Drones were a big part of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show for the first time ever. Hundreds of the devices helped this year’s performer, Lady Gaga, kick her show off, presenting a colorful, swirling backdrop as she stood on the roof of Houston’s NRG Stadium. But as Gaga herself seemed to leap from the roof, dropping down to the stadium to start her show proper, her army of drones didn’t follow.
That’s because the drone shows were actually filmed earlier this week, as Intel confirmed to The Verge. That includes Gaga’s intro sequence, which saw her dancing in front of an American flag, and a later 10-second spot that featured the drones as they changed from the Pepsi to Intel logos. Restrictions placed on the area by the Federal Aviation Administration forbid drones from flying within a 34.5-mile radius of the NRG Stadium, in addition to other rules that bar drones from hovering too high, or from doing acrobatic maneuvers directly above hundreds of thousands of people.
It’s probably the first time you’ve seen 300 drones flying in formation, but it’s almost certainly not the last. The technology underpinning the Intel Shooting Star drone system is fascinating in and of itself, but its potential applications are even more so. The same drones that accompanied Lady Gaga will one day revolutionize search-and-rescue, agriculture, halftime shows, and more.
First, though, let’s focus on the fun stuff.
Drone Show Performing for a global audience of about 160 million or so people represents this drone platform’s biggest stage, but Intel has done this before. The company’s Shooting Star drone squad recently finished a three-week run at Disney World, and last year 500 synchronized drones flew in Sydney, setting the highly specific world record for “most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.”
NEWS HIGHLIGHTS • Three hundred Intel® Shooting Star™ drones light up the sky over Lady Gaga to kick off the Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl LI Halftime Show performance. • Following the show, a 10-second Intel ad showcased the drones forming a Pepsi logo that morphed into an Intel logo.
このプレスリリースでTOEICでおなじみの以下の表現で特設サイトを案内しています。
For more information on Intel Shooting Star drone light shows, visit “Intel Drones Light up the Sky,” and for more information on the Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl LI Halftime Show, visit www.pepsihalftime.com.
Red Zones and Red Tape Student of Super Bowl security measures and FAA regulations may by this point have some questions. The government strictly forbids drones within 34.5 miles of Houston’s NRG Stadium, after all, and the FAA limits on how high drones can fly in any circumstance, let alone above 80,000 or so people. How on earth did Intel get away with it? The short answer is, it taped the show earlier this week. The long answer is worth exploring though, because it provides insight into the evolution of Shooting Star system and where it might go from here. Preparations kicked off in early December, when Intel’s engineers started wading into the mind-numbing logistics of choreographing 300 dancing drones. Do they fly inside the stadium? How are they integrated into what Lady Gaga is doing onstage? Is the stadium’s domed roof open or closed? “The whole halftime is a huge execution monster of an exercise,” says Anil Nanduri, who leads Intel’s drone efforts. Once Intel and the Super Bowl creative team understood the restraints, they started storyboarding the show, settling on a sparkling array of stars that culminates in one giant, glittering, fluttering flag effect. Oh, and also the Pepsi logo, which was at least blue if not red and white. It was a brief performance, and secondary to Gaga’s onstage glitter and glam. Pulling it off, though, was a feat. The team required a dispensation from the feds—an especially tricky task given that NRG Stadium sits within Houston Hobby Airport’s air traffic control jurisdiction, and that Intel and the NFL had just weeks to put it all together.
Two publications have broken with their respective histories to wade into the presidential election: WIRED, which released a ringing endorsement of Hillary Clinton Thursday, and Scientific American, which did not endorse a candidate, but came out strongly in an article for the September 1 issue condemning Donald Trump’s anti-science views.
Scientific American is not in the business of endorsing political candidates. But we do take a stand for science—the most reliable path to objective knowledge the world has seen—and the Enlightenment values that gave rise to it. For more than 170 years we have documented, for better and for worse, the rise of science and technology and their impact on the nation and the world. We have strived to assert in our reporting, writing and editing the principle that decision making in the sphere of public policy should accept the conclusions that evidence, gathered in the spirit and with the methods of science, tells us to be true.
For nearly a quarter of a century, this organization has championed a specific way of thinking about tomorrow. If it’s true, as the writer William Gibson once had it, that the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, then our task has been to locate the places where various futures break through to our present and identify which one we hope for.
Our founders—Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly—all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley. The future they endorsed was the one they saw manifested in the early Internet: one where self-organizing networks would replace old hierarchies. To them, the US government was one of those kludgy, inefficient legacy systems that mainly just get in the way.
Over the past couple of decades, we’ve gotten to watch their future play out: We’ve seen the creative energies of countless previously invisible communities unleashed—and, well, we’ve watched networks become just as good at concentrating wealth and influence in the hands of a few people as the old hierarchies were. We’ve seen geeks become billionaires, autocrats become hackers, and our readers (people curious about how technology is shaping the world) become the American mainstream. Like any sane group of thinkers, we’ve calibrated our judgments along the way. But much of our worldview hasn’t changed. We value freedom: open systems, open markets, free people, free information, free inquiry. We’ve become even more dedicated to scientific rigor, good data, and evidence-driven thinking. And we’ve never lost our optimism.
I bring all this up because, for all of its opinions and enthusiasms, WIRED has never made a practice of endorsing candidates for president of the United States. Through five election cycles we’ve written about politics and politicians and held them up against our ideals. But we’ve avoided telling you, our readers, who WIRED viewed as the best choice.
Today we will. WIRED sees only one person running for president who can do the job: Hillary Clinton.
No one, not even a bacterium, likes being infected by a virus, and early in evolution, bacteria developed a way to destroy viruses with exquisitely precise attacks. Very recently, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna figured out the inner workings of this bacterial self-protection, and then, in a tour de force of elegant deduction and experiment, they developed a plug-and-play version of that approach. Their technique, CRISPR-Cas9, gives scientists the power to remove or add genetic material at will. Working with cells in a lab, geneticists have used this technology to cut out HIV, to correct sickle-cell anemia and to alter cancer cells to make them more susceptible to chemotherapy. With CRISPR-Cas9, a scientist could, in theory, alter any human gene. This is a true breakthrough, the implications of which we are just beginning to imagine.
King is a geneticist and the discoverer of the BRCA1 cancer gene
IN A WAY, humans were genetic engineers long before anyone knew what a gene was. They could give living things new traits—sweeter kernels of corn, flatter bulldog faces—through selective breeding. But it took time, and it didn't always pan out. By the 1930s refining nature got faster. Scientists bombarded seeds and insect eggs with x-rays, causing mutations to scatter through genomes like shrapnel. If one of hundreds of irradiated plants or insects grew up with the traits scientists desired, they bred it and tossed the rest. That's where red grapefruits came from, and most barley for modern beer.
Genome modification has become less of a crapshoot. In 2002, molecular biologists learned to delete or replace specific genes using enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases; the next-generation technique used enzymes named TALENs. Yet the procedures were expensive and complicated. They only worked on organisms whose molecular innards had been thoroughly dissected—like mice or fruit flies. Genome engineers went on the hunt for something better.
ちょうどアメリカ版WiredのCover StoryがUnsung Geniusesという特集を組んでいました。Most of the time, the people doing the asking are not household names—not the Musks or Sandbergs of the world. They’re unsung talents, the ones doing the actual work of innovation, sleeves rolled up, meals skipped, families missed.とセレブになっていないイノベータを紹介するのが目的のようです。
A FEW TIMES a year, I get to see demonstrations of some of the most mind-blowing technologies and designs—explode-your-head kind of stuff—and I can’t tell a soul about them. Nobody, not even my wife. And certainly not you. Just imagine: You receive an invite from an engineering or product lead to come down and visit with a few folks at, er, Giant Tech Multinational to check out a new project, something they’re excited about and want some feedback on. Most of the time, the people doing the asking are not household names—not the Musks or Sandbergs of the world. They’re unsung talents, the ones doing the actual work of innovation, sleeves rolled up, meals skipped, families missed.
AS ARTIFICIAL intelligence becomes integral to everything from health care to home heating systems, you can think of Yoky Matsuoka as one of the chief architects of the future. The winner of a MacArthur “genius” award, Matsuoka was on the founding team of Google X and helped build the Nest smart thermostat. At 43, she’s a polymath who has studied computer science, electrical engineering, neuroscience, robotics, and mechanical engineering. Her aim is nothing less than blending elements of each of these fields to redefine the relationship humans can have with technology. “With the combination of technology and neuroscience, there are so many things we can achieve,” Matsuoka says.
Her path to invention began with tennis. At 16, she came to the United States from Japan to improve her game, then attended UC Berkeley. After multiple injuries, she gave up her professional tennis ambitions and turned to engineering, focusing on building a robot that could play tennis with her. This pursuit brought her to MIT, where she got a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science. But her tennis buddy, as she called the robot, fell short. “The limitation wasn’t in engineering or computer science but in understanding the human brain,” she says. So she began studying computational neuroscience: “I thought, ‘I’m going to create a brand-new way to study artificial intelligence.’” She became a pioneer in the emerging field of neurobotics.
This was part of the larger work that the MacArthur Foundation recognized in 2007.とUnsungといっても作家のAdichieも受賞していたMacArthur Foundationをもらっているのですから、業界では有名な方なのでしょう。TOEIC的には受賞関連で使われる場合の動詞recognizeを抑えておきたいですね。
Words checked = [3469] Words in Oxford 3000™ = [86%]
昨年の秋に、フランス、ドイツ、オーストリア、ベルギー、スイス、ルクセンブルクに進出したようです。
Lean and silver-haired, with a goatee and an easy-going, laconic manner, Hastings, 54, sits in Netflix's European headquarters, which overlooks a canal in the heart of Amsterdam. The space is so new that it's almost entirely empty, although the artwork has been finished: graffiti art adorns the walls, and doors have been decorated with unnerving, life-size blow-up portraits of characters from some of the channel's best known series, including a malevolent George "Pornstache" Mendez (played by Pablo Schreiber) from Orange Is the New Black. Hastings is in the Dutch capital to host a dinner with journalists to mark Netflix's first anniversary in the Netherlands, and to oversee the firm's push into Europe.
France was one of six territories into which Netflix launched in autumn 2014 (the others were Germany, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg), as growth in the core US market, where the service currently has 37.2 million customers, inevitably starts to slow. (Hastings has said that, in the long term, he's aiming for between 60 million and 90 million subscribers in the US.) Next on his list are central, eastern and southern Europe. "We've got Asia, the Middle East and Africa still to go," he says. "Our basic view is that we want to make Netflix available everywhere in the world."
Hunt explains that to ensure streaming quality, Netflix has purpose-built its own content-delivery network (CDN) called Open Connect -- essentially, a set of servers that house Netflix video that the company offers to ISPs either to install directly into their own networks, or to connect with at common internet exchange points throughout the world.
"If the data is travelling a shorter distance -- the industry calls it the last mile -- it makes things work substantially better," he says. "But in many ways, the real smarts happen on the client end. We leverage very straightforward, conventional protocols -- in this case just http -- to gather data very efficiently and use it as effectively as possible. A key piece of that is adaptive streaming. We can pick and choose which of several different versions of the video and audio to request and deliver, in order to get the best picture that your particular internet connection is capable of. We spend a lot of time trading off how quickly and how aggressively it shifts up to higher-quality levels, and how much buffer to retain, so it never stops, never freezes and doesn't interrupt unless there's absolutely no alternative."
Netflix's second differentiator lies in its use of data, terabytes of which are analysed to build recommendations for each subscriber. Every title on the service is tagged and cross-referenced with a vast array of global viewer data, including what an individual subscriber watched and how they watched it. Did they binge watch seven episodes in a row, for instance? Did they fast forward through certain sections, or rewind to rewatch a particular scene? Or if they abandoned a film, when did they do so? And what did they click on next?
According to Kevin Slavin, assistant professor and founder of Playful Systems at MIT Media Lab, this has far-reaching implications for legacy television's business and delivery models. "The premise of lining up entertainment around a demographic, which is basically what networks do, may fall apart when you place it next to lining up entertainment around a person, which is what Netflix does," he says. "It's not just the shift in availability, or mode of consumption, but it's also the shift in how decisions get made about what to watch. It's true that one of the single biggest determinants about whether a show is going to get watched on linear network television is what was on right before it. But if you're given an alternative [way to choose] that seems to be vastly preferable."
As Hastings tells it, Netflix's breakout moment came 13 years after the company was founded. In 2010 the company had just launched into Canada, its first new territory. Until then, the Netflix model had been a hybrid of DVDs -- which were ordered online and delivered via the post -- and streaming. But north of the border they opted, with some trepidation, to go to market offering a streaming-only service.
"It was a beautiful day in Toronto," Hastings says, sitting in the Netflix office in Amsterdam, "and because we'd spent the day doing demos, we didn't know what our [Canadian launch] numbers were. That night we got them and found that the number of sign-ups was like ten times larger than we'd thought it would be. That was just shocking and I remember thinking, 'Gosh, streaming works!' That was the beginning of our great, global expansion."
Netflixは高画質の4kテレビにも積極的に取り組むようです。
A single-lane, superfast connection is, of course, integral to Hastings' vision for the next frontier for television, which he believes centres on both internet streaming -- which he predicts will account for around 50 per cent of all viewing in the US by 2020 -- and on 4K Ultra HD television (with a resolution of 3,840 x 2,160 pixels). This is the first format that's internet-centric, rather than broadcast-centric, he says. The shift from standard- to high-definition TV has been slow because it didn't make sense for traditional broadcasters to change their signal when only five per cent of consumers owned an HD TV set, he says. "And there was no incentive for consumers to buy an HD TV if they couldn't get any content on it -- so that chicken-and-egg problem forestalls the development of better audio-visual standards.
"But the internet solves that, because we can now have one in a thousand people buy a 4K television, and then Netflix can supply them, over the internet, with 4K content. So then you can, much more quickly, move from one in a thousand, to one in a hundred, to one in ten, to almost everybody, because you don't have to switch over the whole broadcast spectrum. You can treat each individual as an individual. So we're very big on 4K Ultra HD television, which is the next big wave, and you'll see TVs now out there at £1,500, and coming down. Samsung and Sony are both being very aggressive in pushing that -- and we're their primary source of 4K content."
![Wired [UK] February 2015 (単号)](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51KMBF-7UgL._SL160_.jpg)
