As a general rule, we're in favor of any gadgets named for one of our favorite girl group jams. We've also got a soft spot for those projects looking to send a little love in the postal service's direction -- lord knows it can use it. Mr. Postman, naturally, fulfills both of those quotas. The smart ...
Photo by Sean/busbeytheelder/Flickr via Creative Commons
There are many things we do in private that we hope others never see. Installing a car seat is up there for me. Having just moved from New York City, where I rarely drove anywhere, to the country, where I rarely walk anywhere, car seats have suddenly become part of my daily life, and even though I know they may one day save my son’s life, I do not get along with them. When I’m fighting to install one into my car by myself, the process invariably involves instruction manuals (for my car seat and my car), YouTube installation videos (necessary since my manuals seem to be written in Pirahã), ample cursing, and me punching the car seat. Whoever said violence is never justified clearly never owned a Britax.
Most parents will agree car seats are a bitch to install; worse, the stats suggest that three out of four times, we’re doing it wrong. But the angst surrounding car seats does not end with installation—pretty much everything about them is ridiculously confusing. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently changed its recommendations on when to use which types of seats, but chances are, your state law disagrees. Rumor has it that next year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will tell parents to stop using the Lower Anchors and Tethers for Children system (LATCH) to secure car seats once the combined weight of your car seat and your child exceeds 65 pounds, which begs the question—do you know how much your car seat weighs? I don’t even know how much my kid weighs. Then there is the Freakonomics claim that car seats are in fact useless, the Consumer Reports debacle in which the organization apparently had to recall some reviews after screwing up its safety tests, and, oh yeah, the fact that some car seats simply do not fit in some cars. But hey, guess what? Your kid should be in a car seat until she’s 8 years old and don’t even think about letting her ride in the front seat until she’s 13. K?
Punch a car seat; it’ll make you feel better. Then read on, because I’m going to try to answer some of the many exasperated questions many of us have pondered about car seats in recent years.
First, the very basics: Why these insufferable plastic contraptions are well worth the hassle. Car seats can be life-saving, and to understand why, we have to go back to high school physics. When your car flies down the highway at 70 mph, you go this fast, too. This means you and your car have a heck of a lot of momentum, a figure that reflects speed and mass. When you come to a rapid halt in a collision, your car’s momentum has to drop quickly, which requires force—a force that deforms your car, among other things. Your own momentum must drop, too; you have the choice of flying through the windshield and letting the force of hard pavement stop your momentum, or you can use a seat belt, which does the same thing but a little more amiably.
Seat belts do more than just keep you from becoming a projectile; they are also slightly elastic, so they lengthen the time over which your momentum slows (as opposed to if you’d slammed into the pavement), which ultimately reduces the total force on your body at any one time. That’s good. Seat belts also ensure that this force hits two of the strongest parts of your body—your pelvis and your shoulders—and that your more delicate tissues, such as your genitals, abdomen and neck, remain unscathed (unless your car gets crushed to the point of crushing you, too). So: Seat belts are awesome.
Car seats, however, are better—which is important because car crash injuries are more dangerous to children than adults. Motor vehicle accidents are the No. 1 cause of death in children; more than one-third of kids who died in accidents in 2011 were unrestrained. “For a kid, things can come apart much more easily. When we sustain whiplash, they can break their necks,” says Ben Hoffman, a pediatrician and car seat specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Forward-facing car seats, which the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommends kids use from ages 2 to at least 4, have five-point harnesses. They distribute the force associated with impact across an even larger area—there are more straps coming into contact with your kid’s body—which means less force being applied to any single point. According to Partners for Child Passenger Safety, a long-standing research partnership between the State Farm Insurance Company, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, forward-facing car seats really do save lives: When these car seats are not seriously misused—i.e. when parents actually strap their kids in and attach car seats to their cars (apparently some don’t even try?)—car seats of all types reduce a 2- to 6-year-old child’s risk of death in a serious crash by an average of 28 percent compared with seat belts.
But it’s the rear-facing seats that are the real life-savers for kids under 4. Most crashes are frontal, which means that the force applied to riders typically comes from the front. Rear-facing seats distribute the force of impact along the entirety of the backside of your child’s body. Again: same force, but it’s distributed across a much greater area still, which means, yes, less damage. Rear-facing seats also prevent kids’ heads from flying forward as happens to forward-facing passengers. Head-flying is bad for neck muscles and bones, as they have to snap the head back in place (would you want to use your neck as a bungee cord?). One recent study reported that newborns to 2-year-olds were 76 percent more likely to be seriously injured in a car crash when they were in forward-facing car seats compared to rear-facing car seats. Seventy-six percent is a lot. In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics changed its recommendations to say that kids should remain in rear-facing car seats until at least the age of 2 (they used to say age 1); many state laws are not this strict—they are still, I guess, catching up with the science—but I’d do what the doctors say.
Photo by Glenn Fleishman/Flickr via Creative Commons
What about booster seats, which the AAP says you’re supposed to use for 4 to 7-year-olds who have outgrown their forward-facing harness seats? They don’t protect quite as well as the harnessed seats and not nearly as well as rear-facing seats, because they use only the seat belt as a restraint. They are, however, important to ensure that seat belts actually sit where they are supposed to. When kids under 8 wear seat belts without booster seats, the belts can cut across their necks and abdomens, which is precisely where you do not want a massive amount of force to hit your kid. A 2009 study conducted as part of Partners for Child Passenger Safety found that kids between 4 and 8 were 45 percent less likely to sustain moderate to serious injuries in crashes when they were restrained in high-back or backless booster seats to lap-and-shoulder seat belts alone—and this reduction in injury risk went up to 67 percent for kids in post-1998 car models.
Do you know how much your car seat weighs? I don’t even know how much my kid weighs.
What’s important to keep in mind, though, when considering all these studies is that parents who use car seats may differ from parents who don’t use car seats in many important ways. They may drive safer cars and drive more slowly, for instance, both of which could also influence injury risk. Researchers attempt to control for these confounding factors to isolate the effects of car seats themselves, but these controls are never perfect.
In fact, a small body of research downright contradicts many of the studies I have just mentioned. In 2005, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, co-authors of the bestselling Freakonomics published a controversial piece in the New York Times Magazine arguing that “there is no evidence that car seats do a better job than seat belts in saving the lives of children older than 2.” Their assertions were based on several studies Levitt conducted. One mined data from a federal database called FARS, which records the details of U.S. crashes that kill at least one passenger, and found that kids over 2 were no less likely to die in crashes while in car seats than were kids wearing lap-and-shoulder belts. Another Levitt study using crash data from a national database and those of several states found that for kids aged 2 to 6, car seats did not prevent serious injuries any better than lap-and-shoulder belts did. Car seats did, however, reduce the risk of minor injuries by 25 percent.
SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) — New York Times technology columnist and gadget reviewer David Pogue is leaving the newspaper to cover similar topics for Yahoo.
The hiring announced Monday is the latest step in Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer's effort to infuse the Internet company's website with more compelling content that will persuade people to visit more frequently and stick around longer. Mayer is hoping the increased traffic will eventually boost Yahoo's ad sales substantially, although that has not yet happened during her first 15 months on the job.
Pogue built a loyal following reviewing devices and online services while delving into other technology issues during the past 13 years at the Times.
As he did at the Times, Pogue will write columns and produce videos at Yahoo.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-10-21-Yahoo-Technology%20Columnist/id-88a0f4a5eeb344f6bf5dafd1fbf8e0e9
The disparate ecosystems of Windows Phone, Microsoft's traditional desktop and the Xbox 360 left a generation of Redmond loyals aching for a more unified front. Now Dell seems convinced that one is on the way: according to a blurb on the company's online store, Windows 8 apps will be capable of ...Shadowplay
The ABC fantasy series Once Upon A Time is back with a new season that is set in Neverland (not to be confused with the spinoff series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland which will crossover with the 3rd season of the Neverland-set Once Upon A Time), which was set up in the season finale of the show back in the Spring. In that season finale episode, an villainous character called Shadow was introduced. Today we learn that shockrocker Marilyn Manson has been cast in the role of Shadow on the show. MM will only be providing the voice for Shadow since the character is computer generated but it seems significant to me that Manson was cast on the show at all. Read on to learn more.
Once Upon a Time’s journey into the dark recesses of Neverland has gotten pretty scary already, what with an evil Peter Pan running around. Now it’s about to get a whole lot creepier: ABC has confirmed exclusively to Rolling Stone that rocker Marilyn Manson will be joining the cast of the show in November. Manson will voice Shadow, a character whose voice will give life to the very essence of Neverland. “We’ve always been enormous fans of Marilyn Manson,” show creators and executive producers Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz told Rolling Stone. “We wanted to cast someone with the vocal ability to make our skin crawl.” This season on Once Upon a Time follows Emma, Rumpelstiltskin, Regina, Captain Hook and the rest of the Fairytale Avengers in Neverland as they look for Henry while battling the evil Peter Pan. The Shadow has appeared a few times already this season, and he’s not quite the mischievous, fun-loving character who appeared in the classic Peter Pan tales. This version of Shadow is more interested in kidnapping and soul-stealing – and with Manson’s voice added to the mix, he should become a skin-crawling part of Neverland.
I’m one of the only people I know that watches Once Upon a Time (mainly because I invested so much time in Season 1 and that loyalty carried over to Season 2) so, as a viewer, I’m very intrigued by Manson‘s casting. I’ve been an MM fan from the start so I’m glad to see that he’s getting new work these days. I know he has a guest starring stint on the HBO series Eastbound and Down and now with this casting in Once Upon A Time, it looks like MM is much more interested in pursuing a career in acting rather than in music. Once is one of those shows that I DVR and watch when I have nothing else to watch … so I have the new eps of Season 3 recorded, I just haven’t watched them yet. Now that I know MM will voice a character on the show, I guess I have to catch up so I can see how well he does on the show. Do any of y’all watch the show? If so, are you looking forward to hearing MM on the show?
[Source]
eBay says former Apple e-commerce chief RJ Pittman will be its new chief product officer.
Commerce giant eBay on Thursday announced that it's hired away an Apple executive to become its chief product officer.
RJ Pittman, who spent the last three years running Apple's worldwide e-commerce operation, is eBay's new CPO, the company said in a statement.
The role is new for eBay and includes running the company's product and development strategies.
Before his stint at Apple, Pittman spent three years at the top of Google's product management group where he also served as a speaker and evangelist at various public events.
The move comes as Apple rejiggers its retail strategy. Earlier this week, it announced the hiring of Angela Ahrendts from Burberry to run its retail business, a job that was vacant for nearly a year. A leaked memo from CEO Tim Cook noted that Ahrendts would lead both the retail and online parts of Apple's business.
Steve McQueen’s period drama 12 Years a Slave — an adaptation of the autobiography of Solomon Northup, a free man who was sold into slavery—was lensed in and around New Orleans by director of photography Sean Bobbitt, who also operated the camera. The veteran cinematographer, who earned an Oscar nomination for The Pianist, recently talked with The Hollywood Reporter about the photography and some of the most “powerful and horrific” sequences in his latest film.
PHOTOS: '12 Years a Slave': Exclusive Portraits of Star-Producer Brad Pitt and His Cast
“The scene where Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) hangs for the better part of the day was a critical scene to get right,” said Bobbitt, who photographed the movie on film. “For me, that scene really drove home the true horror of slavery. No one can help him because he belongs to someone else. ... The fact that everyone else sort of gets on with their lives around him highlights that this was not unexpected or unusual.”
This long sequence is told with several extended shots at different times of the day. “Steve wanted to show the transition from afternoon into early evening, so the horror of strangling would be driven home,” Bobbitt said. “Each of the shots are held for a long period of time specifically to make the audience as uncomfortable as possible and to force them to reflect on what was happening to Solomon and how terrifying that must have been."
“When the film was first tested, a lot of people complained that the shots were too long and uncomfortable. And to Steve’s credit, he said, ‘That worked perfect then, and we‘re not going to change that.’ “
VIDEO: '12 Years a Slave' Trailer
Bobbitt shared similar thoughts about the take during which the slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) is whipped. “For Steve and myself, that was always going to be one continuous shot,” he related. “The audience is given no relief. Once you put a cut it, then subconsciously everyone is aware that they are watching a film and it let’s them off the hook. …Particularly for a scene like that with the complexity of the emotions and the violence going on, it really acts to heighten the drama and the performance of the actors.”
Bobbitt focused on lighting in a way that stayed true to the period. “There’s always a challenge when you are doing a period piece set in a time when there is no street lighting," he said, citing a night scene during which slave owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) drags Solomon out of bed to quiz him about an occurrence. The light for the actors comes from the candle in a lantern that Fassbender is carrying, but the background would of course be dark. “The background felt really dark but we just have a sense of the world behind it—particularly the house and the trees. It was quite a large area, and the weather was too unstable to put balloons up. So the challenge was how to light a large area for night and get the balance between the foreground and background exactly right. We suspended a series of Space Lights in between the trees so you get areas that are effectively moonlight lighting for the elements of the background. But because [the lighting] was suspended you could move the camera 360 degrees without worrying about seeing it.”
TELLURIDE REVIEW: '12 Years a Slave'
The cinematographer also reflected on capturing the performances. “I’m lucky since I operate the camera, I’m right there with the actors,” he said. “I have that privilege; My eyes are the first eyes that performance goes through. You hope that on any film there will be moment where the hair stands up on the back of your neck and you are in the presence of something special in terms of the performance. I have never been on a film where it happened so often.”
E-mail: Carolyn.Giardina@THR.com
Twitter: @CGinLA
