As Shoppers Hop From Tablet to PC to Phone, Retailers Try to Adapt

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Shoppers often visit ModCloth, a Web site that sells women’s clothes, on their phones but return on a different kind of device to buy something, said Sarah Rose, a vice president at ModCloth.

Ryan O’Neil, a Connecticut government employee, was in the market to buy a digital weather station this month. His wife researched options on their iPad, but even though she found the lowest-price option there, Mr. O’Neil made the purchase on his laptop.

“I do use the iPad to browse sites,” Mr. O’Neil said, but when it comes time to close the deal, he finds it easier to do on a computer.

Many online retailers had visions of holiday shoppers lounging beneath the Christmas tree with their mobile devices in hand, making purchases. The size of the average order on tablets, particularly iPads, tends to be bigger than on PCs. So retailers poured money and marketing into mobile Web sites and apps with rich images and, they thought, easy checkout.

But while visits to e-commerce sites and apps on tablets and phones have nearly doubled since last year, consumers like Mr. O’Neil are more frequently using multiple devices to shop. In many cases, they are more comfortable making the final purchase on a computer, with its bigger screen and keyboard. So retailers are trying to figure out how to appeal to a shopper who may use a cellphone to research products, a tablet to browse the options and a computer to buy.

“I’ve been yelling at customers for two years, saying, ‘Mobile, mobile, mobile,’ ” said Jason Spero, director of mobile sales and strategy at Google. “But the funny thing is, now we’re going to say: ‘Don’t put mobile in a silo. It’s also about the desktop.’ ”

The challenges are daunting, though. It is technically difficult to track consumers as they hop from phone to computer to tablet and back again. This means customers who, say, fill shopping carts on their tablets have to do all the work again on their PCs or other devices. The biggest obstacle, retailers say, is that the tools used to track shoppers on computers — cookies, or bundles of data stored in Web browsers — don’t transfer across devices.

Instead, retailers are figuring out how to sync the experience in other ways, like prompting shoppers to log in on each device. And being able to track people across devices gives retailers more insight into how they shop.

The retailers’ efforts are backed by research. While one-quarter of the visits to e-commerce sites occur on mobile devices, only around 15 percent of purchases do, according to data from I.B.M. According to Google, 85 percent of online shoppers start searching on one device — most often a mobile phone — and make a purchase on another.

At eBags, customers are shopping on their tablets in the evening and returning on their work computers the next day. But eBags has not yet synced the shoppers across devices, so customers must build their shopping carts from scratch if they switch devices.

“That is a blind spot with a lot of sites,” said Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags. “It is a requirement moving forward.”

At eBay, one-third of the purchases involve mobile devices at some point, even if the final purchase is made on a computer.

At eBay, once shoppers log in on a device, they do not need to log in again. Their information, like shipping and credit card details and saved items, syncs across all their devices. If an eBay shopper is interested in a certain handbag, and saves that search on a computer, eBay will send alerts to her cellphone when a new handbag arrives or an auction is about to end.

“They might discover an item on a phone or tablet, do a saved-search push alert later on some other screen and eventually close on the Web site,” said Steve Yankovich, who runs eBay Mobile. “People are buying and shopping and consuming potentially every waking moment of the day.”

ModCloth, an e-commerce site for women’s clothes, said that while a quarter of its visits come from mobile devices, people are not yet buying there in the same proportion, though they are becoming more comfortable with checking out on those devices.

“She’s visiting us more on the phone, but she’s actually transacting somewhere else,” said Sarah Rose, vice president of product at ModCloth.

For example, a shopper will skim through new arrivals on her phone while on the bus and add items to her wish list, then visit that evening on her tablet to make a purchase, Ms. Rose said.

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A defiant NRA calls for armed guards in every school

WASHINGTON -- In an angry and defiant news conference, National Rifle Assn. Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre on Friday forcefully rejected calls to clamp down on guns in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, arguing instead for a massive deployment of armed guards to every school.

LaPierre pledged that the NRA would spearhead such an endeavor, appointing former Arkansas Rep. Asa Hutchinson to lead an effort to develop a cutting-edge model school security plan and a program to train volunteers who would be dispatched to campuses around the country.

In the meantime, he called on Congress to immediately appropriate funding to pay for police officers in every school "to make sure that blanket safety is in place when our kids return to school in January."

The NRA chief noted that armed security guards are stationed in front of banks, airports, courthouses and sports stadiums, and that Secret Service agents and Capitol police with guns protect the president and members of Congress.

"Yet when it comes to our most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family, our children, we as a society leave them every day utterly defenseless," he said in a sharply worded speech before a phalanx of news cameras. "And the monsters and the predators of the world know it and exploit it. That must change now."

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun," he added, "is a good guy with a gun."

Friday’s news conference, held in the ballroom of a luxury Washington hotel a block from the White House, marked the first extensive comments by the influential pro-gun-rights organization since 20 young children and six adults were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School one week ago.

In the wake of the tragedy, President Obama called for an urgent new focus on preventing gun violence, appointing Vice President Joe Biden to oversee a task force on the topic. Calls have mounted for new laws tightening access to guns, and advocates of such measures have publicly urged the NRA to join them in a dialogue about new restrictions.

But it was clear from the initial moments of the news conference that the NRA’s tone would not be a conciliatory one.

LaPierre cast the issue in terms of security, warning darkly about evil forces who want to inflict harm on the innocent.

"The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters, people that are so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can ever possibly comprehend them," he said. "They walk among us every single day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn't planning his attack on a school he's already identified at this very moment? How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with wall-to-wall attention and a sense of identity that they crave while provoking others to try to make their mark?”

Two protesters interrupted his address at different times, holding up signs that read "NRA KILLING OUR KIDS" and "NRA HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS." Security guards pulled them out of the room as they shouted "Violence begins with the NRA!" and "Ban assault weapons now!"

Both times, LaPierre stood silently until they were gone, then resumed his speech without comment.

The NRA chief repeatedly lambasted the media, saying the implication in the press is that "guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools."

"But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?" he asked. "A gun in the hands of a Secret Service agent protecting our president isn't a bad word. A gun in the hands of a soldier protecting the United States of America isn't a bad word. And when you hear your glass breaking at 3 a.m. and you call 911, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a good guy to get there fast enough to protect you."

"Is it so important to you that you’d rather continue to risk the alternative?" he chastised. "Is the press and the political class here in Washington, D.C., so consumed by fear and hatred of the NRA and American gun owners that you're willing to accept a world where real resistance to evil monsters is a lone, unarmed school principal left to surrender her life -- her life -- to shield those children in her care? No one -- no one -- regardless of personal political prejudice, has the right to impose that sacrifice."

Melanie Mason in the Washington bureau contributed to this report.

matea.gold@latimes.com

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Moog Updates Its Far-Out Synthesizer App for iPad

The iPad’s most spaced-out, most diabolically fun musical instrument app just got a big upgrade.

Moog Music has added dozens of new features and a couple of new in-app purchase options to Animoog, its touchscreen synth for iOS. Updates include numerous new tones and timbres, a built-in multi-track recorder, and the ability to use the accelerometer to modulate the synthesizer by shaking and tipping the tablet.

Animoog v2 for the iPad will be available Friday morning in the App Store. It’s a free update if you have the old Animoog. Newcomers can download it for $15 until the end of the year. On January 1, it goes back up to the regular price of $30.

The latest version of Animoog includes a new way to modulate the sound using the iPad’s accelerometer.

Yes, that sounds expensive for an app, but it’s totally worth it. Every iPad-owning musician I know uses — and loves — Animoog. The app makes all the twisted and funky noises you’d expect from something sold under the Moog name (the company has been making electronic instruments for almost 60 years). Animoog combines a touch-sensitive keypad, analog-style knobs and controls, and an animated screen where the notes twirl and dance around. It’s ridiculously fun to play. Experts will find a direct path to their inner Keith Emerson. And if you know absolutely nothing about music, you can still get lost inside it for hours.

The latest version of Animoog includes a new way to modulate the sound by using the iPad’s accelerometer. As you’re playing, you can shake and rattle the iPad to alter the synth’s tonal qualities. Another new addition makes this even cooler — a note hold button just above the keyboard. Tap the note hold, let the sound ring out for a few seconds, then start moving or shaking the iPad to add squelchy pulses, wobbly vibrato or throbs of distortion.

Moog has also added an in-app four-track recorder, which you can download as an expansion pack — it’s free until the end of the year, and after December 31, you’ll be able to buy for it $5.

The recorder lets you overdub four separate Animoog performances, or you can drop in anything from your iTunes library and jam on top of it. It’s especially fun to plug in a drum track and record melodies over it. It also works pretty well as a sampler — you can grab a sound, make a loop, and build entire loop-based tracks from scratch. The results can be exported to Soundcloud from inside Animoog’s recorder.

The enhancements to version 2 of Animoog are simply too numerous to mention, so we’ve embedded the demo at the top of the post. The video also gives a sneak preview of the new Grateful Dead sound pack, which will be available very soon as an in-app purchase. To access the new four-track mini-studio and the other add-ons, update your Animoog app, then tap on the Moog Store tab at the top, just above the x-y pad.

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“Les Miserables” movie relies on close-ups for emotional punch

NEW YORK (Reuters) – For British director Tom Hooper, the key to turning “Les Miserables” from the wildly popular stage musical to a cinematic experience both sweeping and intimate, was all in the close-up.

The stage musical has left audiences around the world wiping away tears with its themes of justice, redemption and romantic and familial love. So bringing it to life on screen for fans and filmgoers was “hugely daunting,” Hooper says.

Still, the Oscar-winning director of “The King’s Speech,” was ambitious, wanting to offer even more of the “intense emotional experience” that has kept fans returning to various stage productions since “Les Miserables” made its English language debut 27 years ago.

“I felt very aware of the fact that so many millions of people hold this close to their hearts and would probably sit in the cinemas in complete fear,” Hooper told reporters about his big screen take on the tale of French revolutionaries rising up against powerful forces.

Movie stars Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway were all put through an intense audition and rehearsal process, to make sure they could sing take after take, live, with cameras positioned right in their face.

It also features a large ensemble including Amanda Seyfried and Eddie Redmayne, as well as Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter who lead the comic relief song, “Master of the House.”

“I thought the great weapon in my arsenal was the close up, because the one thing on stage that you can’t enjoy is the detail of what is going on in people’s faces as they are singing,” Hooper said. “I felt (that) having to do a meditation on the human face was by far the best way to bring out the emotion of the songs.”

That tactic may or may not have paid off for a movie that is seen as one of the front runners for Oscar awards in February. Early screenings of the film that opens on Christmas Day have moved some audiences. Critics have praised the performances, but given the movie as a whole less than top marks.

The movie reunites the same team that worked on the original musical, including French composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, lyricist Alain Boublil, and English language adapter Herbert Kretzmer. It adds one original song to the existing show, which includes the well-known “I Dreamed a Dream”.

Jackman plays petty thief Jean Valjean, the protagonist of the story based on French writer Victor Hugo’s epic 1862 historical novel “Les Miserables.” Valjean transforms himself into a respected businessman but struggles for decades to escape the clutches of his nemesis, police inspector Javert (Russell Crowe), and along the way encounters factory worker Fantine (Anne Hathaway).

TIMELY MESSAGE

Inspired by films such as 1991′s “The Commitments,” singing was filmed live rather than later recorded in a studio to give the movie a more authentic feel.

Hathaway lost 25 pounds (11.3 kg) for the role and cut her long brown hair. She spent six months perfecting the task of crying and singing at the same time for “I Dreamed a Dream” and is a hot favorite for a best supporting actress Oscar.

In a twist of fate, Hooper had initially seen Hathaway singing to Jackman a boisterous version of the “Les Miserables” song “On My Own” at the 2011 Academy Awards ceremony, just when he was trying to decide whether to direct the film and was thinking about casting.

“I was sitting there, going: ‘There is something very strange happening’,” he joked. “Whatever happened, it certainly worked, because I ended up casting both of them.”

Hooper said he took his inspiration mostly from Hugo’s novel rather than any one stage production, and thus saw Crowe’s Javert more as a “deeply honorable” character than a simplistic “bad guy” as portrayed in some productions.

The time also felt right, he said, to bring the story to a larger audience on the big screen.

“There are so many people hurting around the world because of social, economic, inequality and inequity. There is such anger against the system,” he said, “whether it’s the protests on Wall Street or in London at St Paul’s, or the seismic shifts happening in the Middle East.”

“‘Les Miserables’ is the great advocate of the dispossessed,” Hooper said. “It teaches you the way to collective action is through passionate engagement with the people around you. It starts with love for the person next to you.”

(Editing by Jill Serjeant and David Storey)

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Stigma Fading, Marijuana Common in California

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

At a San Francisco concert in 2010, marijuana use was general while signatures were collected for a measure to decriminalize it.

LOS ANGELES — Let Colorado and Washington be the marijuana trailblazers. Let them struggle with the messy details of what it means to actually legalize the drug. Marijuana is, as a practical matter, already legal in much of California.

No matter that its recreational use remains technically against the law. Marijuana has, in many parts of this state, become the equivalent of a beer in a paper bag on the streets of Greenwich Village. It is losing whatever stigma it ever had and still has in many parts of the country, including New York City, where the kind of open marijuana use that is common here would attract the attention of any passing law officer.

“It’s shocking, from my perspective, the number of people that we all know who are recreational marijuana users,” said Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor. “These are incredibly upstanding citizens: Leaders in our community, and exceptional people. Increasingly, people are willing to share how they use it and not be ashamed of it.”

Marijuana can be smelled in suburban backyards in neighborhoods from Hollywood to Topanga Canyon as dusk falls — what in other places is known as the cocktail hour — often wafting in from three sides. In some homes in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, it is offered at the start of a dinner party with the customary ease of a host offering a chilled Bombay Sapphire martini.

Lighting up a cigarette (the tobacco kind) can get you booted from many venues in this rigorously antitobacco state. But no one seemed to mind as marijuana smoke filled the air at an outdoor concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September or even in the much more intimate, enclosed atmosphere of the Troubadour in West Hollywood during a Mountain Goats concert last week.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor, ticked off the acceptance of open marijuana smoking in a list of reasons he thought Venice was such a wonderful place for his morning bicycle rides. With so many people smoking in so many places, he said in an interview this year, there was no reason to light up one’s own joint.

“You just inhale, and you live off everyone else,” said Mr. Schwarzenegger, who as governor signed a law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Some Californians react disdainfully to anyone from out of state who still harbors illicit associations with the drug. Bill Maher, the television host, was speaking about the prevalence of marijuana smoking at dinner parties hosted by Sue Mengers, a retired Hollywood agent famous for her high-powered gatherings of actors and journalists, in an interview after her death last year. “I used to bring her pot,” he said. “And I wasn’t the only one.”

When a reporter sought to ascertain whether this was an on-the-record conversation, Mr. Maher responded tartly: “Where do you think you are? This is California in the year 2011.”

John Burton, the state Democratic chairman, said he recalled an era when the drug was stigmatized under tough antidrug laws. He called the changes in thinking toward marijuana one of the two most striking shifts in public attitude he had seen in 40 years here (the other was gay rights).

“I can remember when your second conviction of having a single marijuana cigarette would get you two to 20 in San Quentin,” he said.

In a Field Poll of California voters conducted in October 2010, 47 percent of respondents said they had smoked marijuana at least once, and 50 percent said it should be legalized. The poll was taken shortly before Californians voted down, by a narrow margin, an initiative to decriminalize marijuana.

“In a Republican year, the legalization came within two points,” said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant who worked on the campaign in favor of the initiative. He said that was evidence of the “fact that the public has evolved on the issue and is ahead of the pols.”

A study by the California Office of Traffic Safety last month found that motorists were more likely to be driving under the influence of marijuana than under the influence of alcohol.

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New York Stock Exchange operator agrees to be sold for $8.2 billion

A flag flies on the facade of the New York Stock Exchange. (Richard Drew / Associated Press / December 20, 2012)

By Andrew Tangel

December 20, 2012, 6:30 a.m.

NYSE Euronext, operator of the New York Stock Exchange, has agreed to sell itself to the IntercontinentalExchange in an acquisition that would reshape Wall Street.

ICE, a 12-year-old electronic exchange operator based in Atlanta, will pay $33.12 a share for NYSE Euronext in a stock-and-cash deal worth $8.2 billion.

The companies announced the acquisition early Thursday, saying both of their boards or directors unanimously approved the deal. The acquisition is slated to close in the second half of 2013, pending the blessing of U.S. and European regulators and both companies' shareholders.

"This transaction leverages the strength of our iconic brand and the value we have created in our global equity and derivatives franchises -- positioning the business for solid long-term growth and development," Duncan Niederauer, chief executive of NYSE Euronext, said in a statement.

Although the New York Stock Exchange is the most public window into Wall Street, the Big Board's share of equities trading has declined sharply in recent years, as NYSE Euronext has expanded its trading venues in an increasingly electronic and fragmented marketplace.

Founded in 2000, ICE has grown into a leading venue for commodities and energy futures exchanges and derivatives clearinghouses.

NYSE Euronext's stock closed at $24.05 a share, with a market cap of $5.84 billion. The NYSE's stock was surging $10 a share, or 42%, in pre-market trading.

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Spoiler Alert: First 3-D Printed Records Sound Awful

The needle drops and a series of high, repetitive whines come from the album. Then a crackling sound, and a muffled guitar riff. Finally, Kurt Cobain’s voice — audible, but distant and hollow, like he is singing in a tunnel with a scarf over his mouth.

It’s about the worst version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” you could find. But it is awesome all the same for its totally unique medium. This particular LP is part of the batch of the first records ever to be created on a 3-D printer.

“It’s surprising how much you can deform and down-sample an audio file and still recognize it,” says Amanda Ghassaei, assistant tech editor at Instructables, who printed the record, and several others, including music from the Pixies, Daft Punk, and Radiohead.

Ghassaei used a state-of-the-art Objet Connex 500 printer to generate the disc. The whole process is possible because printing resolution has finally become high enough to create the audio-laden grooves for the needle to track and amplify. For her printed records, Ghassaei sets the machine to its finest setting, 600 dpi, with 16 micron steps, about the highest quality available on the market. But it’s still far lower resolution than on a vinyl LP, by a factor of 10 or so; hence the muddled sound that results in part from the needle responding to the layering of the printed plastic. Ghassaei used an 11 Khz sampling rate — the highest the resolution would allow, around 1/4 what you get from an MP3. Even at that low of a rate, the printer’s deficiencies cut off the song’s high-range tones.

“It’s really stripped down, it’s down to the bare essentials,” she says. “It’s never going to be as good as vinyl. It’s not really set up for that. But it’s cool because you can really be creative with it.”

To create the 3-D model for the record, Ghassaei essentially reverses the process of ripping an MP3. As the groove of a record is a microscopic image of the analog audio, she starts with the digitized waveform, using Python to take it directly from the MP3 file, and renders the shape of it into an STL wireframe using Processing, an open source tool that automates the file generation. She then uses the software to wrap it in a spiral on a 3-D 12-inch disc, varying the depth of the groove to match the waveform. Compared to a normal record, hers have increased amplitude and groove depth to account for the coarse resolution.

While it’s a first for a printed proper LP, others have toyed with simpler forms of 3-D printable music. Earlier this year, Fred Murphy generated “Stairway to Heaven” and three other songs on discs for the classic Fisher Price record player. That toy turntable is different than the common vinyl record player, though; it uses a music-box system with tines that sound as they rotate over the record’s raised bumps. Murphy posted the how-to for his project on Instructables, and offers pre-made versions of his discs through Shapeways.

Ghassaei, like Murphy, has put her project up on Instructables, though it’s not particularly useful unless you have access to a high-end printer in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars. She is also limited to the first 60 seconds or so, because of the data- and memory-intense 3-D file. A full song would take up a whole side of the album, and the file size would exceed a gigabyte. But that’s not really the point.

“It’s really cool to kind of push the technology and see what you can get out of it,” says Ghassaei. “I’ve got a bunch more that I want to do.”

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“Gangnam Style” in line for UK dictionary inclusion

LONDON (Reuters) – He has the most-watched video in Youtube history, become a pop sensation with a horse-riding dance craze that has swept the world and now Korean singer Psy may cement his place in popular culture with recognition from a British dictionary.

“Gangnam Style,” Psy’s signature song, has been chosen along with “fiscal cliff” and “Romneyshambles” as some of Collins Dictionary‘s words of the year.

“We were looking for words that told the story of the year,” said Ian Brookes, the dictionary‘s consultant editor.

“Some words are from events that have been and gone and so are not likely to stick around … but others are probably here to stay.”

Other headline entries centered on American politics.

“Fiscal cliff” has drawn a lot of attention as the deadline for Congress and President Obama to agree on government spending and tax plans draws nearer.

While the term “Romneyshambles” entered the British public’s consciousness after Mitt Romney‘s gaffe-ridden visit to London in July in which he questioned Britain’s readiness to host the Olympics.

The inclusion of “47 percent” on the list after a leaked video showed Romney telling donors that 47 percent of Americans would definitely vote for Obama because of their dependency on the government capped off a bad year for the losing presidential candidate.

Collins received over 7,000 submissions on its online database.

Twelve words of the year – one for each month – were then selected on the basis of the frequency with which they were spoken, how many places they appeared and their longevity in public discourse.

Appearing on the Collins words of the year list is no guarantee of insertion in the next dictionary.

But Gangnam Style stands a very good chance, Brookes said.

“It’s obviously a craze, so there’s the possibility it will go away. But it’s been heard by so many people that I think it’s probably earned the right to go into the dictionary.”

Other words of the year include “mummy porn” after the popularity of the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books, and “superstorm” after Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc along the east coast of America in October.

(Reporting By Peter Schwartzstein, editing by Paul Casciato)

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Robert Bork, failed Supreme Court nominee, dies at age 85

Robert H. Bork, whose failed Supreme Court nomination in 1987 infuriated conservatives and politicized the confirmation process for the ensuing decades, died Wednesday at the age of 85. 

The former Yale law professor and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit had a history of heart problems and had been in poor health for some time.

But Bork was a towering figure for an early generation of conservatives. In the 1960s and '70s, he argued that a liberal-dominated Supreme Court was abusing its power and remaking American life by ending prayers in public schools, by extending new rights to criminals, by ordering cross-town busing and by voiding the laws against abortion.

PHOTOS: Robert Bork | March 1, 1927 - Dec. 19, 2012

He was an influential legal advisor in the Nixon administration and served as a footnote to history in the Watergate scandal. When the embattled president ordered the firing of special counsel Archibald Cox, the attorney general and his deputy resigned in protest. Bork, who was in the No. 3 post as U.S. solicitor general, then carried out Nixon’s order.

But Bork’s biggest moment came during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. He left Yale and came to Washington when Reagan appointed him to the U.S. court of appeals in the District of Columbia. The job was seen as a steppingstone to the high court.

In 1986, Bork was passed over for a younger colleague when Reagan named Judge Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court. A year later, Bork’s turn came when Justice Lewis Powell, the swing vote on the closely divided court, announced his retirement.

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2012

Democrats, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, launched an all-out attack on Bork’s nomination, saying he would set back the cause of civil rights, women’s rights and civil liberties.

The summer of 1987 saw campaign-style attacks on Bork’s reputation.  In televised hearings, the bearded, heavy-set professor tried to explain his views, but he won few converts. The Senate defeated his nomination by a 58-42 vote.

In his place, Reagan eventually chose Judge Anthony Kennedy, who was confirmed unanimously. The switch proved to have lasting consequences. Kennedy cast decisive votes to uphold Roe vs. Wade and to preserve the ban on school-sponsored prayers.

Bork stepped down from the bench a year after his defeat, but wrote several books renewing his criticism of liberalism. In the past year, he served as a chairman of Mitt Romney’s advisory committee on the judiciary and the courts.

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Eagle Picks Up a Kid: Real or Fake?

Sometimes I feel like Peter Parker. (You know, Spider-Man.) I have real work to do, but then I hear these sirens on the internet and I must go to action.

Well, what about this kid being carried away by an eagle? What can be done with this video? Here is the evidence I will present. Let me just say that I sure hope it’s fake. I would hate to have all our babies snatched away by flying eagles. That would just suck. Although, maybe the eagle is just pumped up about the movie The Hobbit and thinks that kid is actually a hobbit.

Analysis of Camera Shake

This is my first go-to tool when looking at videos. One of the tricks fakers use is to record the video with a tripod. A steady video makes it much easier to add in special effects later. Of course, who records with a tripod? That seems unrealistic. To account for this, the fakers will add “fake shake” to the video.

How do you detect a fake shake? The first step is to use a video-analysis tool like the awesome and free Tracker Video Analysis. With this, I can track the motion of the background in the video to see how the camera moves. Here are four samples of background motion.

Which, if any, of these background motions do you think correspond to a real person with a real camera? Here are the answers:

• A: This is the background motion from the Human Birdwings video. In case you missed it, a guy posted a video of his homemade wings that let him fly like a bird. It was fake.


• B: This is from the eagle-kid video. Real or fake?


• C: This is fake shake from this fake spinning water video. You can see how the camera takes similar pixel size jumps. It’s faker than Sweet ‘N Low.


• D: This is a real video recorded from a real person (me). What does this background look like? To me, it looks like a random walk. Maybe that’s just me.

For this eagle video, which case does it look like? It doesn’t look as bad as the other two known fake videos. However, it doesn’t look like my video either. One of the things I haven’t looked at (yet) is the stabilizing video features that YouTube offers for videos.

I would say that this shake analysis is mostly inconclusive.

Acceleration of a Falling Object

Next, let’s look at the part of the video where the eagle drops the kid. The drop distance is small enough that air resistance should be negligible. This means that the vertical acceleration should have a value of -9.8 m/s² if this eagle and kid are on the surface of the Earth. Here is a plot of vertical motion of the kid after he (or she) is dropped.

I put the arrow to indicate the part of the data where the kid was dropped. Now, I don’t know the scale — but it might not matter. Does this look like constant acceleration? No, it looks like constant velocity. I’m not even going to use the quadratic fit in this case to find the scale.

Instead, let’s look at the time of the fall. From the video, the child was falling for 0.367 seconds. If the child was dropped from rest (or close to it), how high would the kid have to be to fall for this time? Normally, I break down the kinematic equations and show where this comes from, but let me just skip right to it.

Putting in my value for the time, I get a dropped height of 0.66 meters. OK, that’s not as bad as I thought it would be. However, the position function should still be a parabola and not a straight line.

Center of Mass

Here is a shot of the kid while being carried by the eagle.

Look at the angle that the kid is “swinging” back. It could be as high as 30° – but that is just an “eyeball” guess. So what? This actually shows a common misconception. It shows the idea that if something is moving at a constant velocity, there must be a constant force on it. However, at low speeds with no air resistance there wouldn’t need to be a force pulling the kid forward.

If the bird were accelerating, then the kid would swing back. From the swingback angle, you can figure out the acceleration. You can find all the details on how this works in my Iron Man 3 post. Here also is a diagram of a person hanging from something that is accelerating.

The kid hanging back at an angle couldn’t be moving at a constant speed since the horizontal forces don’t add up to zero. If I use an angle of 30°, then the bird would have to accelerate at 5.6 m/s². That’s pretty high for a bird carrying a kid.

How Much Can an Eagle Lift?

Bigger-mass birds need bigger wings, right? Also, a larger wingspan bird could lift more “cargo”. So how much could an eagle lift? Here is my favorite graph showing the relationship between a bird’s wingspan and mass.

Bigger-mass birds need bigger wings. Seems obvious. So, what about a Golden Eagle? Wikipedia lists these as having a mass of about 6.5 kg and a wingspan of about 2.3 meters. What about the kid? Let’s say the kid is 2 years old with a mass of about 13 kg. That is about double the mass of the eagle! Sure, eagles can pick stuff up — but not something this big.

OK — I think we can all agree this video is fake.

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