Monday, March 06, 2006
Lucas: Big pics are doomed
"The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie," said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. "Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'" The portly Lucas, whose "Star Wars" sequel was nominated for the Oscar in makeup, was clearly in Yoda mode at Saturday's Weinstein Co. party — Harvey Weinstein's first Oscar bash since he abandoned Miramax to Disney last year. "I think it's great that the major Oscar nominations have gone to independent films," Lucas told me, adding that it's no accident that the "small movies" outclassed the spectaculars in this year's Academy Awards. "Is that good for the business? No — it's bad for the business. But moviemaking isn't about business. It's about art!"
Was that a smirk? "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies," Lucas declared. "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million."
You heard it here first.
And if the business of Hollywood is in the midst of painful downsizing, so are the parties.
For his traditional post-Oscar splash at Morton's, Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter trimmed the guest list — make that amputated it — by 500 people.
Meanwhile, in the wee hours yesterday, it was business as usual in the garden of the Chateau Marmont. While Sienna Miller flirted up a storm with five guys at her table, the prohibitive favorite for Best Actor, "Capote" star Philip Seymour Hoffman, sat with pals until nearly 3 a.m., eschewing his red-carpet beauty sleep. Oscars? What Oscars?
And it says something that the brightest bauble on the Oscar social scene this weekend very well might have been an empty-eyed flibbertigibbet I have sworn never to recognize (though it was impossible to avoid this person as she repeatedly stepped on her floor-length, strapless Diane von Furstenberg dress in the muddy grass at Barry Diller and von Furstenberg's mogul-infested picnic lunch, ruining the dress and threatening wardrobe malfunction).
Other scenes from the Saturday picnic:
Later on, back at the Weinstein Co. party, William H. Macy lent moral support to his wife, Best Actress nominee Felicity Huffman, as she braved the pre-ceremony jitters. Macy told me: "I will be sooo happy when it's Monday."
Alien Rain Over India
source:http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/03/06/1247207.shtml
Flickr of idea on a gaming project led to photo website
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"It turned out the fun was in the photo sharing," she says.
Fake scrapped the game. She and her programmer husband, Stewart Butterfield, transformed the project into Flickr. In less than two years, the photo-sharing site — now owned by Internet giant Yahoo — has turned into one of the Web's fastest-growing properties.
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"Had we sat down and said, 'Let's start a photo application,' we would have failed," Fake says. "We would have done all this research and done all the wrong things."
Fake and Butterfield's company, Ludicorp, never did launch a game. Yahoo bought the company in March for an undisclosed sum and moved the 11-person team to Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale.
Since then, Flickr has been on a roll, riding the wave of consumer fascination with digital cameras. Shutterbugs are less likely to make many prints these days but still want an outlet to show off their work.
That's where a free, ad-supported site such as Flickr comes in.
Flickr's traffic grew 448% to 3.4 million from December 2004 to December 2005, according to Internet measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings. In the nearly 12 months since Yahoo purchased it, the site went from 250,000 registered users to more than 2 million. About 100 million photos have been posted at the site.
Chad Hurley, CEO of video-sharing site YouTube, is a Flickr fan. He says the site has resonated so quickly with the public "because it brought innovation to a problem people thought was already solved — how to share photos online."
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Flickr's snazzy photo-sharing features set it apart from the dozens of other photography sites. Friends can check out newly posted pictures via searching and add their own "notes" to photos they like.
One distinctive tool lets bloggers simultaneously post photos on their own blogs and at Flickr.
It also uses a tool called "tagging" — adding a few words of text to each posted photo — so that a picture can be easily searched online.
Trip Hosley, co-owner of San Francisco club Shine, became a fan after his brother, Nate, became a father for the second time and tagged pictures of the newborn "Deuce" at the Flickr site. "Within an hour of the birth, there were 100 pictures online that all our family and friends could see, instantly, just by searching for 'Deuce,' " he says.
Hosley even installed a photo booth at Shine where patrons can sit and snap their own pictures and have them instantly uploaded to Flickr.
'Getting' it
Yahoo bought the company as much for Fake and Butterfield as it did to land Flickr, says analyst Charlene Li of market tracker Forrester Research.
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"Caterina is very dynamic, smart and energetic, and her job is to help Yahoo with the social tools," Li says. She calls Butterfield "a brilliant programmer."
Butterfield says Flickr's biggest innovation came from recognizing the social nature of photography.
"It's meant to be shared, talked about, pointed to, saved, archived and available by as many means as possible," he says.
Yahoo has two photo-sharing sites, Flickr and the more traditional "share-and-buy-prints"-oriented Yahoo Photos.
But Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz, the head of technology development, says there's room at Yahoo for multiple areas of photo sharing, just as it offers instant messaging and e-mail as two different communication tools.
Yahoo has kept the Flickr site low-key, with no front-page promotion. Word of mouth is its best marketing tool, Horowitz says.
"The right way to find Flickr is to be invited by a friend, to get plugged into the social network that way," he says. That way, you're more likely to "get it," he says.
Flickr has a spare, hip look that displays photos larger and more stylishly than many others but isn't as simple to navigate as competitors such as Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShare Gallery.
It uses terms such as "photostreams" to describe personal photo collections, "interestingness" to describe cool new pictures and "sets" to describe groups of photos.
There is no simple tool to share pictures via e-mail. Instead, Flickr users must copy the Web address Flickr assigns to the photos into an e-mail.
It's a deliberate omission. "With the kind of growth we've experienced, we're not sure our servers will be able to handle the onslaught from an e-mail application," Fake says.
She says an e-mail function is coming soon: "We know people really want it, we just want to make sure we're prepared."
For now, Flickr users seem untroubled by the lack of a one-click e-mail feature. Ricky Fisher, a Seattle graphic designer, simply shares his pictures with others via the Flickr Web address. What he likes most about the service is its international flavor; he checks out interesting photographs from all over the world.
At the bottom of Flickr's home page are four thumbnail images of the most recently uploaded pictures from the Flickr community. Fisher watches the page to see the new photos and reaches out to photographers whose work he admires.
"You see a lot of amazing stuff this way," he says.
source:http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2006-02-27-flickr_x.htm
Japanese Make Gasoline From Cattle Dung
Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.
"The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said.
About 551,155 tons of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.
Gasoline extracted from cow dung is unheard of, said Tomiaki Tamura, an official of the Natural Resources and Energy Agency. Japan relies almost totally on imports for its oil and gasoline needs.
The team, helped by staff from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology near Tokyo, produced gasoline by adding several unspecified metal catalysts to the dung inside a container and applying a 30-atmosphere pressure and heat of up to 300 degrees Celsius (572 Fahrenheit), Shibusawa said. Details of the catalysts could not be disclosed, he added.
The team hopes to improve the technology so that it can be used commercially within five years, Shibusawa said.
In a separate experiment revealing another unusual business potential for cow dung, another group of researchers has successfully extracted an aromatic ingredient of vanilla from cattle dung, said Miki Tsuruta, a Sekisui Chemical Co. spokeswoman. The extracted ingredient, vanillin, can be used as fragrance in shampoo and candles, she said.
Tsuruta said the vanillin was extracted from a dung solution in a pressurized cooker in a project co-organized by a Japanese medical research institute.
source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060304/ap_on_sc/cow_dung_gasoline
Another Explanation for Multicellular Life
source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/03/2148242
CIO Jury: IT bosses ban Google Desktop over security fears
UK IT bosses are already taking measures to ban employees from downloading Google's Desktop search software on PCs and laptops because of the security risk to corporate data.
Analyst Gartner last week warned that the 'search across computers' feature on the latest version of Google Desktop poses an "unacceptable risk" to many organisations because it allows people to share information and also stores some of that data on Google servers.
Google claims the enterprise version of the software includes security management controls to address corporate security concerns but a sample of UK IT bosses in silicon.com's 12-man CIO Jury user panel said they had already banned or planned to ban any use of Google Desktop within their organisation.


-- Mark Saysell, IT director, Coutts Retail Communications
Phil Young, head of IT at Amtrak Express Parcels, said his organisation's policy is to ban any third-party software that presents a security risk.
He said: "If found by our software auditing tools such installation will be removed and our policies and procedures will be updated accordingly. I think Google is playing with fire in the corporate arena with this latest software."
Mark Saysell, IT director at Coutts Retail Communications UK, said he is planning a network audit to find rogue installations, which will then be de-installed. New security measures will also be put in place to prevent further downloads.
He said: "Google has definitely over-stepped the mark and in turn is forcing IT departments to take a very draconian approach to machine security and web access."
The London Borough of Newham is about to update its information security policy in light of Google Desktop with a recommendation that the software must not be downloaded onto any Newham PC.
Richard Steel, head of ICT at Newham, said: "This is because Newham data will be copied onto Google servers and kept there indefinitely. There is no contract in place between Newham and Google for secure data handling, and under their terms and conditions, they retain the right to search the data for their own purposes."
It is a view backed by Nicholas Evans, European IT director at Key Equipment Finance. He said: "Google has crossed the line from Desktop as a personal search engine to being a tool that can be used to exploit security weaknesses. The sending of data back to the servers only confirms the security risk."
Steve Noyes, CTO at the Met Office, said it isn't just Google Desktop that poses a problem for his organisation. "We have recently stopped people using Google Earth because it has adverse impacts on our networked desktops," he said.
John Odell, group IT director at the BBA Group, described it as a "necessary consequence" of managing "consumer tech" in the enterprise.
Today's CIO Jury was…
Neil Bath, IT director, Brewin Dolphin Securities
Ben Booth, IT director, Mori
Les Boggia, IT division head, Carole Nash Insurance
Nicholas Evans, European IT director, Key Equipment Finance
Mark Foulsham, head of IT, eSure
Christopher Linfoot, IT director, LDV Vans
Steve Noyes, CTO, the Met Office
John Odell, group IT director, BBA Group
Andy Pepper, director of business information systems, Tetley
Mark Saysell, IT director, Coutts Retail Communications UK
Richard Steel, head of ICT, London Borough of Newham
Phil Young, head of IT, Amtrak Express Parcels
If you are a CIO, IT director or equivalent at a large or small company in the private or public sector and you want to be part of silicon.com's CIO Jury pool, or you know an IT chief who should be, then drop us a line at editorial@silicon.com.
source:http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39156914,00.htm
Stem cell agency's fate now in judge's hands
The fate of the nation's most ambitious stem cell research agency will soon rest in the hands of a California judge as the weeklong trial challenging the institute's legality neared conclusion Wednesday.
Three taxpayer groups have alleged in two lawsuits that the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine lacks the proper state government oversight to dole out $3 billion in stem cell grants over the next 10 years. They also accused the board that oversees the agency as being rife with conflict of interests and wrongly exempting itself from the state's open-meeting law.
The trial was expected to end Thursday after lawyers finished wrangling over what e-mail and other written evidence could be considered and then closing arguments were to be submitted in writing to Alameda County Superior Court Judge Bonnie Lewman Sabraw, who will decide the verdict in the non-jury trial.
An influential "working group" of 15 scientists and 7 patient advocates consider grant applications behind closed doors and recommends to the 29-member board that oversees the institute what projects should be funded. Proposition 71, which created the institute and was passed by 59 percent of the electorate in 2004, specifically exempts those grant deliberations from the state's open-meeting law.
Zach Hall, the agency's president, was the only witness called Wednesday and he defended the institute's confidential grant review process as typical and "essential" of such scientific funding endeavors such as the National Institutes of Health.
"This method is confidential because science is a competitive enterprise," said Hall, who is also the agency's top scientist.
Hall also said the confidential grant discussions also bolster frank scientific opinions about applications.
The taxpayers groups said that at least five members of the 29-member board have conflicts because they are University of California officials and the school's various campuses have already applied for stem cell grants. Others on the board are biotechnology executives and investors whose investments could benefit from stem cell grants.
Stem cell agency officials have said that the officials were appointed to the board because they have specialized scientific expertise and that they won't deliberate or participate in any decisions related to the UC campuses they represent.
The institute has been unable to fund any grants because the lawsuits have scared off Wall Street investors who won't purchase any of the $3 billion in bonds until the litigation is resolved. Agency officials say even with a favorable ruling in the trial, it will still take 15 months for bond money to start flowing because of expected appeals.
Still, at least one out-of-state biotechnology company has opened a California lab in hopes of benefiting from Proposition 71 if it is upheld.
Worcester, Mass.-based Advanced Cell Technology formally opened a 10,000 square-foot stem cell lab in Alameda on Tuesday.
"This move to California will allow us to gain significant momentum by being able to take advantage of a favorable environment for funding," said company chief executive William Caldwell.
source:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2006/03/01/financial/f161302S22.DTL