First: The Inner Lives of Wartime Photographers

 

Covering conflict is perilous for anyone — reporters, local stringers, the drivers and interpreters we depend on — but photographers are more exposed, in at least two senses of the word. They need a sustained line of sight to frame their photographs; a reliable source is never enough. And they cannot avert their eyes; they have to let the images in, no matter how searing or disturbing. Robert Capa’s famous advice to younger photographers — “Get closer” — translates in combat to “get more vulnerable,” both literally and emotionally.

Back in 2000, Joao and Greg Marinovich, a shooter who was my partner and guide on journalistic adventures in South Africa, published a book called “The Bang-Bang Club,” about four photographer friends who worked together during the bloody death rattle of apartheid. By the time Greg and Joao wrote their account, they were the only survivors. Kevin Carter, a charismatic, talented, addled mess of a man, had run a garden hose from his exhaust pipe into his car and, while smoking a hypnotic mix of methaqualone and marijuana, composed a suicide note. That same year, 1994, Ken Oosterbroek, the grown-up of the quartet, was shot dead in a crossfire in Thokoza township. Greg, who was standing nearby that day, took a bullet to the chest but eventually recovered. After chasing wars around the globe for another five years and being wounded three more times, Greg retired from combat work to write and do less hazardous photography and video documentaries. And that left only Joao, wedded to the life and seemingly invulnerable.

When I called on Joao at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last week — where he is getting accustomed to his new robo-legs and fighting off waves of infection — Greg was also visiting. Most afternoons, Joao straps on his prostheses and circles the physical-therapy room for an hour and a half, clinging to a walker. He’s months from being able to walk on his own, and until then he’s confined to a bed or a wheelchair, attached to a colostomy bag and a stream of antibiotics. His attitude is amazingly resilient. (The first time I visited Walter Reed, I remarked that he didn’t seem to be any older. “No,” he replied, “but I’m a bit shorter.”) Still, the serial operations and infections have made him more somber. As medics came and went tending to Joao’s gauges and nozzles, we spent a few hours discussing the various predicaments of their field, beginning with the obvious mystery: Why do they do this crazy work?

They do it for the most mundane of reasons (to feed their families) and the most idealistic (to make the world pay attention) and the most visceral (it is exhilarating; it is fun) and the somewhat existential.

“It becomes your identity in so many ways,” Joao said. “This is my identity. This is all I’m known for. Nobody sends me out to go shoot beautiful pictures for travel articles, you know?”

Greg, while conceding there is much about the life he misses, implored his best friend to give it up. But Joao hopes to go back to it as soon as he is firmly on his high-tech feet.

“I wish I was in Libya right now,” he declared at one point.

“If this hadn’t happened, or if you were in a position physically, you would go back?” Greg asked.

“If I was in a position to, yeah. Why not?”

“Why not? You’re asking me? I don’t know, what about your family, Joao?”

Joao, who has an endlessly patient wife and two young children, paused for a time.

“The families are very brave,” he concluded.

Perhaps because they are the sharp end of our journalistic spear, combat photographers have long been subjected to mythologizing. The most common myths are that combat photographers are reckless of spirit, or why else would they take such chances, and hard-shelled of heart, or how else could they bear it? “The Bang-Bang Club” was just made into a movie (which played at the Tribeca Film Festival to disappointing reviews), and one of its failings is that it falls for both of these superficialities. It shows the moments of cowboy exuberance — Greg, played by Ryan Phillippe, sprinting across a sniper alley to fetch Cokes for his thirsty comrades — but ignores the exquisite caution, the calculation of every footfall, the patient diplomacy that is more the rule in conflict coverage.

Another scene has Greg, at the site of a massacre, carefully adjusting the lighting so he can photograph a dead child while his girlfriend breaks down in horror.

“Maybe you have to be like that to do what you do,” she tells him afterward.

“Be like what?” the movie version of Greg asks.

“I think you have to forget that those are real people.”

Bill Keller is executive editor of The New York Times.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An essay this weekend on Page 11, about photographers who cover wars, refers imprecisely to Chris Hondros, a photographer who was killed last month while covering Libya’s rebel militia. He was a senior staff photographer for the Getty Images agency, not a freelancer. The essay also misstates the year that Joao Silva was on assignment for The New York Times in Najaf, Iraq. It was 2004, not 2006.

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Keyboards First. Then Grenades.

General Greene, a senior official in the Army’s research and development engineering command, is among a cadre of high-ranking officials pushing for the military to embrace technologies that are already popular among consumers, like smartphones, video games and virtual worlds. The goal is to provide engaging training tools for soldiers who have grown up using sophisticated consumer electronics and are eager to incorporate them into their routine.

At a time of shrinking budgets, these tools are viewed as relatively inexpensive supplements to larger, costlier training equipment while also providing a surprisingly realistic training experience.

The military is already using some video games for recruitment and to train soldiers, and it has started experimenting with virtual worlds, as well. The tools are developed specifically for military use.

In addition, the Army recently held a contest for soldiers to determine who could develop the best smartphone app.

Among the apps now available on an Army Web site: bugle calls, body fat calculator, Army creeds, sniper awareness and capture avoidance. (Most apps are for both the iPhone and Android phones, but some are for just one system.)

“We have to adapt to where they are,” General Greene said, speaking of the need to appeal to young soldiers and teach them in ways, and on devices, they are accustomed to. “This is something we absolutely have to do.”

But efforts to vastly expand the use of virtual games and everyday electronics have run into a slew of obstacles, not the least of which is a military bureaucracy slow to embrace change.

Security concerns about soldiers using wireless devices on the battlefield are one problem, because transmissions have to be encrypted. Another obstacle is the lingering belief among some high-level officials that games, gadgets and avatars simply have no place in the military.

For now, the budget for video games and smartphones for military training is a relative pittance. For instance, the Army spends roughly $10 million to $20 million a year on licenses, modifications and development of Army games.

“Budgets are always an issue,” said Frank C. DiGiovanni, director for training readiness and strategy at the Defense Department. “What I’m trying to do is demonstrate these are extremely effective.”

Mr. DiGiovanni made his remarks at GameTech, a five-year-old convention that was held here in Orlando in March. It showcases the military’s expanding use of simulators, video games, virtual worlds and smartphones.

Besides the video games that allow soldiers to rehearse for combat, vendors were offering devices that provide cultural and language lessons, medical training and shooting practice.

While GameTech is tiny by convention standards, with just 775 participants and 29 vendors, several participants said they considered it major progress that such an event was being held, given the skepticism military leaders displayed toward video games a decade ago.

“When I started with this in ’99, you couldn’t use the word ‘game,’?” said James Korris, chief executive of Creative Technologies and a creator of one of the first military video games, Full Spectrum Warrior. “They were training guides, cognitive development tools.”

“GameTech?” he added. “Who would have thunk it?”

The military is partly responsible for the growth of the video game industry. For decades, it has created increasingly sophisticated simulators and computer-based war games.

Some of the people involved in the creation of those products went on to work for video game manufacturers, taking their expertise with them. Then, as commercial video games became more sophisticated, the military began borrowing ideas from them.

For instance, in the mid-1990s, some Marines tinkered with the popular Doom video game, replacing fantasy weapons with real ones and monsters with soldiers. A few years later, the military collaborated with academia and game developers to create Full Spectrum Warrior, which was designed to mimic combat.

 

Sony Introduces Its First Tablet Computers

TOKYO — Sony, a laggard in the booming tablet market, introduced its first tablet computers Tuesday in an ambitious attempt to grab second place in the market created and dominated by the iPad.

Sony’s devices will use the Android 3.0 operating system by Google, said Kunimasa Suzuki, deputy president of the consumer products and services group.

These will be the first tablets to enable the use of PlayStation games, said Mr. Suzuki, who produced one of the glossy black devices from his jacket pocket during a media presentation.

The tablets, code-named S1 and S2, will have Wi-Fi and will be compatible with 3G and 4G networks. Sony did not provide the retail prices.

The S1 has a display measuring 9.4 inches and is designed to make it easier to hold for long periods of time, Sony said. The S2 has two 5.5-inch displays in a clamshell design.

Mr. Suzuki raised eyebrows in January when he said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Sony was aiming for the No. 2 spot in the tablet market within a year even though it had yet to put a product on the market.

“That effectively means they have to beat Samsung, which is a very tough rival,” said Nobuo Kurahashi, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities in Tokyo. “Although this is an interesting product, they have already been left behind in televisions, so it’s not going to be easy.”

The company, which had been criticized by analysts for failing to come up with a tablet offering after the release of the iPad in April 2010, has emphasized the need to differentiate its tablet from rivals’, even if that takes time.

“Although it’s a latecomer in the market, it has potential, as what you need is just one big uniqueness that can sell to customers — be it design or whatever,” said Lee Sun-tae, an analyst at Meritz Securities in Seoul.

Global sales of tablet devices are expected to quadruple to about 294 million units between 2011 and 2015, with almost half of that Android-based, the research firm Gartner has forecast.

In a bid to tap that burgeoning demand, competitors including Samsung Electronics, whose Galaxy Tab is Apple’s strongest competitor in the tablet market; Motorola; LG Electronics; and HTC are flooding the market with tablets running Android. Hewlett-Packard unveiled its entrant in the tablet race in February.

Shares in Sony, which reports its quarterly results on May 26, fell 2.1 percent on Tuesday in Tokyo.

 

Sony Introduces Its First Tablet Computers

TOKYO — Sony, a laggard in the booming tablet market, introduced its first tablet computers Tuesday in an ambitious attempt to grab second place in the market created and dominated by the iPad.

Sony’s devices will use the Android 3.0 operating system by Google, said Kunimasa Suzuki, deputy president of the consumer products and services group.

These will be the first tablets to enable the use of PlayStation games, said Mr. Suzuki, who produced one of the glossy black devices from his jacket pocket during a media presentation.

The tablets, code-named S1 and S2, will have Wi-Fi and will be compatible with 3G and 4G networks. Sony did not provide the retail prices.

The S1 has a display measuring 9.4 inches and is designed to make it easier to hold for long periods of time, Sony said. The S2 has two 5.5-inch displays in a clamshell design.

Mr. Suzuki raised eyebrows in January when he said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that Sony was aiming for the No. 2 spot in the tablet market within a year even though it had yet to put a product on the market.

“That effectively means they have to beat Samsung, which is a very tough rival,” said Nobuo Kurahashi, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities in Tokyo. “Although this is an interesting product, they have already been left behind in televisions, so it’s not going to be easy.”

The company, which had been criticized by analysts for failing to come up with a tablet offering after the release of the iPad in April 2010, has emphasized the need to differentiate its tablet from rivals’, even if that takes time.

“Although it’s a latecomer in the market, it has potential, as what you need is just one big uniqueness that can sell to customers — be it design or whatever,” said Lee Sun-tae, an analyst at Meritz Securities in Seoul.

Global sales of tablet devices are expected to quadruple to about 294 million units between 2011 and 2015, with almost half of that Android-based, the research firm Gartner has forecast.

In a bid to tap that burgeoning demand, competitors including Samsung Electronics, whose Galaxy Tab is Apple’s strongest competitor in the tablet market; Motorola; LG Electronics; and HTC are flooding the market with tablets running Android. Hewlett-Packard unveiled its entrant in the tablet race in February.

Shares in Sony, which reports its quarterly results on May 26, fell 2.1 percent on Tuesday in Tokyo.

 

To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons

 

“The song has that triplet going on underneath that pushes it along, and at a certain point I wanted it to stop because the story suddenly turns very serious,” Mr. Simon said in an interview.

“The stopping of sounds and rhythms,” he added, “it’s really important, because, you know, how can I miss you unless you’re gone? If you just keep the thing going like a loop, eventually it loses its power.”

An insight like this may seem purely subjective, far removed from anything a scientist could measure. But now some scientists are aiming to do just that, trying to understand and quantify what makes music expressive — what specific aspects make one version of, say, a Beethoven sonata convey more emotion than another.

The results are contributing to a greater understanding of how the brain works and of the importance of music in human development, communication and cognition, and even as a potential therapeutic tool.

Research is showing, for example, that our brains understand music not only as emotional diversion, but also as a form of motion and activity. The same areas of the brain that activate when we swing a golf club or sign our name also engage when we hear expressive moments in music. Brain regions associated with empathy are activated, too, even for listeners who are not musicians.

And what really communicates emotion may not be melody or rhythm, but moments when musicians make subtle changes to the those musical patterns.

Daniel J. Levitin, director of the laboratory for music perception, cognition and expertise at McGill University in Montreal, began puzzling over musical expression in 2002, after hearing a live performance of one of his favorite pieces, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27.

“It just left me flat,” Dr. Levitin, who wrote the best seller “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton, 2006), recalled in a video describing the project. “I thought, well, how can that be? It’s got this beautiful set of notes. The composer wrote this beautiful piece. What is the pianist doing to mess this up?”

Before entering academia, Dr. Levitin worked in the recording industry, producing, engineering or consulting for Steely Dan, Blue ?yster Cult, the Grateful Dead, Santana, Eric Clapton and Stevie Wonder. He has played tenor saxophone with Mel Tormé and Sting, and guitar with David Byrne. (He also performs around campus with a group called Diminished Faculties.)

After the Mozart mishap, Dr. Levitin and a graduate student, Anjali Bhatara, decided to try teasing apart some elements of musical expression in a rigorous scientific way.

He likened it to tasting two different pots de crème: “One has allspice and ginger and the other has vanilla. You know they taste different but you can’t isolate the ingredient.”

To decipher the contribution of different musical flavorings, they had Thomas Plaunt, chairman of McGill’s piano department, perform snatches of several Chopin nocturnes on a Disklavier, a piano with sensors under each key recording how long he held each note and how hard he struck each key (a measure of how loud each note sounded). The note-by-note data was useful because musicians rarely perform exactly the way the music is written on the page — rather, they add interpretation and personality to a piece by lingering on some notes and quickly releasing others, playing some louder, others softer.

The pianist’s recording became a blueprint, what researchers considered to be the 100 percent musical rendition. Then they started tinkering. A computer calculated the average loudness and length of each note Professor Plaunt played. The researchers created a version using those average values so that the music sounded homogeneous and evenly paced, with every eighth note held for an identical amount of time, each quarter note precisely double the length of an eighth note.

They created other versions too: a 50 percent version, with note lengths and volume halfway between the mechanical average and the original, and versions at 25 percent, 75 percent, and even 125 percent and 150 percent, in which the pianist’s loud notes were even louder, his longest-held notes even longer.

Study subjects listened to them in random order, rating how emotional each sounded. Musicians and nonmusicians alike found the original pianist’s performance most emotional and the averaged version least emotional.

But it was not just changes in volume and timing that moved them. Versions with even more variation than the original, at 125 percent and 150 percent, did not strike listeners as more emotional.

“I think it means that the pianist is very experienced in using these expressive cues,” said Dr. Bhatara, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris Descartes. “He’s using them at kind of an optimal level.”

And random versions with volume and note-length changes arbitrarily sprinkled throughout made almost no impression.

All of this makes perfect sense to Paul Simon.

 

It’s Love at First Kill

A note to the uninitiated: World of Warcraft is a vast online game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, but it is also a social networking experience. When players aren’t battling monsters, their avatars are exploring fantastical landscapes (lush jungles, snowy forests, misty beaches), where they can meet and gab via the game’s instant message feature, or through voice communication software.

And so Ms. Langman and Mr. Bentley found a quiet spot for their avatars to sit. Hours evaporated as they discussed everything from their families to their futures. Sometime before dawn, Ms. Langman realized that while she was in the fictional world of Azeroth, she was also on a date.

For the next two months, Ms. Langman, 27, and Mr. Bentley, 24, rendezvoused in Azeroth, until one day they decided to meet in Santa Barbara instead. When Mr. Bentley stepped onto the tarmac at the Santa Barbara airport on a bright October afternoon in 2008, Ms. Langman ran to him. Mr. Bentley scooped her up into his arms and spun her around.

He had planned to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to Atlanta. But two weeks became two years, and Mr. Bentley and Ms. Langman are still together.

Who knew a World of Warcraft subscription could deliver more romance than Match.com?

Ms. Langman and Mr. Bentley are hardly the only couple to have forged an avatar love connection. Gaming forums are rife with anecdotes from players who are dating and marrying. Some couples have even had their avatars marry. (You can watch videos of the ceremonies on YouTube.)

And while it may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, more people are likely to meet this way as the genre (known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) continues to grow. With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

“It’s giving people something that they’re missing in the real world,” said Ramona Pringle, an interactive media producer and a professor of new media at the Ryerson School of Image Arts in Toronto. “It is a really primal experience. It’s about survival. It’s about needing someone.”

Ms. Pringle, 29, first observed gamer love connections while working as an interactive producer for the PBS “Frontline” project called “Digital Nation.” At BlizzCon 2009, a gaming convention in California, she was stunned by the number of die-hard gamers holding hands and pushing baby carriages.

She thought about her friends: successful, striking and yet struggling to find love. She herself — willowy with wide green eyes — had just had a breakup with a boyfriend. “What’s going on that these people we consider the fringe, these gamers, are finding love?” she said, nursing a beer at a bar in Austin, Tex., last month during the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She wanted to see what gaming might teach her about love.

So instead of turning to religion or therapy to mend her heart, Ms. Pringle said, she turned to World of Warcraft.

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 percent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

To help her navigate World of Warcraft, Ms. Pringle enlisted Brent George, the animation director for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, to be her guide. They began playing last summer — she from Toronto, he from Montreal — as many as six hours a night.

As Ms. Pringle tumbled down the rabbit hole, she found herself directing her avatar — Tristanova, a graceful blue-skinned night elf priest — to run excitedly up to Mr. George’s avatar, Caethis, a heroic-looking warrior. “It’s remarkable to me that you can have a crush on someone’s avatar,” Ms. Pringle said.

But she did. The two have never been romantically involved, yet when Mr. George told her that he would be her knight in shining armor, “I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat,” she said, “even though we hadn’t met in person.”

Multiplayer games encourage such alliances. The beginner’s guide to World of Warcraft notes that you can go it alone, “but by going it alone, you won’t be able to master some of the game’s tougher challenges, you will likely take longer to reach the endgame, and you won’t have access to the game’s most powerful magical treasures.” Ms. Pringle thinks that is analogous to love.

 

It’s Love at First Kill

A note to the uninitiated: World of Warcraft is a vast online game where monsters are meant to be vanquished, but it is also a social networking experience. When players aren’t battling monsters, their avatars are exploring fantastical landscapes (lush jungles, snowy forests, misty beaches), where they can meet and gab via the game’s instant message feature, or through voice communication software.

And so Ms. Langman and Mr. Bentley found a quiet spot for their avatars to sit. Hours evaporated as they discussed everything from their families to their futures. Sometime before dawn, Ms. Langman realized that while she was in the fictional world of Azeroth, she was also on a date.

For the next two months, Ms. Langman, 27, and Mr. Bentley, 24, rendezvoused in Azeroth, until one day they decided to meet in Santa Barbara instead. When Mr. Bentley stepped onto the tarmac at the Santa Barbara airport on a bright October afternoon in 2008, Ms. Langman ran to him. Mr. Bentley scooped her up into his arms and spun her around.

He had planned to stay for a couple of weeks before returning to Atlanta. But two weeks became two years, and Mr. Bentley and Ms. Langman are still together.

Who knew a World of Warcraft subscription could deliver more romance than Match.com?

Ms. Langman and Mr. Bentley are hardly the only couple to have forged an avatar love connection. Gaming forums are rife with anecdotes from players who are dating and marrying. Some couples have even had their avatars marry. (You can watch videos of the ceremonies on YouTube.)

And while it may sound like something out of a science fiction novel, more people are likely to meet this way as the genre (known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs) continues to grow. With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

“It’s giving people something that they’re missing in the real world,” said Ramona Pringle, an interactive media producer and a professor of new media at the Ryerson School of Image Arts in Toronto. “It is a really primal experience. It’s about survival. It’s about needing someone.”

Ms. Pringle, 29, first observed gamer love connections while working as an interactive producer for the PBS “Frontline” project called “Digital Nation.” At BlizzCon 2009, a gaming convention in California, she was stunned by the number of die-hard gamers holding hands and pushing baby carriages.

She thought about her friends: successful, striking and yet struggling to find love. She herself — willowy with wide green eyes — had just had a breakup with a boyfriend. “What’s going on that these people we consider the fringe, these gamers, are finding love?” she said, nursing a beer at a bar in Austin, Tex., last month during the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She wanted to see what gaming might teach her about love.

So instead of turning to religion or therapy to mend her heart, Ms. Pringle said, she turned to World of Warcraft.

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 percent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

To help her navigate World of Warcraft, Ms. Pringle enlisted Brent George, the animation director for James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, to be her guide. They began playing last summer — she from Toronto, he from Montreal — as many as six hours a night.

As Ms. Pringle tumbled down the rabbit hole, she found herself directing her avatar — Tristanova, a graceful blue-skinned night elf priest — to run excitedly up to Mr. George’s avatar, Caethis, a heroic-looking warrior. “It’s remarkable to me that you can have a crush on someone’s avatar,” Ms. Pringle said.

But she did. The two have never been romantically involved, yet when Mr. George told her that he would be her knight in shining armor, “I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat,” she said, “even though we hadn’t met in person.”

Multiplayer games encourage such alliances. The beginner’s guide to World of Warcraft notes that you can go it alone, “but by going it alone, you won’t be able to master some of the game’s tougher challenges, you will likely take longer to reach the endgame, and you won’t have access to the game’s most powerful magical treasures.” Ms. Pringle thinks that is analogous to love.

 

FIRST Open Source Robotics Competitions Teach Collaboration

Among unsung open source collaboration efforts, the FIRST annual robotics competition deserves much more attention than it gets. Aimed at students, including young children, noted inventor of the Segway scooter Dean Kamen is behind the program, which challenges students to develop open source robotics software and components, with prizes for the winners. This program tends to fly mostly under the radar, but year after year it produces ever more interesting incentives for students.

David Strom has a notable report about his visit to a regional FIRST competition in St. Louis. He writes:

"FIRST has been around for 20 years, and if you haven't seen or participated, you might want to think about doing both. There are more than 2,000 teams from 60 countries....What I found interesting was seeing how groups of kids have to collaborate to work on fairly big projects in very limited time: they have to design, buy, build and market the necessary spare parts to build a robot in just a few weeks' time, then ship it off to St. Louis and try to make it work under extreme duress during the competitions."

From April 27 to 30th in St. Louis, anyone can visit the finals of the FIRST robotics competition.? As noted here, pop star Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas is a supporter of FIRST, and President Obama has stopped by FIRST competitions to encourage young roboticists. Kamen, too, participates in the competitions.

Over the past several years, open source robotics has hit a number of milestones. We rounded up several of the notable projects going on around the world in this post.? The FIRST competition goes beyond just challenging kids to build open source robots, though. Over 146 colleges participate in the FIRST program, and one in three applications from young FIRST participants for college scholarship funds gets accepted.

This program does a lot of good, and introduces young people to open source collaboration. All FIRST competitions are free to attend. Check one out in your area.?

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