We're all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I'm not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I'm talking about moments that matter - the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that's still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook's now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the 'Dropbox for photos' where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.
MTV Movies team has high hopes for 'The Avengers,' 'Looper' and more. By MTV News staff
Jennifer Lawrence in "The Hunger Games" Photo: Lionsgate
As we while away the last few days and hours of 2011, looking back upon all the great, unforgettable fare that descended upon our cineplexes this year, we can't help but get excited for what the new year will bring us.
We might not get another "Harry Potter," but there's a lot coming down the pike to fill the void: a new "Alien"-esque film in "Prometheus," the gritty and ruthless "Hunger Games," the superhero spectacle "The Avengers," and a brand new Batman, via "The Dark Knight Rises." Here's a brief rundown of what we hope delivers on the hype and makes our "Best of 2012" lists this time next year.
A Successful "Avengers" Assembly I have a lot of high hopes for movies in 2012. I need "Prometheus" to be as awesome as it appears to be, and Christopher Nolan has to send Batman off in style, but perhaps my biggest concern comes in the form of "The Avengers." Bringing Earth's Mightiest Heroes together under one cinematic roof is a lofty idea, and one that could easily explode in Marvel's face. A successful "Avengers" would mean ambitious, world-building films that extend across multiple franchises can exist. An "Avengers" that fails both critically and commercially is nothing short of a gut shot for comics on the big screen. Too much effort and passion, both from filmmakers and fans, has been put into "The Avengers" over the past few years. Marvel absolutely has to get it right ... and I've got all my fingers, toes and what-have-you's crossed that they will. - Josh Wigler
Taylor Kitsch Solidifies His Movie-Star Status Fans of the dearly departed drama "Friday Night Lights" know Taylor Kitsch as big Tim Riggins, the football-playing, bad-boy-with-a-big-heart from Dillon, Texas. But if you've never spent four quarters with the state champion Panthers, you may not be well-acquainted with Kitsch's sizeable acting chops (and even bigger biceps). After all, his big-screen turns ("X-Men Origins: Wolverine," "The Bang Bang Club") haven't left such an indelible mark as his TV alter ego. But that could (and should) all change in 2012, as the 30-year-old headlines two big-budget popcorn flicks: Disney's "John Carter" and the boardgame-cum-potential-blockbuster "Battleship." Here's hoping clear eyes and full hearts really can't lose. - Amy Wilkinson
"The Hunger Games" Takes Out "Twilight" The end of the "Twilight" film franchise is bittersweet. We'll miss our favorite vampires and werewolves, but 2012 marks the arrival of a new franchise that deserves just as much attention and adoration as Stephenie Meyer's fangtastic fantasyland. "The Hunger Games" is not "Twilight" and shouldn't ever be compared as such, but it deserves that blockbuster status. This is a story about survival, self-reliance and discovery, with a female protagonist who is strong, resilient, independent, intelligent and real. In short, Suzanne Collins' creation has everything modern youth-targeted fiction lacks. I pray to the movie powers for Gary Ross' big-screen adaptation to be the biggest success story of the year and that the fan fervor for the "Games" doubles that of "Twilight." - Kara Warner
Luck For "Looper" Looking ahead to 2012, it's impossible to not stop in awe when considering the sheer number of blockbusters I can't wait to see. This is "stars aligning" material. We're talking Batman, Bilbo and Bond, but if I have my way, people will turn out in droves to see a movie they probably haven't heard of yet: Rian Johnson's "Looper." A sci-fi/crime movie hybrid, "Looper" takes place in the near future where mobsters send their enemies back in time where waiting hitmen finish the job. In the film, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis play the younger and older versions of the same character, and if that and the story don't completely sell it, I'm afraid you're lost, my friend. Test screenings left critics raving, and Johnson has made consistently interesting work since his indie debut "Brick." If there is any justice at the movies, people will see "Looper." - Kevin Sullivan
The Milky Way seems to have too few galactic hangers-on, except when it comes to the big ones. What gives?
By John Matson
?|
December 30, 2011?|
STANDOUTS: The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, as seen from the southern hemisphere.Image: Ken Schwarz/Flickr
Our Milky Way is just one of many billions of galaxies that dot the cosmos?an ordinary spiral in a universe filled with them. The unspecialness of our corner of space, an idea known as the Copernican principle, is a cornerstone of modern cosmology. But it doesn't mean that the Milky Way has to be totally average in every respect.
Among the more than 20 satellite galaxies that hover around the Milky Way in a kind of galactic entourage are two large satellites known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Stargazers and navigators have known about them since before the age the telescope. Yet today's astrophysicists have had a hard time explaining how they got there. Computer simulations of galaxy formation and evolution tend not to produce bright satellite galaxies akin to the two Magellanic Clouds. So researchers had to ask: Are the simulations flawed?perhaps in the way that they account for the all-important role of the mysterious dark matter?or is the Milky Way just a bit of an oddball?
With help from new supercomputer simulations and from a universe-mapping telescope project called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the matter now seems to have been settled.
Sloan survey says? Oddball.
In a state-of-the-art affirmation of the earlier models, the latest round of supercomputer simulations again showed that a Milky Way?size galaxy should rarely gather satellites the size of the Magellanic Clouds. And telescopic observations of thousands of real-life galaxies and their satellites have confirmed that theoretical prediction.
"It's really that the Milky Way is sort of unique," says Michael Busha, an astrophysicist currently based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Busha is lead author of a study in the December 20 Astrophysical Journal that compared the results of a new computer simulation, named Bolshoi, to actual galaxy observations from Sloan. In both simulation and observation, the majority of Milky Way?like galaxies have no companions as hefty as the Magellanic Clouds. A handful of galaxies have one such satellite, and very few?roughly 5 to 10 percent?match the Milky Way's count of two large satellite galaxies.
"It's a little odd, but it's not really odd," Busha says of our home galaxy, likening the Magellanic Clouds to an oversize feature on a human face. "One of my colleagues calls them 'the big ears of the Milky Way,'" he says. "You look like a normal person, you don't look strange, you just happen to have large ears."
The discrepancy between how the Milky Way looks and how theory said it ought to look "has been nagging some of us for a number of years," says cosmologist James Bullock of the University of California, Irvine. "I wouldn't go so far as to say I was losing sleep, but maybe tossing and turning some." Bullock and his co-authors recently used a different simulation, called Millennium-II, and a different set of Sloan galaxies to come to a similar conclusion. "Our galaxy is apparently a little unusual?about as unusual as theory predicted," he says. "This is good news. There are some remaining puzzles, but at least this one seems under control."
What may not be under control is a very different disparity between theory and observation of the Milky Way's companion galaxies at the smaller end of the size spectrum. In what is known as the "missing satellite problem," galaxy simulations tend to produce more small, faint satellite galaxies than astronomers actually see near the outskirts of the Milky Way. Many possible explanations have been suggested?perhaps astronomers simply have not yet found all of the Milky Way's satellites, or perhaps small galaxies do not develop as readily as assumed.
Children don't give words special power to categorize their worldPublic release date: 27-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vladimir Sloutsky Sloutsky.1@osu.edu 614-688-5855 Ohio State University
COLUMBUS, Ohio New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them.
In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items words like "dog" or "pencil" don't have the same ability to influence the thinking of children.
"As adults, we know that words are very predictive. If you use words to guide you, they won't often let you down," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the new study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University and director of the university's Center for Cognitive Science.
"But for children, words are just another feature among many to consider when they're trying to classify an object."
For example, suppose that someone you trust shows you an object that looks like a pen and says that it is a tape recorder, Sloutsky said.
Your first reaction might be to look at the pen to see where the microphone would be hidden, and how you could turn it on or off.
"You might think it was some kind of spy tool, but you would not have a hard time understanding it as a tape recorder even though it looks like a pen," Sloutsky said. "Adults believe words do have a unique power to classify things, but young children don't think the same way."
The results suggest that even after children learn language, it doesn't govern their thinking as much as scientists believed.
"It is only over the course of development that children begin to understand that words can reliably be used to label items," he said.
Sloutsky conducted the study with Wei (Sophia) Deng, a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State. Their research appears online in the journal Psychological Science and will appear in a future print edition.
The study involved two related experiments. One experiment involved 13 preschool children aged 4 to 5 and 30 college-aged adults.
In this first experiment, participants were shown colorful drawings of two fictional creatures that the researchers identified as a "flurp" or a "jalet." Each was distinct in the color and shape of five of their features: body, hands, feet antennae and head. For example, flurps generally had tan-colored square antennae while jalets generally had gray-colored triangle antennae.
The researchers made the heads of the animals particularly salient, or conspicuous: the flurp had a pink head that moved up and down and jalet had a blue head that moved sideways. The head was the only part of the body that moved.
After they learned the relevant characteristics of the flurp and jalet, participants were tested in two conditions. In one condition, they were shown a picture of a creature that had some, but not all of the characteristics of one of the creatures, and asked if it was a flurp or a jalet. In another condition, they were shown a creature where one of the six features was covered and they were asked to predict the missing part.
The critical test came when the participants were shown a creature with a label that matched most of the body parts except for the very noticeable moving head, which belonged to the other animal. They were then asked which animal was pictured.
"About 90 percent of the children went with what the head told them even if the label and every other feature suggested the other animal," Sloutsky said.
"The label was just another feature, and it was not as important to them as the most salient feature the moving head."
Adults put much more stock in the label compared to children about 37 percent used the label to guide their choice, versus 31 percent who used the moving head. The remaining 31 percent had mixed responses.
However, to eliminate the possibility that participants were confused because they had never heard of flurps and jalets before, the researchers conducted another experiment. The second experiment was similar to the first, except that the animals were given more familiar names: "meat-eaters" and "carrot-eaters" instead of flurps and jalets.
In this case, the difference between the adults and children was even clearer. Nearly two-thirds of adults relied on the label to guide their choices, compared to 18 percent who relied on the moving head and 18 percent who were mixed responders. Only 7 percent of the children relied on the labels, compared to 67 percent who relied on the moving head and 26 percent who were mixed responders.
Sloutsky said these findings add to our understanding of how language affects cognition and may help parents communicate and teach their children.
"In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together," he said.
"We can't assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things."
###
Contact: Vladimir Sloutsky (614) 688-5855; Sloutsky.1@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Children don't give words special power to categorize their worldPublic release date: 27-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vladimir Sloutsky Sloutsky.1@osu.edu 614-688-5855 Ohio State University
COLUMBUS, Ohio New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them.
In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items words like "dog" or "pencil" don't have the same ability to influence the thinking of children.
"As adults, we know that words are very predictive. If you use words to guide you, they won't often let you down," said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the new study and professor of psychology at Ohio State University and director of the university's Center for Cognitive Science.
"But for children, words are just another feature among many to consider when they're trying to classify an object."
For example, suppose that someone you trust shows you an object that looks like a pen and says that it is a tape recorder, Sloutsky said.
Your first reaction might be to look at the pen to see where the microphone would be hidden, and how you could turn it on or off.
"You might think it was some kind of spy tool, but you would not have a hard time understanding it as a tape recorder even though it looks like a pen," Sloutsky said. "Adults believe words do have a unique power to classify things, but young children don't think the same way."
The results suggest that even after children learn language, it doesn't govern their thinking as much as scientists believed.
"It is only over the course of development that children begin to understand that words can reliably be used to label items," he said.
Sloutsky conducted the study with Wei (Sophia) Deng, a graduate student in psychology at Ohio State. Their research appears online in the journal Psychological Science and will appear in a future print edition.
The study involved two related experiments. One experiment involved 13 preschool children aged 4 to 5 and 30 college-aged adults.
In this first experiment, participants were shown colorful drawings of two fictional creatures that the researchers identified as a "flurp" or a "jalet." Each was distinct in the color and shape of five of their features: body, hands, feet antennae and head. For example, flurps generally had tan-colored square antennae while jalets generally had gray-colored triangle antennae.
The researchers made the heads of the animals particularly salient, or conspicuous: the flurp had a pink head that moved up and down and jalet had a blue head that moved sideways. The head was the only part of the body that moved.
After they learned the relevant characteristics of the flurp and jalet, participants were tested in two conditions. In one condition, they were shown a picture of a creature that had some, but not all of the characteristics of one of the creatures, and asked if it was a flurp or a jalet. In another condition, they were shown a creature where one of the six features was covered and they were asked to predict the missing part.
The critical test came when the participants were shown a creature with a label that matched most of the body parts except for the very noticeable moving head, which belonged to the other animal. They were then asked which animal was pictured.
"About 90 percent of the children went with what the head told them even if the label and every other feature suggested the other animal," Sloutsky said.
"The label was just another feature, and it was not as important to them as the most salient feature the moving head."
Adults put much more stock in the label compared to children about 37 percent used the label to guide their choice, versus 31 percent who used the moving head. The remaining 31 percent had mixed responses.
However, to eliminate the possibility that participants were confused because they had never heard of flurps and jalets before, the researchers conducted another experiment. The second experiment was similar to the first, except that the animals were given more familiar names: "meat-eaters" and "carrot-eaters" instead of flurps and jalets.
In this case, the difference between the adults and children was even clearer. Nearly two-thirds of adults relied on the label to guide their choices, compared to 18 percent who relied on the moving head and 18 percent who were mixed responders. Only 7 percent of the children relied on the labels, compared to 67 percent who relied on the moving head and 26 percent who were mixed responders.
Sloutsky said these findings add to our understanding of how language affects cognition and may help parents communicate and teach their children.
"In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together," he said.
"We can't assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things."
###
Contact: Vladimir Sloutsky (614) 688-5855; Sloutsky.1@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, (614) 292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
We're all familiar with the pain of having to share photos with people. I'm not talking about the staff party album on Facebook, I'm talking about moments that matter - the family holidays, the weddings, big days like those. And this remains an ongoing issue. We can share Dropbox folders all we like. Everything still has to be downloaded and the interface does not suit viewing, especially on tablets. We can ask friends and family to sign up to a private Flickr group, but that's still another hurdle. Lots of photo and file sharing services are rubbish and many people remain afraid of Facebook's now quite public nature. Now, a new startup out of Berlin has come up with something it calls the 'Dropbox for photos' where you can privately exchange photos in a group: 7moments.
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Public release date: 27-Dec-2011
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