Friday, July 19, 2019
The Best Things at Comic-Con Aren't at Comic-Con
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Wydad Casablanca: Moroccan club appoints Manojlovic as head coach
Thursday, July 18, 2019
‘Cats’ trailer featuring Idris Elba and Jennifer Hudson is hilarious and horrifying
The first official trailer for Cats has hit the web and Twitter is in a frenzy over the first look at the film that stars Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, and Jason Derulo among others.
The film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Weber‘s iconic Broadway musical that utilizes CGI to turn its human actors into leotard-wearing cats with “digital fur” and the result is pretty peculiar. In fact, it’s equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
WATCH: Idris Elba reveals how he found his funny bone for ‘Turn Up Charlie’
Other big names in the flick full of felines are Taylor Swift, Dame Judi Dench, James Corden, Rebel Wilson, and Ian McKellan.
Hearing J-Hud belting out one of the title’s big numbers is astounding, but watching her do it as a cat who walks on two legs is a little atrocious.
Take a look:
Twitter was quick to come with the memes as soon as the trailer dropped on Thursday. Here are a few of our favorite reactions:
Idris Elba and Jason DeRulo in Cats (2019, Dir. Tom Hooper) pic.twitter.com/shRwcy80P0
— Freddie Benson (@DeeH_NYC) July 18, 2019
*Megan Rapinoe voice* I’m not going to see fucking CATS.
— Akilah Hughes (@AkilahObviously) July 18, 2019
I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY DID THIS ON PURPOSE. pic.twitter.com/oItHY9G7s1
— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) July 18, 2019
Me trying to save Idris Elba from the CATS movie: pic.twitter.com/xlaIaAQNTh
— Ryan Aguirre (@aguirreryan) July 18, 2019
WATCH: Idris Elba dances with Taylor Swift in new BTS clip of ‘Cats: The Movie’
Prior to dropping the trailer, Universal released some BTS footage from the film on Wednesday. In it, we see Idris Elba as “Macavity” dancing with Taylor Swift as “Bombalurina.”
The actor admitted that the star-studded cast made tackling this role a little daunting.
“When you see people that are at the top of their game doing it, you raise your bar as well,” Elba says in the clip. “The scale of this film is huge, three or four times bigger for the cats perspective. This is a moment for you to step into a world that’s completely designed to entertain you.”
Cats hits theaters on December 20.
The post ‘Cats’ trailer featuring Idris Elba and Jennifer Hudson is hilarious and horrifying appeared first on theGrio.
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Comic-Con Trailers: 'It Chapter 2,' 'Top Gun: Maverick,' and 'His Dark Materials'
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Behind the scenes of the Apollo mission at MIT
Fifty years ago this week, humanity made its first expedition to another world, when Apollo 11 touched down on the moon and two astronauts walked on its surface. That moment changed the world in ways that still reverberate today.
MIT’s deep and varied connections to that epochal event — many of which have been described on MIT News — began years before the actual landing, when the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now Draper Labs) signed the very first contract to be awarded for the Apollo program after its announcement by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. The Institute’s involvement continued throughout the program — and is still ongoing today.
MIT’s role in creating the navigation and guidance system that got the mission to the moon and back has been widely recognized in books, movies, and television series. But many other aspects of the Institute’s involvement in the Apollo program and its legacy, including advances in mechanical and computational engineering, simulation technology, biomedical studies, and the geophysics of planet formation, have remained less celebrated.
Amid the growing chorus of recollections in various media that have been appearing around this 50th anniversary, here is a small collection of bits and pieces about some of the unsung heroes and lesser-known facts from the Apollo program and MIT’s central role in it.
A new age in electronics
The computer system and its software that controlled the spacecraft — called the Apollo Guidance Computer and designed by the MIT Instrumentation Lab team under the leadership of Eldon Hall — were remarkable achievements that helped push technology forward in many ways.
The AGC’s programs were written in one of the first-ever compiler languages, called MAC, which was developed by Instrumentation Lab engineer Hal Laning. The computer itself, the 1-cubic-foot Apollo Guidance Computer, was the first significant use of silicon integrated circuit chips and greatly accelerated the development of the microchip technology that has gone on to change virtually every consumer product.
In an age when most computers took up entire climate-controlled rooms, the compact AGC was uniquely small and lightweight. But most of its “software” was actually hard-wired: The programs were woven, with tiny donut-shaped metal “cores” strung like beads along a set of wires, with a given wire passing outside the donut to represent a zero, or through the hole for a 1. These so-called rope memories were made in the Boston suburbs at Raytheon, mostly by women who had been hired because they had experience in the weaving industry. Once made, there was no way to change individual bits within the rope, so any change to the software required weaving a whole new rope, and last-minute changes were impossible.
As David Mindell, the Frances and David Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, points out in his book “Digital Apollo,” that system represented the first time a computer of any kind had been used to control, in real-time, many functions of a vehicle carrying human beings — a trend that continues to accelerate as the world moves toward self-driving vehicles. Right after the Apollo successes, the AGC was directly adapted to an F-8 fighter jet, to create the first-ever fly-by-wire system for aircraft, where the plane’s control surfaces are moved via a computer rather than direct cables and hydraulic systems. This approach is now widespread in the aerospace industry, says John Tylko, who teaches MIT’s class 16.895J (Engineering Apollo: The Moon Project as a Complex System), which is taught every other year.
As sophisticated as the computer was for its time, computer users today would barely recognize it as such. Its keyboard and display screen looked more like those on a microwave oven than a computer: a simple numeric keypad and a few lines of five-digit luminous displays. Even the big mainframe computer used to test the code as it was being developed had no keyboard or monitor that the programmers ever saw. Programmers wrote their code by hand, then typed it onto punch cards — one card per line — and handed the deck of cards to a computer operator. The next day, the cards would be returned with a printout of the program’s output. And in this time long before email, communications among the team often relied on handwritten paper notes.
Priceless rocks
MIT’s involvement in the geophysical side of the Apollo program also extends back to the early planning stages — and continues today. For example, Professor Nafi Toksöz, an expert in seismology, helped to develop a seismic monitoring station that the astronauts placed on the moon, where it helped lead to a greater understanding of the moon’s structure and formation. “It was the hardest work I have ever done, but definitely the most exciting,” he has said.
Toksöz says that the data from the Apollo seismometers “changed our understanding of the moon completely.” The seismic waves, which on Earth continue for a few minutes, lasted for two hours, which turned out to be the result of the moon’s extreme lack of water. “That was something we never expected, and had never seen,” he recalls.
The first seismometer was placed on the moon’s surface very shortly after the astronauts landed, and seismologists including Toksöz started seeing the data right away — including every footstep the astronauts took on the surface. Even when the astronauts returned to the lander to sleep before the morning takeoff, the team could see that Buzz Aldrin ScD ’63 and Neil Armstrong were having a sleepless night, with every toss and turn dutifully recorded on the seismic traces.
MIT Professor Gene Simmons was among the first group of scientists to gain access to the lunar samples as soon as NASA released them from quarantine, and he and others in what is now the Department of Earth, Planetary and Atmospheric Sciences (EAPS) have continued to work on these samples ever since. As part of a conference on campus, he exhibited some samples of lunar rock and soil in their first close-up display to the public, where some people may even have had a chance to touch the samples.
Others in EAPS have also been studying those Apollo samples almost from the beginning. Timothy Grove, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, started studying the Apollo samples in 1971 as a graduate student at Harvard University, and has been doing research on them ever since. Grove says that these samples have led to major new understandings of planetary formation processes that have helped us understand the Earth and other planets better as well.
Among other findings, the rocks showed that ratios of the isotopes of oxygen and other elements in the moon rocks were identical to those in terrestrial rocks but completely different than those of any meteorites, proving that the Earth and the moon had a common origin and leading to the hypothesis that the moon was created through a giant impact from a planet-sized body. The rocks also showed that the entire surface of the moon had likely been molten at one time. The idea that a planetary body could be covered by an ocean of magma was a major surprise to geologists, Grove says.
Many puzzles remain to this day, and the analysis of the rock and soil samples goes on. “There’s still a lot of exciting stuff” being found in these samples, Grove says.
Sorting out the facts
In the spate of publicity and new books, articles, and programs about Apollo, inevitably some of the facts — some trivial, some substantive — have been scrambled along the way. “There are some myths being advanced,” says Tylko, some of which he addresses in his “Engineering Apollo” class. “People tend to oversimplify” many aspects of the mission, he says.
For example, many accounts have described the sequence of alarms that came from the guidance computer during the last four minutes of the mission, forcing mission controllers to make the daring decision to go ahead despite the unknown nature of the problem. But Don Eyles, one of the Instrumentation Lab’s programmers who had written the landing software for the AGC, says that he can’t think of a single account he’s read about that sequence of events that gets it entirely right. According to Eyles, many have claimed the problem was caused by the fact that the rendezvous radar switch had been left on, so that its data were overloading the computer and causing it to reboot.
But Eyles says the actual reason was a much more complex sequence of events, including a crucial mismatch between two circuits that would only occur in rare circumstances and thus would have been hard to detect in testing, and a probably last-minute decion to put a vital switch in a position that allowed it to happen. Eyles has described these details in a memoir about the Apollo years and in a technical paper available online, but he says they are difficult to summarize simply. But he thinks the author Norman Mailer may have come closest, capturing the essence of it in his book “Of a Fire on the Moon,” where he describes the issue as caused by a “sneak circuit” and an “undetectable” error in the onboard checklist.
Some accounts have described the AGC as a very limited and primitive computer compared to today’s average smartphone, and Tylko acknowledges that it had a tiny fraction of the power of today’s smart devices — but, he says, “that doesn’t mean they were unsophisticated.” While the AGC only had about 36 kilobytes of read-only memory and 2 kilobytes of random-access memory, “it was exceptionally sophisticated and made the best use of the resources available at the time,” he says.
In some ways it was even ahead of its time, Tylko says. For example, the compiler language developed by Laning along with Ramon Alonso at the Instrumentation Lab used an architecture that he says was relatively intuitive and easy to interact with. Based on a system of “verbs” (actions to be performed) and “nouns” (data to be worked on), “it could probably have made its way into the architecture of PCs,” he says. “It’s an elegant interface based on the way humans think.”
Some accounts go so far as to claim that the computer failed during the descent and astronaut Neil Armstrong had to take over the controls and land manually, but in fact partial manual control was always part of the plan, and the computer remained in ultimate control throughout the mission. None of the onboard computers ever malfunctioned through the entire Apollo program, according to astronaut David Scott SM ’62, who used the computer on two Apollo missions: “We never had a failure, and I think that is a remarkable achievement.”
Behind the scenes
At the peak of the program, a total of about 1,700 people at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab were working on the Apollo program’s software and hardware, according to Draper Laboratory, the Instrumentation Lab’s successor, which spun off from MIT in 1973. A few of those, such as the near-legendary “Doc” Draper himself — Charles Stark Draper ’26, SM ’28, ScD ’38, former head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) — have become widely known for their roles in the mission, but most did their work in near-anonymity, and many went on to entirely different kinds of work after the Apollo program’s end.
Margaret Hamilton, who directed the Instrumentation Lab’s Software Engineering Division, was little known outside of the program itself until an iconic photo of her next to the original stacks of AGC code began making the rounds on social media in the mid 2010s. In 2016, when she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, MIT Professor Jaime Peraire, then head of AeroAstro, said of Hamilton that “She was a true software engineering pioneer, and it’s not hyperbole to say that she, and the Instrumentation Lab’s Software Engineering Division that she led, put us on the moon.” After Apollo, Hamilton went on to found a software services company, which she still leads.
Many others who played major roles in that software and hardware development have also had their roles little recognized over the years. For example, Hal Laning ’40, PhD ’47, who developed the programming language for the AGC, also devised its executive operating system, which employed what was at the time a new way of handling multiple programs at once, by assigning each one a priority level so that the most important tasks, such as controlling the lunar module’s thrusters, would always be taken care of. “Hal was the most brilliant person we ever had the chance to work with,” Instrumentation Lab engineer Dan Lickly told MIT Technology Review. And that priority-driven operating system proved crucial in allowing the Apollo 11 landing to proceed safely in spite of the 1202 alarms going off during the lunar descent.
While the majority of the team working on the project was male, software engineer Dana Densmore recalls that compared to the heavily male-dominated workforce at NASA at the time, the MIT lab was relatively welcoming to women. Densmore, who was a control supervisor for the lunar landing software, told The Wall Street Journal that “NASA had a few women, and they kept them hidden. At the lab it was very different,” and there were opportunities for women there to take on significant roles in the project.
Hamilton recalls the atmosphere at the Instrumentation Lab in those days as one of real dedication and meritocracy. As she told MIT News in 2009, “Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board. Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers.”
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Portraits of mentoring excellence
What makes a great faculty mentor? Appreciative graduate students from across the Institute have thoughts — lots of them.
In letters of nomination to the Committed to Caring (C2C) program over the past five years, students have lauded faculty who validate them, who encourage work-life balance, and who foster an inclusive work environment, among other caring actions. Professors Eytan Modiano, Erin Kelly, and Ju Li especially excel at advocating for students, sharing behind-the-scenes information, and demonstrating empathy.
The pool of C2C honorees is still expanding, along with a growing catalog of supportive actions known as Mentoring Guideposts. A new selection round has just begun, and the C2C program invites all graduate students to nominate professors for their outstanding mentorship by July 26.
Eytan Modiano: listening and advocating
Eytan Modiano is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the associate director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). His work addresses communication networks and protocols with application to satellite, wireless, and optical networks. The primary goal of his research is the design of network architectures that are cost-effective, scalable, and robust. His research group crosses disciplinary boundaries by combining techniques from network optimization; queueing theory; graph theory; network protocols and algorithms; machine learning; and physical layer communications.
When students reach out to Modiano for advice, he makes time in his schedule to meet with them, usually the same day or the next. In doing so, students say that Modiano offers invaluable support and shows students that he prioritizes them.
Modiano provides his students with channels to express their difficulties (a Mentoring Guidepost identified by the C2C program). For example, he allots unstructured time during individual and group meetings for student feedback. “These weekly meetings are mainly focused on research,” Modiano says, “but I always make sure to leave time at the end to talk about anything else that is on a student's mind, such as concerns about their career plans, coursework, or anything else.”
He also reaches out to student groups about how the department and lab could better serve them. As associate director of LIDS, Modiano has responded to such feedback in a number of ways, including working alongside the LIDS Social Committee to organize graduate student events. He has advocated for funding of MIT Graduate Women in Aerospace Engineering, and was a key proponent of the Exploring Aerospace Day, an event the group hosted for interested high school students.
Modiano does not think in binary terms about success and failure: “No single event, or even a series of events, is likely to define a career.” Rather, a career should be seen as a path “with ups and downs and whose trajectory we try to shape.”
Modiano advises, “If you persist, you are likely to find a path that you are happy with, and meet your goals.”
Erin Kelly: sustainably moving forward
In her students’ estimation, Erin Kelly, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies, rises to the level of exceptional mentorship by channeling her expertise in work and organization studies to the benefit of her advisees.
Kelly investigates the implications of workplace policies and management strategies for workers, firms, and families; previous research has examined scheduling and work-family supports, family leaves, harassment policies, and diversity initiatives. As part of the Work, Family, and Health Network, she has evaluated innovative approaches to work redesign with group-randomized trials in professional/technical and health care workforces. Her book with Phyllis Moen, "Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What to Do About It," will be published by Princeton University Press in early 2020.
In Kelly’s words, she tries to “promote working in ways that feel sane and sustainable.” She does not count how many hours her students spend on projects or pay attention to where they work or how quickly they respond to emails. Kelly says that she knows her students are committed to this effort long-term, and that everyone works differently.
One student nominator noted that Kelly was extremely supportive of her decision to have a child during graduate school, offering her advice about how to balance work and home as well as how to transition back into school after maternity leave. The nominator notes, “Erin does not view the baby as an impediment to my professional career.”
In addition to providing advice on course selection and dissertation planning, Kelly offers her students “informal” advising (a Mentoring Guidepost) that goes beyond the usual academic parameters. Kelly “explained to me the importance of networking in finding an academic job,” another student says, “I’ve appreciated this informal mentoring, particularly because I am a woman trying to enter a male-dominated field; understanding how to succeed professionally is important, but is not always obvious.”
Ju Li: a proven mentor and friend
Ju Li is the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. Li’s research focuses on mechanical properties of materials, and energy storage and conversion. His lab also studies the effects of radiation and aggressive environments on microstructure and materials properties.
Li shows empathy for students’ experiences (a Mentoring Guidepost identified by the C2C program). One student remarked that when they were not confident in their own abilities, Li was “extremely patient” and showed faith in their work. Li “lifted me up with his encouraging words and shared his own experiences and even struggles.”
He concerns himself with both training academic researchers and also preparing students for life after MIT, whether their paths lead them to academic, industry, governmental, or entrepreneurial endeavors. Li’s attention to his students and their aims does not go unnoticed. One C2C nominator says that former group members often come back to visit and to seek advice from Li whenever possible, “and nobody regrets being a member of our group.”
It is clear from their letters of nomination that Li’s students deeply admire his character and hold him up as a lifelong role model. In addition to his caring actions, they cite his humility and his treatment of students as “equals and true friends.”
Just as Li’s students admire him, Li was inspired by his own graduate mentor, Sydney Yip, professor emeritus of nuclear science and engineering, and materials science and engineering at MIT. Li says that Yip taught everyone who encountered him to become better researchers and better people. In graduate school, Li says, “I benefited so much by watching how Sid managed his group, and how he interacted with the world … I felt lucky every day.”
More on Committed to Caring (C2C)
The Committed to Caring (C2C) program, an initiative of the Office of Graduate Education, honors faculty members from across the Institute for their outstanding support of graduate students. By sharing the stories of great mentors, like professors Modiano, Kelly, and Li, the C2C Program hopes to encourage exceptional mentorship at MIT.
Selection criteria for the award include the scope and reach of advisor impact on the experience of graduate students, excellence in scholarship, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion.
Nominations for the next round of honorees must be submitted by July 26. Selections will be announced in late September.
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Irv Gotti doesn’t blame Ja Rule for Fyre Festival scandal: “It was crazy”
Irv Gotti is best known for his time at the helm of MURDER INC. when Ja Rule and Ashanti ruled the charts. Now, as the creator and executive producer of TALES, he still has his hand in the music scene.
WATCH: Irv Gotti on MURDER INC. Reunion Tour: ‘It’s one hundred percent happening’
On the heels of the 2019 Emmy nominations which included Netflix’s documentary, Fyre Festival: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, we caught up with him to find out his thoughts on the Fyre Festival and whether or not he believes Ja Rule is to blame for the fiasco that ruined so many people’s lives.
“The Fyre Festival thing was crazy because I didn’t know too much about The Fire Festival. I wasn’t like deeply a part of it or around it, but I’m always there to support Ja. What I thought about it was we didn’t know Billy. I met Billy and he fooled me too. I thought he was a good guy that was doing the right thing. I didn’t know this dude was a hell of a scam artist,” he told TheGrio during an exclusive interview.
“I thought it was a great idea. He showed me the tents…he made it seem like it was gonna be the dopest, flyest thing…I thought it was a phenomenal idea and I wish they would have did it. They should have postponed it and done it right.”
According to Irv Gotti, Ja Rule didn’t do anything wrong.
“Ja, in his defense, Ja Rule could have distanced himself from it. He could have played the Kendall Jenner role,” he said.
Ja Rule blasted for launching new FYRE copycat app called ICONN
Find out how Irv Got found out that the Fire Festival was a sham and how he made sure Ja Rule was alright when the drama ensued.
TALES airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on BET.
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How Long Would It Take to Bicycle to the Moon?
Netball World Cup 2019: South Africa to receive £57,000 bonus if they win title
Spike Lee’s ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ canceled by Netflix
Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It series has been canceled by Netflix after its second season.
—Prosecutors seek prison terms for Charlottesville attackers—
Lee however hasn’t had enough of his 1986 feature film turned into a scripted TV comedy and reportedly plans to shop the show around to other networks.
“Spike Lee is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time and we’re thrilled he brought the series She’s Gotta Have It to Netflix. While this is our last season, we’re very proud that it will be on our service for years to come, and excited to be working with Spike on his upcoming Netflix film Da 5 Bloods,” Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos said in a statement Wednesday to The Hollywood Reporter.
While there was much fanfare during season one of She’s Gotta Have it, season two hasn’t maintained the same momentum of excitement and currently sits at a so-so 67 percent RottenTomatoes.com score.
But where one door close, Netflix has opened another for Lee.
According to Variety, the veteran director will distribute the movie, “Da 5 Bloods” through Netflix.
—‘POSE’ star Billy Porter: “Conservatives are human being too”—
The film will follow the lives of Vietnam veterans who have chosen to return to the jungle in a quest to find their lost innocence.
“To quote my brother Jay-Z from Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn ‘On to Da Next One,’” Lee previously said about pivoting to the project on the heels of his critically acclaimed film “BlacKkKlansman.”
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Nigeria's Amaju Pinnick is dismissed as Caf vice-president
Kim Kardashian calls on Trump to help A$AP Rocky get out of a Swedish jail
Kim Kardashian is on the job lobbying for the release of A$AP Rocky from a seedy Swedish jail and word is she’s contacted Trump’s team to help her out.
—Congressman, celebs push for A$AP Rocky’s release from jail—
The rapper got himself in hot water for engaging in a fight and last week a Swedish court ordered Rocky to spend two weeks in pre-trial detention while police investigate the June 30 fight in downtown Stockholm, TMZ reports.
Since then celebrities, politicians and even reportedly the Congressional Black Caucus took up the cause to help get Rocky back home to the states.
And that would be the place where he once said he didn’t sign up to be a political activist to defend causes that affect Black Americans because he “couldn’t relate.”
But we digress.
Kardashian and her husband Kanye West reportedly heard about the rapper’s predicament after #JusticeForRocky started circulating on social media. Kardashian then put a call in to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner to update him on the situation and ask for help in enlisting Trump. Reportedly Trump agreed that something was off with the whole situation.
—Swedish prison chief balks at accusations of inhumane jail conditions for A$AP Rocky—
Rocky, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, was allegedly involved in a fight before appearing at a music festival in Sweden. It was not clear who else was involved, but videos published on social media appear to show a person being violently thrown onto the ground by Rocky. A defense lawyer has said it was self-defense.
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