Why Oscar's "Simple" Date-Change Is a Ticking Time Bomb

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - The press release didn't look as if it contained big news.

"Key Dates Announced for the 85th Academy Awards," read the headline on the September 18 announcement, which came significantly later than usual for the Academy and contained one seemingly innocuous line:

"In an effort to provide members and the public a longer period of time to see the nominated films, the Academy will reveal the 85th Academy Awards nominations on January 10, five days earlier than previously announced."

But that little change - those five days, which moved the nominations from what was already an unusually early slot to the Thursday before the Golden Globes - has shaken all things Oscar, essentially detonating a time bomb across the Academy Awards landscape.

As advertised, the move will give members of the Academy and prospective viewers extra time to see the 35 or so features that will be nominated (plus another 10 documentaries and foreign-language films) - but it'll give them significantly less time to see the 250 to 300 films that are eligible to be nominated.

"As an Academy member, I'm not happy about it," said one voter, who was typical of those TheWrap has spoken to. "It's short-sighted and unfair to members, and they're limiting the number of movies that might get nominated because members won't see as many. And as a marketer, it hampers you in every way and forces you to flood people with emails and mailings and screenings and screeners to get all your stuff out by January 1."

Grumbling, moaning and the occasional gnashing of teeth over the compressed timeline has been almost constant since the announcement. One commonly heard phrase is, "What were they thinking?" Another is, "I know what they were thinking, and it has nothing to do with what they say they were thinking."

To this latter camp, which includes both outsiders and AMPAS members, the clear intent of the move was to hurt the Golden Globes, the tacky show whose importance on the awards calendar has always rankled the Academy.

The governors were said to be determined to make the Globes (and its presenting body, the much-maligned Hollywood Foreign Press Association) irrelevant by announcing Oscar nominations before the Globes even happen ? as if that would stop people from tuning in or persuade NBC, Dick Clark Productions or the HFPA to pull the plug on a multimillion-dollar cash cow that they would no doubt move to Thanksgiving weekend before they'd ever consider giving it up.

Yes, the move will put the Globes in the awkward position of taking place at a point where trade ads are more likely to proudly trumpet "six Oscar nominations!" than "Golden Globe winner!" And by the time Academy members are able to vote, the Globes results will most likely forgotten by anybody casting an Oscar ballot.

The move won't impact the Globes ratings, but it could conceivably reduce attendance at the show: If a star hoping to use a fabulous Globes acceptance speech to boost an Oscar candidacy winds up not being nominated, will he or she still feel inclined to show up for the HFPA's dog-and-pony show?

Among other awards shows, the real casualty could be the Broadcast Film Critics Association's Critics' Choice Movie Awards, a reliable Oscar precursor that this year is scheduled to take place the evening of the day on which Oscar noms are announced.

It's hard to imagine too many actors wanting to put on a brave face and mingle with nominated colleagues only a few hours after learning that Oscar voters have ignored them; I'm guessing the BFCA may find itself with at least a few last-minute cancellations and lame excuses.

But the move's repercussions go far beyond other awards shows.

A voting window that ends on January 3, immediately after the Christmas/New Year's holidays, will mean more pressure to book early screenings, more of a push to get parties and Q&As done before the holidays, and outright desperation to have screeners in voters' hands before they head to Aspen or Hawaii for the break.

And for films released in December - a typical Oscar slot that has been utilized quite effectively in the past by the likes of "Million Dollar Baby" and "Shakespeare in Love" - the new calendar could be a killer: With nominating ballots due so soon after the holidays, films had better be must-sees if they want to get voters to check them out before casting their ballots.

Obviously, that won't hurt the December releases "Django Unchained," "Zero Dark Thirty," "Les Miserables" and "The Hobbit" - those are no-brainers for any Academy member who wants to be the slightest bit thorough. But what about a lower-profile film like Michael Haneke's "Amour," which Sony Classics is releasing on December 19?

The Cannes Palme d'Or winner is strong enough to escape the foreign-language category and become a viable Best Picture contender if enough members see it, but SPC may have to push awfully hard to get it in front of voters already facing a year-end crunch.

The move also puts a hit on the Palm Springs International Film Festival, whose annual Awards Gala, which typically honors an array of Oscar hopefuls, now falls three days after polls close.

And the late-January Santa Barbara International Film Festival now sits in the 29-day no-man's-land between the nominations and the opening of final voting, long enough after nominations that some potential honorees might want to wait for the Academy's verdict before committing to an SBIFF tribute.

Still, it'll make things easier for Oscar-watchers who also want to go to the Sundance Film Festival; rather than noms coming in the middle of that fest, they will happen two weeks before Park City kicks off.

And yes, the new calendar will, as advertised, give viewers and voters more time to watch the nominated films.

The same voter who slammed the move as unfair for members and terrible for marketers did concede one thing: "From the exhibition point of view, I think it's a good thing. You get an additional two weeks in theaters with the films that have been nominated, and we all know that's where the money is made."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/why-oscars-simple-date-change-ticking-time-bomb-195722191.html

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As eurozone economy shrinks, govt debt loads grow

Europe's government-debt crisis is no longer panicking financial markets. But it won't end until the region's economy starts growing strongly again.

And that will be a while.

The economy of the 17 countries that use the euro has shrunk for two straight quarters _ a common definition of a recession _ and analysts forecast little or no growth until 2014.

Without growth, there won't be enough tax revenue to help countries like Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal narrow their deficits and slow the expansion of their debts. Their debt burdens as a percentage of economic output, a key measure of fiscal health, look worse by the day.

The eurozone's combined debts are equal to about 93 percent of the region's gross domestic product this year and that figure is forecast to rise to peak at 94.5 percent next year. In 2009, the eurozone's debt-to-GDP ratio was 80 percent. A ratio above 90 percent is generally considered high and can put pressure on governments' borrowing costs.

"The worrying thing about the projections is, the peak seems to keep moving," says Raoul Ruparel of the Open Europe think tank.

The panic in European financial markets has eased in recent months largely because of aggressive action by the European Central Bank. The ECB said on Sept. 6 that it was willing to buy unlimited amounts of government bonds issued by countries struggling to pay their debts. That pledge quickly lowered borrowing costs for Spain and Italy, which earlier in the year faced the same kind of financial pressure that forced Ireland, Greece and Spain to seek bailouts.

But stemming the crisis and heading off a default by one or more countries aren't the same as stimulating growth. The U.S. economy remains weak several years after actions by the Federal Reserve helped arrest its financial crisis.

Europe's economy is being held back for several reasons:

_ Austerity. Whether they got into trouble by overspending or after rescuing banks from a real-estate collapse, European governments are tackling their debts the same way: By raising taxes and cutting spending, including wage cuts for public sector workers. Italy slashed its deficit by 2.8 percent of GDP this year, but economists estimate that reduced growth by 1.5 percentage points. Less spending by the government and less spending by consumers who gave more of their income to the government were a drag on the Italian economy.

_ Shaky banks. Banks reeling from the financial crisis are making it harder and more expensive for businesses in the hardest-hit countries to borrow. That's crimping investment and hiring by these companies across southern Europe. Companies in Greece or Portugal are often paying twice as much interest on loans as their German competitors.

_ Consumers are holding back. Wage cuts have weighed on family budgets, and people are saving more because they're worried about further economic shocks. Together, these trends have reduced consumer spending by about 1 percent this year.

_ Anti-business regulation. Laws in many European countries make it hard for companies to lay workers off in lean times, and that makes employers reluctant to hire. Bureaucracy chokes the process of starting a business or exporting goods. Greece's tax accounting rules were so onerous _ permitting large penalties for minor paperwork errors _ that the EU demanded the entire rulebook simply be abolished. Parliament finally complied last week.

European governments are slowly trying to make their economies more competitive. But in a September survey on global competitiveness by the World Economic Forum, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy ranked low because of poor access to financing and rigid labor markets.

It requires 11 bureaucratic filings to start a business in Italy. Fellow euro member Slovenia requires two.

Eurostat data released Thursday showed that for the second straight quarter the eurozone economy contracted. Output shrank by 0.1 percent in the July-September quarter, compared with the previous quarter.

The European Union's executive commission forecasts the eurozone economy will shrink 0.4 percent for all of 2012 and grow by just 0.1 percent in 2013.

Without growth, there's little chance of cutting into an 11.6 percent jobless rate, the highest since the euro was introduced in 1999. Unemployment tops 25 percent in Greece and Spain.

Even with a modest recovery in late 2013 and 2014, the eurozone economy will be smaller _ adjusted for inflation _ than it was in 2008, when the Great Recession reverberated around the world.

Marco Valli, chief European economist for Unicredit, has charted recoveries from five crises going back to the late 1970s. He forecasts that the eurozone economy will not recover to its 2008 level until the first six months of 2015.

"This is unusual, in that even during the major financial crisis of the past, we have never seen such a slow recovery from a financial crisis," he says.

Source: http://www.stltoday.com/business/national-and-international/as-eurozone-economy-shrinks-govt-debt-loads-grow/article_880351fa-6a37-5c1a-aba3-a0edbab10ad6.html

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Brain waves make waves

Friday, November 16, 2012

Naturally, our brain activity waxes and wanes. When listening, this oscillation synchronizes to the sounds we are hearing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have found that this influences the way we listen. Hearing abilities also oscillate and depend on the exact timing of one's brain rhythms. This discovery that sound, brain, and behaviour are so intimately coupled will help us to learn more about listening abilities in hearing loss.

Our world is full of cyclic phenomena: For example, many people experience their attention span changing over the course of a day. Maybe you yourself are more alert in the morning, others more in the afternoon. Bodily functions cyclically change or "oscillate" with environmental rhythms, like light and dark, and this in turn seems to govern our perception and behaviours. One might conclude that we are slaves to our own circadian rhythms, which in turn are slaves to environmental light?dark cycles.

A hard-to-prove idea in neuroscience is that such couplings between rhythms in the environment, rhythms in the brain, and our behaviours are also present at much finer time scales. Molly Henry and Jonas Obleser from the Max Planck Research Group "Auditory Cognition" now followed up on this recurrent idea by investigating the listening brain.

This idea holds fascinating implications for the way humans process speech and music: Imagine the melodic contour of a human voice or your favourite piece of music going up and down. If your brain becomes coupled to, or "entrained" by, these melodic changes, Henry and Obleser rea-soned, then you might also be better prepared to expect fleeting but important sounds occurring in what the voice is saying, for example, a "d" versus a "t".

The simple "fleeting sound" in the scientists' experiment was a very short and very hard-to-detect silent gap (about one one-hundredth of a second) embedded in a simplified version of a melodic contour, which slowly and cyclically changed its pitch at a rate of three cycles per second (3 Hz).

To be able to track each listener's brain activity on a millisecond basis, Henry and Obleser record-ed the electroencephalographic signal from listeners' scalps. First, the authors demonstrated that every listener's brain was "dragged along" (this is what entrainment, a French word, literally means) by the slow cyclic changes in melody; listeners' neural activity waxed and waned. Second, the listeners' ability to discover the fleeting gaps hidden in the melodic changes was by no means constant over time. Instead, it also "oscillated" and was governed by the brain's waxing and wan-ing. The researchers could predict from a listener's slow brain wave whether or not an upcoming gap would be detected or would slip under the radar.

Why is that? "The slow waxings and wanings of brain activity are called neural oscillations. They regulate our ability to process incoming information", Molly Henry explains. Jonas Obleser adds that "from these findings, an important conclusion emerges: All acoustic fluctuations we encoun-ter appear to shape our brain's activity. Apparently, our brain uses these rhythmic fluctuations to be prepared best for processing important upcoming information".

The researchers hope to be able to use the brain's coupling to its acoustic environment as a new measure to study the problems of listeners with hearing loss or people who stutter.

###

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: http://www.mpg.de

Thanks to Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 66 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125280/Brain_waves_make_waves

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Exercise benefits found for pregnancies with high blood pressure, researchers say

ScienceDaily (Nov. 16, 2012) ? Contrary to popular thought, regular exercise before and during pregnancy could have beneficial effects for women that develop high blood pressure during gestation, human physiology professor Jeff Gilbert said, summarizing a new study by his research team that appears in the December issue of Hypertension, a journal of the American Heart Association.

Gilbert's team at the University of Oregon observed that placental ischemia-induced hypertension in rats was alleviated by exercise and was accompanied by a restoration of several circulating factors that have recently been shown to be important in causing the high blood pressure associated with preeclampsia.

Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, such as preeclampsia, are the most common dangerous pregnancy complications, occurring in 5 percent to 8 percent of pregnancies. Globally, preeclampsia and other hypertensive disorders of pregnancy cause 76,000 maternal and 500,000 infant deaths each year, conservatively, according to the Preeclampsia Foundation.

"The data from our study raise the possibility that exercise regimens if started before pregnancy and maintained through most of gestation may be an important way for women to mitigate the risk of preeclampsia," Gilbert said. "There are certainly questions that remain, such as when and how much exercise is required and whether exercise training must begin before pregnancy for these beneficial effects to occur. Moreover, further studies are needed to determine if it can safely be used as a thera?peutic modality for hypertension caused by insufficient blood flow in the placenta.

"But these results are certainly encouraging," he added.

Previous clinical and epidemiological studies have long suggested that regular exercise before and during pregnancy reduced risk of preeclampsia but definitive mechanistic studies on the topic had been lacking until recently. Even though these findings are exciting, there are still safety concerns that need to be evaluated clinically and exercise continues to be discouraged in pregnancies complicated by high blood pressure.

Working in accordance with National Institutes of Health guidelines for animal use, Gilbert's team induced hypertension in pregnant rats by restricting blood flow to the rat placentas and monitored gestation after six weeks of exercise on activity wheels. Animals in test and control groups ran approximately 30 kilometers per week before pregnancy and approximately 4.5 kilometers per week during pregnancy.

Wheel running before and during pregnancy reduced high blood pressure. It also improved circulating concentrations of vascular endothelial growth factor and restored the balance between that factor and soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, which restricts blood vessel growth and function. The study suggests that exercise lowers high blood pressure by maintaining the balance of these two factors that promote proper blood vessel growth and function.

Exercise also improved endothelial cell function and reduced oxidative stress in the hypertensive rat. Fetal weight was not compromised by exercise and there were no obvious signs of fetal stress in rats with hypertension that exercised, Gilbert said.

The work was supported by a grant from the American Heart Association (10SDG2600040) and a five-year, $1.7 million research project grant to Gilbert from NIH (HL114096) to study preeclampsia.

The latter is an R01 grant, historically the oldest grants offered by NIH, providing support for health-related research and development based on the NIH mission.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Xa1zTMZwrAo/121116161057.htm

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New ancient shark species gives insight into origin of great white

Friday, November 16, 2012

The great white shark is one of the largest living predatory animals and a magnet for media sensationalism, yet its evolutionary history is as misunderstood as its role as a menace.

Originally classified as a direct relative of megatooth sharks, the white shark's evolutionary history has been debated by paleontologists for the last 150 years. In a study appearing in print and online today in the journal Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers name and describe an ancient intermediate form of the white shark, Carcharodon hubbelli, which shows the modern white shark likely descended from broad-toothed mako sharks. The study deviates from the white shark's original classification as a relative of megatooth sharks such as the extinct Carcharocles megalodon, the largest carnivorous shark that ever lived.

Based on recalibrated dates of the excavation site in Peru, the study also concludes the new species was about 2 million years older than previously believed.

"We can look at white sharks today a little bit differently ecologically if we know that they come from a mako shark ancestor," said lead author Dana Ehret, a lecturer at Monmouth University in New Jersey who conducted research for the study as a UF graduate student. "That 2-million-year pushback is pretty significant because in the evolutionary history of white sharks, that puts this species in a more appropriate time category to be ancestral or kind of an intermediate form of white shark."

Most ancient shark species are named using isolated teeth, but analysis of C. hubbelli, also known as Hubbell's white shark, was based on a complete set of jaws with 222 teeth intact and 45 vertebrae. The species was named for Gainesville resident Gordon Hubbell, a collector who recovered the fossils from a farmer who discovered them in the Pisco Formation of southern Peru in 1988. Hubbell donated the specimens to the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus in December 2009.

"The impetus of this project was really the fact that Gordon Hubbell donated a majority of his fossil shark collection to the Florida Museum," Ehret said. "Naming the shark in his honor is a small tip of the hat to all the great things he has done to advance paleontology."

Ehret and co-authors published an initial study describing the shark specimens in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology in 2009, but dates for the site reflected information from a 1985 study about the Pisco Formation, he said. With Hubbell's hand-drawn maps and descriptions of the landscape, researchers returned to the site and found the exact spot the fossils were discovered.

Scientists extracted more accurate age estimates from mollusk shells in the fossil horizon to determine the shark species was from the late Miocene, about 6.5 million years ago, rather than the early Pliocene, about 4.5 million years ago. The new dates will also be useful for better understanding other fossils found in the rich Pisco Formation, which include new whale, marine sloth and terrestrial vertebrate species.

"The thing that was remarkable to me was that these fossils came from right out in the desert and this was before GPS, so Dana had only an approximate notion of where it was," said Florida Museum of Natural History Director Douglas Jones, a study co-author who conducted strontium isotope dating of the fossils. "But after a few days of looking, we were able to find this deposit and Dana found the rest of the missing shark's teeth."

Researchers determined Hubbell's white shark was related to ancient broad-toothed mako sharks by comparing the physical shapes of shark teeth to one another. While modern white sharks have serrations on their teeth for consuming marine mammals, mako sharks do not have serrations because they primarily feed on fish. Hubbell's white shark has coarse serrations indicative of a transition from broad-toothed mako sharks to modern white sharks.

These evolutionary relationships have been hypothesized for decades, and researchers who interpret modern white sharks as being more closely related to megatooth sharks say it is "a friendly disagreement," according to Michael Gottfried, an associate professor in geological sciences at Michigan State University.

But shark expert David Ward, a research associate at the Natural History Museum, London, said "fewer people believe the big megatooth sharks are related to the great white sharks than believe the Earth is flat."

"Everyone working within the field will be absolutely delighted to see this relationship formalized," Ward said.

###

University of Florida: http://www.ufl.edu

Thanks to University of Florida for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

This press release has been viewed 93 time(s).

Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125286/New_ancient_shark_species_gives_insight_into_origin_of_great_white

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