শুক্রবার, ২৫ অক্টোবর, ২০১৩

Bad guy blues: Myanmar villains struggle to get by


YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — In a dimly lit alley on a cramped side street of a teeming Southeast Asian city, the bad guys cluster together, plotting their next move.

There is A Yaing Min, the "King of Cruelty," who twirls his mustache as he talks and cultivates a pointy beard with a pointed message: Mess with me, and I will end you. There is Myint Kyi, who has been dispatching enemies — typically with spears — since 1958. There is Phone Naing, muscular and sinewy in tight military pants, who talks only in a low snarl.

Granted, these are not actual evildoers. They are longtime cinematic villains who gather each morning in a tightly packed enclave of video production houses, movie-poster studios and worse-for-wear apartment buildings that serves as the tattered ground zero of the Burmese movie industry. In the heart of Yangon's Little Hollywood, they sit on tiny plastic chairs, glowering, spitting carmine betel-nut saliva onto the ground. They wait, and wait, and wait some more, stalking a quarry that is becoming ever more elusive: a day's work.

For decades, as Myanmar endured dictatorship and international isolation, these actors were the twisted faces of wrongdoing that the country's struggling film industry showed the Burmese people in movies that rarely made it out of the country — and even more rarely dealt with anything that really mattered. Now this nation is opening to a wider world brimming with pop-culture choices, big-budget special effects and international bad guys who jet from Stockholm to Shanghai to wreak destruction on shiny, globalized levels.

The struggle is a microcosm of change in the country once known as Burma, whose military dictatorship handed power to a civilian government in 2011 after elections the previous year. What happens when the world opens up to you? For Myanmar's movie industry, one of the answers was this: It got harder to earn a living being evil.

"The market is in trouble," says A Yaing Min, a former boxer who turned to on-screen villainy in the early 1980s and became a fixture in such Burmese staples as "The Bad Guy with a Pure Heart."

"In other countries," he says, "villains don't have to walk the streets to get their jobs."

Each morning, the bad guys of Yangon and their brethren — all members of Ko Lu Chaw, or "Handsome Guy Group," effectively a trade union for cinematic villains — arrive at dawn. They take up position at outdoor breakfast stalls along 35th and 36th streets, order coffee or tea, and hope for work.

It comes more rarely every day. When it does, it is hardly lucrative — a day or two on bottom-budget videos, a few dollars here and there, perhaps not even practicing the villainy that has been their bread and butter for so long.

Several things made this happen. The government privatized the state-controlled film industry in 2010. Decaying theaters, unable to afford new digital systems to project DVDs, began to close; today, many sit crumbling on street corners. Films were supplanted by a sausage-grinder glut of cheap home videos made in mere days, even hours.

The masses began turning away from overwrought Burmese action movies, electing — in, finally, times of tentative hope — to favor romance, comedy and supernatural horror. And, of course, the arrival of movies from India, South Korea and Thailand, plus visually arresting Hollywood epics like "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Wolverine," pointed up the lack of production values in the homegrown, B-movie culture.

"I worry very much these days. I used to work nonstop. But I haven't had regular work in six months," says Phone Naing, 45, a movie villain for the last quarter century. His compatriots nodded vigorously. Things have gotten so bad, he complained, that directors will press their film technicians into service to play bad guys.

"They'll be working on a set and someone will say, 'Hey, can you be a villain?'" Phone Naing says. "You use cheap villains, you get what you pay for."

Membership in the villains' union helps, a bit. Some of the group's 100 members contribute money to support others. And this year, a coalition of stars got together to donate 100 bags of rice each month to the society. A Yaing Min points proudly to a recent newspaper tabloid that shows him receiving rice from actress Wut Hmone Shwe Yi, Myanmar's latest It girl.

Myanmar's movie industry is organized in a unique way. Actors and actresses congregate — form unions, develop health-care plans, lobby for benefits — based on the roles they play on screen. There is an aging mothers' guild, a spinsters' guild, a comedians' guild. It is typecasting, pulled into the real world.

The villains' union was founded in 1990 to offer such assistance. Myint Kyi, 73, one of its founding members, talks not only of aging but of the injuries that many villains suffered during filming of acrobatic, athletic scenes that usually were done without any stuntmen.

"There was no one to help us when we die, nobody to pay for our funerals or help with our hospital bills when we were injured," says the soft-spoken Myint Kyi, known for the 2000 movie "Blood: A Love Story" and probably one of the few villains seen in public wearing a fanny pack.

He learned his craft from a 1950s screen villain known as "Spear Prince." It was not exactly a safe apprenticeship. "I would get cut all the time," he says. Once his mouth was cut open and he had to have surgery to fix it — on his own dime.

These days, in the hierarchy of movie roles, comedians seem to fare better. Perhaps because Myanmar is hungry for laughter, not villainy, most movies made inside the country these days are comedies. Thus, those who make people smile are higher on the food chain. This is of no small import to the villains, befuddled by a world where the jokester outpaces the scoundrel.

Just up the street, clustered around a plastic table drinking tea, the comedians see it differently. Kyaw Htoo, one of Myanmar's best-known, says the video industry's rise glutted the market for everyone, not just villains. And like so much media today, an easy overabundance means cheaper production values. He talks of Indian movies with multiple generations in the same movie. But in Myanmar, "they let Father die, they let Mother die. It's cheaper to have a boy without parents."

"We face the same obstacles," Kyaw Htoo says. "There's just not enough money."

The numbers seem bleak. Last year, just 17 feature films were produced, down from more than 60 five years ago, according to the Myanmar Motion Picture Organization. By contrast, more than 1,000 videos were made — and that official figure probably excludes hundreds of others, according to U Aye Kyu, a screenwriter and the organization's vice president.

"When we were young, it took many months to shoot a film. Casting was careful, and people were committed," says Aye Kyu. "I'm worried. If they just show foreign films, that's bad news for Myanmar movies."

One contributing factor: whether a coherent international strategy for Burmese movies eventually emerges. Few Burmese films have gone beyond the country's borders, says Tom Vick, author of "Asian Cinema: A Field Guide," and those that have are more on the serious side — hardly the crime-and-potboiler fare that these villains are accustomed to.

"They've been thinking about the local audience and what a local audience wants to see. The question is, would any of these films translate well or will they only appeal to people there and just be a curiosity in other places?" says Vick, the curator of film at the Smithsonian Institution's Freer/Sackler Gallery.

"They have to decide how to focus their film industry," Vick says. "Once countries open up, suddenly Hollywood dominates the movie screen. ... If 'Skyfall' is taking over, what hope does a local filmmaker have?"

That's precisely the worry that consumes our Central Casting of villainy down on 35th Street. Accustomed for so long to being despised and loving it, they never imagined they'd wind up at the margins of the Burmese show-business caste system, lost in a confusing landscape after being so delightfully nefarious to so many for so long.

"I want to see our industry be alongside the international movie industry," says A Yaing Min, the bearded King of Cruelty. "But you have to think of the right people for the right characters, or we villains are done for."

___

Follow Ted Anthony on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bad-guy-blues-myanmar-villains-struggle-062120118.html
Category: stenographer   American Horror Story   Steam Controller   Clemson University   paulina gretzky  

A cost-effective way toward personalized cancer drugs

A cost-effective way toward personalized cancer drugs


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25-Oct-2013



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Contact: Axel Storz
axel.storz@ipa.fraunhofer.de
49-711-970-3660
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft





This news release is available in German.


Before a cancer patient embarks on a course of treatment, tests can be carried out to establish whether or not the chosen cytostatic agent combination is likely to be effective. But the time-consuming and expensive nature of traditional testing methods is prohibiting their widespread use. Collaborating with DITABIS Digital Biomedical Imaging Systems AG and scientists from Universitts-Frauenklinik Tbingen, Fraunhofer researchers have developed a cost-effective, automated system that allows doctors to determine which medications will prove most benefit for each patient. The "DiagnoSYS" system will be on show at BIOTECHNICA 2013 (Booth E09 in Hall 9), which will take place from October 8-10 in Hannover, Germany.


In treating many types of cancer, doctors often use combi-nation of chemotherapy with other treatments. The cytostatic agents used are designed to target faster growing cancer cells. But there is little consistency in how different patients respond to the various treatments: even when dealing with the same type of tumor, there are vast differences in tumor cell reaction to a given treatment. What greatly helps one person may have little effect on another. Thanks to in vitro chemosensitivity testing, it is possible to find the most effective drug for each patient before commencing treatment. The catch is that current methods of testing are extremely expensive and are not covered by standard health insurance plans, meaning that this personalized approach to treating tumors is rarely put into practice.


"Up till now, these tests have mainly been carried out manually," explains biologist Caroline Siegert from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. Medical laboratory scientists begin by mechanically disrupting a tumor sample and then use enzymes to generate a single cell suspension. They then culture the cell mixture for seven days in the presence of various different cytostatic agents, allowing them to see which drug proves most effective. "Performing the different stages manually makes this way of testing not only very expensive but also more prone to error," says Siegert, citing the drawbacks of the method used to date. "Manual cell isolation methods provide a comparatively low sample yield. Moreover, in addition to tumor cells, the samples used for testing tend to contain a variety of other cell types, any of which is capable of affecting the outcome of the test."


Scientists from Fraunhofer IPA's Project Group for Automation in Medical Engineering and Bioengineering PAMB decided to tackle this issue. Together with colleagues from Universitts-Frauenklinik Tbingen and DITABIS Digital Biomedical Imaging Systems AG, they have developed an automated test system which they have dubbed DiagnoSYS. The full title behind the name is Innovative Diagnostic System for Automated Personalized Chemosensitivity Assays.


The system optimizes chemosensitivity tests used to date: the process starts with the automated, mechanical disruption and enzymatic preparation of the tissue sample. The scientists then use magnetic bead activated cell sorting to enrich the yield of tumor cells. This involves equipping antibodies with magnetic particles. These "magnetic" antibodies recognize and bind onto specific structures on the surface of tumor cells, allowing targeted separation of the tumor cells from the rest of the sample. The tumor cells are then cultured together with a variety of cytostatic agents.


The scientists use an ATP luminescence assay in order to evaluate which drugs succeed in killing off cancer cells and which fail. In living cells, ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is a universal energy source. The scientists treat the sample with a luminescent dye, allowing them to use the assay to determine how much ATP is present. The lower the concentration of ATP a sample shows, the more effective the drug.


The process is entirely automated and is carried out under sterile conditions. This increases both the quality and the stability of the assay compared to tests conducted manually. Christian Reis, head of the bioprocess engineering group at Fraunhofer PAMB, outlines the advantages of the process: "In addition to optimizing and standardizing tumor analysis, automation mainly serves to make it cost effective. It will now be possible to deliver the most effective drugs possible, tailored to each individual cancer patient." And by helping to eliminate ineffectual courses of chemotherapy, the new method can even help drive down healthcare costs.


The system's modular structure, meaning it can be easily adapted to fit changing require-ments, is yet another advantage. Visit the joint Fraunhofer booth (E09) in Hall 9 at BIOTECHNICA 2013 to discover just how DiagnoSYS works.



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A cost-effective way toward personalized cancer drugs


[ Back to EurekAlert! ]

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

25-Oct-2013



[


| E-mail

]


Share Share

Contact: Axel Storz
axel.storz@ipa.fraunhofer.de
49-711-970-3660
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft





This news release is available in German.


Before a cancer patient embarks on a course of treatment, tests can be carried out to establish whether or not the chosen cytostatic agent combination is likely to be effective. But the time-consuming and expensive nature of traditional testing methods is prohibiting their widespread use. Collaborating with DITABIS Digital Biomedical Imaging Systems AG and scientists from Universitts-Frauenklinik Tbingen, Fraunhofer researchers have developed a cost-effective, automated system that allows doctors to determine which medications will prove most benefit for each patient. The "DiagnoSYS" system will be on show at BIOTECHNICA 2013 (Booth E09 in Hall 9), which will take place from October 8-10 in Hannover, Germany.


In treating many types of cancer, doctors often use combi-nation of chemotherapy with other treatments. The cytostatic agents used are designed to target faster growing cancer cells. But there is little consistency in how different patients respond to the various treatments: even when dealing with the same type of tumor, there are vast differences in tumor cell reaction to a given treatment. What greatly helps one person may have little effect on another. Thanks to in vitro chemosensitivity testing, it is possible to find the most effective drug for each patient before commencing treatment. The catch is that current methods of testing are extremely expensive and are not covered by standard health insurance plans, meaning that this personalized approach to treating tumors is rarely put into practice.


"Up till now, these tests have mainly been carried out manually," explains biologist Caroline Siegert from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. Medical laboratory scientists begin by mechanically disrupting a tumor sample and then use enzymes to generate a single cell suspension. They then culture the cell mixture for seven days in the presence of various different cytostatic agents, allowing them to see which drug proves most effective. "Performing the different stages manually makes this way of testing not only very expensive but also more prone to error," says Siegert, citing the drawbacks of the method used to date. "Manual cell isolation methods provide a comparatively low sample yield. Moreover, in addition to tumor cells, the samples used for testing tend to contain a variety of other cell types, any of which is capable of affecting the outcome of the test."


Scientists from Fraunhofer IPA's Project Group for Automation in Medical Engineering and Bioengineering PAMB decided to tackle this issue. Together with colleagues from Universitts-Frauenklinik Tbingen and DITABIS Digital Biomedical Imaging Systems AG, they have developed an automated test system which they have dubbed DiagnoSYS. The full title behind the name is Innovative Diagnostic System for Automated Personalized Chemosensitivity Assays.


The system optimizes chemosensitivity tests used to date: the process starts with the automated, mechanical disruption and enzymatic preparation of the tissue sample. The scientists then use magnetic bead activated cell sorting to enrich the yield of tumor cells. This involves equipping antibodies with magnetic particles. These "magnetic" antibodies recognize and bind onto specific structures on the surface of tumor cells, allowing targeted separation of the tumor cells from the rest of the sample. The tumor cells are then cultured together with a variety of cytostatic agents.


The scientists use an ATP luminescence assay in order to evaluate which drugs succeed in killing off cancer cells and which fail. In living cells, ATP (adenosine triphosphate) is a universal energy source. The scientists treat the sample with a luminescent dye, allowing them to use the assay to determine how much ATP is present. The lower the concentration of ATP a sample shows, the more effective the drug.


The process is entirely automated and is carried out under sterile conditions. This increases both the quality and the stability of the assay compared to tests conducted manually. Christian Reis, head of the bioprocess engineering group at Fraunhofer PAMB, outlines the advantages of the process: "In addition to optimizing and standardizing tumor analysis, automation mainly serves to make it cost effective. It will now be possible to deliver the most effective drugs possible, tailored to each individual cancer patient." And by helping to eliminate ineffectual courses of chemotherapy, the new method can even help drive down healthcare costs.


The system's modular structure, meaning it can be easily adapted to fit changing require-ments, is yet another advantage. Visit the joint Fraunhofer booth (E09) in Hall 9 at BIOTECHNICA 2013 to discover just how DiagnoSYS works.



###


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




Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/f-acw102513.php
Category: kris jenner   affordable care act   justin timberlake   Christopher Lane   Hunter Hayes  

Pan-African Ecobank opens first branch in Ethiopia


LAGOS (Reuters) - Pan-African banking group Ecobank Transnational has opened its first branch in Ethiopia, establishing a foothold in the fast-growing East African economy and extending its African network to 35 countries.


Economic growth in Africa's second most populous country is running at more than 9 percent and the government could open up the state-dominated banking sector to new entrants before too long.


Ecobank CEO Thierry Tanoh said that the new branch will give the lender a head start in marketing its pan-African services to overseas businesses and other banks in the region before possible banking deregulation.


"Ethiopia has emerged as one of Africa's most exciting new markets and is forecast to be the world's third-fastest-growing economy between 2011 and 2015, behind only China and India," Tanoh said, adding that Ecobank aims to profit from increasing trade across different African nations as the continent steps up its development and infrastructure.


Tanoh said that such trade had grown to 12 percent of total trade on the continent last year, from less than 10 percent five years ago.


Shares in the bank slipped 1.36 percent to 13.85 naira on Friday, but the stock has gained 24 percent since the start of the year.


Ecobank, which has been expanding rapidly across Africa in recent years, said it obtained the licence for a representative office in July and that the new operations will start with an initial staff of three people.


Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation with 160 million people to Ethiopia's 80 million, contributes more than 40 percent of Ecobank's group revenue.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pan-african-ecobank-opens-first-branch-ethiopia-142550311--sector.html
Category: parenthood   iPhone 5S   michael jackson   Zayn Malik   Lisa Robin Kelly  

Apple's Oct. 22 event: Join us Tuesday (live blog)

Apple's holding an event tomorrow in San Francisco. New iPads, Macs, and software are expected. Join CNET for live coverage.


The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, where Apple's event will take place.

The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, where Apple's event will take place.


(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

It's Apple event time again, and this is your best place to get the news as it happens.


Apple's holding its event in downtown San Francisco on Tuesday, and CNET will be there to bring you live photos and news updates.



Expected are new iPads, updates to several Macs, along with a formal price and release date for Apple's new Mac Pro computer and OS X Mavericks, both of which were announced at a developer event earlier this year. For more on that, check out our full rundown of what we believe Apple will show off.


The presentation is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PT. We'll start our live blog about an hour before Apple officially kicks off its event, along with a live video show from CNET's headquarters just a few blocks away from the venue.


You can tune in to the live blog by clicking the image below, which also includes a way to schedule an e-mail reminder:



Apple held a similar event almost exactly one year ago in San Jose, Calif., where the first iPad Mini appeared. The company has used this particular venue in downtown San Francisco several times before, including for the first iPad's introduction in 2010.



Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57608231-37/apples-oct-22-event-join-us-tuesday-live-blog/?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=News-Apple
Tags: Ian Somerhalder   The Family   9 news   notre dame   Romain Dauriac  

'Fifty Shades' New Guy: 8 Things We Learned From Jamie Dornan's Twitter


MTV News browsed the actor's Twitter to learn more about him.


By Jocelyn Vena








Source:
http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1716128/jamie-dornan-fifty-shades-of-grey-twitter.jhtml

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AMBER robot walks on human-like feet but isn't quite ready for British Knights


DNP RObot with humanlike heels and toes video


Until recently, bipedal robots have sometimes had to take interesting approaches to imitate human walking because they lack our first points of contact with the road: heels and toes. The latest breakthrough from Texas A&M's Amber Lab robotics team may have fixed that, though. An approximation of those foot bones grants the robo-Manziel the pivot-points necessary for (somewhat) naturalistic locomotion. However, this advancement doesn't do nearly as much in terms of making the synthetic legs any stronger. Near the end of the embedded video, the disembodied legs stumble and fall when the attached boom isn't supporting their weight. This is great news for us meatbags, because it makes 2029 feel that much further away.



Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/24/texas-am-robot-with-humanlike-feet/?ncid=rss_truncated
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Amazon's Gigantic Biodomes Have Been Endorsed By Seattle

Amazon's Gigantic Biodomes Have Been Endorsed By SeattleAmazon has somehow gained initial approval to build a huge series of greenhouses slap-bang in the middle of Seattle so it's employees need never leave work.

Read more...


    






Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/qinGV55t7i0/amazons-giagantic-biodomes-have-been-endorsed-by-seatt-1451266530
Tags: engadget   Delbert Belton   Moto X   Riley Cooper Racial Slur Video   Nick Jonas