All the Films We Caught in the Final Three Days of Sundance

Samantha Castellano

Overall, we saw some 27 movies and spent more than 40 hours in theater chairs during the Sundance Film Festival. And during the last three days it was all about mainlining quirky indies and catching up on our documentaries. Here’s what we caught during the final leg of our Sundance marathon.

Day 7

Reversal (above)

In a very strong horror program at Sundance, Reversal had a lot to live up to. No one is going to call this the next I Spit On Your Grave, but as an entry into the women-getting-theirs genre it was good enough. The level of effort put into keeping the audience confused was a bit maddening, but if you’re down for cheap thrills it will be a solid way to spend a Thursday night with friends and popcorn. The rights to the film were acquired by IFC Midnight, so that dream can become a reality.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Z for Zachariah

Leave it to Hollywood to make Margot Robbie the last woman on Earth left for men to fight over. Robbie is probably in the middle of that fight between some dudes right now with 26 other women standing right next to her. But it’s becoming more and more clear that, in addition to being stunning, she’s also a very good actress. After her breakout performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie goes from blonde bombshell to brunette Christian girl-next-door with impressive seamlessness. Director Craig Zobel (Compliance) put together a beautiful, efficient movie about what happens after we’re all gone, leading Robbie and her co-stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine through an exploration of human desires even more powerful than the need to survive.

Day 8

Chung Hoon Chung

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

This was the most Sundance of movies at Sundance this year, winning both the Audience Award and the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize—much like Whiplash did at least year’s festival. And it’s no surprise. This movie was charming and sweet and emotional and funny and clever, and you can read praise of it from pretty much any outlet that talks about movies even occasionally. Fox Searchlight acquired the rights for around $6 million, meaning that its darling status coming out of Park City will soon scale up to a national level.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Nasty Baby

For most of this movie is exactly the Kristen Wiig comedy you want and expect it to be. Then something happens. And that’s all we can tell you, besides the fact that we fully endorse this movie and the choices it makes.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Entertainment

This is a movie about a comedian, Neil Hamburger (the fictitious persona invented by actual comedian Gregg Turkington) spiraling into oblivion as he tours the southwestern United States. It’s bleak and sad and sick and offensive. Many patrons leaving the movie said they would have walked out if they hadn’t been pinned in the middle of their rows. But the thing is, it all feels very intentional. Entertainment isn’t a movie to be enjoyed as much as it is to be endured. Matt Patches over at Grantland wrote a post in which he said it “dismantled” comedy and called it “The Anti-SNL Movie.” That feels about right. So don’t seek out Entertainment expecting to feel good. Seek it out if you want to feel everything else.

Scott Henriksen

The Bronze

The Duplass brothers production machine rolls on with this Sundance 2015 opening night selection. It wasn’t Whiplash (last year’s opening film), but it sure was a monument to profanity in the name of humor! Star Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory) co-wrote it with her husband, Winston, and bless the woman for committing 100 percent as this year’s Young Adult-esque anti-hero with 600 percent more obscenity. Bronze hasn’t won universal praise, but it really, really wants to make you laugh. And we did. A lot. Fortunately, Relativity Media was sufficiently impressed, as they nabbed the film for $3 million.

Day 9

Heikki Frm

The Visit

Here’s an interesting concept: What would the real time, practical response be to an alien visitation? Documentarian Michael Madsen (no, not that Michael Madsen) uses his camera as a stand-in for the hypothetical extra-terrestrial and puts it in front of UN officials and government and military experts to create mock interviews of the unknown life form. Madsen heavily stylizes shots of everyday life to emphasize the perspective of the Other, which is captivating at its highest moments and a bit sleepy at its lowest. Overall, though, it was a unique approach to a documentary, and to the questions raised by what we will do if we learn we are not alone.

Archie Lieberman

Best of Enemies

If you like witty repartee among intellectuals, it’s hard to see how you could have more fun than watching this movie. The filmmakers were on hand for a Q&A after a late-in-the-week screening of Best of Enemies, and while watching Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. spar was highly entertaining, co-directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) insist this is a documentary about how we communicate, and not about the public theater of Vidal and Buckley’s televised “debates” during the electoral conventions of 1968. Though with plenty of footage from those debates, it is staggering to be reminded how the political fights we have now look almost identical the ones we were having almost 50 years ago. Magnolia acquired the picture for an undisclosed sum, so that soon we may all revel in the rivalry of Gore v. Buckley.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Prophet’s Prey

If you ever wondered how Warren Jeffs—imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS)—landed on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list before being apprehended in 2006 during a routine traffic stop, this documentary should answer all your relevant questions. And while we’d hate to spoil anything, here are a few hints: sexual molestation, underage marriage, rape. Director Amy Berg teamed up with author Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven) and investigator Sam Brower (who wrote the book Prophet’s Prey), to explain the horrors taking place within FLDS compounds. Both Brower and Krakauer have been working for years to expose FLDS and bring its “Priesthood holders” to justice, and this doc gives the men a much-deserved bullhorn with which to raise further awareness.

Twitter Aims to Lower Its Learning Curve by Automatically Filling Your Feed

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Now that Twitter is a public company, it’s under added pressure to expand the reach of its microblogging service. And so far, that’s been tough going.

But last week, according to The New York Times , the company began rolling out a new tool meant to make its service more accessible to new users. It’s called Instant Timeline, and as the Times reports, it’s now available to a small percentage of Twitter users on Android phones.

The idea is that when you sign up for a new account, Twitter scans your smartphone contact list for people with Twitter accounts, analyzes their Twitter behavior, and then uses this analysis to automatically fill your Twitter feed with tweets from other people you might be interested in. This might include experts in a certain field, news outlets, the mayor of your city, celebrities of interest, and more.

Traditionally, your feed would only include tweets from people you actively choose to “follow.” Now, it will include all sorts of other tweets as well. In a way, it breaks the original Twitter model, but the hope is that it can reduce what has traditionally been a steep learning curve for the service—something that has hindered Twitter in its ongoing efforts to expand its user base and compete with the likes of Facebook.

The new Instant Timeline also helps new users navigate Twitter’s interface, providing tutorials at certain points throughout the service to explain tricky features, like direct messaging. And it arrives at a crucial time for Twitter. The company, which went public in November 2013, has been facing investor concerns over the social network’s slow growth and declining user engagement.

Though the social network did see more user sign-ups in 2014 than a year ago, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, it saw less engagement from those users overall. Only 36 percent of Twitter users visited the site every day in 2014, a significant drop from 46 percent of users who peeked into their timelines daily in 2013.

The Week in Trailers: Fantastic Four Is Back and Tom Hardy Is a Soviet Agent

Your weekly serving of trailers is coming a bit late, but that’s just because we wanted to maximize the Super Bowl wellspring and see what Sundance Film Festival gems would be available for consumption. After all, we can’t say it’s the superior round up of pre-movies unless we’ve seen ‘em all—or at least as many as we can find! But you’ve got a lot of video to sort through here, so let’s get right to it.

The One Everyone Was Supposed To Be Talking About: Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice

This is where we were expecting to put the new massive DC Comics movie trailer that everyone thought was going to premiere during the Super Bowl. But then they let us down.

Pause at: N/A

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The One Everyone Is Actually Talking About: Fantastic Four

Sony Sells Off the Maker of the Classic MMO EverQuest

EverQuest Next. Sony Online Entertainment/Daybreak Game Company

Sony Online Entertainment, the division of Sony that creates massively multiplayer games like EverQuest, PlanetSide 2, and DC Universe Online, has been sold to New York-based investment firm Columbus Nova, and will be rebranded as Daybreak Game Company, it said today.

“Can’t wait to make Xbox One games!” said Sony Online president John Smedley, who will be staying in his role at Daybreak, on Twitter following the news. As a Sony division, the company made PlayStation and computer games, but nothing for rival game consoles.

SOE had just launched H1Z1, an open-world zombie game in the style of the popular DayZ, on Steam via Early Access. It still plans to release EverQuest Next , a new version of its most popular MMO.

Smedley said in today’s statement that Daybreak’s focus will be “bringing our portfolio to new platforms.”

Daybreak’s new owner Columbus Nova purchased the game studio Harmonix from its corporate parent Viacom in 2010.

Invite Enterprise Architecture to the Digital Party

Sonny Abesamis/Flickr

You’re the CEO of a large company in the throes of a challenging digital transformation. You decide to walk the halls to see how the effort is going.

You pass the digital encampment, a new, open plan area festooned with balloons, stuffed animals, and all manner of neo-corporate bric-a-brac. You breathe a sigh of relief, as you see your marketing folks in deep conversation with a handful of techies – even though it’s hard to tell the difference from all the piercings, strangely colored hair, and lumbersexual getups.

But then, on the way back to your office, you pass a haggard, middle-aged man – one shirt tail out, mumbling to himself. Who is this wreck of an employee? Your enterprise architect.

This hapless fellow – let’s call him Bob – has struggled to find his way in the organization. When he was hired, his new boss, the VP of IT, told him he’d have an impact on the business, but then he was relegated to the bowels of the IT department, to spend every waking hour on portfolio management and IT standards tasks.

Not that portfolio management and IT standards aren’t important, mind you. It’s just that as an EA, he was hoping to have a greater impact on the business outside of IT.

During the last year, however, Bob has gone downhill. He holds onto his sanity by the finest of threads. The problem? The digital effort.

When poor Bob first heard of the digital initiative, his heart rose. Finally, a reason for business and IT to work collaboratively! Customer preferences and behavior will drive a realignment across the organization! Finally, enterprise architecture will be at the center of everything, and Bob will finally get the respect he deserves!

Only it didn’t work out that way. The new Chief Digital Officer came out of the interactive marketing world, and didn’t really have any idea what an EA did – or worse, what one should do.

When it came time to build a digital team, the CDO knocked on the cube walls of the developers and ops people who shrewdly put “DevOps” by their nameplates. But she walked right by Bob’s office without even peeking in.

Why Enterprise Architecture Isn’t Invited to the Digital Party

On the surface, EA and digital sound like a match made in heaven. After all, EA is supposed to help organizations clarify the organizational, process, information, and technology elements or primitives that make up the enterprise in order to establish efficient approaches to coordinating them in order to better achieve the goals of the organization.

Since enterprise digital transformation efforts involve organizational, process, and technology changes that better connect the customer to the technology systems of record, formulating the best way of accomplishing the goals of digital sounds like a perfect application of enterprise architecture.

Only most organizations don’t see this connection – for a number of possible reasons.

First, the existing EA effort may not be focused on broad-based business improvement at all. All too often EAs like Bob get buried in the IT department. Their focus ends up on technology concerns, which are important to be sure, but the connection to the business is tenuous at best.

Not all EAs are in Bob’s predicament, however. There are some well-run EA departments outside of IT that help drive enterprisewide improvement. Yet even these cream-of-the-crop EAs may not have much say in the digital initiative, because today’s EA efforts rarely focus on business agility.

But even if you’ve read my book and taken my course and followed me on Twitter, and even if you’re the best-qualified Agile EA in the world, you may still not be invited to the digital party. There’s still something missing.

The Digital EA Name Game

Perhaps one of the most massive roadblocks to the success of the enterprise architecture profession – and certainly to the EA’s proper place in the digital initiative – is simply the name “enterprise architect.” Architect as a title sounds geeky and technical, and slapping enterprise in front of it doesn’t help much.

Face it, the practice of EA has taken a number of lumps over the years. It’s time to cut loose the baggage.

Fortunately, this problem is easy to fix. Let’s simply cross off all references to EA from the org chart and corresponding business cards. Instead, let’s call the EA team the Center of Digital Excellence. Catchy, eh? It even comes with a handy if somewhat ironic acronym: CODE.

The no-longer-EAs populating CODE might go by titles like VP of Digital Excellence, Director of Digital Excellence, and the like, depending upon how anal HR is with their designations. Just don’t call them architects, as that would defeat the purpose of the renaming.

While we’re at it, let’s chuck other people into CODE as well. We’re already struggling with what to call the folks involved in the DevOps reorg over in IT – are they the DevOps team? Group? Party, maybe?

And now, the digital leadership wants to connect the DevOps folks to the marketing and product folks, leading to perplexing portmanteaus like BizDevOps. Well, what is BizDevOps but a Center of Digital Excellence?

Organizing the Center of Digital Excellence

The Chief Digital Officer title is still quite slippery – is it really a C-level exec? Is it more marketing or more tech? – but if you have a CDO, then it stands to reason that CODE reports to her. How, then, should the CDO organize CODE?

The answer: she shouldn’t. CODE should be self-organizing. Make sure this group understands the business priorities of the digital effort, and ensure they have enough resources – human, technical, and financial – to be successful. And then get out of their way.

It’s important to remember that self-organizing shouldn’t mean disorganized. Instead, it means you trust people to figure out who needs to do what from project to project in order to achieve both the short term and strategic goals of the initiative.

The used-to-be-EAs in this group will find that their way of thinking will be essential to this internal self-organization. After all, understanding what the pieces are and how to assemble them to achieve business goals is the stock in trade of the EA. The only way they can adequately contribute to such an effort, however is to be members of CODE.

It’s time for Bob to come in out of the cold. Mess up his hair and put him in a Center of Digital Excellence T-shirt, and watch your digital effort take off.

Jason Bloomberg is President of Intellyx.

See Bloomberg speak on Agile EA at this week’s Open Group conference in San Diego, the Agile in Government conference in the Washington DC area February 25, or Integrated EA in London the first week of March. (Can’t see him in person? Join his webinar on Digital Transformation: The New Rules of Application Performance on February 18.)

Biologists partner bacterium with nitrogen gas to produce more, cleaner bioethanol

Indiana University biologists believe they have found a faster, cheaper and cleaner way to increase bioethanol production by using nitrogen gas, the most abundant gas in Earth's atmosphere, in place of more costly industrial fertilizers. The discovery could save the industry millions of dollars and make cellulosic ethanol -- made from wood, grasses and inedible parts of plants -- more competitive with corn ethanol and gasoline.

The raw materials for cellulosic ethanol are low in nitrogen, a nutrient required for ethanol-producing microbes to grow, so cellulosic ethanol producers are estimated to spend millions of dollars annually on nitrogen fertilizers like corn steep liquor and diammonium phosphate. But an IU team led by biologist James B. McKinlay has found that the bioethanol-producing bacterium Zymomonas mobilis can use nitrogen gas (N2) as a nitrogen source, something that the more traditional ethanol-producer, baker's yeast, cannot do.

"When we discovered that Z. mobilis could use N2 we expected that it would make less ethanol. N2 utilization and ethanol production demand similar resources within the bacterial cell so we expected resources to be pulled away from ethanol production to allow the bacteria to grow with N2," McKinlay said. "To our surprise the ethanol yield was unchanged when the bacteria used N2. In fact, under certain conditions, the bacteria converted sugars to ethanol much faster when they were fed N2."

Knowing the bacterium could use N2 without hindering ethanol production, the team reasoned that N2 gas could serve as an inexpensive substitute for nitrogen fertilizers during cellulosic ethanol production.

"Until recently, ethanol has been produced almost entirely from food crops, but last year there was a surge in cellulosic ethanol production as several commercial facilities opened," McKinlay said. "Cellulosic ethanol offers more favorable land use and lower carbon emissions than conventional ethanol production. Even so, cellulosic ethanol is struggling to be cost-competitive against corn ethanol and gasoline."

The largest cost contributors to cellulosic ethanol production are the cellulosic plant material and the enzymes needed to degrade the plant material into sugars that are converted into ethanol, so they have received the most attention.

"But we recognized nitrogen fertilizers as a smaller, yet considerable, cost contributor that could potentially be more readily addressed," he said.

They estimated that using N2 gas, which can be produced on-site at production facilities, in place of costly nitrogen supplements could save an ethanol production facility over $1 million dollars a year. Using N­2 gas could also have environmental benefits such as avoiding carbon dioxide emissions associated with producing and transporting the industrial fertilizers.

"More work needs to be done to assess how this approach can be integrated and optimized on an industrial scale, but all of the data we've collected thus far are very encouraging," McKinlay said.

A provisional patent has also been filed in relation to the study with the United State Patent and Trademark Office, he added.

The research was published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by McKinlay and three past and present members of his laboratory: graduate student Timothy A. Kremer, postdoctoral fellow Breah LaSarre, and former research associate Amanda L. Posto. McKinlay is an assistant professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Biology.

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by Indiana University . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

All the Films We Caught in the Final Three Days of Sundance

Samantha Castellano

Overall, we saw some 27 movies and spent more than 40 hours in theater chairs during the Sundance Film Festival. And during the last three days it was all about mainlining quirky indies and catching up on our documentaries. Here’s what we caught during the final leg of our Sundance marathon.

Day 7

Reversal (above)

In a very strong horror program at Sundance, Reversal had a lot to live up to. No one is going to call this the next I Spit On Your Grave, but as an entry into the women-getting-theirs genre it was good enough. The level of effort put into keeping the audience confused was a bit maddening, but if you’re down for cheap thrills it will be a solid way to spend a Thursday night with friends and popcorn. The rights to the film were acquired by IFC Midnight, so that dream can become a reality.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Z for Zachariah

Leave it to Hollywood to make Margot Robbie the last woman on Earth left for men to fight over. Robbie is probably in the middle of that fight between some dudes right now with 26 other women standing right next to her. But it’s becoming more and more clear that, in addition to being stunning, she’s also a very good actress. After her breakout performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Robbie goes from blonde bombshell to brunette Christian girl-next-door with impressive seamlessness. Director Craig Zobel (Compliance) put together a beautiful, efficient movie about what happens after we’re all gone, leading Robbie and her co-stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Chris Pine through an exploration of human desires even more powerful than the need to survive.

Day 8

Chung Hoon Chung

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

This was the most Sundance of movies at Sundance this year, winning both the Audience Award and the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize—much like Whiplash did at least year’s festival. And it’s no surprise. This movie was charming and sweet and emotional and funny and clever, and you can read praise of it from pretty much any outlet that talks about movies even occasionally. Fox Searchlight acquired the rights for around $6 million, meaning that its darling status coming out of Park City will soon scale up to a national level.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Nasty Baby

For most of this movie is exactly the Kristen Wiig comedy you want and expect it to be. Then something happens. And that’s all we can tell you, besides the fact that we fully endorse this movie and the choices it makes.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Entertainment

This is a movie about a comedian, Neil Hamburger (the fictitious persona invented by actual comedian Gregg Turkington) spiraling into oblivion as he tours the southwestern United States. It’s bleak and sad and sick and offensive. Many patrons leaving the movie said they would have walked out if they hadn’t been pinned in the middle of their rows. But the thing is, it all feels very intentional. Entertainment isn’t a movie to be enjoyed as much as it is to be endured. Matt Patches over at Grantland wrote a post in which he said it “dismantled” comedy and called it “The Anti-SNL Movie.” That feels about right. So don’t seek out Entertainment expecting to feel good. Seek it out if you want to feel everything else.

Scott Henriksen

The Bronze

The Duplass brothers production machine rolls on with this Sundance 2015 opening night selection. It wasn’t Whiplash (last year’s opening film), but it sure was a monument to profanity in the name of humor! Star Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory) co-wrote it with her husband, Winston, and bless the woman for committing 100 percent as this year’s Young Adult-esque anti-hero with 600 percent more obscenity. Bronze hasn’t won universal praise, but it really, really wants to make you laugh. And we did. A lot. Fortunately, Relativity Media was sufficiently impressed, as they nabbed the film for $3 million.

Day 9

Heikki Frm

The Visit

Here’s an interesting concept: What would the real time, practical response be to an alien visitation? Documentarian Michael Madsen (no, not that Michael Madsen) uses his camera as a stand-in for the hypothetical extra-terrestrial and puts it in front of UN officials and government and military experts to create mock interviews of the unknown life form. Madsen heavily stylizes shots of everyday life to emphasize the perspective of the Other, which is captivating at its highest moments and a bit sleepy at its lowest. Overall, though, it was a unique approach to a documentary, and to the questions raised by what we will do if we learn we are not alone.

Archie Lieberman

Best of Enemies

If you like witty repartee among intellectuals, it’s hard to see how you could have more fun than watching this movie. The filmmakers were on hand for a Q&A after a late-in-the-week screening of Best of Enemies, and while watching Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. spar was highly entertaining, co-directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville (20 Feet From Stardom) insist this is a documentary about how we communicate, and not about the public theater of Vidal and Buckley’s televised “debates” during the electoral conventions of 1968. Though with plenty of footage from those debates, it is staggering to be reminded how the political fights we have now look almost identical the ones we were having almost 50 years ago. Magnolia acquired the picture for an undisclosed sum, so that soon we may all revel in the rivalry of Gore v. Buckley.

courtesy Sundance Institute

Prophet’s Prey

If you ever wondered how Warren Jeffs—imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS)—landed on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list before being apprehended in 2006 during a routine traffic stop, this documentary should answer all your relevant questions. And while we’d hate to spoil anything, here are a few hints: sexual molestation, underage marriage, rape. Director Amy Berg teamed up with author Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven) and investigator Sam Brower (who wrote the book Prophet’s Prey), to explain the horrors taking place within FLDS compounds. Both Brower and Krakauer have been working for years to expose FLDS and bring its “Priesthood holders” to justice, and this doc gives the men a much-deserved bullhorn with which to raise further awareness.