National World War II Museum: Bringing the battle to life
By Mark Guarino | 11.09.09
There are those who served at the battlefront and witnessed first-hand the ugliness of war. And there are the rest of us who experience it from behind exhibition glass.
This month in New Orleans, however, The National World War II Museum is opening the doors to a new $60 million complex that will feature as its centerpiece a 35-minute film designed to virtually transport viewers 70 years into the past through technology marketed as “4-D cinematics,” including special lighting, fog, stage snow, moving props, surround sound, and digital animation.
Immersive film experiences are usually reserved for wide-screen nature documentaries at science museums or concert films featuring megabands like the Rolling Stones or U2. “Beyond All Boundaries,” the film that will run in perpetuity in New Orleans at the 250-seat Victory Theater, is the first designed to teach history, in particular of a war about which most Americans remain especially reverent.
Turning to Hollywood to accomplish what history exhibitions did in the past is a trend that the museum establishment is finding a lot harder to ignore. Advances in media technology and a concern about reaching younger generations are forcing museum curators to think about moving past found artifacts and into the virtual realm, which is more interactive and offers the opportunity to present multiple perspectives of a single event or issue.
Museum consultant Josh Feinberg, who helped develop exhibitions for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, says that museums are “realizing they need to kind of keep up and remain attractive in this media-heavy world” and that often creates “a blurring of lines between education and entertainment.”
Mr. Feinberg says that because there “sometimes is a rush to use technology,” there is a danger of “sacrificing the content in favor of doing something flashy.”
“There are plenty of ways to engage kids, but if it’s not educational or [doesn’t] … connect them to the content in a meaningful way, what’s the point? So this is not about the technology but about how the tool is used,” says Feinberg.
Lori Fogarty dealt with those questions when, as the executive director of the Oakland Museum of California, she led a campaign to dramatically alter 30,000 square feet of gallery space that had not been touched since 1969. When the doors reopen in May 2010, museumgoers will still be able to view artwork on the wall as they did in the past, but they will also be able to interact with digital components to record their own stories, hear multiple perspectives of a historical event, and create their own portraits to complement what is hanging on the wall.
The transition from a passive to an interactive experience was necessary, Ms. Fogarty says, because “people really have different expectations and desires of museums and don’t necessarily just want to come and look at a wonderful work of art and historic artifact. The interest in the authentic is still very strong, but they want to have a very different kind of museum.”
Phil Hettema knows a lot about these issues. Having worked at Universal Studios Theme Parks Worldwide for more than 10 years, he helped develop projects at theme parks across the United States and Spain. Before that he was a designer at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Earlier this decade, he formed The Hettema Group to bring his expertise to museums, a realm he knew was not without controversy.
“Ten years ago, if you had ‘theme park’ connected with your bio, you were anathema to most museums, because it wasn’t regarded as serious,” says Mr. Hettema. “That has turned 180 degrees. Now, museums are looking for things they can do to bring in an audience and allow them to communicate their story.”
He says his job is to help answer the question: “How do you take all these artifacts and enrich the process?”
At The National World War II Museum, that meant figuring out how to retell the story of the war in a way that was intellectually challenging – informed by the usual facts and biographies of most exhibitions – but also provided a sensory experience meant to let viewers into what it was like to experience a certain event.
Starting five years ago, a group of historians helped Hettema’s creative team draft a story line and decide on source materials for the film for the World War II museum. They ended up using wartime letters and close-up photographs, so that the history was presented from the bottom up.
Then came the “4-D” element. Eight projectors were designed to run concurrently, layering visuals, each cued to the story lines that wrap around the theater. An 18-foot-deep pit houses mechanized props that rise and descend in sync with appropriate moments in the film. They include a concentration camp tower, an antiaircraft gun, the nose cone of a fighter plane, and tank traps. During the film, the seats rumble when tanks approach in the North Africa campaign, and snowflakes fall from the ceiling during the Battle of the Bulge.
“You’re playing with people’s senses throughout the entire experience,” says Bob Farnsworth, senior vice president of Capital Projects, which is overseeing the construction.
Thanks to the involvement of executive producer Tom Hanks, actors such as Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon, and Tobey Maguire lent their voices for the letters, and a 100-member symphony orchestra from Warner Bros. provided the music.
Hettema says immersive experiences like The National World War II Museum’s will become more prevalent, mostly because it has been proved that young people can now “process information more quickly” than they may have been capable of in the past.
“So I think being able to create environments that are more compelling and more experiential is well suited for that audience,” he says. “Anytime we can make anything more participatory, I think the storytelling and the educational part becomes more potent.”
The theater’s opening is not the final stage for the museum, either. The new theater is part of an expanded 300,000-acre campus funded by a $300 million campaign.
Four pavilions to explore other dimensions of the war are planned for completion in 2015, making the entire project the first major cultural institution to open in New Orleans since hurricane Katrina in 2005.
For Hettema, the project has an added personal dimension: His father flew in B-17 bombing raids over Germany during the war. Like many veterans, he rarely talked about his experience upon his return to civilian life, and Hettema did not learn the scope of his father’s involvement in the war until 30 years later when he accompanied his father to reunions and met the men with whom he flew.
“Then you multiply that by the millions of guys who had their own experiences, and the scale of it is mind-boggling,” he says.
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Electric SUVs: A smaller footprint for big vehicles
By Mark Clayton | 11.04.09
Tom Reid likes his ride big – a 2000 Ford Explorer SUV with plenty of interior room and all the amenities. None of those prissy little hybrid vehicles will do for him.
But after gas hit $4 a gallon last year, Mr. Reid had a big fuel bill, too – and an epiphany: convert his gas guzzler to an all-electric vehicle.
So he did. Now Reid’s bright idea has become a sideline business for his shop, HTC Racing, which produces specialized protective coating for automotive and other metal parts in Whitman, Mass. He offers kits to convert any 1995-2004 gas-sucking Ford Explorer into a cheap-to-keep, no fuel, little maintenance all-electric SUV. Cost: $15,000.
He admits that the idea may be “ahead of its time.” Reid has yet to sell a single kit. With gas at only $2.50 a gallon, the conversion cost is too much for even SUV-loving die-hards. But if gasoline prices soar again, Reid says he’ll be ready – and he won’t be alone either.
Converting America’s vast existing fleet of gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks into electrified vehicles is an idea percolating among policy wonks, start-up companies, and fleet owners such as FedEx and the US Postal Service.
Despite all the hoopla over Detroit’s move to make plug-in hybrid and all-electric vehicles, there’s a need for a speedier US shift away from oil in order to enhance energy security and slow the buildup of carbon in the atmosphere, says a small but growing chorus.
President Obama has set a goal of 1 million plug-in vehicles on the road by 2015. But with 260 million cars, SUVs, and light trucks on the road today, new electrified vehicles won’t arrive in sufficient volume to yield a significant benefit on reducing US carbon dioxide emissions or oil consumption for at least 15 years, says Felix Kramer, cofounder of the California Cars Initiative, an advocacy group that promotes plug-in electric-gas hybrid vehicles.
What that means is that conversions will be needed – and the best place to start is with gas guzzlers, Mr. Kramer says .
They point out that even if all new cars sold in America were electric by 2030, they would only represent a third of US vehicles.
“We’re happy automakers are changing – but new plug-in vehicles sales can’t do the job alone or anytime soon,” he says. “It’s clear [new plug-ins] will initially be a drop in the bucket. So we have to change over existing vehicles – we need conversions.”
A big part of the problem is vehicle longevity. It takes 15 to 17 years for a typical vehicle to go from showroom to junkyard crusher – and sometimes longer for SUVs, pickup trucks, and vans that have sturdier frames.
In the scenario where 100 percent of new car sales are plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2030, US oil consumption would fall by just 21 percent and carbon emissions by 15 percent because of the millions of remaining gasoline cars, estimates a California Cars Initiative white paper.
But with an active conversion program that included tax incentives, the number of plug-in vehicles would roughly double to about two-thirds of the fleet by 2030. That would produce a 36 percent cut in oil use and a 25 percent chop in CO2 emissions.
The reason to focus on gas guzzlers rather than gas sippers is the much bigger benefits from electrifying them. When Kramer of the California Cars Initiative converted his Toyota Prius hybrid into a plug-in hybrid with more electric power – the car went from 50 miles per gallon up to 100 m.p.g. But the United States could save far more, he says, if it converted existing pickup trucks that get 15 m.p.g. to vehicles that can go 30 to 40 miles on a charge before shifting to gas.
And that’s the aim of Ali Emadi, president of fledgling Hybrid Electric Vehicle Technologies, a Chicago spinoff of the Illinois Institute of Technology. His young company has just converted its first Ford F-150 pickup truck from a 16 m.p.g. gas hog into a plug-in hybrid that gets up to 41 m.p.g. gasoline equivalent.
“Our technology could be applied to almost any vehicle from SUVs to pickup trucks, buses, or even school buses,” Dr. Emadi says. “The important issue is that when you apply our technology to larger vehicles – trucks and buses – the fuel economy savings and return on investment are much more attractive.”
Unlike Reid’s all-electric approach, Emadi’s company plans to add an electric drive system to an existing internal combustion engine to create in essence a retrofitted plug-in hybrid vehicle that runs primarily on electricity. But once the battery is depleted after 15 miles or so, it can continue running on its internal combustion engine while recapturing braking energy just like a standard hybrid.
Emadi is in talks with potential customers. Big commercial fleets of pickup trucks, SUVs, and vans seem likely to be the first arena where the economics line up and gas-guzzler conversions get the go-ahead.
FedEx, the big delivery company, began retrofitting some of its trucks to standard hybrid models. But its president, Frederick Smith, says that, in the long term, the company “would likely convert a substantial portion of our fleet to the new plug-in hybrid technology.”
Bright Automotive, an Anderson, Ind., startup, has its sights set on building a new commercial 100 m.p.g. plug-in hybrid van it calls the IDEA. But until it wins funding it is focusing on converting Volkswagen’s Transporter van from a 15 to 22 m.p.g. vehicle to a plug-in hybrid workhorse that goes 22 miles on all-electric and 57 m.p.g. across its 50-mile daily drive cycle.
Earlier last month, Inglewood, Calif., announced it had tapped REV Technologies, a company in Vancouver, British Columbia, to convert its existing fleet of 21 Ford Escape SUVs into all-electric vehicles that get 100 miles on a charge.
“When you just look at the sheer number of cars on the road, they’re not going away anytime soon,” says Jay Giraud, president of REV. “People are saying, ‘I want to keep driving what I’ve got – I just want it to be electric.’ ”
Making a similar point in dramatic fashion, Raser Technologies in Provo, Utah, unveiled a converted plug-in hybrid “extended range” Hummer that gets 100 m.p.g., according to the company. Raser is trying to sell its technology to a manufacturer and has no current plans to convert existing vehicles, a spokesman says.
Which leaves Reid wondering when gas prices will rise high enough that individual consumers begin converting their beloved SUVs, vans, and pickup trucks. He also wonders why those fat federal tax credits of $7,500 for new plug-in hybrids like the upcoming Chevy Volt don’t yet apply to converted all-electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids that accomplish the same fuel savings and environmental benefits. Why not a “cash for conversions?” Kramer adds.
“If the government would help with a reasonable tax credit, you’d get all these entrepreneurs like me converting all kinds of vehicles for maybe $10,000,” Reid says. If gas rose to $4 or more a gallon, he figures his SUV conversion to electric-vehicle kits would be selling like hotcakes.
“The way I see it, Americans have a love affair with their SUVs,” he says. “None of my friends want anything to do with little cars – no matter how high [the price of] gas goes.”
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CERN’s LHC ‘big bang’ machine back in the particle biz — sort of
By Pete Spotts | 10.26.09
The Large Hadron Collider, a particle collider under the Swiss-French border, hasn’t recreated the big bang yet, but it has just experienced the little whoosh.
Scientists at the LHC’s home, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), announced today they’ve sent a low-energy beam of protons nearly all the way around the race track for subatomic particles. In one direction only. But it shows that the race track, roughly 17 miles in circumference, is ready for the next milestone — a fully circulating beam of protons, expected next month.
The test took place last week, according to a release from CERN.
The LHC has been offline for a year following an electrical failure between two magnet segments. The failure led to a catastrophic leak of liquid helium.
The liquid helium is critical. It cools the collider’s superconducting magnets to the point where they lose all resistance to electricity. This in turn allows the magnets to generate far more powerful magnetic fields than ordinary magnets of the same size.
The magnets are used to steer beams of particles in opposite directions around the collider until they are brought together in a collision. Magnets also keep the beams tightly focused to enhance the likelihood that a sufficient number of collisions will take place.
Those collisions are expected to yield evidence for a particle called the Higgs boson — which the maker-and-white-board theorists say imparts mass to other particles. And the physics teams say they hope to finding evidence for other, more bizarre particles that could help explain weird things folks have detected looking at the large-scale universe. Things like dark energy and dark matter, for instance.
Other areas physicists hope to explore with the LHC: Extra dimensions to the universe that some theories project beyond the four dimensions humans can directly experience — time, and the three dimensions physical objects occupy; and theories that seek to show how the four basic forces of nature — electromagnetism, the strong force (binding particles in an atom’s nucleus), the weak force (governing radioactive decay), and gravity — are the chilled out manifestations of one over-arching force that prevailed at the dawn of the universe.
Scientists have already shown that the first three of those forces can in effect be unified. Gravity remains the lone holdout.
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Laser sight: NYU’s real-life tricorder
By Jesse Emspak | 09.17.09
It’s a staple of science fiction, made famous by the tricorders on “Star Trek”: a hand-held device that reveals detailed information about some unknown substance or object in front of you. Sometimes you’d even get a real-time picture of each molecule.
Laboratory devices can decipher such unidentified things, but the special equipment is often bigger than a refrigerator and many times more expensive. Not exactly tricorder technology.
But David Grier at New York University believes that he’s closer than ever before – and his design uses parts available from a local electronics store.
The setup is simple: a laser, a microscope, a digital video camera, and a PC. Take the laser and fire it through the microscope “backward” – from behind the object you are looking through the lens. The image that hits the microscope looks like a pattern of rings, like ripples in a pond. With a little computing power, Dr. Grier can read the pattern of circles and create a real-time image that teases out the defining characteristics of an object.
With an ordinary microscope, you can only see a two-dimensional image. But the ring pattern made by the laser allows the user to measure how far the object is from the lens. Since different materials refract light in different ways, you can tell exactly what the target is made of.
The analysis works on liquids, goos, and dusts – things translucent enough to allow laser light to pass through – but also solid objects. This “ripple” effect is just barely visible in ordinary light. It’s what creates the “fuzzing” effect at the edge of shadows. It’s also visible at sunset – brilliant red sunsets are due to dust scattering longer wavelengths, and one could use that to determine the average size of the dust particles. Grier’s technique allows for observing smaller samples in a more controlled way and is accurate with remarkably small samples: down to sizes measured in micrometers, or millionths of a meter. A coat of paint is typically 100 micrometers thick.
“The one place we did go more all-out and used professional equipment was the microscope,” Grier says. “The lenses are higher quality.” The rest of the equipment, he said, isn’t any different from what’s available off-the-shelf.
In the lab at NYU, Grier’s partner in research, Fook Chiong Cheong, shows the setup, which takes up three feet of a lab table.
“In the next generation of the device, we can make it smaller,” Mr. Cheong says. He pointed to a spare video camera lying next to the apparatus. “That one is color,” he says. “The old one is monochrome.”
A color camera enables the user to see exactly how varying wavelengths scatter, giving even more information about whatever it is on the slide. The new camera, he adds, is also cheaper.
Unlike other methods, this one doesn’t damage the object in question. On top of that, there is no longer any need to “tag” substances with radioactive markers or fluorescent compounds, which is expensive and time consuming.
Grier said the next generation of his invention should be able to fit into a soda can. And by adding some fiber-optic cables – also available at the local Radio Shack – he can use lasers of multiple wavelengths, increasing the sensitivity of the device.
Why didn’t anyone think of this before? The basis for imaging this way is called Lorenz-Mie theory. It’s all based on a single equation, which has been well known for a century. But doing the calculations to reconstruct the position, velocity, size, and refractive index of the object is complicated at best. Grier notes that on older machines, the calculations can take a long time.
“Before, you’d have been old before the calculation was done,” he jokes. That all changed with the advent of more powerful PCs and digital imaging technology.
“People had been satisfied for years with ‘back of the envelope’ calculations,” he says. Those older attempts mostly produced snapshots, not precise images.
Developing the new software was the tough part. Grier says the problem is that there were too many moving parts. The laser produces a scatter pattern that changes with time, and you have to track the target’s position, refractive index, and size from the constantly changing image. That’s a total of six parameters (position is three for three dimensions, plus velocity).
At first, Grier’s team tried to standardize two or three of those numbers in the hopes that the others would then come more easily. That didn’t work. “More or less out of resignation we just let all of them vary,” he says. “That worked.”
Joseph Katz, professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says the big difference in Grier’s technique is the ability to study dynamic systems, instead of having to deal with the narrow depth of field an ordinary microscope offers. (It was one of Katz’s original papers that inspired Grier’s work.)
Because you can tell where small particles are moving, you can track how they diffuse through other substances. One recent experiment – designed by a student – involved eggs.
“The administrator looked at us a little funny when we said we needed to buy eggs,” Cheong says.
The team used organic eggs, commercial eggs, and even ostrich eggs (available at the local Whole Foods supermarket). The result? Certain kinds of particles diffuse less well through organic eggs. They haven’t figured out why that is yet.
Another application is dentistry. Cavities happen because bacteria get on your teeth and live in a film that sticks on the surface. If the film could be analyzed and disrupted, the bacteria would die off.
Cheong notes that because the imager can “see” very small particles, it can show exactly how nutrients affect the bacteria.
“It turns out the bacteria feed on both sugar and starch,” he says. “So it’s worse to eat cake than it is to eat candy.” The dream? Use results from this device to create a chewing gum that would eliminate the need for toothbrushes.
One of the reasons Grier started the work was frustration with conventional imaging. Much of the work in his lab deals with finding out how very small particles interact, as well as how to manipulate them. He wanted, he says, to “see what he was doing.”
A similar laser setup can be used to make “light traps” that use focused laser light (slightly different from a laser beam) to hold individual particles in place. The technique is well known, but Grier’s imaging technology lets experimenters see the results as they happen.
With a setup not unlike a video game, Cheong shows how to move tiny glass beads into place, using just a mouse and looking at the image on a screen. So far, there haven’t been any “serious” applications. But for Cheong, that isn’t a problem.
“We try to encourage play here,” he says, adding that it is where good ideas sometimes come from.
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How fast is your Internet connection? Top US speeds revealed.
By Chris Gaylord | 08.25.09
The US may be well behind South Korea and Japan in terms of Internet speeds. But Delaware is closing in. The “First State” comes out on top of a recent nationwide review of connection speeds, with almost double the average US data rate.
Delaware’s average download speed hits 9.9 megabits per second (mbps), according to a new study by the Communications Workers of America that used SpeedMatters.org’s analysis tools. The US average is 5.1 mbps, a quarter of South Korea’s 20.4 mbps and a third of Japan’s 15.8 mbps, the Los Angeles Times reports.
So how did the other states fare? The Northeast grabs most of the top spots, while the less-populated Northwest slumps along. Here’s the top and bottom five:
1. Delaware – 9.9
2. Rhode Island – 9.8
3. New Jersey – 8.9
4. Massachusetts – 8.7
5. New York – 8.4
46. Hawaii – 3.0
47. Wyoming – 2.6
48. Idaho – 2.6
49. Alaska – 2.3
50. Montana – 2.3
This report included D.C. (6.9 mbps) and bottomed out with the Virgin Islands (1.1 mbps) and Puerto Rico (1.0 mbps).
“The study also pointed to the relatively slow rate at which the average US broadband speed rose in recent years, gaining only about 1.6 mpbs since May 2007,” says the LA Times, which published more state rankings. “That was a much slower increase than was seen in the US states with the fastest speeds.”
Curious about your own score? Speedtest.net runs a quick, free Internet speedometer. The site clocks your current download and upload rates. Now that I think of it, let the races begin! Post your scores in the comments.
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[Editor’s note: The original version of this article misstated who delivered the speed stats for the study. It was SpeedMatters.org.]
