Fall movie preview
By Richard Roeper
CONVENTIONAL movie wisdom says summer is for superheroes and sequels, reboots and R-rated comedies — but come autumn, it’s time for the potential classics, the Oscar contenders, “grown-up” movies.
Gender bender
LONDON — Scottish-born author Ali Smith has received a number of honors for her gender-bending novel How to be both that explores issues of sexual identity from Renaissance times to the present, the most recent being the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in June.
Smith’s sixth novel, which had been short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, focuses on an Italian Renaissance painter who disguises herself as a man in order to pursue her artistic passions, and on a modern teenage girl named George grappling with the death of her mother and with her emerging sexuality.
“Ancient and modern meet and speak to each other in this tender, brilliant and witty novel of grief, love, sexuality and shape-shifting identity,” Chair of Judges Shami Chakrabarti said in a statement announcing the winner. The prize is awarded to a work of fiction written in English by a woman anywhere in the world and carries a £30,000 ($46,000) cash prize.
Smith’s critically well-received book intertwines the story of the actual Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa, who disguised her femininity in order to create frescoes in a palazzo in Ferrara, and the fictional George, who is struggling to cope with the sudden death of her mother, with whom she had traveled to Italy to see Del Cossa’s works.
The book has the added twist of coming in two editions, one of which begins with Del Cossa’s story and the other with George’s.
“At its heart, How to be both… is an eloquent challenge to the binary notions governing our existence. Why, Smith seems to ask, should we expect a book to run from A to B, by way of a recognizable plot and subplot, peopled by characters who are easily understood to be one thing or another?,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper said in a review.
Smith, who was born in Inverness in August 1962 and lives in Cambridge, won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1995 for her first collection of stories, Free Love.
Her novels include Hotel World, which was short-listed for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize, and The Accidental which won the Whitbread Novel Award. — Reuters
West Virginia engineer proves to be a David to VW’s Goliath
MORGANTOWN, W.V. — Daniel Carder, an unassuming 45-year-old engineer with gray hair and blue jeans, appears an unlikely type to take down one of the world’s most powerful companies.
But he and his small research team at West Virginia University may have done exactly that, with a $50,000 study which produced early evidence that Volkswagen AG (VW) was cheating on US vehicle emissions tests, setting off a scandal that threatens the German automaker’s leadership, reputation and finances.
“The testing we did kind of opened the can of worms,” Mr. Carder says of his five-member engineering team and the research project that found much higher on-road diesel emission levels for VW vehicles than what US regulators were seeing in tests.
The results of that study, which was paid for by the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in late 2012 and completed in May 2013, were later corroborated by the US Environmental Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board (CARB).
Mr. Carder’s team — a research professor, two graduate students, a faculty member and himself — performed road tests around Los Angeles and up the West Coast to Seattle that generated results so pronounced that they initially suspected a problem with their own research.
“The first thing you do is beat yourself up and say, ‘Did we not do something right?’ You always blame yourself,” he told Reuters in an interview. “(We) saw huge discrepancies. There was one vehicle with 15 to 35 times the emissions levels and another vehicle with 10 to 20 times the emissions levels.”
Despite the discrepancies, a fix shouldn’t involve major changes. “It could be something very small,” said Mr. Carder, who’s the interim director of West Virginia University’s Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines and Emissions in Morgantown, about 320 kilometers west of Washington in the Appalachian foothills.
“It can simply be a change in the fuel injection strategy. What might be realized is a penalty in fuel economy in order to get these systems more active, to lower the emissions levels.”
Mr. Carder said he’s surprised to see such a hullabaloo now, because his team’s findings were made public nearly a year and a half ago.
“We actually presented this data in a public forum and were actually questioned by Volkswagen,” said Carder.
The ICCT’s research contract to Mr. Carder’s team was sparked by separate findings by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center, which showed a discrepancy between test results and real world performance in European diesel engines.
The diesel vehicles chosen for the West Virginia study were the VW Passat, the VW Jetta and the BMW X5. Unlike the VW vehicles, Mr. Carder said the BMW vehicle “performed very nicely — at, or below, the certification emission levels.”
West Virginia University is not new to groundbreaking emissions research, having helped create the first technology to measure vehicle emissions on the road more than 15 years ago.
Mr. Carder belonged to a 15-member West Virginia University team that pioneered portable emissions testing as part of a 1998 settlement between the US Justice department and several heavy duty diesel engine makers including Caterpillar, Inc. and Cummins Engine Co.
The manufacturers agreed to pay $83.4 million in civil penalties after federal officials found evidence that they were selling heavy duty diesel engines equipped with “defeat devices” that allowed the engines to meet EPA emission standards during testing but disabled the emission control system during normal highway driving.
When the news about Volkswagen broke last Friday, Mr. Carder heard from some of the heavy diesel engine manufacturers that were part of the consent decree.
“They saw what had happened and called to say: ‘Good job, you guys,’” Mr. Carder said. “Some folks said: ‘How did they not learn from our mistakes 15 years ago?’”
Regarding his role in unearthing the current scandal, Mr. Carder said there was no particular sense of excitement when his team confirmed that the higher VW emission results were real and not a consequence of faulty measurements.
“There’s no incentive for us to pass or fail,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t want to see something spewing emissions and polluting the environment. But we really have no horse in the race, as they say.” — Reuters
Lower doses of heart meds save lives
MIAMI — People who suffered a heart attack lived longer when their dose of a medication known as a beta-blocker was a quarter of the amount commonly prescribed, researchers said on Monday.
The study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology involved more than 6,000 patients whose survival post-heart attack was compared according to the amount of beta-blockers they were prescribed afterward.
Beta-blockers help ward off heart failure by stopping the effect of adrenaline on the heart and preventing arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat. They are prescribed to nearly everyone who has had a heart attack.
The study found that patients taking one-fourth the dose tested in large clinical trials had a 20% to 25% increase in survival, compared to those on the standard dose.
The findings came as a surprise to lead investigator Jeffrey Goldberger, a professor of medicine in cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
He began the study after discovering heart attack patients were being treated with much lower doses of beta-blockers than were used in clinical trials.
“We expected to see patients treated with the lower doses to have worse survival,” said Mr. Goldberger.
“We were shocked to discover they survived just as well, and possibly even better.”
The study of 6,682 people showed that of those people who received the full dose, 14.7% died within two years.
Among those taking a half dose, 12.9% died in two years and for those taking a quarter dose, 9.5% died.
Earlier clinical trials did not assess the most appropriate beta-blocker doses for individual patients.
Mr. Goldberger said new studies should be launched to figure out how to best treat patients and avoid side effects such as fatigue, sexual dysfunction and depression.
“There is probably not one right dose for every single patient,” Mr. Goldberger said.
“It doesn’t make sense that the same dose will work for an 80-year-old frail man who had a small heart attack as a burly 40-year-old man with a huge heart attack.” — AFP
Forever blowing bubbles
BUBBLES may seem pretty ordinary to the naked eye, but for Louis Pearl, the world’s leading “bubbleologist,” there is more to them than meets the eye.
Pearl — known as “The Amazing Bubble Man” — is currently performing his one-man show at the RCBC Plaza’s Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium in Makati until Sept. 27. There he unravels the art, magic, science, and fun of bubbles.
The 75-minute spectacle, produced by Lunch Theatrical Productions and Concertus Manila, explores the dynamics of bubbles through entertainment and audience participation, while explaining some fascinating facts about bubbles — bringing science to life in a fun manner.
The show features a wide range of science themes, which include subjects such as the colors of bubbles, the physics of soap and water molecules, aerodynamics, and surface tension, among others.
Pearl, who has been bubbling professionally since 1980, began exploring the different aspects of bubbles when he started the Tangent Toy Company. He began performing in 1983 with a show at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
For nearly three decades, Pearl has performed to more than one million people in hundreds of cities around the world. He is a favorite at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, performing his eighth successive season this year.
A literature and art graduate, he has written two books about bubbles, has made a video called Lights, Camera, Bubbles!, and has so far produced 21 fantastic bubble inventions.
Tickets to the show are available at TicketWorld (891-9999, www.ticketworld.com.ph).
Boom time for Filipino writers
By Nickky Faustine P. de Guzman
PRINT’S NOT DEAD. Philippine Literature is not dead. It’s alive and perhaps, livelier than ever before.
Five new areas pushed as diving destinations
By Joseph L. Garcia
IT’S NOT JUST Coron, anymore, folks — five new “rising stars” among diving spots were pinpointed by the Department of Tourism (DoT).
Art with a colonial flavor
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE, MEXICO — With cobblestone streets and no traffic lights, San Miguel de Allende has the look of a sleepy Mexican town.