How technology lifts Pixar's 'Up'

If you want to consider a difficult computational problem, try thinking of the algorithms required to animate more than 10,000 helium balloons, each with its own string, but each also interdependent on the rest, which are collectively hoisting aloft a small house.The production team at Pixar faced many new technological challenges on "Up," its tenth feature film.

That was the challenge the production team at Pixar faced when it set out to begin work on "Up," its tenth feature film, five years in the works, which hits theaters on Friday.

There was absolutely no way the team was going to hand-animate the balloons. Not with their numbers in five-figures, and especially not when you consider that within the cluster, every interaction between two balloons has a ripple effect: If one bumped another, the second would move, likely bumping a third, and so on. And every bit of this would need to be seen on screen.

In "Up," the story revolves around the main character, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen, who, frustrated with his mundane life, ties the thousands of balloons to his house and sets off for adventures in South America. A small boy ends up marooned on board, and hilarity ensues.

The cluster of balloons is so central to the film's branding--it's called "Up," after all--that to promote the film, Pixar teamed up with two of the world's cluster ballooning experts for a nationwide tour involving a real-life flying armchair and dozens of huge, colorful balloons.

"You have a movie that's about a house that flies, which is a pretty far-fetched idea," said Steve May, the supervising technical director on "Up." "We all know, from kids' parties, how a bunch of balloons behave, so if we could animate balloons in a realistic way, the believability that the house could fly would sell"

Virgin rolls out new pricing plan

Virgin Media is planning to reconfigure its monthly mobile pricing plans.
The company said that it would be offering a pair of new mobile voice and data packages for mobile users. The 18 month pricing plans will cost ₤18 and ₤25 respectively.
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The ₤18 plan will offer users the option of unlimited data or text messages, while the ₤25 plan will offer unlimited data and text messages.
Customers who are using Virgin Media's other services (land-line, broadband or television) will also be offered the incentive of free calls within the Virgin mobile network.
The company hopes that the offers will undercut competing carriers, particularly in the higher-end market. Virgin notes that the ₤18 plan is ₤2 cheaper per month than competing plans.
"We’re offering consumers outstanding value and much greater choice, with hundreds of minutes, countless texts and endless web browsing included in their monthly package," said Graeme Oxby, managing director of Virgin Media's mobile branch.
"Mobile from Virgin Media offers a compelling alternative to more expensive, long term contracts and we’re bringing all the benefits of the UK’s leading entertainment and communications company right into the customers’ pocket."
Appealing to customers pocketbooks in has been a popular strategy for Virgin in the midst of the economic crisis. Earlier this year the company dropped its lowest-priced plan to £8.50, and in April the company's US branch unveiled a plan which allows customers to miss up to three payments if they become unemployed.

How currency exchange (FOREX) market works

I bet you are well aware of the existent of Forex trading nowadays. Forex market exists wherever one currency is traded for another. Forex, or Foreign Exchange Market, is generally works as an international currency exchange market. Investors and speculators are allowed to trade currencies from all around the world thru Forex trading.

Forex is a very unique type of trading where traders are buying and selling 'money' in the same time. The trades are done in pairs, such as Euro/JPY, USD/CHF, and CAD/USD. It is the world largest trading market where an average of $1.9 trillion trades is done on a daily basis. The turnover rates in FOREX are nearly 30 times larger than the total volume of equity trades in United States.

Despite its large volume of trades done daily, Forex is relative new to the publics nonetheless. It is only made available to publics in year 1998 where big sized inter-bank units are sliced into smaller pieces and offered to individual traders like you and me. Before that, Forex is a game only for banks, multi national cooperation, and big currency dealers. Only those with large business size and strong financial background were permitted to trade foreign currencies.

Foreign Currency and Currency Exchange Rates

You must express the amounts you report on your U.S. tax return in U.S. dollars. If you receive all or part of your income or pay some or all of your expenses in foreign currency, you must translate the foreign currency into U.S. dollars. How you do this depends on your functional currency. Your functional currency generally is the U.S. dollar unless you are required to use the currency of a foreign country.
You must make all federal income tax determinations in your functional currency. The U.S. dollar is the functional currency for all taxpayers except some qualified business units (QBUs). A QBU is a separate and clearly identified unit of a trade or business that maintains separate books and records.
Even if you have a QBU, your functional currency is the dollar if any of the following apply.

• You conduct the business in dollars.
• The principal place of business is located in the United States.
• You choose to or are required to use the dollar as your functional currency.
• The business books and records are not kept in the currency of the economic environment in which a significant part of the business activities is conducted.

Swine Flu

The 2009 outbreak of Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 is an epidemic of a new strain of influenza virus identified in April 2009, commonly referred to as "swine flu." It is thought to be a mutation ("reassortment") of four known strains of influenza A virus subtype H1N1: one endemic in humans, one endemic in birds, and two endemic in pigs (swine).[70] The source of the outbreak in humans is still unknown, but cases were first discovered in the U.S. and soon after in Mexico, which had a surge of cases, many of them fatal. As a result, the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO), along with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), expressed concern that this could become a worldwide flu pandemic, with WHO raising its alert level to "Phase 5" out of the six maximum, indicating that a pandemic was "imminent."

According to the CDC, it is not yet clear how serious this new virus actually is compared with other influenza viruses, although on May 26th they stated that new cases in the U.S. have probably peaked, and most cases throughout the world have so far been mild relative to "seasonal flus." But because this is a new virus, most people will not have immunity to it, and illness may eventually become more severe and widespread in different demographic and population groups as a result. The H1N1 flu mainly spreads in the same way that regular "seasonal influenza" spreads, which is through the air from coughs and sneezes or touching those infected. It cannot be transmitted from eating cooked pork or by being in close contact with pigs.

As yet there is no vaccine available to prevent infection although companies are in the planning stages for having one available later this year. But there is concern that the virus could mutate again over the coming months, leading to a new and potentially more dangerous flu outbreak later in the year, and a vaccine that will be less effective in preventing its spread. Health officials in the U.S. point out that the "horrific" 1918 flu epidemic, which killed 20 million people in the United States alone, was preceded by a mild "herald" wave of cases in the spring.

As of May 26, the virus had spread to more than 46 countries; however, over 80% of reported deaths have taken place in Mexico. This has led to speculation that Mexico may have been in the midst of an unrecognized epidemic for many months prior to the current outbreak. According to the CDC, the fact that the flu's infection activity is now monitored more closely may help explain why more flu cases than normal are being recorded in Mexico, the United States and other countries. About half of all influenza

CAR model

My Other Car is a Bright Green City

Today's cars are costly, dangerous and an ecological nightmare. What if the solution to the problems they create, though, has more to do with where we live than what we drive?

This is a rough draft of a long essay about why I believe building compact communities should be one of America's highest environmental priorities, and why, in fact, our obsession with building greener cars may be obscuring some fundamental aspects of the problem and some of the benefits of using land-use change as a primary sustainability solution.

It's very rough in some places. But I'd like to put it out there as an opportunity for discussion, and hopefully all you smart folks can help me make it better. So, what do you think about this issue and how can I improve this piece?

Recently, I gave a talk at the IDSA conference, and, as it happened, my talk followed a presentation from the folks at Tesla, sharing the design process of their electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster.

Since I was there to talk about sustainability, and was talking to a big room full of designers, I tried to lay out how serious our environmental predicament has become, and how much we'll need to change if we want to steer clear of ecological catastrophe. Along the way, I shared a few of the reasons why I thought the Roadster, though undoubtedly cool, went nowhere near far enough to be called sustainable.

The response surprised me. After my talk, scores of people approached me or emailed me to ask, in generally polite tones, what the hell I was talking about? How could a car that gets 135 mpg-equivalent not be a major harbinger of sustainability?

Because the answer to the problem of the American car is not under the hood, and we're not going to find a bright green future by looking there.

The U.S. economy, as currently configured, is destroying the planet. We are responsible for the lion's share of a great many global problems, including being both the largest historical carbon polluter and the leading source of global emissions today

In addition, for the several billion people in the developing world who are rapidly climbing out of poverty, our lifestyles are the measure of prosperity. If they replicate the American way of life several billion more times, our goose is cooked. The natural systems on which we depend cannot survive the tidal wave of pollution and ecosystem degradation it would take to enrich billions of people using current technologies, designs and lifestyle choices. And we're not going to talk people out of pursuing a more affluent life: it's insane to think that we can talk them out of pursuing affluence while we waste our way to wealth. If we're serious about saving the planet, we need to help them create better alternatives.

The single best way we can do that is to lead by example. By embracing our own models of sustainably prosperous living, we would do two things: we'd help change the cultural messaging about what prosperity really means, and we'd create some (perhaps many) of technologies and designs other countries will need to invent their own models. More importantly, we'd show that we're taking responsibility for the massive burden we're already placing on the planet, and show that we're again willing to show leadership on global issues. That alone might lead to reinvigorated global negotiations on a whole host of key problems.

So we need a one-planet America and we need it quickly. People hold differing views about what one-planet and quickly mean, but as we better grasp the nature of our predicament, it seems more and more likely that if we want to unveil our model in time for other countries to follow suit, we need to be living it by 2030, and if we take seriously the voices I find most credible on issues of climate change, ecosystem services and the like, that new model needs to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80-90%, drop our raw materials flows by a comparable amount, preserve ecosystem functions across broad swathes of the landscape and dramatically decrease the volume of toxic chemicals finding their way into our soil, air and water.

Lots of argument can (and will be) had about all of these goals. No one really knows for sure yet. But I am increasingly confident that these are in the right ball-park and may even prove to be moderate to conservative targets.