DETROIT (AP) -- Tax increases. Rising gas prices. Political dysfunction in Washington. None of that could keep Americans away from auto dealer showrooms in February.
Industry analysts expect last month's sales to be up about 7 percent from February of 2012 as the U.S. auto sales recovery keeps powering its way through bad news and uncertainty. Automakers release February sales figures Friday.
"I think these little speed bumps aren't big enough to slow down the momentum right now," said Jeff Schuster, senior vice president of forecasting for LMC Automotive, an industry consulting firm.
Schuster and other analysts say there are plenty of reasons to buy cars:
? People need to replace aging cars. Pent-up demand is driving sales, as is the expiration of two- and three-year leases.
? Interest rates are at historic lows, and credit is more readily available.
? Hiring has picked up, giving people more money to spend. Hourly pay has risen faster than inflation the past three months.
? Many automakers have exciting new vehicles to choose from, both trucks and fuel-efficient small cars.
Forecasters say it wasn't a normally lackluster February. Schuster says sales probably hit an annual rate of 15.2 million cars and trucks. The TrueCar.com auto pricing site predicts 15.7 million, making it the best February since 2007. That's far better than the 10.4 million sold in 2009, but short of the recent peak of near 17 million in 2005.
Matt LaFontaine, general manager of the LaFontaine Automotive Group, an 18-franchise chain in the Detroit area, said all of his dealerships that sell Detroit-based brands will beat their projections for the month.
"The biggest thing for us is just making sure we have enough product on the ground," he said.
Congress and President Barack Obama aren't likely to reach an agreement before $85 billion in automatic government spending cuts kick in on Friday, but LaFontaine said the debate and uncertainty haven't cut into auto sales. Customers, he says, "are ready to make a move."
Gas prices, which rose 36 cents per gallon in February to around $3.78 per gallon, also haven't hurt sales. In fact, sales of larger vehicles like pickup trucks have improved, Schuster said. Consumers also shrugged off a Social Security tax increase that started in January and cut take-home pay. For a household making between $70,000 and $100,000 per year, it cost around $300 per month, which is close to a car payment.
Barclay's analyst Brian Johnson said the tax increase has had little impact on new-car buyers, but it may hurt used-car sales because those buyers are more price-sensitive.
Automakers are spending less on discounts and deals, which cut into their profits and brand image. Discounts in February averaged $2,392 per vehicle, down almost 4 percent from a year ago, TrueCar said.
But low interest rates are offsetting that, LaFontaine said. The average four-year auto loan has a 2.5 percent interest rate, according to Bankrate.com. That's about half of what it was five or six years ago. On a $20,000 loan, that means a monthly payment of $438, down $23 from a 5 percent loan. Plus, automakers offer subsidized loans to spur sales, many with no interest.
And some consumers have no choice but to buy. The average vehicle on U.S. roads is a record 11.2 years old. Many car buyers are being forced to replace aging vehicles after hanging on to them through the Great Recession, and businesses are also replacing older pickup trucks.
Mar. 1, 2013 ? President Obama in this year's State of the Union address talked about the future of energy and mentioned "self-healing power grids" -- a grid that is able to keep itself stable during normal conditions and also to self-recover in the event of a disturbance caused, for example, by severe weather.
But as the national power-grid network becomes larger and more complex achieving reliability across the network is increasingly difficult. Now Northwestern University scientists have identified conditions and properties that power companies can consider using to keep power generators in the desired synchronized state and help make a self-healing power grid a reality.
The Northwestern team's design for a better power grid could help reduce both the frequency of blackouts and the cost of electricity as well as offer an improved plan for handling the intermittent power sources of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power, which can destabilize the network.
"We will be looking at a completely different power grid in the future," said Adilson E. Motter, who led the research. "The use of renewable energy is growing. More people will be driving electric cars, and the power grid will be delivering this energy, not gas stations. We need a power grid that is more capable and more reliable. This requires a better understanding of the current power grid as well as new ways to stabilize it."
Motter is the Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
The crux of the challenge is that for the U.S. power grid to function the power generators in each of its three interconnections (Eastern, Western and Texas) must be synchronized, all operating at the frequency of 60 hertz. Out-of-synch power generators can lead to blackouts that affect millions of people and cost billions of dollars -- losses similar to those of the Northeast blackout of 2003.
Having a network that can synchronize spontaneously and recover from failures in real time -- in other words, a self-healing power grid -- could prevent such blackouts. To help achieve this, power companies could apply the Northwestern guidelines as they add power generators to the network or tweak existing generators.
A paper describing the researchers' mathematical model, titled "Spontaneous synchrony in power-grid networks," is published in the March 2013 issue of the journal Nature Physics.
When a problem develops in the power-grid network, control devices are used to return power generators to a synchronized state. Motter likens this to using medicine to treat someone who is ill. He and his colleagues are suggesting conditions to keep synchronicity in good shape so interventions are kept to a minimum.
"Our approach is preventive care -- preventing failures instead of mitigating them," said Motter, an author of the paper and an executive committee member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). "The guidelines we offer could be very useful as the power grid expands."
The researchers derived a condition under which the desired synchronous state of a power grid is stable. They then used this condition to identify tunable parameters of the power generators that result in spontaneous synchronization. This synchronization can be autonomous, not guided by control devices.
"The blackout at this year's Super Bowl was caused by a device that was installed specifically to prevent blackouts," said Takashi Nishikawa, an author of the paper and a research associate professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern. "A large fraction of blackouts have human and equipment errors among the causes.
"Reduced dependence on conventional control devices can improve the reliability of the grid," he said. "Our analysis also suggests ways to design control strategies that potentially can improve the existing ones."
Power generators are very different from each other; some are large and others small. Motter and his colleagues identified a "body mass index" for power generators, which they suggest should be kept approximately the same (making, in essence, all generators look the same to the network) in order to strengthen spontaneous synchronicity in the system. If the body mass indices change, they should be changed in a coordinated way.
The researchers demonstrated their model using real power grids of hundreds of power generators, similar to the size of the Texas portion of the U.S. power grid.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Journal Reference:
Adilson E. Motter, Seth A. Myers, Marian Anghel, Takashi Nishikawa. Spontaneous synchrony in power-grid networks. Nature Physics, 2013; 9 (3): 191 DOI: 10.1038/nphys2535
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
It's almost time to get fired up again! Donald Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice" returns Sunday night for the series' first-ever all-star season, and if the familiar faces joining the competition bring even a little of their past behavior to the boardroom, it's sure to be -- as the boss himself would say -- yooge.
Adam Olszewski / NBC
Of course, with such big personalities vying for bragging rights (and a whole lot of cash for the charities of their choice), it's hard to imagine it not being bigger and better than the seasons before it. These celebrity corporate climbers already know how to play the game, after all.
Or at least they think they do.
Trump is sure to keep them guessing this time around, and he'll have the help of even more past players with their own agendas.
So who'll have the winning edge going into the competition? As always, it'll come down to strategy.
Perhaps Dee Snider and Penn Jillette, both from "Celebrity Apprentice's" fifth season, will work together this time against the competition. Then again, if the season two celebs (Dennis Rodman, Brande Roderick and Claudia Jordan) found some clever way to ally, they'd have numbers on their side -- though not quite as many as the season four folks (La Toya Jackson, Gary Busey, Lil Jon and Lisa Rinna) would have if they plotted together.
As for the season one gang, consisting of -- in part -- Trace Adkins, Stephen Baldwin and Marilu Henner, it's hard to imagine them joining ranks with their fellow alum Omarosa, the three-timer who first made her villainous mark on the freshman season of the original "Apprentice."
But the "Celebrity Apprentice" isn't like other reality TV competitions, and alliances can only help so much. In the end, the boss is looking for a standout, so it's really a game of one.
In that case, maybe the advantage goes to season three's Bret Michaels. Not only is he the only one representing his season, but he's also the only one in the all-star game who's a past winner.
The boss, however, doesn't see that as a plus at all. Trump recently visited TODAY and revealed that he thinks the rocker made a mistake by returning to the competition.
"Well, I think he shouldn't have done it," Trump said of the returning victor. "This is like a champion ... it's like a heavyweight champion who gets knocked out (after) trying to come back."
Ouch.
See which players get ahead in business when the all-star season of "The Celebrity Apprentice" kicks off March 3 at 9 p.m. on NBC.
Which all-star do you think has what it takes to beat the others in the boardroom battle? Take our poll below and share your thoughts about the upcoming season on our Facebook page.
Phew. You guys, we made it! It's almost the weekend. While you crawl toward the Friday finish line, take a pause and check out some of the most beautiful things we found this week. More »
In this still frame from TV and courtesy of South African Daily Sun newspaper, showing a South African man with his hands tethered to the back of a police vehicle being dragged behind as police hold his legs up and the vehicle apparently drives off, east of Johannesburg Tuesday Feb. 26, 2013. The man died of his injuries. In video filmed on a mobile phone, uniformed police are seen trying to subdue the man, then tethering him to the back of a police vehicle which drives off, watched by a large crowd. Moses Dlamini of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate said early Thursday Feb. 28 2013 on ENCA TV network that his service has opened a murder probe. (AP Photo/The Daily Sun) TV OUT
In this still frame from TV and courtesy of South African Daily Sun newspaper, showing a South African man with his hands tethered to the back of a police vehicle being dragged behind as police hold his legs up and the vehicle apparently drives off, east of Johannesburg Tuesday Feb. 26, 2013. The man died of his injuries. In video filmed on a mobile phone, uniformed police are seen trying to subdue the man, then tethering him to the back of a police vehicle which drives off, watched by a large crowd. Moses Dlamini of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate said early Thursday Feb. 28 2013 on ENCA TV network that his service has opened a murder probe. (AP Photo/The Daily Sun) TV OUT
In this still frame from TV and courtesy of South African Daily Sun newspaper, showing a South African man with his hands tethered behind a police vehicle and being dragged behind as police hold his legs up and the vehicle apparently drives off, east of Johannesburg Tuesday Feb. 26, 2013. The man died of his injuries. In video filmed on a mobile phone, uniformed police are seen trying to subdue the man, then tethering him to the back of a police vehicle which drives off, watched by a large crowd. Moses Dlamini of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate said early Thursday Feb. 28 2013 on ENCA TV network that his service has opened a murder probe. (AP Photo/The Daily Sun) TV OUT
In this still frame from TV and courtesy of South African Daily Sun newspaper, showing a South African man as he refuses to get into a police vehicle and seems to be tethered to the back of the vehicle before being dragged behind as police hold his legs up and the vehicle apparently drives off, east of Johannesburg Tuesday Feb. 26, 2013. The man died of his injuries. In video filmed on a mobile phone, uniformed police are seen trying to subdue the man, then tethering him to the back of a police vehicle which drives off, watched by a large crowd. Moses Dlamini of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate said early Thursday Feb. 28 2013 on ENCA TV network that his service has opened a murder probe. (AP Photo/The Daily Sun) TV OUT
JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? They bound his hands to the rear of a van, and then sped off, dragging the slender taxi driver along the pavement as a crowd of onlookers shouted in dismay. The man was later found dead.
A gut-wrenching video of the scene is all the more disturbing because the men who abused the Mozambican immigrant were uniformed South African police officers and the van was a marked police vehicle.
The graphic scenes of the victim struggling for his life shocked a nation long accustomed to reports of police violence.
"The visuals of the incident are horrific, disturbing and unacceptable. No human being should be treated in that manner," said South African President Jacob Zuma.
The Daily Sun, a South African newspaper, posted video the footage Thursday and it was quickly picked up by other South African news outlets and carried on the Internet. It sparked immediate outrage about police behavior.
"They are there for safety, but we as a people fear them more," said Johannesburg resident Alfonso Adams. "You don't know who to trust anymore."
Some of those in the crowd who watched the scene unfold in the Daveyton township east of Johannesburg shouted at the police and warned that it was being videotaped. The police did not seem at all concerned by all the witnesses and the presence of cameras as they tied Mido Macia, a 27-year-old from neighboring Mozambique, to the back of a police vehicle, his hands behind his head. At least three policemen participated in the incident. Macia was found dead in a Daveyton police cell late Tuesday.
"We are going to film this," several onlookers shouted in Zulu as the police tormented Macia. One bystander can be heard on the videotape shouting in Zulu: "What has this guy done?"
The video can be seen at: http://bit.ly/ZDOj0A
A murder probe is underway on the evidence that Macia suffered head and upper abdomen injuries, including internal bleeding, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, the police watchdog agency, said Thursday. The injuries could be from the dragging and he could also have been beaten later in police custody.
"The allegations are that he was dragged behind a vehicle and his head was bent on the police vehicle. There are also allegations of assault," said the investigative unit's spokesman Moses Dlamini.
The video evidence of the abuse renewed concerns about brutality, corruption and other misconduct by a national police force whose reputation has suffered in recent years amid reports that many officers lack training. Some have been charged with committing the crimes they are supposed to prevent, including rape and murder.
"As horrific as it is, it is not exceptional. Hardly a week goes by without such stories of brutality," said Jacob van Garderen, national director of Lawyers for Human Rights.
At first, Macia, dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt, is dragged along the road by the vehicle at slow speed, the footage shows. He awkwardly tries to keep step even though he is almost horizontal above the ground. Then the van stops, two policemen pick up the legs of the taxi driver and drop them to the ground as the van picks up speed and drives off, beyond the view of the camera.
The police watchdog agency said the incident started just before 7 p.m. on Tuesday when the cab driver was allegedly obstructing traffic with his vehicle. Then Macia allegedly assaulted a constable and took his weapon before he was overpowered, the police investigative unit said.
Macia was found dead in a cell over two hours later by another policeman, according to the watchdog agency.
National Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega "strongly condemned" what happened. South Africans are "urged to remain vigilant and continue to report all acts of crime irrespective of who is involved," said Phiyega in a statement.
Phiyega has tried to upgrade the reputation of the South African police since her appointment last year. Last month, Phiyega told a group of police officials the standing of the force "has been severely but not irreparably tarnished over the past several years."
The problems, though, are immense for a police force that has expanded from some 120,000 to almost 200,000 over the last decade, "often failing to match the increase in quantity with sufficient quality," said Johan Burger, who served for 36 years on the force before becoming a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies.
Several experts contacted by The Associated Press also said that in recent years there has been an increasing willingness to use a shoot-to-kill approach to the crime and violence.
An average of 860 people a year died in police custody or as a result of police action between 2009 and 2010, up from 695 a year from 2003 to 2008, according to Burger of the security studies institute.
Further staining the reputation of the police is the Marikana shootings when, on Aug. 16, 2012, a line of South African police opened fire on a crowd of striking miners, killing 34 at a platinum mine northwest of Johannesburg. A judicial commission is investigating allegations that many were killed in a rocky hill, near the much-filmed initial scene of the attack, shot in the back as they tried to escape.
---
Associated Press Writer Michelle Faul contributed to this story.
Twin CU-Boulder instruments reveal a third radiation belt can wrap around EarthPublic release date: 28-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Dan Baker Daniel.Baker@lasp.colorado.edu 303-492-0591 University of Colorado at Boulder
With the flip of a switch, a pair of instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder and flying onboard twin NASA space probes have forced the revision of a 50-year-old theory about the structure of the radiation belts that wrap around the Earth just a few thousand miles above our heads.
The Van Allen radiation belts donut-shaped rings of so-called "killer electrons" that encircle the Earth were the first discovery of the space age. Data sent back from NASA's Pioneer 3 and Explorer IV spacecraft, both launched in 1958 and both carrying instruments built by James Van Allen, showed the presence of two distinct rings of high-energy electrons.
On Aug. 30, NASA launched the Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission, since renamed the Van Allen Probes mission, to learn more about the belts, which are known to be hazardous to satellites, astronauts and technological systems on Earth.
Each probe carries a Relativistic Electron-Proton Telescope, or REPT, designed and built at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, known as LASP. When CU-Boulder scientists turned on the instruments, just a few days after launch, they were shocked by what they saw unfold: the formation of a third "storage ring" radiation belt.
"It was so odd looking, I thought there must be something wrong with the instrument," said LASP Director Dan Baker, REPT principal investigator and lead author of the study published online today in the journal Science. "But we saw things identically on each of the spacecraft. We had to come to the conclusion that this was real."
The data sent back to Earth from the REPT instruments during the month of September initially showed two Van Allen belts, as expected. But after a few days, the outer ring appeared to compress into an intense, tightly packed electron band and a third, less compact belt of electrons formed further out, creating a total of three rings. The middle "storage ring" persisted as the belt furthest away from Earth began to decay away in the third week of September, until, finally, a powerful interplanetary shockwave traveling from the sun virtually annihilated both the storage ring and the rest of the outer belt.
Scientists have known that the outer Van Allen belt can fluctuate wildly, at times swelling with charged particles before letting them slip away again, depending on space weather. In the months since the storage belt and the outer belt virtually disappeared, the Van Allen radiation zones have re-formed into the originally expected two-belt structure.
"We have no idea how often this sort of thing happens," Baker said. "This may occur fairly frequently but we didn't have the tools to see it."
The fact that NASA's new tools observed the events at all was somewhat serendipitous. When NASA launches a new spacecraft, instruments onboard are turned on, tested and calibrated in a prescribed order. CU-Boulder's REPT instruments were originally scheduled to be turned on about a month after launch, when the third Van Allen radiation belt would have already dissipated. But Baker and his colleagues lobbied to jump the REPT instrument to the front of the instrument commissioning line.
Baker's concern was that the only other NASA sensors collecting similar though far more rudimentary data on the Van Allen radiation belts were onboard the 20-year-old Solar, Anomalous and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer, or SAMPEX, mission, which was expected to fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up in late 2012.
Baker wanted REPT to collect as much overlapping data with SAMPEX as possible so that the two data records could be more easily stitched together and compared with each other. The REPT researchers won their case, and the instruments powered up on Sept. 1.
"Had we not done so, we would have missed this," Baker said. "It's good to be in the right place at the right time with the right instrument."
The two NASA probes, which are flying around Earth in an elliptical orbit, are able to send back observations for the first time from the heart of the two belts as each probe passes through. The information gathered by the twin, octagonal spacecraft will help researchers better understand how space weather affects near-Earth phenomena by interacting with, feeding and stripping away the Van Allen belts.
A better understanding of belt formation, including the number of belts, will help researchers refine their understanding of how and when solar storms can wreak havoc on Earth.
"We can offer these new observations to the theorists who model what's going on in the belts," said Shri Kanekal, the deputy mission scientist for the Van Allen Probes at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and a co-author of the new study. "Nature presents us with this event it's there, it's a fact, you can't argue with it and now we have to explain why it's the case. Why did the third belt persist for four weeks? Why does it change? All of this information teaches us more about space."
###
Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study include Vaughn Hoxie, a professional research assistant at LASP; Xinlin Li, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences; and Scot Elkington, a LASP research associate.
Contact:
Dan Baker, 303-492-0591
Daniel.Baker@lasp.colorado.edu
Laura Snider, CU media relations, 303-735-0528
Laura.Snider@colorado.edu
Editors: Contents embargoed until 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 28, when NASA will hold a news conference to discuss the new findings on the Van Allen radiation belts. CU-Boulder's Dan Baker will be among the panelists. The news conference will air live on NASA Television at the agency's website. Journalists wishing to participate by phone must contact Geoff Brown at 240-228-5618 or Geoffrey.Brown@jhuapl.edu with their media affiliation no later than 10 a.m. on Feb. 28.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Twin CU-Boulder instruments reveal a third radiation belt can wrap around EarthPublic release date: 28-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Dan Baker Daniel.Baker@lasp.colorado.edu 303-492-0591 University of Colorado at Boulder
With the flip of a switch, a pair of instruments designed and built by the University of Colorado Boulder and flying onboard twin NASA space probes have forced the revision of a 50-year-old theory about the structure of the radiation belts that wrap around the Earth just a few thousand miles above our heads.
The Van Allen radiation belts donut-shaped rings of so-called "killer electrons" that encircle the Earth were the first discovery of the space age. Data sent back from NASA's Pioneer 3 and Explorer IV spacecraft, both launched in 1958 and both carrying instruments built by James Van Allen, showed the presence of two distinct rings of high-energy electrons.
On Aug. 30, NASA launched the Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission, since renamed the Van Allen Probes mission, to learn more about the belts, which are known to be hazardous to satellites, astronauts and technological systems on Earth.
Each probe carries a Relativistic Electron-Proton Telescope, or REPT, designed and built at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, known as LASP. When CU-Boulder scientists turned on the instruments, just a few days after launch, they were shocked by what they saw unfold: the formation of a third "storage ring" radiation belt.
"It was so odd looking, I thought there must be something wrong with the instrument," said LASP Director Dan Baker, REPT principal investigator and lead author of the study published online today in the journal Science. "But we saw things identically on each of the spacecraft. We had to come to the conclusion that this was real."
The data sent back to Earth from the REPT instruments during the month of September initially showed two Van Allen belts, as expected. But after a few days, the outer ring appeared to compress into an intense, tightly packed electron band and a third, less compact belt of electrons formed further out, creating a total of three rings. The middle "storage ring" persisted as the belt furthest away from Earth began to decay away in the third week of September, until, finally, a powerful interplanetary shockwave traveling from the sun virtually annihilated both the storage ring and the rest of the outer belt.
Scientists have known that the outer Van Allen belt can fluctuate wildly, at times swelling with charged particles before letting them slip away again, depending on space weather. In the months since the storage belt and the outer belt virtually disappeared, the Van Allen radiation zones have re-formed into the originally expected two-belt structure.
"We have no idea how often this sort of thing happens," Baker said. "This may occur fairly frequently but we didn't have the tools to see it."
The fact that NASA's new tools observed the events at all was somewhat serendipitous. When NASA launches a new spacecraft, instruments onboard are turned on, tested and calibrated in a prescribed order. CU-Boulder's REPT instruments were originally scheduled to be turned on about a month after launch, when the third Van Allen radiation belt would have already dissipated. But Baker and his colleagues lobbied to jump the REPT instrument to the front of the instrument commissioning line.
Baker's concern was that the only other NASA sensors collecting similar though far more rudimentary data on the Van Allen radiation belts were onboard the 20-year-old Solar, Anomalous and Magnetospheric Particle Explorer, or SAMPEX, mission, which was expected to fall back into Earth's atmosphere and burn up in late 2012.
Baker wanted REPT to collect as much overlapping data with SAMPEX as possible so that the two data records could be more easily stitched together and compared with each other. The REPT researchers won their case, and the instruments powered up on Sept. 1.
"Had we not done so, we would have missed this," Baker said. "It's good to be in the right place at the right time with the right instrument."
The two NASA probes, which are flying around Earth in an elliptical orbit, are able to send back observations for the first time from the heart of the two belts as each probe passes through. The information gathered by the twin, octagonal spacecraft will help researchers better understand how space weather affects near-Earth phenomena by interacting with, feeding and stripping away the Van Allen belts.
A better understanding of belt formation, including the number of belts, will help researchers refine their understanding of how and when solar storms can wreak havoc on Earth.
"We can offer these new observations to the theorists who model what's going on in the belts," said Shri Kanekal, the deputy mission scientist for the Van Allen Probes at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and a co-author of the new study. "Nature presents us with this event it's there, it's a fact, you can't argue with it and now we have to explain why it's the case. Why did the third belt persist for four weeks? Why does it change? All of this information teaches us more about space."
###
Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study include Vaughn Hoxie, a professional research assistant at LASP; Xinlin Li, a professor of aerospace engineering sciences; and Scot Elkington, a LASP research associate.
Contact:
Dan Baker, 303-492-0591
Daniel.Baker@lasp.colorado.edu
Laura Snider, CU media relations, 303-735-0528
Laura.Snider@colorado.edu
Editors: Contents embargoed until 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 28, when NASA will hold a news conference to discuss the new findings on the Van Allen radiation belts. CU-Boulder's Dan Baker will be among the panelists. The news conference will air live on NASA Television at the agency's website. Journalists wishing to participate by phone must contact Geoff Brown at 240-228-5618 or Geoffrey.Brown@jhuapl.edu with their media affiliation no later than 10 a.m. on Feb. 28.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - There's a lot to like about "Phantom" - from a terrific ensemble cast of notable character actors to several genuine moments of claustrophobic tension - but the movie, like the rust-bucket old submarine in which most of it takes place, would be better off dry-docked.
Based on a little-known incident in May of 1968 which one historian says drove the superpowers even closer to nuclear war than the Cuban Missile Crisis did a few years earlier, "Phantom" takes what could have been a nail-biter of a story and too often lets the air out when things get tense. In the hands of a better director, there's no telling how great a movie you could get out of that plot and this cast, but writer-director Todd Robinson (who scripted the seafaring "White Squall") misses more than he hits.
Ed Harris stars as Demi, a Soviet submarine captain whose entire naval career has been overshadowed by his father's achievements and by past mistakes he can't quite shake. He's planning to retire from active duty when his commanding officer Markov (Lance Henriksen) gives him one last assignment, taking a battered old B67 out for one last run before it gets sold off to the Chinese. (Demi's old sub, like its newly-appointed captain, has seen better days.)
His crew includes his longtime second in command Alex (William Fichtner), protocol officer and hard-line Communist Party apparatchik Pavlov (Johnathon Schaech) and trusted medic Semak (Jason Beghe). Joining the crew in a cloud of mystery from the KGB is Bruni (David Duchovny), who doesn't make his motivations immediately apparent to the others.
(It's worth nothing that none of these actors makes any attempt to sound Russian, which turns out to be a solid strategy - we don't get distracted by "moose-and-squirrel" accents and are thus more able to empathize with these men, even though they represent one-time enemies of the state.)
We come to learn that Bruni has brought aboard a new device known as the Phantom, which can cloak submarines from radar detection. His plan, which may or may not be backed by the Kremlin, involves firing a warhead at a U.S. ship, letting the Chinese take the blame, and watching those two countries nuke each other into oblivion while Russia calmly watches at a distance.
Demi, whatever his flaws, isn't about to shoulder the blame for World War III, which sets him and his confidants against Bruni and the crew members following his orders. And since all this is happening inside a tiny submarine, you'd imagine plenty of non-stop tension at close quarters, right?
Well...we get a little of that, admittedly, and sometimes it's effective. Robinson makes two significant errors that unfortunately capsize his better ideas: he doesn't effectively map out the submarine, so that when one cadre is conspiring against the other, we don't always know where our heroes are in relation to the people they're fighting against, and that undercuts the suspense.
The filmmaker's other mistake is to assume that the viewers know a lot about how submarines work and where they travel in relation to other watercraft and what they do in combat situations, which leads to a lot of scenes where people yell jargon at each other and push buttons frantically and look through periscopes intently, while the land-lubbers in the audience have no idea what's at stake or even what just happened.
Faultless in all this is the cast, with Harris and Fichtner effectively portraying the mutual respect and waterlogged exhaustion of these two old salts. As a showcase for some of the screen's finest supporting players, "Phantom" delivers, but its flaws drag the proceedings to the bottom of the briney.
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Public release date: 28-Feb-2013
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