mappeal

Steve Kaplan, an organizer for IATSE Local 839 (also known as the Animation Guild), also supports unionization for VFX artists, but said many workers will simply not speak openly about the issue. The industry is small, and artists don’t want to risk alienating the visual-effects studios that employ them.

“I believe they fear retribution,” he said. “That fear would certainly be of retribution in the form of being passed over for employment and labeled a ‘troublemaker’ because of their support of unionization.”

“The next day it occurred to me, ‘Oh wait, this is almost the same as how [Internet] protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for transferring a file!’” Prabhakar said. “The algorithm the ants were using to discover how much food there is available is essentially the same as that used in the Transmission Control Protocol.”

Moises Velasquez-Manoff:

So here’s the short of it: At least a subset of autism — perhaps one-third, and very likely more — looks like a type of inflammatory disease. And it begins in the womb.

It starts with what scientists call immune dysregulation. Ideally, your immune system should operate like an enlightened action hero, meting out inflammation precisely, accurately and with deadly force when necessary, but then quickly returning to a Zen-like calm.

Everyone’s feeling squeezed. Vfx companies say the major studios are shaving their margins down to nothing, but fear retaliation if they try to form a trade organization. Artists, who receive no health or retirement benefits, say salaries are falling though demand for their craft increases, but worry that vfx companies would retaliate if they try to unionize.

Beneath it all, American artists and companies alike fear the visual-effects business itself may go extinct in the U.S.

a headline straight from a paleo-future.

A small, flat rock known as Coronation suffered the wrath of Curiosity’s laser when the Mars rover finally fired up its ChemCam instrument and delivered 30 pulses of energy at the rock over a 10-second period.

The laser pulses, each delivering more than 1 million watts of power for around 5 one-billionths of a second, turn some of the rock’s atoms into a glowing, ionized plasma. By analyzing the light from the plasma, the ChemCam’s three spectrometers can determine what elements are in the rock.

Citigroup, Abbott Laboratories, and AT&T are among the 26 companies that paid more to their CEOs in 2011 than they did in U.S. federal taxes, according to a study released on Thursday.
Tax breaks on research and development, past losses, and foreign-held earnings were among those lightening the tax load for many companies on the list, said the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

via boingboing