Creative New

Canon EOS 5D MKII

Via blog.vincentlaforet

I’ve had a chance to get a hold of the 5D MKII on several occasions - seven to be specific (2 of those nights were spent shooting the first film, Reverie.)   I’ve felt compelled to try to create something with it each time I’ve had the camera in my hands.    And I will admit this camera has brought me back the closest to the feeling I had at the age of 15 when I had my first camera and a few rolls of Tri-X to burn through.   Simply put - it’s so much fun and pure.

You’ll see some footage shot with Tilt-shift lenses from the air - my first time with video - as well as one of the last shots of the series that was shot with a full motion picture Steadicam rig.   All of the footage was shot with several different prototypes of theCanon EOS 5D MKII that I was allowed to borrow at different intervals - cut in Final Cut Studio, and graded in Color.  I’m still in the middle of post-productions with almost every one of these shoots - busier shooting than editing to be honest.  But I thought I’d share some of this footage as most of your are likely to receive your production 5DMKIIs sometime this week (those that put their names down first of course.)

vincentlaforet Hi-Def video

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Via discovermagazine

A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I’ve come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough. Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde’s office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist.

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

“We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” Linde says.

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Via sciencedaily

 Physicists in the USA and at the London Centre for Nanotechnology have found a way to extend the quantum lifetime of electrons by more than 5,000 per cent, as reported recently in Physical Review Letters. Electrons exhibit a property called ‘spin’ and work like tiny magnets which can point up, down or a quantum superposition of both.

The state of the spin can be used to store information and so by extending their life the research provides a significant step towards building a usable quantum computer.

“Silicon has dominated the computing industry for decades,” says Dr Gavin Morley, lead author of the paper. “The most sensitive way to see the quantum behaviour of electrons held in silicon chips uses electrical currents. Unfortunately, the problem has always been that these currents damage the quantum features under study, degrading their usefulness.”

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Via physorg

Since their development in the 1940s, transistors have been at the heart of computers and other modern electronic devices. Transistors – whose job is to start, stop, or amplify electric current – come in all shapes, sizes and materials, depending on the application. Recently, scientists have fabricated a new variation: a micro-sized plasma transistor.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed the microplasma transistor by integrating a conventional microcavity plasma device with an electron emitter. Kuo-Feng (Kevin) Chen and Professor J. Gary Eden, Director of the Laboratory for Optical Physics and Engineering, published their study in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. As Eden explained, a plasma transistor could one day have certain advantages compared with conventional transistors. 

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Via pinktentacle

Via itmedia.co.jp

As the use of e-money gains popularity in Japan, versatile FeliCa RFID readers that support multiple forms of electronic currency are popping up in convenience stores and vending machines, making it easier for users to pay with the swipe of a phone. Electronics giant NEC is jumping in on the action with a FeliCa payment terminal modeled after a life-sized android.

The robot — a prototype that NEC demonstrated at the recent iEXPO 2008 trade show in Tokyo — incorporates existing technology, which means a finished version can be produced and deployed at short notice. NEC hopes to land it a job at an amusement park selling entrance tickets to visitors with FeliCa-enabled wallet phones, also known as osaifu keitai.

To pay the robot, users simply select the appropriate e-money icon on the robot’s chest-mounted touch screen panel and then swipe their phone over the reader/writer embedded in the left hand. The robot can also be programmed to transfer electronic coupons and other data to the user’s phone when payment is made.

Other features include a camera system that can work with face recognition technology to identify and profile park visitors. If asked to do so, the robot can recommend specific attractions based on the person’s apparent age and gender.

It is unclear whether any theme parks have expressed interest in hiring the robot. If not, NEC could easily equip it with fingerprint scanners and put it to work at immigration counters to gather biometric data on foreigners in Japan. Tourists would love it.

Via nytimes

Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.

At a time when the search for the genetic glitches behind brain disorders has become mired in uncertain and complex findings, the new idea provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is grounded in work at the forefront of science. The two researchers — Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, who are both outsiders to the field of behavior genetics — have spelled out their theory in a series of recent journal articles.

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Real-Time and 3D Vision for

Autonomous Small and Micro Air Vehicles

Via  newscientist

Via research.microsoft

Flying low to the ground is a pilot’s nightmare: buildings, trees, and power cables all threaten to put an early end to the flight. But now the first large robotic aircraft able to fly at low levels and weave around such obstacles has been developed by US engineers.Giving uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) this ability could aid military operations in urban areas, or help search-and-rescue efforts after disasters.Most UAVs do not have the capacity to sense and avoid obstacles at all - a significant barrier to their being allowed to fly in civilian airspace.But now engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, have modified a commercial civilian UAV helicopter made by Yamaha to be able to see obstacles it encounters.The helicopter’s “eye” is a custom-built 3D laser scanner, which sweeps an oval path ahead of the 3.5-metre long craft. The scanner can detect objects as hard to see as power lines from 150 metres away.

Video:link.brightcove

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Via gamasutra

The upcoming Mirror’s Edge is one of the most original-looking titles to come out of the new-style quality-driven Electronic Arts since the company’s creative realignment is announced. It was developed by its DICE studio in Sweden, which is best (and, at this juncture, almost exclusively) known for its Battlefield series of shooters.

What drove the creative philosophy of this game? The visuals and gameplay are a departure from the grittiness and combat-focused world of those games.

In this in-depth interview, producer Nick Channon spells out the inspiration for these decisions, outlining some of the methodology — as well as the thinking behind the approach the game ultimately ended up with.

So, the most obvious, interesting choice about this game is that it’s first person. There are a few free running- or parkour-inspired games out right now, but as far as I’m aware, this is the only one that’s first person; how did you guys end up with that?

NC: Well I think at DICE we’ve done a lot of first person work, and so that kind of inspired us to create [this] — we wanted to create something quite urban, and we wanted to create a game that was all about movement.

I think the other thing was, as well, that we really wanted to create a connection with you and the character, and the fact that you’re playing the game through the eyes of Faith; as soon as you get to third person, you would be watching Faith, whereas we want you to be connected to her.

The analogy we give is “being in an action movie, instead of playing it”, and I think that’s more rewarding. And I think, also, we wanted to create something very fresh, and it’s been a challenge, but we’re really pleased with where we are.

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The chip is the smallest in size with the lowest cost so far

Via taiwannews

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – National Taiwan University announced their latest invention System on a Chip (SOC) yesterday, the smallest such product at the lowest cost and consuming the least electricity. The NTU research team claims that the transmission speed of the chip is 100 times as fast as WiFi and 350 times as fast as a 3.5G cell phone.

Jri Lee (李致毅), professor of the NTU Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, demonstrated their latest invention in the presentation held by the prestigious university yesterday. The SOC successfully combines RF Front-End Circuits and an antenna array to reach the highest transmission speed. A patent application is under way.

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Via flightglobal

US Air Force pilots flyingBoeing F-15s “dominated” and “amazed” Indian Air Force Sukhoi Su-30MKI pilots in a recent exercise, but still expect that legacy F-15s andLockheed Martin F-16s will swiftly lose their competitive edge to the Russian export fighters.

Those remarks came in an explicitly candid assessment by an unidentified USAF pilot posted on 4 November on the YouTube online video sharing service. “Now what I’m scared of is Congress is going to hear that and go – ‘Great, we don’t need to buy any more airplanes. No, no, no, no,’” the pilot tells an audience that includes retired air force leaders.

He adds that “it’s only a matter of time” before the IAF Su-30 pilots learn how to overcome the manoeuvre used so successfully against them at the international Red Flag exercise.

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