The Star Wars Panel’s Real Magic Was Its Balancing Act

Skip to story Cast and crew (and stormtroopers) of Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the Star Wars Celebration live panel on April 16, 2015. Cast and crew (and stormtroopers) of Star Wars: The Force Awakens at the Star Wars Celebration live panel on April 16, 2015. Screengrab/Youtube



After decades of Comic-Cons, the patterns of epic geek live panels are well established—a bit of warm up, special guests, surprise guests, maybe some theatrics, and a climactic debut of something, maybe new footage of a big, highly anticipated movie.


You know why they do it like that? Because it works.


Disney owns Star Wars, so Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention going on all weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center, is as highly controlled as any Disney experience. JJ Abrams, the director/producer/co-writer of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, hit all his marks during his panel this morning with Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy, executive producer and the person in charge of Lucasfilm, stayed on rigorously on point, and showed off the new Star Wars T-shirt she’d bought in the convention hall the night before, when a significant chunk of the audience in the Anaheim Convention Center Arena were overnighting outside.


The energy, though! Granted, a room full of thousands of Star Wars fans is a self-selected audience, but still. When Abrams was talking about using practical sets and visual effects while shooting in Abu Dhabi—standing in for a desert world called Jakoo—he said: “Star Wars is as much a Western and a fairy tale as anything else, and one of the things you expect and want to see are real, tangible, John Ford landscapes.” The applause was profound. People don’t just want Star Wars to be good. They kind of need it to be. (One might argue that George Lucas’ vision of Tatooine owed more to David Lean than John Ford, but then one would be a pedant and a killjoy, wouldn’t one?)


Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 11.05.27 AM Screengrab/Youtube

Kennedy explained it this way. “We’re fans, too. Everybody inside the Lucasfilm organization are fans,” she said. “Many, many fans are inside the Walt Disney company. Everybody has a Star Wars story, and that generational experience is something that is really important, and it’s everything in terms of the future of Star Wars.” Pandering? Sure. Narratively dangerous? Absolutely, if you want to bring in a new audience instead of just people like, well, me. But it was also important. Abrams, Kennedy, and team have to energize the base before they can bring out new voters. It’s not easy. They’re trying to thread the stone needle (deep cut).


One way to get that done is, as Kennedy said, by appealing across generations. The halls of Star Wars Celebration are full of families, everyone in costume. The kids all want pictures with the grown men in stormtrooper outfits. That might explain why all the old cast is coming back. It makes sure my demographic will be crying all through the new movie. All I have to do is bring my kids when Force Awakens opens in December and, as Darth Vader would say, the circle will be complete.


So, yes, the Force was strong in that arena. When the lights went down and lightsaber blades lit up across the entire hall it looked…awesome. When Abrams and Kennedy introduced two of the droid makers for the new movie, the moment felt like it was losing some of its energy…until a working R2-D2 rolled out, beeping and whistling. It was like seeing an old friend—and for a punchline, the new droid character BB8 rolled out, too, which seems impossible. It’s a dome-like head on a multidirectional ball, but it works in real life. “If it were CG, it’d be a lot easier,” Abrams admitted.


Screen Shot 2015-04-16 at 10.33.55 AM Screengrab/Youtube

One talking point that everyone hit involved the representation of women in the updated Star Wars universe. Like, who did Kennedy identify with in the first trilogy? “It’s an interesting question, because originally I didn’t have a lot of choices,” she said. “But I have to say that’s something that’s going to change.” She promised that in the next two decades of Star Wars movies (because that’s what we’re getting) they’d be building more women characters. That should be welcome news to the little girls in costume around the con, because as many of them were in Leia outfits as in Mandalorian battle armor.


Carrie Fisher picked up the same thread when a few members of the original cast came out. “I liked being the only one when I was 19,” she said. “But now I need some backup.” She also promised that while she wouldn’t be wearing those weird side-buns from the first Star Wars, there’d be something as good as the metal bikini she wore in Return of the Jedi. Not sure what that’s going to be about.


The moments with the original cast were charming. Anthony Daniels (C-3P0), Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), Fisher (Princess Leia), and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) are all returning, of course. When Hamill came onstage with Fisher, he gave her a little sideways hug and pointed out at the crowd, his finger making a little crossing motion—I’m thinking he noticed one of the two new claymore-style lightsabers from the first trailer, the one with saber-energy quillons. (That’s what the little things coming off the side above the hilt are called. Yes, sorry, I fence.) “All through my adult life I’ve felt such love from you,” Hamill said, “and you’re more than just fans, you’re family.” For real? Doesn’t matter. Totally worked.


Fisher, who’s famously ribald, put it a little differently. “It’s an amazing thing to be part of so many people’s childhoods, and be a toy at the same time,” she said. “So thank you for playing with me.” When someone in the audience shouted “I love you, Carrie,” she responded: “I love you, too! See you later.”


Oh, also, they showed a trailer.


Let’s not kid ourselves. You already watched it. But just in case, a couple of things worth pointing out: The landscape of, presumably, Jakoo, is litered with crashed spaceships. Rey, played by Daisey Ridley, scavenges the spaceship graveyard. John Boyega’s Finn ends up there, somehow, in stormtooper armor, though neither he nor Abrams would cop to him actually being a stormtrooper during the panel. Finn also eventually sports a bitchin’ leather jacket. (Talking to you, cosplayers.)


In any case, there’s running from explosions, black TIE fighters, x-wings skimming the surface of a lake (one of them piloted by a joyful Poe Dameron, who actor Oscar Isaac described during the panel as “the best frickin’ pilot in the galaxy…sent on a mission by a certain princess, and he ends up coming across Mr. John Boyega’s character, and their fates are forever intertwined.” That’s as spoilery as things got.) The Millenium Falcon runs from a TIE fighter by flying into the skeleton of a crashed Imperial star destroyer, which seems like a typically Han Solo-esque move, but we never see him flying the ship.


But the trailer also has Luke Skywalker talking about how the Force runs in his family. Someone holds the charred, melted mask of Darth Vader. A hooded Luke—going by the robotic right hand, at least—pats an aging R2-D2. Someone passes what looks a lot like Luke’s first light saber (which was Anakin’s before he became Darth Vader) into the hands of a woman. We get a lot of Empire imagery—new stormtoopers arrayed like a scene out of Triumph of the Will, in front of a new insignia banner; star destroyers in flight; and a black-armored cross between a stormtrooper and what the expanded Star Wars universe used to call a Sith trooper, an even badder badguy.


The most important shot, though, didn’t involve any spaceships or special effects at all. It was an older, greyer Han Solo, standing next to Chewbacca, bowcaster drawn. “Chewie,” Han says. “We’re home.”


It’s a classic Abrams button-push, the director working in full-on heartstring-tugging Spielberg mode. But those kind of gestures make sense here. Star Wars is home. It’s memories of first trips to the movies, handed down from parents to kids, fairy tales about magic swords and heroes who put to right a universe gone wrong. Abrams puts those moments on film for a simple reason: They work.



Audio Visuals: Twitter Will Chew You Up and Spit You Out


We strive for diversity here on the Audio Visuals desk. We want eclectic music choices and a wide array of narrative formats to both keep you, the readers, guessing, and to promote all the crazy this medium has to offer. We also love cartoons, so we try to find a lot of kick-ass animations for your viewing pleasure. This week it’s a zany little grab bag with your new favorite cover of any Backstreet Boys song, Snoop Dogg paying tribute to cinema of yore, Florence Welch going H.A.M. on herself, a socially conscious animated short, and a few other tasty treats to satisfy your appetite. Commence your tiny desk concert now.


“Carmen”—Stromae (Above)


Nothing says “social commentary” like putting a cartoon Barack Obama on the back of a big blue bird and sending him over the edge of a cliff into the waiting mouth of an even bigger and scarier blue bird. What do you think Stromae is trying to tell us here? Think it has anything to do with … Twitter? Maybe? Oh, and Sylvain Chomet, of Triplets of Belleville fame, directed this. FYI.


“So Many Pros”—Snoop Dogg


Because there aren’t enough nods to 1970s blaxploitation cinema, like, anywhere, Snoop finds a home in this week’s best of roundup.


“Candy Sugar Rush”—Slow Knights


Scissor Sisters lead guitarist Del Marquis has embarked on a side project and it’s called Slow Knights. Fortunately, these new jams have the same kicky kiki energy we’ve come to know and love from the Sisters, and this video has the good vibes to match. Here’s your week’s ray of sunshine.


“Shame”—Young Fathers


The lead (and only) actor in this video is Joshua Hubbard, and he goes for it. This week’s best solo performance winner is Young Fathers by a mile.


“Dream Lover”—The Vaccines


They had us when the space cruiser showed up on screen. The Vaccines are on a mission to obtain the Dream Lover, which, if touched, transforms into your heart’s deepest desire. But will they make it past the all-seeing eye and weaponized fembots?!


“The Grid”—SBCR


Have you ever wished a revenge thriller could just be condensed into the training montage and subsequent action-packed climax? Well now SBCR has you covered! But it’s kind of NSFW for some pretty heavy violence.


“Ship to Wreck”—Florence + The Machine


Wow. Florence Welch is continuing her screaming exorcism of all the demons she took on between albums with the Machine’s third music video for How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful. Welch recently broke her foot when a stage dive ended poorly at Coachella. We don’t want anyone to get hurt, but we also want our musicians to be truly rock star and go all in for their art, which Welch is clearly willing to do, regardless of the medium. Respect.


“Baggage Man”—Sizarr


Sizarr wins this week for most interesting animation, because we rarely get to see people imagined as the preserved husks of citizens in Pompeii. Oh, come on. You weren’t thinking that, too?


“Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely”—Kingship


The only problem with the song and video for Backstreet Boys’ “Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely” was that it wasn’t a rock opera visualized with drawings that look like they were torn from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s forsaken Dune storyboards. Now everything is right with the world and balance has been restored.


“Ingen Hejd”—Joy


This one … well, it’s just pretty wild! If Nicki Minaj slammed her energy together with M.I.A. the resulting frequency would probably sound like Joy. It would look like her, too, if frequencies could look like anything. Regardless, this girl is on some bananas shit, and we want to celebrate such forceful individualism.



New research sheds light on how popular probiotic benefits the gut

In recent years, research into the benefits of gut bacteria has exploded. Scientists across the globe are examining how these microbes can help improve health and prevent disease.



One of the most well-known of these is Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG). This strain of bacteria, which is part of many popular probiotic products, has a reputation as a helpful microbe. Researchers have found evidence that it can help with intestinal problems, respiratory infections and some skin disorders. Some research suggests that it may even help with weight loss.


But a key question has remained unanswered: How does LGG actually produce benefits?


Now, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM) have come up with an explanation. It appears that LGG may act as a facilitator, modifying the activity of other gut bacteria. This is the first time this mechanism has been described; the discovery could eventually help scientists create more effective strategies to foster a healthy gut. The paper was published in the latest issue of the journal mBio.


Claire M. Fraser, PhD, professor of medicine at the UM SOM, as well as director of the Institute for Genome Sciences, studied the effect of LGG on a group of elderly subjects "This species of bacteria has a reputation for being really useful to humans," says Prof. Fraser. "So we wanted to better understand how it might work in the human intestine."


She and her collaborator, Dr. Patricia Hibberd at Massachusetts General Hospital, tested 12 subjects, who ingested LGG twice a day for 28 days. She analyzed gut bacteria before and after this regimen, and found that ingesting LGG led to increases in several genes that foster several species of gut bacteria, including Bacteroides, Eubacterium, Faecalibacterium, Bifidobacterium and Streptococcus. These microbes have been shown to have a range of benefits in humans, including the promotion of a healthy immune system. (Fraser notes that LGG may also have direct effects, in addition to its ability to modify the overall ecosystem.)


"This is a new idea, that some probiotics may work by affecting the overall ecosystem of the gut," said Prof. Fraser. "Previously we tended to think that LGG and other probiotics worked directly on the host. I think this finding has many exciting implications." For one, Fraser says, it lends support to the idea that we need to look at the microbes in the gut as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a series of solitary bacteria. Modifying the behavior of microbes already in the gut may be just as important as adding any single species to this population.


Prof. Fraser and her colleagues used an innovative method for enumerating gut bacteria; this approach, known as metagenomic analysis, allows for a much more comprehensive view of what the microbes are actually doing in a given person's intestines. Previous methods do not provide nearly the same level of detail as this method.


"Dr. Fraser's study is not only fascinating, but it will help advance a rapidly emerging research area," said Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who is also the vice president for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean of the School of Medicine. "In coming years, scientists will learn a great deal about the microbes that exist within us. I'm sure that Prof. Fraser, the Institute and the School of Medicine will be deeply involved in these trailblazing efforts."



Get Your Theories Ready: It’s the Force Awakens Teaser Screengrabs


Han Solo in the flesh. Darth Vader in the very-much-not flesh. We might not know too much more than we did before (other than Finn’s actually a stormtrooper), but that’s half the fun, isn’t it? There are more than enough tantalizing glimpses in here to get your crazy theories spun up, so get spinning already. (Expand the images for optimal obsessing.)



The Second Star Wars Teaser Is Here!


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The Second Star Wars Teaser Is Here!


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The 10 Most Walkable Cities in America


Cities that make life easier for pedestrians are, to many, better places to live. Studies have shown that walkable urban areas are healthier, wealthier and safer (perhaps in part because wealthy people can afford to live in nicer places)—and anyway, who doesn’t want to go outside every once in a while?


If getting around without a car appeals, you should head to New York City or San Francisco (if you can afford either). That’s according to a new ranking of the most walkable large US cities by Redfin, a real estate analysis website and brokerage.


The site uses something it calls Walk Score, an algorithm to measure how convenient it is to do daily errands without wheels, on a 100-point scale. It doesn’t take into account public transit systems (there’s a different score for that), but looks at things like the walking distance to schools, restaurants, and grocery stores, from any given point.


“It’s a population-rated average, sampled at every block,” explains Matt Lerner, VP of products at Redfin. “We’re basically sampling the walk score for every block in the city, weighted by the number of people who live there.” Cities are scored by where the population is, and aren’t penalized for non-walkable areas like shipping ports, industrial districts, and airports.


Most of the cities in the Redfin top 10 are unsurprising. NYC, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington D.C. all got big before the automobile age, so they were made for moving on foot. But the top scores for Miami, Oakland, and Seattle point to the fact that history isn’t all that matters. Cities can change to cater to pedestrians instead of, or at least in addition to, cars.


Lots of cities have become more pedestrian-friendly since Redfin’s last rankings, in 2011. Four years ago, New York City and San Francisco had basically the same score (about 85). Now, the Big Apple’s several points up, thanks to pro-walking efforts like booting cars out of Times Square, Lerner says.


Detroit didn’t crack the top ten, but its score went up 2.2 points, to 52.2, in part thanks to the downtown arrival of big companies like Quicken Loans, bringing restaurants, shops, and businesses with them. New Orleans’ score rose nearly a point, as it develops more affordable housing and revitalizes commercial districts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Miami has seen a surge of development, with new mixed-use commercial and residential areas opening up in the past few years. So there’s good news for pedestrians all over the country.


If you’re only interested in a top 10 walkable city, here’s who came out on top:


New York: 87.6

San Francisco: 83.9

Boston: 79.5

Philadelphia: 76.5

Miami: 75.6

Chicago: 74.8

Washington, D.C.: 74.1

Seattle: 70.8

Oakland: 68.5

Baltimore: 66.2



Major advance in artificial photosynthesis poses win/win for the environment

A potentially game-changing breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis has been achieved with the development of a system that can capture carbon dioxide emissions before they are vented into the atmosphere and then, powered by solar energy, convert that carbon dioxide into valuable chemical products, including biodegradable plastics, pharmaceutical drugs and even liquid fuels.



Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created a hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that mimics the natural photosynthetic process by which plants use the energy in sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water. However, this new artificial photosynthetic system synthesizes the combination of carbon dioxide and water into acetate, the most common building block today for biosynthesis.


"We believe our system is a revolutionary leap forward in the field of artificial photosynthesis," says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and one of the leaders of this study. "Our system has the potential to fundamentally change the chemical and oil industry in that we can produce chemicals and fuels in a totally renewable way, rather than extracting them from deep below the ground."


Yang, who also holds appointments with UC Berkeley and the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (Kavli-ENSI) at Berkeley, is one of three corresponding authors of a paper describing this research in the journal Nano Letters. The paper is titled "Nanowire-bacteria hybrids for unassisted solar carbon dioxide fixation to value-added chemicals." The other corresponding authors and leaders of this research are chemists Christopher Chang and Michelle Chang. Both also hold joint appointments with Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley. In addition, Chris Chang is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator.


The more carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere the warmer the atmosphere becomes. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, primarily as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Yet fossil fuels, especially coal, will remain a significant source of energy to meet human needs for the foreseeable future. Technologies for sequestering carbon before it escapes into the atmosphere are being pursued but all require the captured carbon to be stored, a requirement that comes with its own environmental challenges.


The artificial photosynthetic technique developed by the Berkeley researchers solves the storage problem by putting the captured carbon dioxide to good use.


"In natural photosynthesis, leaves harvest solar energy and carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of molecular products that form biomass," says Chris Chang, an expert in catalysts for carbon-neutral energy conversions. "In our system, nanowires harvest solar energy and deliver electrons to bacteria, where carbon dioxide is reduced and combined with water for the synthesis of a variety of targeted, value-added chemical products."


By combining biocompatible light-capturing nanowire arrays with select bacterial populations, the new artificial photosynthesis system offers a win/win situation for the environment: solar-powered green chemistry using sequestered carbon dioxide.


"Our system represents an emerging alliance between the fields of materials sciences and biology, where opportunities to make new functional devices can mix and match components of each discipline," says Michelle Chang, an expert in biosynthesis. "For example, the morphology of the nanowire array protects the bacteria like Easter eggs buried in tall grass so that these usually-oxygen sensitive organisms can survive in environmental carbon-dioxide sources such as flue gases."


The system starts with an "artificial forest" of nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon and titanium oxide nanowires, developed earlier by Yang and his research group.


"Our artificial forest is similar to the chloroplasts in green plants," Yang says. "When sunlight is absorbed, photo-excited electron?hole pairs are generated in the silicon and titanium oxide nanowires, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum. The photo-generated electrons in the silicon will be passed onto bacteria for the CO2 reduction while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide split water molecules to make oxygen."


Once the forest of nanowire arrays is established, it is populated with microbial populations that produce enzymes known to selectively catalyze the reduction of carbon dioxide. For this study, the Berkeley team used Sporomusa ovata, an anaerobic bacterium that readily accepts electrons directly from the surrounding environment and uses them to reduce carbon dioxide.


"S. ovata is a great carbon dioxide catalyst as it makes acetate, a versatile chemical intermediate that can be used to manufacture a diverse array of useful chemicals," says Michelle Chang. "We were able to uniformly populate our nanowire array with S. ovata using buffered brackish water with trace vitamins as the only organic component."


Once the carbon dioxide has been reduced by S. ovata to acetate (or some other biosynthetic intermediate), genetically engineered E.coli are used to synthesize targeted chemical products. To improve the yields of targeted chemical products, the S. ovata and E.coli were kept separate for this study. In the future, these two activities -- catalyzing and synthesizing -- could be combined into a single step process.


A key to the success of their artificial photosynthesis system is the separation of the demanding requirements for light-capture efficiency and catalytic activity that is made possible by the nanowire/bacteria hybrid technology. With this approach, the Berkeley team achieved a solar energy conversion efficiency of up to 0.38-percent for about 200 hours under simulated sunlight, which is about the same as that of a leaf.


The yields of target chemical molecules produced from the acetate were also encouraging -- as high as 26-percent for butanol, a fuel comparable to gasoline, 25-percent for amorphadiene, a precursor to the antimaleria drug artemisinin, and 52-percent for the renewable and biodegradable plastic PHB. Improved performances are anticipated with further refinements of the technology.


"We are currently working on our second generation system which has a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency of three-percent," Yang says. "Once we can reach a conversion efficiency of 10-percent in a cost effective manner, the technology should be commercially viable."



Cape Watch: Wonder Woman Gets a Shiny New Director

CapeWatch33 Marvel Comics (left, right), Warner Bros. (center)



In case you missed it somehow—maybe you were busy watching DaredevilAvengers: Age of Ultron is very close to hitting theaters, when it’ll become the biggest movie ever released or something (well, until the new Star Wars in December, at least). There has been all manner of promotion for it in the last week, including livestreams of the red carpet premiere and revelations that one of the biggest mysteries about the movie’s trailer wasn’t actually meant to be a mystery at all. But let’s just presume you already knew all that and move on. Here, instead, is the cream of the superhero movie news crop from the last seven days that isn’t Ultron-centric (apart from one item).


SUPER IDEA (MAYBE?): A Change for Wonder Woman


On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter had the news that director Michelle MacLaren had left Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman movie due to what are being called “creative differences”—in other words, the go-to euphemism for “we’re not really going to tell you what happened.” But don’t worry, the WW movie isn’t in too much trouble. Just two days later, THR broke the story that Patty Jenkins would be replacing her, and that everything was surprisingly still on track.

Why this is just confusing: The MacLaren Wonder Woman held a lot of promise, considering her amazing work on television, and the “creative differences” reasoning is something that almost always covers up a bad scene that nobody wants to talk about, so we’ll probably never know what happened there. However, bringing Jenkins in is a smart move, not just because it shows that Warners is dedicated to keeping a woman at the helm of the movie, but also because Jenkins famously left Marvel’s second Thor movie over similar “creative differences” back in 2011, to the upset of the movie’s stars. Managing to avoid an Ant-Man-esque situation while also hiring someone who has previously walked away from a Marvel gig? Double points for bluntness, Warners.


SUPER IDEA: Marvel Courting Guardians of the Galaxy, Pixar Writers for Captain Marvel


THR also had the story that Marvel is looking to bring Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve together to co-write a screenplay for Captain Marvel, its 2018 project that will see the studio finally let a woman play the lead. Perlman has previous Marvel experience, having co-written last summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy, while LeFauve is one of the writers on the upcoming Pixar movie Inside Out. Both had submitted pitches for the movie separately, but Marvel intends to combine them into one screenplay.

Why this is super: As Guardians shows, Perlman’s got what it takes to “get” Marvel, and it’s hard to argue with the Pixar pedigree, so this seems like a pretty solid team for what’s going to be an important movie for Marvel. Now all we need is a director and a star… (For those wondering, yes, the “Michelle MacLaren is being courted for Captain Marvel” rumors started about five minutes after she left Wonder Woman.)


MEH IDEA: Captain Marvel Isn’t in Avengers: Age of Ultron


Speaking of Captain Marvel, it turns out she really was going to be in the second Avengers movie … in Joss Whedon’s mind, at least. “The way we reveal Scarlet Witch [in costume] at the end of the movie? Those were Captain Marvel plate shots,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Badass Digest during an interview to promote Age of Ultron. “Joss said, ‘We’ll cast her later!’ And I said, ‘Yeah Joss, we’ll cast her later.’ [Whispers to an invisible associate who isn’t Joss] ‘We’re not putting her in there!'” The reason Feige was against her showing up in the movie was that bringing her into the movie without a proper origin “would have done that character a disservice,” he explained. Sorry, Carol fans.

Why this is … well, common sense, more than anything: As much as there’s a certain element of the comic book fanbase currently very upset at this news, it’s hard to argue that Feige’s wrong. Just dropping Captain Marvel into the movie without a real introduction makes her seem peripheral to events and less important or interesting than the other heroes as a result (kind of like Hawkeye in Thor). It’s not the worst idea to let her rest until she can get the attention she deserves.


SUPER IDEA: Olivia Munn Is a Mutant


Clearly, Bryan Singer has reached the Jim Lee period of Uncanny X-Men in his research for next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. Not only do we know that Jubilee will show up and have heard many rumors that Channing Tatum’s Gambit will also make an appearance, but now it turns out that The Newsroom’s Olivia Munn will be playing Psylocke, the caucasian supermodel turned Asian ninja much beloved by teenage boys because of her fighting skills and knife, which is the focused totality of her psychic powers and not her figure-hugging costume at all.

Why this is super: We abandoned X-Men just before Psylocke came into ascendance as a character, but we can’t deny that we’re looking forward to hearing whether or not Munn actually has to deliver the line about her knife being the focused totality of her psychic abilities. If she doesn’t, we can at least hope she’s asked to do so at every interview and convention appearance to promote the movie.


SUPER IDEA: Ant-Man Might Not Be as Bad as You Feared


What with all the overwhelming hype surrounding the oh-so-close release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, you might have forgotten that another Marvel Studios movie is set for release this year. In case that’s true, Marvel tried to rekindle interest in Ant-Man by releasing another trailer—one that’s thankfully not as dull as the first.

Why this is super: Putting aside the really distracting performances of everyone involved that isn’t Paul Rudd (seriously, everyone comes across as weirdly affected and unconvincing, right?), there are a couple of lines and/or moments here that suggest that there’s a funny and fun movie struggling to be released from under all the self-importance. Please, oh please, let the finished product end up being more like that than the first trailer suggested.



The Warped, Weed-Fueled World of the Major Lazer Cartoon


There are certain shows that defy easy description. Shows whose premises aren’t exactly cut out for the program guide on your TV. Shows like, say, Major Lazer. Here’s the briefest thumbnail we can muster:


Somewhere far off in a dystopian future, Jamaica has become Earth’s most powerful nation—and an epicenter of oppression. From the White House (which has since relocated to the Caribbean), the grumpy, nefarious President Whitewall persecutes the Jamaican people and aims to curb all the good times. He’s aided by the metal-jawed General Rubbish, a right-hand man with what looks to be a vinyl-record-turned-buzz saw for a right hand. Meanwhile, Whitewall’s teenage daughter Penny just wants to cut loose and soak up the music and culture of the real Jamaica—its dancehalls, bars, and streets. She’s also secretly befriended Whitewall’s number one enemy: Major Lazer, a brawny, beret- and sunglasses-clad supersoldier whose right forearm has been replaced with a laser gun. Lazer, who has been portrayed by Terry Crews in live-action form, runs a strip club full of holograms, enjoys cannabis, and can surf on a bird if need be.


There are also several vampires and at least one ninja.


So goes the high-intensity absurdity of FXX’s long-gestating animated series, which premieres at midnight tonight (really that’s midnight tomorrow, but you know what we mean). With a hero voiced by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (aka Lost‘s Mr. Eko), the music-heavy program is based on the mascot for Major Lazer, Diplo’s party-starting, culture-fusing dancehall/electronic act. “Every single episode is pretty ridiculous,” says Ferry Gouw, art director and co-creator of Major Lazer (the character and the show). “Really stupid and really deep at the same time.”


The character’s road to animation started around 2008, after Diplo first created the music project. Diplo and his manager auditioned Gouw, a visual artist, to design a “Rasta commando with a laser gun for an arm” as the project’s visual centerpiece. The properties they offered up as reference points—Marvel Comics, and 1980s cartoons like G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and Centurions—were the kinds of things Gouw grew up with. He created a few quick mockups of the Major Lazer character and project logo, and his designs have been used and stayed almost entirely the same ever since.


Gouw has made hundreds of Major Lazer illustrations for albums, remixes, tweets and other uses, but the project really turned a corner with the video for Major Lazer’s 2009 track “Hold the Line.” The clip, which Gouw animated, depicts Lazer battling a vampiric villain; interspersed is a lovingly detailed commercial for ’80s-esque Major Lazer-themed figures and vehicles. Gouw doesn’t speak particularly fondly of the result—“looking back, it’s embarrassing and shitty,” he says—but it was nominated for a 2009 MTV Video Music Award for Breakthrough Video. “That was the start of the idea that this illustrated character could have some legs and go on to become a natural animated thing,” Gouw says. “The look of the world in the video, and the toys—people remember that era instinctively.”


Adult Swim then approached the Major Lazer camp about making a cartoon for it. News and production sketches of a Major Lazer show date back to 2011, and a pilot was created at some point, but the results never made it to air. The show’s launch was spearheaded by Nick Weidenfeld, a producer for various Adult Swim series including Metalocalypse and Moral Orel, but then Weidenfeld left the network to head to Fox, and the project began to drag. By February 2013, the series was canceled. However, over at Fox, Weindenfeld was planting the seeds for what would become FXX’s Animation Domination High Def block; eventually, Major Lazer joined him at his new home.


The show’s visuals are still ripped out of the late ’80s/early ’90s animation playbook—colorful, slightly faded, semi-realistic, semi-clunky—and its villains are grotesque weirdos, just as in programs like Toxic Avengers and Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The show’s cast is promisingly diverse, including J.K. Simmons as President Whitewall, Andy Samberg, Aziz Ansari, and Charli XCX. (We’re not sure how that happened either.)


The most surprising element, though, is the fun the show has with recreational vices—for good or evil. Riff Raff voices Double Cup, a cough-syrup-powered villain who wants to poison the local water supply with cough syrup so that everyone slows down (thus literally slowing down any rebel forces). Another episode involves getting too high to the point of literally flying into the sky and confronting a terrifying weed monster.


But while Major Lazer sports all the trappings of a contemporary stoner comedy—the chaos, the weirdness, the post-modernism—Gouw points to its emphasis on narrative flow and pacing. There are no Family Guy-style cutaway jokes; rather, the narrative morphs to a music video back to the narrative, then to a fight scene, and so on. “It’s just frantically moving forward,” Gouw says. “In that way, it’s kind of like being high—but not the kind of high where you laugh at slacker jokes,” he says.


It’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed the shamelessly silly music spin-off cartoons; New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer’s Hammerman were both more than 20 years ago. The difference between those tie-ins and Major Lazer, of course, is that this turns the wink-wink, so-goofy-it’s-good knob way up—but just like its predecessors the show’s appeal still hinges on its crossover element. As part of contemporary electronic/dance music culture’s massive upswing in popularity, Diplo’s been having a really long (and ongoing) moment worth capitalizing on.


Gouw is confident that the show’s characters and story are rich enough to push past the novelty of the tie-in, and could even potentially survive the waning of electronic music’s cultural power. But while he envisions a full-fledged toy line of action figures and vehicles, he knows that there’s more to success than arm-mounted weaponry and some killer beats. “There’s nothing more sad than keeping [it] going when it’s shit,” he says. “As long as it’s good, we’ll make it.”



Why We Need a Human ‘Intention Genome’


Dan Ariely has devoted his career to scrutinizing the bizarre logic that often guides human behavior—and amassing the evidence that exposes us as incorrigible liars and hypocrites, irrational decision-makers, and incompetent money managers. His latest projects poke at humans’ pathological addiction to procrastination and poor time management.


Yet for a guy who began his research by studying the psychology of pain—in part because he had experienced so much of his own when he was 18 and suffered severe burns after a flare exploded next to him—Ariely isn’t a career misanthrope. The professor of behavioral economics at Duke University is shifting a lot of his attention today toward exploring a much more hopeful question: Can technology—especially AI—help humans reverse eons of irrational behavior and bad habits that seem hard-coded in our DNA? Ariely believes it can, and believes that it will start with AI-oriented software and tools that can create what he calls an “intention genome” for every individual—tools to help align our unlimited aspirations and goals with our very limited time on earth.


Ariely has taken his own step in that direction as co-founder of Timeful, a new time-management app that taps into machine intelligence to create personalized daily schedules aligned to priorities and goals. We asked him to explain why humans are in such dire need of technology’s help.


What excites you most about where we’re headed with technology?


So far, technology has helped us dramatically improve the physical world. All of a sudden we can write, we can talk over great distances, we can climb great buildings with elevators and escalators and so on.

But we haven’t done the same thing for cognitive limitations. I’m hoping that technology will make it easier for us to achieve things that are more difficult that have to do with what do we decide to spend our precious financial, time, and social resources on? How can technology help us make fewer mistakes? How can we make sure we don’t sacrifice the future for the present?


What worries you the most?


What worries me is that it’s not clear we’re going in that direction. I think that as technology improves, much of the improvement in technology is actually making things worse. Think about Facebook. It has lots of wonderful uses. But you can ask the question, to what degree is this helping people be more productive in the long run? And to what extent is Facebook not optimizing something important in the long run, but simply optimizing something in the short term? For example, Facebook would probably be very happy if you checked Facebook for three hours every day rather than one hour, even though in the long term you would be less productive, have less money, and be more distracted from important things.


To me, this sort of myopic optimization—short-term optimization on behalf of companies when they control our environment and they can get us to behave in a way that is not in our best long-term interest—is frightening. I think more and more, companies try to distract us. They try to distract us on our computers, phones and on TV. Our goals get sacrificed for the benefit of the short-term goals of those companies. And because of that, we’re getting more and more tempted—we’re less able to execute on our long-term goals. The question is, will we start developing technologies that can help solve this?


Let’s assume we won’t solve the Facebook issue anytime soon. How else could we tackle this problem of distraction?


One example is electronic wallets. The way electronic wallets are built these days, they’re mostly about getting people to spend money faster without thinking about it. Think about Apple Pay and this idea that you go into Starbucks, take stuff out and you don’t even charge anything. You just walk out and they know who you are and what you took, and they charge you a month later on your credit card. What all of those things create is higher temptation, lower personal accountability, and lack of thinking about the future.


It doesn’t have to be like this. Imagine how we could create technologies that would get people to think extra carefully about spending, so that every time you’re about to go into a coffee shop, you would think about, where is this money coming from? What would you not be able to do? Is it over or under your budget? Technology doesn’t have to be about temptation at the moment, but that’s the direction we’re headed.


You’ve shown how irrational we can be with money, ethics, and other issues. Why do you think lousy time management is the biggest problem that AI can help solve?


Because I think the technology is becoming available and that it’s possible. Let’s say I wanted to solve obesity. I would have to control all supermarkets, all restaurants, and I would have to control your kitchen. In principle, that’s possible, if you want to give me permission. But it’s going to be very tough. With money, same thing. Again, I would have to control all credit cards, electronic wallets, and so on.


Time management is actually more straightforward. The reason is that most of us use a calendar. A calendar is this thing that when we see it, and we see how things are set up for us, there’s a likelihood that we will actually execute in that order. If you think about food, money, and calendars, calendars right now provide the highest opportunity for change.


Why should we focus on new technology for calendars? I’ve got 5 calendar apps.


There is a beautiful study where they gave half the people a lecture on the importance of getting a vaccination, and only 3 percent of the people went. They gave the other half the same lecture, but they also asked them to indicate on their calendar when they were going to go. In that group, 26 percent of the people went to get vaccinations. Not everybody wants to get vaccinated. But the idea is that we have intentions, and unless they get specified in a concrete way on the calendar, they’re unlikely to be carried out. The calendar is an incredibly good tool for that.


Is this what you think the creation of an “intention genome” will solve?


Yes. The idea of the intention genome is that you can think about intentions as characterized in a multidimensional space. For example, if you tell me that you want to go running, I know that it’s something that takes between 30 minutes and an hour. You could do it either most likely before work, or with some likelihood later in the day, and the exact hour doesn’t matter so much. If you tell me you want to do laundry, I know that it’s something that doesn’t require much cognitive skills or attention, that you can do it at home, it takes about two hours, and during the same time, you could do some other things, as well.


If you tell me that you have a presentation to work on, I know already that it’s something that you need to focus on, maybe use your most productive hours of the day to do it, that then you might need a little break from it, and you could come back and do some of the other stuff. I also know it has a deadline, and I know that if you finish it before the deadline, you would not be stressed, and if you work on it up to the last moment, you will be stressed.


Every intention can be represented in terms of when could it be carried out, how important it is, and how much capacity it needs, and can you do something else at the same time? And how long can you focus on it in one sitting, and do you have to finish it in one sitting, or can you spread it over multiple days? Does it actually get better if you break it over multiple days or not? We can represent all of the intentions this way. And the moment we do, it gives us tremendous power to figure out when to schedule things for people. That’s basically the idea, that we understand the fundamental attributes of what people want to do, and we schedule them taking into account those fundamental attributes.


Do you see AI solutions on the horizon that could help reverse some of our bad habits?


Absolutely. Personally, I have huge challenges with time management, so I’m really enjoying Timeful. But I think that other solutions could be helping people make decisions about food and make decisions about money.


Let’s just take money. Money is all about now versus later, which is a very tough computation, and it’s about what are we getting now and what are we giving up? This is very complex. If I asked you to cut down $500 from your spending now, what should you cut? What’s the best way to cut it and not lose a lot from the quality of life? It’s not clear what the right answer is. But maybe I could help you figure out the right approach.


Similarly with food—if I asked you what is the kind of food that you would eat that would be the most compatible with your lifestyle and diet, how would you figure it out? You’re supposed to keep everything in mind and do the experiments and add things and subtract things. That’s very, very tough. But with AI and new technologies and software, we can help people with those things.


I think that data and technology approaches that look at what we do, how we live and that map other elements to it, such as happiness and quality of life, can actually help us make much better decisions. That’s my hope.



Boston Is All About Robots, Freedom, and Lobstah



Boston Is All About Robots, Freedom, and Lobstah



645,966 PEOPLE LIVE IN BOSTON // MORE THAN 360,000 STUDENTS ATTEND 85 COLLEGES IN THE AREA // 35,671 RUNNERS ENTERED THE 2014 BOSTON MARATHON // 9 RUNNERS WERE MORE THAN 80 YEARS OLD // 54 COMPETITORS RACED IN WHEELCHAIRS // 95 COUNTRIES WERE REPRESENTED IN THE MARATHON 645,966 People live in Boston // More than 360,000 students attend 85 colleges in the area // 35,671 runners entered the 2014 Boston Marathon // 9 runners were more than 80 years old // 54 competitors raced in wheelchairs // 95 countries were represented in the marathon Dan Matutina





Top VC Firm Says Techies Need to Get Along With Government


From Airbnb to Uber, some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies have been fighting regulators since their inception. Now, one of the tech industry’s most respected venture capital firms wants to help both sides of the battle make nice with each other.


Andreessen Horowitz announced today that it’s launching a new policy and regulatory affairs unit, and that it has appointed Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s former general counsel, to lead the shop. Ullyot, who worked at both the White House and the Department of Justice before coming to the Valley, will be tasked with helping the firm’s portfolio companies see eye to eye with the government regulators with whom they’re increasingly butting heads.


In general, Silicon Valley has not done a very good job of being proactive and having open lines of communication. Margit Wennmachers, Andreessen Horowitz


This move is a strong sign that the Berlin Wall that’s risen between Silicon Valley and government is beginning to crack as tech companies realize they can accomplish more by working with the the powers that be instead of against it. Meanwhile, the federal government at least is gradually becoming more receptive to tech and has started recruiting top tech talent like former Googler and current US CTO Megan Smith into its ranks.


“In general, Silicon Valley has not done a very good job of being proactive and having open lines of communication,” says Margit Wennmachers, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Now, I think both sides have gotten a lot better.”


Move Fast and Fix Things


That’s partly because they need to. Tech companies today are growing faster than ever before, thanks to the proliferation of mobile technology. This means they’re also attracting the attention of government much earlier than they did even a decade ago. At the same time, they’re taking on entrenched industries like transportation, payments, and hospitality, which are not only regulated by government, but are dominated by incumbents that have substantial sway over the government, from taxi industry lobbyists to big Wall Street donors. And often, it’s not the feds tech companies end up tangling with, but local and state regulators.


The goal of the new unit, Ullyot says, is to make sure Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies don’t have to start from scratch every time they run into a regulatory “surprise.” That, he says, was a big part of his job in the early days of Facebook, navigating the muddy waters of privacy regulation during the early days of social media. “From a lawyer’s perspective, it was a fascinating project,” he says. “I thought: is there a way you can do this on a broader scale and help a lot of companies and help the tech sector in general?”


As head of this new unit, he will be doing just that. It would be reasonable to assume there would also be a substantial amount of lobbying involved in this role, but Ullyot insists that’s not the case. Instead, he says his job will be to convene a network of regulators, think tanks, and “influencers” to make sure the firm’s companies are having the right conversations with the right people before an issue arises.


“We’ll be working with them to think about the issues, and hopefully avoid those surprise issues in the first place,” he says.


Still, when an issue does arise, as it often does with Andreessen Horowitz investments like Lyft and Airbnb, it’s not a huge leap to imagine that the firm would be tempted to throw its weight around to make more pointed requests, just like lobbyists would.


For now, at least, both Ullyot and Wennmachers say that’s not the plan, and that the firm intends to leave those duties to the companies, themselves, many of whom already have substantial public policy teams.


“We’re going to teach them how to fish rather than throwing the line ourselves,” says Wennmachers. “That’s how the company becomes a great company.”



Cape Watch: Wonder Woman Gets a Shiny New Director

CapeWatch33 Marvel Comics (left, right), Warner Bros. (center)



In case you missed it somehow—maybe you were busy watching DaredevilAvengers: Age of Ultron is very close to hitting theaters, when it’ll become the biggest movie ever released or something (well, until the new Star Wars in December, at least). There has been all manner of promotion for it in the last week, including livestreams of the red carpet premiere and revelations that one of the biggest mysteries about the movie’s trailer wasn’t actually meant to be a mystery at all. But let’s just presume you already knew all that and move on. Here, instead, is the cream of the superhero movie news crop from the last seven days that isn’t Ultron-centric (apart from one item).


SUPER IDEA (MAYBE?): A Change for Wonder Woman


On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter had the news that director Michelle MacLaren had left Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman movie due to what are being called “creative differences”—in other words, the go-to euphemism for “we’re not really going to tell you what happened.” But don’t worry, the WW movie isn’t in too much trouble. Just two days later, THR broke the story that Patty Jenkins would be replacing her, and that everything was surprisingly still on track.

Why this is just confusing: The MacLaren Wonder Woman held a lot of promise, considering her amazing work on television, and the “creative differences” reasoning is something that almost always covers up a bad scene that nobody wants to talk about, so we’ll probably never know what happened there. However, bringing Jenkins in is a smart move, not just because it shows that Warners is dedicated to keeping a woman at the helm of the movie, but also because Jenkins famously left Marvel’s second Thor movie over similar “creative differences” back in 2011, to the upset of the movie’s stars. Managing to avoid an Ant-Man-esque situation while also hiring someone who has previously walked away from a Marvel gig? Double points for bluntness, Warners.


SUPER IDEA: Marvel Courting Guardians of the Galaxy, Pixar Writers for Captain Marvel


THR also had the story that Marvel is looking to bring Nicole Perlman and Meg LeFauve together to co-write a screenplay for Captain Marvel, its 2018 project that will see the studio finally let a woman play the lead. Perlman has previous Marvel experience, having co-written last summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy, while LeFauve is one of the writers on the upcoming Pixar movie Inside Out. Both had submitted pitches for the movie separately, but Marvel intends to combine them into one screenplay.

Why this is super: As Guardians shows, Perlman’s got what it takes to “get” Marvel, and it’s hard to argue with the Pixar pedigree, so this seems like a pretty solid team for what’s going to be an important movie for Marvel. Now all we need is a director and a star… (For those wondering, yes, the “Michelle MacLaren is being courted for Captain Marvel” rumors started about five minutes after she left Wonder Woman.)


MEH IDEA: Captain Marvel Isn’t in Avengers: Age of Ultron


Speaking of Captain Marvel, it turns out she really was going to be in the second Avengers movie … in Joss Whedon’s mind, at least. “The way we reveal Scarlet Witch [in costume] at the end of the movie? Those were Captain Marvel plate shots,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Badass Digest during an interview to promote Age of Ultron. “Joss said, ‘We’ll cast her later!’ And I said, ‘Yeah Joss, we’ll cast her later.’ [Whispers to an invisible associate who isn’t Joss] ‘We’re not putting her in there!'” The reason Feige was against her showing up in the movie was that bringing her into the movie without a proper origin “would have done that character a disservice,” he explained. Sorry, Carol fans.

Why this is … well, common sense, more than anything: As much as there’s a certain element of the comic book fanbase currently very upset at this news, it’s hard to argue that Feige’s wrong. Just dropping Captain Marvel into the movie without a real introduction makes her seem peripheral to events and less important or interesting than the other heroes as a result (kind of like Hawkeye in Thor). It’s not the worst idea to let her rest until she can get the attention she deserves.


SUPER IDEA: Olivia Munn Is a Mutant


Clearly, Bryan Singer has reached the Jim Lee period of Uncanny X-Men in his research for next year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. Not only do we know that Jubilee will show up and have heard many rumors that Channing Tatum’s Gambit will also make an appearance, but now it turns out that The Newsroom’s Olivia Munn will be playing Psylocke, the caucasian supermodel turned Asian ninja much beloved by teenage boys because of her fighting skills and knife, which is the focused totality of her psychic powers and not her figure-hugging costume at all.

Why this is super: We abandoned X-Men just before Psylocke came into ascendance as a character, but we can’t deny that we’re looking forward to hearing whether or not Munn actually has to deliver the line about her knife being the focused totality of her psychic abilities. If she doesn’t, we can at least hope she’s asked to do so at every interview and convention appearance to promote the movie.


SUPER IDEA: Ant-Man Might Not Be as Bad as You Feared


What with all the overwhelming hype surrounding the oh-so-close release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, you might have forgotten that another Marvel Studios movie is set for release this year. In case that’s true, Marvel tried to rekindle interest in Ant-Man by releasing another trailer—one that’s thankfully not as dull as the first.

Why this is super: Putting aside the really distracting performances of everyone involved that isn’t Paul Rudd (seriously, everyone comes across as weirdly affected and unconvincing, right?), there are a couple of lines and/or moments here that suggest that there’s a funny and fun movie struggling to be released from under all the self-importance. Please, oh please, let the finished product end up being more like that than the first trailer suggested.



The Warped, Weed-Fueled World of the Major Lazer Cartoon


There are certain shows that defy easy description. Shows whose premises aren’t exactly cut out for the program guide on your TV. Shows like, say, Major Lazer. Here’s the briefest thumbnail we can muster:


Somewhere far off in a dystopian future, Jamaica has become Earth’s most powerful nation—and an epicenter of oppression. From the White House (which has since relocated to the Caribbean), the grumpy, nefarious President Whitewall persecutes the Jamaican people and aims to curb all the good times. He’s aided by the metal-jawed General Rubbish, a right-hand man with what looks to be a vinyl-record-turned-buzz saw for a right hand. Meanwhile, Whitewall’s teenage daughter Penny just wants to cut loose and soak up the music and culture of the real Jamaica—its dancehalls, bars, and streets. She’s also secretly befriended Whitewall’s number one enemy: Major Lazer, a brawny, beret- and sunglasses-clad supersoldier whose right forearm has been replaced with a laser gun. Lazer, who has been portrayed by Terry Crews in live-action form, runs a strip club full of holograms, enjoys cannabis, and can surf on a bird if need be.


There are also several vampires and at least one ninja.


So goes the high-intensity absurdity of FXX’s long-gestating animated series, which premieres at midnight tonight (really that’s midnight tomorrow, but you know what we mean). With a hero voiced by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (aka Lost‘s Mr. Eko), the music-heavy program is based on the mascot for Major Lazer, Diplo’s party-starting, culture-fusing dancehall/electronic act. “Every single episode is pretty ridiculous,” says Ferry Gouw, art director and co-creator of Major Lazer (the character and the show). “Really stupid and really deep at the same time.”


The character’s road to animation started around 2008, after Diplo first created the music project. Diplo and his manager auditioned Gouw, a visual artist, to design a “Rasta commando with a laser gun for an arm” as the project’s visual centerpiece. The properties they offered up as reference points—Marvel Comics, and 1980s cartoons like G.I. Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and Centurions—were the kinds of things Gouw grew up with. He created a few quick mockups of the Major Lazer character and project logo, and his designs have been used and stayed almost entirely the same ever since.


Gouw has made hundreds of Major Lazer illustrations for albums, remixes, tweets and other uses, but the project really turned a corner with the video for Major Lazer’s 2009 track “Hold the Line.” The clip, which Gouw animated, depicts Lazer battling a vampiric villain; interspersed is a lovingly detailed commercial for ’80s-esque Major Lazer-themed figures and vehicles. Gouw doesn’t speak particularly fondly of the result—“looking back, it’s embarrassing and shitty,” he says—but it was nominated for a 2009 MTV Video Music Award for Breakthrough Video. “That was the start of the idea that this illustrated character could have some legs and go on to become a natural animated thing,” Gouw says. “The look of the world in the video, and the toys—people remember that era instinctively.”


Adult Swim then approached the Major Lazer camp about making a cartoon for it. News of and production sketches of a Major Lazer show date back to 2011, and a pilot was created at some point, but the results never made it to air. The show’s launch was spearheaded by Nick Weidenfeld, a producer for various Adult Swim series including Metalocalypse and Moral Orel, but then Weidenfeld left the network to head to Fox, and the project began to drag. In February 2013, the series was officially canceled. However, over at Fox, Weindenfeld was planting the seeds for what would become FXX’s Animation Domination High Def block; eventually, Major Lazer joined him at his new home.


The show’s visuals are still ripped out of the late ’80s/early ’90s animation playbook—colorful, slightly faded, semi-realistic, semi-clunky—and its villains are grotesque weirdos, just as in programs like Toxic Avengers and Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The show’s cast is promisingly diverse, including J.K. Simmons as President Whitewall, Andy Samberg, Aziz Ansari, and Charli XCX. (We’re not sure how that happened either.)


The most surprising element, though, is the fun the show has with recreational vices—for good or evil. Riff Raff voices Double Cup, a cough-syrup-powered villain who wants to poison the local water supply with cough syrup so that everyone slows down (thus literally slowing down any rebel forces). Another episode involves getting too high to the point of literally flying into the sky and confronting a terrifying weed monster.


But while Major Lazer sports all the trappings of a contemporary stoner comedy—the chaos, the weirdness, the post-modernism—Gouw points to its emphasis on narrative flow and pacing. There are no Family Guy-style cutaway jokes; rather, the narrative morphs to a music video back to the narrative, then to a fight scene, and so on. “It’s just frantically moving forward,” Gouw says. “In that way, it’s kind of like being high—but not the kind of high where you laugh at slacker jokes,” he says.


It’s been a long time since we’ve enjoyed the shamelessly silly music spin-off cartoons; New Kids on the Block and MC Hammer’s Hammerman were both more than 20 years ago. The difference between those tie-ins and Major Lazer, of course, is that this turns the wink-wink, so-goofy-it’s-good knob way up—but just like its predecessors the show’s appeal still hinges on its crossover element. As part of contemporary electronic/dance music culture’s massive upswing in popularity, Diplo’s been having a really long (and ongoing) moment worth capitalizing on.


Gouw is confident that the show’s characters and story are rich enough to push past the novelty of the tie-in, and could even potentially survive the waning of electronic music’s cultural power. But while he envisions a full-fledged toy line of action figures and vehicles, he knows that there’s more to success than arm-mounted weaponry and some killer beats. “There’s nothing more sad than keeping [it] going when it’s shit,” he says. “As long as it’s good, we’ll make it.”



Why We Need a Human ‘Intention Genome’


Dan Ariely has devoted his career to scrutinizing the bizarre logic that often guides human behavior—and amassing the evidence that exposes us as incorrigible liars and hypocrites, irrational decision-makers, and incompetent money managers. His latest projects poke at humans’ pathological addiction to procrastination and poor time management.


Yet for a guy who began his research by studying the psychology of pain—in part because he had experienced so much of his own when he was 18 and suffered severe burns after a flare exploded next to him—Ariely isn’t a career misanthrope. The professor of behavioral economics at Duke University is shifting a lot of his attention today toward exploring a much more hopeful question: Can technology—especially AI—help humans reverse eons of irrational behavior and bad habits that seem hard-coded in our DNA? Ariely believes it can, and believes that it will start with AI-oriented software and tools that can create what he calls an “intention genome” for every individual—tools to help align our unlimited aspirations and goals with our very limited time on earth.


Ariely has taken his own step in that direction as co-founder of Timeful, a new time-management app that taps into machine intelligence to create personalized daily schedules aligned to priorities and goals. We asked him to explain why humans are in such dire need of technology’s help.


What excites you most about where we’re headed with technology?


So far, technology has helped us dramatically improve the physical world. All of a sudden we can write, we can talk over great distances, we can climb great buildings with elevators and escalators and so on.

But we haven’t done the same thing for cognitive limitations. I’m hoping that technology will make it easier for us to achieve things that are more difficult that have to do with what do we decide to spend our precious financial, time, and social resources on? How can technology help us make fewer mistakes? How can we make sure we don’t sacrifice the future for the present?


What worries you the most?


What worries me is that it’s not clear we’re going in that direction. I think that as technology improves, much of the improvement in technology is actually making things worse. Think about Facebook. It has lots of wonderful uses. But you can ask the question, to what degree is this helping people be more productive in the long run? And to what extent is Facebook not optimizing something important in the long run, but simply optimizing something in the short term? For example, Facebook would probably be very happy if you checked Facebook for three hours every day rather than one hour, even though in the long term you would be less productive, have less money, and be more distracted from important things.


To me, this sort of myopic optimization—short-term optimization on behalf of companies when they control our environment and they can get us to behave in a way that is not in our best long-term interest—is frightening. I think more and more, companies try to distract us. They try to distract us on our computers, phones and on TV. Our goals get sacrificed for the benefit of the short-term goals of those companies. And because of that, we’re getting more and more tempted—we’re less able to execute on our long-term goals. The question is, will we start developing technologies that can help solve this?


Let’s assume we won’t solve the Facebook issue anytime soon. How else could we tackle this problem of distraction?


One example is electronic wallets. The way electronic wallets are built these days, they’re mostly about getting people to spend money faster without thinking about it. Think about Apple Pay and this idea that you go into Starbucks, take stuff out and you don’t even charge anything. You just walk out and they know who you are and what you took, and they charge you a month later on your credit card. What all of those things create is higher temptation, lower personal accountability, and lack of thinking about the future.


It doesn’t have to be like this. Imagine how we could create technologies that would get people to think extra carefully about spending, so that every time you’re about to go into a coffee shop, you would think about, where is this money coming from? What would you not be able to do? Is it over or under your budget? Technology doesn’t have to be about temptation at the moment, but that’s the direction we’re headed.


You’ve shown how irrational we can be with money, ethics, and other issues. Why do you think lousy time management is the biggest problem that AI can help solve?


Because I think the technology is becoming available and that it’s possible. Let’s say I wanted to solve obesity. I would have to control all supermarkets, all restaurants, and I would have to control your kitchen. In principle, that’s possible, if you want to give me permission. But it’s going to be very tough. With money, same thing. Again, I would have to control all credit cards, electronic wallets, and so on.


Time management is actually more straightforward. The reason is that most of us use a calendar. A calendar is this thing that when we see it, and we see how things are set up for us, there’s a likelihood that we will actually execute in that order. If you think about food, money, and calendars, calendars right now provide the highest opportunity for change.


Why should we focus on new technology for calendars? I’ve got 5 calendar apps.


There is a beautiful study where they gave half the people a lecture on the importance of getting a vaccination, and only 3 percent of the people went. They gave the other half the same lecture, but they also asked them to indicate on their calendar when they were going to go. In that group, 26 percent of the people went to get vaccinations. Not everybody wants to get vaccinated. But the idea is that we have intentions, and unless they get specified in a concrete way on the calendar, they’re unlikely to be carried out. The calendar is an incredibly good tool for that.


Is this what you think the creation of an “intention genome” will solve?


Yes. The idea of the intention genome is that you can think about intentions as characterized in a multidimensional space. For example, if you tell me that you want to go running, I know that it’s something that takes between 30 minutes and an hour. You could do it either most likely before work, or with some likelihood later in the day, and the exact hour doesn’t matter so much. If you tell me you want to do laundry, I know that it’s something that doesn’t require much cognitive skills or attention, that you can do it at home, it takes about two hours, and during the same time, you could do some other things, as well.


If you tell me that you have a presentation to work on, I know already that it’s something that you need to focus on, maybe use your most productive hours of the day to do it, that then you might need a little break from it, and you could come back and do some of the other stuff. I also know it has a deadline, and I know that if you finish it before the deadline, you would not be stressed, and if you work on it up to the last moment, you will be stressed.


Every intention can be represented in terms of when could it be carried out, how important it is, and how much capacity it needs, and can you do something else at the same time? And how long can you focus on it in one sitting, and do you have to finish it in one sitting, or can you spread it over multiple days? Does it actually get better if you break it over multiple days or not? We can represent all of the intentions this way. And the moment we do, it gives us tremendous power to figure out when to schedule things for people. That’s basically the idea, that we understand the fundamental attributes of what people want to do, and we schedule them taking into account those fundamental attributes.


Do you see AI solutions on the horizon that could help reverse some of our bad habits?


Absolutely. Personally, I have huge challenges with time management, so I’m really enjoying Timeful. But I think that other solutions could be helping people make decisions about food and make decisions about money.


Let’s just take money. Money is all about now versus later, which is a very tough computation, and it’s about what are we getting now and what are we giving up? This is very complex. If I asked you to cut down $500 from your spending now, what should you cut? What’s the best way to cut it and not lose a lot from the quality of life? It’s not clear what the right answer is. But maybe I could help you figure out the right approach.


Similarly with food—if I asked you what is the kind of food that you would eat that would be the most compatible with your lifestyle and diet, how would you figure it out? You’re supposed to keep everything in mind and do the experiments and add things and subtract things. That’s very, very tough. But with AI and new technologies and software, we can help people with those things.


I think that data and technology approaches that look at what we do, how we live and that map other elements to it, such as happiness and quality of life, can actually help us make much better decisions. That’s my hope.



Boston Is All About Robots, Freedom, and Lobstah



Boston Is All About Robots, Freedom, and Lobstah



645,966 PEOPLE LIVE IN BOSTON // MORE THAN 360,000 STUDENTS ATTEND 85 COLLEGES IN THE AREA // 35,671 RUNNERS ENTERED THE 2014 BOSTON MARATHON // 9 RUNNERS WERE MORE THAN 80 YEARS OLD // 54 COMPETITORS RACED IN WHEELCHAIRS // 95 COUNTRIES WERE REPRESENTED IN THE MARATHON 645,966 People live in Boston // More than 360,000 students attend 85 colleges in the area // 35,671 runners entered the 2014 Boston Marathon // 9 runners were more than 80 years old // 54 competitors raced in wheelchairs // 95 countries were represented in the marathon Dan Matutina





Top VC Firm Says Techies Need to Get Along With Government


From Airbnb to Uber, some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies have been fighting regulators since their inception. Now, one of the tech industry’s most respected venture capital firms wants to help both sides of the battle make nice with each other.


Andreessen Horowitz announced today that it’s launching a new policy and regulatory affairs unit, and that it has appointed Ted Ullyot, Facebook’s former general counsel, to lead the shop. Ullyot, who worked at both the White House and the Department of Justice before coming to the Valley, will be tasked with helping the firm’s portfolio companies see eye to eye with the government regulators with whom they’re increasingly butting heads.


In general, Silicon Valley has not done a very good job of being proactive and having open lines of communication. Margit Wennmachers, Andreessen Horowitz


This move is a strong sign that the Berlin Wall that’s risen between Silicon Valley and government is beginning to crack as tech companies realize they can accomplish more by working with the the powers that be instead of against it. Meanwhile, the federal government at least is gradually becoming more receptive to tech and has started recruiting top tech talent like former Googler and current US CTO Megan Smith into its ranks.


“In general, Silicon Valley has not done a very good job of being proactive and having open lines of communication,” says Margit Wennmachers, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Now, I think both sides have gotten a lot better.”


Move Fast and Fix Things


That’s partly because they need to. Tech companies today are growing faster than ever before, thanks to the proliferation of mobile technology. This means they’re also attracting the attention of government much earlier than they did even a decade ago. At the same time, they’re taking on entrenched industries like transportation, payments, and hospitality, which are not only regulated by government, but are dominated by incumbents that have substantial sway over the government, from taxi industry lobbyists to big Wall Street donors. And often, it’s not the feds tech companies end up tangling with, but local and state regulators.


The goal of the new unit, Ullyot says, is to make sure Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies don’t have to start from scratch every time they run into a regulatory “surprise.” That, he says, was a big part of his job in the early days of Facebook, navigating the muddy waters of privacy regulation during the early days of social media. “From a lawyer’s perspective, it was a fascinating project,” he says. “I thought: is there a way you can do this on a broader scale and help a lot of companies and help the tech sector in general?”


As head of this new unit, he will be doing just that. It would be reasonable to assume there would also be a substantial amount of lobbying involved in this role, but Ullyot insists that’s not the case. Instead, he says his job will be to convene a network of regulators, think tanks, and “influencers” to make sure the firm’s companies are having the right conversations with the right people before an issue arises.


“We’ll be working with them to think about the issues, and hopefully avoid those surprise issues in the first place,” he says.


Still, when an issue does arise, as it often does with Andreessen Horowitz investments like Lyft and Airbnb, it’s not a huge leap to imagine that the firm would be tempted to throw its weight around to make more pointed requests, just like lobbyists would.


For now, at least, both Ullyot and Wennmachers say that’s not the plan, and that the firm intends to leave those duties to the companies, themselves, many of whom already have substantial public policy teams.


“We’re going to teach them how to fish rather than throwing the line ourselves,” says Wennmachers. “That’s how the company becomes a great company.”