Former Lab Technician Denies Faulty DNA Work in Rape Cases

A former New York City laboratory technician whose work on rape cases is now being scrutinized for serious mistakes said on Friday that she had been unaware there were problems in her work and, disputing an earlier report, denied she had resigned under pressure.

The former lab technician, Serrita Mitchell, said any problems must have been someone else’s.

“My work?” Ms. Mitchell said. “No, no, no, not my work.”

Earlier, the city medical examiner’s office, where Ms. Mitchell said she was employed from 2000 to 2011, said it was reviewing 843 rape cases handled by a lab technician who might have missed critical evidence.

So far, it has finished looking over about half the cases, and found 26 in which the technician had missed biological evidence and 19 in which evidence was commingled with evidence from other cases. In seven cases where evidence was missed, the medical examiner’s office was able to extract a DNA profile, raising the possibility that detectives could have caught some suspects sooner.

The office declined to identify the technician. Documents said she quit in November 2011 after the office moved to fire her, once supervisors had begun to discover deficiencies in her work. A city official who declined to be identified said Ms. Mitchell was the technician.

However, Ms. Mitchell, reached at her home in the Bronx on Friday, said she had never been told there were problems. “It couldn’t be me because your work gets checked,” she said. “You have supervisors.”

She also said that she had resigned because of a rotator cuff injury that impeded her movement. “I loved the job so much that I stayed a little longer,” she said, explaining that she had not expected to stay with the medical examiner’s office so long. “Then it was time to leave.”

Also on Friday, the Legal Aid Society, which provides criminal defense lawyers for most of the city’s poor defendants, said it was demanding that the city turn over information about the cases under review.

If needed, Legal Aid will sue the city to gain access to identifying information about the cases, its chief lawyer, Steven Banks, said, noting that New York was one of only 14 states that did not require routine disclosure of criminal evidence before trial.

Disclosure of the faulty examination of the evidence is prompting questions about outside review of the medical examiner’s office. The City Council on Friday announced plans for an emergency oversight committee, and its members spoke with outrage about the likelihood that missed semen stains and “false negatives” might have enabled rapists to go unpunished.

“The mishandling of rape cases is making double victims of women who have already suffered an indescribably horrific event,” said Christine C. Quinn, the Council speaker.

A few more details emerged Friday about a 2001 case involving the rape of a minor in Brooklyn, in which the technician missed biological evidence, the review found. The victim accused an 18-year-old acquaintance of forcing himself on her, and he was questioned by the police but not charged, according to a law enforcement official.

Unrelated to the rape, he pleaded guilty in 2005 to third-degree robbery and served two years in prison. The DNA sample he gave in the robbery case was matched with the one belatedly developed from evidence the technician had overlooked in the 2001 rape, law enforcement officials said. He was recently indicted in the 2001 rape.

Especially alarming to defense lawyers was the possibility that DNA samples were cross-contaminated and led to false convictions, or could do so in the future.

“Up to this point,” Mr. Banks said, “they have not made information available to us, as the primary defender in New York City, to determine whether there’s an injustice that’s been done in past cases, pending cases, or allowing us to be on the lookout in future cases.” He added, “If it could happen with one analyst, how does anyone know that it stops there?”

The medical examiner’s office has said that the risk of cross-contamination was extremely low and that it does not appear that anyone was wrongly convicted in the cases that have been reviewed so far. And officials in at least two of the city’s district attorneys’ offices — for Brooklyn and Manhattan — said they had not found any erroneous convictions.

But Mr. Banks said the authorities needed to do more, and that their statements thus far were the equivalent of “trust us.”

“Given what’s happened,” he said, “that’s cold comfort.”

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Business Briefing | Retailing: Best Buy Shares Rally on Improved Holiday Sales

The Best Buy Company had better-than-expected holiday sales, setting off a gain of $2, or 16.4 percent, in its stock price, to $14.21 a share on Friday. The holiday quarter accounted for about a third of Best Buy’s revenue last year. The chain said that revenue at stores open at least a year fell 1.4 percent for the nine weeks ended Jan. 5. The company’s performance in the United States was flat. The chief executive, Hubert Joly, said in a statement that the result was better than the last several quarters. A Morningstar analyst, R. J. Hottovy, said the results showed that some of Best Buy’s initiatives, like more employee training and online price matching helped increase sales.

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At Nordstrom Rack hostage scene, mall employees try to go to work

Near the scene of an overnight hostage situation at the Nordstrom Rack store in Westchester, traffic was picking up Friday morning around the Promenade at Howard Hughes Center mall.

As cars drove by on Sepulveda Boulevard and Center Drive, puzzled mall employees, many of whom were unaware of the hostage situation in which 14 Rack employees were held and later released, gathered at the main entrance to the mall and questioned authorities about what to do.

Jackie Carter, 40, of Redondo Beach, works in technical support in a building on Center Drive. Armed with a thermos of coffee, he said he was supposed to be at work at 6 a.m., but officers told him it was unclear when they would open access to the buildings near the mall.

He said he wasn’t sure what he was going to do because his wife had dropped him off at work.

“I guess there’s no work,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bill Schaeffer of Los Feliz suddenly got a voicemail from his manager around 7:30 a.m. telling him not to come to work at Piccolo’s Books inside the mall.

The message came too late though. Schaeffer had already gotten to work and gone to a nearby coffee shop to pass time. After conferring with officers, Schaeffer, 55, said he was going to go home.

“Now it’s time to run errands,” he said.

One female hostage held at the store was sexually assaulted, another was stabbed in the neck and a third was pistol-whipped, police said Friday.

The ordeal began about 11 p.m. Thursday, when two men took the hostages, leading them into a store room and bathroom, police said.

Police did not say exactly how long the suspects were in the Nordstrom Rack before they fled with an undisclosed amount of money.

Police early Friday were trying to confirm that the getaway car was found at a nearby location.

When the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT officers arrived Thursday night, they surrounded the store, according to police sources. At one point, one of the suspects left the store, saw police and ran back inside. A second suspect walked out with an unidentified woman, saw police and headed back to the store.

The officers entered the store at 3:30 a.m. and freed 14 people -- employees and possibly customers -- huddled in a storage room. The Promenade at Howard Hughes Center is near the 405 Freeway.

The LAPD had called a tactical alert and closed off the area around the shopping center.

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The Internet of Things Has Arrived — And So Have Massive Security Issues

Internet. Things. Add the “Of” and suddenly these three simple words become a magic meme — the theme we’ve been hearing all week at CES, the oft-heralded prediction that may have finally arrived in 2013.

While not devoid of hype and hyperbole, the Internet of Things (IoT) does represent a revolution happening right now. Companies of all kinds – not just technology and telecommunications firms – are linking “things” as diverse as smartphones, cars and household appliances to industrial-strength sensors, each other and the internet. The technical result may be mundane features such as intercommunication and autonomous machine-to-machine (M2M) data transfer, but the potential benefits to lifestyles and businesses are huge.

But … with great opportunity comes great responsibility. Along with its conveniences, the IoT will unveil unprecedented security challenges: in data privacy, safety, governance and trust.

It’s scary how few people are preparing for it. Most security and risk professionals are so preoccupied with putting last week’s vulnerability-malware-hacktivist genie back into the bottle, that they’re too distracted to notice their R&D colleagues have conjured up even more unpredictable spirits. Spirits in the form of automated systems that can reach beyond the digital plane to influence and adjust the physical world … all without human interfacing.

The Loopholes

Security loopholes can occur anywhere in the IoT, but let’s look at the most basic level: the route data takes to the provider.

Many smart meters, for example, don’t push their data to an internet service gateway directly or immediately. Instead, they send collected information to a local data collation hub – often another smart meter in a neighbor’s house – where the data is stored until later uploaded in bulk.

Placing sensitive data in insecure locations is never a good idea, and the loss of physical security has long been considered tantamount to a breach. Yet some early elements of the IoT incorporate this very flaw into their designs. It’s often an attempt to compensate for a lack of technological maturity where always-on network connectivity is unavailable or too expensive, or the central infrastructure does not scale to accommodate the vast number of input devices.

As the IoT crawls through its early stages, we can expect to see more such compromises; developers have to accommodate technical constraints — by either limiting functionality or compromising security. In a highly competitive tech marketplace, I think we all know which of these will be the first casualty.

And it’s not just security: it’s privacy, too. As the objects within the IoT collect seemingly inconsequential fragments of data to fulfill their service, think about what happens when that information is collated, correlated, and reviewed.

Because even tiny items of data in aggregate can identify, define, and label us without our knowledge. Just consider the scenario of the IoT tracking our food purchases. At the innocuous end of the privacy spectrum, the frequency and timing of these purchases can easily reveal we’re on a diet; at the other end of the spectrum, the times and dates of those purchases could even reveal our religion (Jewish holidays, Muslim fasts).

Bottom line: As technology becomes more entwined with the physical world, the consequences of security failures escalate. Like a game of chess – where simple rules can lead to almost limitless possibilities – the complexity of IoT interconnections rapidly outstrips our ability to unravel them.

By accident or by design, useful IoT solutions could mash together, introducing or accelerating black swan events: catastrophic failures that are unexpected but obvious in hindsight. The key to addressing these is to plan for and address these scenarios, now.

With great opportunity comes great responsibility. Along with its conveniences, the IoT will unveil unprecedented security challenges.

The Evolutions

The Internet of Things will mature in three main stages.

Stage 1: Personification of Dumb Objects

In the initial stages of the IoT, identity is provided to selected objects through QR codes, for example. Value to users here comes from the interaction of these identities with other intelligent systems, such as smartphones or web services. Think about “smart” car keys that don’t have to be taken out of the pocket to allow the car to start. Unfortunately, these devices can and have already been subverted.

Stage 2: Partially Autonomous Sensor Networks

In this intermediary stage, the “things” in the IoT develop the ability to sense their surroundings, including the environment, location, and other devices. Value to users here comes from those things taking action, albeit limited in scope, based on that information. Think about a residential thermostat that can be adjusted via a smartphone and authenticated web service, or that may self-adjust based on its awareness of the homeowner’s location (e.g., switching on the heating/cooling as it detects the owner nearing home). While a centralized failure here leaving vast numbers of people without heating may be tolerable, imagine the scenario where a hacktivist collective or state-sponsored attacker switches off an entire country’s electrical supply as an act of punishment.

Stage 3: Autonomous Independent Devices

In this final stage of maturity for the IoT, technology availability, capacity, and standardization will have reached a level that doesn’t require another device (such as a smartphone or web service) to function. Not only will the “things” be able to sense context, but they will be able to autonomously interact with other things, sensors, and services. Think about drug dispensers that can issue medication in response to sensing conditions in the human body through a set of apps, sensors, and other monitoring/feedback tools. It requires little imagination to consider the potential disaster scenarios that could originate from system failures or malicious threats in this scenario.

Now, let’s take one popular and heatedly discussed example from CES to sum up these stages of maturity: the smart refrigerator. In the personification stage (1), the refrigerator owner scans cartons of milk with his smartphone, which triggers a reminder when the milk expires. In the semi-autonomous sensor network stage (2), the refrigerator detects the milk on its own and issues reminders across a broader range of connected apps. In the autonomous and independent stage (3), the refrigerator orders replacement milk just before it’s empty or expires — entirely on its own.

I am hard-pressed to find a catastrophic scenario associated with the refrigerator – other than the refrigerator spending your entire month’s pay on milk or becoming self-aware like Skynet – but the fact remains we can’t predict how things will look. That makes regulation and legislation difficult.

Even the European Union Commission, with its strong track record on privacy issues, acknowledged that its well-regarded Data Protection Directive law would be unable to cope with the Internet of Things:

The technology will have moved on by leaps and bounds by that stage; the legislation simply cannot keep up with the pace of technology.

So it’s possible that frameworks around regulating the IoT will parallel the PCI Data Security Standard, where an industry recognized the need for regulation and introduced its own rather than wait for government intervention.

Either way: Given the wide-reaching impact of the IoT, formal legislation and government involvement is almost certain. Especially when we consider the safety risks of automated systems interacting in the physical world – governments won’t be able to stand by silently if autonomous decisions endanger lives.

People can somehow take other people doing bad things, but they won’t allow their machines to make such mistakes.

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N. Dakota, Washington win Miss America prelims

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Miss North Dakota and Miss Washington have picked up prizes in the third day of preliminary Miss America competition in Las Vegas.

Miss North Dakota Rosie Sauvageau took top honors Thursday after her piano and vocal rendition of “To Make You Feel My Love.” The 24-year-old from Fargo, N.D., will take a $ 2,000 Amway scholarship home from the competition at Planet Hollywood resort.

Miss Washington Mandy Schendel took the trophy for the third round of the Lifestyle and Fitness category after modeling a strapless white Catalina swimsuit. The 22-year-old from Newcastle, Wash., earned a $ 1,000 Amway scholarship for it.

Contestants are divided into three groups and compete in different categories during three nights of preliminaries. Their scores will factor in the finals that will be broadcast live on Saturday.

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The New Old Age Blog: Taking a Zen Approach to Caregiving

You try to help your elderly father. Irritated and defensive, he snaps at you instead of going along with your suggestion. And you think “this is so unfair” and feel a rising tide of anger.

How to handle situations like this, which arise often and create so much angst for caregivers?

Jennifer Block finds the answer in what she calls “contemplative caregiving” — the application of Buddhist principles to caregiving and the subject of a year-long course that starts at the San Francisco Zen Center in a few weeks.

This approach aims to cultivate compassion, both for older people and the people they depend on, said Ms. Block, 49, a Buddhist chaplain and the course’s lead instructor. She’s also the former director of education at the Zen Hospice project in San Francisco and founder of the Beyond Measure School for Contemplative Care, which is helping develop a new, Zen-inspired senior living community in the area.

I caught up with Ms. Block recently, and what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Let’s start with your experience. Have you been a caregiver?

My experience in caregiving is as a professional providing spiritual care to individuals and families when they are facing and coping with aging and sickness and loss and dying, particularly in hospital and hospice settings.

What kinds of challenges have you witnessed?

People are for the most part unprepared for caregiving. They’re either untrained or unable to trust their own instincts. They lack confidence as well as knowledge. By confidence, I mean understanding and accepting that we don’t know all the answers – what to do, how to fix things.

This past weekend, I was on the phone with a woman who’d brought her mom to live near her in assisted living. The mom had been to the hospital the day before. My conversation with the daughter was about helping her see the truth that her mother needed more care and that was going to change the daughter’s responsibilities and her life. And also, her mother was frail, elderly, and coming nearer to death.

That’s hard, isn’t it?

Yes, because we live in a death-denying society. Also, we live in a fast-paced, demanding world that says don’t sit still — do something. But people receiving care often need most of all for us to spend time with them. When we do that, their mortality and our grief and our helplessness becomes closer to us and more apparent.

How can contemplative caregiving help?

We teach people to cultivate a relationship with aging, sickness and dying. To turn toward it rather than turning away, and to pay close attention. Most people don’t want to do this.

A person needs training to face what is difficult in oneself and in others. There are spiritual muscles we need to develop, just like we develop physical muscles in a gym. Also, the mind needs to be trained to be responsive instead of reactive.

What does that mean?

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re trying to help your mother, and she says something off-putting to you like “you’ve always been terrible at keeping house. It’s no wonder you lost my pajamas.”

The first thing is to notice your experience. To become aware of that feeling, almost like being slapped emotionally. To notice your chest tightening.

Then I tell people to take a deep breath. And say something to themselves like “soften” to address that tightness. That’s how you can stay facing something uncomfortable rather than turning away.

If I were in this position, I might say something to myself like “hello unhappiness” or “hello suffering” or “hello aging” to tether myself.

The second step would be curiosity about that experience. Like, wow, where do I feel that anger that rose up in me, or that fear? Oh, it’s in my chest. I’m going to feel that, stay with it, investigate it.

Why is that important?

Because as we investigate something we come to understand it. And, paradoxically, when we pay attention to pain it changes. It softens. It moves. It lessens. It deepens. And we get to know it and learn not to be afraid of it or change it or fix it but just come alongside of it.

Over hours, days, months, years, the mind and heart come to know pain. And the response to pain is compassion — the wish for the alleviation of pain.

Let’s go back to what mother said about your housekeeping and the pajamas. Maybe you leave the room for five minutes so you can pay attention to your reaction and remember your training. Then, you can go back in and have a response rather than a reaction. Maybe something like “Mom, I think you’re right. I may not be the world’s best housekeeper. I’m sorry I lost your pajamas. It seems like you’re having a pretty strong response to that, and I’d like to know why it matters so much to you. What’s happening with you today?”

Are other skills important?

Another skill is to become aware of how much we receive as well as give in caregiving. Caregiving can be really gratifying. It’s an expression of our values and identity: the way we want the world to be. So, I try to teach people how this role benefits them. Such as learning what it’s like to be old. Or having a close, intimate relationship with an older parent for the first time in decades. It isn’t necessarily pleasant or easy. But the alternative is missing someone’s final chapter, and that can be a real loss.

What will you do in your course?

We’ll teach the principles of contemplative care and discuss them. We’ll have homework, such as ‘Bring me three examples of someone you were caring for who was caring toward you in return.’ That’s one way of practicing attention. And people will train in meditation.

We’ll also explore our own relationship to aging, sickness, dying and loss. We’ll tell our stories: this is the situation I was in, this is where I felt myself shut down, this was the edge of my comfort or knowledge. And we’ll teach principles from Buddhism. Equanimity. Compassion. Deep inner connectedness.

What can people do on their own?

Mindfulness training is offered in almost every city. That’s one of the core components of this approach.

I think every caregiver needs to have their own caregiver — a therapist or a colleague or a friend, someone who is there for them and with whom they can unburden themselves. I think of caregiving as drawing water from a well. We need to make sure that we have whatever nurtures us, whatever supplies that well. And often, that’s connecting with others.

Are other groups doing this kind of work?

In New York City, the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care educates the public and professionals about contemplative care. And in New Mexico, the Upaya Zen Center does similar work, much of it centered around death and dying.

People who want to read about this might want to look at a new book of essays, “The Arts of Contemplative Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work” (Wisdom Publications, 2012).

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Common Sense: Economic Experts Give Predictions for 2013

To many politicians, the deal that raised taxes on the wealthy and averted the fiscal cliff was a sellout, a cop-out, a Band-Aid — in short, nothing good. And now the debt ceiling showdown is looming. So why have stock investors cheered, pushing the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to five-year highs?

My annual survey suggests that investment experts are cautiously upbeat about the economy and the stock market (but not bonds) for 2013, even though they acknowledge that political dysfunction in Washington poses risks. The tax deal may have upset Tea Party Republicans looking for big cuts in entitlement spending and liberals demanding even bigger tax increases on the wealthy. But investors seem to be taking the long view that the warring factions did in the end reach a deal, and it amounts to a $4 trillion stimulus compared with what would have happened if Congress had done nothing. Stimulus may be a bad word in Washington, but many investors seem to believe that continued deficit spending and only a modest tax increase will be good for the economy and corporate profits, at least this year.

The experts I consulted a year ago — Bill Miller for stocks, Bill Gross for bonds and Karl E. Case for real estate — proved accurate in their predictions for 2012. So I asked them for a return engagement. I also spoke to Byron Wien, vice chairman and a senior adviser at Blackstone. Last year, Mr. Wien was one of the few pundits who was exactly right about the stock market, predicting that the S.& P. 500 would close the year “over 1400.” The index ended the year at 1426, a gain of 13.4 percent for the year.

Bill Miller: ‘The great bond bear market has begun’

Perhaps the biggest comeback of 2012 belongs to Mr. Miller of Legg Mason, who became a mutual fund legend by beating the S.& P. 500 for 15 consecutive years, from 1991 to 2005. Then, during 2008 and the financial panic, he seemingly lost his magic touch. His fund plunged 55 percent. The Wall Street Journal, in its headline about the fund’s dismal returns, spoke of his “defeat.” And after another disappointing year in 2011, he retired as head of the Legg Mason Value Trust, the firm’s flagship fund.

But Mr. Miller kept his hand in the market, managing the much smaller Legg Mason Capital Management Opportunity Trust. When I sought him out a year ago, reasoning that even the most brilliant investors can be expected to have a few bad years, he was bullish on stocks. That proved good advice. Mr. Miller’s fund gained over 40 percent in 2012, and was top-performing mutual fund in Morningstar’s database. How did he do it?

Mr. Miller made big bets on the battered and out-of-favor home building and financial sectors, the kind of contrarian strategy that served Mr. Miller well for so many years. Major holdings like Pulte Homes (which gained 160 percent over the past year) and Bank of America (which nearly doubled) were some his best-performing stocks.

Mr. Miller remains optimistic about stocks for 2013, with an asterisk. When I reached him this week, he offered these predictions: “The great bond bear market has begun, starting with Treasuries, which should see years of losses as interest rates gradually normalize. Equities, which outperformed bonds in 2012, will continue to do well, driven by rising earnings, strong free cash flow, solid profit margins, low inflation and attractive valuation relative to bonds. The path of least resistance for stocks and the economy is higher. The chief risk is the dysfunctional political environment, which could derail what otherwise is a very promising outlook.”

Mr. Wien, whose long career on Wall Street included stints at Morgan Stanley and Pequot Capital, told me he’s “gloomy” about prospects in Washington. “We can’t solve our problems simply by getting the rich to pay more. We have to broaden the tax base, revise the tax code and tackle the structural problems we aren’t facing. We need to deal with entitlements. The latest deal did absolutely nothing to address that. I don’t know if democracy can solve these problems.”

Despite his success at predicting the market last year, Mr. Wien isn’t putting a number on the S.& P. 500 this year, but his expectations are modest. He expects the S.& P. 500 to test 1300 at some point, which would be about a 10 percent decline from current levels, before ending the year about where it is now. “I don’t expect the stock market to do much this year,” he said. “Most analysts are forecasting returns of 10 percent or more, but I think earnings could be down for the year, which would make it hard for the market to gain that much.”

But he’s optimistic about stock markets in some other countries, especially China, where stocks lagged last year, and Japan, which has been in the doldrums for years. He’s forecasting a 20 percent gain this year for Chinese shares.

Bill Gross: ‘Ashes in our stocking’

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Irvine City Council overhauls oversight, spending on Great Park

Capping a raucous eight-hour-plus meeting, the Irvine City Council early Wednesday voted to overhaul the oversight and spending on the beleaguered Orange County Great Park while authorizing an audit of the more than $220 million that so far has been spent on the ambitious project.

A newly elected City Council majority voted 3 to 2 to terminate contracts with two firms that had been paid a combined $1.1 million a year for consulting, lobbying, marketing and public relations. One of those firms — Forde & Mollrich public relations — has been paid $12.4 million since county voters approved the Great Park plan in 2002.

"We need to stop talking about building a Great Park and actually start building a Great Park," council member Jeff Lalloway said.

The council, by the same split vote, also changed the composition of the Great Park's board of directors, shedding four non-elected members and handing control to Irvine's five council members.

The actions mark a significant turning point in the decade-long effort to turn the former El Toro Marine base into a 1,447-acre municipal park with man-made canyons, rivers, forests and gardens that planners hoped would rival New York's Central Park.

The city hoped to finish and maintain the park for years to come with $1.4 billion in state redevelopment funds. But that money vanished last year as part of the cutbacks to deal with California's massive budget deficit.

"We've gone through $220 million, but where has it gone?" council member Christina Shea said of the project's initial funding from developers in exchange for the right to build around the site. "The fact of the matter is the money is almost gone. It can't be business as usual."

The council majority said the changes will bring accountability and efficiencies to a project that critics say has been larded with wasteful spending and no-bid contracts. For all that has been spent, only about 200 acres of the park has been developed and half of that is leased to farmers.

But council members Larry Agran and Beth Krom, who have steered the course of the project since its inception, voted against reconfiguring the Great Park's board of directors and canceling the contracts with the two firms.

Krom has called the move a "witch hunt" against her and Agran. Feuding between liberal and conservative factions on the council has long shaped Irvine politics.

"This is a power play," she said. "There's a new sheriff in town."

The council meeting stretched long into the night, with the final vote coming Wednesday at 1:34 a.m. Tensions were high in the packed chambers with cheering, clapping and heckling coming from the crowd.

At one point council member Lalloway lamented that he "couldn't hear himself think."

During public comments, newly elected Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer chastised the council for "fighting like schoolchildren." Earlier this week he said that if the Irvine's new council majority can't make progress on the Great Park, he would seek a ballot initiative to have the county take over.

And Spitzer angrily told Agran that his stewardship of the project had been a failure.

"You know what?" he said. "It's their vision now. You're in the minority."

mike.anton@latimes.com

rhea.mahbubani@latimes.com

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Disk Jockey: Hear Your Favorite Theme Songs Played by a Floppy-Drive Orchestra

While making music with computers is nothing new, it’s rarely quite so literal as the melodies of Youtube user MrSolidSnake74, who transformed eight floppy disk drives into an orchestra of MIDI magic. In the gallery above, you can hear his arrangements based on popular themes from Super Mario Bros, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Mega Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Game of Thrones and more, as performed by his floppy disk “instruments.”

“The concept behind this is basically getting the stepper motor to operate a certain frequency (getting the motor to step a certain amount of times in a second) which generates a pitch. Then we arrange those pitches together and we get a song,” he explained.

After creating his own arrangements of songs, he uses code written by a Youtube user named Sammy1Am to transform MIDI files into serial data packets, and sends them to an Arduino — an open-source microcontroller board – which routes the information to the floppy drives.

Want to make your own musical disk drives? Check out the Sammy1A how-to video:

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‘Lincoln’ leads Oscars with 12 nominations

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — The Civil War saga “Lincoln” leads the Academy Awards with 12 nominations, including best picture, director for Steven Spielberg and acting honors for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and Tommy Lee Jones.

Also among the nine nominees for best picture Thursday: the old-age love story “Amour”; the Iran hostage thriller “Argo”; the independent hit “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; the slave-revenge narrative “Django Unchained”; the musical “Les Miserables”; the shipwreck story “Life of Pi”; the lost-souls romance “Silver Linings Playbook“; and the Osama bin Laden manhunt chronicle “Zero Dark Thirty.”

“Life of Pi” surprisingly ran second with 11 nominations, ahead of “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Les Miserables,” which had been considered potential front-runners.

More surprising were snubs in the directing category, where three favorites missed out: Ben Affleck for “Argo” and past Oscar winners Kathryn Bigelow for “Zero Dark Thirty” and Tom Hooper for “Les Miserables.” Bigelow was the first woman ever the win the directing Oscar for 2009′s “The Hurt Locker,” while Hooper won a year later for “The King’s Speech.”

The best-picture category also had surprising omissions. The acclaimed first-love tale “Moonrise Kingdom” was left out and only got one nomination, for original screenplay. Also snubbed for best-picture was “The Master,” a critical favorite that did manage three acting nominations for Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Two-time winner Spielberg earned his seventh directing nomination, and also in the mix are past winner Ang Lee for “Life of Pi” and past nominee David O. Russell for “Silver Linings Playbook.” The other slots went to surprise picks who are first-time nominees: Michael Haneke for his French-language “Amour” and Benh Zeitlin for “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

“Amour” also was a best-picture surprise. The film, which won the top prize at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, mainly had been considered a favorite in the foreign-language category, where it also was nominated. “Amour” had five nominations, including original screenplay and best-actress for Emmanuelle Riva.

The year’s second-biggest box-office hit, “The Dark Knight Rises,” was shut out entirely, even for visual effects. The omission of its predecessor, “The Dark Knight,” from best-picture consideration for 2008, was largely responsible for the expansion of the Oscar category from five nominees to 10 the following year. “The Dark Knight” had earned eight nominations and won two Oscars.

Chronicling Abraham Lincoln’s final months as he engineers passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, “Lincoln” stars best-actor contender Day-Lewis in a monumental performance as the 16th president, supporting-actress nominee Field as the notoriously headstrong Mary Todd Lincoln and supporting-actor prospect Jones as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens.

Joining Day-Lewis in the best-actor field are Bradley Cooper as a psychiatric patient trying to get his life back together in “Silver Linings Playbook”; Hugh Jackman as Victor Hugo’s tragic hero Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables”; Phoenix as a Navy vet who falls in with a cult in “The Master”; and Denzel Washington as a boozy airline pilot in “Flight.”

Cooper had been a bit of a longshot. John Hawkes, a potential best-actor favorite, missed out for his role as a man in an iron lung aiming to lose his virginity in “The Sessions.”

Nominated for best actress are Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative hunting bin Laden in “Zero Dark Thirty”; Jennifer Lawrence as a troubled young widow struggling to heal in “Silver Linings Playbook”; Riva as an ailing woman tended by her husband in “Amour”; Quvenzhane Wallis as a spirited girl on the Louisiana delta in “Beasts of the Southern Wild”; and Naomi Watts as a mother caught up in a devastating tsunami in “The Impossible.”

Best actress had a wild age range: Riva is the oldest nominee ever in the category at 85, while Wallis is the youngest ever at 9.

Along with Field, supporting-actress nominees are Adams as a cult leader’s devoted wife in “The Master”; Anne Hathaway as an outcast mother reduced to prostitution in “Les Miserables”; Helen Hunt as a sex surrogate in “The Sessions”; and Jacki Weaver as an unstable man’s doting mom in “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Besides Jones, the supporting-actor contenders are Alan Arkin as a wily Hollywood producer in “Argo”; Robert De Niro as a football-obsessed patriarch in “Silver Linings Playbook”; Hoffman as a dynamic cult leader in “The Master”; and Christoph Waltz as a genteel bounty hunter in “Django Unchained.”

“Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane, who will host the Feb. 24 Oscars, joined Emma Stone to announce the Oscar lineup, and he scored a nomination himself, original song for “Everybody Needs a Best Friend,” the tune he co-wrote for his big-screen directing debut “Ted.”

“That’s kind of cool I got nominated,” MacFarlane deadpanned at the announcement. “I get to go to the Oscars.”

Walt Disney predictably dominated the animated-feature category with three of the five nominees: “Brave,” ”Frankenweenie” and “Wreck-It Ralph.” Also nominated were “ParaNorman” and “The Pirates! Band of Misfits.”

“I’m absolutely blown away,” Rich Moore, director of “Wreck-It Ralph” said by phone. “It is weird at 5:30 in the morning to hear Emma Stone say your name. It’s surreal.”

“Lincoln” is Spielberg’s best awards prospect since his critical peak in the 1990s, when he won best-picture and directing Oscars for “Schindler’s List” and a second directing Oscar for “Saving Private Ryan.” The 12 nominations for “Lincoln” matched Spielberg’s personal best on “Schindler’s List,” which won seven Oscars.

Spielberg’s latest film could vault him, Day-Lewis and Field to new heights among Hollywood’s super-elite of multiple Oscar winners.

A best-picture win for “Lincoln” would be Spielberg’s second, while another directing win would be his third, a feat achieved only by Frank Capra and William Wyler, who each earned three directing Oscars, and John Ford, who received four.

“Lincoln” also was the ninth best-picture nominee Spielberg has directed, moving him into a tie for second-place with Ford. Only Wyler directed more best-picture nominees, with 13.

Day-Lewis and Field both have two lead-acting Oscars already, he for “My Left Foot” and “There Will Be Blood” and she for “Norma Rae” and “Places in the Heart.” A third Oscar for either would put them in rare company with previous triple winners Ingrid Bergman, Walter Brennan, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Katharine Hepburn is the record-holder with four acting Oscars.

An Oscar for Jones would be his second supporting-actor prize; he previously won for “The Fugitive.”

“Lincoln” composer John Williams — whose five Oscars include three for the music of three earlier Spielberg films, “Jaws,” ”E.T. the Extra-terrestrial” and “Schindler’s List” — earned his 43rd nomination for best score, extending his all-time record in the category.

The Oscars feature a best-picture field that ranges from five to 10 films depending on a complex formula of ballots from the 5,856 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Winners for the 85th Oscars will be announced Feb. 24 at a ceremony aired live on ABC from Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre.

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Online:

http://www.oscars.org

___

AP Movie Critic Christy Lemire contributed to this report.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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