Washington State has finalized rules for recreational marijuana sales, joining Colorado in beginning to create a legal framework for the pot industry. Randy Simmons, deputy director of the Washington Liquor Control Board, says other states and even other countries are watching Washington's developing system very closely.
“The Ferris wheel is coming!”
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros frontman Alex Ebert is reassuring himself as much as he’s boasting about the second most visible attraction of the inaugural Big Top festival. Front and center is the actual big top -- a traditional circus tent complete with sawdust and bold primary colors -- under which the 12-member band will perform on a rotating stage.
Outside on the grounds of Los Angeles Historic State Park, food vendors, magicians and performers of all stripes will entertain the hundreds expected to show, bringing to life a dream Ebert has been mulling since founding his band in 2007. Now 35, it turns out Ebert attended an actual circus for the first time only a couple years ago.
“My primary relationship with the circus is through Dumbo,” he explains to The Hollywood Reporter on Big Top eve, acknowledging that, while one of the saddest animated movies of all-time, it was also “the best -- Dumbo had a major impact on me.”
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The idea for the four-day fest, which Ebert and Co. curated, falls in line with the classic big top trope. “The idea is to come into a town and simmer a bit,” says Ebert. “To hang out and eat lunch and play piano randomly in a saloon and then meet the families and see the shows. Then say sayonara and get on your camel and ride.”
Indeed, there will be plenty to see and hear at the Big Top -- although no animals -- where more than 25 bands are slated to appear. Among them: such under-the-radar acts as Torque Method, Fool’s Gold and Henry Wolfe. The criteria for bookings, says Ebert, was straightforward: they needed to be local, have previously played on a bill with Sharpe or “have a similar emotional and spiritual availability” to the concept of “the ideal music troupe experience.”
That includes the in-the-round performance Sharpe and crew have devised. On the night THR visited the band’s dress rehearsal (see photo below), they were testing out a stellar cover of Paul Simon’s “Graceland” as the players all faced each other (another cover planned: Nina Simone's "Ain't Got No"). “It may seem a bit exclusionary -- having our backs to the audience -- but for us to be able to face each other and also for the audience to catch every member's face as they turn around. ... It's fun.”
You could say Edward Sharpe, perhaps more than any other current band, has made untraditional venues a staple of its tours. “As much as we could,” Ebert half-apologizes – though there’s no need; the band has staged shows inside a train and in the London tunnels. Although, if Ebert had his druthers, he adds, “I would play no place -- just parking lots and parks and houses and rooftops and do it very DIY.”
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On the other hand, Ebert also has grand plans for his Big Top run, including a DVD or film to document the event and, hopefully down the road, creating “an entire town with its own money and commerce, with animals everywhere and people camping. A highly immersive collaborative experience.”
Ambitious much? Or just a big dreamer. If you’re Alex Ebert, likely a little bit of both. "This is supposed to be a traveling thing at some point," he adds.
But first things first: now that the tent is erected, freak show posters are positioned and vendors are taking their places -- all of which is being filmed for a future DVD release -- it's about appreciating what's directly in front of you.
"I'm blown away that we're doing this," says Ebert, who credits Zeros manager Bryan Ling for seeing the project through. "It's a huge undertaking and [takes] a lot of force of will. Because you don't have to do this. It's not a terribly big money maker, so why do it? The reason is to create a sense of being alive."
Twitter: @shirleyhalperin
The new Hadoop is nothing less than the Apache Foundation's attempt to create a whole new general framework for the way big data can be stored, mined, and processed.
It ought to not only further stimulate the way apps are written for Hadoop, but also allow for the creation of entirely new data-crunching methodologies within Hadoop that simply weren't possible because of its earlier architectural limitations. In short, it's good stuff.
What's been holding Hadoop back all this time? More important, where's it going from here?
Various criticisms of Hadoop have revolved around its scaling limitations, but the biggest constraint on scale has been its job handling. All jobs in Hadoop are run as batch processes through a single daemon called JobTracker, which creates a scalability and processing-speed bottleneck.
With Hadoop 2, the JobTracker approach has been scrapped. Instead, Hadoop uses an entirely new job-processing framework built using two daemons: ResourceManager, which governs all jobs in the system, and NodeManager, which runs on each Hadoop node and keeps the ResourceManager informed about what's happening on that node. (Each running application also has its own governor, ApplicationMaster.)
This setup is so unlike the previous MapReduce that Apache gave it an entirely new name: YARN, or Yet Another Resource Negotiator, with the new MapReduce running as one of many possible components for it. In fact, Apache claims that any distributed application can run on YARN, albeit with some porting. To that end, Apache's maintained a list of YARN-compatible applications, such as the social-graph analysis system Apache Giraph (which Facebook uses). More are on the way from other parties, too.
As radical as this approach is, Apache wisely decided not to break backward compatibility, so MapReduce 2 still has the same APIs as its predecessor. Existing jobs just need a recompile to work properly.
It's also hardly coincidence that YARN makes Hadoop far more cross-compatible with other Apache projects for massaging big data. Use one, and it becomes far easier to use the rest. Such a rising tide for Hadoop would help lift all of Apache's related boats.
The biggest win of all here is how MapReduce itself becomes just one possible way of many to mine data through Hadoop. Apache's own Spark, another candidate for porting to YARN, might be better suited to some kinds of work than MapReduce, so Hadoop 2 gives you more flexibility to choose the engine that's the best fit.
The two big Hadoop vendors, Cloudera and Hortonworks, both have their own discussions of how YARN is crucial stuff, even if they approach Hadoop from markedly different directions. Cloudera's Impala offers the ability to run low-latency SQL queries against HDFS-stored data, which makes them best suited to live analytics; Hortonworks has chosen to go with Apache's native Hive technology, which is best for data warehouse operations (like long-running queries with lots of join-type operations).
Porting apps to YARN isn't a trivial effort, though, so the payoff involved in reworking Hadoop this radically will be strongly based on how much gets deployed within the new framework. But the fact that both Cloudera and Hortonworks are solidly behind Hadoop 2 and haven't forked the product -- or stuck with its earlier iterations -- is major evidence Hadoop 2 isn't just smoke or mirrors. Or tangled yarn.
This story, "Hadoop 2: Big data's big leap forward," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
By Kim Palmer
CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Cleveland Police Chief Mark McGrath announced on Tuesday that following an 11-month investigation his office will issue suspensions for 63 of the 104 officers involved in a 25-minute high-speed car chase that resulted in the fatal shooting of the driver and his passenger.
The officers will serve suspensions totaling 178 days, with the longest suspension 10 days, McGrath said, saying the officers were very honest and professional during the investigation.
The officers are being disciplined because of excessive speed, insubordination and failure to request permission to join the pursuit, he said.
On November 29, 2012, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams fled a traffic stop and led police on a chase that ended with 13 officers firing 137 rounds at the car Russell was driving. The chase involved 63 police cars, according to the investigation.
The 13 officers directly involved in the shooting of Russell and Williams were not among those suspended and still may face discipline and possible criminal charges.
McGrath said many of the officers involved told the investigation they joined the chase because they thought Russell and Williams were shooting at police and they thought "a police officer was in trouble."
Officers involved reported shots fired from Russell's car that investigators now believe were the sound of his 1979 Chevy backfiring.
They also thought Williams, the passenger, had a weapon in her hand during the chase, according to the investigation. The investigation found no weapon and no gunshot residue on Williams's hands.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said on Tuesday that county prosecutors have not yet decided whether to bring criminal charges against the 13 officers directly involved in the shooting.
Jackson also said although the investigation had taken 11 months, "justice was not delayed for the victims" and that his office was "not throwing officers under the bus for political reasons and we're not covering anything up."
A lawyer for the families of Russell and Williams could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.
In March, the U.S. Justice Department launched a review of Cleveland police policies over the possible use of excessive force by officers.
Nine Cleveland police department supervisors were suspended, two demoted and one was fired due to the way they handled the incident, McGrath said.
(Reporting by Kim Palmer; Editing by Brendan O'Brien, Greg McCune and Leslie Adler)
Shadowplay
The ABC fantasy series Once Upon A Time is back with a new season that is set in Neverland (not to be confused with the spinoff series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland which will crossover with the 3rd season of the Neverland-set Once Upon A Time), which was set up in the season finale of the show back in the Spring. In that season finale episode, an villainous character called Shadow was introduced. Today we learn that shockrocker Marilyn Manson has been cast in the role of Shadow on the show. MM will only be providing the voice for Shadow since the character is computer generated but it seems significant to me that Manson was cast on the show at all. Read on to learn more.
Once Upon a Time’s journey into the dark recesses of Neverland has gotten pretty scary already, what with an evil Peter Pan running around. Now it’s about to get a whole lot creepier: ABC has confirmed exclusively to Rolling Stone that rocker Marilyn Manson will be joining the cast of the show in November. Manson will voice Shadow, a character whose voice will give life to the very essence of Neverland. “We’ve always been enormous fans of Marilyn Manson,” show creators and executive producers Eddy Kitsis and Adam Horowitz told Rolling Stone. “We wanted to cast someone with the vocal ability to make our skin crawl.” This season on Once Upon a Time follows Emma, Rumpelstiltskin, Regina, Captain Hook and the rest of the Fairytale Avengers in Neverland as they look for Henry while battling the evil Peter Pan. The Shadow has appeared a few times already this season, and he’s not quite the mischievous, fun-loving character who appeared in the classic Peter Pan tales. This version of Shadow is more interested in kidnapping and soul-stealing – and with Manson’s voice added to the mix, he should become a skin-crawling part of Neverland.
I’m one of the only people I know that watches Once Upon a Time (mainly because I invested so much time in Season 1 and that loyalty carried over to Season 2) so, as a viewer, I’m very intrigued by Manson‘s casting. I’ve been an MM fan from the start so I’m glad to see that he’s getting new work these days. I know he has a guest starring stint on the HBO series Eastbound and Down and now with this casting in Once Upon A Time, it looks like MM is much more interested in pursuing a career in acting rather than in music. Once is one of those shows that I DVR and watch when I have nothing else to watch … so I have the new eps of Season 3 recorded, I just haven’t watched them yet. Now that I know MM will voice a character on the show, I guess I have to catch up so I can see how well he does on the show. Do any of y’all watch the show? If so, are you looking forward to hearing MM on the show?
[Source]
At Microsoft's huge Xbox reveal last spring, the company made a big hubub about the 300,000 cloud servers it would be adding to help speed up GPU and CPU heavy tasks. But in an interview with Gizmodo, Xbox Live Lead Programmer John Bruno detailed how it could change the way we think about gaming in the future.
Powerful cloud computing lets developers offload tasks like graphics processing and AI computation from Xbox One's local resources. "There is s thrust to turn more things server-side," Says Bruno. "Looking for ways to expand the power of the box." As we've noted before, this lets game developers build games bigger than what the hardware can support on its own. But it could be so much more.
In large measure, Xbox Live is about multiplayer gaming, and in effort to make its offering competitive, Microsoft is offering the benefits of its scalable dedicated server resources to all developers for free. This sounds like a lot of techno-babble, but it's a big deal. "We want Xbox Live to be the best place to play multiplayer games," says Bruno.
How does the Xbox Live cloud help? As the developer of Tinfall explained back in June, scalable, dedicated server resources vastly improve gaming experiences. They make multiplayer more reliable by preventing disconnects, and they also make sessions fair by eliminating any advantages a player hosting a game might have.
Big game studios can pay for their own server resources that are allocated regionally depending on who is logging on to play games where. Microsoft's offer of free cloud computing allows all developers to take advantage of big-ticket resources, even if they're not that big.
The lofty potential of Xbox Live's Cloud Computing is that it allows developers to evolve games and experiences over time. In a commonly cited example, Forza studies your driving style over time to evolve its AI.
But according to Bruno, this is just the tip of the iceberg. "It could change the way developers think about their franchises and their intellectual property." What if a game purchase was a constantly evolving experience that grew over time—more like what we're used to from software these days. We're talking about more than just patches and stability improvements. Bruno declined to comment on the future of business models, but he did note that it would be interesting to see developers grow their games over time. Imagine a world without expansion packs.
Bruno is obviously touting all of the benefits of Xbox Live's cloud in an effort to lure in both developers and customers. It remains to be seen how many people will actually take advantage of the possibilities on Xbox One. What' pretty certain, is that there's an opportunity, and that's always a good thing.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/how-xbox-lives-cloud-computing-could-change-gaming-for-1445530846A very old squished mosquito found in fossilized rock from Montana. Analysis of the insect's gut revealed telltale chemicals found in blood.
A very old squished mosquito found in fossilized rock from Montana. Analysis of the insect's gut revealed telltale chemicals found in blood.
PNASScientists who study why species vanish are increasingly looking for ancient DNA. They find it easily enough in the movies; remember the mosquito blood in Jurassic Park that contained dinosaur DNA from the bug's last bite? But in real life, scientists haven't turned up multi-million-year-old DNA in any useable form.
Fortunately, a team at the Smithsonian Institution has now found something unique in a 46-million-year-old, fossilized mosquito — not DNA, but the chemical remains of the insect's last bloody meal.
They started with a fossilized mosquito. If you think it's incredibly rare for a dinosaur to die and get fossilized for millions of years, imagine what it's like for a bug. Dale Greenwalt has. "Everything has to go exactly right to become fossilized," the retired biochemist explains.
Everything did go right in a little corner of Montana millions years ago. There's a rock formation there — mostly shale — that's a veritable bug cemetery. Greenwalt collects fossils there, as a Smithsonian volunteer. He spends weeks along a stream examining pieces of shale with a handheld lens, then hauls the loot back to the Smithsonian for more microscopic study.
How the bugs ended up in the shale, he says, is a process that only happened rarely. Millions of years ago, a mosquito, say, might land on a gooey mat of algae and microbes, floating on a pond. The mosquito gets stuck in the muck and dies. And then, Greenwalt says, "The algae and the microbes actually grow up and around and encase and envelope the insect."
That entombment protects the bug's corpse. The mat eventually sinks to the bottom of the pond. As sediment slowly covers it and becomes rock, the bug's impression is preserved in stone.
What Greenwalt and a team from the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History have discovered in one of those impressions is iron — a lot of it — as well as chemical compounds called porphyrins. They're found in what had been the mosquito's abdomen, and nowhere else in the impression. Nor are these compounds in the surrounding rock.
The tiny cache of iron and porphyrins was preserved inside the mosquito fossil for 46 million years. "It was exciting," Greenwalt says, "and everyone was jumping up and down because we knew this was exceedingly rare and important."
Fossil mosquitoes collected by Dale Greenwalt, a volunteer research collaborator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.The fossils were collected as part of a 5-year project to produce a research collection of fossil insects from the Kishenehn Formation.
Fossil mosquitoes collected by Dale Greenwalt, a volunteer research collaborator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.The fossils were collected as part of a 5-year project to produce a research collection of fossil insects from the Kishenehn Formation.
Courtesy of James Di LoretoThey were jumping up and down because iron and porphyrins are the brick and mortar of hemoglobin, the substance that carries oxygen in blood. What they had were the remains of the mosquito's last blood meal. Given the species of mosquito (something Greenwalt could tell from its shape), Greenwalt guesses that its last meal came from a bird; it's a species that preys on birds nowadays. He says the research is important because it demonstrates a technique that could turn up other chemical clues to ancient life.
The team describes the discovery in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Greenwalt says it was the Smithsonian's high-tech spectroscopy equipment — which can detect tiny amounts of any element — that made this possible. It's the kind of hardware you don't find in most paleontology labs.
The team plans to try their equipment out on more bugs. "We have fossil insects that are bright yellow, bright red [and] bright orange ... probably a whole array of different types of pigments," Greenwalt says. "I've got the next ten years of my life all planned out working at the museum."
Considering that Greenwalt is a volunteer at the Museum of Natural History — he's been retired from a career as a biochemist for years — that looks like a pretty good deal for the Smithsonian ... and for bug history.
