Famed gospel singer Andrae Crouch was rushed to the hospital Sunday night after falling ill in the shower at his L.A. home ... TMZ has learned.
The 71-year-old Grammy winner behind "Let the Church Say Amen" tells us he was "overcome by heat" during his shower ... and shouted for his assistant and his twin sister to call for help.
An ambulance arrived to the scene -- and Crouch was transported to a nearby hospital. A few hours later, doctors determined Crouch was OK, and he was cleared to go home.
We spoke to Crouch ... who tells us he suffers from diabetes and suspects his condition contributed to the incident in the shower.
The singer tells us he feels better now, but adds, "Diabetes is no fun."
He adds, "Thanks to all my fans for all your prayers and support."
Powell mentored Motown artists like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, and the Supremes. "Ladies dance with their feet, not their buttocks," she'd tell the girl groups.
Tony Ding/AP
In 2007, decades after Maxine Powell had retired from training a generation of black artists at Motown, a reporter from a Cleveland television station askedif anyone had been particularly difficult for her to work with.
Powell cut her off before she finished. "I don't have that," she said. "No one is difficult. Each person is a beautiful, unique human being. So if you have a problem and you're acting negative, you have been conditioned."
She went on. "So I said to my students, 'Allow me to help you unlearn that and realize and discover what a beautiful flower you are.'"
Powell, who died this weekend at the age of 98, was Motown's director of artist development during its heyday, and her job was to teach the label's young musicians how to present themselves in public. "They did come from humble beginnings," she told the Cleveland reporter, "some of them from the projects, some of them were using street language, some were rude and crude."
But to audiences at the time, those beginnings would have been invisible. For a long stretch in the 1960s, Motown's clean, factory-precise sound dominated popular music. The label's roster — the Temptations, the Supremes, The Jackson 5 — helped desegregate the radio waves. Motown was a kind of machine: songs were written by committee and artists had their images meticulously managed and cultivated. This meant that Motown's artists made incursions into places that black artists were not often seen; according to a Contemporary Black Biography interview, Powell told artists she was preparing them for "the White House and Buckingham Palace."
Body language. Everybody walks, but I teach how to glide. I teach how if you drop something, how to pick it up. If your slip comes down around your feet, how to stand in the basic standing position and step out of it smiling, with your hip bones pushed forward and the buttocks pushed under. You never, never protrude the buttocks because it means an ugly gesture, you see? They learned all of those things. I was turned loose to do whatever was necessary to make the artist look first-class.
"You don't need as much as some, but you close your eyes when you're singing, and people think you're asleep, I told him," Powell recalled. "And you slouch. So we'll work on those two things."
She also worked with the Temptations, Tammi Terrell, Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder. ("But I didn't do anything for Stevie," she told Rebecca Roberts. "Stevie was always beautiful.")
"Two days a week when you were back in Detroit you had to go to artists' development," Smokey Robinson said. "It was mandatory. You went there and learned so many things about being in show businesses."
But Powell said that her work wasn't simply about prettifying pop stars — she saw it as part of the larger fight for black progress. "All my life I was thinking of things that would help my race become outstanding and I thought of class and style...two things that would be accepted around the world," she told the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Just this summer, Powell told people gathered at an event in her honor that she would "teach until there's no breath left in my body." And indeed, Martha Reeves, the lead singer of the Vandellas and later a member of Detroit's city council, said she dispatched Powell to schools and retirement homes to teach children and the elderly about "poise and pride."
Today, black artists don't have trouble making it to the White House. Beyonce was the toast of the inaugural ball in 2008, and Jay-Z, her husband, was on the dais during the President Obama's second inauguration this year. Black artists no longer need charm school to burnish their palatability with white audiences; today, authenticity has as much cachet as respectability, if not more. Motown desegregated the airwaves, normalizing black celebrity enough that black people would eventually not always have to be perfect in public spaces. (Indeed, many of the artists that Powell tutored – Gaye and Terrell, in particular — later dealt with their demons in the limelight.) That's a reality that Maxine Powell and Motown helped to bring about, even if that may not have been their intent.
To the last, Powell was a picture of grace.
"Thank you so much for being here," Roberts said to her on All Things Considered.
Impeccable as always, Powell responded: "You're perfectly welcome."
Using an IP camera in lieu of a dedicated Internet-connected baby monitor can have its advantages. But it also comes with some profound security risks. Here's how to secure your baby cam and keep hackers at bay.
Stepping out for a day to recharge his batteries, Leonardo DiCaprio went to a local cafe with a group of friends in New York City this afternoon (October 18).
"The Great Gatsby" super star wore a gray setter cap, shades, a dark blue long sleeved shirt and jeans as he chowed down with a few of his closest pals.
In related news, the 38-year-old American icon is already at it again with a brand new film, in pre-production, and set for release on November 15th of this year. The movie's title is "The Wolf of Wall Street."
According to the synopsis, the drama/biography is "based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stockbroker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government."
ISTANBUL (AP) — Two Turkish Airlines pilots held hostage in Lebanon by militants since August have returned home.
Turkish television channels showed live images Saturday night of pilots Murat Akpinar and Murat Agca arriving at an airport in Istanbul. They arrived on a Qatar Executive private jet.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials greeted the pilots on the tarmac.
The two were freed as part of a deal that saw nine Shiite pilgrims from Lebanon freed from captivity in Syria.
It's unclear if the third part of the deal has been executed, which calls for the release several dozen women held in Syrian government jails. That was a key demand of Syrian rebels who were holding the Lebanese pilgrims.
How do consumers create markets? The case of the minimoto
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Mary-Ann Twist JCR@bus.wisc.edu 608-255-5582 University of Chicago Press Journals
Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."
The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.
The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.
"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."
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Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.
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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.
How do consumers create markets? The case of the minimoto
Public release date: 15-Oct-2013 [
| E-mail
| Share
]
Contact: Mary-Ann Twist JCR@bus.wisc.edu 608-255-5582 University of Chicago Press Journals
Consumers have the power to do more than just respond to products that companies put on the market; they can actually change and develop new markets, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
"Firm-centric models of market development view consumers as relatively passive, downstream actors, whose agency and ability to affect a market are limited to decision making in a realm of choices controlled by marketing institutions," write authors Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten (both Aalto University). "Recently consumer culture scholars have explored the power of various kinds of consumer resistance to change markets or develop new ones."
The authors studied the emergence and growth of a new market within the motorcycle industry, the minimoto. The original minimoto is a child's minibike that has been modified significantly to be ridden and raced by adults. Minimoto aficionados are passionate about the bikes, and there is currently a thriving global market for parts to modify stock minibikes from major manufacturers such as Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha.
The mainstream motorcycle industry has always viewed minimotos as a niche product in a shrinking segment of dirt bikes. The authors explain the emergence of the minimoto market as a process in three stages: consumer innovation, where creative consumers mobilize available objects and other resources to overcome barriers; community formation, when creative consumers engage other people in the same activities, leading to the development of products, practices, and infrastructures; and a final stage of market emergence.
"Such organic market emergence distributes the risk and the investment of market building broadly among consumers rather than concentrating it at the level of the firm," the authors write. "And it offers insight into the kinds of actors that have the power to shift markets in fundamental ways."
###
Diane M. Martin and John W. Schouten. "Consumption-Driven Market Emergence." Journal of Consumer Research: February 2014. For more information, contact John Schouten or visit http://ejcr.org/.
[
| E-mail
| Share
]
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.
On Tuesday night, Eleanor Catton became the youngest person to be awarded the Man Booker Prize in its 45-year history. Catton's book The Luminaries and those of her fellow finalists make up what has been hailed as perhaps the best shortlist in a decade, and they have been my companions for the past few weeks. It's a list spanning continents and styles, with a debut novel at one end and, at the other, one by a veteran who speculated that his latest book could well be his last.
It's not every year that I'm tempted to take on the marathon read in advance of the announcement, but this shortlist promised so much: the chance to embark on explorations that would take me to the story of a young girl's life in Zimbabwe, to the New Zealand gold fields, to an English village struggling with seismic social change, to an encounter between Japan and America, to a mother's story in a time before the New Testament, and to the center of a radical Indian political movement. This is everything an international prize should offer readers; a journey around the world and in and out of lives, a chance to discover new voices, to celebrate the many forms a novel can take, to be transported. This is one year that the Man Booker Prize achieved just that.
The judges praised NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names for prose that offered a "fresh adventure in language." It's a fiercely accomplished debut that follows the life of a young girl named Darling, from a childhood of deprivation and poverty in a shantytown in Zimbabwe to the uneasy adolescence of a new life in Detroit. Just as Bulawayo's protagonist and her friends bend and twist English until it becomes their own language, so too does the author take the idea of the novel and, with confidence and dexterity, shape it to tell the painful truth of diaspora.
Such skilled innovation is evident too in Harvest, by Jim Crace, the award-winning author of Quarantine and Being Dead. In his fable of villagers who find their ancient way of life under threat, Crace is at his very best. Harvest defies easy classification, taking on the biggest questions of our existence as social beings and compressing them into vividly drawn characters whose actions challenge a reader's perceptions of their own time and place.
Eleanor Catton's debut novel, The Rehearsal, was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian First Book award.
AP
Eleanor Catton's debut novel, The Rehearsal, was shortlisted for the 2009 Guardian First Book award.
AP
The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin is a book read in an afternoon, and remembered long after. Mary, mother of a murdered son, struggles to mourn in the presence of a menacing character recognizable as the writer of the Gospel of John. As her watcher questions and cajoles, demanding a version of events that Mary cannot endorse, Toibin shows us how history is made, in the determined shaping and reshaping of stories. Bold, intense and exquisitely crafted, this iconoclastic imagining is a power pack of a book that, at only 81 pages, presents a daring interpretation of what a novel can be.
Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being plays with ideas of perception and interconnectedness from the title page onward. Her eponymous narrator, who lives on a remote Canadian island, finds a plastic bag washed up on the beach. In it is a Hello Kitty box containing the diary of Nao, a girl struggling toward womanhood in modern-day Japan. Ruth's own writing has stalled, and as she immerses herself in Nao's story, and that of the girl's 104-year-old Zen Buddhist grandmother, Ozeki braids together the lives of the three women. It's an intricate pattern of cause and effect, skillfully batting the stories of Ruth and Nao back and forth until the reader feels she has entered a conversation across space and time, unraveling some of the mysteries of existence along the way.
Cause and effect are also at the core of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland, a tale of two brothers set in Kolkata and Rhode Island. One, Subhash, leaves home for a new life in America; the other, Udayan, stays behind, deeply involved in the politics of his country. Udayan's radical affiliations lead to his brutal execution by security forces. While perhaps the most conventional title on the shortlist in terms of form, Lahiri's work is a measured and thoughtful meditation on home, family and the enduring effects of personal choice.
In a shortlist of memorable titles, this year's winner, The Luminaries, by Canadian-born New Zealander Eleanor Catton, is a masterwork of structural brilliance. Set in the gold fields of New Zealand in 1866, the book tells the stories of 20 characters, all of whom are implicated in an untimely death, a suspected suicide, a disappearance and a stolen fortune. While there is a compelling narrative — a mystery to be solved — there are also archetypal characters rendered alive with dialogue, and a plot that seduces the reader with revelations and reversals at every turn.
If the shortlist this year has offered up new ways to appreciate how a story may be told, Catton's win celebrates a writer whose powers of innovation are deeply rooted in an understanding of what it takes to hold a reader in her grip for 800-plus pages, never losing their attention.
Ellah Allfrey is an editor and critic. She lives in London.
• Eminem is 41, Chris Kirkpatrick of ‘N Sync is 42, Ziggy Marley is 45, Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) is 51 and Margot Kidder (Superman) is 65 years old. Click HERE to see who else is celebrating a birthday today.
Turtle Beach Announces Extended Partnership with Microsoft
The companies will collaborate on audio solutions for the Xbox One through 2015
VALHALLA, N.Y. – October 18, 2013 – Turtle Beach, the leader in gaming audio products, today announced an extended partnership with Microsoft to create innovative hardware, software, and applications that support the Xbox One's advanced audio capabilities. The new agreement extends a relationship first revealed when Turtle Beach announced the XO FOUR and XO SEVEN next generation gaming headsets in May, 2013.
The partnership provides a wide range of opportunities to increase exposure of the Turtle Beach brand to consumers. In connection with the launch of the XO FOUR and XO SEVEN headsets, Turtle Beach and Microsoft will collaborate on consumer, trade and retailer events, as well as integrated marketing initiatives, including retail point-of-sale displays and kiosks.
Turtle Beach headsets have supported Xbox One preview events across the world, including: trade events such as Gamescom in Cologne, the Tokyo Game Show, PAX Prime in Seattle; loft showcase events in San Francisco and New York; and the 'Area One' experiential tour which will visit 75 major markets in North America and Europe. Turtle Beach headsets will also be featured in Microsoft's Xbox One booths at the 2013 Brasil Games Show from October 25 to 29, and Paris Games Week from October 30 to November 3.
"Turtle Beach is a key partner with Microsoft in the new Xbox One console platform," said Branden Powell, Director of Strategic Alliances at Microsoft. "We are committed to our partnership with Turtle Beach and will continue to work together to create innovative audio solutions that support the Xbox One's advanced audio capabilities."
Turtle Beach expects to launch the XO FOUR and XO SEVEN headsets for the Xbox One console in the first quarter of 2014. Microsoft has informed its partners in the Xbox One console launch that the Xbox One Headset Adapter, being built by Microsoft and provided to Turtle Beach for inclusion with new gaming headsets, will not be available until early 2014. Both companies will leverage the additional time to build supply to meet anticipated high-demand when the headsets launch.
"We are very excited about the coming XBOX ONE launch and expect to continue to work closely with Microsoft to deliver the best audio products and capabilities for the XBOX ONE through 2014 and 2015," said Juergen Stark, Chief Executive Officer at Turtle Beach. "I know we will excite consumers with our new headsets in the coming months and I am looking forward to the launch of the XO FOUR and XO SEVEN in early 2014."
Turtle Beach is launching nine additional headsets in the next 60 days, including limited edition Call of Duty®: Ghosts gaming headsets, iSeries media headsets, and the Marvel's Thor: The Dark World edition of the new Marvel SEVEN entertainment headset.
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About Turtle Beach Turtle Beach (http://www.turtlebeach.com) designs and markets premium audio peripherals for video game, personal computer, and mobile platforms, including its acclaimed line of Ear Force gaming headphones and headsets crafted for PC and Mac, Nintendo, PlayStation and Xbox game consoles, including the next-generation Xbox One. According to the NPD Group, Turtle Beach manufactures the top five best-selling third-party gaming headsets of all time when ranked in dollar sales. The Ear Force X12 wired headset is the No. 1 best-selling third-party gaming headset of all time.
Turtle Beach is the official audio provider for Major League Gaming, the world's largest eSports league, and Twitch, the world's leading video platform and community for gamers
Turtle Beach, headquartered in Valhalla, New York, is a brand of Voyetra Turtle Beach, Inc., which has been at the forefront of music and audio technology for more than three decades and is recognized as a pioneer of today's PC audio industry.
Turtle Beach and Ear Force are registered trademarks of Voyetra Turtle Beach, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders and are hereby acknowledged.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee is suing a museum in her hometown of Monroeville to stop it from selling souvenirs with her name and the title of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book.
The lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in Mobile, said the Monroe County Heritage Museum has traded on Lee's fame without her approval and without compensating her. It seeks an unspecified amount in damages.
"Every single statement in the lawsuit is either false, meritless, or both," museum attorney Matt Goforth said Friday in an email.
The lawsuit comes after Lee sought a federal trademark for the title of her book when it's used on clothing. The museum opposed her application, saying its souvenir sales are vital to its continued operation. A ruling is over a year away.
Lee's book is set in fictional Maycomb County, but her suit says the setting was inspired by the real Monroe County where she lives in south Alabama. The museum in Monroeville has displays honoring her and presents the play "To Kill a Mockingbird" each summer in the old county courthouse courtroom, which served as a model for the movie's courtroom. The museum pays royalties for using the play, and that is not an issue in the suit.
The suit contends the museum has profited from the unauthorized use of Lee's name and book title through the sale of clothing and a variety of souvenirs. Its website also uses the title (http://www.tokillamockingbird.com ) without any compensation, the suit says.
"Ms. Lee has suffered a stroke and is in ill health. The defendant apparently believes that she lacks the desire to police her trademarks, and therefore seeks to take advantage of Ms. Lee's condition and property. The defendant is mistaken," the suit says.
The suit says that in August, the museum refused an offer from Lee to sell it merchandise she had authorized.
Clay Rankin, the Mobile attorney representing the 87-year-old author, did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The museum's Birmingham attorney said the tourist attraction is within its rights to educate the public and preserve the area's history. "It's sad that Harper Lee's handlers have seen fit to attack the nonprofit museum in her hometown that has been honoring her and the town's rich history associated with that legacy for over 20 years," Goforth said.
The suit says the museum took in more than $500,000 in revenue in 2012. Goforth said the museum earned $28,566 from merchandise sales in 2012.
U.S. District Judge William Steele has not scheduled any hearings in the case.
Long-standing rumors of an 'Amazon phone' could finally come true
Amazon is gearing up to release multiple smart phones manufactured by HTC, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Sources of the Financial Times claim that a range of phones are in the works, with at least one that is in advanced stages. The phone is said to be released as early as the end of this year, but launch plans have changed before and may be pushed back again until 2014.
Amazon has traditionally used white label manufacturers for its Kindle devices, holding all branding to itself. The move to partnering with HTC for manufacturing is something that HTC is well-accustomed to, but it's unclear what Amazon has to gain from having the HTC logo on its devices.
Presumably the partnership could be mutually beneficial if Amazon targets the product correctly. Amazon could potentially leverage HTC's brand recognition and history of dealing with wireless carriers, and an Amazon-driven phone that sells extremely well would be a boon for HTC's currently struggling financial situation.
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Maya Angelou attends the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Maya Angelou attends the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Singer Tony Bennett and his wife Susan Crow attend the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Actor Joel Grey, left, singer Tony Bennett his wife Susan Crow and writer Gay Talese attend the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Van Cleef & Arpels vice president of marketing and communications, Kristina Buckley, left, model Coco Rocha and Van Cleef & Arpels president and CEO Alain Bernard attend the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Model Coca Rocha and W magazine editor Stefano Tonchi attend the 5th annual Norman Mailer Center benefit gala at The New York Public Library on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013 in New York.(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — Her body weak, her voice rich and strong, Maya Angelou sang, lectured and reminisced as she accepted a lifetime achievement award Thursday night from the Norman Mailer Center.
The 85-year-old author, poet, dancer and actress was honored during a benefit gala at the New York Public Library, the annual gathering organized by the Mailer Center and writers colony . Seated in a wheelchair, she was a vivid presence in dark glasses and a sparkling black dress as she marveled that a girl from a segregated Arkansas village could grow up to become a literary star.
"Imagine it," she said, "a town so prejudiced black people couldn't even eat vanilla ice cream."
Angelou was introduced by her former editor at Random House, Robert Loomis, and she praised him for talking her into writing her breakthrough memoir, the million-selling "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." The key was suggesting to her that the book might be too hard to write.
The people who knew her best, she explained, understood that "if you want to get Maya Angelou to do so something, tell her she can't."
Angelou, a longtime resident of North Carolina, will be back in Manhattan next month to collect an honorary National Book Award medal.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz and the late author-journalist Michael Hastings also received prizes Thursday. Hastings' widow, Elise, teared up as she accepted a journalism award on behalf of her husband, who died in a car accident last summer at age 33.
She recalled that Hastings, best known for a Rolling Stone story about the U.S. war in Afghanistan that led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, felt a kinship with for the brilliant and troublesome Mailer. When the couple fought, she said, he would point out that in "comparison to Mailer he was a great husband," a reference to a notorious incident in which Mailer stabbed his wife.
Hastings was a "dissident, a cynical idealist and a breathtaking writer," she said.
The dinner event was the fifth gala for the Mailer center, named for the celebrated author who died in 2007 and dedicated to helping writers "across all genres who seek artful ways to express themselves and provoke meaningful discussion about our society."
Previous honorees include Toni Morrison, Keith Richards and Robert Caro.
Amnesty International says more than 950 people have died in military detention in Nigeria, as the government fights an Islamist insurgency. Civilians are increasingly becoming targets of the Islamists — and many local people say they are more frightened of government soldiers than the insurgents.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — NBC-Universal employees have been told the recasting of Christian Grey in the company's film version of the erotic best-seller "Fifty Shades of Grey" will be finalized in the next few weeks.
A company-wide "town hall" on Wednesday covered a variety of subjects but "Fifty Shades" was the inevitable hot topic in the wake of last weekend's announcement that Charlie Hunnam was dropping out as Christian Grey, according to an NBC-Universal employee who attended the meeting.
The source, who requested anonymity because the meeting was private, also said NBCU officials confirmed "Fifty Shades" will still be released next year and that co-star Dakota Johnson remains committed to her role as Anastasia Steele.
The meeting was held primarily to introduce Jeff Shell, who is taking over as Universal Pictures co-chairman.
The infamously reclusive creator of Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson, spoke for the first time in several years in a new interview at Mental Floss. Watterson, whose art will soon appear in an exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum with work from Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, discussed his feelings on the world of digital comics, creators’ rights, and how he almost lost Calvin & Hobbes.
Asked where he thinks Calvin & Hobbes fits into today’s comics landscape, which includes not only print comics but webcomics and digital comics, Watterson replies:
Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with.
He also discussed his battle for more room and flexibility on the comics page at a time when that real estate was shrinking, a battle that he famously won. It was a riskier proposition than many may realize; after signing most of his rights away to get syndicated, Watterson said he had no legal rights to demand anything, and could have even lost Calvin & Hobbes itself. “I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way… It was a grim, sad time.”
While the notion of Bill Watterson being replaced by anyone on Calvin & Hobbes is blasphemy to fans of the strip, the experience he describes offers an interesting contrast to the landscape of comics today, where it’s far easier for webcartoonists with a wide variety of styles and stories to find their own niche audience without the help of a syndicate. But as Watterson notes, this can also atomize the audience from national to niche, while the comics pages of newspapers are still shrinking (and newspapers aren’t faring so well themselves).
This long tail of comics may allow creators more diversity and more control, but Watterson worries that without mass media distribution comics ”will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money” — that it will be difficult to create more comics like Calvin & Hobbes, which become cultural touchstones because they are read by all, not merely a small, devoted audience.
A fuller version of the interview will be published in the December issue of Mental Floss magazine.
Ricky Schroder Yanks Daughter From School After Cancer Outbreak
Exclusive Details
Ricky Schroder has such fears his daughter's Malibu school causes cancer ... he's yanked her out, and we're told other high-profile parents have similar concerns.
Ricky tells TMZ ... the facts are scary -- 3 teachers at Malibu Middle School have been diagnosed with thyroid cancer in the last 6 months. Seven other teachers have experienced severe migraines and others say they have skin rashes, hair loss and other ailments.
Ricky says the buzz around the school is that soil around the school is contaminated with PCBs, lead and pesticides. Teachers also think the classrooms might be contaminated with mold.
Parents are now demanding tests for various contaminants, including radioactivity, asbestos and Ricky tells us ... he's physically removed his daughter from the school "as an abundance of caution" ... until it's determined it's safe for her to return. Until then, she's taking classes at home via independent study ... and about 25% of the students in her class are doing the same thing.
As for Ricky ... he says until he knows it's safe for his daughter to return to classes, she'll be homeschooled.
School officials are conducting more testing this week. According to a statement, preliminary tests showed "no unusual findings" for mold contamination ... and any mold found so far should not pose a health problem.
We've reached out to a number of school officials for comment ... so far, no response from them.
Contact: Anna Mikulak amikulak@psychologicalscience.org 202-293-9300 Association for Psychological Science
When financial gain depends on cooperation, we might expect that people would put aside their differences and focus on the bottom line. But new research suggests that people's racial biases make them more likely to leave money on the table when a windfall is not split evenly between groups.
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"It has been suggested that race bias in economic decisions may not occur in a market where discrimination is costly, but these findings provide the first evidence that this assumption is false," explain psychological scientists Jennifer Kubota and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University. "Our work suggests that after offers are on the table, people perceive the fairness of those offers differently even when they are objectively identical based on race."
The research was inspired by the debt ceiling debates that raged on in the summer of 2011.
"Many members of both the House and Senate seemed willing to incur costs that would hurt their own constituents in order to vote along political lines," say Kubota and Phelps. "The debate led us to wonder: Are people willing to punish members of another group when they perceive their behavior as unfair, even when exacting that punishment comes at a personal cost?"
The researchers decided that an important first step in understanding this phenomenon, given race-based financial disparities in the United States, would be to examine interracial economic decisions.
They had 49 participants of different ethnic and racial backgrounds engage in a so-called "ultimatum game," in which players accept or reject proposed splits of money. Participants were paired off and a "proposer" in each pair was given $10 to split between them. If the other player accepted the offer, the money was doled out accordingly; if the other player rejected the offer, both participants were left empty-handed. The researchers arranged it so that participants were always responding to offers from virtual proposers.
Because of existing cultural associations in the United States that link Black American males with aggression, hostility, and untrustworthiness, the researchers hypothesized that the participants might be more likely to perceive a low financial offer as unfair if it came from a Black rather than White proposer.
Overall, participants were more likely to accept White proposers' offers compared to those from Black proposers. And the data indicated that Black proposers had to offer larger amounts in order for players to accept the deal.
The effect is likely due to specific stereotypes or prejudices associated with Black Americans, given that participants showed a similar pattern of acceptance for offers from other-race proposers (who were neither White nor Black) and from White proposers.
The researchers point out that the financial offers being made in their study were relatively small and that people might be less likely to reject offers based on race when larger financial gains are at stake. Nonetheless, they argue that their findings have broad implications, with relevance to any context in which people punish others for what they consider to be violations of fairness:
"These findings may be especially relevant for legal and economic decisions and serve as an potential example of how people punish unfair or negative behavior in real-life," Kubota and Phelps conclude.
###
For more information about this study, please contact:
Elizabeth A. Phelps at liz.phelps@nyu.edu
Jennifer T. Kubota at jennifer.kubota@nyu.edu
In addition to Phelps and Kubota, co-authors include Jian Li of Peking University, Eyal Bar-David of New York University, and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University.
The article abstract is available online at: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/11/0956797613496435.abstract
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Grants MH080756 and AG039283).
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Price of Racial Bias: Intergroup Negotiations in the Ultimatum Game" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.
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The cost of racial bias in economic decisions
Public release date: 17-Oct-2013 [
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Contact: Anna Mikulak amikulak@psychologicalscience.org 202-293-9300 Association for Psychological Science
When financial gain depends on cooperation, we might expect that people would put aside their differences and focus on the bottom line. But new research suggests that people's racial biases make them more likely to leave money on the table when a windfall is not split evenly between groups.
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
"It has been suggested that race bias in economic decisions may not occur in a market where discrimination is costly, but these findings provide the first evidence that this assumption is false," explain psychological scientists Jennifer Kubota and Elizabeth Phelps of New York University. "Our work suggests that after offers are on the table, people perceive the fairness of those offers differently even when they are objectively identical based on race."
The research was inspired by the debt ceiling debates that raged on in the summer of 2011.
"Many members of both the House and Senate seemed willing to incur costs that would hurt their own constituents in order to vote along political lines," say Kubota and Phelps. "The debate led us to wonder: Are people willing to punish members of another group when they perceive their behavior as unfair, even when exacting that punishment comes at a personal cost?"
The researchers decided that an important first step in understanding this phenomenon, given race-based financial disparities in the United States, would be to examine interracial economic decisions.
They had 49 participants of different ethnic and racial backgrounds engage in a so-called "ultimatum game," in which players accept or reject proposed splits of money. Participants were paired off and a "proposer" in each pair was given $10 to split between them. If the other player accepted the offer, the money was doled out accordingly; if the other player rejected the offer, both participants were left empty-handed. The researchers arranged it so that participants were always responding to offers from virtual proposers.
Because of existing cultural associations in the United States that link Black American males with aggression, hostility, and untrustworthiness, the researchers hypothesized that the participants might be more likely to perceive a low financial offer as unfair if it came from a Black rather than White proposer.
Overall, participants were more likely to accept White proposers' offers compared to those from Black proposers. And the data indicated that Black proposers had to offer larger amounts in order for players to accept the deal.
The effect is likely due to specific stereotypes or prejudices associated with Black Americans, given that participants showed a similar pattern of acceptance for offers from other-race proposers (who were neither White nor Black) and from White proposers.
The researchers point out that the financial offers being made in their study were relatively small and that people might be less likely to reject offers based on race when larger financial gains are at stake. Nonetheless, they argue that their findings have broad implications, with relevance to any context in which people punish others for what they consider to be violations of fairness:
"These findings may be especially relevant for legal and economic decisions and serve as an potential example of how people punish unfair or negative behavior in real-life," Kubota and Phelps conclude.
###
For more information about this study, please contact:
Elizabeth A. Phelps at liz.phelps@nyu.edu
Jennifer T. Kubota at jennifer.kubota@nyu.edu
In addition to Phelps and Kubota, co-authors include Jian Li of Peking University, Eyal Bar-David of New York University, and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University.
The article abstract is available online at: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/11/0956797613496435.abstract
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Grants MH080756 and AG039283).
The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Price of Racial Bias: Intergroup Negotiations in the Ultimatum Game" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.
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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.
Yahoo will start encrypting the webmail sessions of its users in early 2014 by making HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) standard for all Yahoo Mail connections.
Security experts, privacy advocates, and users have asked Yahoo for this feature for a long time. Other major webmail providers already offer it.
In November 2012, the Electronic Frontier Foundation with other privacy, security and human rights organizations, sent a letter to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer asking the company to add HTTPS support to its communication services, including email and instant messaging.
HTTPS, which combines the HTTP Web communications protocol with the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption protocol, is widely used to secure connections between Web users and websites, and prevents sensitive data from being intercepted and read by unauthorized parties while in transit.
Yahoo started rolling out a new Web interface for Yahoo Mail late last year that provided support for full-session HTTPS, but only as an option. In order to enable the feature, users can go in their email account settings and check the "Use SSL" box in the "Security" section.
"Starting January 8, 2014, we will make encrypted https connections standard for all Yahoo Mail users," Jeffrey Bonforte, Yahoo's senior vice president of communication products, said Monday in a blog post. "Our teams are working hard to make the necessary changes to default https connections on Yahoo Mail, and we look forward to providing this extra layer of security for all our users."
The move comes at a time when there is increased discussion about privacy and security online following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency and the intelligence agencies of other countries are running extensive electronic surveillance programs.
Some of the NSA programs revealed by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden involve the upstream interception of Internet traffic as it passes through global networks, as well as data collection from online services providers including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, AOL and others.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the NSA collected online address books in bulk from Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook, Gmail, and other email and chat programs at Internet access points controlled by foreign telecommunications companies and allied intelligence services.
This type of upstream data collection is something that HTTPS can potentially prevent, as long as the implementation is strong enough. The service provider might be later compelled to hand over the decrypted data at its end, but at least in that case the interception would be done with its knowledge.
In addition to preventing bulk data collection by government agencies, HTTPS can also prevent hacker attacks, like the theft of authentication cookies over insecure wireless networks or through cross-site scripting attacks.
A new tool from security vendor Onapsis aims to secure SAP's in-memory database HANA, the German company's fastest-growing data processing product.
Onapsis, a Boston-based company that specializes in SAP security, will incorporate the tool into its X1 suite, which scans for vulnerabilities and configuration problems in SAP deployments.
HANA is a cornerstone of SAP's strategy to compete with Oracle and IBM. Available as a cloud service and an appliance, it's designed to process analytical and transaction workloads much faster for SAP's ERP, CRM, supply chain and business intelligence applications.
HANA became generally available last year, and SAP has called it the fastest-growing product in its history, with more than 1,000 customers at the end of 2012.
But the product is "so new that there is no real practical knowledge on how to secure it," according to Onapsis CEO Mariano Nunez.
The HANA modules in X1 perform automated scans that check if a HANA's configuration matches SAP's security guidelines for the platform. They look for problems such as missing patches, users with excessive permissions, dangerous SAP XS Engine applications, missing audit trails and weak passwords, among other issues.
The modules prioritize the risks administrators should mitigate and continuously monitor HANA for new risks, Nunez said. The HANA modules will be available in November as a free update for existing X1 customers.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Facebook is now allowing teenagers to share their posts on the social network with anyone on the Internet, raising the risks of minors leaving a digital trail that could lead to trouble.
The change announced Wednesday affects Facebook users who list their ages as being from 13 to 17.
Until now, Facebook users falling within that age group had been limited to sharing information and photos only with their own friends or friends of those friends.
The new policy will give teens the choice of switching their settings so their posts can be accessible to the general public. That option already has been available to adults, including users who are 18 or 19.
As a protective measure, Facebook will warn minors opting to be more open that they are exposing themselves to a broader audience. The warning will repeat on every post, as long as the settings remain on "public."
The initial privacy settings of teens under 18 will automatically be programmed so posts are seen only by friends. That's slightly more restrictive than the previous automatic setting that allowed teens to distribute their posts to friends of their friends in the network.
In a blog post, Facebook said it decided to revise its privacy rules to make its service more enjoyable for teens and provide them with a more powerful megaphone when they believe they have an important point to make or a cause to support.
"Teens are among the savviest people using social media, and whether it comes to civic engagement, activism, or their thoughts on a new movie, they want to be heard," Facebook wrote.
The relaxed standards also may help teens spend more time on Facebook instead of other services, such as Snapchat, that are becoming more popular hangouts among younger people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, though, says that the company's internal data shows its social network remains a magnet for teens.
Giving people more reasons to habitually visit its social network is important to Facebook because a larger audience helps sell more of the ads that generate most of the Menlo Park, Calif., company's revenue.
Facebook hasn't disclosed how many of its nearly 1.2 billon users are teens.
The teen audience is large enough to give Facebook periodic headaches. As its social network has steadily expanded, Facebook has had to combat sexual predators and bullies who prey upon children on its service.
Facebook doesn't allow children under 13 to set up accounts on its service, but doesn't have a reliable way to verify users' ages.
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