firehose

The Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm, Sweden this morning that Canadian writer Alice Munro has won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, calling her the "master of the contemporary short story." Munro, who is 82 years old, is the 13th woman to win the prize which has been awarded  since 1901.

Munro, who was born in Ontario in 1931 and lives there today, focuses much of her fiction on her native environs, and in a statement to the New York Times through her publisher, Random House, Munro said, "I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians." She continued, “I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.”

Munro's work, primarily short fiction, has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review. She was previously awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize for her body of work and is a three-time winner of Canada's Governor's General Award for fiction in 1968, 1978, and 1986.

By Nathan Grayson on October 10th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

Gone Home has been out for a little while now, and in that time it has captured the heart of literally every human being on Earth. Also Alec, but we don’t really know what manner of creature he is. So then, what’s Fullbright up to these days? Resting on its laurels? Basking in the motivation-searing afterglow of past success? Finally realizing that – oh crap – they totally forgot to add in all the guns? Turns out, the answer is none of those things, despite overwhelming plausibility. The next immediate step, then, is more content for Gone Home, but not the sort that might muck up the game’s musty, lived-in history. And after that? Well, probably don’t expect Gone Home 2.

Gone Home was created by four people (three of them living and working out of the same house in Portland, Oregon) over the course of a grueling year-and-a-half span. You’d think, now that it’s out, that’d warrant a much-needed vacation. A step into morning sunlight after a very lengthy night. And you’d be right. Sort of.

The game is done. Odds are, its story and content will remain untouched, even though writer/designer Steve Gaynor fully admits that he’s not quite fully satisfied with things like [MINOR SPOILER] the basement area’s design or the mom character’s development [END SPOILER]. And there’s a good reason for this: Gaynor and co love their first bouncing baby architectural structure, but they need some space.

“If it’s successful commercially, that’s great, because it gives us freedom to do another thing we want to do on a schedule without having to be, like, ‘Oh shit, if we don’t ship something else in another six months, we’re all gonna be broke,’” Gaynor explained to RPS. “I think that’s the dilemma a lot of triple-A studios fall into. You start a triple-A studio to make your dream project, and you hire 50 people or 100 people or whatever, and your game breaks even or whatever. But you can’t just take a breather. You have to keep paying those people. So you’re like, ‘OK, I guess we’ll just make this game again but put a two on the end.’”

“Or you spend so much time with your head in a game – we worked on Gone Home for a year and a half – and you think in terms of that game for a long time after you’ve released it. I think that, if you go straight into another project, you’re in danger of thinking of it in terms of the thing you just made.”

Gone Home will, however, at least see one addition to its age-gnarled trunk of tricks. Gaynor wants to put some distance between himself and the game, but he absolutely does not want to leave it behind. And so, instead of cluttering up the place with all manner of side rooms of subplots, Fullbright’s planning to toss in some extra background. For free.

“We’re working on a commentary mode right now, and we’re going to release that as free DLC,” Gaynor said after, I kid you not, banging on a table and laughingly bellowing “exclusive” because he is delightful. “If you have it on Steam, you’ll just get it. We don’t have a date for it yet, but it’ll be relatively soon. We’re aiming for the short-term, and we’ve already recorded most of it.”

“A bunch of icons appear, and you’ll either hear one of us or – and I haven’t talked with her yet – maybe our voice actress, Sarah Grayson. I want to talk to her about the experience of playing Sam. So it’s a bunch of background stuff. Some easter-egg-y stuff, too. I actually got to talk to Corin Tucker, who’s the lead singer of [riot grrrl bands] Heavens to Betsy and Sleater-Kinney. I got to get her on the tape talking about her experiences at the beginning of the riot grrrl scene. So you’ve got the four of us talking day-to-day, but you also have people who contributed their own presence and identity through their voice or music. That’s really exciting to me.”

That’s not necessarily the only bit of sprucing-up Gone Home will receive, either. Don’t expect a total remodeling, but more detail work can’t hurt. “It’s stuff like [the commentary],” said Gaynor. “We can keep supporting Gone Home in certain ways as we’re trying to get in the headspace of what our actual next game will be.”

That, of course, is the next big question. Where does Fullbright go after Gone Home hit home for so many? Once upon a time, the team would’ve been shuffled into another wibbly, wobbly, hyper-stuffed triple-A deck, but now it has full creative freedom. And that’s magnificent, until you realize that limitless choice is actually the scariest thing in the entire universe. Decisions. Responsibility. The weight of the world. But you don’t always have to bulldoze everything in order to begin anew. Foundations are important, and Gaynor thinks he’s found a solid one.

“I’m inspired by indie studios that build on what they had success with, but do something new and interesting with it,” he explained. “The guys at Supergiant, who made Bastion, have been an inspiration to me the whole time. The idea of them taking basic facts of Command & Conquer, which they worked on, and making something really striking and unique in Bastion [was great]. And now they’re not going, ‘We’re gonna throw it all out. We’re gonna make a flight sim.’ Instead, they’re saying, ‘We’ve got Bastion, and we want to build off that to make a really new, unique experience that stands on its own with Transistor.’ The core way you interact with it is different, but it’s built on the base of the first thing they made that had a lot of potential.”

“I guarantee that we’re not going to be doing Gone Home, but in a different house. I don’t think people would be interested in something that amounts to, ‘Oh, it’s just Gone Home, but different content.’ But we’re also not going to make something that we have no experience with whatsoever. So it’s about walking the line and figuring out what you can add or change to make the result totally stand on its own – but to also be fed by this other thing that built the framework.”

I hope this one comes with tissues.

Nokia introduced its Glance screen feature with the Lumia 925, allowing users to double-tap to wake the device, and it has been gradually improving it ever since. While Glance also typically shows a clock when the phone display is turned off, Nokia has previously added a "Peek" feature to let you wave to activate the time. Today the company is releasing a beta of what it calls Glance Background, allowing some Lumia owners to set a background image on the Glance screen.

Nokia Sleeping Screen was a distinct feature of Nokia's Symbian devices, and the Glance Background beta mimics most of the old options. You can select up to four images to rotate as the Glance background and choose from preloaded images or your own. There's even a basic editor with preset effects and the ability to colorize images and zoom in. The setup is really basic and it's just an additional Windows Phone app to install.

A little additional battery drain for a background image

The app will work on the Nokia Lumia 1020, 928, 925, 920, 820, 720, and 620, providing you have the latest Amber update with General Distribution Release 2 (GDR2). However it won't work on the Lumia 625 or 520 as they don't support the Glance screen feature. Nokia notes you may experience some issues with the app as it's still in beta, including flickering and an increase in power consumption. If you're willing to sacrifice a little bit of battery for an image on the Glance screen then head over to the Windows Phone Store to download Glance Background.

To look at Monsanto’s product pages, you’d think the company’s business is in selling two closely related commodities: agricultural seeds and weed killers. But that would be like saying that Verizon sells people data and phone calls. What these companies are truly engaged in is an effort to make themselves indispensable to their target market’s daily activities. Now Monsanto is stepping up that campaign by expanding into the high-tech world of big data with its $930 million acquisition of The Climate Corporation.

It’s not that Monsanto is unfamiliar with the cutting edge of technology — as its long list of patents will attest — but so far most of the company’s energies have been spent on altering, enhancing, and otherwise rearranging the basic ingredients that go into land farming. With Climate Corp’s expertise in hyper-local weather prediction and big data analytics, Monsanto looks set to become a fully fledged services company as well.

Founded by a pair of former Google employees in 2006, The Climate Corporation began life under the moniker of WeatherBill Inc. Siraj Khaliq and David Friedberg put together a complex system for highly detailed weather monitoring, prediction, and analysis, which allowed them to offer a new type of insurance to farmers. Instead of protecting growers against loss, WeatherBill promised to recompense their anticipated profit in the event of a given weather calamity. Thus, if you sign up for the company’s drought protection plan and your fields don’t receive the stipulated amount of rain, you still get the full anticipated profit of a healthy year’s crop.

Name your peril and The Climate Corporation will insure your profits against it

After changing its name to The Climate Corporation in 2011 and thereby better harnessing the prime web estate of its climate.com homepage, the company’s next big milestone has been this month’s takeover by Monsanto. The all-cash purchase price of $930 million is big by anyone’s standards — standing alongside Instagram and Yammer in the pantheon of tech startup sales — and marks the growing value and importance of applying big data analytics to long-established industries like agriculture.

As Monsanto’s press release makes clear, it’s buying technical acumen and capabilities first, with the insurance business being of secondary interest. Climate.com provides the farmer’s equivalent of a fitness tracker: it offers hourly reports on field-level conditions like precipation and wind speed, email and text alerts when thresholds are exceeded, and even a mobile app for iOS and Android. You’re not just given rough temperature estimates, you’re given field-specific and highly detailed weather forecasts, plus a litany of optional support services for helping you choose when to seed your next crop.

Yes, there’s even a mobile app

It’s this farmer-support infrastructure that most appeals to Monsanto, which already has various ventures like its AgAcademy and Integrated Farming Systems (IFS) designed to help inform planting decisions. The first IFS product from Monsanto — FieldScripts for corn, which advises on the best types of Monsanto seeds to plant in each field — is actually the product of a similar acquisition the company made last year when it bought Precision Planting for a quarter of Climate Corp's price. FieldScripts is still in testing ahead of a 2014 launch, illustrating how nascent this market still is.

If Monsanto is successful in putting together a comprehensive farm management, oversight, and planning service, it can make itself even more pervasive in the US farmer’s day-to-day operations. The company’s not being modest in its estimates, claiming there’s $20 billion of "untapped yield opportunity," which it can help farmers unlock through the application of what it calls "data science." Buying The Climate Corporation is a shortcut to getting out in the lead.

Developing the service side of its business is more than just an attempt to catalyze extra growth for Monsanto; it could also help rejuvenate the company’s dubious reputation around the world. Monsanto’s Brave New World approach to farming — where super-strength herbicides like Roundup are used in concert with genetically modified seeds — has been highly controversial. Some 2 million people participated in a global March Against Monsanto in May, and another such event is planned for this Saturday.

The grassroots repulsion to Monsanto’s practices has been vocal, finding expression through documentaries like The World According to Monsanto and activist websites such as Occupy Monsanto. Fears about the undocumented or as yet unidentified effects of genetically modified food intermingle with disapproval of Monsanto’s zealous enforcement of patent rights and the onerous conditions it imposes upon its client farmers. Monsanto demands, for example, that growers should keep purchasing new seeds every year instead of re-seeding their fields in the natural way.

Monsanto's diversification roadmap passes through Silicon Valley

Although unpopular, these impositions have proven successful in establishing Monsanto as the preeminent seed and herbicide supplier in the US. Still, the company now has a chance to improve its image dramatically if it continues along a path of diversifying its biotechnology core with more benign information services such as those Climate Corp can provide.

Tim Gosman, Senior Consultant at The Brand Union, warns that Monsanto's efforts "to help farmers improve their practices and profits will be seen by many as hugely disingenuous." The company still has a major reputation issue it needs to resolve, he tells The Verge, but "it's a wise move to try and generate some positive PR for the business and this acquisition could be the first step towards doing exactly that."

The Climate Corporation aims to retain all its current employees and will continue to operate in its present role as an expert risk management and agri-insurance firm. The question for Monsanto is whether it can properly capitalize on Climate’s smarts to become the leader in this new field of data-driven farming. If it does, it stands to benefit both financially and reputationally.

More than a thousand Chinese college students were forced to manufacture the PlayStation 4 as part of an unpaid internship at a Foxconn factory, reports Dongfang Daily.

Xi'an Technological University students spent two months at the Foxconn plant in Yantai, China, for a work-study program that ran from August to this week. Students from the program told Dongfang Daily that the internship was mandatory — their diploma would be withheld if they didn't participate, and if they attempted to drop out of the program early, they would lose six credits' worth of courses. The students also said they were given tasks outside of their areas of study, and sometimes performed manual labor.

The same Foxconn plant came under fire last October when it was found to be using underage workers to manufacture the Wii U.

Foxconn said in a statement to Quartz that during an internal investigation, it found the students were given night shifts and forced to work overtime, a violation of company policy.

"Immediate actions have been taken to bring that campus into full compliance with our code and policies," said a Foxconn representative, including "reinforcing the policies of no overtime and no night shifts for student interns, even though such work is voluntary, and reminding all interns of their rights to terminate their participation in the program at any time."

In a statement given to MCV, Sony said that Foxconn complies with Sony's Supplier Code of Conduct, which the company established in 2005.

"The Sony Group established the 'Sony Supplier Code of Conduct' in June 2005 with the expectation of every supplier agreeing and adhering to the policies of the Sony Group in complying with all applicable laws, work ethics, labour conditions, and respect for human rights, environmental conservation and health & safety," said Sony. "We understand Foxconn fully comprehend and comply with this 'Sony Supplier Code of Conduct.'"

[Thanks, Fan Zhang]