Embed Size (px)
DESCRIPTION
.
Citation preview
This is a stone.
DigitalMindfield
When choosing MINDFIELD DIGITAL™ and our DBMD™ Program for your development services, you can be sure you will receive an app that will save you money and resources using the most advanced design and interface concepts.
We follow an Application Development Cycle where every We follow an Application Development Cycle where every step is carried out to maximum perfection. Our application developers are experienced and knowledgeable, and are skilled at delivering top high tech Apps.
Our team is constantly looking for promising partners in Our team is constantly looking for promising partners in order to improve our quality, broaden our experience and create a global range of Apps with the most impressive conceptual designs, 3D Graphics and Sound FX.
This is a stone.
MYSTERY SOLVED? AUSTRALIAN SAYS HE’S
BITCOIN FOUNDER
TV’S ‘BIG BANG’ WINS IN A COMEDY LANDSLIDE
THE EVOLUTION OF APPLE MUSIC
82 112
46
HOW AMAZON CONVINCED YOU TO PAY
UP FOR SHOPPING
14
TOP 10 APPS 118
iTUNES REVIEW 122
TOP 10 SONGS 176
TOP 10 ALBUMS 178
TOP 10 MUSIC VIDEOS 180
TOP 10 TV SHOWS 182
TOP 10 BOOKS 184
ROVI BUYING TIVO IN $1.1B CASH AND STOCK DEAL 08
OCULUS RIFT DELAYS FLATTEN VIRTUAL-REALITY FAN FERVOR 22
3 PLANETS ORBITING DWARF STAR PRIME SPOTS TO SEARCH FOR LIFE 32
YAHOO CEO COULD GET $55M IN SEVERANCE PAY IN POTENTIAL SALE 38
SOLAR PLANE ON GLOBAL TRIP SOARS FROM CALIFORNIA TO ARIZONA 64
RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE FLOWS DOWN RADIOACTIVE RIVER 66
WHAT IS BITCOIN? A LOOK AT THE DIGITAL CURRENCY 88
BRAZIL JUDGE OVERTURNS WHATSAPP SUSPENSION 98
GOOGLE FACES FIRST EU FINE IN 2016 WITH NO DEAL ON CARDS: SOURCES 102
GOOGLE OFFERS $250,000 FOR FLINT RESEARCH, LOCAL NONPROFIT 108
BOX OFFICE TOP 20: ‘THE JUNGLE BOOK’ 138
REVIEW: THE AVENGERS DIVIDE IN REVITALIZING ‘CIVIL WAR’ 148
SCIENCE: PHYSICISTS ABUZZ ABOUT POSSIBLE NEW PARTICLE AS CERN REVS UP 156
HEALTH: NURSING HOMES STARTING TO OFFER MORE INDIVIDUALIZED MENUS 166
MILITARY TESTS UNMANNED SHIP DESIGNED TO CROSS OCEANS 186
FIAT CHRYSLER, GOOGLE TO COOPERATE ON AUTONOMOUS MINIVANS 192
HUNGARY AIMING TO DRIVE UBER RIDE-HAILING APP OUT OF COUNTRY 198
Digital TV listing company Rovi is buying TiVo in a cash-and-stock deal valued at about $1.1 billion.
Rovi Corp. said Friday that it will pay $10.70 in cash and stock for each TiVo Inc. share. Rovi will pay $2.75 per share in cash, or about $277 million. The rest, $7.95 per share, will be paid in stock.
Once the deal closes, the combined business will use the TiVo name. TiVo is a digital video recording company.
ROVI BUYING TIVO IN $1.1B CASH AND STOCK DEAL
8
9
10
Rovi CEO Tom Carson will serve as CEO of the new company. The executive said in a written statement on Friday that the buyout will help to extend services across platforms and expand its customer base. The transaction will add more than 10 million TiVo-served households to Rovi’s current customer base of about 18 million households using its guides globally.
The companies anticipate at least $100 million in annual cost savings. The transaction is expected to add to Rovi’s adjusted earnings per share within the first year after closing.
Both companies’ boards have approved the deal, which is targeted to close in the third quarter. It still needs approval from both companies’ shareholders.
Shares of TiVo, based in San Jose, California, added 17 cents to $9.59 in premarket trading. Shares of Rovi, based in Santa Clara, California, surged $1.15, or 6.6 percent, to $18.50.
11
Image: Ted S. Warren14
Amazon is clearly entering its Prime. Meaning, of course, its $100 annual membership program, now a decade old, which has accomplished the remarkable feat of convincing millions of people to pay an annual fee for the privilege of, well, shopping.
Prime is now central to Amazon’s strategy of dominating the world of commerce. What started as a yearly fee for free two-day shipping now offers a sometimes bewildering array of perks, including household product subscriptions, one and two hour Prime Now delivery, streaming music and video, e-books, groceries (for an additional $200 a year), photo storage and more.
HOW AMAZON CONVINCED YOU TO PAY UP FOR SHOPPING
15
16
“Prime has become an all-you-can-eat, physical-digital hybrid,” Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in his annual shareholder letter in April. He wants the service to be such a good deal that you’d be “irresponsible” not to sign up, he wrote.
Why the emphasis on Prime? Simply put, members of the loyalty program shop more frequently and spend more money, analysts say.
Prime shoppers helped drive Amazon’s surprise profit surge in the first quarter. Shares of the e-commerce giant jumped in after-hours trading Thursday after it reported a 28 percent jump in revenue, to $29.13 billion. Net income was $513 million, compared to a loss in the year-earlier quarter.
Amazon doesn’t release detailed numbers on Prime, although Bezos wrote that Prime has “tens of millions” of subscribers. Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter estimates there are about 50 million Prime members.
Even a 25 percent price increase in 2014, the only one for Prime in 10 years, hasn’t appreciably dampened enthusiasm for the program. Membership grew 51 percent last year, including 47 percent growth in the U.S., according to Bezos.
Pachter estimates that Prime members spend about four times what others do, and account for about a third of all Amazon purchases. “That’s why Prime matters,” he said.
Tawnie Knight in Tuscon, Arizona joined Prime about two years ago for the convenience of free shipping. Since then Amazon has become her default shopping site.
17
“I call it the $100 cart, because every time I go on there I spend about $100,” she said. “Before Prime I probably spend around the same amount, just with other retailers like Walmart.”
Brandon Kraft joined Prime when it began 10 years ago to get cheap textbooks while in school. Now he finds it essential - with five kids ranging in age 17 months to 6 years at home - for ordering diapers and wipes and other household goods.
“I think it’s fair to say we spend $125 or $150 a month at Amazon that we wouldn’t have been spending if we didn’t have Prime,” Kraft said. “We go to the Amazon site first when we need something, and if they don’t carry it we start the actual shopping process of looking elsewhere.”
Of course, Amazon Prime isn’t for everyone. Those that shop infrequently online won’t find the $100-a-year fee worth it. With an estimated 244 million registered Amazon accounts, a large majority of Amazon shoppers - roughly 80 percent, in fact - haven’t signed up yet.
18
Image: Gary He19
Image: Joe Klamar20
Amazon continues to add Prime offerings to entice more users. Last week Amazon started offering a monthly Prime subscription for $11 a month, aimed at hooking shoppers during the holidays when the majority of Prime members sign up. In 2015, 3 million shoppers joined Prime in the third week of December alone.
Amazon also introduced a standalone video service for $9 a month, setting itself up to directly compete with other streaming services like Netflix.
Investors have long griped about Amazon’s strategy of investing the revenue it makes into new offerings, leading to little or no earnings growth. But the first quarter results were the fourth in a row in which Amazon reported a profit, which some analysts interpret as a willingness to rein in costs when needed.
Chief financial officer Brian Olavsky, however, told reporters on a conference call that the company’s profits stem mostly from strong growth in sales. The company isn’t slowing its investments, he said, citing recent spending on logistics and original programming for its streaming video service.
21
Virtual reality, oddly enough, isn’t immune to the problems that arise in practical reality. Just ask would-be fans of the Oculus Rift headset, many - possibly most - of whom are still waiting for their $600 gadgets more than four weeks after they started shipping .
The delay, naturally, has sparked online grousing and even some data-based activism, including the creation of a crowdsourced spreadsheet for tracking who received their prized VR gear and when. Some longtime supporters of Oculus have declared themselves alienated by the company’s inability to deliver; others have defected to rival VR systems, or are at least considering it.
OCULUS RIFT DELAYS FLATTEN VIRTUAL-REALITY FAN FERVOR
22
23
24
Christian Cantrell, a software engineer and science-fiction author in Sterling, Virginia, put in his pre-order roughly 15 minutes after Oculus started accepting them in January - and is still waiting. It’s been a “bummer,” he says, because he passed up buying a rival headset, the HTC Vive, hoping to be part of a VR “renaissance” with Rift.
“I’ve been kind of like an Oculus believer,” he says. “But if they bump it again, I might just order a Vive.”
It’s too soon to say how the delays will affect Oculus, much less the overall acceptance of VR, a technology that submerges users in realistic artificial worlds. (Early VR “experiences” consist primarily of video games .) In other contexts, big companies like Apple have managed to weather shortages and shipping delays for products such as the Apple Watch and its new iPhone SE.
But some find the Rift delays intolerable, especially given that Oculus is no fledgling startup, but part of Facebook - the social network bought it two years ago for $2 billion. “There’s an element of inexcusable incompetence going on,” says J.P. Gownder, a Forrester Research analyst, who placed his preorder in the first 10 minutes but doesn’t expect his Rift until mid-May.
Experienced hardware manufacturers would have set up suppliers months or years in advance to avoid these types of problems, Gownder says. The fact that Oculus managed to bungle its launch with more than three years to prepare, plus the backing of Facebook, is “scandalous,” he says.
25
26
Oculus, which has blamed the delays on an “unexpected component shortage,” declined to comment on specifics. It told the AP in a statement it has moved to address the shortage and expects deliveries to accelerate in coming weeks. By way of apology, Oculus said it will offer free shipping to customers who ordered before April 1.
Few have been as disappointed as some of the company’s earliest supporters. Back in January, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey announced that 5,600 of the company’s first Kickstarter backers would be eligible for a free headset. He then tweeted on the eve of first deliveries that the gifts would “start arriving” two days before others, giving the impression Kickstarter backers would get theirs first.
27
It didn’t happen. Unhappy customers gathered on Reddit to complain and to figure out where they stood in line; one poster catalogued the frustration on a crowdsourced spreadsheet. While not necessarily representative of the entire Oculus customer base, that data shows that of the 131 early Kickstarter backers who submitted responses, only 28 report receiving a unit. Of 1,399 pre-order customers, just 165 say they got a Rift.
The virtual reality boom is just getting going, and the competition is growing. Sony will release its PlayStation VR headset later this year. Google is expected to expand on its primitive Cardboard viewer, and recent Apple acquisitions suggest that it may also be jumping into the field soon.
Meanwhile, the Rift is losing some of its first-mover appeal. Some games originally designed to be Oculus exclusives have now been hacked to work on the HTC Vive, which launched about a week after the Rift, but hasn’t experienced shipping delays. Customers who bought Rift games before receiving their headset can now get digital keys so they can play the games in real reality, on a regular PC.
Bill Ellis, a 30-year-old computer engineer in Houston, has been playing with his Vive since it arrived April 5, and may not keep the Rift after it arrives. His plan, he says, was always to buy both, and sell the one that didn’t live up to expectations: “The one that hasn’t shown up is the one that hasn’t lived up to my expectations so far.”
28
Image: Koelnmesse GmbH29
Image: M. Kornmesser32
Astronomers searching for life beyond our solar system may need to look no farther than a little, feeble nearby star.
A Belgian-led team reported Monday that it’s discovered three Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star less than 40 light-years away. It’s the first time planets have been found around this type of star - and it opens up new, rich territory in the search for extraterrestrial life.
Because this star is so close and so faint, astronomers can study the atmospheres of these three temperate exoplanets and, eventually, hunt for signs of possible life. They’re already making atmospheric observations, in fact, using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope will join in next week.
Altogether, it’s a “winning combination” for seeking chemical traces of life outside our solar system, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Julien de Wit, a co-author of the study, released by the journal Nature.
3 PLANETS ORBITING DWARF STAR PRIME SPOTS
TO SEARCH FOR LIFE
33
The star in question - named Trappist-1 after the Belgian telescope in Chile that made the discovery - is barely the size of Jupiter and located in the constellation Aquarius.
Other exoplanet searches have targeted bigger, brighter stars more like our sun, but the starlight in these cases can be so bright that it washes out the signatures of planets. By comparison, cool dwarf stars that emit infrared light, like Trappist-1, make it easier to spot potential worlds.
University of Liege astronomers in Belgium - lead study authors Michael Gillon and Emmanuel Jehin - built the Trappist telescope to observe 60 of the nearest ultra-cool dwarf stars. The risky effort paid off, de Wit noted in an email.
“Systems around these tiny stars are the only places where we can detect life on an Earth-sized exoplanet with our current technology,” Gillon said in a statement. “So if we want to find life elsewhere in the universe, this is where we should start to look.”
The two inner exoplanets take between 1.5 and 2.4 days to orbit the Trappist-1 star. The precise orbit time of the third planet is not known, but it falls somewhere between 4.5 days and 73 days. That puts the planets 20 times to 100 times closer to their star than Earth is to our sun, Gillon noted. The setup is more similar in scale to Jupiter’s moons than to our solar system, he added.
Although the two innermost planets are very close to the star, it showers them with only a few times the amount of energy that Earth receives from our own sun. The third exoplanet
34
35
Image: D. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics36
farther out may receive significantly less of such radiation than Earth does.
The astronomers speculate the two inner exoplanets may have pockets where life may exist, while the third exoplanet actually might fall within the habitable zone - real estate located at just the right distance from a star in order to harbor water and, possibly, life.
Spitzer and Hubble should answer whether the exoplanets have large and clear atmospheres, according to de Wit. They also might be able to detect water and methane, if molecules are present.
Future observatories, including NASA’s James Web Space Telescope set to launch in 2018, should unearth even more details.
Gillon and his colleagues identified the three exoplanets by observing regular dips in the infrared signals emanating from the Trappist-1 star, some 36 light-years away. A single light-year represents about 6 trillion miles.
The astronomers conducted the survey last year using the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope, or Trappist. It’s considered a prototype for a more expansive European project that will widen the search for potentially habitable worlds to 500 ultra-cool stars. This upcoming project is dubbed Speculoos - short for Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars.
Online:
Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
37
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will walk away with a $55 million severance package if the company’s auction of its Internet operations culminates in a sale that ousts her from her job.
The payout disclosed in a regulatory filing Friday consists of cash, stock awards and other benefits that Mayer would get should she be forced out as CEO within a year after a sale.
YAHOO CEO COULD GET $55M IN SEVERANCE PAY IN POTENTIAL SALE
38
39
Image: Laurent Gillieron40
Although Yahoo’s board is still evaluating takeover offers, most investors are betting that the company will decide to sell its well-known brand and an Internet business that includes a popular email service and sections focused on sports and finance.
Mayer, a former Google executive, has been unsuccessfully trying to turn around Yahoo for nearly four years. Instead, Yahoo’s long-running slump has deepened during her reign, making her pay a prickly topic among investors.
“I don’t think this management team has done anything to merit a huge payout,” said Eric Jackson, managing director of SpringOwl Asset Management, a Yahoo shareholder critical of Mayer’s leadership.
Yahoo declined to comment beyond its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The documents didn’t explain the rationale for the severance packages covering Mayer and other Yahoo executives, although they are common at most publicly held companies as a way to maintain some stability during times of uncertainty.
Mayer received a compensation package valued at nearly $36 million last year under the SEC’s accounting rules. Yahoo’s board maintained in its filing that it was only worth about $14 million as of April 1.
The chances of a sale happening at Yahoo Inc. increased earlier this week when the Sunnyvale, California, company reached a truce with activist investor Starboard Value, an outspoken critic of Mayer’s that has been pushing her to sell. Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith is now one of three Yahoo directors on a special committee assessing the bids for the Internet business.
41
42
Image: Alice Truong and Matthew Strand
Although Yahoo’s hasn’t set a timetable for reaching a decision, most analysts expect a deal to be struck within the next two months at a price ranging anywhere from $4 billion to $10 billion.
In an opinion shared by most of his peers on Wall Street, RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney says he believes Verizon Communications is the most likely buyer. After snapping up AOL Inc., another fallen Internet start, for $4.4 billion, Verizon has publicly expressed interest in taking over Yahoo, too.
43
That has spurred speculation that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will shove aside Mayer if Verizon buys Yahoo’s Internet operations. Armstrong was a top advertising executive at Google during much of the same time Mayer was working on some of the products that helped turn Google into the Internet’s most powerful company.
Mayer’s inability to boost Yahoo’s advertising sales at a time that marketers are shifting more of their budgets to digital services is the main reason investors are pushing the company to cash out and turn its Internet operations to a new owner.
Last year, for instance, Yahoo’s board set a target asking management to generate $4.6 billion in revenue, after subtracting ad commissions. That would have been a modest 5 percent increase from the previous year. Yahoo’s revenue last year instead came in at $4.1 billion.
The company this year expects its revenue after ad commissions to decline another 15 percent to a projected $3.5 billion.
Mayer is nearly done with a cost-cutting plan that is jettisoning 15 percent of Yahoo’s workforce in an effort to boost profits as revenue drops.
Yahoo’s stock added a penny to close Friday at $36.60, more than double its value in July 2012 when the company hired Mayer. But the run-up has been driven by the rising value of Yahoo’s stake in China’s e-commerce leader, Alibaba Group.
The investment in Alibaba was made long before Mayer’s hiring, although she has been unsuccessfully trying to find a legal way to avoid paying taxes when the stake is sold.
44
45
46
47
Image: iMore48
MUSIC HAS NEVER BEEN MORE UNIVERSAL
Since it first broke cover as a “One more thing...” reveal by Apple CEO Tim Cook at last year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the Cupertino giant’s much-hyped music streaming service, Apple Music, has made strong progress in eating into Spotify’s formidable and long-established share of this market. During Apple’s second-quarter 2016 earnings call, Cook confirmed that the service now boasted 13 million paid subscribers, a two-million jump on February’s figure. However, amid the rising user numbers, the service’s wider evolution continues apace.
49
GOOD PROGRESS ALREADY FOR THE NEW SERVICE
With much controversy and debate having long reigned over the role of streaming in the music industry and the lack of money that it produces for artists, hopes were high at the time of Apple Music’s announcement that the service would do much to restore the prior financial prosperity of the music industry. Indeed, such a sentiment was expressed even before the service’s formal unveiling by Sony Music CEO Doug Morris.
On the admittedly limited evidence that one could possibly glean just 10 months after such a service becoming available to the public, Apple Music seems to be making a big contribution - certainly to the coffers of the Cupertino company itself. The most recent quarter may have seen Apple announce its first year-over-year drop in iPhone sales for a while, but it enjoyed strong services revenue, which helped it to generate some $50.6 billion in revenue and $10.5 billion profit.
50
51
52
53
ARTIST LINKS PAY DIVIDENDS FOR APPLE
So, how has Apple Music been able to achieve such headway already? Its strong exclusive offerings and support from such artists as Drake and St. Vincent have certainly made a difference. Apple showed its receptiveness towards the concerns of artists when it responded to the protestations of Taylor Swift and lesser-known artists by agreeing to pay them during its free trial period.
So comprehensively have Apple Music and Swift kissed and made up, that she subsequently agreed to stream her 1989 album on the service. This was followed by the exclusive appearance on the platform of her 1989 World Tour documentary and even the release of an entertaining advertisement for the service that sees her (or presumably her stunt double) fall off a treadmill.
But Apple Music’s success with artists can’t be attributed solely to Swift. The Pennsylvania native was, after all, shown in the commercial getting pumped up to the song “Jumpman” from the What a Time To Be Alive mixtape by the Future and Drake, whose new album Views was recently made exclusively available on Apple Music for one week.
‘Exclusivity’ deals on other streaming services have not always proven such so far - Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, for instance, was initially intended as a Tidal exclusive before becoming available on Apple Music as well. However, Apple has done a better job so far of making sure the term ‘exclusive’ actually means such, with the latest albums by Swift and Adele still unable to be streamed elsewhere.
54
55
56
Apple Music’s relationship with Drake seems an especially close one, given that the service will also prominently sponsor his Summer Sixteen Tour when it kicks off on July 20, while the rapper’s OVO label even has a Beats 1 radio show. In another development signaling the growing commitment that Apple Music is gaining from artists, it was revealed earlier this year that DJ Khaled had signed a deal with the service for a weekly We The Best radio show and biweekly TV series.
DEVELOPER FEATURES LOOK SET TO EXPAND APPLE MUSIC’S REACH
Meanwhile, software changes continue to demonstrate the considerable and expanding potential of the service; a few months ago, we learned that iOS 9.3 apps can now add music from the Apple Music catalog directly to a user’s music library. It was suggested at the time that the little-discussed feature could open up a multitude of possibilities for application developers, and now, Apple has introduced a new Apple Music API enabling developers to control playback from the streaming service within their own apps.
The new API means that developers can now, for example, queue up a new song within their apps or create a playlist with its own title and description. Apple has released documentation, entitled Apple Music Best Practices for App Developers, outlining what the API can make possible. It reveals that developers can use the API to see whether a user is currently a member, see which country the user’s account is based in, queue up the next song or songs based on a song ID for playback and inspect playlists
Image: iMore57
already in My Music or create new playlists with a title and description.
Intriguingly, if a given user isn’t already an Apple Music subscriber, developers are given the ability to earn a one-time commission when the user forks out for a paid plan. Developers are subject to certain limitations when using the API, as outlined in Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines. For example, the company will reject apps that “include the ability to save or download music or video content from third-party sources (e.g. Apple Music, YouTube, SoundCloud, Vimeo, etc) without explicit authorization from those sources”.
58
59
ANDROID USERS ARE FEELING THE BENEFIT, TOO
If Apple wants its streaming service to truly take on Spotify, it can’t ignore the significant proportion of mobile users who aren’t using iDevices, which is why the most recent changes to the Apple Music Android app are so important. They follow several significant modifications in recent months, including a homescreen widget for easier playback control and the ability to save music to SD cards for offline listening.
The latest upgrade brings Android users the ability to watch the service’s video content, such as the aforementioned Swift tour documentary, as well as support for family memberships. The latter means that users can now update or subscribe to dedicated family plans for six people, described as “arguably one of the best features about Apple Music” by 9to5Mac writer Chance Miller. It’ll set you back just $14.99 to subscribe to a six-person family membership of Apple Music, which represents incredible value given the $9.99 price of a one-person membership.
60
61
A BOLD NEW ERA FOR APPLE MUSIC
Apple Music may have some seriously heavy music industry expectations on its shoulders, and of course, it has some way to go yet to match the 30 million subscriber base presently enjoyed by Spotify. However, the service is certainly making ominous progress as far as its rivals are concerned, and given Apple’s stellar resources and existing iTunes user base, who would bet against it kick-starting a new, more services-oriented era for the Californian giant? Never before has Apple Music had such universal appeal - it really is bringing the whole world together in one place, with all of the signs being that there’s much more to come yet.
by Benjamin Kerry & Gavin Lenaghan
62
Image: TechnoBuffalo63
64
A solar-powered airplane soared above the clouds Monday after taking off from California for Arizona to resume its journey around the world using only energy from the sun.
The Swiss-made Solar Impulse 2 left Mountain View south of San Francisco shortly after 5 a.m. Monday for an expected 16-hour trip to Phoenix.
Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg was at the helm of the plane that began circumnavigating the globe last year. Video from a wing-mounted camera showed the aircraft taking off in a westerly direction before swinging to the southeast and rising above the clouds.
About an hour after takeoff, Borschberg used his phone to snap photos of the sun coming up along the horizon. Then he prepared for media interviews and made breakfast plans.
“I’m heating up water for coffee,” Borschberg told his ground crew. “A nice Nescafe.”
His co-pilot, Bertrand Piccard, also of Switzerland, made the three-day trip from Hawaii to the heart of Silicon Valley, where he landed last week.
The Solar Impulse 2’s wings, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night.
After Phoenix, the plane will make two more stops in the United States before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe or northern Africa, according to the website documenting the journey.
The two legs to cross the Pacific were the riskiest part of the plane’s travels because of the lack of emergency landing sites.
“We have demonstrated it is feasible to fly many days, many nights, that the technology works” said Borschberg, 63, who piloted the plane during a five-day trip from Japan to Hawaii and who kept himself alert by doing yoga poses and meditation.
The crew was forced to stay in Oahu for nine months after the plane’s battery system sustained heat damage on its trip from Japan.
The single-seat aircraft began its voyage in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates and made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China and Japan.
The layovers will give the pilots a chance to swap places and engage with local communities along the way so they can explain the project, which is estimated to cost more than $100 million and began in 2002 to highlight the importance of renewable energy and the spirit of innovation.
65
66
At first glance, Gilani Dambaev looks like a healthy 60-year-old man and the river flowing past his rural family home appears pristine. But Dambaev is riddled with diseases that his doctors link to a lifetime’s exposure to excessive radiation, and the Geiger counter beeps loudly as a reporter strolls down to the muddy riverbank.
Some 50 kilometers (30 miles) upstream from Dambaev’s crumbling village lies Mayak, a nuclear complex that has been responsible for at least two of the country’s biggest radioactive accidents. Worse, environmentalists say, is the facility’s decades-old record of using the Arctic-bound waters of the Techa River to dump waste from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, hundreds of tons of which is imported annually from neighboring nations.
RUSSIA’S NUCLEAR NIGHTMARE
FLOWS DOWN RADIOACTIVE RIVER
Image: Katherine Jacobsen67
The results can be felt in every aching household along the Techa, where doctors record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers vastly higher than the Russian average - and citizens such as Dambaev are left to rue the government’s failure over four decades to admit the danger.
“Sometimes they would put up signs warning us not to swim in the river, but they never said why,” said Dambaev, a retired construction worker who like his wife, brother, children and grandchildren have government-issued cards identifying them as residents of radiation-tainted territory. “After work, we would go swimming in the river. The kids would too.”
Thousands already have been resettled by Russia’s Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corp. to new homes two kilometers (a mile) inland from the river, leaving Dambaev’s village of Muslyumovo in a state of steady decay as shops close and abandoned homes are bulldozed. The evacuations began in 2008, two decades after Russia started to admit disasters past and present stretching from Mayak’s earliest days in the late 1940s as the maker of plutonium for the first Soviet atomic bombs.
The question, 30 years after the former Soviet Union’s greatest nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, is whether Mayak is truly cleaning up its act or remains primed to inflict more invisible damage on Russians. Nuclear regulators say waste no longer reaches the river following the last confirmed dumping scandal in 2004, but anti-nuclear activists say it’s impossible to tell given the level of state secrecy.
68
69
Image: Katherine Jacobsen70
Image: Gary He
Vladimir Slivyak, an activist for the Russian environmentalist group EcoDefense, has visited villages downstream from Mayak many times to help document the poor health of locals in the area, 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) east of Moscow near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.
“My opinion is they’re still dumping radioactive waste,” he said, “but proving that is impossible unless Mayak says: ‘Yes, we’re dumping radioactive waste.’”
The Nuclear Safety Institute at the Russian Academy of Sciences, which oversees safety standards for the country’s nuclear industry, told the AP that Mayak’s nuclear waste processing system presents no danger to the surrounding population. The plant also manufactures a range of radioactive isotopes of use for specialist equipment, medical research and cancer treatments that generate lucrative contracts worldwide.
Rosatom spokesman Vladislav Bochkov, in response to several Associated Press requests seeking an interview to discuss Mayak’s safety standards and operations, sent an email Thursday denying Mayak dumps nuclear waste in the river. Bochkov said the complex “follows all the environmental protection guidelines and has all the a pprovals it needs for operation.”
“The level of pollution in the Techa River today completely complies with the sanitary standards of the Russian Federation,” he wrote. He said the river water is clean: “You can drink it endlessly.”
But when the AP took a Geiger counter to the riverbank outside Dambaev’s home, the meter reading surged at the water line
71
Image: Iuliia Subbotovska72
and the machine began beeping loudly and continuously. Measurements ranged from 8.5 to 9.8 microsieverts - 80 to 100 times the level of naturally occurring background radiation. A typical chest X-ray involves a burst of about 100 microsieverts.
Nuclear Safety Institute member Leonid Bolshov bills these levels as safe, saying: “The level of pollution in the water today is incomparably less to what it used to be.”
What it used to be is pretty bad. Environmentalists estimate that Mayak tossed 76 million cubic meters (2.68 billion cubic feet) of untreated waste - enough to fill more than 30,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools - into the river from 1948 to the mid-1950s as nuclear scientists scrambled to catch up to the U.S. nuclear program.
In September 1957, underground storage tanks of overheating nuclear waste exploded, sending a cloud of nuclear fallout 300 kilometers (200 miles) northeast across 217 towns and villages containing 272,000 people, a minority of which were quietly evacuated over the following two years.
A decade later, a nearby lake used to dispose of nuclear waste dried up amid a summer drought, and high winds whipped the exposed powdery residue to many of the same population centers. Greenpeace estimates the fallout reached 68 towns and villages containing 42,000 people.
Russia suppressed all news of both disasters until the late 1980s, when it acknowledged the two accidents and the Mayak site’s very existence.
73
74
Image: Efrem Lukatsky75
76
In 1993, Russia said the two accidents combined with longer-term dumping of waste into the river meant that an estimated 450,000 people had been exposed to excess radiation from Mayak. It offered no breakdown of immediate deaths, accelerated deaths or increased rates of illness and disease in the populace.
A 2005 criminal case against Mayak’s then-director, Vitaly Sadovnikov, revealed that the plant continued to dump at least 30 million cubic meters (1 billion cubic feet) of untreated nuclear waste into the river from 2001 to 2004. Prosecution documents said the dumping quadrupled the volume of the radioactive isotope strontium-90 in the river.
A study by Greenpeace in 2007, citing hospital records and door-to-door surveys of Muslyumovo residents, reported cancer rates 3.6 times higher than the Russian national average. Russian scientists have reported residents suffer 25 times more genetic defects than the general population.
A decades-long Radiation Research Society study of people living near the Techa River conducted jointly by Russian and American scientists has linked radiation particularly to higher rates of cancer of the uterus and esophagus. In their latest 2015 report, the scientists analyzed 17,435 residents born before 1956, among them 1,933 with cancer. They found that the vast majority of residents had accumulated heightened deposits of strontium-90 in their bones and such “radiation exposure has increased the risks for most solid cancers.”
Such figures come as no surprise to one of Muslyumovo’s longest-serving doctors, Gulfarida Galimova, a gynecologist and family general practitioner who started work in the village’s hospital in 1981. Galimova says she was immediately struck by the exceptional volume of pediatric emergencies involving miscarriages, early and still births, and newborns with malformed limbs and other defects.
77
“City of Pripyat, Ukraine, today. The Chernobyl disaster was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the city, then located in the Ukrainian, Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union.”
78
Image: Katherine Jacobsen79
Still, like others she did not know Mayak -unmarked on any map at the time and still off-limits to the public today - even existed. She recalls 1980s mornings of blissful ignorance washing her hair in the deceptively soft waters of the Techa.
“The water was nice and not calcified. Soft water. Your hair would be so fluffy,” Galimova recalled.
She was among some 280 households that accepted Rosatom’s offer to abandon their homes in Muslyumovo for new two-story homes away from the river in what today is called New Muslyumovo. But her 2012 move came too late for her own family. A son born in the village in 1985, and a grandson born last year, both have birth defects that she blames on Mayak radiation. Her son has a club foot; her grandson has heart deformities.
One of her neighbors in New Muslyumovo, with its rows of pastel yellow homes with red roofs, blames the new location for her family’s health problems. Alfia Batirshina, 28, says a radon deposit beneath the topsoil of the new settlement gives her chronic headaches and her 8-year-old daughter recurring nosebleeds.
She is loath to discuss her daughter’s own birth defect, a deformed leg, and keeps her out of view of journalists. Her 62-year-old father, Vakil Batirshin, struggles to say anything at all. His neck is painfully swollen from lymph nodes that have grown triple their normal size, leaving his words nearly unintelligible.
The homemaker says she and neighbors are resigned to their medical fate living in Mayak’s nuclear shadow.
“I don’t hope for anything anymore,” she said. “If we get sick, we get sick.”
80
Image: Katherine Jacobsen81
82
An Australian man long rumored to be associated with the digital currency Bitcoin has publicly identified himself as its creator, a claim that would end one of the biggest mysteries in the tech world.
BBC News said Monday that Craig Wright told the media outlet he is the man previously known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. The computer scientist, inventor and academic said he launched the currency in 2009 with the help of others.
Wright made similar claims to the Economist magazine, which said on its website it still has “nagging” questions about Wright’s claim. He also asserted his role in a lengthy blog post.
MYSTERY SOLVED? AUSTRALIAN SAYS HE’S BITCOIN FOUNDER
83
84
The founder’s identity has been shrouded in uncertainty, and the media’s inability to pinpoint the person responsible has led to a series of investigations. Last year, some reports claimed Wright was the founder and had used a false name to mask his identity.
Wright told the BBC he had decided to make his identity known to stop the spread of “misinformation” about Bitcoin.
“I didn’t take the decision lightly to make my identity public and I want to be clear that I’m doing this because I care so passionately about my work and also to dispel any negative myths and fears,” he said.
Wright said he believes that Bitcoin and blockchain, the technical innovation that makes the currency possible, “can change the world for the better.”
He added that he would now be able to release his research and academic work to help people understand the potential of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is designed for secure financial transactions that require no central authority - no banks, no government regulators. That makes it attractive to off-the-grid types such as libertarians, people who want to evade tax authorities, and criminals, even though Bitcoin doesn’t guarantee anonymity, since it documents every transaction in a public forum.
According to the BBC, Wright supported his claim to being the founder by signing digital messages using cryptographic keys used during the early days of Bitcoin.
85
86
Image: Gary He
If Wright is the founder, he is likely a very wealthy person. The person going by the pseudonym Nakamoto is believed to have amassed about 1 million Bitcoins, which would be worth about $450 million if converted to cash, the BBC says.
Jon Matonis, one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, which says it helps support the use of the currency, told the BBC he is convinced that Wright is who he claims to be and is responsible for a brilliant achievement.
The hunt for Bitcoin’s founder had become a mission for some journalists. Attention focused for a time on a Finnish sociologist, a Japanese math whiz and a Japanese-American engineer.
In December, the technology magazine Wired and the website Gizmodo both published lengthy investigations based on documents and emails that concluded Wright was probably the man behind the pseudonym. He was living in an upscale suburb of Sydney at the time.
The reports were circumstantial and contained no proof. But Wright’s new statements, and his use of Nakamoto’s own encrypted signature, known as a PGP key, may have confirmed his role.
He also spoke to GQ magazine and the London Review of Books.
87
88
Bitcoin is a type of digital currency that allows people to buy goods and services and exchange money without involving banks, credit card issuers or other third parties. Its origins have long been a mystery - though an Australian man long rumored to have ties to bitcoin has come forward claiming to be its creator.
Who is this man, and how does this system work?
Here’s a brief look at bitcoin:
HOW BITCOINS WORK
Bitcoin is a digital currency that is not tied to a bank or government and allows users to spend money anonymously. The coins are created by users who “mine” them by lending computing power to verifying other users’ transactions. They receive bitcoins in exchange.
WHAT IS BITCOIN? A LOOK AT THE
DIGITAL CURRENCY
89
The coins also can be bought and sold on exchanges with U.S. dollars and other currencies. Their value has fluctuated over time. At its height in late 2013, a single bitcoin was valued above $1,100. On Monday, it was worth about $445.
Because the currency isn’t formally regulated, its legality is a bit fuzzy. The currency has also drawn the ire of many in law enforcement and cybersecurity because it’s difficult to trace, making it a currency of choice for hackers behind ransomware attacks. But in September, New York state regulators approved their first license for a company dealing in bitcoin.
WHY BITCOINS ARE POPULAR
Bitcoins are basically lines of computer code that are digitally signed each time they travel from one owner to the next. Transactions can be made anonymously, making the currency popular with libertarians as well as tech enthusiasts, speculators - and criminals.
90
91
SHOULD I TRADE IN ALL MY CASH FOR BITCOINS?
That would be a questionable decision. Many businesses such as blogging platform WordPress and retailer Overstock have jumped on the bitcoin bandwagon amid a flurry of media coverage. Leading bitcoin payment processor BitPay works with more than 60,000 businesses and organizations, while the total number of bitcoin transactions has climbed to over 200,000 per day, more than double from a year ago, according to bitcoin wallet site blockchain.info.
Still, its popularity is low compared with cash and cards, and many individuals and businesses won’t accept bitcoins for payments.
HOW BITCOINS ARE KEPT SECURE
The bitcoin network works by harnessing individuals’ greed for the collective good. A network of tech-savvy users called miners keep the system honest by pouring their computing power into a blockchain, a global running tally of every bitcoin transaction. The blockchain prevents rogues from spending the same bitcoin twice, and the miners are rewarded for their efforts by being gifted with the occasional bitcoin. As long as miners keep the blockchain secure, counterfeiting shouldn’t be an issue.
92
Image: Gary He93
94
HOW BITCOIN IS VULNERABLE
Much of the mischief surrounding bitcoin occurs at the places where people store their digital cash or exchange it for traditional currencies, like dollars or euros. If an exchange has sloppy security, or if a person’s electronic wallet is compromised, then the money can easily be stolen. The biggest scandal involved Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which went offline in February 2014. Its CEO, Mark Karpeles, said tens of thousands of bitcoins worth several hundred million dollars were unaccounted for. He was arrested on suspicion of inflating his cash account in August.
HOW BITCOIN CAME TO BE
It’s a mystery. Bitcoin was launched in 2009 by a person or group of people operating under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin was then adopted by a small clutch of enthusiasts. Nakamoto dropped off the map as bitcoin began to attract widespread attention. But proponents say that doesn’t matter: The currency obeys its own internal logic.
95
96
WHO IS THE REAL NAKAMOTO?
There’s been plenty of speculation on Nakamoto’s identity over the years. In December, the technology magazine Wired and the website Gizmodo both concluded that Australian computer scientist, inventor and academic Craig Wright was probably the man behind the pseudonym. The reports offered detailed circumstantial, but no hard proof, and hedged their conclusions accordingly.
On Monday, Wright told BBC News, the Economist and GQ that he is Nakamoto. (He also put out a press release .) Wright said he launched the currency in 2009 with the help of others. Wright told the BBC that he decided to make his identity known to stop the spread of “misinformation” about bitcoin.
If Wright is the founder, he is likely a very wealthy person. The person going by the pseudonym Nakamoto is believed to have amassed about 1 million bitcoins, which would be worth about $450 million if converted to cash.
97
Image: Yasuyoshi Chiba98
A Brazilian judge struck down an earlier court ruling to suspend messaging service WhatsApp in Latin America’s biggest country for 72 hours, reactivating it on Tuesday, the day after it was shut down.
The ruling by Judge Ricardo Mucio Santana de Abreu Lima came just hours after another judge upheld an earlier judicial order suspending WhatsApp’s services. The application was working again by Tuesday afternoon.
The suspension had gone into effect Monday shortly after it was ordered by Judge Marcel Maia Montalvao, in the northeastern state of Sergipe.
A court official in Sergipe said the suspension was ordered because WhatsApp has repeatedly failed to turn over information about its users for an investigation into drug trafficking and organized crime.
BRAZIL JUDGE OVERTURNS WHATSAPP SUSPENSION
99
100
WhatsApp officials have estimated that the service is used by 100 million Brazilians.
“Yet again millions of innocent Brazilians are being punished because a court wants WhatsApp to turn over information we repeatedly said we don’t have,” the messaging service’s CEO and co-founder Jan Koum said on his Facebook page after Montalvao’s ruling. “We encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people’s information safe and secure, we also don’t keep your chat history on our servers.”
“We have no intention of compromising the security of our billion users around the world,” he added.
Montalvao’s suspension was the latest chapter in a dispute between Brazilian law enforcement and Facebook, which bought WhatsApp in 2014.
Calls to Facebook’s offices in Sao Paulo went unanswered on Tuesday.
In March, Facebook’s most senior representative in Latin America was detained in Sao Paulo and held overnight.
At the time, a spokeswoman for federal police in Sergipe, Monica Horta, said investigators had requested content from a WhatsApp messaging group as well as other data, including geolocation. Investigators first contacted WhatsApp several months earlier but hadn’t received a response, Horta said.
Brazilian authorities also clashed with Facebook in December, when a judicial order forced telecoms to block WhatsApp for about 12 hours over its alleged refusal to cooperate with a police inquiry.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the time said he was “stunned” by the “extreme decision.
101
Google is likely to face its first European Union antitrust sanction this year, with little prospect of it settling a test case with the bloc’s regulator over its shopping service, people familiar with the matter said.
There are few incentives left for either party to reach a deal in a six-year dispute that could set a precedent for Google searches for hotels, flights and other services and tests regulators’ ability to ensure diversity on the Web.
Alphabet Inc’s Google, which was hit by a second EU antitrust charge this month for using its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, shows little sign of backing down after years of wrangling with European authorities.
GOOGLE FACES FIRST EU FINE IN 2016 WITH NO DEAL ON CARDS: SOURCES
102
103
Image: Mark Lennihan104
Several people familiar with the matter said they believe that after three failed compromise attempts since 2010, Google has no plan to try to settle allegations that its Web search results favor its own shopping service, unless the EU watchdog changes its stance.
Such a change of heart appears unlikely, with European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager -- a Dane whose team is leading the Google investigation -- showing little interest in reaching a settlement where there is no finding of wrongdoing or a fine against the company, other people said.
Underpinning Vestager’s tough approach, and the Commission’s case, are scores of complaints from companies, big and small, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Alphabet shares were flat at 1824 GMT.
MICROSOFT’S SHADOW
For Google, which has denied any wrongdoing, the stakes are high. Some rivals are convinced that any fine is effectively a cost of doing business and it has more to gain in profit from its existing business model than conceding to complaints.
The European Commission declined to comment.
“From a pure profitability perspective, it is better off dragging out the competition case, continuing its practices for as long as possible, and ultimately paying a fine that will be smaller than the profits it generates by continuing the conduct,” Thomas Vinje, a lawyer who advises several of Google’s competitors, told Reuters.
105
106
Image: Gary He
However, some sources said they see last week’s low-key pact with arch-rival Microsoft to withdraw all regulatory complaints against each other as a signal that Google might in time choose to strike a deal with Brussels.
By doing so it would avoid a repeat of Microsoft’s damaging fight with the European Commission and by settling at least its dispute with the EU over Internet shopping might also head off possible actions by other regulators.
One source said it was too early for Google to rule anything out or in regarding the EU case.
To date, Google has a mixed record in taking on regulators globally, winning some battles and losing others.
However, Microsoft offers a salutary lesson to those who want to take on the Commission, Ioannis Kokkoris, a law professor at Queen Mary University of London, said.
Microsoft ended up with fines of more than 2.2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) after a decade-long battle with the Commission.
“You are entering a long battle, an expensive battle. And if you go to court, the outcome would not necessarily be better,” Kokkoris said.
107
Image: Justin Sullivan108
Google is offering $250,000 to help with the ongoing response efforts in Flint as the Michigan city reels from the effects of a lead-contaminated water supply.
Google spokesman Patrick Lenihan announced the two grants to reporters. He says the first $150,000 grant will help researchers from the University of Michigan predict which homes are likely to have water with high lead levels without physically testing it.
GOOGLE OFFERS $250,000 FOR
FLINT RESEARCH, LOCAL NONPROFIT
109
University researchers will also build a mobile app and online tools that can help Flint residents visualize data, report concerns and request testing kits.
The second $100,000 Google grant goes to the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. Kathi Horton, the foundation’s president, says she doesn’t know what that money will be used for yet. The foundation gives grants to other area nonprofits.
110
111
112
“The Big Bang Theory” was the comedy winner in television last week - by a landslide.
The long-running CBS sitcom was seen by 14.1 million people last Thursday, easily the week’s most-watched program, the Nielsen company said. The next closest comedy was CBS’ “Mom,” which had 8.3 million viewers.
CBS was television’s most popular network, as it usually is unless one of its competitors is airing a special event.
Nielsen, at a news conference Tuesday, unveiled data that illustrates how the myriad of ways people can watch television these days is boosting the viewership for some programs.
TV’S ‘BIG BANG’ WINS IN A COMEDY LANDSLIDE
113
114
Some programming, like sports, is almost always watched live, but that’s not the case with much prime-time entertainment.
For example, for one episodic drama - Nielsen would not reveal the specific show - 61 percent of viewers saw it either live or on DVR within a week, 25 percent saw between eight and 25 days, and 14 percent saw it between 36 and 121 days.
Nielsen hadn’t previously revealed viewership so distant from a show’s original airing. While reality shows and serial dramas are commonly watched live or quite close to when they originally air, self-contained dramas and comedies have a better chance of being watched weeks if not months after they are shown for the first time.
The people who do this kind of time-shifting are likely to be younger - just the kind of audience television advertisers want to reach, Nielsen said.
CBS won last week in prime time, averaging 7.5 million viewers. NBC had 5.4 million viewers, ABC had 5.1 million, Fox had 3.2 million, Univision had 2.1 million, the CW had 1.6 million, Telemundo had 1.5 million and ION Television had 1.3 million.
TNT was the week’s most popular cable network, averaging 2.59 million viewers. Fox News Channel had 2 million, ESPN had 1.9 million, USA had 1.5 million and the Disney Channel had 1.45 million.
NBC’s “Nightly News” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.3 million viewers. ABC’s “World News” was second with 8 million and the “CBS Evening News” had 7 million viewers.
115
For the week of April 25-May 1, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: “The Big Bang Theory,” CBS, 14.13 million; “Dancing With the Stars,” ABC, 11.75 million; “60 Minutes,” CBS, 10.34 million; “NCIS,” CBS, 10.25 million; “Blue Bloods,” CBS, 10.13 million; “Little Big Shots,” NBC, 10.1 million; “The Voice” (Tuesday), NBC, 10.07 million; “Empire,” Fox, 10.03 million; “Madam Secretary,” CBS, 9.9 million; “The Voice” (Monday), NBC, 9.49 million.
ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox is owned by 21st Century Fox. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks.
Online:
http://www.nielsen.com
116
117
iOS
#01 – slither.ioBy Steve HowseCategory: GamesRequires iOS 6.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#02 – TIDALBy TIDAL Music ASCategory: MusicRequires iOS 8.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#03 – SnapchatBy Snapchat, Inc.Category: Photo & VideoRequires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#04 – Word Flow KeyboardBy Microsoft CorporationCategory: UtilitiesRequires iOS 9.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#05 – MessengerBy Facebook, Inc.Category: Social NetworkingRequires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#06 – FacebookBy Facebook, Inc.Category: Social NetworkingRequires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#07 – InstagramBy Instagram, Inc.Category: Photo & VideoRequires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#08 – YouTubeBy Google, Inc.Category: Photo & VideoRequires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#10 – iTunes UBy AppleCategory: EducationRequires iOS 8.3 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#09 – HBO NOWBy HBOCategory: EntertainmentRequires iOS 8.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
118
#01 – OS X El CapitanBy AppleCategory: UtilitiesCompatibility: OS X 10.6.8 or later
#07 – App Face for FacebookBy JUNHUA XIECategory: Social NetworkingCompatibility: OS X 10.10 or later, 64-bit processor
#08 – App for InstagramBy Joacim StåhlCategory: Social NetworkingCompatibility: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
#09 – ooVoo Video Call, Text and VoiceBy ooVoo LLCCategory: Social NetworkingCompatibility: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
#02 – XcodeBy AppleCategory: Developer ToolsCompatibility: OS X 10.8.4 or later
#10 – Word Document WriterBy HUANG TINGCategory: BusinessCompatibility: OS X 10.10 or later, 64-bit processor
#04 – Microsoft Remote DesktopBy Microsoft CorporationCategory: BusinessCompatibility: OS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor
Mac OS X
#03 – KindleBy AMZN Mobile LLCCategory: ReferenceCompatibility: OS X 10.8 or later
#05 – The UnarchiverBy Dag AgrenCategory: UtilitiesCompatibility: OS X 10.6.0 or later, 64-bit processor
#06 – SlackBy Slack Technologies, Inc.Category: BusinessOS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor
119
#04 – 7 Minute Workout ChallengeBy Fitness Guide IncCategory: Health & Fitness / Price: $2.99Requires iOS 6.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#05 – FacetuneBy Lightricks Ltd.Category: Photo & Video / Price: $3.99Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#06 – Bloons TD 5By Ninja KiwiCategory: Games / Price: $2.99Requires iOS 6.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#07 – Face Swap LiveBy Laan LabsCategory: Photo & Video / Price: $0.99Requires iOS 8.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#08 – Akinator the GenieBy ElokenceCategory: Entertainment / Price: $1.99Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#09 – Geometry DashBy RobTop Games ABCategory: Games / Price: $1.99Requires iOS 5.1.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#10 – NBA 2K16By 2KCategory: Games / Price: $7.99Requires iOS 9.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#01 – Minecraft: Pocket EditionBy MojangCategory: Games / Price: $6.99Requires iOS 5.1.1 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#02 – Plague Inc.By Ndemic CreationsCategory: Games / Price: $0.99Requires iOS 6.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
#03 – Heads Up!By Warner Bros.Category: Games / Price: $0.99Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
iOS120
#05 – Final Cut ProBy AppleCategory: Video / Price: $299.99Compatibility: OS X 10.10.4 or later, 64-bit processor
#06 – Disk CleanerBy Pocket Bits LLCCategory: Utilities / Price: $5 .99Compatibility: OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor
#09 – Document WriterBy xiong fengCategory: Business / Price: $9.99Compatibility: OS X 10.7 or later
#08 – NotabilityBy Ginger LabsCategory: Productivity / Price: $5.99Compatibility: OS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor
#10 – PixelmatorBy Pixelmator TeamCategory: Graphics & Design / Price: $29.99Compatibility: OS X 10.9.5 or later, 64-bit processor
#04 – Logic Pro XBy AppleCategory: Music / Price: $199.99Compatibility: OS X 10.8.4 or later, 64-bit processor
#07 – MacFamilyTree 8By Synium Software GmbHCategory: Productivity / Price: $29.99Compatibility: OS X 10.10.0 or later, 64-bit processor
#03 – MagnetBy CrowdCaféCategory: Productivity / Price: $0.99Compatibility: OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor
#02 – Snake OnlineBy Dung Nguyen Le HoangCategory: Games / Price: $0.99Compatibility: OS X 10.9 or later, 64-bit processor
#01 – GarageBandBy AppleCategory: Music / Price: $4.99Compatibility: OS X 10.9 or later
Mac OS X121
MoviesTV Shows&
Trailer
122
The Witch
A Puritan family in 1600s New England is ravaged by black magic, witchcraft, and possession.
FIVE FACTS:1. Stephen King, who is often called the “master of horror,” has stated that he was terrified by this film.
2. Shot in only twenty-five days.
3. Ralph Ineson and Kate Dickie both appeared in Game of Thrones (2011), although they never shared any scenes together.
4. Most of the film’s dialogues and story were based on writings from the time.
5. There were more scenes planned to involve Black Phillip, but because he wasn’t as well trained as planned, the ideas had to be scratched.
by Robert EggersGenre: HorrorReleased: 2016Price: $14.99
101 Ratings
Rotten Tomatoes
90%123
Cast Interview
124
125
Where to Invade Next
The tenth documentary movie from controversial director Michael Moore sees him spend time in various countries across the globe to see how they deal with economic and social struggles, and to see what America could learn from them.
FIVE FACTS:1. Moore’s first documentary in 6 years.
2. Not a single frame of the movie was shot on location in the USA.
3. He has also directed several music videos, including one for R.E.M., and two for Rage Against the Machine, during one of which he was threatened with arrest.
4. Two of Moore’s documentaries (Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11) are considered to be two of the greatest documentary movies of all time.
5. Has been named as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.
by Michael MooreGenre: DocumentaryReleased: 2016Price: $14.99
178 Ratings
126
Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes
77%127
128
‘Late Show’ Interview
129
Music
Trailer for the Movie that Correspondswith the Album
130
Genre: PopReleased: Apr 23, 201612 Songs (+movie and digital booklet)Price: $17.99
10094 Ratings
LemonadeBeyoncé
The second visual album from the legendary songstress has already made waves across the world on music streaming service Tidal – and now you can own it, too.
FIVE FACTS:1. The album features other notable musicians such as Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, and James Blake.
2. The album is allegedly fueled by husband Jay Z’s supposed infidelity, although many think this may just be a marketing tactic.
3. At the time of writing, Beyoncé has been nominated for 468 awards, winning 181 of them.
4. Recognized as the Top Certified Artist in America during the 2000s.
5. Has won 20 Grammy Awards, and is the most nominated woman in the award shows history.
131
132
Performance of ‘Formation’ from the Super Bowl 2016
133
ViewsDrake
The much-anticipated fourth studio album from the Canadian rapper – a homage to his home city of Toronto- cements him as one of the most innovative pop artists and rappers of this time.
FIVE FACTS:1. Drake was an actor in Canadian TV show Degrassi: The Next Generation- where he starred in a total of 138 episodes.
2. Is the global ambassador for the Toronto Raptors basketball team.
3. Drake’s work has won him a Grammy Award, three Juno Awards, six BET Awards, and several major Billboard charts records.
4. Has penned songs for other artists, including Alicia Keys, Rita Ora, and Jamie Foxx.
5. The album cover for Views shows Drake sitting atop the CN Tower – a Toronto landmark. The building’s Twitter account later confirmed it to be photoshopped.
Genre: Hip-Hop/RapReleased: Apr 29, 201620 SongsPrice: $13.99
13506 Ratings
134
Trailer for the Album
135
‘Hotline Bling’
136
137
“The Jungle Book” extended its box-office reign to three weeks, easily besting a handful of newcomers that made little impact.
In its third week of release, the Disney release took in $43.7 million, according to final box-office figures Monday. Jon Favreau’s well-reviewed Rudyard Kipling adaptation has held up extremely well, bringing its North American sum to $253.4 million.
BOX OFFICE TOP 20: ‘THE JUNGLE BOOK’
138
139
140
Three new releases didn’t come close. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele’s action comedy debuted with $9.5 million; Garry Marshall’s latest holiday-themed romantic comedy “Mother’s Day” weakly opened with $8.4 million; and the video-game adaptation “Ratchet & Clank” took in just $4.9 million.
The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by comScore:
1. “The Jungle Book,” Disney, $43,714,706,
4,041 locations, $10,818 average,
$253,371,506, 3 weeks.
2. “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,”
Universal, $9,619,300, 3,802 locations,
$2,530 average, $34,215,325, 2 weeks.
3. “Keanu,” Warner Bros., $9,453,224,
2,658 locations, $3,557 average,
$9,453,224, 1 week.
4. “Mother’s Day,” Open Road,
$8,369,184, 3,035 locations, $2,758
average, $8,369,184, 1 week.
141
5. “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” W arner
Bros., $6,080,496, 2,310 locations,
$2,632 average, $44,661,136, 3 weeks.
6. “Zootopia,” Disney, $5,328,858,
2,487 locations, $2,143 average,
$323,841,347, 9 weeks.
7. “Ratchet And Clank,” Focus Features,
$4,869,278, 2,891 locations, $1,684
average, $4,869,278, 1 week.
8. “The Boss,” Universal, $4,286,820,
2,823 locations, $1,519 average,
$56,147,945, 4 weeks.
9. “Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice,”
Warner Bros., $3,869,416, 2,330
locations, $1,661 average, $325,192,009,
6 weeks.
10. “Criminal,” Lionsgate, $1,346,196,
1,578 locations, $853 average,
$13,497,363, 3 weeks.
142
143
144
11. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2,”
Universal, $1,108,820, 1,092
locations, $1,015 average, $57,295,620,
6 weeks.
12. “MET Opera: Elektra,” Fathom
Events, $1,037,000, 900 locations,
$1,152 average, $1,037,000, 1 week.
13. “A Hologram For The King,” Roadside
Attractions, $943,227, 523 locations,
$1,803 average, $2,564,641, 2 weeks.
14. “Green Room,” A24, $926,370,
470 locations, $1,971 average,
$1,323,256, 3 weeks.
15. “Eye In The Sky,” Bleecker Street,
$909,214, 614 locations, $1,481
average, $16,402,697, 8 weeks.
16. “Compadres,” Lionsgate, $650,844,
368 locations, $1,769 average,
$2,393,033, 2 weeks.
145
146
17. “God’s Not Dead 2,” Pure Flix,
$610,785, 739 locations, $827
average, $19,941,153, 5 weeks.
18. “Miracles From Heaven,” Sony,
$536,864, 660 locations, $813
average, $59,669,273, 7 weeks.
19. “Papa Hemingway In Cuba,” Yari Film
Group Releasing, $475,224, 325
locations, $1,462 average, $475,224, 1 week.
20. “Hello, My Name Is Doris,”
Roadside Attractions, $452,340,
406 locations, $1,114 average, $12,777,039,
8 weeks.
Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by 21st Century Fox; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC
147
148
Conventional movie wisdom would suggest that there can only be diminishing returns with long-running franchises. There must be a breaking point, right? Especially at movie four, five, six and beyond. There are exceptions, sure, but even the painstakingly plotted Marvel films have had low points.
And yet in the ashes of “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the brain trust behind Marvel Studios and directors Joe and Anthony Russo have built what is easily one of the strongest films of their so-called cinematic universe with “Captain America: Civil War,” an engaging, lively and just flat out fun use of the characters we’ve gotten to know across the last eight years and 12 films.
REVIEW: THE AVENGERS DIVIDE
IN REVITALIZING ‘CIVIL WAR’
149
As our interest waned in the prospect of yet another supervillain threatening to destroy an entire city or planet, Marvel smartly pivoted and turned the conflict inward. With the near inevitability of a civilian death toll any time the Avengers are involved in an incident, the UN steps in with an accord proposing regulation and oversight. Essentially now, the Avengers need permission before they jump into action.
Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) is for it. Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans) is against it. And the rest of the Avengers must decide where they side, leading to some interesting alliances - like Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) going against her pal Cap, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) positioning against his friend Black Widow, and so on.
Some of it is rather silly, especially the villain Zemo, whose somewhat nonsense plan leaves a lot to chance and coincidence. Daniel Brühl, as always, is great in the role, but still little more than a plot device - as though the screenwriters thought that it would be too dark for the good guys to fracture without a push from a manipulative outsider.
The good news is that this Avengers movie in disguise keeps everything rather intimate for a superhero movie. There are only so many times these films can get away with scenes of massive destruction - the thrill (and horror) of the spectacle starts to dull. In “Civil War” the combat is mostly hand-to-hand, the stakes are personal, and the set pieces small. The showdown of the superhero teams is confined to an airport runway, for instance.
150
151
152
Image: Gary He153
That airport sequence, by the way, is exceptionally entertaining. It’s both witty and visually engaging and worth the price of admission. Cap, Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Hawkeye, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) face off against Iron Man, Black Widow, War Machine (Don Cheadle), Vision (Paul Bettany) and the two newbies, Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman).
It’s also hard not to be a little cynical about the obvious corporate machinations of “Civil War,” like the introduction of Spider-Man and Black Panther - two characters who we already know are getting their own movies. Every moment with them feels like a trailer, and like the best trailers, we see only the finest stuff. “Civil War” dares you to not be won over by Holland’s youthful comedic charm and Boseman’s depth as the stoic prince in the killer suit.
154
We also can conjecture, for instance, that Spider-Man doesn’t ultimately have much of an impact on the plot because the actual Spider-Man movie will eventually come from Sony, not Disney. Does any of this really matter if the movies are good? No, of course not. We just know too much about the roadmap to make any of it seem spontaneous, surprising and organic. Characters can’t just break out from the pack on their own merits. If they could, Marvel probably would have resurrected the idea for a Black Widow movie by now.
The thing is, Marvel makes it funny, and that charm and care is what has and will keep audiences coming back over and over again.
“Captain America: Civil War,” a Walt Disney Studios release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “extended sequences of violence, action and mayhem.” Running time: 147 minutes. Three stars out of four.
155
156
157
Image: Anna Pantelia158
Was it a blip, or a breakthrough?
Scientists around the globe are revved up with excitement as the world’s biggest atom smasher - best known for revealing the Higgs boson four years ago - starts whirring again to churn out data that may confirm cautious hints of an entirely new particle.
Such a discovery would all but upend the most basic understanding of physics, experts say.
The European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN by its French-language acronym, has in recent months given more oomph to the machinery in a 27-kilometer (17-mile) underground circuit along the French-Swiss border known as the Large Hadron Collider.
In a surprise development in December, two separate LHC detectors each turned up faint signs that could indicate a new particle, and since then theorizing has been rife.
“It’s a hint at a possible discovery,” said theoretical physicist Csaba Csaki, who isn’t involved in the experiments. “If this is really true, then it would possibly be the most exciting thing that I have seen in particle physics in my career - more exciting than the discovery of the Higgs itself.”
After a wintertime break, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, reopened on March 25 to prepare for a restart in early May. CERN scientists are doing safety tests and scrubbing clean the pipes before slamming together large bundles of particles in hopes of producing enough data to clear up that mystery. Firm answers aren’t expected for weeks, if not until an August conference of physicists in Chicago known as ICHEP.
159
On Friday, the LHC was temporarily immobilized by a weasel, which invaded a transformer that helps power the machine and set off an electrical outage. CERN says it was one of a few small glitches that will delay by a few days plans to start the data collection at the $4.4 billion collider.
The 2012 confirmation of the Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle” by some laypeople, culminated a theory first floated decades earlier. The “Higgs” rounded out the Standard Model of physics, which aims to explain how the universe is structured at the infinitesimal level.
The LHC’s Atlas and Compact Muon Solenoid particle detectors in December turned up preliminary readings that suggested a particle not accounted for by the Standard Model might exist at 750 Giga electron Volts. This mystery particle would be nearly four times more massive than the top quark, the most massive particle in the model, and six times more massive than the Higgs, CERN officials say.
The Standard Model has worked well, but has gaps notably about dark matter, which is believed to make up one-quarter of the mass of the universe. Theorists say the December results, if confirmed, could help elucidate that enigma; or it could signal a graviton - a theorized first particle with gravity - or another boson, even hint of a new dimension.
More data is needed to iron those possibilities out, and even then, the December results could just be a blip. But with so much still unexplained, physicists say discoveries of new particles - whether this year or later - may be inevitable as colliders get more and more powerful.
160
161
Dave Charlton, who heads the AVtlas team, said the December results could just be a “fluctuation” and “in that case, really for science, there’s not really any consequence ... At this point, you won’t find any experimentalist who will put any weight on this: We are all very largely expecting it to go away again.”
“But if it stays around, it’s almost a new ball game,” said Charlton, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in Britain.
The unprecedented power of the LHC has turned physics on its head in recent years.
162
Whereas theorists once predicted behaviors that experimentalists would test in the lab, the vast energy being pumped into CERN’s collider means scientists are now seeing results for which there isn’t yet a theoretical explanation.
“This particle - if it’s real - it would be something totally unexpected that tells us we’re missing something interesting,” he said.
Whatever happens, experimentalists and theorists agree that 2016 promises to be exciting because of the sheer amount of data pumped out from the high-intensity collisions at record-
163
Image: Brice164
high energy of 13 Tera electron Volts, a level first reached on a smaller scale last year, and up from 8 TeVs previously. (CERN likens 1 TeV to the energy generated by a flying mosquito: That may not sound like much, but it’s being generated at a scale a trillion times smaller.)
In energy, the LHC will be nearly at full throttle - its maximum is 14 TeV - and over 2,700 bunches of particles will be in beams that collide at the speed of light, which is “nearly the maximum,” CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier said. He said the aim is to produce six times more collisions this year than in 2015.
“When you open up the energies, you open up possibilities to find new particles,” he said. “The window that we’re opening at 13 TeV is very significant. If something exists between 8 and 13 TeV, we’re going to find it.”
Still, both branches of physics are trying to stay skeptical despite the buzz that’s been growing since December.
Csaki, a theorist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, stressed that the preliminary results don’t qualify as a discovery yet and there’s a good chance they may turn out not to be true. The Higgs boson had been predicted by physicists for a long time before it was finally confirmed, he noted.
“Right now it’s a statistical game, but the good thing is that there will be a lot of new data coming in this year and hopefully by this summer we will know if this is real or not,” Csaki said, alluding to the Chicago conference. “No vacation in August.”
165
166
167
168
On a recent Thursday, the staff at Sunny Vista Living Center in Colorado Springs bustled in the kitchen. The phone rang with a last minute order as Chris Willard tended to a large pot of Thai-style soup with fresh ginger, vegetables and thin-sliced beef.
It was a special meal for a woman of Asian descent who didn’t like any of the dozen choices on the menu.
“You have to be creative,” said Willard, a chef with an easy smile and a long mustache, who is the nursing home’s food service director. Earlier that day, he had received a thumbs-up for his gluten-free pancakes.
Sunny Vista is part of a slow but growing trend among the nation’s 15,600 nursing homes to abandon rigid menus and strict meal times in favor of a more individualized approach toward food.
Advocates pushing for the change say it has taken more than three decades to get to this point.
Now, the federal government is proposing regulations that would require facilities to create menus that reflect religious, cultural and ethnic needs and preferences, as well. Further, the proposed rules would empower nursing home residents with the “right to make personal dietary choices.”
The government acknowledges that the nation’s 1.4 million nursing home residents are diverse and that “it may be challenging” to meet every preference. But it wants facilities to offer residents “meaningful choices in diets that are nutritionally adequate and satisfying to the individual.”
169
Regulations aside, Donna Manring, owner of Innovative Dinning Solutions, a consulting firm, said that aging Baby Boomers will put pressure on nursing homes to adapt by offering such menu items as organic vegetables, locally-sourced meat and gluten-free or vegetarian options.
“Put your seatbelts on because expectations are going to grow greatly,” Manring said.
While Sunny Vista is ahead of the proposed changes, advocates for seniors say many nursing homes are still stuck in time, operating like hospitals and offering a limited number of unsavory meals.
The ability to choose what to eat and when to do so is hugely important for seniors’ quality of life, said Amity Overall-Laib, director of the National Long-Term Care Ombudsman Resource Center.
Issues with the quantity, quality and variation of meals rank among the top 10 complaints of nursing home residents and their relatives or friends.
Shannon Gimbel, the lead ombudsman for the Denver region, said the complaints go beyond the chicken being too dry or too tough. She’s stepped in to advocate for seniors who weren’t getting enough food or whose requests for fresh vegetables were ignored for far too long.
“There are more options than there have ever been,” Gimbel said. “Do I think it stills needs to be better? Yes, I do.”
Under current regulations, food is supposed to be palatable. But Penny Shaw, a nursing home resident in the Boston area and an advocate
170
171
172
for nursing home reform, said she’s been served overcooked vegetables and watery mashed potatoes.
“Who would want to eat that?” asked Shaw, 72.
Shaw said her nursing home offers menu choices, but they are limited. She’d love to order a soup cooked from scratch, kiwis instead of melon and have an avocado once in a while. But the soups are pre-made, and kiwis and avocados are not offered, she said.
“Person-centered implies individualized and I don’t think that’ll ever happen,” Shaw said.
Part of the problem is cost. In fiscal 2014, nursing homes spent a daily average of $20.07 per person on dietary costs, which includes the cost for raw food and kitchen staff, according to the American Health Care Association, which represents nursing homes. But those costs vary widely across the country. In Texas, the average is $14.54; while New York is $23.97.
Janet Burns, chief executive at Sunny Vista, said the cost of fresh food is lower than prepackaged meals, but labor costs are higher. Her dietary costs were $1.08 higher than the nation’s average in 2014. However, she said, higher costs are offset by things like preventing weight loss, a problem experienced by many nursing home residents. For example, she said, medication to increase a resident’s appetite is more expensive than preparing a special meal.
Costs aside, Burns said, “It’s the right thing to do.”
Sandra Simmons, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies quality of care and life in institutional settings, says studies have shown that the daily caloric intake of 50 percent to
173
Image: Alexander Raths174
70 percent of nursing home residents is below recommended levels, she said.
The issue, she argues, isn’t just food choices but low staffing levels. Many nursing home residents need physical help or, if they have dementia, they need cues or encouragement to eat. If staff members are stretched thin, they might not be able to provide that level of care. And that means that even if there are choices, residents might not get them.
Back at Sunny Vista, resident Althea Jones said it’s been difficult to express her opinions about food, something ingrained in her since childhood. No one told her she had a right to do so, she said. Now she’s being encouraged to speak up - and her voice is being heard. “I love beans,” said Jones, 85. “I don’t eat cattle or pigs, but I can eat chicken.”
175
176
ONE DANCE (FEAT. WIZKID & KYLA)Drake
H.O.L.Y.FloriDa GeorGia line
THIS IS WHAT YOU CAME FOR (FEAT. RIHANNA)Calvin Harris
LET HIM FLY (THE VOICE PERFORMANCE)alisan Porter
7 YEARSlukas GraHam
DON’T LET ME DOWN (FEAT. DAYA)tHe CHainsmokers
THE THRILL IS GONE (THE VOICE PERFORMANCE)laitH al-saaDi
WORK FROM HOME (FEAT. TY DOLLA $IGN)FiFtH Harmony
NOmeGHan trainor
I GOT A WOMAN (THE VOICE PERFORMANCE)aDam WakeFielD
177
178
TRAVELLERCHris staPleton
MONTEVALLOsam Hunt
LEMONADEBeyonCé
VIEWSDrake
NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC, VOL. 58various artists
KILL THE LIGHTSluke Bryan
BLURRYFACEtWenty one Pilots
25aDele
화양연화 THE MOST BEAUTIFULMOMENTIN LIFE: YOUNG FOREVERBts
THERAPY SESSIONnF
179
180
불타오르네 FIRE Bts
BLACK SWEAT PrinCe
CAKE BY THE OCEANDnCe
H.O.L.Y.FloriDa GeorGia line
THE SOUND OF SILENCEDisturBeD
NOmeGHan trainor
WORK FROM HOME (FEAT. TY DOLLA $IGN)FiFtH Harmony
EPILOGUE : YOUNG FOREVERBts
NEW ROMANTICStaylor sWiFt
THIS ONE’S FOR ME AND YOU(FEAT. NEW EDITION)JoHnny Gill
181
182
OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEWkeePinG uP WitH tHe karDasHians, season 12
BLOOD IN THE STREETSFear tHe WalkinG DeaD, season 2
VERDICTtHe GooD WiFe, season 7
RENDER SAFEmaDam seCretary, season 2
DRIVEQuantiCo, season 1
ARE WE OUT OF THE WOODS YET?sHaHs oF sunset, season 5
#BRIDEZILLA#riCHkiDs oF Beverly Hills, season 4
THE INVISIBLE HANDelementary, season 4
EPISODE 1tHe niGHt manaGer, season 1
EPISODE 2tHe niGHt manaGer, season 1
183
184
15TH AFFAIRJames Patterson & maxine Paetro
THE CROWNkiera Cass
MONDAY (TIMELESS SERIES #1)e. l. toDD
DOMINATEDmaya Banks
THE TRIALS OF APOLLO, BOOK ONE:THE HIDDEN ORACLEriCk riorDan
THE LAST MILEDaviD BalDaCCi
ME BEFORE YOUJoJo moyes
DARE TO TAKECarly PHilliPs
MISTER Olauren Blakely
THE APARTMENTDanielle steel
185
The military is launching tests on the world’s largest unmanned surface vessel - a self-driving, 132-foot ship designed to travel thousands of miles out at sea without a single crew member on board.
The so-called “Sea Hunter” has the potential to revolutionize not only the military’s maritime service but commercial shipping - marking the first step toward sending unmanned cargo vessels between countries, according to military officials, who showed off the ship in San Diego on Monday before it was put in the water.
MILITARY TESTS UNMANNED SHIP DESIGNED TO CROSS OCEANS
186
187
The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, developed the ship along with Virginia-based Leidos. DARPA will test it in conjunction with the Navy over the next two years off California’s coast. The tests will largely focus on its ability to react on its own to avoid collisions with seafaring traffic.
During the testing phase, the ship will have human operators as a safety net, but once it proves to be reliable, the autonomous surface vessel will maneuver itself - able to go out at sea for months at a time.
Program manager Scott Littlefield said there will be no “remote-controlled driving of the vessel,” instead it will be given its mission-level commands telling it where to go and what to accomplish and then software will enable it to drive itself safely.
The military initially built the diesel-powered ship to detect stealthy electric submarines, but developers say they believe it has the capability to go beyond that, including doing mine sweeps. There are no plans at this point to arm it.
“There are a lot of advantages that we’re still trying to learn about,” Littlefield said.
Among them is the possibility that the full-size prototype could pave the way to developing crewless cargo vessels for the commercial shipping industry someday, he added. Countries from Europe to Asia have been looking into developing fleets of unmanned ships to cut down on operating costs but the idea has sparked debate over whether it’s possible to make robotic boats safe enough to run on their own far from land.
188
189
The International Transport Workers’ Federation, the union representing more than half of the world’s more than 1 million seafarers, has said it does not believe technology will ever be able to replace the ability of humans to foresee and react to the various dangers at sea.
The “Sea Hunter” was built off the Oregon coast, and moved on a barge to San Diego’s coastline to begin testing. The prototype can travel at a speed of up to 27 knots per hour, and is equipped with a variety of sensors and an advanced optical system to detect other ships, Littlefield said.
The program to develop the ship cost $120 million, though Littlefield said the vessels can now be produced for about $20 million.
During the collision tests, the ship will be programed to follow international traffic rules for boats of its size, Littlefield said. There are no standards for unmanned ships yet, but he believes that could change if vessels like this one make it out of the experimental stage.
The Navy over the years has experimented with a number of unmanned systems - from drone helicopters to small, remotely controlled boats launched from ships. The Pentagon’s budget over the next five years calls for investing in more high-end Naval ships, including $600 million to be invested in unmanned undersea vehicles.
190
Image: Gary HeImage: John F. Williams191
Image: Paul Sancya192
Fiat Chrysler and Google will work together to more than double the size of Google’s self-driving vehicle fleet by adding 100 Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
The companies announced the agreement on Tuesday, saying that Chrysler engineers would work with Google to install sensors and software so the vans can drive themselves.
The added vehicles are needed as Google expands real-world testing. Google says it will own the gas-electric hybrid vans, and it’s not currently licensing autonomous car technology to Fiat Chrysler or anyone else. Both companies are free to work with others as well.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
FIAT CHRYSLER, GOOGLE TO COOPERATE ON AUTONOMOUS MINIVANS
193
The added vehicles are needed as Google increases real-world testing in four cities including Mountain View, California; Austin, Texas; Kirkland, Washington; and the Phoenix area. Initially the vans will be tested by Google on its private test track in California, but eventually they’ll make their way to public roads.
It’s the first time Google has worked directly with an auto company on installing self-driving sensors and computers. The 100 newly redesigned minivans would be “uniquely built” for Google’s self-driving technology, FCA said in a statement. Both companies will have engineers at a site near Detroit to work on the vans.
Image: Webb Bland194
195
“The opportunity to work closely with FCA engineers will accelerate our efforts to develop a fully self-driving car that will make our roads safer,” said John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s project.
The agreement could give FCA an inside track to manufacturing vehicles for Google because its engineers would become experienced with what Google needs. But neither company would comment on possible future deals.
Currently Google’s 7-year-old autonomous car project, which is now part of the so-called X lab at Alphabet Inc., Google’s Mountain View-based parent company, has 21 Lexus SUVs modified to drive autonomously, plus another 33 pod-like small cars.
Fiat Chrysler - which has lagged bigger, richer rivals like Volkswagen AG and General Motors Co. in the development of self-driving cars - will welcome the chance to test Google’s technology. The Italian-American automaker also has manufacturing expertise and factories that Google lacks.
Google has set a goal of having self-driving cars in the public’s hands by 2020.
Image: Paul Sancya196
197
198
The Hungarian government wants to drive out ride-hailing app Uber from the country while proposing new legislation to crack down on unlicensed passenger transport, officials said Monday.
Taxi drivers have held several demonstrations against Uber and unlicensed drivers, slowing traffic in Budapest and petitioning authorities to ban the U.S. company, whose European headquarters are in Amsterdam.
Uber was “consciously and cynically breaking every Hungarian law,” said Janos Fonagy, state secretary at the Ministry of National
HUNGARY AIMING TO DRIVE UBER
RIDE-HAILING APP OUT OF COUNTRY
199
Development. “The aim is to make impossible in Hungary the activities of this company which ignores the rules, and totally oust them from Hungary.”
The government has proposed new legislation increasing penalties for unlicensed drivers - who could lose their license for up to six months and their cars for up to three years - and banning apps like Uber for up to a year.
Fonagy said after a meeting with representatives of 16 taxi companies and transportation groups that parliament was expected to approve proposals later this month. He also urged taxi drivers to meet users’ demands, for example, by increasing the use of apps.
Earlier, Uber said the planned rules, which could affect 1,200 drivers and 150,000 users, could be unconstitutional and violate EU law.
“This unprecedented proposal destroys much-needed jobs ... and will cut the country off from exciting digital developments being embraced across Europe and the world,” Zoltan Fekete, Uber’s general manager in Hungary, said in a statement.
For their part, taxi drivers said they planned to go ahead with a protest scheduled for Tuesday afternoon which would block traffic on roads in downtown Budapest, including the Chain and Liberty bridges, which span the Danube River.
“There is nothing new in the government proposals. We’ve heard these promises before,” protest organizer Geza Gottlieb said. “The only thing authorities would really need to do is enforce existing regulations.”
Uber Technologies, Inc. is based in San Francisco.
Image: Laszlo Balogh200
201
AppleMagazine © Copyright 2015-2011. All Rights Reserved.No part of the document may be circulated, quoted, or reproduced for distribution without prior written approval.
Proper Trademark Notice and Attribution iPad™, iPhone™, iPod™, Mac™, iMac™, Macbook™, iOS™, OS X™ are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the US and other countries.Please contact support for additional trademark ownership rights information.
The following is a list of Apple’s trademarks and service marks http://www.apple.com/legal/ trademark/appletmlist.html.All other trademarks are the properties of their owners.
AppleMagazine is an independent publication and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Apple Inc.
Authorized Publisher
APPLEMAGAZINE VIDEO CHANNEL
Pedro Miszewski Video Director / Producer
Laurel Hislip Host
WRITERS
Precise English Inc. Benjamin Kerry (UK) Gavin Lenaghan (UK) Craig Lenaghan (UK) Elena Lusk (US)
COLUMNS
iTUNES REVIEW Benjamin Kerry
FINANCE NEWS Associated Press / Bloomberg
REVISION
Gavin Lenaghan Elena Lusk
PRODUCTION SUPPORT / COLLABORATORS
Rui da Costa Roger Gayalkar Lise Berda Susan Kiesling James Jarvis Richard Sawyer Lauren Brown Robert Fluellen Matthew Coburn Raquel Serrano Jeffrey Milks Lisa Swiniarski
PRIVACY POLICY applemagazine.com/privacy-policy/
TERMS OF USE applemagazine.com/terms-of-use/
SOCIAL NETWORKS
Twitter @apple_magazine twitter.com/#!/Apple_Magazine
Facebook facebook.com/applemagazineinternational
SUBSCRIPTIONS
AppleMagazine Official Website applemagazine.com
Zinio LLC. zino.com
Readr Newsstand readrapp.com
Magzter Newsstand magzter.com
Amazon Newsstand amazon.com
Ebsco/Flipster ebsco.com
Scoop Newsstand (Singapore) getscoop.com
CONTACTS
Suport & CRM - [email protected] Magazine and Website Editor - [email protected] Executive Director - [email protected] Advertise - [email protected]
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOREXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Ivan Castilho Chief Executive Officer / Design Conception
MINDFIELD DIGITAL ART & GRAPHIC DESIGN
Glauco Ribeiro Chief Design Officer / Art & Graphic Design Director
Michael Danglen Art & Graphic Design Producer
Anderson Oliveira Art & Graphic Design Producer
OFFICIAL WEBSITE
Yogh Inc. WordPress Production & Website Support
Lucas Carvalho Production Director
Fellipe Giesel Web Designer / Producer
Filipe Siems Web Designer / Programmer
MASTHEADAPPLEMAGAZINE INTERNATIONALapplemagazine.com
![Apple Magazine No.121 (Feb 21, 2014) [p.78-87]](https://img.pdfslide.us/doc/110x75/577cd0871a28ab9e78927ee4/apple-magazine-no121-feb-21-2014-p78-87.jpg)
![Apple Lisa: "It Works" Pamphlet [May 1983]](https://img.pdfslide.us/doc/110x75/577cd52d1a28ab9e789a1558/apple-lisa-it-works-pamphlet-may-1983.jpg)
![Apple Lisa: LisaWrite Brochure [May 1983]](https://img.pdfslide.us/doc/110x75/577cd52d1a28ab9e789a1554/apple-lisa-lisawrite-brochure-may-1983.jpg)
