An In-Your-Face Look at Handguns from Around the World

By Amanda Gorence

Smith and Wesson .38 revolver

Guns have a massive amount of power associated with them. They are designed to kill. We decided to photograph portraits of them in a similar way you might photograph a powerful person. Like powerful people, pistols have this ‘perfect’ quality that we wanted to explore. As we started shooting them, we could see flaws in their design. Metal burring around the barrels, scratches in the metal. This imperfection and detail were very interesting to us; connecting us back to these images as ‘portraits’.
We also loved the impossible perspective these portraits provided. Typically, when you see a gun at this range and perspective it’s usually seconds before the pistol is fired. This makes it very hard to examine at point blank range. As the viewer, you want to lean in and see the detail; but at the same time it’s very uneasy to be as close as you are to the barrel of a gun.—Peter Andrew

Point Blank is an ongoing series of handguns from around the world by Toronto-based photographer Peter Andrew, Simon Duffy and Derek Blais. Captured in extreme detail, the large-scale ‘portraits’ are undeniably in-your-face, lending an intensity you can’t turn away from. Andrew says they are meant to be studied like you would a face, the detail and imperfections found within building a story that make us wonder where they’ve been or why and how they’ve been used. The trio has photographed seven handguns thus far and continue to build the collection. The project was recently featured in the 2013 Communication Arts Photography Annual.

Desert Eagle

Uzi

Glock

Smith and Wesson 9mm

Rhino

Beretta

The World's Most Precise Clock Could Prove Einstein Wrong

By Adam Cole

This may look like a mad scientist's garage sale, but it's actually the most precise clock ever built.

Jim Burrus/NIST

What a makes a good clock? Andrew Ludlow, a physicist at the , says one of the most important criteria is stability.

"If you could imagine a grandfather clock and see the pendulum swinging back and forth, ideally that pendulum would swing back and forth very uniformly," Ludlow says. "Each swing would take exactly the same amount of time."

That's stability. But what if something perturbs the system, like a mischievous toddler?

"Imagine that toddler shaking the grandfather clock itself — that oscillation period could vary quite a bit," Ludlow says. "How much that ticking rate varies determines the precision with which you can measure the evolution of time."

Ludlow is a clockmaker, but his clocks don't have pendulums or gears. They are atomic clocks that rely on what Ludlow calls "the natural internal ticking of the atom."

Every atom of a given element has its own characteristic resonant frequency. The speed of that vibration is very consistent and very fast — there are quadrillions of "ticks" every second. Atomic-clock makers use the regularity of these vibrations to keep time with extreme accuracy.
Toddlers can't mess up these clocks, but there's still a little instability. Atoms move around, and that makes their vibrations slightly harder to measure. So Ludlow and his team used a lattice of lasers to trap the atoms and then cool them down. With the atoms frozen in place, the scientists could more accurately measure their vibration.

Ludlow's clock is 10 times more accurate than the last model. It's the most precise atomic clock ever built.

"Obviously getting to a meeting on time doesn't require this type of precision," Ludlow says. "But believe it or not, there's a number of both scientific and technical applications."

Better atomic clocks will facilitate and faster telecommunication networks. And some physicists are excited about another application: testing Einstein's .

"Today many scientists believe that the theory of relativity is incompatible with other physical theories," Ludlow says.

Einstein predicted that certain physical properties, like the strength of the interaction between photons and electrons, or the ratio of the mass of electrons and protons, should never change. But competing theories say that those "fundamental constants" might actually fluctuate and such changes would slightly influence the ticking speed of atomic clocks.

"As clocks become better and better, they become more and more useful tools to explore this possible variation," Ludlow says.

Einstein also predicted that clocks in different gravitational fields would tick at different speeds. For example, a clock in Boulder, Colo., which is a mile above sea level, would feel a slightly weaker gravitational pull than a clock at sea level in Washington, D.C. As a result, it would tick just a bit faster — and after 200,000 years it would be a full second ahead.

That's not much of an effect, but it's big enough for most atomic clocks to measure. And Ludlow's clock can register the change in gravity across a single inch of elevation. That kind of sensitivity will allow scientists to test Einstein's theories with greater precision in the real world.

Brandy's South Africa Concert Sees Audience Of 40 In 90,000-Seat Stadium

Brandy tried to bring her act to South Africa last weekend, but it almost didn't count.

The "Boy is Mine" singer took the stage at the 90,000-capacity FNB Stadium to a crowd of merely 40 people. Brandy was intended as a surprise performer during the music portion of the Nelson Mandela Sport and Culture Day, but the surprise element didn't work out in her favor. Attendees didn't know to expect the singer, and they poured out of the stadium after a series of performers -- David Jenkins, Elvis Blue, Salif Keita and D'Banj -- played sets before Brandy.

South African singer Kabomo witnessed the travesty and had this to report:


Not only did Brandy not have viewers in the stadium, but she was snubbed on TV as well. SABC, South Africa's national channel, ended its broadcast of the music performances before she took the stage, The Guardian reports.

Although Brandy's latest album, last year's "Two Eleven," didn't chart as high as previous efforts in the U.S. or the U.K., her popularity in Africa endures, despite her latest bad news. She has performed there for years, and her 1998 album "Never Say Never" remains an R&B classic. Better luck next time, Mrs. Norwood.

Ikea is worst in Customer Delivery

Ikea is so good at so many things. Why is it so bad at delivery?

By Jessica Winter

A woman sits at a model room in an Ikea store. Courtesy of epsos.de/Flickr

It all started because I wanted the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. Not a new, licensed reproduction—I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea’s Billy bookcases, which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour pairing couture with jeans on her first Vogue cover, or Mike D plonking a Target pouf smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.

We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.

• June 7. We buy the bookcase.
• June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: “Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.”
• June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
• June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: “Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. … You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.”
• June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
• June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
• June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.

And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who’d say something like, “We can’t deliver your item because it hasn’t arrived,” then call Ikea, who’d say, “They do have it—you need to call them back and find out why they’re not delivering it,” and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered—to UX Logistics, who said they didn’t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we’d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn’t yet received the delivery.

It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.

The nightmare of Ikea delivery is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own “very frustrating” Ikea delivery experience in a December 2011 Ad Age profile, which stressed the firm’s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who’s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn’t the flaw in the Eivor Cirkel rug. It’s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.

Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery. Like many big-box retailers, Ikea outsources all its delivery. “With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,” says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea’s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn’t have much competition in the bargain furniture business—there’s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, “Ikea’s target customers are consumers who prize ‘value,’ and are willing to spend their own time to save money”—by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. “Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,” Gallino says.

Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product—even heavy, unwieldy products—can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary wag.com. But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn’t have to be assembled or curated”—in other words, anything that isn’t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can’t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. “Yesterday, you didn’t know you needed a new strainer,” Frei says, “but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can’t do that.”

Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. “The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,” says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn’s recent book Happy Money makes the case that a pay-now-enjoy-later model of consumption leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.

Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article “‘The IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love”—written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely—argues that successfully assembling an Ikea product can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband’s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. “I’m not so sure the answer is no,” Norton says. “It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There’s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.”

Or not. “Working as Ikea’s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,” my husband said in a statement to Slate.

Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea’s unique alchemy. “Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you’ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn’t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. “If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can’t find it,” Frei says, “you’ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.”

Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he’d wanted to purchase a Spoka nightlight for his daughter, but Ikea doesn’t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I’m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was “most likely in stock” in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I’d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn’t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an Ikea cinnamon bun and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won’t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it’s still a little strange—a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store—to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.

Controversy Raging Over Mukul’s ST Status

By Raju Das

Shillong, Aug 23 : For sometimes now there has been a raging controversy regarding Chief Minister Mukul Manda Sangma’s Scheduled Tribe (ST) status and the matter has reached the Meghalaya High Court.

Some associations, including the Garo Students’ Union (GSU) and the All North East Indigenous Garo Law Promoters’ Association (ANEIGLPA) have opposed Mukul Sangma’s ST status.

The controversy began when one Monindro Agitok Sangma challenged Mukul’s ST status way back in 2004 and filed a petition. In March 2010, the Shillong bench of Gauhati High Court disposed off the petition. Last week, the advisor of ANEIGLPA, Tennydard Marak again filed a petition.

The controversy is regarding Mukul’s mix parentage and the surname he adopted. The Garos are a matrilineal tribe and surnames therefore are inherited from the mother. The Chief Minister’s father is Binoy Bhusan Maji Marak from the Garo community. His mother was Roshanara Begum and embraced Christianity after her marriage.

After questions were raised how Mukul got the Sangma title when his mother’s surname was Begum and was a non-tribal, it was said that Roshanara Begum was adopted by one Rikmi Manda Sangma in 1960 as her daughter and so the title. A legal deed of adoption was also shown as proof.

However, the ANEIGLPA said that neither the adoption was done under the customary norms of the Garos, where both sides of the clan (mother-father) hold a meeting for the adoption, neither was the legal deed of adoption was done during Roshanara Begum’s lifetime.

“The affidavit of adoption of Roshanara Begum was done in 2008 after her death,” Tennydard Marak said today. He claimed that the Electoral Voter’s Identity Card showed Roshanara Begum going by her maiden name till her death in 2006. Based on these arguments some of these associations are staing that Mukul is not a Garo and also not a ST.

A Year After The Northeast Exodus From Bangalore

Bangalore, Aug 22 : Exactly a year ago, on August 15, 2012, northeasterners started leaving Bangalore in droves after bulk SMSes threatened their safety. An estimated 30,000 boarded whatever trains they could jump on to, and headed home.

Says Linus Kamei, then president of the Naga Students' UNION: "It was as if all hell had broken loose. Everyone was worried and even though the Karnataka and northeastern governments reassured safety, nothing mattered."

Many have returned to Bangalore since. Edmund Zhimomi, 21, had always considered Bangalore his home and it was pressure from his family that forced him to return to his home state, leaving his course. Although his family wanted him to stay back, he finally decided to get back to his studies. "Being in Bangalore was one of the best things to have happened to me and I was not ready to give it at any cost," said Zhimomi.

Students seem to have got back to their routine. "We are back to status quo. In fact, within months of the exodus, most northeastern students who had left Bangalore returned. Even this year we have not seen any drop in admissions by students of the northeast," said Johnson Rajkumar, assistant professor, department of communication, St Joseph's College.

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, said they ran a helpline during and after the exodus. "Till the exodus happened, no one had a clear picture of how many people, and from which states, were working in Bangalore. To say everyone has returned is incorrect. Many people said they would stay back in their home states with whatever they have than struggle in distant lands."

Commercial establishments say their employees have returned. Employment opportunities in a city like Bangalore remain lucrative. But there are exceptions like Vinod Sharma, who runs a Tibetan restaurant near Koramangala. He had to hire a new set of employees after the exodus. "I had three men, all from Manipur, working for me, but they packed and left. My attempts to contact them never succeeded, I had to hire new employees."

Chinese Incursion in India Caught On Tape

For the first time in television history, Chinese troops were caught on tape intruding in the Indian space at Indo-China border near Taiwan in Arunachal Pradesh.

The video fueled racist comments on Times of India's Facebook page as some Indian commenters resorted to stereotypical remarks such as "ching chang chung ching".

The record was however soon set straight by Kima, a popular Mizo blogger from Mumbai, who commented:

"Sorry to contradict some of your sentiments but the language you can hear is not Chinese, the Indian soldier is speaking in Mizo, he's a Mizo, he's calling out to his Mizo mates and saying "Hepa hi min lo manpui rawh" (Help me grab this Chinese guy!), "Hminga, a kawnghren ah khan man ta che" (Hminga, grab him by the freaking belt) etc.

They're trying their best to push them back. Come on Mizos, show these Chinese our headhunting traditions and put the fear of God in them. And to my Indian fellowmen, can you please refrain yourselves from saying stuff like "ching chang chung ching" etc? There are a hell lot of people from the North East with similar facial features guarding the borders FOR India, protecting all of us."

The earlier racist comments have since been deleted.

Watch the video of the Chinese incursion caught on tape:

Controversy Raised Over Kaladan Project

Aizawl, Aug 22 : A top diplomat courted controversy here by declaring that the flagship of India’s Look East Policy – the Kaladan Multi-Modal Transport Project (KMMTP) currently being implemented in Mizoram does not have the required Union Cabinet sanction.

This is surprising as the Mizoram PWD is in the midst of implementing the 171 km road project from the National Highway 54 to Zochachua on the Mizoram-Mynamar border where the land route from Paletwa, Myanmar from the Sitwee port is to join it.

“I am in charge of the KMMTP project and I know that it does not have Cabinet sanction,” Special Secretary, Union Ministry of External Affairs, said when asked about the project after his key note address at a conference on foreign policy here on Monday.

When asked to clarify his remarks dismissing people’s concerns about the environmental and social impact of KMMTP on tribes living in these areas terming them ‘mere propaganda’, he said that misconceptions were being spread around about the project.

But when it was pointed out that the KMMTP road project in Lawngtlai district had been halted by the Union Ministry of Environment & Forests as it did not have the required forest clearance from that Ministry, his reply was, “there is no KMMTP project in Mizoram and if there is we are not involved in it.”

Raghavan’s stand has put the Mizoram Government in a quandary leading the Chief Minister Lalthanhawla to claim State right to dig roads wherever it sees fit. Besides, the CM pointed out that the KMMTP is part of India’s Look East Policy.

Under this, the Ministry for Development of North East Region (DoNER) has sanctioned 99.3 kms of new road to link up with the activities on the Myanmar side under KMMTP under the Special Accelerated Road Development Programme for North East (SARDP-NE). It is being implemented by the State PWD.

The work is being implemented by two companies which has already completed formation-cutting in about 50 kms of the road in Lawngtlai district.

The work has now stopped pending grant of forest clearance since late last month as about 16 hectares of forest land and 181 hectares of jhumlands will be affected.