Leave it to Matt Lauer to steal the spotlight in a swimsuit. With Halloween-themed morning shows cancelled in 2012 due to Superstorm Sandy, the Today show celebrated the holiday, full force on Thursday, Oct. 31 to compensate for last year.
As the hosts of the program slowly trickled out in their costumes -- Al Roker as Mr. T, Natalie Morales and Savannah Guthrie as Laverne and Shirley, Kathie Lee and Hoda Kotb as Flintstone characters, Carson Daly channeling Larry Wilcox' CHiPs character Jon (with the show's former star Erik Estrada in tow) -- the clear and apparent winner of Halloween 2013 was Lauer dressed as Pamela Anderson's Baywatch character C.J. Parker.
Kathie Lee Gifford (L) and Hoda Kotb attend NBC's "Today" Halloween 2013 in Rockefeller Plaza on October 31, 2013 in New York City. Credit: D Dipasupil/FilmMagic
Natalie Morales (L) and Savannah Guthrie attend NBC's "Today" Halloween 2013 in Rockefeller Plaza on October 31, 2013 in New York City. Credit: D Dipasupil/FilmMagic
The Today show host made a memorable entrance as he mimicked C.J.'s opening credit run in slow motion. Dressed in the iconic form-fitting red swimsuit, Lauer completed his Halloween costume with a makeshift tan and long blonde wig -- his face caked with make-up. The crowd outside Rockefeller Center roared in response.
Credit: NBC
But that's not all! Willie Geist accompanied Lauer dressed as David Hasselhoff's character on the show. The dynamic duo was then joined by real-life Baywatch cast member Carmen Electra.
Carmen Electra (L) and Willie Geist attend NBC's "Today" Halloween 2013 in Rockefeller Plaza on October 31, 2013 in New York City. Credit: D Dipasupil/FilmMagic
With the Today show pulling out their biggest Halloween surprise yet, the theme of classic TV show costumes worked out well for the group. The hosts of ABC's Good Morning America, meanwhile, celebrated its Halloween "Buzzy Awards" with George Stephanopoulos dressed as George Clooney's character in Gravity, Robin Roberts channeling Oprah in The Butler and the best of this bunch? Lara Spencer coming in like a wrecking ball.
An apple bobbing game at a Halloween fancy-dress party in October 1922.
Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
A Halloween apple-bob may seem as homespun as a hayride, but that shiny red apple has a steamy past. It was once a powerful symbol of fertility and immortality.
Apple-bobbing and eating candy apples are "the fossilized remnants of beliefs that ultimately go back to prehistory," British apple expert and fruit historian, Joan Morgan, tells the Salt.
Morgan and I co-wrote The New Book of Apples several years back. I asked her this week for a refresher on the fruit's Halloween-specific tricks and treats.
Throughout Europe, Morgan says, "apples, apple peels and even pips have long been used to peer into the romantic future." And when early European colonists brought the first apple trees to North America as seeds — also known as pips — in their pockets, these customs came with them.
Bobbing for apples was one of them. In one popular version of the game, girls would secretly mark apples before tipping them into a barrel of water. Apples float, and as the girls' potential sweethearts ducked to catch the fruit with their teeth, future couplings were determined – or foretold.
Girls also continued the tradition of using apple peels to divine their romantic destiny. Every fall, communities in New England would prepare mountains of apples for the great kettles of apple butter that were put up for the winter. An eligible young lady would try and peel an apple in a single unbroken strip, toss the peel over her shoulder, and peer nervously to see what letter the peel formed on the floor: This was the initial of her future husband.
But, as Morgan emphasizes, the playful connection between apples and courtship reflects a more serious and ancient link between apples, fertility and a life without end.
Howard Chandler Christy's painting "Halloween," as reproduced in Scribner's in January 1916.
"Apples once grew wild across western Asia and Europe and were regarded as sacred across many cultures," Morgan says. Early Indo-European mythologies tell of goddesses "like the Norse Idun, who dispenses magical apples to her fellow deities to keep them young."
Avalon, where the dying King Arthur is said to have been laid to rest, is an "Isle of Apples," Morgan recalls, and "the Irish hero Bran is beckoned to his paradise by a branch of apple blossom from Emain Ablach, an island in a marvelous archipelago beyond the sea, where apple trees bloom and fruit at the same time."
It's not hard to imagine how apples became such powerful symbols of fertility and renewal. As the leaves turned, and the days shortened, the arrival of apples on the menu of hunter-gatherers and the first farmers would have been eagerly anticipated. It didn't really matter whether the apples were large or small, sweet or sour. They could be eaten fresh, boiled or baked; strung up to dry for the winter months; or allowed to ferment into a hard cider that must have made the dark and cold easier to bear.
In the failing autumn light, a shiny red or golden apple might have seemed like a promise – or an entreaty - that the sun would come again. Apple blossoms heralded the renewal of life each spring. And in the magical mix of image and meaning, ripe apples acquired the power and allure of a fertile women's body.
The specific connection between apples, fortune-telling and Halloween goes back to the Celtic festival Samhain. It fell around the end of our modern October, and marked the end of summer, the end of harvest, and — revelers worried — perhaps the extinction of life itself.
To encourage the Sun deity to return the following year, ancient Celts burned huge bonfires into the night, and tied apples to evergreen branches. Gifts of fruit and nuts and animal sacrifices were offered to the gods.
In 1886, Irish Halloween celebrations included bobbing for apples.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
According to this tradition, barriers to the Underworld were temporarily suspended to allow the year's dead to enter. But this liminal state also allowed ghosts and mischievous spirits to visit the living. It was a time when divination was supposedly especially powerful.
The Romans and then the Christian Church hijacked Samhain and grafted on their own celebrations, but many elements endure.
And as for those candy apples? That's a more recent invention. "It's claimed they were invented accidentally in 1908 by William Kolb a candy maker in Newark, N.J.," says Morgan. "He dropped some apples in his candy syrup" and in a region with plenty of fruit trees — and a sugar refinery — a new Halloween tradition was born.
Sure it's not healthy, but we admit that we get a bit shaky in the time it takes to complete our final descent. We've read all of SkyMall, and it's just too hard to be away from the warming glow of our Kindle Paperwhite. Thankfully, however, the FAA has finally pulled the trigger on the long-awaited ...
New dark matter detector sends first data from gold mine 1.5km underground
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Simon Levey s.levey@imperial.ac.uk 44-020-759-46702 Imperial College London
Scientists testing the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment have reported promising scientific and technological results today.
They have set up the experiment to identify the nature of dark matter, an invisible substance that physicists believe is all around us, making up most of the matter in the universe, but that barely has any effect on our every-day lives.
Scientists have published the first results from the Sanford laboratory today, which, they say, validate the experiment's design and performance. The research challenges previous studies that claim 'sightings' of dark matter.
They are now beginning a process to uncover the exact identity of the dark matter particle - a process equivalent to the work done by the Large Hadron Collider in identifying the Higgs boson.
Seventeen universities and research institutes in the USA and Portugal, and Imperial College London, UCL, University of Edinburgh in the UK, run the LUX experiment, with most funding coming from the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy in the USA.
The new laboratory is sited in a former gold mine nearly one and a half kilometres below the Black Hills in the American state of South Dakota. Work on LUX started in 2008 and the experiment was completed ready for an initial run earlier in 2013.
Here, scientists are operating some of the world's most sensitive equipment in an extremely sheltered environment, because they are looking for tiny and extremely rare flashes of light that would indicate a collision between a dark matter particle and a normal matter particle.
"These instruments take many years to build and we are always pushing new technologies to the limit," says Dr Henrique Arajo from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London who leads the College's team working on LUX.
"It is very significant that LUX worked as designed when we finally pushed the 'on' button. Many experiments never reach this stage."
Physicists believe that dark matter accounts for about a quarter of the energy in the Universe, compared with ordinary matter, which makes up only a twentieth. The rest consists of the even more mysterious dark energy.
Since the experiment was installed underground in February, they have been looking for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which are the prime candidates to constitute the dark matter in our galaxy and in the Universe.
These particles are thought to have mass like normal particles and create a tiny gravitational pull, but cannot be observed directly since they neither emit nor absorb light at any wavelength. On the largest scales, its presence can be inferred from the motion of stars within galaxies, and of individual galaxies in galactic clusters.
Collisions between WIMPs and normal matter are rare and extremely difficult to detect because cosmic-ray particles from space can overwhelm the already faint flashes expected from WIMPs.
Few cosmic rays can penetrate as deep underground as the LUX experiment and the detector is further protected from background radiation by being immersed in a shielding tank of ultra-pure water.
"We are able to detect the faint flashes of light very effectively using good internal reflector materials and very sensitive photon sensors," says Dr Arajo.
"LUX has significantly higher sensitivity than the previous world's best dark matter experiments especially for the lightest WIMPs, which cause the faintest signals."
The new LUX result challenges evidence from other experiments, such as CoGeNT and DAMA, where scientists have previously claimed to have data about the nature of WIMPs.
Dr Arajo says: "A number of previous results make it look like WIMPs exist with a particularly low mass. While this may still turn out to be the case, our new data reveal that, on that occasion, it was a case of mistaken identity."
HUNTING FOR DARK MATTER
A decade ago, scientists of the UK-led ZEPLIN programme deployed the first dark matter detector of this type underground at the Boulby mine in North Yorkshire.
"We had a pioneering role in what has become the world's most sensitive dark matter search technology, building and operating three detectors at Boulby."
"The last and most sensitive, ZEPLIN-III, was built by our team at Imperial until we concluded our programme in 2011 joining LUX soon after."
Scientists including Dr Arajo are already designing and soon will start building the next-generation experiment, LZ, which is the coming together of the two programmes LUX and ZEPLIN.
With a 7-tonne liquid xenon target, LZ will be 30 times larger than LUX and have over 100 times better range. It will be so sensitive that it will be limited only by the interference of background signals from astrophysical neutrinos. These similarly illusive particles were once a candidate to explain the dark matter problem but physicists now know they are not massive enough to do the job.
LZ is a collaboration of 26 institutes in the US, UK, Portugal and Russia. Dr Arajo from Imperial leads the UK team on LZ, which counts also with colleagues from Edinburgh, UCL, Oxford and Sheffield universities as well as the Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury national laboratories.
HOW DOES IT WORK
At the heart of the experiment is a 6-foot-tall titanium 'thermal flask' filled with almost a third of a tonne of liquid xenon, cooled to minus 100 degrees centigrade.
When a WIMP hits a xenon atom it recoils like a white billiard ball striking the opening triangle of coloured balls in a game of snooker and photons of light are emitted; at the same time, this interaction also releases electrons from surrounding atoms.
The electrons are drawn upward by an electrical field and get absorbed into a thin layer of xenon gas at the top of the tank, releasing more photons.
Light detectors in the top and bottom of the tank are each capable of detecting these two photon signatures. The locations of the two signals can be pinpointed to within a few millimetres.
The energy of the interaction can be precisely measured from the brightness of the pulses of light. Any particles interacting in the xenon will cause these signals, but WIMP interactions are expected to have characteristic sizes which are quite different from those caused by ordinary particles.
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New dark matter detector sends first data from gold mine 1.5km underground
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Simon Levey s.levey@imperial.ac.uk 44-020-759-46702 Imperial College London
Scientists testing the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment have reported promising scientific and technological results today.
They have set up the experiment to identify the nature of dark matter, an invisible substance that physicists believe is all around us, making up most of the matter in the universe, but that barely has any effect on our every-day lives.
Scientists have published the first results from the Sanford laboratory today, which, they say, validate the experiment's design and performance. The research challenges previous studies that claim 'sightings' of dark matter.
They are now beginning a process to uncover the exact identity of the dark matter particle - a process equivalent to the work done by the Large Hadron Collider in identifying the Higgs boson.
Seventeen universities and research institutes in the USA and Portugal, and Imperial College London, UCL, University of Edinburgh in the UK, run the LUX experiment, with most funding coming from the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy in the USA.
The new laboratory is sited in a former gold mine nearly one and a half kilometres below the Black Hills in the American state of South Dakota. Work on LUX started in 2008 and the experiment was completed ready for an initial run earlier in 2013.
Here, scientists are operating some of the world's most sensitive equipment in an extremely sheltered environment, because they are looking for tiny and extremely rare flashes of light that would indicate a collision between a dark matter particle and a normal matter particle.
"These instruments take many years to build and we are always pushing new technologies to the limit," says Dr Henrique Arajo from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London who leads the College's team working on LUX.
"It is very significant that LUX worked as designed when we finally pushed the 'on' button. Many experiments never reach this stage."
Physicists believe that dark matter accounts for about a quarter of the energy in the Universe, compared with ordinary matter, which makes up only a twentieth. The rest consists of the even more mysterious dark energy.
Since the experiment was installed underground in February, they have been looking for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which are the prime candidates to constitute the dark matter in our galaxy and in the Universe.
These particles are thought to have mass like normal particles and create a tiny gravitational pull, but cannot be observed directly since they neither emit nor absorb light at any wavelength. On the largest scales, its presence can be inferred from the motion of stars within galaxies, and of individual galaxies in galactic clusters.
Collisions between WIMPs and normal matter are rare and extremely difficult to detect because cosmic-ray particles from space can overwhelm the already faint flashes expected from WIMPs.
Few cosmic rays can penetrate as deep underground as the LUX experiment and the detector is further protected from background radiation by being immersed in a shielding tank of ultra-pure water.
"We are able to detect the faint flashes of light very effectively using good internal reflector materials and very sensitive photon sensors," says Dr Arajo.
"LUX has significantly higher sensitivity than the previous world's best dark matter experiments especially for the lightest WIMPs, which cause the faintest signals."
The new LUX result challenges evidence from other experiments, such as CoGeNT and DAMA, where scientists have previously claimed to have data about the nature of WIMPs.
Dr Arajo says: "A number of previous results make it look like WIMPs exist with a particularly low mass. While this may still turn out to be the case, our new data reveal that, on that occasion, it was a case of mistaken identity."
HUNTING FOR DARK MATTER
A decade ago, scientists of the UK-led ZEPLIN programme deployed the first dark matter detector of this type underground at the Boulby mine in North Yorkshire.
"We had a pioneering role in what has become the world's most sensitive dark matter search technology, building and operating three detectors at Boulby."
"The last and most sensitive, ZEPLIN-III, was built by our team at Imperial until we concluded our programme in 2011 joining LUX soon after."
Scientists including Dr Arajo are already designing and soon will start building the next-generation experiment, LZ, which is the coming together of the two programmes LUX and ZEPLIN.
With a 7-tonne liquid xenon target, LZ will be 30 times larger than LUX and have over 100 times better range. It will be so sensitive that it will be limited only by the interference of background signals from astrophysical neutrinos. These similarly illusive particles were once a candidate to explain the dark matter problem but physicists now know they are not massive enough to do the job.
LZ is a collaboration of 26 institutes in the US, UK, Portugal and Russia. Dr Arajo from Imperial leads the UK team on LZ, which counts also with colleagues from Edinburgh, UCL, Oxford and Sheffield universities as well as the Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury national laboratories.
HOW DOES IT WORK
At the heart of the experiment is a 6-foot-tall titanium 'thermal flask' filled with almost a third of a tonne of liquid xenon, cooled to minus 100 degrees centigrade.
When a WIMP hits a xenon atom it recoils like a white billiard ball striking the opening triangle of coloured balls in a game of snooker and photons of light are emitted; at the same time, this interaction also releases electrons from surrounding atoms.
The electrons are drawn upward by an electrical field and get absorbed into a thin layer of xenon gas at the top of the tank, releasing more photons.
Light detectors in the top and bottom of the tank are each capable of detecting these two photon signatures. The locations of the two signals can be pinpointed to within a few millimetres.
The energy of the interaction can be precisely measured from the brightness of the pulses of light. Any particles interacting in the xenon will cause these signals, but WIMP interactions are expected to have characteristic sizes which are quite different from those caused by ordinary particles.
###
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]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Oracle is exploring silicon photonics, an optical technology drawing widespread interest, as a potential weapon in the battle against data-center power consumption.
Advances in CPU and memory design could boost efficiency dramatically over the next few years. When they do, the interconnects among components, servers and switches will effectively become the power hogs of the data center, according to Ashok Krishnamoorthy, architect and chief technologist in photonics at Oracle.
Optical connections, which will eventually be needed for high-speed links within rows and racks of servers, promise efficiency gains over copper cables but need to get cheaper first. A key part of that effort will be integration, the time-honored work of bringing the functions of many separate chips into one. Silicon photonics is a likely technology for doing that, though it probably won't ship in volume for two years or so, said Linley Group analyst Jag Bolaria.
Oracle isn't often associated with networking and may not even manufacture or sell the technologies it's now studying. But as a big player in computing and storage, it could benefit from fostering a future technology that helps make faster, more efficient data centers possible.
Like other Oracle hardware divisions, the photonics unit has its roots in the former Sun Microsystems, which began work on short-reach optical communications in 2004 and has had a photonics partnership with the U.S. military research agency DARPA since 2008. Silicon photonics is part of Oracle's larger effort to help data centers and private and public clouds meet future computing needs, Krishnamoorthy said.
"We see bandwidth and computing demand growing unabated," he told an audience at the recent Open Server Summit in Santa Clara, California. "Can we scale infrastructure and systems to meet demand?"
Silicon photonics holds the potential to help do that, Krishnamoorthy said. In his conference presentation, he used power consumption as a measure of efficiency, while adding that space and cooling are also critical issues.
Work that the industry is already doing may make both CPUs and memory several times more efficient over the next several years, Krishnamoorthy said. At that point, connectivity will consume a much bigger percentage of a data center's power than it does now. "If we do our job here, then we have sort of this gaping interconnect problem," he said. Oracle's goal is optical interconnects that use about one-tenth as much power as those in use now.
For high speeds over long distances, optical links are already standard. Multi-gigabit carrier backbones can carry a whole city's data as waves of light, which are converted to and from electrical signals on each end. When individual servers start generating enough information, data-center architects will have to use optical technology just to connect them the top of the server rack.
We're not there yet. Even at 100Gbps, electrical interconnects can go four or five meters, enough to reach the top of a rack of servers, Linley Group's Bolaria said. And even though the need for 100-Gigabit links is starting to creep into the busiest data centers, there's still room to grow because those connections are really made up of four 25Gbps wires, he said.
But Krishnamoorthy sees a transition to optics coming. "We think that the speeds at 25-gigabit and beyond will get us to push optics onto every blade," he said.
Ultimately, Oracle wants to take photonics even beyond server interfaces. Miniaturized connections could link processors at high speed across a motherboard, Krishnamoorthy believes.
The current high cost of optical modules isn't as important for long-distance network interfaces as it is for server connections, because there are relatively few of them, according to Bolaria. But when every server needs an optical connection to a top-of-rack switch, data-center builders will need something both less expensive and smaller than a module with multiple parts to it, and that's where silicon photonics comes in, he said. Though other chip-making materials are used today in some highly integrated optical interfaces, silicon is likely to win out because of the huge industry already in place around silicon, Bolaria said.
Oracle is in good company. In addition to startups such as Luxtera, big names are pursuing silicon photonics. Cisco Systems recently acquired silicon photonics startup Lightwire, and data-center interconnect vendor Mellanox Technologies has bought another new player, Kotura. Intel is also developing data-center photonics, including through a collaboration with Facebook.
Though it's not needed yet, they're all thinking ahead, Bolaria said.
"At some point, electrical will fail to suffice for what we're trying to do," he said. "It's going to take years, so a lot of them are spending money in it now so they can be better prepared than their competitors when that happens."
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service , IDG News Service
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for the IDG News Service. More by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Girl With a Pearl Earring, oil on canvas, c. 1670, 46.5 cm by 40 cm
Painting by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy of Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague.
Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring has arrived at the Frick Collection in New York, drawing unprecedented crowds. We might therefore ask: Who was she? Several authors, ranging from Marcel Proust’s friend the journalist Jean-Louis Vaudoyer to New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, have suggested she might be the artist’s eldest daughter, Maria. Many Vermeer scholars dismiss that notion as a Romantic anachronism, a projection onto an earlier period of a modern view of art as a reflection of the artist’s circumstances. In the wake of this denial, Tracy Chevalier’s novel Girl With a Pearl Earring provided an alternative, fictional answer: She was the family maid’s assistant, Griet (played by Scarlett Johansson in the film), who became Vermeer’s love interest.
But the evidence suggests Vermeer’s daughter Maria was his likely model and a crucial part of his art. More provocatively, I believe that Maria Vermeer was also a gifted artist who painted roughly one-fifth of the works currently assigned to her father.
Vermeer was the greatest of the Dutch genre painters, who took their subject matter from everyday life. Rembrandt had already used himself and other family members as models for historical roles, and such models were even more appropriate for genre scenes. Another factor was the rise of optical naturalism, including the aid of the camera obscura, a forerunner of the modern photographic camera pioneered by Carel Fabritius (also represented at the Frick), Rembrandt’s most gifted student and Vermeer’s primary influence. But Vermeer did not simply “record” the world around him; rather, he carefully crafted poetic constructions based on what he observed. The more closely he relied on the life around him, the more compelling was his art.
Allegory of Painting, or Art of Painting, oil on canvas, c. 1667, 120 cm by 100 cm
Painting by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Vermeer himself tells us this in his Art of Painting, his visual testament to his ambitions. The composition shows a painter seated at his easel from behind, dressed in an old-fashioned Netherlandish costume, painting a young girl adorned with laurel and holding a trumpet and book. The painter is often identified as Vermeer based on his comparable hair and costume in his Procuress of 1656.
Since 1949, the girl has been called Clio, the muse of history writing, following the conventional notion that history was the highest category of art. But the mature Vermeer did not paint history. Scholars have also mistranslated documents in which Vermeer’s widow and mother-in-law described a painting “in which ‘Painting’ is being depicted [uytgebeeld, which also means performed as a role, or personified as a character on stage].” The girl personifies Painting [Pictura], holding attributes associated with Painting, while others are arrayed on the table before her. These include a blue and yellow “garment of changing color,” likely the same textile artfully wrapped around her head as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, who therefore might also personify Painting. In neither case does she take her job very seriously. In place of “high” historical or allegorical content, Vermeer characterizes Painting through his playful relation to his model as a particular individual that he knows intimately. As a painter of modern life, Vermeer’s greatness lies in the domestic, familial character of his art.
It is the more conservative scholars who apply an anachronistic, premodern paradigm of art as illustrating an institutional (historical) message. Vermeer was instead a pioneer of the modern paradigm of art as expressing the artist’s unique circumstances, experiences, and sensibilities, a paradigm first articulated in texts from the Romantic period. The same period witnessed the founding of the modern discipline of art history, which began to gather individual artists’ oeuvres, relevant facts about their lives, and diverse interpretations of their works, and first “discovered” Vermeer as an unrecognized genius. We continue to pursue these goals today.
Surprisingly, given the number of monographs devoted to Vermeer’s relatively few paintings, no scholar put forward an account of his gradual painting-by-painting development before my 2009 book. Several authors identified the figures who appear repeatedly in his compositions as Vermeer, his wife, his gradually ageing eldest daughters Maria and Elisabeth (Lijsbeth), and even the family maid in Vermeer’s Milkmaid (the suggestion of the historian J.M. Montias and likely inspiration for Chevalier). But no one sought to address Vermeer’s use of family models in a systematic way, and some rejected the possibility altogether.
In his Art of Painting, Young Woman With a Pearl Necklace, and Girl With a Pearl Earring, scholars recognized the same beautiful young model who resembles Vermeer’s wife in earlier compositions. Maria was born around 1654 and would have been 13, 15, and 16 if the paintings in question are dated 1667, 1669, and 1670, respectively. The plainer model in Vermeer’s Girl Writing, Girl With a Guitar, and Lacemaker, who resembles Vermeer in his dated self-portraits, would have been his second daughter, Lijsbeth.
Another crucial dimension involves roughly a fifth of the paintings currently assigned to Vermeer—five in New York City alone—that were based on the same models, objects, and interiors and adapt or combine elements of Vermeer’s compositions but do not correspond to his level of technical mastery, characteristic approaches, or logical development. The failure to identify these “misfit” paintings, which possess their own divergent appeal, has precluded the recognition of Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development and vice versa. Dates now assigned to Vermeer's paintings are also often too early, because they are not based on a painting-by-painting account of his development, include the misfit paintings, and do not take into consideration his models and their approximate ages. Earlier authors had questioned each of these misfits as possibly painted by a pupil or one of his children but did not pursue that possibility or the paintings as a group. Vermeer did not register any pupils, but his follower could have been one of his children, whom he did not need to register, most plausibly Maria. Two misfits, Mistress and Maid in the Frick Collection and Woman With a Lute, were also traded against a huge debt to a baker after the deaths of Vermeer and his patron, who bought Vermeer’s Lacemaker, his last painting. That is, the paintings were sold and possibly produced as forgeries to alleviate the family’s financial straits. Maria’s apprenticeship must therefore have been a family secret. Perhaps partly because of these circumstances, she does not appear to have pursued painting after her marriage and her father’s death.
Girl With the Red Hat, oil on panel, c. 1672, 23.2 cm by 18.1 cm
Painting by Maria Vermeer? Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Most intriguingly, two of the misfit paintings, Girl With a Flute and Girl With a Red Hat, have been associated with or even identified as self-portraits, and together with a third, Girl Interrupted, also in the Frick, appear to portray the same model as Girl With a Pearl Earring. Since the Frick paintings cannot travel, the present exhibition offers the only possibility of comparing the originals in proximity. Did Maria portray herself in these works? If so, despite her technical challenges, she surpassed her father in psychological intimacy. Girl With a Red Hat, which would portray her at about 18 around 1672, also offers an astounding virtuoso display, including what may be the most fascinating (albeit implausible) headgear in the history of art. Her precocious masterpiece, if that is what it is, further mirrors and thereby transforms our experience of her father’s earlier Girl With a Pearl Earring as not just a pretty face or even an image of Vermeer’s daughter, but a portrait—another portrait—of the artist as a young woman.
These ideas, the subject of an all-day symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University last spring, are admittedly speculations. Yet no one has previously sought to identify the models in these paintings in a systematic way, account for the misfit paintings, or explain Vermeer’s painting-by-painting development. These factors are inextricably linked in the ongoing process of understanding Vermeer’s work, including Girl With a Pearl Earring and might ultimately lead to the discovery of another unrecognized genius.
Update, Oct. 30, 2013: Due to an editing error, captions for the three paintings in this piece featured the dates commonly believed to be the original dates of Vermeer’s work. We have updated the captions to reflect Binstock’s theory of their order.
UK, London - October 29, 2013 -Three today announced that it will offer iPad Air with Wi-Fi + Cellular in UK on Friday, November 1, and iPad mini with Retina display with Wi-Fi + Cellular later in November. Three will offer these new iPads with a range of attractive data plans that will allow customers to connect to its fast DC-HSDPA+ 3G network and its 4G network that will be available at no extra cost, in December.
iPad Air features a stunning 9.7-inch Retina display in a new thinner and lighter design. Precision-engineered to weigh just one pound, iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a narrower bezel, the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner-making content even more immersive. iPad mini with Retina display brings all the pixels from the 9.7-inch iPad to its 7.9-inch screen, delivering razor sharp text and detail in the same amazingly thin and light design. The new iPads feature the powerful and power-efficient Apple-designed A7 chip with 64-bit desktop-class architecture, ultrafast wireless with faster built-in Wi-Fi and expanded LTE cellular connectivity, and the newly-designed iOS 7 featuring hundreds of great new features.
Customers can buy iPad Air with Wi-Fi + Cellular at all Three retail shops, online or by calling 0800 358 8460, beginning November, 1. For complete details on pricing and pre-registration, please visit www.three.co.uk. For more information on iPad please visit www.apple.com/ipad.
Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland tees off the 5th hole during the Pro-Am event of the HSBC Champions golf tournament, which begins on Thursday, at the Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. (AP Photo)
Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland tees off the 5th hole during the Pro-Am event of the HSBC Champions golf tournament, which begins on Thursday, at the Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. (AP Photo)
Phil Mickelson of the United States tees off the 5th hole during the Pro-Am event of the HSBC Champions golf tournament, which begins on Thursday, at the Sheshan International Golf Club in Shanghai, China, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. (AP Photo)
SHANGHAI (AP) — Rory McIlroy found himself in a spot that must have seemed vaguely familiar — atop the leaderboard.
McIlroy looked more like a two-time major champion Thursday when he opened with a 7-under 65 to build a two-shot lead in HSBC Champions. McIlroy was at his best around the turn when he made four birdies in a five-hole stretch.
The 24-year-old from Northern Ireland has not won all year.
Gonzalo Fernandez-Castano, coming off a win last week at the BMW Masters, and Jamie Donaldson each had 67. Jordan Spieth and U.S. Open champion Justin Rose were at 68.
British Open champion Phil Mickelson had a chance to join McIlroy in the lead until putting two balls in the water on the par-5 eighth hole and making a quadruple-bogey 9.
The Kardashian/Jenner clan knows how to celebrate in style. With Kendall Jenner's 18th birthday less than a week away (her actual birthday is Nov. 3), the whole motley crue spent the afternoon of Oct. 29 at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, Calif. to celebrate the model's big day.
The family rented out the entire park, and took full advantage of the thrill-inducing rides, including several roller coasters -- and sharing the experience, naturally, via Keek and Instagram videos. Kendall and her sister Kylie, 16, also rode a wild ride called SlingShot, which catapults seated passengers into the air with bungee cords.
Kris Jenner posts a selfie with Bruce, Brody, and Brandon Jenner at Kendall Jenner's 18th birthday celebration at Magic Mountain on Oct. 29. Credit: Courtesy of Kris Jenner
After Kris Jenner attended Bruce Jenner's birthday party on Oct. 27, the separated couple once again amicably bonded to enjoy Kendall's special night. The momager posted a selfie with Bruce, Brody, and Brandon Jenner, captioning it, "Great night at Magic Mountain! @sprandoni @brodyjenner Bruce #happybirthdaykendall."
The couple announced the end of their 22-year marriage on the Oct. 21 cover of Us Weekly, but since then have seemed chummier than ever, attending numerous family functions together.
Check out Joe Sexton's part from Videograss' "The Last Ones." Joe's been pushing the street game since his prolonged days as an Am for Stepchild. Now he's one of the leaders in street progression, and there's no wonder why. He has an unmistakable style, bringing simplicity to incredibly technical tricks. Note the switch nosepress bs 180 at 2:26. That, folks, is how it's done.
ATLANTA (AP) — Well, one thing about season 13 of "American Idol" is that unlike last season, the judges seem to be getting along.
At an audition stop in Atlanta Wednesday, Jennifer Lopez said she's excited for people to see how funny Harry Connick Jr. is and how much he knows about music.
"He incredibly funny. His music education is so far beyond the normal person I think," said the singer. "What he has to offer to America...is the art of singing, the art of playing, all of that... It's gonna be something new for the show."
When Connick Jr. was asked about Lopez, he returned the pleasantries.
"No one really has any idea what it takes to be Jennifer Lopez. I mean people say, 'Oh, I want that.' Well, if they wanted it they would do what it takes to get there and they don't even have a 10th of a percentage of an understanding to do what it takes. These people that are auditioning for this show are so lucky to have a minute of (Lopez's) time, whether they make it through or not because the essence of 'American Idol' is looking for a new superstar and Jennifer embodies superstar."
Lopez also said she has been surprised by how emotional Keith Urban is.
"I find that I'm like that and women are like that but to see a man so kind of in touch with that place it was really a pleasant surprise for me again. People got to know him last year but I think they're gonna get to know him even more this year."
Lopez sat on the judges' panel with Randy Jackson and Steven Tyler for seasons 10 and 11 of the show. She took season 12 off to go on a world tour. Keith Urban joined the show for season 12 and is returning for his second season. This is Connick Jr.'s first time judging.
"There's a lot of subtle change everywhere," said Urban. "Not just with us but with the way the show looks, the way it feels."
Two changes we know of: The results show has been cut to 30 minutes and Randy Jackson will remain on the show but in a mentoring capacity.
"American Idol" premieres its 13th season with a two-hour episode on Wednesday, Jan. 15, on Fox.
FILe - This Sept. 22, 2013 file photo shows actress Claire Danes at the 65th Primetime Emmy Awards at Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. Danes has been tapped to host the 20th anniversary Nobel Peace Prize concert in December. The Emmy-winning “Homeland” actress will host the Dec. 11 event in Oslo, Norway. (Photo by Dan Steinberg/Invision/AP, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Claire Danes has been tapped to host the 20th anniversary Nobel Peace Prize concert in December.
The Emmy-winning "Homeland" actress will host the Dec. 11 event in Oslo, Norway.
The concert will celebrate the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was awarded the prestigious honor earlier this month.
The watchdog agency works to eliminate the world's chemical weapons and received the prize days after OPCW inspectors started arriving in war-torn Syria to oversee the dismantling of President Bashar Assad's chemical arsenal.
The Nobel Peace Prize concert typically attracts top celebrities. Past luminaries have included Paul McCartney, Rihanna, and Tony Bennett. The lineup for this year's concert has yet to be announced.
Web videoconferencing may get easier after a decision by Cisco Systems that should help bring widely used technology into browsers.
Cisco announced in a blog post Wednesday that it plans to make its codec based on the H.264 standard available as a free, open-source download from the Internet. Also on Wednesday, Mozilla said it would add the technology to Firefox.
H.264 is a standard for real-time video that is widely used by Cisco and other vendors. It hasn't become a native part of the major browsers because it requires royalty payments to MPEG LA, which licenses the technology. In order to make H.264 available for browsers, Cisco will not pass on its licensing costs for the codec.
Without a native codec in browsers that works with major videoconferencing platforms, users have had to download an application or plug-in before doing a video chat in a browser, said Nemertes Research analyst Irwin Lazar. That often means dealing with security settings that try to block new software, plus installing updates to the software over time. Google includes its own VP8 video codec free in the Chrome browser, but Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla have steered clear of VP8, Lazar said. H.264 is the standard that can get browser users connected to other videoconferencing platforms, he said.
Cisco wants to clear a path to getting H.264 included in WebRTC, a set of multimedia features in the HTML5 standard. The Internet Engineering Task Force is scheduled to choose a video codec for WebRTC at a meeting next week in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service , IDG News Service
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for the IDG News Service. More by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
The Killing star Joel Kinnaman nabbed the title role in February's RoboCop reboot. Breaking Bad's Aaron Paul toplines March's Need for Speed and Game of Thrones' Kit Harington has several movies in the works including February's Pompeii, in which he stars. But The Walking Dead actors Andrew Lincoln and Norman Reedus? Not so much.
As AMC's fourth-season zombie drama continues to dominate as TV's No. 1 show among the key 18-to-49 demographic, its runaway success hasn't made stars of its largely unknown ensemble cast. Lincoln, 40, and Reedus, 44, recently signed with CAA, a signal the actors are asking the tough question: Why hasn't Walking Dead done for them what Mad Men, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad have done for their stars?
"Maybe now that they have more significant representation, they'll have a marketing strategy to push themselves out there more," says Henry Schafer, executive vp at The Q Scores Co., which measures consumer appeal of celebrities. Schafer says requests to gauge the value of Walking Dead stars are few and far between: "If they're not being requested by our clients, it's a good indicator that they're not being used for anything beyond Walking Dead."
Gerry Philpott, president and CEO at market researcher E-Poll, agrees: "Their awareness is low." He estimates that Mad Men star Jon Hamm has twice the awareness level of Lincoln despite Walking Dead having more than double the viewership. "Jon has been on longer, he won the Golden Globe, Mad Men is an Emmy darling, and their people get featured quite a bit more," Philpott says. "Those all work together to have someone pop and stand out more."
The Walking Dead cast isn't high on bookers' lists of prime talk-show guests. Lincoln (best known for Love, Actually before being cast on the zombie drama) last year appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and Late Show With David Letterman, but other promo spots have been rare, with a source noting bookers have to contend with his time in Atlanta and home in the U.K. outside of production. If castmembers appear on a magazine cover, it's almost always in character (save for Reedus' upcoming Men's Fitness cover). The same is true for endorsement deals, with Reedus having appeared in character in a Time Warner Cable ad during the Super Bowl in February.
Observers suggest Walking Dead -- whose season-four premiere Oct. 13 drew 16.1 million viewers (and an 8.3 rating in the 18-to-49 demo) and was renewed Oct. 29 for a fifth season with Scott M. Gimple returning as showrunner -- isn't being seen by as many Hollywood insiders, who have helped other cable drama stars break through. For instance, Walking Dead has yet to crack the top Emmy categories.
Its Atlanta shooting location also might be an obstacle to stardom. Series talent often sets up shop in Georgia from April through November. "The Walking Dead is quite a bit of a time strain on their schedules," says creator/executive producer Robert Kirkman. "I think we'll see some big movies from these actors in time. I really feel like it's on the cusp; we just haven't gotten there yet."
Reedus has been the biggest breakout so far, with the indie drama Sunlight Jr. with Naomi Watts set for Nov. 15. A source says the Boondock Saints alum was offered a one-day gig in George Clooney's tentpole Tomorrowland, but he had to pass because the Disney pic required him to change his hair (a no-no for Walking Dead).
Where they are stars is at Walking Dead fan events. Reedus, along with Lincoln and current and former co-stars Danai Gurira, Lauren Cohan, Steven Yeun, Melissa McBride, Chad Coleman, Laurie Holden and Sarah Wayne Callies, will appear at one Nov. 1-3 in Atlanta. Gurira starred in the Sundance indie Mother of George and has an award-winning writing career. Yeun has the indie film I Origins with Michael Pitt in the works, and young lead Chandler Riggs just booked the indie Home Invasion and has producer Jason Blum's Mercy in 2014.
Callies -- who played Lincoln's leading lady and whose character was among those killed in season three -- has fielded multiple pilot offers and opted for a theater role as her follow-up. Holden has a part in Dumb and Dumber To. Former co-star Jon Bernthal, whose character was whacked in season two, might have the most promising trajectory, reuniting with original Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont for TNT's upcoming Mob City and scoring roles in winter's The Wolf of Wall Street and Grudge Match. He's also filming Brad Pitt's Fury.
And if the series maintains its ratings, opportunities likely will follow. "We're really in the beginning of the cycle," says Bob Williams, CEO at Burns Entertainment, which matches celebrities with brands for endorsement deals. "Brands are typically looking for that strong face and name recognition, and that can take time."
If you needed more proof that our nation's industrial surveillance complex has gone completely off the rails, look no further than today's Washington Post. There you will find another blockbuster story on NSA spying that should make your blood boil, assuming it isn't already hot enough to cook an egg.
Bottom line: The spooks are tapping into private fiber backbones operated overseas by Google and Yahoo, decrypting all the traffic before it gets into their private clouds, storing copies, and re-encrypting it before sending it on its way. And yes, this is another gift from Edward Snowden.
Per the Post's Barton Gellman and independent security wonk Ashkan Soltani:
According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA's acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records -- ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video.
The story is accompanied by a hand-drawn illustration showing how and where the wires get tapped, along with a smiley face indicating (one assumes) a happy NSA agent now swimming in unencrypted data.
Credit: Washington Post
Yahoo & Google: Not happy campers Unlike PRISM, in which major tech firms respond to legal requests for data from the spooks, this program, known in NSA parlance by the code name "Muscular," appears to be a complete surprise to both Google and Yahoo, who sound none too happy about it. The difference between each tech company's fierce denial of the original claims about PRISM -- that they had allowed the NSA "direct access" to their networks -- and their response to this revelation is pretty telling. Per the Post article:
In a statement, Google said it was "troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity...."
At Yahoo, a spokeswoman said: "We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency...."
Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. "I hope you publish this," one of them said.
Mumbai Film Festival (Celebration of Spanish Cinema)
Cast
Alex Gonzalez, Adriana Ugarte, Alberto Ammann, Maria Castro, Christian Mulas
Director
Daniel Calparsoro
Screenwriters
Carlos Montero, Jaime Vaca, Daniel Calparsoro
Nostalgists will remember Daniel Calparsoro as the director of abrasive, tough little social commentary movies with loads of soul, but that’s all over now. An efficient, strikingly superficial thriller that does what it does and isn’t interested in doing anything more, Combustion is pure, unashamed product. Welding together automobiles, muscles, mini-skirts and music into a slick flick about people being nasty to each other, the film delivers its ingredients as a slightly low-rent Spanish derivation of Fast and Furious 6, which underplayed at home but has generated brisk sales offshore. Job done.
Brutish, sneering Navas (Alberto Ammann, best-known outside Spain for playing the innocent jailbird in Cell 211) drives a black car, which he races illegally. To raise more cash he also breaks into the houses of the wealthy by using Navas' girlfriend Ari (Adriana Ugarte) as bait for the male owners.
The plan for their big final hit is to rob the store of jewelry heiress Julia (Maria Castro), engaged to former racing driver Mikel (Alex Gonzalez, driving a white Porsche a la James Dean), forced into retirement and trying to settle down into a more conservative lifestyle. But things go awry when Ari starts to fall for Mikel. When he takes her out in his private plane, she starts to realize that she could have lots of money without having to rob any more, though this is not said: the question of whether it’s Mikel or his cash that she’s falling for is left interestingly ambiguous.
Sometimes the characters desire sex, sometimes money and sometimes car thrills, but their desires never escape this triangle, which leaves them all looking like cardboard, albeit quite nice-looking cardboard. Mikel’s troubled past makes him vulnerable and therefore attractive to Ari, but there is always the nagging doubt that it’s his plane rather than Mikel himself that’s really doing it for her.
Ari dominates the first half of the story but is quickly dropped when Mikel and Navas begin to bond over their vehicles, sitting side by side appreciating the Porsche’s purring engine and doing a testosterone-raising chickie run. Unable to compete with the cars for the boys’ attention, Ari meekly retires to the status of ornament. Meanwhile, the despicable way that the boys treat the hapless heiress Julia (oddly, the film both fetishizes and criticizes wealth) removes any lingering sympathy that the audience may have felt for her, so the film’s finale represents a victory not so much for good over evil as a victory of the bad over the very bad.
Dialogue is entirely predictable and borrowed. Daniel Aranyo’s busy photography dutifully goes to the ground whenever cars or Ari’s long legs are in his viewfinder, then swoops high over the races and chases, while endless cityscapes aim at redrawing Madrid as a place where such things might actually happen. Carlos Jean’s score is practically omnipresent, occasionally surging into uplifting pop songs with lyrics that fuse the banal and the incomprehensible into an entirely new language.
Production companies: Antena 3 Films, Canal+, La Sexta, Zeta Audiovisual Cast: Alex Gonzalez, Adriana Ugarte, Alberto Ammann, Maria Castro, Christian Mulas Director: Daniel Calparsoro Screenwriters: Carlos Montero, Jaime Vaca, Calparsoro Producers: Francisco Ramos, Mercedes Gamero Director of photography: Daniel Aranyo Production designer: Anton Laguna Music: Carlos Jean Costume designer: Loles Garcia Editor: David Pinillos, Antonio Frutos Sound: Sergio Burmann, James Munoz, Nicolas de Poulpiquet Sales: Film Factory Entertainment
Sure it's not healthy, but we admit that we get a bit shaky in the time it takes to complete our final descent. We've read all of SkyMall, and it's just too hard to be away from the warming glow of our Kindle Paperwhite. Thankfully, however, the FAA has finally pulled the trigger on the long-awaited ...![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
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