Major funding boost for the next generation of arts and humanities researchers

Public release date: 15-Oct-2013
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Contact: Paul Teed
paul.teed@rhul.ac.uk
01-784-443-967
Royal Holloway, University of London

Today, a consortium led by Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded a grant of 13.5 million to fund approximately 176 postgraduate students, in order to address the national need for highly skilled researchers in disciplines across the arts and humanities.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the new Doctoral Training Partnership will bring together seven universities across London and the South-East, allowing students to benefit from diverse training opportunities and expertise from all members. This will include Royal Holloway, the University of Brighton, Kingston University, the University of Roehampton, the Royal College of Art, the University of Surrey and the University of the Arts London.

This unique training opportunity will also be enhanced by placements and partnerships with 13 arts and cultural organisations, including the Barbican, the Natural History Museum, the British Film Institute, the Science Museum and the Museum of London.

"We are very excited about leading this consortium and developing researchers who are at the forefront of their disciplines", said Professor Katie Normington, Dean of Arts and Social Science at Royal Holloway. "Our consortium draws its name, TECHNE, from the art of craft. Underpinning our innovative interdisciplinary student training will be the development of the craft and skill of the researcher."

The consortium was praised by the AHRC's award panel for having robust partnerships with a focus on providing future opportunities for students, as well as tailored training and support in subjects such as music, modern languages and history.

David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, said: "The AHRC is creating more opportunities for the next generation of researchers, both within and beyond academia in the thriving arts and humanities sector. I'm particularly pleased to see an emphasis on student placements and additional skills training among the new arrangements."

Professor Mark Llewellyn, Director of Research for the AHRC, said: "This investment by the AHRC will not only support university researchers but also enrich the contexts in which arts and humanities skills and capabilities engage with and contribute to advancement and growth in sectors across the wider UK economy."

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Public release date: 15-Oct-2013
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Contact: Paul Teed
paul.teed@rhul.ac.uk
01-784-443-967
Royal Holloway, University of London

Today, a consortium led by Royal Holloway, University of London, has been awarded a grant of 13.5 million to fund approximately 176 postgraduate students, in order to address the national need for highly skilled researchers in disciplines across the arts and humanities.

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the new Doctoral Training Partnership will bring together seven universities across London and the South-East, allowing students to benefit from diverse training opportunities and expertise from all members. This will include Royal Holloway, the University of Brighton, Kingston University, the University of Roehampton, the Royal College of Art, the University of Surrey and the University of the Arts London.

This unique training opportunity will also be enhanced by placements and partnerships with 13 arts and cultural organisations, including the Barbican, the Natural History Museum, the British Film Institute, the Science Museum and the Museum of London.

"We are very excited about leading this consortium and developing researchers who are at the forefront of their disciplines", said Professor Katie Normington, Dean of Arts and Social Science at Royal Holloway. "Our consortium draws its name, TECHNE, from the art of craft. Underpinning our innovative interdisciplinary student training will be the development of the craft and skill of the researcher."

The consortium was praised by the AHRC's award panel for having robust partnerships with a focus on providing future opportunities for students, as well as tailored training and support in subjects such as music, modern languages and history.

David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, said: "The AHRC is creating more opportunities for the next generation of researchers, both within and beyond academia in the thriving arts and humanities sector. I'm particularly pleased to see an emphasis on student placements and additional skills training among the new arrangements."

Professor Mark Llewellyn, Director of Research for the AHRC, said: "This investment by the AHRC will not only support university researchers but also enrich the contexts in which arts and humanities skills and capabilities engage with and contribute to advancement and growth in sectors across the wider UK economy."

###

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/rhuo-mfb101513.php
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What, Exactly, Is James Franco Doing?

James Franco has big plans, always.

Andrew Medichini/AP

James Franco has big plans, always.

Andrew Medichini/AP

What is James Franco doing?

People started asking this question, in earnest, somewhere around the time he went on General Hospital in 2009. Up until then, he'd been a young actor whose path was relatively normal: he was on Freaks & Geeks, and in Never Been Kissed, and he played James Dean on cable. He was in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, and then into Apatow country. Occasional forays into super-artsy stuff like films that showed in museums? No big deal. Nothing you wouldn't see from, say, Ethan Hawke or somebody like that. Swerves between, say, Pineapple Express and Milk, but that happens. Mork wound up in Good Morning, Vietnam, after all.

But then: General Hospital.

Appearances in mainstream stoner comedies are one thing, when it comes to changing up the highness of your brow and toying with the expectations people have of what you would and wouldn't do. But ... a soap? A real, straight-up soap? The same one Luke and Laura were on? Even knowing that he called the appearance a form of performance art, it continued to raise the question...

What is James Franco doing?

Right now, he's releasing his first alleged novel, Actors Anonymous, but we'll get back to that.

It's not like he needs another line of work. He has a band. He writes short stories. He hosted the Oscars. He was roasted on Comedy Central. He's taken many, many classes — and taught some, too. He makes offbeat art and appears in other people's offbeat art. He's played a hot guy on single-woman network sitcoms (both Tina Fey's and Mindy Kaling's).

At the time of a 2010 profile in New York Magazine, the question Franco predicted would be asked about him — and the writer told him was already being asked — was whether he was spreading himself too thin. But in fact, by doing so much, Franco may have achieved something that's almost impossible: he has no meaningful image other than as himself. There is nothing James Franco could do at this point that would move the needle.

What could he do that would seem out of place? What could he do that you really wouldn't expect? He wouldn't really surprise people if he won an Academy Award. He wouldn't really surprise people if he decided to take a one-day role in a Virgin Airlines video demonstrating seatbelts. He could show up in oil paintings, on a sitcom, as a Jeopardy! contestant, as the announced star of So Fast & Extra Furious 8, or in hard-core pornography, and nobody would really think it was anything other than a further example of Well, That's James Franco For You.

"I might be surprised if somebody else did that, but I can sort of believe it, coming from James Franco," is what a lot of us would say about literally anything he did with his career. Aside from something nefarious, even in his personal life, what could he really do now that would require a comeback, or a rehabilitation tour, or a second chance, or an audit of how audiences feel about him?

At times, he's seemed like the kind of guy who's obsessed with pretending he only touches the avant-garde — a self-styled intellectual who disdains everything that's not from art museums. But he's also perfectly happy to do Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Oz The Great And Powerful, two huge moneymaking films that have little connection to short films that wind up in museums. This year, he did This Is The End, a proudly stupid gross-out apocalypse comedy in which he and his friends play themselves.

Blockbusters, both self-consciously respectable and not so much? Fine. Obscurity? Fine. School? Fine. Art? Fine. Poetry? Fine.

And now he's published that "novel," Actors Anonymous. It's not really a novel; it's really a collection of ... stuff. Loosely — like, "XXXL shirt on XXXS body" loosely — based on the 12 steps of addiction treatment programs, it consists of short stories, snippets of scripts, and what it's hard not to envision as Things James Franco Wrote Down On The Back Of A Receipt One Time About Acting And Being Famous.

Among these snippets, there are flashes of insight — like, "I performed for money, and I performed for free. It's better to perform for money if you hate the director; it's better to perform for free if you love him." But there are also things nobody would pay money to read under normal circumstances — like, "There are some people that are very serious about their acting. But the ones that are too serious are boring and usually end up strangling their own performances." That would probably not make the cut if he said it in an interview; it's not really book material.

The fiction sections are stories about actors, but other themes tie them together: mostly, they are about young men driven nearly mad by some combination of generalized rage and a specific desire to have sex with, and sometimes to dominate and possess, women. They're far too inconsistent to be really satisfying, but they simmer with a sometimes intriguing frustration. Franco loves to intersperse signs that certain stories are autobiographical and that he's appearing in the book as "James Franco" or "The Actor," but there are also tweaked details that are meant to hold the reader at a slight distance and retain some sense of disorientation with regard to truth and fiction.

In other words, it's the James-Franco-iest book he could have written, because there's nothing to wrap yourself around. It's not very good, but it's not unambitious, and it's not lazy. It's about him but it's not, it's revealing but it's not, and in the end, it's interesting but it's not.

It's impossible for a celebrity to have an image that's a true blank canvas; we are far too voracious for that. But Franco has perhaps achieved the next best thing: a canvas onto which he's spilled so much paint in so many patterns that it ceases to look like anything, and anything you could add to it would look like it belonged there. And, of course, if you stare at it long enough, you can see patterns emerge and then recede — a poseur, a poet, something jarringly authentic, something painfully manufactured. Even, if you squint, the Last Honest Man In Hollywood, who puts out a book that demonstrates that like a lot of us, he has a certain number of sharp thoughts and an awful lot of mundane ones.

Lots of actors go high-low — the Steven Soderbergh "one for them, one for me" thing. But this is different; Franco has achieved a lack of definition that's unthinkable for a guy like George Clooney, no matter what combination of art-house movies and blockbusters he might make.

There was a lot of talk after Franco's Comedy Central roast about the number of jokes that focused on the idea that he's gay. If nothing else, you'd expect the people who were there to roast him, like Seth Rogen and Nick Kroll and Andy Samberg, to expect a little more from themselves than gay-panic har-har-ing like it's 1998. Even if they didn't worry that those jokes — 26, by BuzzFeed's count — would be offensive, you'd expect them to worry that after 26, they'd seem tired, as Aziz Ansari eventually pointed out that they were.

But maybe people who would normally know better remained stalled at lame gay jokes because roasts are usually focused on making fun of an image of the roastee that the audience will recognize, and Franco offers up less material in that regard than you might think. Hard to make pseudo-intellectual jokes at the expense of a guy who cheerfully made Your Highness. Hard to make dumb-stoner jokes at the expense of a guy who spends so much time pursuing advanced degrees.

It's really hard to know how much of this is on purpose. If it is — if this splatter-painting on his own image to achieve a certain imageless state is something he planned — it's nearly genius, but rather cynical. If it's accidental, it's almost sweet.

But the result is the same either way. He has a strange kind of freedom that comes from a very successful campaign of obfuscation, not so much about his personal life as about his sensibility. So he floats around, and he does what he wants, and none of it changes anything.

Franco has 13 projects listed on his IMDB page that are (or are rumored to be) somewhere between concept and execution — and those are just acting. There's also directing, writing, cinematography, and an unbilled job as the provider of morning pastries for the cast of NCIS.

That last one is a lie, but for a minute, you believed it.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/10/15/234075232/what-exactly-is-james-franco-doing?ft=1&f=1032
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AMD pairs with Raptr to create Gaming Evolved app: offers social ...

Fri, Oct 11, 2013 | 08:39 BST

AMD has paired with gaming network Raptr to offer PC gamers a new social app called Gaming Evolved. The suite allows users to stream their play over Twitch, speak with other players and tweak their game’s spec settings all in one place. Convenient.

In a press release issued by AMD and Raptr, both parties explained that the Gaming Evolved app can was, “designed to make PC gaming as simple to use as consoles,” allowing users to quickly and automatically optimise their rig’s setting to whatever game they play using the Control Center function. It uses Raptr’s cloud tech to identify set-ups and game specs and match them to whatever you’re running at the time.

Users can also earn real rewards by playing games, capture screenshots and share them with friends, enable Twitch live-streaming, chat with other members and browse the web from within the app.

The app is in open beta now, and you can get more details
>here.

In a statement, Raptr CEO Dennis Fong said, “We believe we’re taking a big step in improving the PC gaming experience for the masses. Combining AMD’s expertise in hardware and performance with Raptr’s already popular desktop app and 18+ million community was a perfect fit.”

“We’ve watched Raptr build a hugely successful platform and it’s clear that they understand what gamers want,” added Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager at AMD. “The Gaming Evolved App Powered by Raptr allows our users get the most out of their gaming rigs while tapping into a thriving community where they can share their experiences and get rewards.”

Source: http://www.vg247.com/2013/10/11/amd-pairs-with-raptr-to-create-gaming-evolved-app-offers-social-functions-streaming-more/
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Piracy Among Hot Topics Addressed at Australian International Movie Convention

Columbia Pictures

The local premiere of "Captain Phillips" opened the Australian International Movie Convention on Sunday

SYDNEY -- Australia’s major film exhibition and distribution confab, the Australian International Movie Convention opened Monday with a keynote speech from returning federal arts minister, Senator George Brandis, underlining the issues of copyright reform, piracy and ongoing support for both local and runway production as key to the continued growth of the film sector here.

In his first major address to the industry since his party’s win in the Sept. 7 election, Brandis said that he would “reaffirm the government’s commitment to content industries, keep the thresholds of the offset under review and readdress policy covering copyright and piracy in light of technological advancements”.

Brandis is also the nations Attorney General, who last held the post of arts minister in 2007 and was one of the architects of the package of screen production incentives which include the producer, location and post digital and visual effects offsets.  

He said that five years after introducing production incentives, they have “proved to be a highly successful stimulant for investment in Australian screen production. It has also served to attract a number of high budget films to be made in Australia. The producer offset, for films with significant Australian content, has helped raise the finance for 115 Australian feature films since I introduced it in 2007. This equates to over AUS$452 million ($429 million) in support, which has over time increased the viability of screen businesses”.

However, recent times have not been without challenges, he said “given the high value of the Australian dollar and an expanding number of tax breaks being offered in other countries and in many states in the United States.”

“During the election campaign I undertook to keep the thresholds of the offset under review and I reaffirm that commitment today,” he said.

And answering the content industry’s call for a new set of copyright laws “that work in the digital age,” he said that industry, as well as government, had to act effectively on the issue of piracy.

“In times of turbulent change, industry cannot rely solely on government to fix all the problems that arise,” he said. “Protection of copyright materials isn’t simply a matter of law or government intervention, it is importantly a matter of practice. You know better than I of the agility that modern successful businesses need, and I am pleased to say that you have been able to demonstrate.

“Australia already has a robust legal framework for the protection of copyright, but despite an extensive menu of criminal offenses applicable under copyright law, still the problems of piracy and unauthorized use remain,” Brandis said.  

 “I understand that content industries are facing challenges at the business level. And that means we are all facing challenges at a policy level. The Internet has led to and continues to drive structural adjustments to content industries. New technologies are changing how governments should respond. Australia is not the only country facing these changes.

 “We are all awaiting the Australian Law Commission’s final report on copyright which is to be provided to the government at the end of next month. The government will consider the commission’s findings and any recommendations carefully. But in considering those recommendations, I will bring to that consideration the views that I have expressed in this speech,” Brandis finished.

The 625 delegates at the Convention, on Queensland's Gold Coast, will also see a session on making Tracks, the upcoming adventure travel film starring Mia Wasikowska, based on the story of Robyn Davidson’s camel trek across Australia, with producer Emile Sherman and Davidson. Tracks had its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on the weekend.

Distributors are also previewing their 2014 films for exhibitors, and delegates were treated to an advance screening of Tom Hanks-starrer Captain Phillips on Sunday. The annual box office achievement awards will be announced Tuesday.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/film/~3/MFK7BJ3k3Fo/story01.htm
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'Fifty Shades Of Grey': We Get Crazy Re-Casting Christian Grey!

With a vacant spot in the cast left by Charlie Hunnam, MTV News has five picks you definitely won't expect.


By Kevin P. Sullivan

Source:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1715543/fifty-shades-of-grey-christian-grey-re-casting.jhtml

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WIRED Space Photo of the Day: Hebes Chasma

This mosaic of Hebes Chasma is composed of eight single images taken with the High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express, corresponding to orbits 360 (2 May 2004), 2149 (16 September 2005), 3217 (12 July 2006), 5142 (3 January 2008), 5160 (8 January 2008), 5178 (13 January 2008), 6241 (11 November 2008), and 7237 (24 August 2009). The image centre lies at about 1°S / 284°E.

Hebes Chasma is an enclosed, almost 8 km-deep trough stretching 315 km in an east–west direction and 125 km from north to south at its widest point. It sits about 300 km north of the vast Valles Marineris canyon. A flat-topped mesa is located in the centre of Hebes Chasma, which was likely shaped by the action of wind and water.

Image: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) [high-resolution]

Caption: ESA

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Hands-free harmonica playing with the magnetic HarpArm

Harmonica players are lining up for the HarpArm, which was a winner at the 2013 NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show. The HarpArm is a modern alternative to the neck worn “rack” harp holding apparatus that has been on the market for decades. It features an adjustable holder that attaches to a regular microphone […]
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