Tag: cell phones
Audience Members Are Getting Lousy Reviews

Audience Members Are Getting Lousy Reviews

Broadway star Patti LuPone made headlines recently when she grabbed a cellphone from a woman texting in the second row. It may have helped that she was in character, playing a tough-broad diva from a community theater.

The play, Shows for Days, was being performed at Lincoln Center, where generations of mostly well-mannered audiences have gone for live performances. The texter’s orchestra-section ticket could not have been inexpensive.

Are mobile devices rewiring some of our brains? That is, are certain audience members unable to recognize that the figures onstage, whether acting or playing the violin, are not pixels but living, breathing humans capable of hearing and seeing what we in the audience are doing?

Also not to be dismissed were the other theatergoers trying to focus on the drama onstage but distracted by a neighbor’s tapping on her little flashing screen. That might be regarded as bad form even at movie theaters where serious works are shown.

A new rash of bad audience behavior may have any number of causes. One could be, as suggested above, an inability to distinguish between what happens on screens and what occurs in real life. It may be a collapse in basic manners or ignorance of what the rules are — especially in regard to digital natives, for whom live theater might seem retro without irony.

Consider the case of Nick Silvestri. Before a show began, the 19-year-old jumped on the stage at the venerable Booth Theatre and tried to plug his cellphone into an electrical outlet. Adding a dash of opera buffa to the story — look it up, Nick — the outlet was a fake, part of the scenery.

Bizarre as his action may have seemed, it was impossible not to forgive Silvestri after his charming apology. Promoters of the show, Hand to God, sensing perhaps both a teachable moment and a shot at some free publicity, held a news conference outside the theater, starring Silvestri and his explanations.

The young man noted that his judgment may have been clouded by a few pre-theater drinks. His contention that he doesn’t “go to plays very much” was easy to believe. “I didn’t realize that the stage is considered off-limits” sounded more of a stretch.

For brazen misbehavior, a recent incident at a theater in Washington, D.C., beats them all. It happened during a performance of The Fix, a musical at the Signature Theatre. A drunken woman from the audience sauntered onto the stage, searching for a ladies’ room, and then staggered backstage just as the star was about to make her entrance.

“There she was,” Christine Sherrill told The Washington Post, “kind of loudly asking me where the bathroom was.”

At that point, another audience member walked through a curtain leading to the backstage and told the workers there that she also needed a restroom. The crew escorted both women to the lobby. They soon took off from the theater.

The last example did not directly involve a mobile phone device, but you have to wonder: Had these women’s personal boundaries been blunted by a life attached to screens on which all kinds of urges are loosed without consequence? It can’t just have been the booze. No amount of alcohol would prompt most ladies, for example, to break a storefront window.

Clearly, some members of today’s audiences can’t appreciate that there are human beings on the stage communicating with them. They might consider quarantining themselves before a flat screen at home, where no one would care whether they are singing along, texting or sitting on the toilet.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Melina Sampaio Manfrinatti, via Flickr.

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — The tutued young woman, the court interpreter, and the middle-aged dad wearing a jester’s cap in Seattle Seahawks colors traipsed down to the Living Computer Museum here Saturday morning with a single goal in mind.

They wanted to help stamp out Ebola. Using 10,000 or so smartphones.

Aid groups point to a gaping hole in the effort to battle the terrifying disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea: the lack of real-time data. How many new cases are cropping up and where? How many deaths have occurred? Where are the empty hospital beds? What supplies are needed and where?

The phones — programmed Saturday by volunteers here — will allow relief workers to collect data in the field and transmit it back to the United Nations via a specially constructed WiFi network so that aid can be sent where it is needed most. Information will be shared with scientists and humanitarian workers.

This high-tech effort, announced Monday, is part of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s $100 million pledge to help eradicate the disease, whose toll last week crested 5,000 in West Africa. On Monday, a Sierra Leone surgeon who had been airlifted to the United States for treatment died in a Nebraska hospital after contracting the disease.

“If we can provide an aid worker with a cellphone, they can communicate back to headquarters about what’s going on in the countryside in real time,” said Andy Hickl, senior director for innovation at Vulcan Inc., Allen’s technology firm.

“We’re taking it from six people (collecting data) in the field to 10,000 reporters from the field,” Hickl said Saturday, as volunteers in the cavernous museum building scrambled to unpack phones and download software. “If we have the data in the right hands, we can make decisions about where the next supply plane or truck should go.”

Hickl traveled to Accra, Ghana, in October to visit the headquarters of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. He had been invited by UNMEER’s chief of mission to help the organization’s information management team.

“We said, ‘What do you know about what’s going on in the three countries?'” Hickl recounted. “The answer was, ‘Not enough.'”

Right now, he said, the “state of the art” for information gathering in the affected nations is the clipboard, and once data is compiled, “someone has to type the information into an Excel spreadsheet and it gets sent via email at some point.”

The hope is that the smartphones and WiFi network being installed to transmit the data will help speed the response to the spreading crisis.

The kind of data that will be logged into forms installed in the smartphones falls into three categories: How good is connectivity? For example, is it even possible for sick people to make a phone call and have someone take them to an Ebola treatment center?

Where and under what circumstances are humanitarian groups operating? And finally, what is life like in the far corners of the countries plagued by the disease? Are families holding up? Who has died? Is there food?

The first phone shipments were scheduled for Monday: 600 were sent to the U.N. mission in Accra, 2,500 went to aid workers in Guinea, and 1,000 were dispatched to an aid group called Mercy Corps.

The WiFi network in the affected countries will be built by NetHope, a consortium of international humanitarian groups that specializes in bringing technology to developing regions.

“We have seen a huge drop in reporting in the last few weeks,” said Lauren Woodman, NetHope chief executive. “We believe it’s because of a lack of connectivity. Our member organizations tell us it takes three to four hours to make a phone call. … The system is just broken.”

At the Living Computer Museum on Saturday morning, Adriana Franco-Erickson, a court interpreter who lives in Kent, Wash., unpacked a steady stream of boxed phones. Her husband and daughter installed software.

They came out, she said, because they were “desperate to find a way to help fight the Ebola.”

“We are citizens of the world,” she said as she worked. “Helping control the disease in Africa will also help us all to be better.”

AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso

Apple Acknowledges Bug In iPhone Software, Offers Fix

Apple Acknowledges Bug In iPhone Software, Offers Fix

Washington (AFP) – Apple Thursday acknowledged a bug in its iPhone software update that caused users to lose cellular service, offering a temporary fix and a full update “in the next few days.”

A statement on Apple’s website was the first to acknowledge the problem, which came after numerous users complained on social media and online forums that the iOS 8.0.1 update left their phones largely inoperable.

The update was developed to add in fitness monitoring programs which were omitted from the iOS 8 platform released last week.

The Apple website acknowledged that the latest update, which was pulled shortly after its release Wednesday, caused a loss of cellular service and the touch identification which allows users to operate their phones with a fingerprint ID.

“We have a workaround for you if you have an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus and you lost cellular service and Touch ID functionality today after updating to iOS 8.0.1,” Apple said.

The temporary fix allows users to reinstall iOS 8 through iTunes.

“We are also preparing iOS 8.0.2 with a fix for the issue, and will release it as soon as it’s ready in the next few days,” Apple added.

The news caused further embarrassment to Apple after some users posted comments about bends in the bodies of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus when carried in trouser pockets.

On the MacRumors forum of Apple users, one iPhone buyer noted that, after carrying the handset in a front pocket for 18 hours, “I saw the reflection of the window in the iPhones slightly distorted.”

The user posted a picture of the bent iPhone, and dozens posted similar complaints on Twitter.

Apple said Monday it sold more than 10 million of the new smartphones in the first three days since launching in a handful of countries, setting a new record for opening weekend sales.

The new iPhones were launched Friday in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Puerto Rico and Singapore.

They will be available in more than 20 additional countries on September 26, and 115 countries by the end of the year.

Samsung meanwhile said Wednesday it was launching its oversized Galaxy Note smartphone earlier than expected, getting into the key Chinese market ahead of Apple.

AFP Photo/Robyn Beck

Apple Unveils Two Big-Screen iPhones

Apple Unveils Two Big-Screen iPhones

San Francisco (AFP) — Apple on Tuesday unveiled two new versions of the iPhone, boosting the screen size of the iconic smartphone to 4.7 and 5.5 inches.

Unveiling the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple chief Tim Cook said the company was launching “the biggest advancement in the history of iPhones.”

Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller, speaking in Cupertino, California, said the new iPhones were “simply stunning” with polarized glass displays and bodies that are “thinner than ever before.”

“These are the best phones ever made,” Schiller said, as he described the new devices at a major set-piece event streamed live online.

The new iPhone 6 will start at the same price of existing iPhones at $199 for U.S. customers while the iPhone 6 Plus will be at $299 with a two-year contract.

Schiller said the devices would be available in at least 115 countries by the end of the year.

Apple will cut the price of existing iPhone 5S and 5C with the launch.

Apple’s move, expanding the latest iPhone with a four-inch screen, comes as consumers are switching to handsets with bigger displays to watch videos and browse the Internet.

Observers say the timing is right for Apple to introduce a generation of iPhone 6 models with screen sizes stretched to tap into users’ love for “phablets” that combine the features of smartphones and tablets.

AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan

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