Open Sesame - the keyless wonder

Oliwia Dabrowska has spoken of her 'years of trauma and shame' after her role in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. How have other child actors reacted to their roles in disturbing movies – and how do directors protect them?The movie industry has a bag of tricks to get children to do what a director wants, from opening up a present to get that "excited" reaction shot, to telling the kid their dog has died to wring out the tears. The latter is frowned upon these days, though it still works on many grownup actors. But what if the child is in a movie they would be way too young to watch?The issue resurfaced recently when Oliwia Dabrowska recounted how her role as the totemic Girl in the Red Coat in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List had "led to years of trauma and shame".
Not because of the experience itself, but because it inspired her to watch Schindler's List when she was

just

11, thus witnessing scenes of death and torture most adults would find harrowing. (To be fair, Spielberg had made her promise to wait until she turned 18.)
To make matters worse, Dabrowska says, she was often asked about the Holocaust, as if having been in the movie as a toddler had made her an expert on the subject.As
with Dabrowska, the golden rule used to be: keep the kids in the dark. Monty Python simply never told the children what Every Sperm Is Sacred meant when making The Meaning Of Life, just as the kid in The Shining never realised he was in a horror movie.
Linda Blair claims she didn't really know what she was doing when she was asked to spout profanities and simulate masturbation with a crucifix for The Exorcist – even if that sounds like a case for social services today.
Far worse, Blair says, was the way people treated her after the movie came out.
They were frightened of her, as if she had actually been possessed. Blair's career was subsequently blighted by drug problems.With scary children more in demand than ever, directors have become more responsible, though, and it often looks worse than it really is. Nicole Kidman's bath scene with a 10-year-old boy in 2004's Birth, for example, caused an uproar, until it transpired that she and her co-star, Cameron Bright, were not actually naked, and their scenes were mostly filmed separately. Bright went on to land roles in the Twilight movies, among others.The
message

seems to be: handled badly, putting kids into mature movies can turn out disastrously; handled well, it can still turn out disastrously. Then again, Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields survived

playing child prostitutes in Taxi Driver and Pretty Baby, but Drew Barrymore went off the rails after doing ET.
So maybe it's clickbank pirate fault?HorrorSteve Roseguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.
All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Laura Perna, a researcher in college finance and affordability, answers select reader questions about paying for college. Part 1.In its ongoing challenge to attract more users to Windows 8, Microsoft is offering bits of its Bing Internet search service to boost the functionality of third-party Windows Store applications.     Sometimes the fastest pathway from point A to point B is not a straight line: for example, if you’re underwater and contending with strong and shifting currents.
But figuring out the best route in such settings is a monumentally complex problem — especially if you’re trying to do it not just for one underwater vehicle, but for a swarm of them moving all at once toward separate destinations.
But that’s just what a team of engineers at MIT has figured out how to do, in research results to be presented in May at the annual IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The team, led by Pierre Lermusiaux, the Doherty Associate Professor in Ocean Utilization, developed a mathematical procedure that can optimize path planning for automated underwater vehicles (AUVs), even in regions with complex shorelines and strong shifting currents. The system can provide paths optimized either for the shortest travel time or for the minimum use of energy, or to maximize the collection of data that is considered most important.Collections of propelled AUVs and gliding AUVs (also called gliders) are now often used for mapping and oceanographic research, for military reconnaissance and harbor protection, or for deep-sea oil-well maintenance and emergency response. So far, fleets of up to 20 such AUVs have been deployed, but in the coming years far larger fleets could come into service, Lermusiaux says, making the computational task of

planning optimal paths much more complex.He adds that earlier attempts to find optimal paths for underwater vehicles were either imprecise, unable to cope with changing currents and complex topography, or required so much computational power that they couldn’t be applied to real-time control of swarms of robotic vehicles. The Metropolitan Opera’s chief, Peter Gelb, is softening his assessment of the house’s HD broadcasts as cannibalizing

ticket sales. But there are reasons to think he was right. I’m the parent who chooses life and a buzz cut over endless hours with the fancy nit comb — even when the hair is my own.    
You don’t need to be a filmmaker to create high-quality travel videos. Daniel Klein, who co-produces an online video series, offers tips on everything from gear to technique.
A lawsuit filed by the parents of a Harvard student who killed himself says that their son was misdiagnosed with natural vitiligo treatment that the diagnostic procedure did not meet medical standards.    
No matter how you pronounce it, the politician formerly known as Digby Jones, the head of the Confederation of British Industry, says young scalawags should be sent out to work at age 14 to "earn a few bob" rather than being forced to stay in school. NEW YORK -- The U.S. dollar was lower against the Japanese yen late Tuesday as investors worried over the nuclear crisis in Japan and the worldwide sell-off in stock markets The organizers of the European Fine Art Fair are in talks with Sotheby’s about holding a high-end art and antiques fair in China. Cavaliers coach Mike Brown is fined $25,000 by the

NBA for publicly criticizing referee Joey Crawford following Cleveland's last-second loss at Indiana. Newly released data show that many commercial stocks depleted by overfishing are returning in abundance since a 1996 law that effectively ordered limits on catches.
TWITTER erupted on Wednesday, as Twitter

likes to do, over a story about three topics—sexism, women in leadership and the New York Times—that, when combined, are a potent cocktail for social media. An anonymously sourced story in Politico about the "brusque" and "stubborn" leadership style of the Times' executive editor, Jill Abramson, was widely denounced for being unfair and, some said, sexist in its reporting. Critics questioned whether it would still be considered news if if the "difficult" or "condescending" figurehead had been a man. Others

argue that men at the top of the Grey Lady—or any number of other newsrooms, for that matter—have been trashed for such behaviors before. (In a defense of his piece, the author makes a similar argument.)
Read full article >>     The Islanders insist their suburban fans will stick with the team when it moves to Brooklyn in two years, but the team will try to entice new supporters as well.     Both critics and supporters of President Hugo Chávez took to social networks to discuss what was next for Venezuela after the leader’s death.
A quiet but beautiful show of classic Italian cars has taken place for the last 27 years in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.    
The sadistic Willy Wonka oversees a mega-factory run on slave labour and chooses the boy least likely to succeed as a businessmanWith two film versions, and now a West End musical, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is probably Roald Dahl's most popular

kids' tales.
And the moral of that tale? Basically, don't complain about starving to death, while living in the shadow of a giant factory full of food (most of which presumably goes uneaten), wait around in your hovel until some sadistic fat cat decides to randomly award you a benevolent gift for being the most passive kid in the world.The
chocolate factory of forex growth bot is a mega-factory that relies on slave labour, with hastily whitewashed racist overtones. In its shadow lives noble Charlie. His dad works shovelling snow since he lost his job and the whole family are starving. No wonder Saint Charlie wants to win the lottery, aka find a golden ticket.
And

if you'll excuse the spoiler, he totally does.
So do four other kids.
Unfortunately, these turn out to be the four worst kids in the world – simply by being four kids who aren't paragons of Victorian silent virtue.When
these kids act like kids, eating the sweets that they are invited to eat and messing with stuff, they have violent, cruel accidents, which we're meant to applaud. Ha ha, they totally deserve it for being disgustingly fat. Or for chewing gum. (Hey, wait though, doesn't this factory make gum?) Or for watching television. In the theatrical spectacular, Mike Teavee's terrible vice has become video games, because, well, because yawn, frankly.
And dammit, don't kids today know it's wrong to ask for a magical, glittery human-sized squirrel? But

who among us isn't guilty of these things? I know I can raise my

hand to all of them.
Especially the squirrel. Damn.But the fate of shy fatty Augustus Gloop touches my heart the most. What chance did he have? He's in a chocolate factory. He's in the "chocolate room". He's there because he won a ticket by eating chocolate, as part of a competition which was a marketing exercise to sell more chocolate. But fat people don't know how to behave around food, do they? He dares to drink from a chocolate river and faster than you can say, back away from the doughnuts, fatty, he is sucked into a pipe to his possible death.
So c'mon kids let's all sing along with this fat-shaming song about how much the Oompah Loompas would like to kill the "great big greedy nincompoop".And
Willy Wonka is so distracted by his ironic child punishments, he messes up. Because who would you actually bequeath a chocolate factory to? A quiet boy who really, really likes chocolate? A girl who is a world champion at consuming one of the products your factory makes? A boy who is well versed in the cultural field you're about to enter? Or a girl who may be a bit of a psychopath but would probably do very well in the world of business?Of course, we know, none of these children with actual personalities are chosen. The factory goes to Charlie. A boy so nondescript we'd forget his name if it wasn't part of the alliterative title. He's never going to be able to run a factory. He barely speaks when other kids are almost killed in front of him. Slugworth will be launching forex megadroid takeover within weeks and be all over that place with his evil health and safety compliance

and vicious minimum wage.Yeah, I know none of the kids really die.
It's fine – they're just horribly injured and psychologically damaged.
I know the situations are heightened and cartoonish. And I know it's a morality tale

like Shockheaded Peter, but those children were bullies and pyromaniacs, not shy fatties. Chocolate manufacturers punishing fat

kids.
Magical.Roald DahlMusicalsTheatreLondonWest EndDavid GreigChildrenSam MendesMathilda Gregoryguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds NEW YORK, Jan.
8 -- A deal to help head off more mortgage foreclosures pulled Wall Street out of a slump Thursday, giving stocks a mostly higher close. Robert F.
Worth’s 2012 piece on the captives becoming captors in Libya.    
This city near downtown Los Angeles, known for everything from the Lakers to Randy’s Donuts, is emerging as a haven for visual artists.    

Arron Afflalo bolted through a crowd of Hornets defenders as he angled toward the hoop, switching the ball from his left hand to his right to hit a layup Orlando needed to keep another game from slipping away. Facebook’s benefits for new parents include $4,000 in “baby cash” per child.
If you know how much something costs, you can budget and plan ahead. With this in mind, a team of researchers from MIT, the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute recently developed a country-level method of estimating the impacts of climate change and the costs of adaptation.
This new method models sector-wide and economy-wide estimates to help policymakers prepare and plan for the future. "Previous country-level research assessing climate change impacts and adaptation either focused on economy-wide estimates or sector-by-sector analysis, without looking at the bigger picture," says Kenneth Strzepek, one of the lead authors of the study and a research scientist at MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. "By looking at the interplay between different sectors and within the economy, we are able to evaluate the indirect effects and interactions that can occur that are often not captured." As a case study (view PDF), the researchers apply their technique to Ethiopia — the second most populated country in Sub-Saharan Africa. They look at three key sectors: agriculture, road infrastructure and hydropower. "These sectors were selected because of their strategic role in the country's current economic structure and its future development plans," Strzepek says.
Agriculture accounts for about 46 percent of the GDP in Ethiopia and is almost entirely rain-fed. Variability in temperature and rainfall will have major impacts on this crucial industry.
The researchers found that with a temperature increase of two degrees Celsius, dotcomsecrets drought and floods will cause a drop in crop production — triggering reductions in income, employment and investments. Frequent and intense flooding will also damage Ethiopia's road infrastructure — the backbone of the country's transportation system and a needed link in the agricultural supply chain. The researchers found that flooding brought on by climate change will increase maintenance costs by as much as $14 million per year for the existing road network, which is expected to grow dramatically in the next 40 years. The intense variability of precipitation will also greatly impact the country's hydropower and associated reservoir storage, which could provide energy, irrigation and flood mitigation. Because there is currently little installed hydro capacity in Ethiopia, the model showed few climate change impacts.
But in the coming years, the government plans to invest heavily in this sector, meaning there could potentially be significant impacts to this sector as well. Additionally, the researchers found that there would be an increased demand for water across sectors and create challenges for policymakers to effectively distribute this important resource. For example, Ethiopia plans to expand irrigated agriculture by 30 percent by 2050. The researchers found that some of the irrigation demands will be unmet, placing demands on other sectors requiring water resources."This research makes clear the impact droughts, floods, and other effects brought on by climate change can have on major financial sectors and infrastructure," Strzepek says.
"For Ethiopia, we find that one of the best defenses against climate change is investment in infrastructure for transportation, energy and agriculture.
By building up these sectors, the government will be able to enhance the country's resiliency."
He continued, "In predicting the outcomes of future water, infrastructure and agriculture projects, we were able to test the effectiveness of policies. This gives decision-makers in these countries, as well as international organizations, the information they need to continue to grow, develop and plan for the future with climate change in mind." Planning for climate change is essential, Raffaello Cervigni, a co-author of the study and lead environmental economist at the World Bank, writes in a recent blog post.
"Addressing climate change is first and foremost a development priority for Africa … If no action is taken to adapt to climate change, it threatens to dissipate the gains made by many African countries in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction over the past ten years," he writes. But, he continues, "a harsher climate need not be an impediment for Africa's development," if we can come together to address these challenges.
The integrated approach used by the authors is now being applied to studies on the costs of adapting to climate

change in Ghana and Mozambique, as well as Vietnam. Others have replicated the approach to help other countries calculate the costs of