WIll be glad if you'll support us, and will do it monthly :-)

THE lights dimmed. The crowd hushed. The teleprompters flickered.

Kazuo Hirai stepped up and flashed a winning smile: it was show time. The scene was oddly upbeat inside the Sony Corporation last Thursday as Mr. Hirai, the company’s new chief executive, faced the cameras. He outlined a strategy that, he vowed, would return the troubled electronics giant to profit.

“The time for Sony to change is now,” said Mr. Hirai, who formally took up the C.E.O. post on April 1. He posed for the cameras, one finger held high in a No. 1 sign. “I believe Sony can change,” he said.

Outside Sony — and inside it, too — not everyone is quite so sure.

That is because Sony, which once defined Japan’s technological prowess, wowed the world with the Walkman and the Trinitron TV and shocked Hollywood with bold acquisitions like Columbia Pictures, is now in the fight of its life.

In fact, it is in a fight for its life — a development that exemplifies the stunning decline of Japan’s industrialized economy. Once upon a time, Japan Inc., not to mention Sony itself, seemed invulnerable. Today, Sony and many other Japanese manufacturers are pressed on all sides: by rising Asian rivals, a punishingly strong Japanese yen and, in Sony’s case, an astonishing lack of ideas. (snipped)

Thanks & regards,

NEW HAVEN — Yale announced a year ago that it was creating the “first new college to bear the Yale name in 300 years” at the National University of Singapore, and last week, after reviewing 2,500 applications, it sent out the first handful of faculty job offers for Yale-N.U.S. College. So it is distinctly awkward timing that members of the Yale College faculty, which never voted on the plan, are now raising concerns about joining their storied institution with an autocratic city-state where drug offenses can bring the death penalty, homosexual relations are illegal and criminal defamation charges are aggressively pursued. On campus, there is a whiff of a Yale Spring, a slow awakening — at a university with no faculty senate — to faculty discontent. Many Yale professors are unhappy about the absence of a vote on the Singapore project, while some go further and attack it as a dangerous collaboration with a government that does not support the broad freedoms they believe are central to liberal arts education.

“The faculty is feeling disempowered, that it has no voice in what is going on,” said Seyla Benhabib, a political science professor.

Richard C. Levin, the university’s president, said the faculty had no vote on the project because it would not affect the college. It was approved by the Yale Corporation, the governing board. Yale officials take pains to explain that Yale-N.U.S., which will be paid for entirely by Singapore, will not be Yale but a distinct institution with its own president and its own diploma.

Of course, some faculty support the project, and some are deeply involved in it: Charles Bailyn, an astronomy professor, will be the dean of Yale-N.U.S. when the first 150 students arrive next year, and other professors helped develop the plan and are working on hiring.

VVVVVVVVVVVVV

Anyone who know how stupid the American Criminal Justice system is should find this absurd. We've taken to blowing up our citizenry with Drones and filling our prisons with drug addicts busted on possession charges. But now we're too good for Singapore -- one of the most civilized places on the planet.

http://laughingsquid.com/opmod-battle-mug/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PuCtZC9S9hc

FACTS:

-I can't cut/copy/delete any files from the card (even though i managed at one point to copy the footage from a mac, so I don't care about recovering data, formatting on a mac failed too)

-the drive has become incredibly slow and freezes any time you click or right click any file within "STREAM" location

-there are some garbage files created in my stream location made up of symbols and shit

-I scanned the card and my whole computer with avg antivirus and malwarebytes: found nothing

• trying to format from camera gives error and can't complete

-formatting from my computer cannot complete

-formatting from disk management cannot complete or freezes

-downloaded "SDFormatter" as well as "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool", both of which when I run (and I've tried all format options) give error "media device is write-protected" so I double check the little switch on the side of my sdhc card and I made sure it was upwards(meaning it's not write-protected)

   So my next step was to run "regedit" and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\StorageDevicePolicies
   I then opened "WriteProtect" and entered 0 value instead of 1, pressed ok. Result: same shit.

-also tried "Apacer Formatting Utility" with special .bat file . Result: negative

-then I tried command prompt CHKDSK H: /F result: negative

-then I rebooted in safe mode with command prompt only, I accessed my card and ran "Format H:" and I got error "format cannot run because the volume is in use by another process " so I tried dismounting the drive too but that did nothing either

what do u think?anything I can do?

I bought this card from amazon uk but right now i'm in greece on holiday and will be here for the next month and need to shoot stuff, so I can't try and send it back. and there are no video sdhc sandisk cards in stock in greece, and if they are, they cost about 300 euro :)))

Is this a bloody disease or what?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/16/148680705/why-are-some-countries-rich-and-others-poor <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Why are some nations rich and others poor? In a new book called Why Nations Fail, a pair of economists argue that a lot comes down to politics.

To research the book, the authors scoured the world for populations and geographic areas that are identical in all respects save one: they're on different sides of a border.

The two Koreas are an extreme example. But you can see the same thing on the border of the US and Mexico, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and dozens of other neighboring countries. In all of these cases, the people and land were fairly similar, but the border changed everything.

"It's all about institutions," Daron Acemoglu, one of the authors, explained. "It's really about human-made systems, rules, regulations, formal or informal that create different incentives."

When these guys talk about institutions they mean it as broadly as possible: it's the formal rules and laws, but also the norms and common practices of a society. Lots of countries have great constitutions but their leaders have a practice of ignoring the rules whenever they feel like it.

Acemoglu and his co-author, James Robinson say the key difference between rich countries and poor ones is the degree to which a country has institutions that keep a small elite from grabbing all the wealth. In poor countries, the rich and powerful crush the poor and powerless.

Think of a poor farmer in Haiti or the Congo today or medieval Europe 500 years ago. Sure, he could, maybe, irrigate his land and till the soil and grow more stuff. But they know that the institutions in place guarantee that a well connected member of the elite will show up and claim the spoils. So what's the point? The poor have no incentive to invest in land or businesses or to accumulate savings. The result - undeveloped land and a poor nation.

James said, "Ultimately, what needs to change is that those countries have to make a transition to having inclusive institutions. And that's not something that throwing money at them can achieve."

This can seem discouraging but their message does offer hope, too. Poverty is not the simple result of bad geography, bad culture, bad history. It's the result of us: of the ways that people choose to organize their societies. And, that means, we can change things.

It's not about the cute African kids, it's about the money.

I'm going to be visiting Los Angeles for the next week to decide on whether or not I want to make 'the move.' While I'm in LA I'd love to visit some sets of current productions- are there any listings of what's being shot right now, either in print or online?

I'm also hoping to connect with anyone who is working on any independent narrative films, or any documentary work, as I'm moving from somewhere that there isn't much of a film community and hoping to find other filmmakers to collaborate with, so if you know of anyone or of any resources, that would be wonderful to know about!

Christopher

Before I press record the lcd shows different colors in comparison to the video I can watch after recording (after recording it looks a bit more green). I have tried nearly everything but without any good result.

Is the reason that the DSP of the cam doesnt compute every pic manipulation effect to save energy and to protect the cam from overheating in non recording mode?

any ideas to fix that? Or are patches for the hack available that will fix it?

Thx in advance

I'm using: SmallHD DP4+EVF Hot-Bloc power distribution with Sony NPF-970 battery (powers monitor and camera) ----- follow focus and rig

Its really compact and also balanced perfectly, hands free will hang on your shoulder!!

:-)

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/arduino-control-of-a-camera-lens

Vladimir-- built an Arduino-based pass-through ring (translated) which intercepts automatic lens controls. It’s meant for use with the Canon EOS lenses which have their own electronics allowing control of things like focus and zoom.

It seems like part of the motivation here was to uses the lenses with other brands of cameras. But Vladimir does also talk about the possibility of improving on some of the sensors that don’t perform well in certain climate conditions (think of how crystal oscillators will drift as temperature changes).

The machine translation is a bit rough to follow, but it seems the adapter ring still uses the settings sent in from the camera but has the Arduino clone to translate them into a format that the lens is expecting. In addition to this there is a set of buttons on that small PCB beside the lens which allow for fine tuning the aperture.

Here is the Russian link if anyone can translate or extract better info:

http://www.ixbt.com/digimage/canonautosonyl.shtml

It would be nice to translate GH-2 lens focus commands to say Canon. Then we can have our autofocus and aperture control on a wide range of adapted lenses.

Maybe a Russian speaker can e-mail him to see if he can adapt to M43 to canon rather than Sony to Canon.

1e. First i set LCD Mode to 2 2e. I set Monitor 1 more to the left, and the other completely below

I looked on both page 90 and page 123 but I can not find where to turn it off in the camera. Where exactly is the option located in the camera? Thx KeNoah

I'll be moving to stockholm next month with my family. I lived there in the 90s. I could use some advice in the following areas:

1) where do you get camera gear? - what are the best stores in town - what happens when you buy something from amazon or bh? I assume you get hit with the 25% mums tax but what else?

2) Where are the best places to connect with people who make short films? Students are fine but where else?

I'm not a film professional but want to do small budget high-quality shorts.

Thanks for any thoughts/