mardi 21 décembre 2010
All News About Films
Two months after the Westfield Galleria in Roseville closed from a devastating fire, shoppers were again forced to evacuate Monday. This time, choral singers are to blame.
The Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra and several area congregations had prearranged a "flash mob" singing of "Hallelujah Chorus" in the mall's food court.
But with thousands of people crowding the second-floor food court, the "random act of musical kindness" never got off the ground.
"It was so jammed with people that you could not even move," said Connie Santos, who hoped to enjoy the music, then shop.
"Somebody reported hearing two pops that sounded like the floor was giving way and another said the floor was shifting," said Tom Dodaro, a Roseville Fire Department spokesman.
City engineers were on site inspecting the floors to test their structural integrity, fire officials said.
Westfield officials announced late Monday night that all Galleria stores will reopen at 8 a.m. Tuesday.
About 70 percent of the mall had reopened since the Oct. 21 police standoff and fire. The entire mall had been closed for a week following the devastating blaze.
In the purest sense, "flash mobs" are a prank or improvisational performance on an unsuspecting audience and venue. In some cases, performers have been arrested in their attempts at humor. In this case, the police and fire departments were apparently summoned because too many people were in on the joke.
Some participants had been talking up the 7:30 p.m. scheduled performance for weeks on the social networking site Twitter.
The Choral Society website detailed the event like a regular performance.
"Come join our large Chorus of area Singers as they burst into Handel's Hallelujah Chorus much to the surprise and delight of Shoppers in the Food Court of the recently reopened Westfield Galleria at Roseville," the website reads. The site also allows people to download the score.
Even the mall's public relations firm knew the plan days in advance and was ready to escort media outlets to prime viewing locations.
The Choral Society website detailed the event like a regular performance.
"Come join our large Chorus of area Singers as they burst into Handel's Hallelujah Chorus much to the surprise and delight of Shoppers in the Food Court of the recently reopened Westfield Galleria at Roseville," the website reads. The site also allows people to download the score.
Even the mall's public relations firm knew the plan days in advance and was ready to escort media outlets to prime viewing locations.
Santos said she arrived at the food court early to listen to a friend from church sing. With so many people "wedged in there," she could tell something wasn't right.
"The floor was bouncing a little too much. I heard a few people say it seemed like an earthquake," she said.
Soon she heard the announcement that the mall would be closing early. Each announcement was progressively louder. People were not moving at first. Eventually, firefighters walking side by side escorted the stragglers out
All News about Stars !!
I Wish I Could Create Space-Age Movies Like This
With obvious nods at 2001, Sunshine, and countless other space-set stunners, it was made with "no money, just a little time and a lot of passion," according to creators BC2010. I dunno, there seems to be a lotta tech-wizardry involved...
There's a making-of video below, which shows how they used a green screen to film everything against. Then, using Carrara Pro for modeling, animation and rendering; Syntheyes for matchmoving; After Effects for compositing and motion graphics; and Final Cut Pro HD to stitch everything together, it was complete. Utterly perfect. I suppose knowing the right people and the right skills helps with projects like this, but isn't it nice dreaming of making stuff like this yourself? [Vimeo via Fly Lyf]
my oppinion : Nicely done, but it kind of lacked purpose to me. Who are these people? Why do they need to watch movies projected on the moon?
Whose story are we watching? The smooth sunshine-deprived people in the theater? Are they prisioners?
________________________________________________
Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page and continues as professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.
Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the "new trade theory," a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." Mr. Krugman's current academic research is focused on economic and currency crises.
At the same time, Mr. Krugman has written extensively for a broader public audience. Some of his recent articles on economic issues, originally published in Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American and other journals, are reprinted in Pop Internationalism and The Accidental Theorist.
On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Back Story With Paul Krugman
Mr. Krugman received his B.A. from Yale University in 1974 and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977. He has taught at Yale, MIT and Stanford. At MIT he became the Ford International Professor of Economics.
Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 20 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His professional reputation rests largely on work in international trade and finance; he is one of the founders of the "new trade theory," a major rethinking of the theory of international trade. In recognition of that work, in 1991 the American Economic Association awarded him its John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." Mr. Krugman's current academic research is focused on economic and currency crises.
At the same time, Mr. Krugman has written extensively for a broader public audience. Some of his recent articles on economic issues, originally published in Foreign Affairs, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American and other journals, are reprinted in Pop Internationalism and The Accidental Theorist.
On October 13, 2008, it was announced that Mr. Krugman would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Back Story With Paul Krugman__________________________________________
MJC instructor to be tried on molestation charges
And now, the United States.
The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, disappointed with the returns they’re getting, search for alternatives. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for in some country or other, and money rushes in.
But eventually it becomes clear that the investment opportunity wasn’t all it seemed to be, and the money rushes out again, with nasty consequences for the former financial favorite. That’s the story of multiple financial crises in Latin America and Asia. And it’s also the story of the U.S. combined housing and credit bubble. These days, we’re playing the role usually assigned to third-world economies.
For reasons I’ll explain later, it’s unlikely that America will experience a recession as severe as that in, say, Argentina. But the origins of our problem are pretty much the same. And understanding those origins also helps us understand where U.S. economic policy went wrong.
The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: “Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?”
His answer was that the main explanation lay not here in America, but abroad. In particular, third world economies, which had been investor favorites for much of the 1990s, were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997. As a result, they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.
The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
In the end, most of that money went to the United States. Why? Because, said Mr. Bernanke, of the “depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets.”
All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”
In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.
As I said, these consequences probably won’t be as bad as the devastating recessions that racked third-world victims of the same syndrome. The saving grace of America’s situation is that our foreign debts are in our own currency. This means that we won’t have the kind of financial death spiral Argentina experienced, in which a falling peso caused the country’s debts, which were in dollars, to balloon in value relative to domestic assets.
But even without those currency effects, the next year or two could be quite unpleasant.
What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.
The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.
It wasn’t just Alan Greenspan’s unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of “froth” in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America’s financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets.
Right now, Mr. Bernanke is in crisis-management mode, trying to deal with the mess his predecessor left behind. I don’t have any problems with his testimony yesterday, although I suspect that it’s already too late to prevent a recession.
But let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.
The story has played itself out time and time again over the past 30 years. Global investors, disappointed with the returns they’re getting, search for alternatives. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for in some country or other, and money rushes in.
But eventually it becomes clear that the investment opportunity wasn’t all it seemed to be, and the money rushes out again, with nasty consequences for the former financial favorite. That’s the story of multiple financial crises in Latin America and Asia. And it’s also the story of the U.S. combined housing and credit bubble. These days, we’re playing the role usually assigned to third-world economies.
For reasons I’ll explain later, it’s unlikely that America will experience a recession as severe as that in, say, Argentina. But the origins of our problem are pretty much the same. And understanding those origins also helps us understand where U.S. economic policy went wrong.
The global origins of our current mess were actually laid out by none other than Ben Bernanke, in an influential speech he gave early in 2005, before he was named chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Bernanke asked a good question: “Why is the United States, with the world’s largest economy, borrowing heavily on international capital markets — rather than lending, as would seem more natural?”
His answer was that the main explanation lay not here in America, but abroad. In particular, third world economies, which had been investor favorites for much of the 1990s, were shaken by a series of financial crises beginning in 1997. As a result, they abruptly switched from being destinations for capital to sources of capital, as their governments began accumulating huge precautionary hoards of overseas assets.
The result, said Mr. Bernanke, was a “global saving glut”: lots of money, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
In the end, most of that money went to the United States. Why? Because, said Mr. Bernanke, of the “depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets.”
All of this was right, except for one thing: U.S. financial markets, it turns out, were characterized less by sophistication than by sophistry, which my dictionary defines as “a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone.” E.g., “Repackaging dubious loans into collateralized debt obligations creates a lot of perfectly safe, AAA assets that will never go bad.”
In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.
As I said, these consequences probably won’t be as bad as the devastating recessions that racked third-world victims of the same syndrome. The saving grace of America’s situation is that our foreign debts are in our own currency. This means that we won’t have the kind of financial death spiral Argentina experienced, in which a falling peso caused the country’s debts, which were in dollars, to balloon in value relative to domestic assets.
But even without those currency effects, the next year or two could be quite unpleasant.
What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.
The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.
It wasn’t just Alan Greenspan’s unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of “froth” in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America’s financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets.
Right now, Mr. Bernanke is in crisis-management mode, trying to deal with the mess his predecessor left behind. I don’t have any problems with his testimony yesterday, although I suspect that it’s already too late to prevent a recession.
But let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.
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