Advice that should be?given to modern people considering marriage: “Before you marry, consider this, ‘Is this the person I’d like to watch stare at their phone for the rest of their lives?” In the Greek myth of?Sisyphus, Sisyphus, as punishment for aspiring to immortality, is given the task to roll a boulder up a hill every morning only to have it roll back down every night. A grisly situation that, every morning, he must remedy by rolling the boulder back up the hill. There are plenty of aphorisms about the digital human condition, many of them quite astute: “Email is a to-do list given to you by other people” is one of my favorites. So is the one at the beginning of this post. If you’d really like to drill down, “The problem with email is that it’s email” is up there, as long as you realize that email is just today’s go-to stand-in for all of human communication. If you?re like most people in information technology, you could spend 16 hours of your day replying to email without even touching anything else.?You could achieve the ludicrous construction of Inbox Zero, and still, the next morning, wake up to Inbox 276. It’s overwhelming, and absurd, but for those of us who rely on that number to feel confident or useful, we start leak emailing. Answering an email in a taxi, or right before a meal or, the worst, after sex. You become the person whose phone is more alluring than other people, the person who’d rather have a digital conversation than a regular one. Because your phone is the closest form of drug, your job becomes what you do in your spare time and even in your most intimate moments. You are a textbook case of Existentialism. In layman’s terms, you suck. “Does the realization of the absurd require suicide?” Albert Camus asked in his own spin on the Sisyphean myth. “No. It requires revolt,” he answers. And no, setting up a douchey auto-reply highlighting how important you are, another textbook case of Existentialism, is not the answer. Every blogger who complains about email is just complaining about how popular they are. I’m at Inbox 46,761 — a success problem. The revolt required in this case, before you spend six hours or more of your day in email, is to train people to not expect an answer. And to be
CAIRO (AP) ? The military leader of al-Qaida's Yemeni branch says Americans will not be safe unless their leaders respect the security of other nations and do not attack or oppress them.
In a message addressed "to the American nation," Qassim al-Rimi, commander of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, said: "your security is not achieved by despoiling other nations' security or by attacking and oppressing them."
The six-minute English-subtitled audio, posted on a militant website late Saturday, implored Americans to "leave us with our religion, land and nations and mind your own internal affairs."
Al-Rimi said the bombing of the Boston marathon in April, and the recent sending of ricin-tainted letters "indicate that the control of your security has broken away." The video was produced by al-Qaida's media arm, al-Malahem Foundation.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? At the height of the financial crisis, bargain hunters would gather each week on county courthouse steps to bid on foreclosed properties throughout Northern and Central California. The inventory lists were long, especially in hard-hit areas such as Sacramento and Stockton. But the auctions were generally short affairs ? often because real estate speculators were illegally fixing the bidding process.
In the past three years, federal prosecutors have charged 54 people and two companies in three states for bid-rigging during courthouse auctions of foreclosed properties. Most cases originated in California, the state with the highest foreclosure rate during the financial crisis. Nearly identical rings were also broken up in Raleigh, N.C., and Mobile, Ala.
Working in concert, the would-be buyers would appoint just one person to bid on each property on the auction block, thus securing the "winning" bid. Minutes after the official proceeding was over, they would then conduct an auction among themselves, often on the same courthouse steps.
That's when a property's true price would emerge. The conspirators would then divvy up the difference paid at the official auction and the private one.
Federal prosecutors say such schemes have operated for decades, once earning a few thousand dollars per property. But the explosion of foreclosures amid the country's financial meltdown a few years ago upped illicit gains to millions of dollars. The scammers took money that otherwise would have gone to banks selling the foreclosed properties or beleaguered homeowners who should have been compensated.
The bidding investigations are being driven by a special task force established at the U.S. Department of Justice in the wake of the financial crisis to combat mortgage fraud. The probes aim to "stop those who engage in illegal conduct that thwarts the competitive process, and take advantage of American consumers when they are most vulnerable," said Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer, head of DOJ's antitrust division in Washington, D.C.
Prosecutors say the circle of conspirators gradually widened at each courthouse: First-time buyers would be brought into the conspiracy as an increasing number of speculators attended the auctions. Those not in on the schemes were often pressured not to return by verbal harassment and, in some cases, physical jostling.
In the last two years, more than 30 people have pleaded guilty to participating in a series of courthouse bid-rigging conspiracies in Northern California counties. Another 11 have been busted in Central California. Similar prosecutions have been carried out in Alabama, where eight people have pleaded guilty in Mobile in the last two years. Five others have pleaded guilty in North Carolina since 2010 to operating a bidding conspiracy around Raleigh.
For many now going to prison, this is their first brush with the law.
Father and son Robert and Jason Brannon were each sentenced to 20 months in prison this month in Mobile, Ala., after pleading guilty to participating in 17 rigged bids. The two opened a real estate investment company in 2003, after Robert Brannon sold a portion of the family farm. When they began attending auctions to acquire rental properties, they discovered that some speculators were rigging the bids and joined in the conspiracy, according to court documents.
In addition to the jail time, the Brannons were ordered to pay restitution of almost $22,000 each, their cut from the rigged auctions.
In April, real estate investor Mohammed Rezaian pleaded guilty to participating in similar scams in Northern California. He has agreed to cooperate in the prosecution of other perpetrators and pay a fine of $213,000. He also faces a little less than two years in prison when sentenced sometime next year. Neither he nor his lawyers returned phone calls.
Federal officials say they expect to charge a few more people in the coming months but that cases are expected to soon drop off now that the heated foreclosure market of late 2008 and 2009 has cooled.
Madeline Schnapp, an economist with PropertyRadar, a company that tracks foreclosures, said sales at auctions have fallen from a height of about 30,000 a month to about 5,000 a month in California as government programs and new laws have made it more difficult for banks to begin foreclosure proceedings.
"There's not much of a supply now," she said.
Paul Pfingst, a lawyer who represents another investor charged in participating in a Central California ring, says illegal temptation got the better of many speculators who couldn't resist victimizing seemingly unsympathetic banks. His client, Andrew Katakis, is accused of participating along with four others in a $2.5 million conspiracy to rig bids in the Stockton area, which has led the nation in foreclosures.
"The amount of money and properties that were changing hands was staggering," said Pfingst, who maintains his client's innocence. "It caused many people to cross from legality to illegality."
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, May 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, May 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, May 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, May 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., speaks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential LIbrary in Simi Valley, Calif., Friday, May 31, 2013. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Friday that Republicans could appeal to a broader electorate in blue states like California by connecting with voters who have shunned the party in the past and by being big enough to agree to disagree on some issues.
Paul, who is considering a presidential campaign in 2016, said the path to victory needs both principle and pragmatism, noting that the GOP is consistently losing campaigns on the West Coast, in New England and in Midwest states like Illinois. Invoking President Ronald Reagan during his speech, Paul said Republicans need to become a "bigger, more inclusive party" to restore their fortunes.
"I think the party can be big enough to allow people who don't all agree on every issue. It's not going to change who I am or what I talk about but I think we can be a big enough party to include people," Paul said at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. "It's like when you talk to your family ? do you agree on every issue?"
Paul, the son of former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, said the party should not "dilute" its message of limiting government's reach and curtailing spending but said it needs to put together a broader coalition that includes Hispanic and black voters. He urged Republicans to appeal to voters on issues like the environment and education that have been more associated with Democrats.
"If we want to win in bluish-getting-bluer states like California, we have to change the current perceptions of who we are," he said.
The libertarian senator has challenged Republicans to confront the results of the 2012 election, saying it requires outreach to new voters and a willingness to reform government. He won applause at the California speech when he pointed to a bill he has introduced that would require the Senate to hold off voting on a measure for one day for every 20 pages of legislation it considers. He quipped that President Barack Obama's health care reform law would have required a long wait.
The speech honoring Reagan, who remains revered within the party, capped a month that took Paul to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. He held fundraisers in Silicon Valley earlier in the week and met with executives and employees representing technology companies such as Google, Facebook and eBay.
In June, Paul is scheduled to headline fundraisers in South Carolina and make another trip to Iowa, giving him more visibility among Republicans searching for someone to help it rebound from two terms under Obama.
"When the Republican Party looks like the rest of America, we'll win again," Paul said.
___
Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas
My name is Nathan (RC) Peters. In March 2011, I was hired on as a contract Quality Assurance tester to work at Certain Affinity studios in Austin, Texas. I worked on the multiplayer portion of Halo 4. Here is an inside look at the reality of being a contract worker within a video game company, and why you should never accept a job as a contractor.
Prior to this job, I had only one other QA job, and that was for Activision in Santa Monica, California. I found the job on Craigslist, applied, and was called in for an interview. At that time I was much younger, and desperate for a job. Plus, who wouldn?t want to play video games for money? After a week of training I was assigned to a team, and ended up working QA for the PC title Quake Wars: Enemy Territory.
After that project was done, I left the industry and transitioned into the music business. I did quite well. I was a producer, sound designer, and composer. I ended up having a song in Tiger Woods 2004, signed a 64 song deal with MTV Studios, and composed music from home on various indie projects which netted me IMDB.com credits.
In 2009, I moved back home to Austin, Texas where I unsuccessfully ran a small music agency. The business was abundant, and I was successful in booking some good talent, and even got a couple artists onto Pandora radio. However, the return-on-investment (ROI) was not there. I sunk a big chunk of my earnings from music royalties into the company, and within a year had made nothing back. On top of that, I got a divorce.
At that time I was much younger, and desperate for a job. Plus, who wouldn?t want to play video games for money?
In late 2010, I closed shop on my business, sold off every bit of music equipment I had, and sold off all of my possessions, except for my Xbox 360. I moved in with my sister and decided I needed to start over. With all of my free time, I managed to pick up Battlefield 3 on release (I was already playing Bad Company 2, and played the BF3 Beta to level cap). I would play it about eight hours a day, and eventually saw that I was ranked 3,338 on the Xbox leaderboards. I then made the decision to try and get back into the gaming industry.
Now, at this time I had no degree to speak of (as of this writing I am an undergraduate at the Art Institute of Austin, majoring in a BS of Audio Production) so I knew I probably had to start back at the bottom of the ladder. I felt that, if I could get my foot in the door, within a year, whatever studio that hired me would realize that I would be quite an asset for their audio team.
S
I applied everywhere. I used indeed.com to filter out job postings. I must have submitted 50+ resumes. After five months and roughly six interviews (all conducted on the phone either with an HR rep within the studio or with a representative from a temp agency) I nailed an in-person interview at Certain Affinity.
I had done my research and knew that Max (the studio head) came from Bungie and the original Halo 2 Multiplayer world. They had also worked on Call of Duty: Black Ops, and so I was getting very excited. When I showed up for my interview, I sat in the lobby, extremely over-dressed and nervous as I was staring at a life-sized Master Chief statue who was protecting me in the lobby with his dual-wielding SMGs.
The interview was casual and even fun. I remember being asked if I had identified any bugs in recent AAA titles. In fact, I had. In Skyrim, I wanted to change my Xbox button configuration so the sprint mirrored that of most first-person shooters. In doing so, I noticed that if you equipped a torch, and used the new button to sprint?by clicking the right thumbstick?you could sprint indefinitely, without losing stamina, and even after the torch ran out. They laughed, and my future QA manager even said, ?Well that is probably how they exploit those speed runs!?
I got hired. The Halo 4 multiplayer QA team consisted of 10 males, ranging in age from 22 all the way to my age, which was 32 at the time. My QA manager was young, maybe mid-twenties. (Although I never asked.) Every single one, with the exception of my manager, was a contractor. I was the noob of the team and got assigned two maps: one was near Alpha complete, getting ready for E3, and the other was still in block-out phase. Readers will know these maps as Adrift and Meltdown (whose name I personally suggested) but at the time they were called Warehouse and Canyon.
My first couple of months there were an absolute dream come true. Certain Affinity is a smaller studio?at the time there were about 62 employees. Everyone sat on the same level, including Max, and the layout was like a call center. It had a great kitchen, gourmet coffee, and tons of snacks. We got lunches on numerous occasions. The atmosphere was killer, laid back and super friendly.
Some readers may be thinking, ?Well what is the problem here? This sounds awesome!? ...Truth be told, it was like being Jon Snow or Theon Greyjoy under the Stark roof.
One of the cool things we did at CA were playtests. A lot of playtests! For nine months I literally played Halo 4 every day for money. We would grab the newest build and go into a closed room with 16 Xboxes and play various modes, checking code and, most importantly, monitoring host and client frames per second.
These playtests would always be a mixture of QA, developers, coders, producers and artists. It was not uncommon to see Max hang out and observe or even play.
Most of the sessions were fun, but there was also a nasty air of "nerd-dickdom" competitiveness. Controllers were slammed; F bombs were dropped; homosexual slurs were tossed about (and I know for a fact we had some gay workers in the studio). So yeah, it was grown-up nerds making a video game.
At this point in the article, some readers may be thinking, ?Well what is the problem here? This sounds awesome!? Truth be told, it wasn?t, and it was because I was a contractor. It was like being Jon Snow or Theon Greyjoy under the Stark roof. Yes, people may talk to you, or relatively like you, but you are not accepted. The smiles, and jests and "bottle talk" always seemed phony, and the reason was because I was temp?in fact, my whole department was.
One of the reasons I took this job was because they sold me on the fact that, if I did well, and showed promise, that it would be a real possibility to get hired on full-time. I sure as hell did not accept it for the whopping pay rate of $11 an hour. So being older and a bit more experienced in the work world, I took the job by the horns and ran with it. I did everything I could to stand out. I asked a ton of questions about code, the debug, the game modes, everything. I talked to all the producers and developers and level designers I could to ensure we were on the same page and also so they would know my name.
Once, I worked an entire weekend on a voluntary basis. Halo 4 primary developer 343 wanted to cut our signature mode: Dominion. At that time, it was broken as hell and really unbalanced. The concept was outstanding, but there were a crap load of balancing issues. 343 was always tinkering with kits and available weapons, so the devs were having a hard time balancing ordnance drops.
We worked all weekend while coders would cook up frankenbuilds, and even Max stayed for the majority of the sessions. After long playtests he would take us in the kitchen and personally ask everyone in the group their thoughts. I felt like I was a part of something special.
They will work you to death and they will promise you potential, but it is for nothing. You will never truly be a part of anything. It is time to seriously consider unionizing, or organizing a major strike.
Towards the end, things started to fall apart. It was not all of Certain Affinity?s fault. 343 was changing things on a daily basis. It was a very frustrating experience from what I observed, and we even lost our super designer Charlie, who was one of the original guys at Infinity Ward. Charlie was awesome, a hippy genius with just a pinch of ego. But he was approachable and I commend him for his patience, because that guy would ask for and receive an overwhelming amount of good and bad criticism on some of his proposed modes.
Management was a joke at CA. I was shifting tasks on a daily basis. One day I was helping another contractor with audio stuff (hoping this would grant me my in with the company), the next I was doing a collision pass on my map which I had already done two times in hope of cramming a few more bugs into our bug-tracking software JIRA so our "numbers" were up. Our contractor team leads were really no help either.
In the end, I put my two week notice in, just about two weeks before Halo 4 was released. At this point we were already bugging DLC maps, I was assigned to what is now known as "Skyline" (another one that was my suggestion). At the time of my announcement, I had given up. Post Halo 4, I wanted some type of assurance. Who wouldn?t? I asked for a one-dollar raise, and never heard anything back. In fact, instead of learning in person, I had to call my temp agency, who then called Certain Affinity, who then called me back to say that CA denied it.
Editor's Note: We reached out to Certain Affinity to get their side of the story. They sent over the following statement, from director of talent & culture Susan Bollinger: "Thank you for reaching out to us. We can confirm that Mr. Peters was a QA tester here, contracted through a 3rd party agency. Obviously what he had to say is of concern. We are sorry to hear that he feels he did not have a positive experience, as we have established our policies and practices to create the best possible working environment for everyone, contractors and otherwise."
We were supposed to have employee evaluations with our manager as well as a producer, and that never happened. The only team meetings we ever had were ones to berate us about using Gchat in ?non-professional? ways. And to remind us that we were contractors and should be honored to even have this job. I stopped going in, and would show up whenever. Eventually they just terminated my contract before my official two weeks expired. I knew it was coming and didn?t care.
This article was written in hopes to inspire all would-be workers to not accept positions as contractors in the game industry. I am not simply speaking about Quality Assurance. We at CA had contract audio designers, coders, and level designers. A lot of the amazing concept artists were contractors as well. It is a flawed system, and it will get you nowhere. (I realize that this is a gross generalization but I am sticking to that statement.)
They will work you to death and they will promise you potential, but it is for nothing. You will never truly be a part of anything. It is time to seriously consider unionizing, or organizing a major strike. The AAA titles for Christmas are in full swing right now, and I would personally love to see the jaws dropping at all the major studios if every single contractor attached to a title simply did not show up. I worked on the biggest title of 2012. I know the talent that is out there, and you know who you are, too. We are all too good to be treated like this. There is a right way, and a wrong way to conduct business, and underpaying overqualified designers and artists is just not right.
Are you in the gaming industry? Do you have an opinion about this? Sound off below.
Secrets of the cicada's soundPublic release date: 31-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Catherine Meyers cmeyers@aip.org 301-209-3088 American Institute of Physics
Of all the bugs that achieve the mantle of summer pest, cicadas are perhaps the most curious. They don't sting, they don't bite, they don't buzz around your head, they taste good in chocolate, but as the drowning din of the 17-year brood this summer will remind: we would love them less if they emerged more often.
Cicadas are unique among insects in their ability to emit loud and annoying sounds. So why would anyone actually want to replicate theses sounds?
A team of U.S. Naval researchers have been working on that very problem for several years now, because it turns out that the humble cicada has naturally solved a compelling unmet challenge in underwater communication: how to make an extremely loud noise with a very small body using very little power.
At the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal, the team, based at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, RI, will present their latest results analyzing the cicada's sound first steps toward making devices that would mimic it for remote sensing underwater, ship-to-ship communications, rescue operations and other applications.
How Cicadas Make Their Sound
Humans have marveled at the periodic emergence of cicadas for thousands of years, and as far back as the 1940s, scientists have tried to uncover the secrets of this strange insect. But only recently has it been possible to carefully measure the physical properties of the cicada using lasers to simultaneously measure the vibration of its "tymbals," the corrugated exoskeleton on the insect responsible for its sound, explained Derke Hughes, a researcher at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
Hughes works on an unfunded project to uncover the insect's secrets in his spare time, collaborating with other volunteers. In Montreal, Hughes and his colleagues will present work on the nonlinear nature of cicada mating calls.
Their analysis shows is that the insects manage to produce their incredibly large sound because they have a unique anatomy that combines a ribbed membrane on the torso that vibrates when they deform their bodies.
While that basic insight is clear, the problem of reproducing the sound is still daunting, Hughes said. He has not yet worked out an accurate physics-based model that describes how the cicada makes its sound when it deforms its body. "We're still working on it," he said.
A second talk in Montreal will describe an attempt to give a fuller physical explanation of how the cicada generates sound. The explanation, in brief, is that a buckling rib is arrested in its rapid motion by impact with the part of the cicada's anatomy called a tymbal, which functions somewhat as a gong being hit by a hammer. It is set into vibration at nearly a single frequency, and the vibration rapidly dies out.
Like Buckling All Your Ribs at Once
To understand how the cicada makes its sound, you would have to imagine pulling your ribs to the point of buckling collapse, releasing them and then repeating that cycle, said Hughes.
If your body were like that of a cicada, he explained, you would have a thick set of muscles on either side of your torso that would allow you to cave in your chest so far that all your ribs would buckle inward one at a time into a deformed position. Releasing the muscle would allow your ribs to snap back to their regular shape and then pulling the muscle again would repeat this. The cicada repeats this cycle for its left and right sides about 300 to 400 times a second.
"That's basically what's happening in the cicada," Hughes said.
Replicating this sound is a challenge because the cicada's chirp is nonlinear it is not a simple matter of one part moving and the sound emerging from that. The buckling is not a uniform process, and the tymbal surfaces vibrate out of phase with each other and then somehow combine to make a sound that can drown out even the noisiest summer barbecues.
Why Cicadas Make Noise
The cause for all that chirping is nature's oldest, Hughes said. Cicada males make sounds to attract nearby females, who respond by snapping their wings. The male hears this and responds to by moving closer.
A few years ago Hughes and his colleagues showed that as the male cicada approaches the female, its sound gets softer. Hughes described this as the cicada putting on its best bedroom voice and uttering the insect equivalent of "hey, baby."
In field experiments, he and his colleagues showed that they could trick the male cicada by making a snapping sound that mimics the female.
###
The presentations 1pAB11 and 1pAB10, "Nature of nonlinear mechanisms in the generation and propagation of sound in the cicada mating call" and "Buckling as a source of sound, with application to the modeling of cicada sound generation," are in the afternoon session of Monday, June 3. Abstracts: http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.jun13/asa151.html and http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.jun13/asa150.html
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ICA 2013 MONTREAL
USEFUL LINKS:
Main meeting website: http://www.ica2013montreal.org/
Itinerary planner and technical program: http://acousticalsociety.org/meetings/ica-2013/
WORLD WIDE PRESS ROOM
ASA's World Wide Press Room will be updated with additional tips on dozens of newsworthy stories and with lay-language papers, which are 300-1200 word summaries of presentations written by scientists for a general audience and accompanied by photos, audio, and video.
PRESS REGISTRATION
We will grant free registration to credentialed journalists and professional freelance journalists. If you are a reporter and would like to attend, contact Jason Bardi (jbardi@aip.org, 240-535-4954), who can also help with setting up interviews and obtaining images, sound clips, or background information.
This news release was prepared for the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), Acoustics Today magazine, ECHOES newsletter, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. For more information about ASA, visit our website at http://www.acousticalsociety.org.
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Secrets of the cicada's soundPublic release date: 31-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Catherine Meyers cmeyers@aip.org 301-209-3088 American Institute of Physics
Of all the bugs that achieve the mantle of summer pest, cicadas are perhaps the most curious. They don't sting, they don't bite, they don't buzz around your head, they taste good in chocolate, but as the drowning din of the 17-year brood this summer will remind: we would love them less if they emerged more often.
Cicadas are unique among insects in their ability to emit loud and annoying sounds. So why would anyone actually want to replicate theses sounds?
A team of U.S. Naval researchers have been working on that very problem for several years now, because it turns out that the humble cicada has naturally solved a compelling unmet challenge in underwater communication: how to make an extremely loud noise with a very small body using very little power.
At the 21st International Congress on Acoustics (ICA 2013), held June 2-7 in Montreal, the team, based at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, RI, will present their latest results analyzing the cicada's sound first steps toward making devices that would mimic it for remote sensing underwater, ship-to-ship communications, rescue operations and other applications.
How Cicadas Make Their Sound
Humans have marveled at the periodic emergence of cicadas for thousands of years, and as far back as the 1940s, scientists have tried to uncover the secrets of this strange insect. But only recently has it been possible to carefully measure the physical properties of the cicada using lasers to simultaneously measure the vibration of its "tymbals," the corrugated exoskeleton on the insect responsible for its sound, explained Derke Hughes, a researcher at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
Hughes works on an unfunded project to uncover the insect's secrets in his spare time, collaborating with other volunteers. In Montreal, Hughes and his colleagues will present work on the nonlinear nature of cicada mating calls.
Their analysis shows is that the insects manage to produce their incredibly large sound because they have a unique anatomy that combines a ribbed membrane on the torso that vibrates when they deform their bodies.
While that basic insight is clear, the problem of reproducing the sound is still daunting, Hughes said. He has not yet worked out an accurate physics-based model that describes how the cicada makes its sound when it deforms its body. "We're still working on it," he said.
A second talk in Montreal will describe an attempt to give a fuller physical explanation of how the cicada generates sound. The explanation, in brief, is that a buckling rib is arrested in its rapid motion by impact with the part of the cicada's anatomy called a tymbal, which functions somewhat as a gong being hit by a hammer. It is set into vibration at nearly a single frequency, and the vibration rapidly dies out.
Like Buckling All Your Ribs at Once
To understand how the cicada makes its sound, you would have to imagine pulling your ribs to the point of buckling collapse, releasing them and then repeating that cycle, said Hughes.
If your body were like that of a cicada, he explained, you would have a thick set of muscles on either side of your torso that would allow you to cave in your chest so far that all your ribs would buckle inward one at a time into a deformed position. Releasing the muscle would allow your ribs to snap back to their regular shape and then pulling the muscle again would repeat this. The cicada repeats this cycle for its left and right sides about 300 to 400 times a second.
"That's basically what's happening in the cicada," Hughes said.
Replicating this sound is a challenge because the cicada's chirp is nonlinear it is not a simple matter of one part moving and the sound emerging from that. The buckling is not a uniform process, and the tymbal surfaces vibrate out of phase with each other and then somehow combine to make a sound that can drown out even the noisiest summer barbecues.
Why Cicadas Make Noise
The cause for all that chirping is nature's oldest, Hughes said. Cicada males make sounds to attract nearby females, who respond by snapping their wings. The male hears this and responds to by moving closer.
A few years ago Hughes and his colleagues showed that as the male cicada approaches the female, its sound gets softer. Hughes described this as the cicada putting on its best bedroom voice and uttering the insect equivalent of "hey, baby."
In field experiments, he and his colleagues showed that they could trick the male cicada by making a snapping sound that mimics the female.
###
The presentations 1pAB11 and 1pAB10, "Nature of nonlinear mechanisms in the generation and propagation of sound in the cicada mating call" and "Buckling as a source of sound, with application to the modeling of cicada sound generation," are in the afternoon session of Monday, June 3. Abstracts: http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.jun13/asa151.html and http://asa.aip.org/web2/asa/abstracts/search.jun13/asa150.html
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE ICA 2013 MONTREAL
USEFUL LINKS:
Main meeting website: http://www.ica2013montreal.org/
Itinerary planner and technical program: http://acousticalsociety.org/meetings/ica-2013/
WORLD WIDE PRESS ROOM
ASA's World Wide Press Room will be updated with additional tips on dozens of newsworthy stories and with lay-language papers, which are 300-1200 word summaries of presentations written by scientists for a general audience and accompanied by photos, audio, and video.
PRESS REGISTRATION
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This news release was prepared for the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) by the American Institute of Physics (AIP).
ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), Acoustics Today magazine, ECHOES newsletter, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. For more information about ASA, visit our website at http://www.acousticalsociety.org.
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Razer promised it was aiming to iterate its Blade gaming laptop on a yearly basis, and despite the company's recent focus on tablets, it appears to be keeping its word. Today, a mere eight months after releasing the second-gen Blade, Razer unveiled two new members of the Blade family: the 17-inch Blade Pro and its 14-inch sibling. As you might expect, the Pro tops its elders with new silicon and storage options. It's exchanging third-gen Intel Ivy Bridge silicon for a fourth-gen Haswell chip and upgrading from an NVIDIA GTX 660M to a GTX 765M GPU. Oh, and Razer's nixed the HDD options from the big Blade's menu -- the Pro packs a 128GB SSD standard, with optional upgrades to 256 or 512GB. That new hardware is evidently smaller than what it's replacing: though the Pro shares the same size chassis as its predecessor, it packs a 74Wh battery (the older Blade has a 60Wh cell). Other than that, the Blade Pro comes with Razer's Switchblade interface, a trio of USB 3.0 ports, 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 and a 1920 x 1080 display, just like the prior Blade.
Meanwhile, the new 14-inch Blade will come with mostly the same hardware as the Pro, meaning it's got a Haswell chip and GTX 765M graphics along with a buffet of SSD choices. Those components are stuffed inside a chassis that measures 13.6 x 9.3 x 0.66 inches, and weighs 4.13 pounds. Naturally, given its smaller size, it lacks the Switchblade LCD and buttons, has a 1.3 megapixel webcam (as opposed to the Pro's 2 megapixel unit) and a 14-inch 1600 x 900 display. And, despite its relatively svelte dimensions (for a portable gaming rig), the baby Blade still has a 70Wh battery inside. The Pro starts at $2,299, or $200 less than prior Blades and the 14-inch model will set you back a minimum of $1,799. Each will be available in North America in Q2, with a worldwide rollout of the Pro coming sometime later this year.
Update: Good news, Indie game developers! Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan just announced that those devs with a successfully funded Kickstarter can get a new Blade Pro for just $999.
Advice that should be?given to modern people considering marriage: “Before you marry, consider this, ‘Is this the person I’d like to watch stare at their phone for the rest of their lives?” In the Greek myth of?Sisyphus, Sisyphus, as punishment for aspiring to immortality, is given the task to roll a boulder up a hill every morning only to have it roll back down every night. A grisly situation that, every morning, he must remedy by rolling the boulder back up the hill. There are plenty of aphorisms about the digital human condition, many of them quite astute: “Email is a to-do list given to you by other people” is one of my favorites. So is the one at the beginning of this post. If you’d really like to drill down, “The problem with email is that it’s email” is up there, as long as you realize that email is just today’s go-to stand-in for all of human communication. If you?re like most people in information technology, you could spend 16 hours of your day replying to email without even touching anything else.?You could achieve the ludicrous construction of Inbox Zero, and still, the next morning, wake up to Inbox 276. It’s overwhelming, and absurd, but for those of us who rely on that number to feel confident or useful, we start leak emailing. Answering an email in a taxi, or right before a meal or, the worst, after sex. You become the person whose phone is more alluring than other people, the person who’d rather have a digital conversation than a regular one. Because your phone is the closest form of drug, your job becomes what you do in your spare time and even in your most intimate moments. You are a textbook case of Existentialism. In layman’s terms, you suck. “Does the realization of the absurd require suicide?” Albert Camus asked in his own spin on the Sisyphean myth. “No. It requires revolt,” he answers. And no, setting up a douchey auto-reply highlighting how important you are, another textbook case of Existentialism, is not the answer. Every blogger who complains about email is just complaining about how popular they are. I’m at Inbox 46,761 — a success problem. The revolt required in this case, before you spend six hours or more of your day in email, is to train people to not expect an answer. And to be
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Public release date: 31-May-2013
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