSD," said Bill Lucia, the group's chief executive.

All of this is playing out against the backdrop of the upcoming March 5 election. The campaign for three school board seats has turned substantially into a contest between candidates who strongly back Deasy's policies and those more sympathetic toward the teachers union. Deasy supporters praise the superintendent for measures they say will improve the quality of teaching. The union has faulted Deasy for limiting job protections and said he has imposed unwise or unproven reforms.

In the upcoming election, the union and pro-Deasy forces are matched head to head in District 4, with several employee unions behind incumbent Steve Zimmer and a coalition of donors behind challenger Kate Anderson.

Anderson had high praise for Deasy's directive, saying it struck the right balance and that teachers and students would benefit.

Zimmer said that although he understands that principals need guidance, "I worry about anything that would cause resistance or delay in going forward. I hope this use of a percentage won't disrupt what had been a collaborative process."

howard.blume@latimes.com

Read More..

The Quirky World of Competitive Snow Carving Comes to California

Team 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

Read More..