Graffiti Art Reflects an Experiment’s Excitement on the Walls

The three concrete blocks CERN installed to contain waste at the CMS experiment were ugly and needed paint, according to Niels Dupont-Sagorin, who is in charge of safety at the site. But a quote from contractors for a basic white coat of paint turned out to be pricey. So, he thought, why not make the paint job an artistic investment? A few months later, the site now sports two physics-themed outdoor frescoes done by a local graffiti artist, with one design by a retired CMS researcher.

“My idea was to ask some graffiti artists because I’m from the suburbs of Paris and into street art,” Dupont-Sagorin said. But here on the Swiss-French border, “I didn’t actually know at which door to knock.”

Then one day, while driving from the Meyrin, Switzerland, campus over to the CMS site, Dupont-Sagorin saw something at a roundabout that made him stop. A man was spray painting a billboard with information about an upcoming event in a way Dupont-Sagorin quite liked. He stopped and asked if the man did this work for hire. Indeed, the painter was a freelance artist who goes by the street name Loodz [pictured above with Dupont-Sagorin]. They exchanged information, and Dupont-Sagorin went home to check out Loodz’s website.

“Immediately, I noticed he was good,” Dupont-Sagorin said. “But he’s paid, you know, not a graffiti terrorist.”

He sent Loodz a picture of the blank concrete blocks and also took the opportunity to send a shot of another long blank wall at the entrance to the CMS Control Room.

Loodz sent back some proposal sketches. Dupont-Sagorin was happy with one of them, a dark sketch of the universe dotted with tiny white stars. But the second design lacked something; he thought a more CERN-specific piece would be more fitting.

He asked for suggestions from Michael Hoch, a CMS physicist and himself a curator-creator of many an art project at the experimental site. Hoch knew just whom to ask about the wall: now-retired CMS researcher Sergio Cittolin.

In 1994, Cittolin made a design depicting the evolution of the universe after the Big Bang. This was first used for LHC outreach on a “magic box” toy, a Jacobs-ladder-like cube whose sides flap open never-endingly to reveal inner designs. Later he revamped the sketch into one long image that was adapted into a banner on the CMS website.

Hoch thought Sergio’s creation would work perfectly on the blank wall by the CMS control room. Dupont-Sagorin agreed, noting that its origins also connected to the experiment nicely. With Sergio’s permission, he sent high-definition photos of the banner to Loodz, who merged them with photos of the wall in order to plan the final piece.

Funding ultimately came from the CMS Outreach office and the Experiment Area Manager in the Engineering Department. Loodz did all the art himself, entirely in spray paint, and finished both the wall and then the concrete blocks of the waste area in just 10 days.

“I’m really happy with it,” Dupont-Sagorin said. “I’d like to have money to do it elsewhere.” He has a keen personal interest in outreach and even works as a CERN tour guide on the side. “The shape of your message, your presentations – everything you do is important,” he said.

Sleep Lessons

When Tad's mother found she no longer needed sleep, they left town. It was full, she said, of dirty old men and devil worshipers. She drove north, away from the Mason-Dixon Line. Tad wasn't scared. He rode in the back, between the blue fold-down seats, on a blanket that smelled like Sarah the Doberman. The radio played "Coward of the County" and Blondie. Tad slept.

Tad had a little globe inside a cube of clear plastic, like magic. The oceans were blue, America was red, other countries were other colors. His dinosaur book said they were once one big country. Tad woke up in Rolla. They were going to a fortune teller, to have their palms read. The old gypsy woman lifted his hand, tracing his lifeline carefully with her finger. Soon they would see the Arch, dark silver over the sunset.

At Dixie Truckers Home, Tad woke up in the pickup alone, by the gas pumps, island of light in the vibrating night. He looked out the window, played with the clicking knobs that made the CB needles jump. Bearded men walked to their semis. When his mom came back, they shared an apple and a Snickers bar. Then they drove again. In the dark of the supercab, he remembered he was missing school. Nathan Watson was bringing his turtle to class tomorrow. The two Jennifers, like sun and moon, always smiling in the front row.

Dawn in the Land of Lincoln. They bought ears of corn from a farmer on the roadside. Illinois gravel was different, full of smooth, round pebbles. Tad's globe was gone, left at the fortune teller's. Now he had a rubber band and a few oval pebbles, fingers for a slingshot. A rainbow faded over Peoria.

Some things were good: scrambled eggs made with butter, Scandinavian names, Michigan, dogs that protect their owners. Others bad: gypsies, cars called Cutlass or LeSabre, even numbers, parts of Chicago. Tad's mother loved her dad, who died but was reincarnated in Tad, because good people come back when you need them. She drove on. Her dad died because he plastered ceilings for so many years, and the heart doctor was busy golfing.

Now they had to hurry — people were after them. Tad woke up cold in Michigan, climbed into the front to lie near the warmth of the engine. They saw Indiana, but found no one home at Grandma's, only shriveled tomatoes on the porch rail. While Tad slept, his mom found her way back to Barney's, her old horse-trader boyfriend who used to hit her. Barney still had their parakeet. He let her take it, cage and all.

They drove past the house she always wanted to live in as a girl. They drove past the dentist's office where she met Tad's father. Mr. Holly's farm — he gave gold watches to all his "nieces." In the fog by the lake, she saw a white fox. When they got back to Missouri, God would punish the wicked. They would shelter in a Mormon church. Mormons had big freezers, for storing a year's worth of food.

The parakeet ruffled and shivered in its cage. By Missouri, it was dead. Home smelled funny. Sarah the Doberman had chewed into Tad's mattress and had her puppies there, in a nest of torn foam. She licked and licked those puppies. They could nurse while sleeping, their eyes like chocolate crinkles. Tad could take his mother's bed until she learned to sleep again, letting go the chiming illucid dream smoldering all around her.

Drawing success

Nation's talented young animators are entering their works in international competitions, to get ahead at home. Chen Nan reports.

There was a time in the not too distant past when Chinese animation talents on the international scene were few and far between. But this has changed thanks to the emergence of bold and pioneering animators. Exploring the country's cultural heritage and the complexities of modern life, these young animators are standing out, at home and abroad.

Lei Lei, is one of them. A graduate of Tsinghua University, Academy of Arts & Design, he drew world attention with his romantic short animation film, This Is Love, which won the 2010 Best Narrative Short at Ottawa International Animation Festival, becoming only the second Chinese animation film to bag the award, after Monkeys Fishing Up the Moon walked away with the honors in 1982.

Prizes at the Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film, Germany, and Melbourne International Animation Festival followed, enabling him to make the opening animation film, City Village City, for the Shenzhen Expo Hall of the Shanghai World Expo 2010. The wide acclaim this drew won him other opportunities such as cooperating with Nike.

"China has talented young animators. The problem is there may not be enough competitions or platforms where they can further develop their talents," Lei, 26, says. "Entering international competitions is one way of showing our capabilities. Then people at home take notice."

Lei has been invited to show his animation films at venues such as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts (UCCA), and also to give lectures on independent animation filmmaking.

With growing recognition, Lei has One Man's Animation Film Studio, from Ray Design Studio, which he set up in 2005.

"Ever since I started making animation films, I have done it on my own, right from the idea to the final production stage," Lei says. "It's an independent studio and the animation films are (a reflection of) my own voice.

"People invariably assume that animation is hard work and requires a team. But to me, animation is a kind of language I can use to express myself. It's free and easy. I want to tell this to more people," he says.

Lei, born in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, made his voice heard in 2007 with his graduation work, The Face, which won the Best Art Design Award at the First China (Beijing) International Student Animation Festival.

For the past few years, Lei has been working at a stable pace, finishing two to three independent animated works a year and screening them at international animation festivals.

He says the best of Chinese animations are still the Monkey King series and animations of the early 1980s. Today's films are good commercial products, but not good animation works, he says.

"Take a look at the Monkey King series. Every detail has been well produced, from the drawing to the music. Today's films are way behind. I want to take viewers back to the golden age of Chinese animation."

Being an independent animator is not easy, he points out. Like independent movie makers, independent animation works cater to a minority, he says.

Shanghai Animation Film Studio, the nation's first animation studio, founded in 1949, has made hundreds of animation films which have won applause at home and abroad. However, amid the nation's rapid economic and social changes, the studio has slowed down and been transformed.

"Many animation film bases in China are actually production bases. They lack good ideas and detailed productions. All they want is quick output and financial rewards," Lei says.

Wang Bo, the co-founder and curator of the First China Independent Animation Film Forum, which was held earlier in October at 798 art district, says he has noticed a steady improvement in the independent animation scene.

"Technically, young animators are on a par with international ones," Wang says. "They are proving that animation filmmaking is more than just child's play. Like any contemporary art form, it has its value."

The rapid transformation of Chinese society is a popular theme with many young animators. For example, Lei's award-winning Magic Cube and Ping Pong was inspired by his childhood experiences.

"More young people and artists are expressing their concern over the disappearance of traditional Chinese values," Wang says. "Their works tend to have a strong local flavor and deal with contemporary life."

The country's growing concern with identity has seen more young artists expressing their own ideas and more companies supporting independent animators.

For the Shanghai Expo in 2010, Swedish company Absolut teamed up 29-year-old Chinese animation artist, Gao Yu, to launch its limited-edition bottle called 72 Transformations, that features an image of the mythical Monkey King.

Lu Ming, one of the most successful young comic book artists in China, was commissioned by adidas to produce billboards for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Although cooperation with international brands has brought them reputation and financial rewards, the artists say these are just jobs and not their passion.

"I want to tell contemporary Chinese stories, my own stories and stories I care about," Lu says. He points out that independent animators struggle to compete with Japanese animations and US companies, such as Disney.

Xue Yanping, a professor from the Animation College of China Communication University, however, sees a bright side for the local animation scene, and points out that the country has the talent in terms of character and plot development. Young Chinese animators who have won international recognition also have better leverage while negotiating with investors, he says.

"This is the age of multimedia, and when we talk about indie animators, it is not just about their shorts but also their distinctive visual style and their take on local life," he says.

"China is on the brink of a creative outburst. I believe more creative and original artists and artworks will explode on the scene."

Rappelz expansion coming in November

Gala Networks Europe wants you to know that a new Rappelz expansion is launching in November. The firm also mentions that you'll be in good company if you check it out, since Rappelz has been enjoyed by over 5 million players worldwide.

In terms of new content, Epic VII Part 3: The Trial brings the long-awaited master class quest for players at level 148 and up, and the challenging encounter features battles with Lucian and an evil witch in addition to a foray into the Espoir dungeon.

The expansion also boasts the game's first solo dungeon, and the Vulcanus instance is designed for players at level 30 and above. Finally, there's a new Rappelz creature coming with the content update. The Cube is a golem "formed of pure mana crystals that have been brought to life with magic and ancient mysterious technology," according to Gala's press release. You can learn more about the expansion at the official Rappelz website.

What Does The Bonus Army Tell Us About Occupy Wall Street?

They called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or the Bonus Army or Bonus Marchers for short, and in 1932 they set-up semi-permanent encampments in Washington D.C. Nearly 80 years later, people are occupying Wall Street, and many, many other places around the country. And as loud as the shouts of deliberate mass media ignorance were a month ago, the Occupy movement is not all over everything, and it’s as difficult to avoid coverage now as it was to find it then. It seems to be a unique construct, a product of now—nonviolent, persistent and inchoate in the sense of there's too much to say (rather than not being able to say it). But they're walking in someone else’s footprints, whether they know it or not.

Comparisons of Occupy Wall Street to the Bonus Army are not entirely new; mentions have been made in the past month (and more recently by Frank Rich in his piece looking at the new Class War), and rightfully so. In fact, efforts to parse Occupy Wall Street by historical comparison are a new cottage industry. Correlations with the Tea Party (both of them) are popular, based purely on the putative populist nature of each, and echoes of the war protests of the '60s do pop up as well.

No one is suggesting that a wormhole opened up and pulled a historical event straight into modern times, or that, say, a magic shoe was found and worn by an Occupy Wall Street organizer, filling him or her with the channeled knowledge of Eugene Debs manifesting itself in the form of a well-managed listserv. I just recommend that a comparison the Bonus Army is apt, because in 1932, what they did basically was Occupy D.C.

The arrival of the Bonus Army was quite dramatic. They came from all over the country. Some of them just picked up stakes and brought the family with them, figuring there was nothing left to come back to. They made their way, some in groups, some one by one. More fortunate America helped them along: road and bridge tolls were waived, and the travelers weren’t rousted like the everyday forgotten man. When they reached D.C., they set up camps, tents when they could, or shanties cobbled together from tarpaper and scrap wood and whatever they could scrounge.

Occupy Wall Street is somewhat more diffuse in its goals, and more in line with the 18th century events that Hogeland writes about. Though, to be fair, Occupy Wall Street has been very, very vague (and purposefully so) as to what they’re looking for. I asked Hogeland if that was in any way unique, from an historical perspective: “The absence of articulated demands on the part of OWS may be unique or at least highly unusual in American economic-related protest. The 19th-century Populists demanded specific, radical legislation to benefit ordinary people. The Whiskey Rebels wanted fair taxation. The Shaysites wanted fair taxation and debt relief. And they said so.”

Maybe it's spurious to compare the circumstances of the two: then, the occupiers were veterans, crushed by the circumstances of the Great Depression, moved to uproot their lives in hopes of a very real result, and now, a melange of the generally dispossessed, moved by frustration over a financial system suspected to be rigged. There are similarities, so maybe not as spurious as it is too tenuous to avoid refutation.

The two movements shared an analogous backdrop. Just as Occupy Wall Street unfolds in the shadow of the fiscal crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, the Bonus Army congregated in the full bloom of the Great Depression. Without the downturn, neither protest actually could have happened. There was even a specific federal program that inflamed each: instead of the TARP program that doled out free taxpayer money to financial institutions recently, Hoover had established the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an entity to save the large banks and railroads through government loans, just months before the Bonus Army declared their march. So both the Bonus Army and Occupy Wall Street were set into motion in response to almost deliberately provocative federal policy, and the economic horror show that necessitated it.

Try to imagine that speech given in small bites, repeated in waves throughout an Occupy Wall Street general assembly, and it wouldn’t be out of place at all, would it? (And some not-bad advice to boot.)

And there is one trait that, of the major American protests, is shared only by Occupy Wall Street and the Bonus Army, that of a population, moved by varying degrees of perceived unfairness, to make not just a statement but to erect a semi-permanent edifice, to occupy. Not a march, not a riot, not a long-term picketing effort, but people uprooting themselves and planting themselves in a temporary autonomous zone, in the interest of making a point. Occupy Wall Street has Zuccotti Park, and the Bonus Army set themselves up primarily Anacostia Flats, across the river to the southeast from the Capitol in a bit of land within the skewed cube of the D.C. city limits that would otherwise be Maryland.

To be fair, while they both share occupation as a tactic, Occupy Wall Street is using it to address the ineffability of its goal in a way that did not confront the Bonus Army—not just a squishiniess in targeting, but the conundrum of possible tangible results. Says Hogeland, “Sitting at a white's-only lunch counter deliberately breaks the precise law you want ended, and it calls the world's attention to the law's immorality; arrests dramatically underscore all that. Civil disobedience doesn't work when there's no law for protesters to deliberately break in hopes of getting it ended.” Setting up a camp, attracting attention, is a different creature than civil disobedience, and is more like the polite but insistent refusal to not be paid attention to. The Bonus Army was ready to leave once they got their bonuses. It's as if once Occupy Wall Street stops occupying Wall Street, they will lose cohesion and purpose, as Occupy Wall Street will be ready to leave when, well… I guess we don’t know when they’ll be ready to leave, or what the outcome will be (barring further drum circle controversies). That will be one for waiting.

Diablo III Info Wrap-Up

Achievements can be obtained in a number of ways: play-through progression, extreme behavior (level 60 Hardcore character), and absurd shenanigans (play without any armor on). The point of achievements is they unlock components for your banner, which is a visual representation of all you've done in the game. PVP might reward you with quests. Pennant might get longer through play-through progression. Base of banner gets larger through playing Hardcore. You can easily teleport to friends by clicking on their banner.

Stone of Recall is an endless use item that lets you get back to town from the wilderness, which leaves a blue portal behind so that only you can go back to where you were before you started the teleport. The Cauldron of Jordan allows you to sell items right out of your bag from wherever you are. The Cube of the Nephalem allows you to break items down wherever you are so that you can craft items later on back in town.

The Mystic is where you go to enhance your items; take any item you have and add an enhancement to it such as gold find or magic find. Enhancements are actually random in Diablo III, so you can apply the same enhancement and have the chance to have it be better the second time you try. The Mystic can be leveled-up to be more powerful. The Jeweler can combine gems into one, socket gems, remove gems (use extra experience gem till you reach level cap and then remove it after you don't need experience anymore), and add sockets to items. The Blacksmith can forge and craft items for you, plus make legendary and unique set item recipes that you find within the game. The different crafters are shared across your account, so your Barbarian might get the Blacksmith leveled to five, and then when you start a Demon Hunter they'll be able to access that level five Blacksmith without having to level them up themselves.

New PVP mode is Team Deathmatch - ten-minute games between two teams of four and there will be no skill swapping during the game. You will use your PVE character for Team Deathmatch games.
Auction House decided upon because loot is a big part of the game, item drops are randomized, there are low odds for any given item, and trading is the best way to find items and improve your character. It's convenient, secure, and easy, plus you can trade items using gold or real money. Items, gold, and components can be sold - almost anything. Participate for free in real-money auctions as you'll have a small number of free listings every week. If your item sells you can output that money to a Paypal account or put it directly into your e-balance so you can put more items on the Auction House or use the money to buy a real-money item that you personally want. Auction House getting a smart search and advanced search so that you can search for the exact stats you're looking for.

Spartans make magic - again

The northeast corner of Spartan Stadium is now officially The Magic Corner.

“I’m going to make a video of all the magical plays that have happened in that part of the stadium,” said an uncharacteristically giddy coach Mark Dantonio. “I am. Seriously. I’m going to have that part of the stadium enshrined. You want to write a story? Write a story about all the special plays that happened down there.”

That corner was where “Little Giants,” last year’s overtime touchdown off a fake field goal against Notre Dame, occurred. It was also where Larry Caper scored an overtime touchdown that beat Michigan in 2009. And it was also where Amp Campbell scooped up a fumble and returned it for a touchdown against Oregon in 1999 — a year after a serious neck injury against the Ducks nearly claimed his football career.

But “The Rocket” might soar far beyond all predecessors.

“Wow,” was all B.J. Cunningham could initially say.

It was his face mask that deflected the Hail Mary pass into Keith Nichol’s waiting grasp at the Wisconsin two yard line with no time remaining on the clock and nearly 80,000 stunned people at Spartan Stadium expecting overtime.

“I can’t say that’s how we drew it up,” quarterback Kirk Cousins said.

The Spartans’ 37-31 last-second miracle over Wisconsin potentially becomes one of those seminal moments for a program historically stung by hard luck defeats in the closing seconds. There’s a litany of heartache that the Spartan faithful can recite religiously over recent history.

Maybe the football heavens are finally smiling down upon them. They’ve enjoyed significant good luck since last season with “Little Giants” and the fake punt “Mousetrap” that spurred an improbable comeback at Northwestern. The Spartans now believe that they can perform the improbable.

It’s another evolutionary step for a program that must be taken seriously.

“Absolutely, we believe in ourselves and that’s all that matters,” Cousins said. “There were some people who thought we had no chance against Wisconsin, and they’ll probably think that we’ll have a let down next week against Nebraska. But we don’t care about that. It doesn’t even really motivate us like it might have before because we know that we can do it.”

This could have been a colossal choke for Michigan State, blowing a 14-point fourth quarter lead after coming back from a 14-point first quarter deficit.

It didn’t matter that they didn’t have William Gholston. Those crying the loudest that the sophomore defensive end’s one-game suspension against the Badgers was suitable justice for his transgressions last week against Michigan were left crying even more.

Was this Dantonio’s biggest win at Michigan State?

“I thought last week’s was pretty special,” he said.

These are the two best teams in the Big Ten. That’s not saying much considering the conference’s collective quality is far worse relative to its previous “down” years. But they provided an entertaining show that fans in these parts wouldn’t mind seeing again on the first Saturday in December in Indianapolis for the Big Ten’s inaugural football championship game.

The most important game for Michigan State — at least relative to its chances of finally making a Rose Bowl for the first time in a generation — remains next week in Nebraska. The Cornhuskers are a Legends Division partner, and a victory in Lincoln would assure the Spartans of all the necessary divisional tiebreakers.

Dantonio will enjoy this one. And he should. He absorbed a lot of criticism last week. Many thought he couldn’t teach discipline to his players after six personal fouls against the Wolverines. But his team didn’t commit one penalty against Wisconsin.

The Magic Cube: Will Your Next Keyboard be Virtual?

Given the rate of change with computers over the years, what's with the lack of change in keyboards?

Our computers have decreased in size 99% over the last 10 years, but keyboards? They're still the same. We still accumulate years’ worth of lint, dust, and potato chip crumbs. Heaven forbid we want to use our computers while eating a cheeseburger or the keys will be greasy for the next 3-6 months. Do we really need all those keys? Why do they keep adding more functions to the function keys?

So far the best anyone's been able to do is give us canned air or a keyboard cover.

Our frustrations with keyboards appear to be never ending, but maybe we shouldn't speak so soon.

Though it may not win any awards for product title originality, the magic cube is a portable device that projects a laser keyboard onto any flat surface. You can't get food stuck in it, spill a super-size ultra-hot coffee on it or dislodge any of the keys from gaming too hard.

And the best part: it's compatible with iPhone, Android, iPad and any Bluetooth enabled device. We have enough to worry about between running down our smart phone batteries with hours of web surfing, tweeting or Facebook stalking that we can barely have time to read through our text messages for any wayward autocorrect fixes.

Gone are the days of touchtone keys, out-of-this-world typos, hitting the return key by accident on the iPhone or wishing your thumbs weren't so big. The magic cube is super portable, has mouse capabilities, and handwriting recognition software.

The possibilities are nearly endless. For those of us who spend the better part of everyday texting, we can now do so with increased speed and agility. Are you a student? Set up on your desktop. The professor will never know what you're doing. Texting at work? Never easier.

A genius of the storefront

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar’s headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus – and Jobs himself.

“The best clients, to my mind, don’t say that whatever you do is fine,” Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs’ death. “They’re intertwined in the process. When I look back, it’s hard to remember who had what thought when. That’s the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house.”

Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

“No one in commercial architecture has ever channeled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple,” said James Timberlake, a founding partner of KieranTimberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London. “Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and under-budgeted. It’s gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape.”

The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced – and expensive. In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product’s presentation and customer experience.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple’s cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements. Bohlin’s firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ gold medal in 2010.

In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry.

Jobs was “a very public person,” Timberlake observed. “That’s in contrast to Peter. He’s not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson. He doesn’t sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it’s more like a fireside chat.”

Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives.

“He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions,” Backus recalled. “We all enjoyed the collaboration.”

The notion of glass as Apple’s signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company’s New York store in SoHo, housed in a historic building.

“We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down,” Bohlin said. “So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stairway idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal.”

Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure.

“We got James O’Callaghan involved. He’s brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London,” Bohlin said. “Now we’re cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom.”

In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, “so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall.” Bohlin said.

“This is the kind of detail Steve wanted,” he added. “We’ve been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century. Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It’s an interesting challenge, how to marry the two.”

Apple’s use of glass in retail architecture emerged as a design and branding element at its Fifth Avenue store, which opened in 2006. The site had the initial challenge of luring customers into an underground plaza that had been notoriously inhospitable as a retail destination. The solution was a pristine glass cube and staircase flooded with natural light.

“We came to the conclusion it had to feel inevitable,” Bohlin said. “The adjacent GM Building has a tall, narrow facade, and its best aspect is directly across from the Plaza Hotel. Everything in the area is rectangular. So we thought of a square of light. It looks easy, but it wasn’t.”

Customers started lining up 42 hours before the store opened, and lines have formed ever since, with crowd control often required to prevent overcrowding. The building is now being renovated and expanded. In keeping with Bohlin’s and Jobs’ never-ending quest to achieve more with less, a new cube will feature larger glass panes and fewer visible connecting elements.

Despite its popular and critical success, Bohlin and Apple have not simply repeated the glass cube in other cities. The new Apple store in Shanghai is a glass cylinder using huge seamless panels of curved glass. Like the cube on Fifth Avenue, it leads to a large underground space, but in contrast, the area around it isn’t rectilinear, and the most prominent local landmark, a towering television tower, is located at an oblique angle to the shopping plaza.

“We had the idea of a circle,” Bohlin said. “Steve said, ‘Why isn’t the entire plaza around the entrance a circle?’ I said that was a great idea, but that’s beyond our control. The plaza was already under construction. Somehow he got the developer to agree to redesign and redo it. I don’t know how he did it.”

More recently, Bohlin has used glass to create what he calls “great market halls,” such as the Upper West Side store at 66th Street and Broadway.

“We’re doing a number of those,” he said. “The glazed lid. Can it be detailed any more delicately? I’m not sure. We continue to press that. Steve was a great client in this regard. He would not discourage innovation that was within his vision of what Apple is or he is.”

For someone as fascinated – some would say obsessed – by design and architecture as Jobs, it’s surprising that he lived in a relatively modest Tudor-style house in Palo Alto, Calif., built by a developer, and never lived in a house he helped to design. That might have changed had he lived a while longer. He and Bohlin had been at work for years on plans for a new house when Jobs died.

Rethinking your hobbies

I love what you write about keeping your hobbies and interests, but I have a bit of a different problem.

When I was a teenager, I found a lot of solace in comic books. I like how they presented a world that wasn’t completely soaked in moral ambiguity and that good people generally came out on top, something I didn’t often see in my real life at the time.

Now, I’m 31. I have a great job that pays very well. I’ve been dating a girl seriously for several years. And I also still have my comic book hobby. I buy a few dozen titles a month, read them, put them in plastic bags, and save them in a storage room I have in the basement of my home.

Sometimes, though, when I go down there, I feel like there’s a ton of money wasted. I look around and wonder what I could have done with all of those resources and it adds a twinge of guilt. I also have a sense that maybe I should “grow up.”

I’m wondering what your thoughts are.

First of all, I don’t have a problem with any non-destructive hobby that brings personal enjoyment, even ones others might define as “childish.” I have one friend who collects vintage action figures and another friend who’s into My Little Ponies. They’re both in their thirties and are well-adjusted folks with great careers. If it brings you joy without personal injury, enjoy it.

The question really is whether or not you get sufficient enjoyment out of the hobby for what you put into it. I don’t really know what your costs are for the hobby and I also don’t know what your enjoyment level is at this point. Do you get excited about comic books at this point? Do you look forward to reading them? Do you re-read old issues? Do you follow hobby news online?

There’s also the nostalgia factor. Sometimes we change as people and it’s very hard to let go of something that meant something deeply to us in the past. In fact, it can often go so far as to produce some joy in the present that’s actually just an echo of what we once got a great deal of joy out of. It also may be that what you enjoy about the hobby has changed – or, in your case, you now have this sense that you need to “bag” all of your comics to preserve them when before they were something you read, cut up for art projects, mangled, threw under your bed, and “lived” with.

The closest hobby I have in my own life to compare this to is Magic: the Gathering. For those unfamiliar, Magic: the Gathering is a trading card game, meaning that you can easily play a game of it with just a few cards, but there are literally tens of thousands of different cards available, each of which can alter the game. Players choose their own small sets of cards from their collection to play with, called decks.

I started playing Magic: the Gathering in high school when several of my friends and I started playing all at once. I kept playing into college and for a bit after college, but once my first child was born, I had to take stock of the hobby. I realized that what I actually enjoyed at this point was the occasional game with my wife and with old friends. I had no real need or interest to continue to buy new cards.

So I sold off most of my collection right around the time we needed some help with our financial turnaround. The collection had been sitting in my closet for a year or two anyway at that point, with only a few cards actually played with. I turned the remainder of the cards into a handful of playable decks and a “draft cube” (another playable set of cards) and kept around a few leftovers to occasionally trade for newer stuff to put into those decks.

Today, I probably play Magic once a month. I’ll play with my wife or with another close friend of mine. I don’t buy any new cards – instead, I just pull out some of the ones I have. I realized that what I enjoy about the hobby right now doesn’t require me to spend any money.

My oldest child is starting to show an interest in it, too, as he watches us play. His reading skills aren’t quite there yet, but he understands some of what’s going on.

Steve Jobs’ magic on Apple stores

When the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. "Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again," Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar's headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus - and Jobs himself.

"The best clients, to my mind, don't say that whatever you do is fine," Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs' death. "They're intertwined in the process. When I look back, it's hard to remember who had what thought when. That's the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house."

Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

"No one in commercial architecture has ever channelled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple," said James Timberlake, a founding partner of Kieran-Timberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London.

"Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and underbudgeted. It's gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape."

The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced - and expensive.

In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product's presentation and customer experience.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple's cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements.

Bohlin's firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects' gold medal in 2010.

In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry. Jobs was "a very public person," Timberlake observed. "That's in contrast to Peter. He's not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson.

He doesn't sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it's more like a fireside chat." Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives. "He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions," Backus recalled. "We all enjoyed the collaboration."

The notion of glass as Apple's signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company's New York store in So-Ho, housed in a historic building."We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down," Bohlin said.

"So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stair way idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal." Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure."We got James O'Callaghan involved.

He's brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London," Bohlin said. "Now we're cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom." In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, "so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall." Bohlin said.

"This is the kind of detail Steve wanted," he added. "We've been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century.

He was innovative on store front

When the architect Peter Bohlin arrived for his first meeting with Steve Jobs, he wore a tie. "Steve laughed, and I never wore a tie again," Bohlin recalled.

Thus began a collaboration that has extended from Pixar's headquarters, completed in 2001, to more than 30 Apple Stores (and counting) around the globe, all designed by Bohlin and a team of architects from Bohlin Cywinski Jackson led by Karl Backus - and Jobs himself.

"The best clients, to my mind, don't say that whatever you do is fine," Bohlin said last week, a few days after Jobs' death. "They're intertwined in the process. When I look back, it's hard to remember who had what thought when. That's the best, most satisfying work, whether a large building or a house."

Just as Jobs transformed the notion of the personal computer and the cellphone, he left an indelible stamp on architecture, especially the retail kind, traditionally a backwater of the profession.

"No one in commercial architecture has ever channelled a product into architecture for a client the way Peter did for Apple," said James Timberlake, a founding partner of Kieran-Timberlake, who is now designing the new American embassy in London.

"Most commercial architecture is under-detailed, under-edited and underbudgeted. It's gross and ugly, and most of it is an eyesore on the American landscape."

The work of Bohlin and his colleagues for Apple, by contrast, is sleek, transparent, inviting, technologically advanced - and expensive.

In many ways, the retail architecture is simply the largest box in which an Apple product is wrapped, and Jobs was famously attentive to every detail in an Apple product's presentation and customer experience.

The extensive use of glass in structures like Apple's cube on Fifth Avenue in New York, its cylinder in the Pudong district of Shanghai or its soaring market hall on the Upper West Side of Manhattan have become so distinctive that Apple is seeking to patent the glass elements.

Bohlin's firm has won 42 awards for its work for Apple, and Bohlin himself was awarded the American Institute of Architects' gold medal in 2010.

In their years working together, Jobs and Bohlin, who is 74, appeared to have achieved a rare chemistry. Jobs was "a very public person," Timberlake observed. "That's in contrast to Peter. He's not a Frank Lloyd Wright or a Philip Johnson.

He doesn't sweep into a room and take over. You go to a design meeting, and it's more like a fireside chat." Backus, who lives in California and focuses full time on Apple work, said the team learned early on to approach Jobs with alternatives. "He liked to be presented with options and would often make very insightful suggestions," Backus recalled. "We all enjoyed the collaboration."

The notion of glass as Apple's signature architectural statement first appeared in the staircase in the company's New York store in So-Ho, housed in a historic building."We had a two-story space, which is a great challenge to get people to go up or down," Bohlin said.

"So we thought of glass. Steve loved the glass stair way idea. He got it. You make magic. We made these stairs that were quite ethereal." Just as Jobs obsessed over Apple products, he pushed Bohlin to make the glass structures ever more refined and pure."We got James O'Callaghan involved.

He's brilliant, a British structural engineer with offices in New York and London," Bohlin said. "Now we're cantilevering the stairs from top to bottom." In the newest Apple store, in Hamburg, Germany, the stairs float in space, attached only at the top and bottom. The fittings are embedded in the glass, "so you get this magical sleek profile when you look up the wall." Bohlin said.

"This is the kind of detail Steve wanted," he added. "We've been driving for this, doing more and more with less and less. This has been a vision of architecture since earlier in the last century.

Modernism, some people would argue, is doing more with less. Steve wanted us to push the edge of technology, but it had to be comfortable for people. Sometimes that idea got lost in modernism. It's an interesting challenge, how to marry the two."

Transcript for UCStrategies Experts Discuss SBCs

Hi, everyone, this is Russell Bennett from UCStrategies. Today I’m hosting a podcast on the session border control market, which is under fairly significant transformation. This is a very large and complex topic and we can probably talk for hours on this, each of us. However, the piece of news that’s brought this to the forefront this week is the announcement that Avaya is acquiring Sipera, which is a security and SBC company. So what this actually means is that now all the leaders of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC have their own SBC technology: Microsoft, Cisco, Siemens, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent. And some of the kind of secondary and tertiary players also have a security element.

So clearly, this is an admission that session border control or network edge security is critical for UC, and this raises just a host of points that we’re going to try and cover today. I’d like to call first on Marty Parker.

Thanks, Russell. I first want to express that it’s just disappointing that we need session border controllers at all. The internet really is a disappointingly wild place from the view of security and behavior, so having said that bit of indignation, I’ll just go on to say therefore they are necessary. Session border controllers are certainly necessary for the interface of any session, and usually that applies to a SIP-type session, to the internet. Now in our telephony world, not so much in the UC world, Unified Communication, but over in the telephony world they’re primarily applied as the interface for session initiation protocol trunks, or SIP trunks. And again, it’s a puzzle that the carriers, who have been trusted to provide secure T1 / B1 transmission for so many years really are no longer trusted by most enterprises to provide the sole interface to the network for SIP trunking. So most enterprises are finding, and recommendations from their IP telephony providers, that they should install a session border controller. It’s seen really as part of the network infrastructure.  The application, the IP PBX is delivering voice and media and signaling into the network, in through switches, in through routers, and then if it wants to go out through the edge it will use a session border controller for that interface – products like the Cisco Unified Border Element, the Cube and products like that are well known. As Russell said, everybody in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC has them. Also, the leaders in the corporate telephony magic quadrant all have it.

Since we have them, the big question is how is that market going to evolve? And clearly what’s happening is that SBC functionality, the denial of service protections, the man-in-the-middle protections, the hidden protocol protections, all of those sorts of things are being done by very fast software. And they will over time be built into other products, whether it’s routers or it’s PBX gateway products, we’re going to see those built in. And then over time we’ll see another shift because in the end a SIP session or a connection to the internet should be part of, and most enterprises want it to be part of their integrated threat management. Because every enterprise of any size has some version of a threat management program for everything I’ve said about real time communications as well as all the non-real time communications. It’s likely that those providers, Radware would be an example, who has already added SBC functionality into their threat management portfolio, will suggest to the IT infrastructure manager that there’s no need for a separate product, “You can use our integrated threat management solution to manage this.”

It’s going to be a very rapidly developing world, I think, because software has that tendency. Certainly product releases will be the gating pace, but you can see the end from the beginning, that over time we will see SBC functionality built into integrated threat management tools and built into network infrastructure; not seen as a separate functionality of IP telephony. So I’ll pass it back to you, Russell, thanks.

How cryotherapy chamber allowed Wales to come in from the cold

Specifically, I am thinking about the scene in Coronation Street when Anne Malone is accidentally and fatally locked inside the walk-in freezer of Freshco supermarket while trying to implicate Curly Watts in a blackmail plot by sabotaging a box of fish fingers with WD40.

It is, I grant, an unconventional reverie. But although thousands of men and women have passed through the chamber — including, a few months ago, the entire Welsh rugby squad — I still want guarantees. A session in the cold room lasts only three minutes, but at temperatures around minus 30C lower than the coldest ever recorded on Earth, that is quite enough.

“Nobody has ever died in there,” the centre’s doctor, Tadeusz Kilian, assures me. “If you feel uncomfortable, or it’s too cold, then bang on the door, and we will let you out. While you are inside, try not to touch yourself.” I think I know what he means.

My attire – a band around the ears, a mask over the nose and mouth, a baggy pair of jersey shorts, long socks and a pair of quaint wooden clogs — seems recklessly sparse in the circumstances.

But I need to be completely dry. At temperatures as low as these, anything remotely moist or clammy will freeze instantly and painfully. Not two months ago, former Olympic 100 metres champion Justin Gatlin suffered a horrific case of frostbite when he walked into a cryo-chamber in a pair of sweaty socks that fused to his feet.

In the 1920s, the OSC was the country retreat of Polish president Ignacy Moscicki, who liked to hunt deer in the surrounding forest. Little by little, accoutrements were added — an athletics track, playing fields, a swimming pool, a gymnasium — until in the 1970s, the socialist government decided to turn it into a production line for elite, ideologically unimpeachable sportsmen.

The brutalist architecture and beige-tinged decor still retain a charming, Eastern-bloc feel to them. But in every other respect, the centre is at the vanguard of sporting medicine.

The door swings open and three of us step into the ante-chamber, a holding room with a temperature of about minus 76F (-60C). After 30 seconds of acclimatisation, a second door swings open, and we are instantly met by a blast of freezing steam. Liquid nitrogen is used to cool the chamber, and it is impossible to see more than a couple of feet in front.

To get the obvious question out of the way first: yes, it is a bit parky in there. The chamber is around the size of a lift, and we shuffle around it in a clockwise direction, peering through the mist, attempting to avoid walking into the walls. The first 20 seconds are tolerable enough; with the extremities covered, it takes a little while for heat to sap from the body.

But once it does, once the temperature of my skin drops to around 10C, I begin to realise what Wales captain Sam Warburton meant when he described the cryotherapy chamber as an ‘evil sauna’.

The predominant sensation is one of numbness, but inflected with a warbling tremolo of pain. A couple of scabs on my calves begin to sting excruciatingly — later, when I peel off my knee-length socks, I realise that the lint has simply burnt off and they are beginning to weep anew.

This is how cryotherapy works its magic. Essentially, it fools your body into flooding the bloodstream with endorphins by convincing you that you are dying.

Your veins open to around three times their normal diameter and blood rushes to the surface. Among the immediate effects are pain relief, superior healing times and revitalisation of the skin. But it is the long-term benefits that persuaded Wales’ management to take a 58-man party to Poland for two separate training camps in July.

Scary Amount of Candy Hits Manhattan Stores for Halloween

As trick-or-treat time nears, New Yorkers on the hunt for specialty candies can find an array of options uptown or downtown that will delight the sweet teeth of little devils and witches.

"There is something deliciously fun for everyone in our Halloween collection," said Dylan Lauren, CEO of Dylan’s Candy Bar, at 1100 Third Ave. near 61st Street, whose offerings include a "Halloween Tackle Box" ($24) filled with Halloween standby candy corn and"bloody" dextrose bones, fudge-filled fangs and gummy brains.

Dylan's Candy Bar made some changes to its sweet roster for this year's holiday.

"Halloween last year was about vampires, but this year, beware — the new theme is zombies," Lauren said in a statement. "The spookiness and the nostalgia behind zombies appeals to both the young and old."

The store, for instance, has a "Zombie Blood Energy Potion" ($6) in a biohazard-like package that promises to be a tasty lime energy drink.

In the West Village, the Christopher Street shop Sockertbit is hosting a Swedish-style Halloween.

Owner Florence Ernberg said she's hoping to import a Swedish custom to the neighborhood for the month.

"Swedes have a tradition that on Saturdays they can eat as much candy as they want," she said, describing lördags godis, which means "candy Saturday" in Swedish.

Sockerbit, whose name is the Swedish term for "sugar cube," is tempting trick-or-treaters with "candy-bob" shish kabobs of gummy candy ($3.95) and gummy candy bouquets in small ($45) and large ($65) sizes.

The 89 Christopher St. shop also has imported dark gray glass pumpkins ($28) that can be filled with candy.

At Martine's Chocolates, at 400 E. 82nd St. and inside Bloomingdale's on the sixth floor, owner Martine Leventer has added "cute" owls ($10.25) to her popular lollipops of ghosts, pumpkins, cats and bats.

"The lollipops, in general, are very popular," Leventer said. "And the eyeballs are a good seller. You open the box and it's looking at you."

Martine's also makes special order items, like a chocolate haunted house ($36.50), but said with the economic downturn, shoppers are looking for smaller items.

Her natural chocolates made with Belgian Callebaut couverture chocolate, French butter, fresh American cream and other fine ingredients, have been gaining popularity for Halloween.

"There seems to be more and more interest," she said. "When you have a party you want your guests to have good chocolate, and we have a good number of parents who want to give their kids good chocolate and make them used to it so they won't end up eating junk with chemicals."

Chocolate Bar, on Eighth Avenue between Jane and West 12th streets, will have milk chocolate and dark chocolate candy corn bark ($6.50), chocolate-covered ghost and pumpkin marshmallow "Peeps" ($4) and chocolate candy corn ghost lollypops ($2.50).

The shop's Pumpkin Spice Signature Bar, which is available in milk chocolate and 65 percent cacao varieties, is spiced with cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg.

Arcam rCube review

Apple’s Steve Jobs always had a thing about cubes (G4, NeXT), and a love of music. Arcam’s very Apple-like rCube speaker system looks and sounds so good Steve would have been happy to have stuck the company logo on it.

Apple’s one venture into own-branded speakers was the quickly forgotten Apple iPod Hi-Fi – a great, big slab that looked like a single speaker had toppled onto its side.

(I’m ignoring the translucent SoundSticks, iSub and Cube speakers as they were a joint venture with Harman Kardon.)

The Arcam rCube combines the cool, minimalist looks of an Apple product with top-quality audio performance.

It’s not just minimalist in its clean glossy black or white lines. It measures just 200mm cubed. And at 5kg it’s half the weight of other supposedly portable speakers like B&W’s Zeppelin.

You wouldn’t want to carry the rCube all day but it’s easy to move around the house or office with its nifty hidden handle.

And it’s not just smart in looks and sound. The rCube is more sophisticated than other premium speaker systems.

It’s wireless in more ways than one. Using the rWave USB dongle you can losslessly and wirelessly stream music from your PC or Mac at up to 50m. Better than that you can connect up to eight rCubes to create your very own whole-home audio network.

The rWand+, meanwhile, lets you wirelessly stream at the same lossless quality from your iPhone or iPod or iPad, at a distance of 10m.

With the rWand+ you can control what’s playing without having to leave the garden or kitchen. And parties can get even more interactive by passing the rWand+ round so that friends can have their turn DJing using their own iPods, etc.

Both rWave and rWand+ use clever Kleer wireless technology that’s superior to standard Bluetooth.

These extra don’t come cheap, however. The rWave costs £79, and the rWand just a tenner less. Neither comes packed with the base rCube unit.

The rCube’s integral Lithium-Ion rechargeable battery is a trooper, lasting up to eight hours, which should be long enough for most parties or days out in the garden.

And while it’s resting it will charge your iPod or iPhone.

The touch controls on the top of the rCube are also minimal, and there’s a slimish remote offering the usual volume and track functions.

And here’s my only negative about Arcam’s rCube. Despite being a cube you have to aim the remote at a reasonably strict angle to get results – usually above or to the front of the unit.

At the back you get a rear panel row of ports and sockets (AUX, Composite and Component Video, a USB connector for firmware upgrades, DC In, and a power switch).

There’s also a switch to reduce bass output when the unit is placed in a corner. When the rCube’s sitting in the middle of the room or at least away from bass-reinforcing walls you can activate the Bass Boost to compensate.

Unlike many similar better-sound-at-the-push-of-a-button magic switches on rival speakers Arcam’s Bass Boost button really does make a difference.

It’s hard to put into words just how good the Arcam rCube sounds – with pretty much any genre of music. It’s a cliché to say the sound has to be heard to be believed but I was not expecting the level of acoustic fidelity even though I’d read plenty of eulogising rCube reviews.

What HiFi praised its “unbreakably cohesive delivery … subtlety and sufficient punch”. Other reviews point out the rCube’s power and clarity, and state that “its acoustic performance is unmatched” and “gorgeously complete”.

What’s not to like about the rCube? Well, at £500 it was a luxury purchase – worth the money but out of many people’s price range. So the recent price drop to £350 makes this a superb and affordable premium Apple device speaker system.

Program tries to give kids a leg up on tech

Jamaica schools seventh-grader Rylan Tate always liked math, particularly geometry. Still, he didn't know why it's important to understand things like lines, angles and shapes, other than to do well on tests.

He does now, thanks to the Gateway to Technology pre-engineering program, which Vermilion Advantage brought to his school this year.

"You can use math to design things and build things and make things better," Rylan said, as he and his classmates drew three-dimensional cubes on computers in their science class Tuesday. "It's fun."

Part of the national Project Lead the Way program, the Gateway to Technology curriculum introduces junior high and middle school students to engineering principles and technology. Students engage in hands-on, real-world activities that call on their critical-thinking, problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills.

"The goal is to get students excited about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers," said Kim Kuchenbrod, Vermilion Advantage's workforce development consultant. "We want to plant that interest now, so that they'll take more advanced math and science classes in high school and go on to pursue careers in engineering, technology or health care. Hopefully, they'll come back and fill those types of jobs here in Vermilion County."

The program currently is available in 18 middle schools and junior high schools in Illinois, including North Ridge and South View middle schools in Danville. However, it's been difficult to establish in-house programs in rural school districts because of software, technology and training costs.

About a year ago, Vermilion Advantage officials began thinking of a way to deliver the program to rural schools and came up with their mobile engineering lab. It was funded by an Alcoa Foundation grant and other resources and is supported by the Vermilion Advantage Workforce Clusters.

Vermilion Advantage is piloting the nine-week program for more than 200 seventh-graders at three schools this year, first Jamaica and later Westville and Oakwood. Next year, officials want to expand it to include other schools, as well as eighth-graders.

"Our ultimate goal is to have a lab for the north county schools and one for the south county schools," Kuchenbrod said. "And we're hoping, based on the results, that the program could be used by other counties to reach students in the rural districts."

A few weeks ago, instructor Debbie Clow, a former Oakwood High School chemistry and physics teacher, introduced a unit on design and modeling to science teacher Miranda Simmon's seventh-graders. Plans call for introducing other units — automation and robotics, energy and environments, flight and space, the magic of electrons and the science of technology — which can be taught independently or in conjunction with each other.

So far, students have designed and built air racers out of heavy paper and furniture for Cabbage Patch dolls out of cardboard. They are learning to sketch two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes on paper and on their laptops, and will soon create three-dimensional pegboards on the computer and different-shaped pegs that must fit into the right holes.

"They're learning math and science, just in a different way," Clow said, adding the hands-on projects show students the relevancy of what they're learning.

The program also includes guest speakers, local engineers and other professionals, and field trips.

"It's just a wonderful, top-notch program," Principal Mollie Pletch said, adding it enhances the school's curriculum with "hands-on, problem-solving challenges. Watching them work together, talk things through, share ideas, accept compromise and seeing their critical-thinking skills and creativity at work ... is great to see. We're so thankful to Vermilion Advantages and the area business and industry for making this opportunity possible."

Students said they like using computers and other technology that is second nature to them. They also like the project-based learning concept, which requires less lecturing by the teacher and more problem-solving by them.

"If something doesn't work right, you have to figure out why and fix it," Haven Richards said, adding students have to work as a team to do that.

"I think it's pretty awesome," Aleah Carder said, adding the program has opened up career possibilities. "I always thought I wanted to be a teacher. Now I'm considering becoming an engineer."

Twitter Pays Tribute to Al Davis

In a week that saw the world lose one of the true modern innovators of technology, football fans mourn the loss of another icon with the passing of Al Davis on Saturday.

“Al Davis’s passion for football and his influence on the game were extraordinary. He defined the Raiders and contributed to pro football at every level. Al Davis is a true legend of the game whose impact and legacy will forever be part of the NFL,” tweeted Roger Goodell, NFL commissioner.

The 82-year old Oakland Raiders owner, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1992, passed away at his home in Oakland. The renegade football figure who was a personnel assistant, scout, assistant coach, head coach, general manager, commissioner, team owner and CEO during his lifetime, leaves behind a football legacy unmatched by few.

“Not sure if I can identify greater contributor to the game than Al Davis. Even those who battled on field, in court & in media honor him,” ESPN’s Chris Mortensen posted on Twitter As an owner he implored his team to ‘Just win, baby’, Davis made his mark in football and in the lives of the players, coaches, media and fans that he encountered.

“A leader, an innovator & a friend. Al Davis marched to his own drum & will be missed. RIP AL Davis 1929-2011,” tweeted Magic Johson, NBA Hall of Famer.

“I grew up a Raiders fan. My deepest sympathies to the @raiders and Davis Family. Truly a sad day for football. RIP Al Davis,” tweeted Barry Sanders, NFL Hall of Famer.

“Al Davis has passed away at 82. His team is playing well this season. They have always had their own idenity. Football has lost an icon,” tweeted Rich Brooks, Kentucky football coach.

“Rest in peace, Al Davis. Knew him well. Admired his vast football knowledge, against-the-grain courage. AFL commish, coach, GM, owner. Rare,” tweeted Skip Bayless, ESPN.

“Rest in piece al davis, you will be missed sir, we lost two pioneers this week…aaaaaagh,” tweeted Shaquille O’Neal, retired NBA great.

Davis’ impact reached beyond the football world. The Raiders’ team philosophy and swagger resonated with members of the hip-hop community including early pioneers of West Coast rap, N.W.A. – who would often wear Raiders apparel on stage and in videos. Davis even supplied N.W.A. with some team gear during the rap groups’ ascent into mainstream consciousness.

According to a tweet from Adam Schefter, the last person to interview Davis for ESPN was one of the original founders of N.W.A., Ice Cube.

“Rest in Power to The Al Davis “win baby win”. U will be missed,” tweeted Snoop Dogg, rapper.

“Damn…R.I.P. Al Davis… Unlike no other,fearless,content,consistent,& just an all around unforgettable figure in American football,” Lil Wayne, rapper.

Steve Jobs told us what we needed before we knew

Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it. He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use them.

Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it.

"To some people, this is like Elvis Presley or John Lennon. It's a change in our times. It's the end of an era," said Scott Robbins, 34, a barber and an Apple fan. "It's like the end of the innovators."

Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause. He died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a statement from family members who were present. He was 56.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple's board said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

President Barack Obama said in a statement that Jobs "exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity."

"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators -- brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world and talented enough to do it," he said.

Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January -- his third since his health problems began -- and resigned in August. Jobs became Apple's chairman and handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

Outside Apple's Cupertino headquarters, three flags -- an American flag, a California state flag and an Apple flag -- were flying at half-staff late Wednesday.

"Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor." Cook wrote in an email to Apple's employees. "Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."

The news Apple fans and shareholders had been dreading came the day after Apple unveiled its latest iPhone, a device that got a lukewarm reception. Perhaps, there would have been more excitement had Jobs been well enough to show it off with his trademark theatrics.

Jobs started Apple with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the company. During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable technology company in the world with a market value of $351 billion. Almost all that wealth has been created since Jobs' return.

Cultivating Apple's countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, Jobs rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.

He helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.

For transformation of American industry, he has few rivals. He has long been linked to his personal computer-age contemporary, Bill Gates, and has drawn comparisons to other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney. Jobs died as Walt Disney Co.'s largest shareholder, a by-product of his decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.

Perhaps most influentially, Jobs in 2001 launched the iPod, which offered "1,000 songs in your pocket." Over the next 10 years, its white earphones and thumb-dial control seemed to become more ubiquitous than the wristwatch.

In 2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, joined a year later by Apple's App Store, where developers could sell iPhone "apps" which made the phone a device not just for making calls but also for managing money, editing photos, playing games and social networking. And in 2010, Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch computer that took off even though market analysts said no one really needed one.

By 2011, Apple had become the second-largest company of any kind in the United States by market value. In August, it briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company.

Under Jobs, the company cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for each of its new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his customers wanted, and where demand didn't exist, he leveraged a cult-like following to create it.

When he spoke at Apple presentations, almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black mock turtleneck, legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He often boasted about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda - "one more thing" -- before introducing its latest ambitious idea.

In later years, Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues about his health. Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of pancreatic cancer -- an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He underwent surgery and said he had been cured. In 2009, following weight loss he initially attributed to a hormonal imbalance, he abruptly took a six-month leave. During that time, he received a liver transplant that became public two months after it was performed.

He went on another medical leave in January 2011, this time for an unspecified duration. He never went back and resigned as CEO in August, though he stayed on as chairman. Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, he didn't reference his illness in his resignation letter.

Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Simpson, then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson, who became a novelist.

Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs of Los Altos, California, a working-class couple who nurtured his early interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA's Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.

Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after six months.

"All of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it," he said at a Stanford University commencement address in 2005. "I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out."

When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club - a group of computer hobbyists - with Steve Wozniak, a high school friend who was a few years older.

Wozniak's homemade computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. According to Wozniak, Jobs suggested the name after visiting an "apple orchard" that Wozniak said was actually a commune.

Their first creation was the Apple I -- essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.

The Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age 25.

During a 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that allowed people to control computers with the click of a mouse, not typed commands. He returned to Apple and ordered his engineering team to copy what he had seen.

It foreshadowed a propensity to take other people's concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful products. Under Jobs, Apple didn't invent computers, digital music players or smartphones - it reinvented them for people who didn't want to learn computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of keeping their gadgets working.

"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," Jobs said in an interview for the 1996 PBS series "Triumph of the Nerds."

The engineers responded with two computers. The pricier Lisa - the same name as his daughter - launched to a cool reception in 1983. The less-expensive Macintosh, named for an employee's favorite apple, exploded onto the scene in 1984.

The Mac was heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George Orwell's "1984" and captured Apple's iconoclastic style. In the ad, expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen, which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the arrival of the Mac.

There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi, John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part because few programs had been written for it.

With Apple's stock price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the board and left Apple within months.

"What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating," Jobs said in his Stanford speech. "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

He got into two other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.

Pixar, ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless money pit. Then in 1995 came "Toy Story," the first computer-animated full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal with Disney for Pixar's next two films, "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story 2." Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock in a deal that got him a seat on Disney's board and 138 million shares of stock that accounted for most of his fortune. Forbes magazine estimated Jobs was worth $7 billion in a survey last month.

With Next, Jobs came up with a cube-shaped computer. He was said to be obsessive about the tiniest details, insisting on design perfection even for the machine's guts. The machine cost a pricey $6,500 to $10,000, and he never managed to spark much demand for it.

Ultimately, he shifted the focus to software -- a move that paid off later when Apple bought Next for its operating system technology, the basis for the software still used in Mac computers.

By 1996, when Apple bought Next, Apple was in dire financial straits. It had lost more than $800 million in a year, dragged its heels in licensing Mac software for other computers and surrendered most of its market share to PCs that ran Windows.

Larry Ellison, Jobs' close friend and fellow Silicon Valley billionaire and the CEO of Oracle Corp., publicly contemplated buying Apple in early 1997 and ousting its leadership. The idea fizzled, but Jobs stepped in as interim chief later that year.

He slashed unprofitable projects, narrowed the company's focus and presided over a new marketing push to set the Mac apart from Windows, starting with a campaign encouraging computer users to "Think different."

Apple's first new product under his direction, the brightly colored, plastic iMac, launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first year. Apple returned to profitability that year. Jobs dropped the "interim" from his title in 2000.

He changed his style, too, said Tim Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for Creative Strategies.

"In the early days, he was in charge of every detail. The only way you could say it is, he was kind of a control freak," he said. In his second stint, "he clearly was much more mellow and more mature."

In the decade that followed, Jobs kept Apple profitable while pushing out an impressive roster of new products.

Apple's popularity exploded in the 2000s. The iPod, smaller and sleeker with each generation, introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget.

The arrival of the iTunes music store in 2003 gave people a convenient way to buy music legally online, song by song. For the music industry, it was a mixed blessing. The industry got a way to reach Internet-savvy people who, in the age of Napster, were growing accustomed to downloading music free. But online sales also hastened the demise of CDs and established Apple as a gatekeeper, resulting in battles between Jobs and music executives over pricing and other issues.

Jobs' command over gadget lovers and pop culture swelled to the point that, on the eve of the iPhone's launch in 2007, faithful followers slept on sidewalks outside posh Apple stores for the chance to buy one. Three years later, at the iPad's debut, the lines snaked around blocks and out through parking lots, even though people had the option to order one in advance.

The decade was not without its glitches. In the mid-2000s, Apple was swept up in a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into stock options backdating, a practice that artificially raised the value of options grants. But Jobs and Apple emerged unscathed after two former executives took the fall and eventually settled with the SEC.

Jobs' personal ethos -- a natural food lover who embraced Buddhism and New Age philosophy -- was closely linked to the public persona he shaped for Apple. Apple itself became a statement against the commoditization of technology -- a cynical view, to be sure, from a company whose computers can cost three or more times as much as those of its rivals.

For technology lovers, buying Apple products has meant gaining entrance to an exclusive club. At the top was a complicated and contradictory figure who was endlessly fascinating -- even to his detractors, of which Jobs had many. Jobs was a hero to techno-geeks and a villain to partners he bullied and to workers whose projects he unceremoniously killed or claimed as his own.

Unauthorized biographer Alan Deutschman described him as "deeply moody and maddeningly erratic." In his personal life, Jobs denied for two years that he was the father of Lisa, the baby born to his longtime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978.

Few seemed immune to Jobs' charisma and will. He could adeptly convince those in his presence of just about anything - even if they disagreed again when he left the room and his magic wore off.

"He always has an aura around his persona," said Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for more than 20 years as a Creative Strategies analyst. "When you talk to him, you know you're really talking to a brilliant mind."

But Bajarin also remembers Jobs lashing out with profanity at an employee who interrupted their meeting. Jobs, the perfectionist, demanded greatness from everyone at Apple.

Jobs valued his privacy, but some details of his romantic and family life have been uncovered. In the early 1980s, Jobs dated the folk singer Joan Baez, according to Deutschman.

In 1989, Jobs spoke at Stanford's graduate business school and met his wife, Laurene Powell, who was then a student. When she became pregnant, Jobs at first refused to marry her. It was a near-repeat of what had happened more than a decade earlier with then-girlfriend Brennan, Deutschman said, but eventually Jobs relented.