Sony Announces Permanent Ban for PS3 Hackers

The company says anyone running unauthorized or pirated software will have their access 'terminated permanently.'

Sony recently published a notice on its Web site warning that anyone who runs unauthorized or pirated software on a PlayStation 3 "may have their access to the PlayStation Network and access to Sony Entertainment Network services through [the] PlayStation 3 system terminated permanently."

"Unauthorized software for the PlayStation 3 system was recently released by hackers," the notice states. "Use of such software violates the terms of the 'System Software License Agreement for the PlayStation 3 System' and the 'Terms of Services and User Agreement' for the PlayStation Network/Sony Entertainment Network and its Community Code of Conduct provisions."

"To avoid a permanent hardware ban, Sony advises users immediately delete any and all unauthorised or pirated software from the console," writes VG247's Brenna Hillier.

"The statement comes at the launch of 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 2' on the Playstation 3," notes Examiner.com's Shui Ta. "The first-person shooter, which will be played by millions online, will most likely be one of the best-selling video games on the system."

"However, the effects of [Sony's] actions may well be short-lived: the PlayStation 3's system software is now completely open and hackers are known to be equipped with a complete list of all the identifying data sent from the console to the server," writes Eurogamer's Richard Leadbetter. "Sony could face a challenge in keeping these banned systems offline if hardware ID spoofer tools become available."

Source: http://www.esecurityplanet.com/hackers/sony-announces-permanent-ban-for-ps3-hackers.html

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Bill moves forward in Mexico to criminalize "crying wolf" on social media

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The state congress of Veracruz, Mexico is considering a bill to reform the Gulf state's penal code to punish offenders with one to four years in prison for disturbing public order by publishing fasle alarms regarding emergencies or violent acts, reported the website Animal Pol?tico.

The proposal to modify article 373 of Veracruz's penal code originated when two Facebook and Twitter users were jailed for "sowing panic" by spreading false information about a shooting in the city of Xalapa in August 2011.

The magazine Proceso warned that the bill would inhibit locals from using social media to a report shootings, the whereabouts of armed groups or killings in the state.

The Supreme Court and the National Commission on Human Rights sent recommendations for the bill's text pending the approval of the state's congress, according to the newspaper El Universal.

Veracruz is considered the most dangerous state in Mexico for journalists, where nine have been killed since 2011.


Source: http://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-12078-bill-moves-forward-mexico-criminalize-crying-wolf-social-media

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What Are You Waiting For?

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Every day is a new opportunity. Every day, as the clich? goes, ?is the first day of the rest of your life?. That means you have a lot of ?firsts? left to live. You can change. You can start now. But if you?re struggling, Dr. Lee Baucom will explain why today, and then shows you how to get started anyway. This is helpful advice for both the ETR 6-Week ?Bad Habit Transformation Contest? and our upcoming $100,000 Transformation Contest that will take place in early 2013. Stay tuned for more details.

Craig Ballantyne

?You could just as easily change your life today as any other day. You don?t need to wait for January first.? ? Dan Kennedy

_________________

A New American Dream

The original Psycho Cybernetics was written by Maxwell Maltz Ph.D in 1960.? That book, sometimes referred to as the birth of ?Self-Help? inspired some 30 million people including predominant Self-Help experts, like Tony Robbins and Zig Ziglar.? The recently revised version, The New Psycho Cybernetics: A Mind Technology for Living Your Life without Limits, written in 2002, includes the insights of entrepreneurial brilliance of Dan S. Kennedy.? The update made the ideas of Dr. Maltz apply more readily to today?s society.? Dr. Maltz was a renowned plastic surgeon who noticed that though he could fix outer issues he but found that his patients needed help with inner healing as well. The New Psycho Cybernetics is said to help readers develop self-confidence, overcome procrastination, and improve overall health and self-image. The idea is that you can replace negative thoughts and self-image with positive affirmations. Athletes, entrepreneurs, college students and self-help experts have all used The New Cybernetics method to improve their lives.
_________________

Why We Don?t Change
By Lee H. Baucom, Ph.D.

I was driving out of my neighborhood, headed to work today.? And I realized I was going a way I don?t usually go.? Or I should say ?didn?t use to go.?

What happened?? How did I end up there?

Okay, so give me a second to explain.? There are 4 ways to exit my neighborhood from my house.? I always went with 2 of them.? Then, they decided to do some roadwork off the main road that encompassed two of the exits.? And when I say ?roadwork,? I mean wet tar, wet oil, pieces of scrap metal, etc.? In other words, nothing I wanted to drive through!

So, I decided (note I said ?decided?) to go another way.? The next day, I head off to the office.? And I find myself driving the old way.? I fussed at myself and turned around.? That afternoon, I automatically headed in the old way.? I fussed at myself again!

The next day, I very purposefully set out to go the new way. . . and started to turn the old way!? ?What is up?? I asked myself.? I corrected, and went out the new way.? The next few days, I forced myself to remember to go the new way.

One day, I noticed I was headed out the new way, and hadn?t had to be so purposeful.? It was just the new way out.? And today, a month after the work ended (and therefore my original reason for changing), and I found myself headed out the ?new? way (which is quickly becoming the old way).

How many times do you hear people saying ?that?s just not me??? Often, it is about some change ? new hairstyle, new clothes, etc.? Any change somehow challenges our perception of ?me.?? Even if the challenge seems fairly innocuous, if not downright useless.

Yet we tend to stay in our routines, regardless of how useful that routine may be.? If our routine is to eat that snack just before bed, even as the scales are warning us about how the ?me? is expanding, we are likely to keep on snacking.

Neuroscientists can tell us that the more we do something, the more the habit grows.? And as the habit grows, we create a ?groove? in our neurology.? We connect our neurons to that certain habit.

The longer we do the habit, the deeper the groove.? The deeper the groove, the harder the habit is to break.? And the more we begin to see that habit as part of the ?me.?

Which means that I discuss doing something differently in their marriage.? I request they act differently toward a spouse, stop yelling, bring flowers, call to update, etc., etc., etc.? And the response I get is ?I can?t do that.? I just can?t change.? That?s not me.?? Precisely, I think to myself.

But the ?me? they are operating from is NOT working, and IS causing a problem in their marriage.? So why not try to change?

Because change is hard!

At least in the beginning.

Until the change becomes habit ? becomes the new ?ME.?

Which brings us to the important piece, ?what to do about it!?? We all know change is hard.? But change is life, right?

So, let?s start with this:? if it ain?t working, time to change.? Let?s just agree to that.

If we can?t agree to that, then the rest is irrelevant.

Still with me?

Okay, so let?s first define what it is you need to change.? What do YOU (not your spouse, as you have no control over that) need to change in how you interact with your spouse?

Write that down.

Now ask yourself this:? ?Is that really a core piece of myself??? ?Does it really define me as a person??? ?What if I do it differently.? Will I be an entirely different person, or will I just be interacting differently??

Be clear about that.? How you interact is not who you are.? It is a habit of interaction.

Next step:? what is the better way to interact?

Why is it a better way??? Again, be clear about this.

Now, notice when you usually do the old way.? Imagine a time when you did just that, then re-imagine it with the new way.

Next step:? assume you will not be perfect.? Remember my driving?? I kept leaving the old way.? But I stopped and corrected.
Same for you.? When you try the new way, if you find yourself starting down the old way, stop.? Apologize, and try it the different way.

Then keep on trying the new way.

One day, and in not as long as you think, the new way will be the old way.

Keep changing.? Keep evolving.? That is the nature of life.? It?s all about growing!

[Ed. Note: Dr. Baucom is the creator of the Save The Marriage System.? He has been working with individuals and couples to save and improve their marriages for almost a quarter of a century.? During that time, Dr. Baucom has had the opportunity to help over 100,000 couples create amazing relationships.? You can learn more about his work at SaveTheMarriage.com.]

?

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Death penalty court-martial sought in Bales case

Army prosecutors on Tuesday asked an investigative officer to recommend a death penalty court-martial for a staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers in a predawn rampage, saying that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales committed "heinous and despicable crimes."

Prosecutors made their closing arguments after a week of testimony in the preliminary hearing. Prosecutors say Bales, 39, slipped away from his remote base at Camp Belambay in southern Afghanistan to attack two villages early on March 11. Among the dead were nine children.

The slayings drew such angry protests that the U.S. temporarily halted combat operations in Afghanistan, and it was three weeks before American investigators could reach the crime scenes.

"Terrible, terrible things happened," said prosecutor, Maj. Rob Stelle. "That is clear."

Stelle cited statements Bales made after he was apprehended, saying that they demonstrated "a clear memory of what he had done, and consciousness of wrong-doing."

Several soldiers testified that Bales returned to the base alone just before dawn, covered in blood, and that he made incriminating statements such as, "I thought I was doing the right thing."

An attorney for Bales argued there's not enough information to move forward with the court-martial.

"There are a number of questions that have not been answered so far in this investigation," attorney Emma Scanlan told the investigating officer overseeing the preliminary hearing.

Scanlan said that it's still unknown what Bales' state of mind was the evening of the killings.

An Army criminal investigations command special agent had testified last week that Bales tested positive for steroids three days after the killings, and other soldiers testified that Bales had been drinking the evening of the massacre.

"We've heard that Sgt. Bales was lucid, coherent and responsive," Scanlan said in her closing argument. "We don't know what it means to be on alcohol, steroids and sleeping aids."

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The investigating officer said Tuesday that he would have a written recommendation by the end of the week, but that is just the start of the process. That recommendation goes next to the brigade command, and the ultimate decision would be made by the three-star general on the base. There's no clear sense of how long that could take before a decision is reached on whether to proceed to a court-martial trial.

If a court-martial takes place, it will be held at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the Washington state base south of Seattle, and witnesses will be flown in from Afghanistan.

Bales faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder. The preliminary hearing, which began Nov. 5, included nighttime sessions on Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the convenience of the Afghan witnesses. Bales did not testify.

The witnesses included a 7-year-old girl, who described how she hid behind her father when a gunman came to their village that night, how the stranger fired, and how her father died, cursing in pain and anger.

None of the Afghan witnesses were able to identify Bales as the shooter, but other evidence, including tests of the blood on his clothes, implicated him, according to testimony from a DNA expert.

After the hearing concluded, Scanlan spoke with reporters, saying that in addition to questions about Bales' state of mind, there are still questions of whether there were more people involved.

During testimony, a special agent testified that months after the killings, she was able to interview the wife of one of the victims, who recounted having seen two U.S. soldiers. Later, however, the woman's brother-in-law, Mullah Baraan, who was not present at the shootings, testified that the woman says there was only one shooter. The woman herself did not testify.

"We need to know if more than one person was outside that wire," Scanlan said.

Scanlan also raised the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injury, noting that Bales had received a screening at the traumatic brain injury clinic at Madigan Army Medical Center during a period of time that the center is under investigation for reversing hundreds of PTSD diagnoses of soldiers since 2007.

"We're in the process of investigating that," she said.

When asked if Bales had ever been diagnosed with PTSD, Scanlan said, "I'm not going to answer that right now."

Dan Conway, a military defense lawyer based in New Hampshire, said Tuesday that PTSD must be considered as a factor in the case.

"I think the defense team has an obligation to meet with doctors and determine if PTSD affected Bales' ability to premeditate the murders," Conway said. "It could play a very important role."

Bales' wife, Kari, and her sister, Stephanie Tandberg, met with reporters briefly after the hearings concluded. Tandberg read a statement, saying "we all grieve deeply for the Afghani families who lost their loved ones on March 11, but we must all not rush to judgment."

Last week, the lead prosecutor, Lt. Col. Jay Morse, said on the night of the killings Bales watched a movie about a former CIA agent on a revenge killing spree, with two fellow soldiers, while drinking contraband whiskey. Morse said Bales first attacked one village, Alkozai, returned to the base at Camp Belambay, then headed out again to attack a second village, Najiban. Bales returned to the base covered in blood, Morse said, and his incriminating statements indicate he was "deliberate and methodical."

In the family statement, Tandberg said: "We all want very much to know how, why, and what happened ... Much of the testimony was painful, even heartbreaking, but we are not convinced the government has shown us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what happened that night ... We know Bob as bright, courageous and honorable, as a man who is a good citizen soldier, son, husband, father, uncle and sibling. We in Bob's family are proud to stand by him."

AP writer Nicholas K. Geranios contributed to this report from Spokane, Wash.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49810536/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

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Ideas Hatched: The Dole and How to Swing It

The Dole and How to Swing It


I?ve given you the libertarian argument: screw you, it?s my money, and redistributing it according to your preferences rather than mine is robbery, plain and simple.? I?ve also given you the empirical economic argument that a larger welfare state makes us all poorer by leading us all to work less, as is the case in Europe.? This perhaps overstated the case ?one might argue that an expansion of the welfare state, financed by taxing the rich, could leave the rest of us in between no better or worse off, and amount to a simple transfer from rich to poor.? That proposition seems to me to be the chief domestic policy promise of the Obama campaign. ?If this proposition is true, and we are somehow unmoved by the libertarian argument that redistribution is theft, then the middle class can buy its virtue on the cheap by simply supporting the welfare state.? A vote for Obama establishes that you care; at bottom all you care about is having other people support the poor, but of course you get credit beyond this.? To the extent that middle class may have just done precisely this ? bought its virtue on the cheap ? it is about to find out that it will be a lot more expensive than it anticipated.
Raising taxes has 2 possible effects on labor supply decisions: 1) you work more because you need to work more to achieve the same standard of living (income effect); or 2) you work less because leisure, which cannot be taxed, becomes relatively more attractive (substitution effect).? A few posts ago I discussed the economic research that indicated the second effect dominates when the extra tax revenues finance transfers that provide to us things we would otherwise purchase for ourselves by working more, and therefore the tendency is for all to work less.? This is a dynamic that affects not just those at the bottom ? it affects the vast set of people who receive middle class entitlements, such as education and retirement benefits.?
But the extent to which this dynamic is in play for different income groups is a function of how the taxes and benefits are distributed across groups, and of course the doling out of benefits is not uniform across income classes.? A new tax that is levied on only the rich to finance transfers to the poor does not change the tax picture for the poor, but it does change the tradeoff between work and leisure.? An unskilled laborer who can find a job in the market for $10 an hour views staying idle more and more attractive if the effective wage for staying idle increases.? To paraphrase Milton Friedman, the surest way to increase the supply of unemployed people is to pay them more money.? In my experience, I think that many liberals simply reject that such incentives really affect the labor decisions of the poor.? In their view, all people are earnestly seeking employment to earn a living and be self-sufficient.? That is, many liberals I know seem to think that such pride among the poor is there, and that the simple economic calculus does not apply to their labor decisions.?
Consider someone in that low-income set, with little education, busting to scratch out a living at a low wage rate, who sees a neighbor living at a similar standard with no hassles.? I think it would take a rather admirable level of pride for someone in that situation to eschew the easy path; we can all understand the frustration someone in that situation would feel in thinking that all of his efforts get him nowhere.? The only break against giving in to the obvious incentive to not work is pride ? the desire to be self-sufficient and not dependent on others.? Rather than celebrating those cases where such pride has kept people off of the dole despite their hard work providing them little or no benefit over the dole ? the federal government actively engages in efforts to argue people out of such pride.? There should be a stigma to being dependent ? and indeed there is a stigma, otherwise the feds wouldn?t have to run around convincing people otherwise.
A too generous safety net, on pure economic grounds, creates a clear incentive to not seek employment ? increasing the benefits derived from not working is equivalent to increasing the effective marginal tax rate for working ? few of us face a situation with as steep a marginal tax rate as those at the lowest rung of the economic ladder.? For these people, there is basically no ?income? effect from the decision not to work, and of course there is a huge substitution effect.? In supply and demand terms in the market for unskilled labor, the supply curve shifts to the left.? If demand is unaffected (a big if, as I will discuss), the wage rate for unskilled labor goes up, but total employment for unskilled labor goes down.? This may not show up as increased unemployment, because to be considered unemployed you have to be seeking a job.? Nonetheless, many people who are capable of learning on the job, becoming more skilled, and growing in income simply step off the ladder.?? When you increase the benefits of the welfare state, you increase the number of people seeking to be beneficiaries via the reduction in labor supply.?
For those who pay ? in this example the rich ? there is nothing coming back to them in the form of a recycled benefit.? For them, both the income and the substitution effect are equally in play, and therefore there is a chance the income effect will dominate so that the rich do not decrease their work input, and tax revenues go up.? This is clearly the hope of the current administration.? I have made the argument that the substitution effect will dominate in these cases ? that the rich will simply work less, and that the increased welfare state will require that the taxes trickle down to the lower income categories.? When I?ve made this argument to liberal friends, they reject that this is a likely response to increased taxation.? In this view, either the rich cannot scale back their labor (i.e. due to employer?s not allowing it), or their sense of vocation in their work makes them unresponsive to such incentives.?
If you consider a high paid employee of a bank, as an example, the increased tax rate may have no effect ? he cannot say to his boss that he would like to cut back from 60 hours to 40 hours a week, otherwise he would simply be let go.? But in many cases that same banker will have a spouse, also well-educated and highly skilled, whose decision to work is much more malleable.? Entering the workforce, that person faces the 15 percent payroll taxes (yes, I know, the employer ?pays? half of this ? but this is the statutory incidence of the tax, not the economic incidence ? it comes out of your pocket) right off the bat, in addition to coming in at the top marginal tax rate for federal (currently 35 percent) and applicable state taxes (let?s say 5 percent for arguments sake).? Prior to any tax increase from the current status quo, this person works half of the year to pay taxes.? But it?s worse than that, because that couple faces costs that it could otherwise avoid if one person stayed out of the labor market: child care or a nanny, increased commuting costs, increased wardrobe costs, increased stress, the likelihood of dining out more often, landscaping and other routine house maintenance costs.?? The marginal tax rate for a well-to-do two income family can easily be over 75 percent ? there is not a huge incentive for the spouse to work under those circumstances. ?As a result, trying to inch up the marginal tax rate on this couple may eek a few more dollars out of the bread winner, while giving up all of the tax revenues it might otherwise receive from the spouse.?
So we have two problems right away ? we?ve caused some people to drop out of the labor market to go on the dole, with the promise of having to increase only the taxes of the rich.? But the rich don?t play ball, and are likely to cut back their own supply of labor, which leaves tax revenues insufficient for the promised benefits.? There seemed to be only one platform objective of the Obama campaign ? increase the taxes on the rich in order to finance the enlargement of the welfare state. ?This is based on fantasy. ?In order to finance the increased benefits, the taxes have to trickle down.? This trickle down can lead to yet more decisions to become a one income family, further reducing the tax base.
The story so far is all about the effects of the change in policy on labor supply for both rich and poor.? But that is not the whole story ? recall the ?non-tax? elements of the marginal decision for the spouse ? all of the added expenses of going to work.? By dropping out of the labor force, the loss of the take home income is partially offset by avoiding exactly those transactions ? the family commutes less, fires the nanny and housecleaning service, cooks at home, cuts the lawn themselves, etc.? All of these decisions reduce the demand for low-skilled workers.?? This reduction in demand leads to yet lower employment numbers for the low-skilled workers, and increases the number of people on the dole.? And, of course, this requires yet more tax revenues.
The demand effects of trying to tax the rich are limited to low-skilled workers.? As a quasi-entrepreneur in a service business, scaling up and hiring employees is a decision that is affected by marginal tax rates.? The hope in any such hiring decision is that I can bill sufficient hours of the employee?s time so that I earn some profit.? The risk is that I cannot; and contrary to the Scrooge like image of businessmen firing employees as soon as things look grim, in my experience quite the opposite is true ? the entrepreneur will hold on in the hopes that things will improve and delay the firing decision - especially for a well-liked employee.? That means that every employer understands there is a significant risk of loss in hiring an employee; you increase the taxes on the employer in cases where he makes a successful hire, and you?ve reduced the potential payoff to taking such risks.? Ergo, you take fewer risks.? This scenario is worse yet outside of service businesses, where significant capital investments are required as a precursor to hiring more people, and the risks of expanding employment increase significantly.? With less demand among business owners for laborers at all levels of skill, everyone is impacted negatively.
Rich people are like the rich kid whose parents get him the brand new leather basketball. You play by that kid's rules, or the kid takes his ball and goes home, and you don't play at all. If you tell him that half of his points won't count, or will count for the other team, he will surely pick up his ball and go home. You may not like that rich kid, but the game depends on him. If rich people don't invest, because they are rightfully afraid that any gains from the risks they take will be taxed away, we not only are deprived of the ball, we don't even have a court to play on.
There is a point where you can kill the golden goose.? Every communist country killed it long ago; the socialist welfare states of Europe haven?t entirely killed it, but they have it by the neck held under very cold water.? And yet such policies have an unbelievable degree of persistence, attributable to the simplistic Marxist view that the rich are in opposition to the poor.? As the simple logic of what I just conveyed plays itself out, people will double down on their strange belief that the rich are ripping them off.? It is the persistence of crappy economic policies that we need to fear.? Site Meter

Source: http://ideashatched.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-dole-and-how-to-swing-it.html

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Vornado Realty Cashes Out On Commercial Mortgage-Backed ...

Vornado Realty Trust (VNO), one of New York?s largest owners of retail and office space, has completed a refinancing of one of its boom-era Manhattan acquisitions, converting nearly $500 million in equity into cash in the process.

Vornado refinanced the 43-story midtown building at 1290 Ave. of the Americas, which was appraised this month at $2 billion, some 28% above the 2007 purchase price of $1.55 billion, according to the term sheet for the commercial mortgage-backed securities financing the new loan.

The $950 million, 10-year interest-only loan from Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., UBS Securities and the Bank of China paid off $412 million in existing debt, and after reserves and closing costs provides $479 million in excess cash. Vornado owns 70% of the building and billionaire Donald Trump owns a noncontrolling 30% stake, according to the term sheet.

Vornado declined to provide immediate comment, though it confirmed the refinancing in a statement earlier Tuesday.

The deal comes as Manhattan prices have soared by 16.3% over the past 12 months, according to the Moody?s RCA Commercial Property Price Indices. Since the trough in October 2009, Manhattan prices have gained more than 52% though they remain 13.7% below their December 2007 peak.

Nationally, prices have climbed 28% since the January 2010 trough but remain 21.8% below their December 2007 peak, the indices said.

The CMBS?which will finance the full $950 million?are part of an expected surge in issuance to meet demand for the securities prized for their higher yields relative to other investment-grade debt. Investors expecting low interest rates to add fuel to the U.S. real-estate recovery have added to the demand, which has reduced yield premiums to levels that are attracting more borrowers.

The ?substantial return of equity? to the sponsor, the interest-only loan and the 2014 exit of one of the major tenants, law firm Morrison & Foerster, are among the ?bear? observations by Morningstar, which rated the CMBS.

But the concerns are offset by strong cash flow, proximity near Rockefeller Center and strong market fundamentals, the rating firm said in its presale note.

CMBS volume may reach $46 billion this year, up from $33 billion in 2011, according to Commercial Mortgage Alert. Some lenders and issuers expect the volume could rise to $65 billion next year, though that still would be far short of the $230 billion sold in 2007.

Write to Al Yoon at albert.yoon@dowjones.com

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Copyright ? 2012 Dow Jones Newswires

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Vornado Realty Cashes Out On Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities Loan Refinancing

Source: http://cashwoe.com/?p=9311

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The Ugly Duckling House | DIY Home Improvement Blog: Re ...

There's really very little reason to make this a two-parter, but given how slow progress can be here at the Ugg-Duck with finals approaching, I wanted to give you an update on what's going on lately in the guest bath, and I hadn't yet fixed a glaring problem with the shower tile.

I knew my bathtub was white, so when I bought a tube of caulk from the store, I went with white. ?Word to the wise: just plunk down the extra few bucks to buy a full, regular tube of caulk. ?I went cheap and bought only what I thought would be enough for the shower, which was true, but I spend time on the computer all day at work and my hands are simply not very happy with me for having to manually squeeze out the bead of caulk around the entire tub (the tube makes it look as easy as squeezing toothpaste, but my hands disagreed). ?I felt old and silly. ?So next time, I'll be buying a full tube and using my caulk gun.


I ran into a snag when I realized that white was fine for the tub, but too white for the corners of the tile shower where an off-white grout was used. ?Here is where I'll give you a few more tips in case you're wondering:
  • You'll want to use silicone caulk for maximum moisture/mildew/mold protection in your shower.
  • As I mentioned in part one, you'll also want to remove any and all old caulk to make sure there are no potential gaps or weak spots when filling the area in with new caulk
  • Whether you choose to use tape or not, you want a protective line (but not too much that you have to clean up) to prevent any moisture from seeping under the tile. ?The tub and corners of the shower are weak spots, so this is why (this is why, this is why, this is why) we caulk. ?I choose to tape since I get a nice, straight line without going back over and fixing mistakes when it's dry.
  • While most acrylic caulk comes in a variety of colors readily available at the hardware store, silicone caulk can be a little more difficult. ?My choices at the store when I bought my tube were white and clear (though I later learned that Home Depot carries a greater color variety and went back to match it to my grout). ?And unlike acrylic, silicone caulk isn't paintable. ?It also doesn't like to stick to acrylic caulk (just in case you're wondering, I have tried this and the caulk immediately turned from white to yellow and peeled right back off when dry).
  • Don't forget that silicone caulk is the same whether the tube is labeled for kitchens or bathrooms. ?You want a permanent, waterproof seal - not the label. ?So don't be afraid to look in the next section over if you're not finding what you're looking for.
Silicone caulk can also be used to patch ?up small patches of missing grout between your tiles. ?If you have an old shower like mine, sometimes you can get away with patching areas where the grout went missing over time. ?This is difficult to do if you do not have the exact color of the grout used (it will look splotchy). ?I originally thought I would use pre-mixed grout to fill in the areas where I found weak spots in the grout, but the caulk matched so well that I just took care of things ahead of schedule (gasp!). ?The process is pretty simple: ?just make sure you've thoroughly rid the area of any loose?grout (which typically means making the hole a little bigger) with a blade. ?And be careful not to crack the tile. ?After that, it's a simple swipe of silicone caulk (again, waterproofy-ness is key) will fix up a small spot. ?For larger problems, you'll want to instead scrape the grout out with an oscillating tool (that has a tile blade) and re-grout.

The reason I tell you this is simply because I'm a homeowner; not an expert. ?I make mistakes with this house all the time - even when I try my best. ?It's totally normal and something I think we all deserve to see every once in a while so we don't feel like we're the?only?ones caulking things up (pun, hehe). ?Oh, and ignore the nasty tiles in these photos - I have one final cleanup job before the shower is ready to use.
When I saw the white was too glaring for the tile corners of the shower, I went back to the store to grab an off-white color, came back home, removed the brand new caulk I just applied (it had dried enough to cleanly remove), and re-applied the caulk. ?So essentially I re-caulked my re-caulked shower. ?But lesson learned. ?The area around the tub I was able to leave alone because it matched the white caulk perfectly fine.

After applying the caulk, it's time to let the bathroom rest for 24 hours. ?Now I know you're looking at tubes of caulk that have "1-hour shower ready" or "30-minute shower ready" labels, and while that sounds great, every single one of them still says that you really need to let things dry for?a full 24 hours before use. ?Sure, I suppose if you're in a shower emergency you can get the area slightly wet after that 30 minutes (or using the caulk to plug a leak in your sliding door), but in reality, every tube will tell you to wait an entire day.


But, bonus? ?I also took the dry time to install a fancy new shower head for the bathroom. ?The old one was just gross, and this one will allow me to also use a spray handle to give Charlie a bath (picture will be in the final reveal this week). ?Of course, I fully intend to clean the tub between dog washings in case a guest comes over. ?Which will be virtually never, but hey, Charlie will be a clean pup!

Can't ya feel it? ?Just a little cleaning, and my bathroom will be ready to go. ?Wahoo!

Sarah

Source: http://www.uglyducklinghouse.com/2012/11/re-caulking-your-shower-part-ii.html

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Observations on film art : Return to Paranormalcy

Paranormal Activity (2007).

DB here:

What is there for me to do? Art historian Ernst Gombrich suggested that this is a problem that confronts every creative artist. If you want to make paintings or compose music or direct movies, you confront an existing community of artists and long-established traditions of art-making. You work with what you?re given. You inherit technology and materials, but you also inherit ideas and familiar conventions and well-worn work habits. You want to find a niche, but you?re also in competition with others for it.

You confront, in other words, a kind of ecosystem with its own history and a current state of play. How can you fit your talents and temperament into that ecosystem? How, more specifically, can you create something different?

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Variorum moviemaking

Paranormal Activity (2007).

It can be useful to think of commercial filmmaking as this sort of system, a cooperative/ competitive arena challenging directors, writers, cinematographers, and other film artists to innovate. Innovation isn?t the only aim of moviemaking, of course, and just because something is innovative doesn?t mean it?s good. And not all innovations announce the fact; Jean Renoir?s deft uses of space in his 1930s films didn?t trumpet their originality. Innovation can be quiet and subtle.

Still, as students of the art of film, we?re naturally attuned to novelty?a fresh treatment of an established genre, an unusual approach to characterization, a new application of existing technology. If we?re interested in mainstream film, particularly Hollywood?s, we learn things from the way that filmmakers swarm over something new and try to mimic it or tweak it or turn it around. Make a movie about a possessed pre-adolescent girl who needs an exorcism, and soon we?ll have movies about possessed high-school girls, possessed dogs, possessed cars, and so on.

Call it the variorum quality of popular culture?the tendency to explore, sometimes exhaustively, all the possibilities of a single premise. Filmmakers seize an idea and run with it, in different directions. Of course they may be asking, ?How can we cash in on this trend?? but in order to answer that they have to ask another question: ?What if we did such-and-such differently?? Even if you start by trying to make money, you still have to make a movie. And that movie will need to be minimally distinctive. The question for the filmmaker remains: What is there for me to do?

Something like this process is going on under our noses. Paranormal Activity (2007), Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), and Paranormal Activity 4 (2012, released in October) have become a cheaply made but very successful franchise. Taken together, the four films have won estimated worldwide box-office revenues of ?$700 million and counting.

Their popularity offers one reason to examine them, but a better reason is that they make the variorum dynamic unusually clear. The originator and director of the first installment, Oren Peli, and the directors who followed (Tod Williams for the second entry, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman for the last two, along with continuing writer Christopher Landon) were obliged to innovate within very tight limits. From movie to movie, they came up with fresh and unexpected solutions.

This isn?t about proving these movies to be masterpieces or stinkers. Whatever you think about the quality of the innovations I?ll be looking at, they offer us some leads about how filmic storytelling can change under the ?selection pressures? of American commercial cinema.

More strikingly, the Paranormal Activity franchise is that rare thing: a popular series that stands out by very specific and noticeable uses of film technique. Audiences eat it up. The suspense and surprises are part of the appeal, certainly, but there?s reason to think that at least some viewers look forward to following each entry?s formal dynamic of familiarity and variation. Filmmaking becomes a kind of gamelike performance that coaxes us to ask: How will they deal the cards this time?

Of course there are spoilers from here on. Even the pictures contain spoilers.

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The same, please, only different

The Blair Witch Project (1999).

The broad task that Peli faced when he began work on Paranormal Activity was clear: How to make a diabolic-possession film different from the others? By then, and still, that variant of horror was pretty well-defined. And indeed the film Peli came up with wasn?t that original in outline. A couple is disturbed by mysterious noises and actions in their house. They call in experts and try to find the source of the disturbance. Eventually the woman becomes possessed and kills her lover.

Throughout, the conventions of the supernatural film rule: sudden blackouts, bone-shaking noises emitted by offscreen fiends, and characters exploring basements, closets, moonlit yards, and other scary spaces. Special effects are invoked to levitate victims or drag them by unseen hands. Occasionally we?re faked out by scares launched as pranks that some characters pull on others. As usual, normal, i.e. bourgeois American life, is devastated by supernatural forces. Cozy domestic surroundings, including an array of consumer goods, become menacing.?Much of all this was pioneered by The Exorcist (1973), so the tradition has plenty of cobwebs on it.

Shooting in seven days on a small budget, Peli settled on a formal framework that borrowed from another tradition, that of the pseudo-documentary fiction film. This too goes far back, to This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and Bob Roberts (1992), and before to Stanton Kaye?s Georg (1964), Jim McBride?s David Holzman?s Diary (1967),?and?Mitchell Block?s No Lies (1972) , and Peter Watkins? Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965). More distant predecessors might be Welles? 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, or even the fake memoirs we find in the early years of the novel. Today the pseudo-documentary mode, used for comic or dramatic purposes, is familiar to us from television shows like The Office. This mode has its own conventions, such as to-camera interviews and the occasionally awkward framing, most noticeable in the recurring image of a fallen camera.

The pseudo-documentary approach had been tried in the horror film in the 1980s, but it gained attention at the end of the 1990s with?The Last Broadcast (1998) and ?The Blair Witch Project (1999). No surprise: Horror films tend to be low-budget items, and shooting in a run-and-gun manner, with handheld shots and awkward sound, was both cheap and realistic-looking. A cycle emerged, exemplified most notably in the bigger-budget Cloverfield (2008).

The problem of the pseudo-documentary is to motivate the fact that someone is filming these dramas. Various solutions have been worked out. You might make the protagonist a filmmaker exploring a subject or creating a diary. Or you can pretend that the people being filmed are celebrities (as in Spinal Tap). Or make the act of filming an effort to document dramatic occurrences. Filmmakers face a second problem as well: motivating how the film has been made public. You can, for instance, present it as a TV or theatrical documentary, as Spinal Tap purports to be. More recently another solution has been found. You can suggest that this film has been discovered after the events were over.

Because of this rationale, the approach is sometimes called the ?found-footage? treatment, or in Varietyese the ?faux found-footage film.? I?m not delighted by this term because for a long time ?found-footage? has referred to films like Bruce Conner?s A Movie or Christian Marclay?s The Clock, assembled out of existing footage scavenged from different sources. So I?ll call fictional movies like Blair Witch and Cloverfield ?discovered footage? films.

One reason for this name is that these films hark back to an early tradition of literary fiction, that of the ?topos of the discovered manuscript? or ?the old oak chest.? Here a tale is presented as a manuscript found and prepared for publication by other hands. The purpose, at first blush, is to give the story an air of authenticity. The same urge prevails in the discovered-footage horror movies, which use this blatant artifice to play with the possibility that these weird happenings really took place. As the image surmounting this blog entry suggests, Peli linked his film to this tradition, even letting the all-too-real company Paramount Pictures attest to the veracity of what we?re going to see.

The development of the Paranormal series took place under the sign of rivalry. A great many horror films of the late 2000s and early 2010s used the pseudo-documentary approach, sometimes marking the footage as recovered. After the success of Peli?s original film, intense competition emerged. There was a blatant ripoff (Paranormal Entity, 2009), followed by many others, including the subtler pseudo-doc The Last Exorcism (2010), which seems to presume that we?ll take it as a found-footage item too.

Just as important, in making successors to the original film, Peli and his colleagues had to compete with themselves. So they freshened up their plots.?Paranormal 2 features not a live-in couple but a family; Paranormal 3 centers on an unmarried mother, her live-in boyfriend, and her two daughters. Paranormal 4?features a family whose neighbors are a possessed mother and son.

Interestingly, the subsequent films supply relatively little mythical or doctrinal backstory. Although there are always one or two scenes in which the characters launch on some research, the plots mostly?minimize exposition about the hows and whys of possession. (Contrast The Exorcist.) We get just enough hints to assume that there?s a demon who offers women worldly goods in exchange for innocent boys? souls. Mostly the films concentrate on the characters? responses, chiefly their quarrels about whether the weird happenings are supernaturally caused. Each film needs at least one blocking character, somebody whose skepticism, obstinacy, or cluelessness keeps the plot going and prevents the characters from simply getting the hell out.

The films also vary protagonists and the characters we?re attached to. Micah moves the plot forward in the first entry with his urge to document the weird happenings, while in the second, the father Daniel and his daughter Ali take turns probing what?s going on. In the third film, again it?s mostly a male filmmaker, Dennis, who propels the inquiry, while in the latest iteration, the narrative momentum is passed to the inquisitive teenage girl Alex.

Perhaps the most up- to-date way the filmmakers refresh the franchise is by making the various films interlock. The films set up a chronology that positions the original release as the third phase of a larger action. Paranormal 2 occurs just before the events of the first one, and Paranormal 3 flashes back eighteen years to supply some preconditions for the previous entries. Moreover, some portions of the plots overlap, so that scenes from one installment are replayed in another, explaining how the time frames mesh. This sort of shuffling with time and perspective is nowadays common both within films and across them; the second and third Bourne films offer good examples.

Above all, the filmmakers have created a new ecological niche by virtue of some initial stylistic choices Peli?s first film made. They were striking but exceptionally constraining. To produce more Paranormal films created a very specific set of problems: How to respect those initial constraints and yet rework them in unpredictable ways?

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Hand-eye coordination

Paranormal Activity 3 (2011).

Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project use the discovered-footage format to justify their amateurish look. These are on-the-fly records of some pretty strange phenomena. By contrast, the Paranormal Activity series doesn?t limit itself to handheld footage. It sets up a dynamic between that and something quite different: the fixed, distant shot reminiscent of surveillance footage.

The alternatives are laid out in the first film, when Micah, perplexed by the ghostly goings-on, buys a fancy video camera and sets it up in the bedroom he shares with Katie. That way he can capture what?s happening while they are sleeping. At other times he takes the camera off its tripod and shoots the house in the usual handheld, eyewitness way.

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The result is a movie, and a series, with two markedly different visual treatments. The handheld footage is pure subjectivity, showing exactly what the camera operator sees. It responds immediately to what?s out there, panning or moving toward things of interest. It also permits fairly close shots of the other characters. By contrast, the locked-down shots are completely objective, recording in the manner of surveillance video. Indifferent to human intentions, the camera may be poorly placed to capture what?s happening. And it?s by and large committed to very wide and distant views, compared to the closer views yielded by the probing handheld lens.

Take the handheld technique first. This yields a severely restricted range of knowledge, as I?ve already discussed in relation to Cloverfield. This narrow range is suited for a film playing up mystery and suspense. In any given scene, we don?t know any more than the camera operator does. But of course this feature is also a drawback, because the filmmaker can?t build suspense through crosscutting?showing, say, a door creaking or a shadow moving somewhere else in the house.

The default for most fiction films is camera ubiquity. That is, in principle the camera can be anywhere and show us anything. If the camera doesn?t do that, you need special justification. So for thrillers or horror films, you can show just advancing feet or clutching hands or scary shadows, because we know that these genres promote gaps in our knowledge. We accept the obvious suppression of information.

Another way to justify not showing everything is attachment to one character?s range of knowledge. This is another common strategy of suspense and horror. Even more restrictive is an optical point-of-view treatment, which might be the polar opposite of camera ubiquity. Hitchcock was particularly keen to find ways he could drill into optical point-of-view as a narrative device.

Treating the camera as a vehicle for subjective POV can yield some sudden shocks. One of the most provocative ones in the Paranormal franchise occurs in the third installment, when Dennis approaches Julia at the top of the stairs. His camera-eye viewpoint makes her seem to be standing there, but as he approaches the perspective changes and we see that she?s actually floating.

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In the same installment, the ?Bloody Mary? encounter in the bathroom gains force not only through the camera?s limitation to Randy?s optical pov, but through the mirror that in the darkness reflects only the red dot of the camera?s ?on? signal. It?s all we have to look at in a scene in which the sounds of thrashing and smashing overwhelm the image.

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So the handheld subjective camera of Paranormal Activity and other films in the trend avoids camera ubiquity. This creates familiar problems, but filmmakers in this stylistic cycle have come up with solutions.

*How do you explain why the camera is recording this drama? The standard justification is that a crew has decided for some reason to make a movie about something, as in Spinal Tap and The Last Exorcism. Paranormal Activity finds two more pretexts. The video camera can record home movies in Daddy-cam fashion; this motivation is especially important in Paranormal Activity 2. Or the camera can serve to document the weird goings-on in the demon-haunted homes. This motivation is especially strong for the locked-down surveillance recordings.

The camera operator may be the protagonist or at least a major character. How do you show the character to the audience??Options: Have him or her shoot the act of filming in a mirror (very popular). Have him or her address the camera when it?s resting. Let other characters wield the camera and show the cameraperson. Or set the camera down and let it keep filming, often risking decentered compositions but still indicating things clearly enough.

Sometimes you want camera ubiquity. Shot/ reverse-shot cutting is especially valuable because it can emphasize major lines of dialogue and reactions. How can you achieve this in the subjective-camera style??By cheating a little. For example, a single-camera record can capture the give-and-take of a conversation only by either framing both people in a single shot or by panning between them. If you want proper shot/ reverse-shot cuts you have to use overlapping sound during editing to cover the moments when you stopped the shot or panned to reframe the other character.?Even when you establish that two cameras are filming the action, you may have to cheat on position quite a bit. (See this discussion of a scene in?The Office.)

The Last Exorcism mimics this documentary shortcut in its shot/ reverse shot exchanges, using sound bridges to present the illusion of continuous time. Paranormal Activity?tries this tactic only in the first installment, and then rarely.

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Chronicle offers an intriguing example of how these problems can be solved. At the beginning Andrew, shooting into a mirror, explains that he has decided to film everything.

Throughout the early portions of the movie we get only what his camera sees, usually with him behind the viewfinder. But eventually we meet Casey, a young woman who has a camera too. The result is shot/ reverse-shot cutting justified as each camera?s viewpoint.

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At the climax, when the boy superheroes fight it out above the city, so many people are filming the scene with cellphones, TV news cameras, and government surveillance, that the action is covered fully from many angles. The visual storytelling achieves camera ubiquity.

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The impersonal view

Paranormal Activity 2?(2010).

Many horror films have used the handheld approach, but the strongest innovation of the Paranormal series, I think, is the idea of counterweighting the free-camera shots with fixed-camera footage. Like the moving handheld shot, the locked-down surveillance shots avoid camera ubiquity and restrict us severely. But they have other advantages.

As we?ve seen, the fixed setup complements the human-centered handheld camera. It shows everything in front of it indiscriminately. By prying itself loose from the characters, and filming them while they?re not aware of it?especially when they?re sleeping?it allows us a more neutral sense of the film?s space and the things that happen in it. Just as important, it fits smoothly with some standard horror conventions.

For example, offscreen threats are central to the horror film, and the fixed camera can maintain their effects. As (bad) luck would have it, the cameras set up in Paranormal Activity?aren?t always ideally framed for showing everything. Very often they merely suggest the demon?s pursuit of the characters. The demon Toby is just off left of frame in the third installment (he blasts some air at the babysitter Lisa) and some entity like Toby seems to be at work offscreen right in the second one, attracting Hunter?s attention.

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Likewise, offscreen sound is crucial to the horror film, as Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur showed long ago with the sudden intrusion of bus brakes into a suspenseful pursuit in?The Cat People. The fixed camera can capture those sounds but because no human agent is behind it, there?s no way it can move forward to explore their sources, as a camera operated by a human might.

The surveillance shots, while limited visually, provide information that the subjective shots don?t. In the first film, while Micah sleeps, the bedroom-cam shows some weird goings-ons that he isn?t aware of?notably, Katie getting up and standing unmoving by the bed for several hours. In later installments, the presence of more than one surveillance camera can provide story information via crosscutting. As with Chronicle, multiplying surveillance views pushes the visual narration toward a more complete (and conventional) coverage of the action.

Crucial to the films? innovation is the fact that the locked-down shots are distant views. The films have extraordinarily few shots for contemporary productions: about 230 in the first part, about 500 in the second (because of the multiple cameras), about 230 again in part three, and about 320 in the last. The number of setups is greater than these figures would suggest because some cuts are jump cuts or drop-frames within extended camera takes.

Long-take, locked-down shots are common in ?festival cinema? but virtually unheard of in mainstream Hollywood film. Remarkably, we have box-office hits consisting of long, static takes that hold multiplex audiences in thrall.?Of course the long ?empty? takes are recruited to the conventional cause of sustained silence and sudden, startling outbursts. The genre, we might say, motivates the style. The same audience wouldn?t be so tolerant of a protracted shot in Tarkovsky or Hou.

Yet we shouldn?t dismiss these shots as mere gimmicks. Their stillness encourages us to scan these spacious frames for hints about what will happen next. The impersonal lens often lingers on bare spaces, and when something of interest happens we won?t be given a cut in. Sometimes the crucial action is barely there, as when Ali and Brad are hidden in shadow, behind the digital read-out, in the lower right of this shot.

To some extent, the distant framing of the surveillance shots revives classic staging techniques in a cinema that seems largely to have forgotten them. Instead of the barrage of close-ups and rapid shot changes we get with today?s intensified continuity style, we get lengthy, static, often indiscernible images we have to scour for clues.

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Granted, often those clues are signaled through slight movements, as in the eerie twirling of the toy spider suspended over Hunter?s crib (top of this section). Centering is also important, as when the Ouija board?s planchette scuttles around and then bursts into flames. Sometimes a character can point to what?s important in the visual field.

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For the most part, the static framings yield deep, dense compositions reminiscent of 1910s tableau cinema. In the second installment particularly, key bits of action are pushed very far from us or isolated in apertures. The kitchen camera setup lets Ali?s distant face poke up from the sofa into bare visibility (immediately below), or be framed in the window when she tries to get back in as Abby the dog approaches the locked door. (See bottom of this entry.) Unlike most modern films, these lose a great deal of information on small screens.

Overall, the handheld POV shot and the detached and distant long shot complement each other. Both are well fitted to the demands of the horror film, which requires secrets to be concealed from the characters while throwing out hints to us. Beyond genre conventions, though, these films might train the young audience to be patient and learn to settle into images that ripen slowly and don?t yield their meanings up immediately. Well, I can dream, can?t I?

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Stretching the rules

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010).

I?ve spoken of these films in general terms, but what makes the series particularly intriguing to me is the development from one installment to the next. The makers aren?t only competing with other filmmakers; they?re competing with themselves. Each new episode has to innovate within the framework they?ve set up?not only by expanding the story action, as we?ve seen, but also by varying the stylistic parameters. That generates new problems, self-imposed ones, and the search for new solutions.

The original Paranormal Activity sets up many of the stylistic premises of the series: the use of mirrors to introduce the camera and its operator, the idea that the investigator will replay the locked-down footage (and then film that with the handheld camera), and the need for at least one skeptical character who will resist the investigation. Here Micah has one camera, which he carries with him by day and installs on its tripod at night. And the resolution of the film is played directly to the camera, as Micah slips out at night to follow Katie and after a long pause is hurled back into the camera, smashing it to the floor. The tipped-over framing records Katie creeping forward, smiling, and roaring into the lens?her revenge on the filming she hated from the start.

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Paranormal Activity 2 is largely a prequel, taking place about a year before the first one. Now the single camera is a daddy-cam, recording the arrival of Hunter, the baby born to Daniel and Katie?s sister Kristi. This camera is really a daughter-cam, because it?s mostly wielded by Ali, Daniel?s daughter by a previous marriage. She drives the investigation, but she?s initially more thrilled than afraid. (She also wonders if the ghost is her mother.) The situation shifts from a live-in couple (Paranormal 1) to a happy nuclear family (Paranormal 2) and from a midrange income level to a very prosperous one.

After the house is mysteriously ransacked, Daniel installs a home surveillance system. Six high-angle cameras cover the house. They?re trained on the front door, the back pool, the kitchen, the living room, Hunter?s room, and the master bedroom. In addition, we have Daniel?s Daddy-cam, now outfitted with night vision. This will become important in the climax, allowing us to glimpse, spasmodically, the demon?s response to the attempted exorcism of Kristi.

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Naturally all these cameras yield a much-expanded range of knowledge. Now we can see at least part of what?s going on in various parts of the house, and the narration cuts freely from one room to another. Because of the shot scale, though, quicker cutting means that we have to run fast checks in each shot on whether anything seems dangerous.

Important shifts toward camera ubiquity, these new setups also can play a game with our expectations. For example, the eerie shots of the swimming pool at night show the bobbing pool cleaner sidling through the water. Yet Kristi points out that every morning the cleaner has been removed from the pool. The surveillance shots we see never show this, and not until late in the film, when other stretches of the surveillance footage are played, do we see it leave the water. Even sneakier is the tendency of the night footage to mislead us about what?s important. Nearly every night sequence begins with a shot showing the front stoop of the house, but nothing (so far as I can tell) is ever revealed by these images in Paranormal 2, though at the start of Paranormal 4?they pay off by showing Katie leaving with Hunter in her arms.

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In context, Paranormal 2?s recurring shot serves to announce a new sequence of hauntings, but it?s also a little amusing. The standard shot showing a safe household, with no one approaching, serves simply to remind us that the demon is already comfortably inside.

Paranormal Activity 3 is a more distant prequel, setting up the childhood of sisters Kristi and Katie. Here the novelty is the use of VHS tape to record the action. Again, the footage begins as Daddy-cam shooting, as Dennis films Katie?s eighth birthday party and then starts to make a sex tape with Julie. But when the spooky hijinks start, the man of the household decides to investigate. Unlike Micah, though, Dennis is a videographer by trade and so has three cameras at his disposal. He uses one as a handheld device, occasionally set up in his and Julie?s bedroom. He installs another camera in the girls? bedroom and puts the third one downstairs.

Reducing the ?panopticon? of the previous installment from seven to three might be seen as a step backward, but the filmmakers have a clever innovation up their sleeve.?Dennis can?t cover the downstairs adequately with his remaining camera.?Out of a table fan he constructs a swiveling base to which he can attach a camera. This yields a panning back-and-forth framing.

Of course this mechanical panning is just as little concerned with items of human interest as the static shots of the earlier installments. Indeed, it maintains the horror-film convention of ominous offscreen action, but motivates it as impersonal scanning. The camera slowly reveals pieces of space, but if something exciting starts to happen onscreen, the camera relentlessly turns away.

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Set in 2011, Paranormal Activity 4 is the first chronological sequel to the first entry, with a new cast of characters involved in action long after the initial demon outbreak. In some ways, making a teenage girl the protagonist is more conventional than the early films? focus on couples. Still competing with themselves, the filmmakers needed to recast the series? stylistic premises. They seem to have asked: Well, who uses dedicated video cameras today?especially if our characters are mostly teenagers? Accordingly, the franchise?s signature seesawing between handheld imagery and locked-down recording is now provided by cellphones and computers.

Although some footage purports to come from a video camera, most of it doesn?t. Alex and her boyfriend Ben set up four laptops around the house, all constantly recording what transpires in the rooms. This tactic allows some changes in the surveillance footage. The camera angle is typically lower than in Paranormal 2, since the laptops are sitting on tables or counters. Moreover, their framings can shift. In the boy Wyatt?s room, his laptop is sometimes closer or farther away, and is sometimes blocked by masses of blankets. The kitchen laptop is shifted around when Alex?s mother moves it closer to her work area.

In addition to recording the household?s supernatural doings, the laptop device lets the teenage heroine Alex have video chats with her boyfriend Ben. In the earlier films we get occasional to-camera monologues, but here we watch Alex talk close to the lens, directly to us, and ?at length; we see what Ben sees, and sometimes we see him from her screen?s vantage?a sort of virtual shot/ reverse-shot.

At crucial moments Alex picks up the laptop and carries it around with her. As a result, we get?more conventional horror-film images of the protagonist?ideally an easily startled young woman?moving through space. In the earlier films, the camera operator?s reactions were given through the subjective framing and offscreen comments, curses, and yelps. Now when Alex hurries across the street to Robbie?s mystery house, we see principally her face.

Ariel Schulman acknowledged that the laptop device adheres to the ?rules? of the franchise and the genre while producing, for the first time, conventional close shots of the camera operator. ?We were really psyched just to do a shot where the girl?s carrying a laptop, and it?s just filming her. . .? It just seemed like a really fun way to carry a camera and film ourself because otherwise there?s no other way to shoot close-ups in a ?Paranormal? movie.? Henry Joost adds: ?The close-up on a teenaged girl?s face being scared is a horror movie icon. . . . If it?s dark, the only light is from the laptop screen, which is scary. It has all the right ingredients to be in a horror movie.?

Finally, in an innovation parallel to the night-vision footage of part two and the swiveling camera of part three, Paranormal Activity 4 incorporates Xbox Kinect technology. The gadget projects a blast of green dots into the living room, and these can be picked up by night-vision video. One effect is to make Robbie even more ghoulish.

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Consistent with the perceptual teasing in earlier films? extreme long-shots, the Kinect grid also signals the demon?s presence by slight contours, most jolting when the dots shift a little to betray phantom movement. As the earlier entries used powder or dust to track the invisible demon, Paranormal 4 enlists a higher-tech sort of particle. Like the other innovations, it shows?that the creators needed not only new situations and plot twists but new variants on their stylistic premises.

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Who?s there?

I haven?t yet mentioned one creative problem discovered-footage filmmakers need to confront. Who?s responsible for what we see?

The Paranormal films are obviously assembled. They often have superimposed titles, as above and at the start of the night hauntings. The very first one, at the top of this entry, suggests that something dire will happen to our protagonists; otherwise why ask the families for permission to show the footage?

Editing and camera tricks show the hand of some coordinating intelligence. Some scenes fade out and the night scenes typically start with a fade-in. Locked-down scenes consuming hours are sometimes run fast-forward. We even get dialogue hooks. Randy says, ?Just watch the fuckin? tape, Dennis.? Cut to Dennis watching the tape. In the multiple-camera entries like 2 and 3, there?s cutting from room to room, sometimes following characters through the house. There?s also crosscutting for traditional suspense effects, as when Julie and Dennis are quarrelling while Katie is terrorized by Toby upstairs.

? ? ?

The multiple-camera films betray some perverse humor. We cut from the babysitter Lisa?s terrified retreat from the girls? room to a shot, about an hour later, of her waiting anxiously by the door for the parents? return so she can get out as fast as possible.

? ? ?

And sometimes the series of shots is deliberately misleading, dwelling on vacant spaces and failing us to show the characters doing crucial things. Some agent who wanted to convey basic information would provide a more concise set of extracts. This assembler wants to build suspense.

Cloverfield presents itself as a government file, presumably collected and joined by analysts. But Chronicle and The Last Exorcism don?t bother to explain how the recovered footage was discovered, let alone assembled. It?s as if, by this point in the development of the cycle, these marks of authenticity can be omitted.

As usual, the Paranormal series is a bit cagier. With opening titles indicating that the footage is in official hands, the films suggest that these too are from an ongoing investigation of Katie and her family. But I wouldn?t put it past some future installment to center on the unseen collators and editors who have provided us with these shocks and thrills.

In any case, problem-setting and problem-solving remain. The filmmakers have pursued the implications of a narrow set of stylistic choices, and that pursuit comes with both rewards and risks. Meanwhile, other filmmakers may take up the challenge and try to surpass what this series has achieved: limited but genuine experimentation within mainstream conventions. Competing with each other and with their own achievements, filmmakers are pressed to discover new, if narrow, niches in Hollywood?s ecosystem.


E. H. Gombrich?s comment about artists? tasks comes from his interview with Didier Eribon, Looking for Answers, p. 168. George Watson has some brief but helpful comments on fake memoirs and the discovered-manuscript convention in The Story of the Novel, pp. 15-22. Wikipedia includes a useful list of pseudo-documentaries and discovered-footage?here, but calls them ?found-footage films,? as most horror aficionados seem to do. As I indicate in the entry, that term confuses these fiction films with what has for a long time been a genre of experimental filmmaking. See for an overview William Wees? 1993 book Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films.

On Paranormal Activity, a helpful chronology is available at Dread Central. The chronological collection of the first three films available as a download includes a few extra scenes but omits some things as well, including some of the ?official? titles marking the material as recovered footage. In an incisive analysis, Nicholas Rombes praises Paranormal Activity 2 as verging on avant-garde cinema.

Series creator Oren Peli has also directed?The Chernobyl Diaries (2012), which has a pseudo-documentary quality at times. More peculiar and puzzling is the film Catfish (2010) by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Many viewers and critics were unsure whether?Catfish?was a straight documentary of a reenacted one, perhaps with fictional elements added. Whatever the case, it made Joost and Schulman likely candidates for directing the last two installments of the Paranormal franchise. Schulman discusses the transition to studio filmmaking?here, while also filling in?some background on the Paranormal?team?s working methods.

I regret that some of these illustrations are tiny, but I would have had to make them very large for full visibility, and then their quality would have suffered (and the entry would have been even longer). As should be evident, these films need to be seen on a big screen for all their details to be clear.

For a more disconcerting experiment in mechanized camera pickup in a fiction film, see Lars von Trier?s The Boss of It All (2006), discussed here.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010): On the right, Ali peers in the window as Abby approaches, sniffing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday | November 13, 2012 at 10:51 am and is filed under Film genres, Film technique: Cinematography, Film technique: Staging, Poetics of cinema. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Source: http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/11/13/return-to-paranormalcy/

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NASA probes exploring radiation belts get new name

Twin NASA probes exploring the harsh radiation belts around Earth have a new name honoring the late James Van Allen ? the pioneering scientist who first discovered the radiation zones, the space agency announced Friday.

The heavily armored spacecraft were initially called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes when they launched in late August. They will now be known as the Van Allen Probes for the remainder of their two-year mission, NASA officials said.

"James Van Allen was a true pioneer in astrophysics," former astronaut John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA?s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "His groundbreaking research paved the way for current and future space exploration. These spacecraft now not only honor his iconic name but his mark on science."

Honoring a Space Age pioneer
The Van Allen radiation belts consist of two regions around Earth where our planet's magnetic field has trapped trillions of high-energy solar particles. James Van Allen discovered the belts in 1958, just one year after the Soviet Union blasted humanity's first-ever satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. [ Video: Probes to Investigate Radiation Belt ]

"The Van Allen belts were the first discovery of the Space Age," Rick Fitzgerald, Space Department program area manager at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, said during the renaming ceremony today. APL manages the Van Allen Probes mission for NASA.

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James Van Allen was principal investigator for studies on 24 Earth satellites and planetary missions during his long career, NASA officials said.

The physicist worked on the first successful American satellite, Explorer 1, whose observations helped confirm the existence of the radiation belts. He also discovered similar belts around Saturn and detected one of the ringed planet's moons in 1979, among many other accomplishments. Van Allen died in 2006.

Understanding the belts
The inner Van Allen belt usually extends from the top of Earth's atmosphere to about 4,000 miles up (6,437 kilometers), while the outer one runs from around 8,000 to more than 26,000 miles above our planet (12,874 to 41,842 km). The belts are dynamic, however, and can expand greatly during solar storms.

The fast-moving particles trapped in the belts can damage satellites and potentially pose a threat to orbiting astronauts. As a result, scientists are keen to get a better understanding of the belts and their still-mysterious behavior.

That's what the $686 million Van Allen Probes mission aims to do. The nearly identical spacecraft are flying in formation through the belts on highly elliptical orbits, mapping out the regions' magnetic fields and charged particle density with their eight science instruments.

The mission recently kicked off its two-year primary science mission, having completed its 60-day commissioning period on Oct. 28.

"Over the past 60 days, the many complex systems on the probes have come to life and started to work together," Kim Cooper, Van Allen Probes project manager at APL, said in statement. "The spacecraft?s science instrument teams are already recording illuminating data, and they are taking advantage of their best understanding of the mechanics and properties of the radiation belts to date."

Follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall or SPACE.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49780676/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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49ers, Rams?play to?a ...?tie?

SF ties it up with :03 left in regulation, but neither team can score in OT

Image: Steven JacksonReuters

Rams running back Steven Jackson runs past 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis to score a touchdown Sunday in San Francisco.

By JANIE McCAULEY

Associated Press Sports

updated 8:19 p.m. ET Nov. 11, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO - Two typically reliable kickers missed. Penalties doomed both sides. And a furious, thrilling finish to regulation ended with a dramatic dud in overtime: a tie.

And nobody particularly likes a tie. Especially not the NFC West-leading 49ers, with a chance to separate themselves against a division rival. Or the Rams, eager to snap a three-game losing streak.

San Francisco and St. Louis played the NFL's first tie game in four years as both teams missed overtime field goals in Sunday's 24-24 outcome.

"I have to say, I've been doing this a while. I don't think I've ever been in a game like this," Rams coach Jeff Fisher said. "As I told our guys, we had a number of chances to put the game away. And, unfortunately, we didn't."

Greg Zuerlein kicked a 53-yarder, but the Rams were penalized 5 yards for delay of game ? which holder Johnny Hekker said was his fault. Zuerlein tried again from 58 as Fisher played for the win, and missed wide right with 2:42 left in OT.

San Francisco's David Akers missed wide left on a 41-yard attempt that could have sealed it for the 49ers (6-2-1), who lost quarterback Alex Smith to a first-half concussion.

And just when it seemed the 49ers ? and Akers' typically reliable left leg ? would have one more chance to win it, San Francisco linebacker Patrick Willis was flagged for holding Lance Kendricks on third down. That extended St. Louis' last drive, a costly mistake in a long list of them on an uncharacteristically sloppy day by coach Jim Harbaugh's team.

"I don't know what to make of this," Willis said. "We have one of the best kickers in the game, and it came down to him at the end and he misses it. That tells you right there something wasn't right."

Akers booted a tying 33-yarder with 3 seconds left in regulation after Sam Bradford threw a 2-yard touchdown pass to Austin Pettis with 1:09 remaining.

On the first play of OT, Bradford completed an 80-yard pass to Danny Amendola that took St. Louis (3-5-1) to the 2, but the play was called back for an illegal formation. Some 49ers fans got up to leave, then returned to their seats.

The last tie was between Philadelphia and Cincinnati, 13-13 in 2008. San Francisco played its first tie since 1986.

Frank Gore ran for a 20-yard touchdown with 8:23 to go in regulation just 17 seconds after backup quarterback Colin Kaepernick scurried 7 yards for a score. Kaepernick finished 11 for 17 for 117 yards and also had eight carries for 66 yards, calmly leading the Niners after it took several series to find his groove.

"It just feels like it's unfinished business," San Francisco cornerback Tarell Brown said.

Gore ran for 97 yards, while Michael Crabtree made five catches for 70 yards and a 14-yard touchdown from Smith before he left the game.

Amendola returned for the Rams following a three-game absence with a shoulder injury to make 11 catches for 102 yards. Bradford went 26 for 39 for 275 yards and two touchdowns.

Smith took a hard hit on the back of the neck from linebacker Jo-Lonn Dunbar after a scramble with 1:10 left in the first quarter. But the No. 1 overall pick in the 2005 draft stayed in and completed his next five passes, including Crabtree's TD.

After the hit, Smith was sacked three plays later and also clobbered again on a fourth-and-1 keeper. Doctors indicated to Harbaugh that might have been the play that caused injury.

Harbaugh said Smith would be evaluated this week per NFL concussion protocol. He wasn't available to speak to reporters. Smith, who has started 28 straight games, wound up 7 for 8 for 72 yards.

The 49ers didn't face Bradford in either meeting last season as the Rams quarterback missed six games with a high left ankle sprain. He had all kinds of extra opportunities this time.

"It's a weird feeling. I've never been a part of a game like that before," Bradford said. "I think the mood in this locker room is disappointment."

Late in the third period, the Rams benefited from Dashon Goldson's 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for taking off his helmet. Then, defensive tackle Ray McDonald was flagged for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Bradford when he came in under the quarterback's chin, extending another Rams drive. Zuerlein kicked a 27-yard field goal.

The penalties and miscues were certainly uncharacteristic of San Francisco's defense.

Crabtree's touchdown midway through the second quarter gave him a TD reception in five straight games against the Rams. It was his third touchdown in two games, and all of his team-leading four TD catches have come in the last five games.

Kaepernick took over as Smith went to the bench to be examined by medical personnel and soon left for the locker room.

One wild play late in the first half summed up this wacky day. Punter Hekker completed a 21-yard pass to safety Rodney McLeod from the end zone after Chris Culliver didn't cover McLeod. Hekker did it again in the fourth quarter and had a notable 118.8 passer rating on the day.

On the Rams' 14-play, 18-yard drive over the final minutes of regulation, Hekker faked an end-around and threw a 19-yard completion to Kendricks on fourth-and-8 from the Rams 33.

But the Rams' defense couldn't get a stop, allowing Kaepernick to get his team back into field-goal range for Akers to tie it.

The Rams played without a pair of starters held out for an unspecified team rules violation, cornerback Janoris Jenkins and wide receiver Chris Givens ? and Fisher said afterward he isn't sure if they will play next week at home against the New York Jets.

The 49ers will regroup to face the Bears in prime time.

"It feels weird," safety Donte Whitner said. "We're about wins around here."

Notes: Rams LT Wayne Hunter played after missing two games with a back injury. ... Fans spelled out "THANK YOU VETERANS" in the stands with shiny red, white and blue cards after the first quarter. A special military coin also was used for the pregame toss on Veteran's Day.

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/49782869/ns/sports-nfl/

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