V Squared Labs Turns up The Digital Lighting

      A Daft Punk performance at Coachella Valley, California in 2006 featured a monolithic light pyramid that raised the stakes for the live electronica visuals that go with electronic dance music.  V Squared Labs helps to increase this trend by combining lights, video, and sound. Electronic dance music (along with their festivals) have become a part of American music life.  Now, their integration with high-end visuals is opening new avenues for artists to express themselves and create new images.  See also, www.billboard.

E-Book Owners are Really Lisencees

   The terms of service of e-book sellers specify that you're only licensing a book, not buying it.  Some limitations of digital rights management (DRM), which comes under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) seem sensible to protect the consumers that are buying e-books.  Some issues are digital booksellers power to delete entire books from devices.  And, another, is the fact that most e-books are tied to the sellers reading device, or applets permanently.  What needs to be addressed by the DMCA are the facts that typically the e-book sellers can cancel an account at will, they might go out of business, change ownership, or begin charging to store your purchased contents on their computer servers.  See also, www.wired.com.

Lincoln...History In Review

     The intention behind "Lincoln" is to instruct mainstream moviegoers by using a narrative shaped around watershed moments of the past.  Like Shakespeare's historical plays, Steven Spielberg attempts to register the anxieties of a politically pranoid age, for example "fiscal cliff", while shying away from direct commentary on current concerns.  See also, www.variety.com.

Getty To Continute Featuring Large Exhibits

      The Getty will continue its focus on Greek and Roman antiquities, manuscripts of ancient eras, photography, and 18th and 19th century European paintings.  It will also continue to feature large exhibits like that of the Egyptian King Tutankhamun and the Metropolitan Musem of New York's Byzantium.  Timothy Potts, Ph.d. is the new director of the Getty Museum and is well known for notable acquisitions at previous museums, and exhibitions at museums like the Australian National Gallery. It's important to strike a balance between preventing acquisitions work that would encourage increased looting of ancient sites and providing a proper home for these objects", Dr. Potts (an archeologist) says.  See also, www.getty.edu.

Out Of Africa Via Chessboard

         Phioni Mutesi (16) brought her slum experience out of Africa to visit a Valencia, CA chess tournament.  " I was yearning for porridge" Mutesi said, as she recalled how one day in (2005) she followed her brother to a place where kids gathered to play chess.  Those who showed up got a free bowl of porridge.  Mutesi, who was living on the streets of a squalid Katwe, Ungandan village, near the Ungandan Capital of Kampala, kept returning to the makeshift youth center for food.  Her father died of Aids and her mother struggled to feed four children.  Phioni Mutesi is the youngest person to ever win the African Chess Championship (2005) and the first Ugandan female with a chess title.  See full story, www.latimes.com.

Bond Turns 50

     In a world where people blow themselves up instead of using nuclear weapons, James Bond is not as easily portrayed.  Combined with a succession of colorful toys (weapons like flying water skis) and exotic female spies makes the audience numb.  In an era of cyber-spying, drone warfare, and unique Bond gadgets, Bond these days cannot be seen as an out-of-touch-one-percenter.  No movie in the franchise attempts to maintain this balance as much as "Skyfall".  See also, www.variety.com.

Disney Gives Kids Toys in The Cloud

     Las Vegas - A new technological twist is designed to line the computer goodies that kids lug home from the store with Disney's well-known animated characters.  Images and video clips stored on remote servers are streamed to kids' mobiles when the app recognizes a particular item.  Some versions of the toys will be sold from the Disney Princess line in October 2013.  International sales will start in 2014, said Stephen Berman, JAKKS President and CEO.  JAKKS, Dreamplay, and Disney demonstrated their concept at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas.  See also, www.cesweb.org.