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Monday, October 28, 2013
Giveaway: A Framed Art.com Print (a $215 Value!)
Enter for your chance to win a framed print from Art.com in our giveaway this week.Source: http://feeds.celebritybabies.com/~r/celebrity-babies/~3/XQ8h7jRtCRo/
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Arcade Fire On Its Brand New Beat
Arcade Fire's new album, Reflektor, comes out Tuesday.
JF Lalonde/Courtesy of the artist
Arcade Fire's new album, Reflektor, comes out Tuesday.
JF Lalonde/Courtesy of the artist
Fans of Arcade Fire might be feeling a bit of culture shock. The group has been called the world's most successful indie rock band — but its new album, Reflektor, explores the Haitian roots of band member Regine Chassagne.
She and her husband, frontman Win Butler, have worked with Haitian relief groups for years; the band has donated more than a million dollars to charities there. Speaking with NPR's David Greene, Chassagne and Butler say the seeds of the idea for Reflektor were planted on a trip they took to Haiti right after winning the 2011 Grammy for Album of the Year, in a total upset.
"And then there's people coming from the mountains to watch us play who've never heard The Beatles before," Butler says of the scene when the band arrived. "You realize, stripped of that context, what you're left with is rhythm and emotion and melody; it kind of gets back to these really of basic building blocks of music. So we kind of wanted to start from there and try and make something out of it."
Reflektor isn't a dance record through and through, but it does incorporate many specific dance rhythms — "Here Comes the Night Time," for example, evokes the Hatian street music known as rara in its faster moments. The title of that song, Butler says, refers to an uncanny sight that can often be seen at dusk on the streets of Port-au-Prince, large parts of which have no electricity.
"Everyone's kind of really hustling to get home because it can be kind of dangerous in a lot of neighborhoods; you have to get home before nightfall. And people have their bags of groceries and they're sprinting in the streets trying to get home," he says. "And then you see, like, three dudes in really sharp suits that are just stepping out to go out to a nightclub or something like that. You kind of have this duality where it's this really exciting atmosphere, but then also really dangerous at the same time.
Chassagne says that though the new album's themes are deeply meaningful to her, she hopes the band has created something that can be appreciated anywhere.
"I'm kind of stuck a little bit in both worlds, so I would like to make something that, basically, my mom could dance. She wouldn't dance to a New Order song, but she would dance to the Haitian beat," Chassagne says. "I want to kind of do something that everybody can lock into."
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GOP set to question Sebelius on health law
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sits on a panel to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act enrollment, Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sits on a panel to answer questions about the Affordable Care Act enrollment, Friday, Oct. 25, 2013, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
FILE - In this Aug. 1, 2012 file photo, Jeffrey Zients testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama is calling Zients to help correct problems with the new federal health care website. The White House says Zients will assist a team that is said to be working around the clock on the site, www.healthcare.gov. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans plan to seek answers from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on the Obama administration's troubled start for its health care website to buy insurance, and are raising concerns about the privacy of information that applicants submit under the new system.
GOP lawmakers said Sunday that the Obama administration will face intense scrutiny this week to be more forthcoming about how many people have actually succeeded in enrolling for coverage in the new insurance markets.
Medicare chief Marilyn Tavenner is scheduled to appear during a House hearing on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by Sebelius before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The officials will also be grilled on how such crippling technical problems could have gone undetected prior to the Oct. 1 launch of that website, healthcare.gov.
"The incompetence in building this website is staggering," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., second- ranking Republican on the panel and an opponent of the law.
Democrats said the new system needs more time and it can be fixed to provide millions of people with affordable insurance. Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, said the system was "working in Kentucky."
But the federal online system experienced another problem on Sunday.
A component of that system that has been working relatively well experienced an outage. The federal data services hub, a conduit for verifying the personal information of people applying for benefits under the law, went down in a failure that was blamed on an outside contractor, Terremark.
"Today, Terremark had a network failure that is impacting a number of their clients, including healthcare.gov," HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said. "Secretary Sebelius spoke with the CEO of Verizon this afternoon to discuss the situation and they committed to fixing the problem as soon as possible."
Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Enterprise Solutions, of which Terremark is a part, said: "Our engineers have been working with HHS and other technology companies to identify and address the root cause of the issue. It will fixed as quickly as possible."
Blackburn said she wanted to know much has been spent on the website, how much more it will cost to fix the problems, when everything will be ready and what people should expect to see on the site. Blackburn and Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., raised questions about whether the website could guard the privacy of applicants.
"They do not have an overarching, solid cybersecurity plan to prevent the loss of private information," said Rogers, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said when consumers fill out their applications, "they can trust that the information they're providing is protected by stringent security standards and that the technology underlying the application process has been tested and is secure."
The botched rollout has led to calls on Capitol Hill for a delay of penalties for those remaining uninsured. The Obama administration has said it's willing to extend the grace period until Mar. 31, the end of open enrollment, providing an extra six weeks. The insurance industry says going beyond that risks undermining the new system by giving younger, healthier people a pass.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who has urged the Obama administration to postpone the March 31 deadline, said she is concerned applicants would not have a full six months to enroll. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who is seeking a yearlong delay to the penalty for noncompliance, said there is a need for a "transition period to work out the things."
The administration was under no legal requirement to launch the website Oct 1. Sebelius, who designated her department's Medicare agency to implement the health care law, had the discretion to set open enrollment dates. Officials could have postponed open enrollment by a month, or they could have phased in access to the website.
But all through last summer and into early fall, the administration insisted it was ready to go live in all 50 states on Oct. 1.
The online insurance markets are supposed to be the portal to coverage for people who do not have access to a health plan through their jobs. The health care law offers middle-class people a choice of private insurance plans, made more affordable through new tax credits. Low-income people will be steered to Medicaid in states that agree to expand that safety-net program.
An HHS memo prepared for Sebelius in September estimated that nearly 500,000 people would enroll for coverage in the marketplaces during October, their first month of operation. The actual number is likely to be only a fraction of that. The administration has said 700,000 people have completed applications.
Blackburn spoke on "Fox News Sunday," Beshear appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press," Rogers was on CNN's "State of the Union," Manchin was interviewed on ABC's "This Week" and Shaheen made her comments on CBS' "Face the Nation."
___
Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-10-28-Health%20Overhaul/id-eeb7156116774de7b0f82b6ff92af9cbTags: dexter Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball nadal grandparents day catherine zeta jones
First Listen: Swearin', 'Surfing Strange'
Swearin's new album, Surfing Strange, comes out Nov. 5.
Courtesy of the artist
Swearin's new album, Surfing Strange, comes out Nov. 5.
Courtesy of the artist
On their 2012 debut, the four members of Swearin' cohered around a consistent sound: fierce and fuzzy and improbably melodic, with choruses you couldn't help shouting along to once you could make out the words. But there was a tension in hearing things turn slightly sweet or slightly sharp, depending on who happened to be singing at the time. That the co-frontpersons, Allison Crutchfield and Kyle Gilbride, are also a couple made things all the more interesting, especially when they sang about love.
With Surfing Strange, out Oct. 29, Swearin' is up from two singers to three, and the personalities at play are even more distinct. Crutchfield's vocals are soft and rounded and tend to sink into their noisy surroundings, letting her tone and the heft of her breaths do as much talking as the words themselves. Gilbride is the best shouter of the bunch, with a nasal edge that could strip paint off hardwood and an acutely cute way of bending his vowels. Bassist Keith Spencer is the group's resident quiet Beatle, or perhaps its James Iha: His hushed turn in "Melanoma" is a spiritual cousin of "Take Me Down," dreamy and sad and sung as if through layers of cheesecloth. And though drummer Jeff Bolt's voice isn't heard, the prankster grin he's known to wear when Swearin' performs is palpable on these recordings as well.
The album opens with the pristine call of a strummed acoustic guitar and ringing bass. It's a moment that feels out of character until Crutchfield appears to deliver an onomatopoeic line — "The crunch of the black ice and the buzz of the semis" — that hints at something heavier. Suddenly, guitar feedback squalls, a kick drum rumbles and the entire ensemble crashes together to meet her challenge. This band does tension right.
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Rob Letterman to Direct 'Captain Underpants' for DWA (Exclusive)
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Nicholas Stoller and Rob Letterman
DreamWorks Animation is dressing down to its skivvies, tapping Rob Letterman to direct Captain Underpants, The Hollywood Reporter has learned exclusively.
Nicholas Stoller has written the script for Captain Underpants, which adapts the popular kids books by Dav Pilkey.
Underpants centers on two fourth graders who are best friends and who draw comics that they sell on the playground. Their creation, Captain Underpants, becomes real when the duo accidentally hypnotize the school's mean principal who turns into an actual superhero.
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Scholastic first launched Underpants in September of 1997, and there are now more than 50 million Pilkey books in print in the U.S. alone. Eight Underpants books have been published in 19 countries, and several have debuted at No. 1 on various best-seller lists, including The New York Times and USA Today.
DWA development executive Damon Ross is overseeing the project, which does not have a release date.
Stoller may have started off on the raunchy side of the film business (he wrote and directed Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek) but has lately been spending time with the fuzzily funny Muppets, co-writing 2011's The Muppets and next year's sequel, Muppets Most Wanted. He is currently back in R-rated territory with his latest feature, Neighbors, which stars Seth Rogen and Zac Efron, hitting theaters in May 2014.
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Letterman is a DWA pro, having directed Shark Tale and Monsters vs. Aliens for the studio.
Letterman and Stoller worked together on 2010's Gulliver's Travels, the Jack Black comedy fantasy that Letterman directed (it was his live-action debut) and Stoller co-wrote.
Stoller is repped by UTA and Ziffren Brittenham. Letterman is repped by WME.
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TiVo to Roamio Users: Roam if You Want To
Ultimately, more devices will support out-of-home streaming, suggested Greg Scoblete, analyst for set-top box devices at Digital Tech Consulting. Still, "I think this is merely an interim step to a truly cloud-based solution -- think Netflix -- that doesn't rely on the vagaries of consumer hardware, apps or the kinds of networks you're streaming over," he said.
TiVo was one of the first to enable consumers to time-shift their TV viewing via DVRs, and now the company is targeting place-shifting capabilities as well with out-of-home streaming via the TiVo Roamio Pro and TiVo Roamio Plus DVRs.
The two Roamio devices were launched earlier this year, but this week the company announced that the functionality to record content to the living room and stream to a mobile device -- including smartphone and tablet -- is now available thanks to a new version of the TiVo iOS app.
"Until now, your shows have been locked up in your set-top box at home," said Jim Denney, TiVo's vice president of product marketing. "Now, with a TiVo Roamio DVR, whether it's a hotel in Denmark, the waiting room at the dentist office, when you're stuck at the airport, or at the gym, out-of-home streaming gives you the level of choice, control and freedom that consumers have come to expect."
Out-of-home streaming requires an Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch device running iOS 5.1 or higher; streaming is supported to only one device at a time. Support for streaming over 4G/LTE and to Android devices is scheduled for 2014.
TiVo declined to provide further details.
Three Models
The TiVo Roamio combines the functionality of a DVR with that of a Slingbox as well as Apple TV or a Roku set top box, allowing users to watch live or recorded content remotely anywhere a user has WiFi. Users can also download the content to an iOS device anywhere so that low bandwidth or lack of WiFi is not an issue.
The Roamio devices also include TiVo's second screen dashboard that provides instantaneous personalized recommendations, remote scheduling and even mobile search and discovery.
The TiVo Roamio DVR Series is available in three models including the TiVo Roamio for US$199.99; TiVo Roamio Plus for $399.99; and the TiVo Roamio Pro for $599.99. These Roamio models feature four or six tuners and range from 75 hours to 450 hours of recording space for HD content.
'Playing Catch-Up'
While TiVo was among the first DVR devices on the market back in 1999, today most cable and satellite providers also include DVR and on-demand options. Moreover, the new Roamio functionality is merely catching up to what Sling has already offered.
"That's how I take it," said Greg Ireland, research manager for multiscreen video at IDC. "It is basically playing catch-up with Sling."
TiVo was "pushed to the side when cable boxes added DVRs," Ireland told TechNewsWorld. "TiVo added Web content into the boxes to differentiate what it did, but this is the next step. This is necessary catch up to be able to position the TiVo box as an enabler for your content when you want and where you want."
Place Shifting
While there has been the ability to time-shift content since the early days of the VCR, it is the DVR that really revolutionized viewing with the notion that coming in a few minutes late didn't mean you couldn't start watching the program from the beginning.
The next logical step was the ability to place-shift the content and take it with you. Such capabilities are already offered by Slingbox devices, which Dish Networks offers, as well as by cable networks and channels offering such as Comcast's Xfinity service and HBO Go.
"What we're seeing is a kind of ad-hoc technological solution to what really is a business model break-down: Consumers want their 'TV everywhere' -- on any device, over any kind of network no matter where they are," Greg Scoblete, analyst for set-top box devices at Digital Tech Consulting, told TechNewsWorld. "Unfortunately, the way content license deals work, not every piece of content can be viewed out of the home on devices that aren't TVs."
What that leads to is "the more cumbersome approach of trying to have third-party hardware, like the TiVo, distribute this content out of the home," Scoblete noted.
"Ultimately, more devices will support this kind of out-of-home streaming," he concluded, "but I think this is merely an interim step to a truly cloud-based solution -- think Netflix -- that doesn't rely on the vagaries of consumer hardware, apps or the kinds of networks you're streaming over." 
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“Post-Print” Startup Stateless Media Creates Short, Smart Documentaries For The Web
My recent conversation with Stateless Media’s Peter Savodnik was a bit discombobulating. He’s had what seems like a successful career in longform journalism, with publications in The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. Yet he sounded awfully pessimistic about print — and as someone who makes his living as a writer, that’s not exactly what I wanted to hear.
On the other hand, Savodnik has a vision for what might replace the feature magazine articles that he used to write, and he’s pursuing it through his new company. (Stateless Media’s website describes the content as “post-print storytelling”.) Traditional media outlets, he argued, aren’t giving the younger audience “what they want.”
“We can lament the fact that people don’t want to read long, thoughtful stories, but that doesn’t change the facts on the ground,” he said. “I guess my very strong feeling is that we have a real opportunity here to reconnect with millions and millions of media consumers.”
The vehicle for that connection is something Savodnik has dubbed the “shortreal”, which is essentially an 11-minute online documentary. Stateless Media has released two shortreals thus far, one called “The Brothers Shaikh” (embedded at the end of this post) and a second called “Chutzpah“. And it just released the trailer for a third (which you can watch below), “Being Radler,” covering “the hunt for an East German spy.”
I thought “Chutzpah”, in particular, was well done — it addresses a familiar topic (politician Anthony Weiner), but in a fresh and entertaining way (and according to the Stateless Media site, it has been viewed 14,326 times).
But what makes a shortreal different from any other online video and actually worthy of a new buzzword? Savodnik argued that the aims are implicit in the name — a shortreal doesn’t take much time to watch (the 11-minute duration was chosen because it’s half the length of a 30-minute TV episode, minus the commercials) and it tells a true story. That storytelling, he added, is what’s missing from many documentaries, some of which are more concerned about being beautiful, while others are “cause-driven” and “predictable”: “We know from the start where we’re being led and what we’re going to think.”
“I have the utmost respect for that, but a story is a real story,” Savodnik said. “There are complicated characters who develop over time.”
The initial shortreals were directed by filmmakers Edward Perkins and Kannan Arunasalam. Perkins told me via email that even though he’s directed documentary films for the National Geographic Channel and behind-the-scenes featurettes for films include The Eagle and Searching For Sugar Man, shortreals are “fundamentally different from anything I have worked on before” because they combine “the best of investigative journalism and documentary filmmaking.”
“People have always wanted to hear great stories, and will continue to do so,” he said. “But the way in which they want to consume stories is changing. We want to give people people these stories exactly how and when they want them. On phones. On laptops. On tablets. And in a short 11 minute format that still explores complex issues, embraces ambiguity, and throws up surprises.”
Arunasalam said that a shortreal is closer to a short film than a documentary, “with a very cinematic look and feel.” He offered this explanation for how they’re put together:
For me, it’s an interesting dynamic between the investigative journalist and the filmmaker working together. Usually, as a filmmaker you’re on your own to tell the story. But here, the story is reported by the journalist, who does the investigating and the digging for characters and story-lines — so far mainly by Peter — and the responsibility of making the film rests with the filmmaker. With the Stateless Media approach, the skills of both filmmaker and journalist are fine-tuned to the storytelling process, to make the best possible film.
Stateless has been self-funded thus far, and it sounds like it’s still very much in the experimental stages — for example, Savodnik said he learned a lot from the production of “The Brothers Sheikh” that led to big improvements in “Chutzpah”.
The ultimate goal, he said, is to build out a team of filmmakers who create shortreals from around the world, and to turn Stateless Media into the destination site for that content: “Basically the stories that we like to tell are stories that are — I guess there’s no other way to put it — unexpected, stories that don’t fit into conventional frameworks.”
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