Lasers are indisputably awesome, and NASA just made them a little more so by zapping a record-breaking 622 Mb of data per second between the moon and earth as a part of its Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD). Pulsed laser beams were shot from ground control at the White Sands Test ...Stepping out for a night in support of the arts, Michelle Williams and Dianna Agron were in attendance at the Whitney Museum of American Art Gala & Studio Party in New York City on Wednesday (October 23).
Both actresses looked gorgeous and elegant in black frocks as they made their way down the arrivals carpet at Skylight at Moynihan Station.
Per the popular Big Apple museum's website, the Whitney Museum houses one of the world's foremost collections of modern and contemporary American art.
It offers educational programs, family events, lectures and readings, as well as a free daily tours.
Design isn’t something you would normally associate with a VC firm. But as more firms are adding value-added services, Google Ventures has created an all-star team of designers from Google, Mozilla and more to help portfolio startups create beautiful and easy-to-use products. In particular, Google offers its portfolio startups the opportunity to participate in a Design Sprint, which is an intensive, visual bootcamp around a design problem for portfolio companies.
We were able to embed ourselves in one of these recent sprints, in which a few members of the Google Ventures Design team were helping CircleUp, a startup that connects investors with retail and consumer companies that wouldn’t attract traditional venture funding. The entire process, which would normally take six months for a startup to work through, is compressed to five days (hence the word “sprint”), and starts with the design team spending time with the startup’s product and engineering teams to understand the problem and challenge.
Day two is spent drawing out and sketching a number of solutions, day three is when the team decides which idea is best for the user, and day four is spent developing a prototype. Lastly, GV’s design team and the startup expose the design to potential users to understand what works with the design and what needs to be changed. As GV Design Partner Jake Knapp explains, this thinking and structure is based on a strategy developed by IDEO and Stanford’s d.school.
As we witnessed with CircleUp’s sprint, the entire process is interactive, visual and effective, ending with real prototypes that have been tested by real users. The room where the Design Sprint takes place looks like a real research and testing lab, complete with pictures, Post-its and voting stickers all over the walls, as well as a giant timer clock.
With CircleUp, we sat down with Knapp, who previously worked on design for Google Search, Chrome, Ads, Gmail, Apps, Google+, Security, Commerce and the 2011 Google-wide redesign, as well as Braden Kowitz, the first designer to join GV who also led design for Google Buzz, Gmail, Apps for Business and more.
CircleUp founder Ryan Caldbeck tells us that GV taught his team how to think differently about design and come to conclusions that could have taken months. And Caldbeck tells us that the company adopted the eventual product that came out of the sprint, adding, “Ninety percent of what we used came from the process we went through with the GV Design Studio. The design sprint helped us completely redesign our core page, which helps investors evaluate private companies on CircleUp.”
In total, the Google Ventures Design Studio has done 27 design sprints for portfolio companies so far this year and 28 user research sprints. Last year they did about 30 design sprints and about 30 research sprints. It’s clearly a unique service that most other VC firms do not supply.
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Saturday's hottest ticket in New York City was to see a band nobody's heard of. The Reflektors burned through a fan-only presale, and tickets hit the secondary market at prices high as $5,000 — a hefty sum to see any band, much less a band yet to release its first album, in Bushwick's warehousiest corridors. That's like half a year's rent for that neighborhood. But the hype was real. Based only on the "Is-this-really-happening?" disbelief stretching the faces of all the superfans and industry types in the audience, you'd think they were about to see a band that would never play a skuzzy converted depot in east Brooklyn: U2 or Bruce Springsteen, or, I don't know, Arcade Fire.
The thing about the musicians on stage was that they looked a lot like Arcade Fire. Despite his Jack White-like red shirt and white tie, the bassist's flaming red hair drew Richard Reed Parry comparisons. And they sounded like Arcade Fire, too. They even covered "Sprawl II." And that's because — (no) surprise! — The Reflektors was Arcade Fire. That cat was never really in the bag. After a little tongue-in-cheek stage banter ("We started three years ago. We were nervous to play New York because we heard you're standoffish!"), a gold-suited Win Butler and his band ran through a set of mostly unheard tracks from their upcoming album Reflektor, masquerading as a brand new band riding the promotional cycle for its first album.
But the group that played at 299 Meserole this weekend, no matter what you called them, was clearly neither a set of wide-eyed naïfs dropping their first 12", nor the band that made sneaking out of your parents house feel like toppling the Berlin Wall. The musicians were belied by more than their popularity; never mind that most in attendance — who embraced the show's "formal" dress code with thrifted tuxes, reflective masks or fratty banana suits — only got access to buying these tickets after pre-ordering Reflektor. They're also darker, and maybe a more disillusioned, too. "We're so excited to play CMJ," Butler called out sarcastically. "Thank you so much to all the industry types who offered to sign our band!"
But the plucky effrontery that has underpinned all Arcade Fire's work to date is crumbling. The band has told stories about struggling under somebody's thumb since its 2003 debut album Funeral. Songs like "Wake Up" and "Crown of Love" captured an anthemic emotional power, half hope and half rebellion, unmatched by the group's successors and copycats. The songs bloomed around refrains that felt bigger than any stadium they eventually filled. But this is less so on Reflektor. The new songs Arcade Fire played Saturday were full of new (mostly rhythmic) ideas coming to the fore and many old (mostly romantic) identifiers fading away.
Some saw that change coming when Arcade Fire announced that James Murphy, the David Bowie-obsessed former face of LCD Soundsystem and head of disco-punk label DFA, was announced as Reflektor's producer. He introduced the band at the show. Others heard it in the album's dynamic, Bowie-featuring first single, which abandoned that operatic Springsteenian populism for pop reflective of the transformations undertaken by their arena-sized predecessors the Talking Heads and U2 (there's that similarity again).
That change got its first full public display in Bushwick. Take "We Exist," for one. Four years ago an Arcade Fire song with titles that way might've sounded like "Born to Run," but when that "Hang On To Your Love"/"Your Cover's Blown" bassline crept out beneath the venue's Murphy-esque disco balls and reflective hanging polygons, it left no ambiguities about the type of music Arcade Fire is now interested in making. Fans of the group should have been safe assuming they'd get the standard fare of marching violinists yowling to the rafters, but instead were blindsided by Sade. With strings marginalized and two miscellaneous percussionists in tow, this group looked and sounded more like Stop Making Sense than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
This departure is not a totally clean break from their last work, 2010's Grammy-winning, Twitter-enraging The Suburbs. There were of course the type of joyful moments Arcade Fire is known for (see the swelling "Supersymmetry"), and brand new sounds, like the Princely backup vocals of "It's Never Over (Orpheus)" and the murky rave-up "Here Comes the Night Time." But taking the stage in the throes of a transformation didn't always work in Arcade Fire's favor. The band sometimes sounded uninspired performing new songs they'd written in their old style (like the underwhelming "Joan of Arc") or those that didn't do Butler's heady aspiration to sound like "a mash up of Studio 54 and Hatian voodoo" real justice (the chopped reggaeton of "Flashbulb Eyes"). Some old favorites even looked limp in their new duds (like the beloved "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)"), while others ("Haiti") sound suddenly prophetic of where the band has touched down.
Gone is the jubilation of the Arcade Fire of days past. The crowd occasionally felt awkward inside the band's new big beat, and responded to Butler's post-encore announcement that there would be no more Reflektors, or Arcade Fire, tonight but rather a DJ set from James Murphy for those who wanted to "dance all night," with more than a smattering of boos. But the band itself is dancing toward something that'll lead it outside the sounds their old crowd formed around. Seeing that live was alone worth the price of admission.
DANVERS, Mass. (AP) — A 14-year-old high school student described by classmates as soft-spoken and pleasant was accused of killing a well-liked math teacher, whose body was found in the woods behind the school.
Law enforcement officials recovered the remains of 24-year-old Danvers High School teacher Colleen Ritzer early Wednesday, Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett said. The teen, Philip Chism, was arraigned Wednesday in Salem on a murder charge and ordered held without bail.
Ritzer was reported missing late Tuesday night after she didn't come home from work or answer her cellphone. Investigators found blood in a second-floor school bathroom and soon located her body, Blodgett said. He did not say how Ritzer died.
"She was a very, very respected, loved teacher," Blodgett said, calling the killing a "terrible tragedy."
The boy also was reported missing Tuesday after not coming home from school. He was spotted walking along a road in neighboring Topsfield at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Investigators said in court documents that the arrest was made based on statements by the suspect and corroborating evidence at multiple scenes. They said they also recovered video surveillance.
At his arraignment in adult court Wednesday afternoon, Chism's defense attorney argued for the proceeding to be closed and her client to be allowed to stay hidden because of his age. The judge denied the request. The attorney declined to comment outside court.
Ritzer had a Twitter account where she gave homework assignments, encouraged students and described herself as a "math teacher often too excited about the topics I'm teaching."
She was a 2011 graduate of Assumption College in Worcester, a school spokeswoman said Wednesday. She graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in math, a minor in psychology and a secondary education concentration, according to the college's 2011 commencement program.
Chris Weimert, 17, was a student in Ritzer's geometry class last year. He said she had taught at the school for two years and was a warm, welcoming person who would stand outside her classroom and say hello to students she didn't teach.
"She was the nicest teacher anyone could ever have. She always had a warm smile on her face," he said.
Weimert said the suspect, who he knew from seeing him around school, "seemed like a good kid." He said, "It really threw the whole town of Danvers a curve ball."
Kyle Cahill, a junior, said he knows Chism from the soccer team. He said the 14-year-old moved to Massachusetts from Tennessee before the school year began and was a top goal scorer on the school's junior varsity team.
He called him a quiet, nice kid.
"He wasn't violent at all. He was really the opposite of aggressive," Cahill said.
Cahill said there was a soccer team dinner Tuesday night that the accused teen skipped, and team members were wondering where he was.
"We're all just a family. It just amazes me really," he said. "I'm just stunned."
Ryan Kelleher, a senior who also plays soccer, said the arrest of the soft-spoken Chism didn't make sense to him.
"From what I know about him and seeing him every day, it just doesn't add up that he would do such a thing, unless this was all an act to fool somebody," the 17-year-old said.
Kelleher took Ritzer's algebra class last year and said hello to her on Tuesday in the hallway. He said students related to the young teacher, who liked to wear jeans and UGG boots just like the students.
Ritzer lived at home with her 20-year-old brother and her sister, a high school senior. The close-knit family was often outside, barbecuing, spending time together and enjoying each other's company, neighbors said.
Mary Duffy has lived next door to the Ritzers in the comfortable, suburban neighborhood in Andover since the family moved there more than two decades ago. She had known Colleen Ritzer from the time she was a baby and said the Ritzers' oldest child had just one ambition in life: to be a high school math teacher.
"All I ever heard is that she loved her job," Duffy said.
Ritzer's uncle Dale Webster provided a brief written statement in which the family asked for privacy.
"At this time, we are mourning the tragic death or our amazing, beautiful daughter and sister," the statement read. "Everyone that knew and loved Colleen knew of her passion for teaching and how she mentored each and every one of her students."
There was no reason to believe anyone else was involved and there was no public safety danger, authorities said.
All public schools in Danvers, about 20 miles north of Boston, were closed Wednesday.
The high school's students were planning a candlelight vigil Wednesday evening.
Ritzer is the second teacher allegedly killed by a student in the U.S. this week. A Sparks, Nev., middle school teacher was allegedly shot by a 12-year-old student on Monday.
___
Associated Press writer Lynne Tuohy in Andover contributed to this report.
HIV-positive babies rest in an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Treatment right after birth may make it possible for HIV-positive newborns to fight off the virus.
HIV-positive babies rest in an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Treatment right after birth may make it possible for HIV-positive newborns to fight off the virus.
A 3-year-old girl born in Mississippi with HIV acquired from her mother during pregnancy remains free of detectable virus at least 18 months after she stopped taking antiviral pills.
New results on this child, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, appear to green-light a study in the advanced planning stages in which researchers around the world will try to replicate her successful treatment in other infected newborns.
And it means that the Mississippi girl still can be considered possibly or even probably cured of HIV infection — only the second person in the world with that lucky distinction. The first is Timothy Ray Brown, a 47-year-old American man apparently cured by a bone marrow transplant he received in Berlin a half-dozen years ago.
This new report addresses many of the questions raised earlier this year when disclosure of the Mississippi child's case was called a possible game-changer in the long search for an HIV cure.
"There was some very healthy skepticism," Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, tells Shots. She's part of the team that has been exhaustively testing the toddler's blood and considering every possible explanation for her apparently HIV-free state.
Luzuriaga is confident the latest tests prove that the child was truly infected with HIV at the time of her birth — not merely carrying remnants of free-floating virus or infected blood cells transferred before birth from her mother, as some skeptics wondered.
The UMass researcher says there's no way the child's mother could have contributed enough of her own blood plasma to the newborn to account for the high levels of HIV detected in the child's blood shortly after birth.
Similarly, Luzuriaga says, new calculations show that the mother "would have had to transfer a huge number of [HIV-infected] white blood cells to the baby in order for us to get the [viral] signal that we got early on."
Clinching the question as far as the researchers are concerned is the infant's response to anti-HIV drugs that she began receiving shortly after birth. The remarkable earliness of her treatment is a crucial feature that makes this child different from almost any other.
"There's a very characteristic clearance curve of viruses once we start babies on treatment," Luzuriaga says. "The decay of viruses we see in this baby is exactly what we saw in early treatment trials from 20 years ago when we initiated anti-retroviral therapy and shut off viral replication. That's a very different decay curve than you would expect if it were just free virus transferred to the baby."
It might be helpful to recap the unusual, if not unique, features of the Mississippi case.
Her mother did not receive prenatal care, so she was not identified as HIV-infected before delivery. If she had been, she would have received drugs that are highly effective in preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
While the mother was in labor, she got HIV testing, as is routine for women without prenatal care. When that came up positive, Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatrician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, was ready to test the newborn for infection and start anti-retroviral medicines within 30 hours of birth.
The treatment quickly cleared the virus from the baby's blood. Normally such children would stay on antiviral drugs for a lifetime. But in this case the mother – whose life circumstances were reportedly chaotic – stopped giving the child the medication between 15 and 18 months after birth.
Gay and her colleagues caught up to the child when she was 23 months old and were astonished to discover she was apparently still virus-free despite being off treatment. Five rounds of state-of-the-art testing — at UMass, Johns Hopkins, federal research labs and the University of California San Diego — failed to reveal any trace of the virus in her blood.
That led to last spring's report and widely reported hope that the child had been cured of HIV.
But Dr. Scott Hammer, an HIV researcher at Columbia University in New York, is not quite convinced. "Is the child cured of HIV infection? The best answer at this moment is a definitive 'maybe,' " Hammer writes in a New England Journal editorial that accompanied the report.
The reason is that a couple of tests done when the child was about 2 years old found indications that her system may contain pieces of RNA or DNA from HIV. This hints that some of the nucleic acid building blocks of the virus are hanging around within her blood cells.
There's no evidence these "proviral" remnants are capable of assembling themselves into whole viruses that can make copies of themselves. But researchers are concerned about that possibility and how it might be headed off.
"The question is whether those viral nucleic acids have the ability at some point to replicate and allow a rebound of the virus," Luzuriaga acknowledges. "That's why it's important to continue to test the baby over time." She says that means years.
But for now, the signs from the Mississippi child's case are encouraging enough to have generated an ambitious global human experiment that Luzuriaga says is in final planning stages.
Women who present in labor without having had prenatal care will be tested for HIV and, if positive, their infants will be intensively treated within a couple of days of birth, as the Mississippi child was. Then they'll be followed with the most sensitive tests to determine if the virus has been eradicated.
If certain criteria are met, researchers plan to decide whether it would be safe to discontinue HIV treatment deliberately and follow the children closely to see if the virus returns. (If it did, treatment would be restarted.)
If the experiment succeeds, it would be a huge advance in the prevention of childhood HIV and AIDS in many parts of the world. More than 9 out of 10 of the world's 3.4 million HIV-infected children live in sub-Saharan Africa, where many women deliver without having had prenatal care or HIV treatment. Around 900 children are newly infected every day.
Meanwhile, researchers pursuing an HIV cure will convene next month in San Francisco to consider various strategies — for adults as well as children. One other recent glimmer of hope was provided this summer by Boston researchers who reported that two HIV-infected men with lymphoma remain virus-free without treatment for several months after stopping antiviral treatment.
October 22, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> HAPPENING TODAY: In case you don't realize how fast Apple's iPad business has gone down the tubes, by Henry Blodget: "On October 22nd, Apple is finally launching new iPads. This launch can't come soon enough... despite the launch of a cheaper iPad last year -- the iPad Mini -- the growth of Apple's iPad sales has hit a wall." Business Insider
>>>> Why you're still going to buy Apple's ho-hum iPad upgrade ReadWrite
>>>> iPad 2 remains Apple's most popular tablet, iPhone 5c demand growing Apple Insider
>> ME TOO: Nokia launches tablet, joins large-screen smartphone race, by Matt Smith: "Nokia unveiled its first tablet and two large-screen smartphones... at the annual Nokia World event in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday. The Lumia 2520 tablet, along with its Lumia 1520 and 1620 phablets, are among the last products the Finnish company developed to compete with Apple and Samsung before deciding to sell its handset business to Microsoft. The new Lumias use Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system and will face tough competition from large-screen smartphones from Samsung and Apple, which is also expected to unveil slimmer, faster iPads on Tuesday." Reuters
>>>> Nokia unveils 10.1-inch Lumia 2520, a $499 Windows RT 8.1 tablet coming this fall with LTE and a $150 Power Keyboard TNW
>>>> With a 6-inch display, Nokia's new Lumia 1520 is now the largest Windows Phone $749 list GeekWire
>>>> Nokia updates low-end Asha line with clear cases -- and for the first time, 3G $69, $89, and up VentureBeat
>>>> Nokia Lumia sales reportedly hit record-high numbers last quarter The Verge
>> ORANGE IS THE NEW GREEN: Netflix tops 40 million customers total, more paid US subscribers than HBO, by Richard Lawler: "New original series Orange is the New Black has been a hit and while Netflix still isn't releasing viewing numbers, it says the show will end the year 'as our most watched original series ever.' Yes, bigger than House of Cards." Engadget
>>>> Netflix soars as Hastings seeks to damp 'Euphoria' Bloomberg
>> MICROSOFT MISCHIEF: Microsoft grabbing mobile content to make Windows Phone 'WebApps', by John Callahan: "Just one week ago, Microsoft's Windows Phone head Joe Belfiore said in an interview that the company's mobile OS still lacks a number of major apps in its ecosystem. Now there's word that the company is taking a rather proactive move to add apps to the Windows Phone Store by lifting content from a number of popular mobile web sites and turning them into 'WebApps'." Neowin
>>>> Flipboard coming to Windows Phone 8 and Lumia 2520 tablet Engadget
>>>> Instagram coming to Windows Phone in 'coming weeks' VentureBeat
>>>> Maxthon Cloud Browser comes to Windows Phone PCWorld
>> CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR: They're here! Surface 2, Surface Pro 2 and new accessories now on sale, by Steve Clarke: "Knowledgeable staff are on hand at all Microsoft retail store locations to answer questions and help with Surface setup, so customers have a great out-of-box experience and walk out the door with a product personalized for them." Microsoft Blog
>>>> Problems with Windows/RT 8.1 update continue InfoWorld
>>>> Why does Windows have terrible battery life? Coding Horror
>> CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS: Apple's iCloud cracked: Lack of two-factor authentication allows remote data download, by Violet Blue: "Notorious Russian hacker Vladimir Katalov released findings showing Apple's iCloud vulnerable to unauthorized download access, with iCloud data stored on Microsoft and Amazon servers." ZDNet
>> FORENSICS 101: 6 IT outsourcing lessons learned from Healthcare.gov's troubled launch, by By Stephanie Overby: "The troubled launch of the U.S. federal government's healthcare information exchange is a high-profile example of outsourced IT gone wrong. The $400 million project, which was supposed to be a one-stop online shop for Americans seeking health insurance, made headlines for its bugs and glitches...deadline after deadline was missed on the multi-contractor project for a variety of reasons -- from government agencies slow to issue their specifications to last minute changes to the Healthcare.gov's primary features." CIO
>>>> Release to the open source community the source code to healthcare.gov We the People
>>>> Obama on HealthCare.gov glitches: 'nobody's madder than me' GigaOM
>> TINY SILVER LINING: BlackBerry announces 5 million downloads of BBM for iOS and Android only 8 hours after release, by Mike Beasley: "The app is also now the #1 free app on the iTunes App Store. That number could actually be much higher, as the 5 million applies only to the number of users whose accounts have been activated for use." 9to5Mac
>>>> BBM for Android, BlackBerry's last gasp at relevance CITEWorld
>> DEPARTURE LOUNGE: With David Pogue hire, Yahoo joins journalism investment boom, by Ryan Tate: "Pogue says he's leaving the New York Times after 13 years as the paper's highly visible tech reviewer to lead the forthcoming Yahoo site, where he'll contribute videos and blog posts. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer called the venture 'a major expansion of consumer tech coverage on Yahoo.'" Wired
>>>> Goodbye -- and hello A Note from Pogue
>> Google acquires Android performance startup FlexyCore for a reported $23 million TechCrunch
>> Windows RT 8.1 update again available for download Softpedia
>> Yahoo is ordered to start using Microsoft Search in Hong Kong and Taiwan TechCrunch
>> Top websites secretly track your device fingerprint IEEE Spectrum
>> LG hints at pending Chrome OS devices with trademark filings TechHive
>> SAP's shift to cloud may just be paying off GigaOM
>> Bitcoin has gone on an insane surge Business Insider
>> Unaccredited investors may finally get the go-ahead to fund startups this week AllThingsD
>> Video discovery service Telly (formerly TwitVid) raises $3.4M VentureBeat
>> Sqrrl snags $5.2M to commercialize the NSA's Accumulo database GigaOM
>> CryptoSeal VPN shuts down rather than risk NSA demands for crypto keys Ars Technica
>> Has Big Tech got too big for its boots? Dan Gillmor/The Guardian
>> The world wants to break up with America's internet Motherboard
>> How Knight Capital's buggy software made it lose $172,222 a second for 45 minutes Python Sweetness
>> Dear Startups: Stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code Today Emma Learned
>> More woe for Amazon in Germany as antitrust watchdog investigates its 3rd party pricing practices TechCrunch
>> Fox News reportedly used fake commenter accounts to rebut critical blog posts Media Matters
>> The End of Files -- the biggest revolution in computer usability since the GUI? Brett Geoghegan/Blue Sheep Thinking
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: Thank god I have the newest, fastest iPhone so I can mindlessly check the same three apps 500 times a day. @KevinFarzad
FEED ME, SEYMOUR: Comments? Questions? Tips? Shoot mail to Trent or Woody. Follow @gegax or @woodyleonhard.
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