Tag Archives: Marvel

Doctor Strange contest for girls in the US aged 15 – 18

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The deadline is Oct. 5, 2016 so if you do qualify for entry, you’d best be quick.

David Bruggeman in his Sept. 25, 2016 posting provides more information,

… the latest contest is called The Magic of STEM Challenge and is tied to the November [2016] release of the film Doctor Strange.

The name highlights part of the dramatic arc of the film – a neurosurgeon engaging with magic as he seeks to recover from an accident.  I have not seen the film, but it may bear some resemblance to how the Thor films have tried to explain the fantastical actions of those characters with some basis in science.  But don’t look too close (as you shouldn’t in any superhero film) or the gloss of scientific realism will disappear.

But I’m writing about the contest.  There’s a short window for entries, because the contest is open until October 5th.  Entrants are girls in the U.S. from 15-18 years old (grades 10-12), and must submit a video blog (vlog) on a scientific or technological questions. …

As some may know, Canadian actress Rachel McAdams is one of the leads in the film so she’s introducing the contest and the winner of the previous STEM Marvel contest (Captain America: Civil War),

You can find out more about the contest and the rules here.

One final thing about the movie, there has been a bit of a controversy with regard to the casting of Brit actress Tilda Swinton. From an April 28, 2016 posting by Kaiser on the Celebitchy blog,

… now C. Robert Cargill, the Strange screenwriter, has come out to try to explain it.

Tilda Swinton was cast as a Tibetan monk in the Marvel movie Doctor Strange so the comic book character could be changed to a ‘Celtic’ to avoid upsetting China, a screenwriter has claimed. One of the film’s screenwriters has suggested that the casting of the British actress as sorcerer the Ancient One was partly done to avoid offending China’s government. Moviegoers in China now represent the world’s second-largest annual box office after North America but the film’s backers apparently did not want to risk losing out on the Chinese market by introducing the highly politically charged subject of Tibet.

“He originates from Tibet, so if you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he’s Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that that’s bullsh*t and risk the Chinese government going, ‘Hey, you know one of the biggest film-watching countries in the world? We’re not going to show your movie because you decided to get political,” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill said in a podcast interview with the Texas-based DoubleToasted.com.

Cargill, who wasn’t involved in the casting of Swinton, said the comic book character of the Ancient One was ‘a racist stereotype.’

‘There is no other character in Marvel history that is such a cultural landmine, that is absolutely unwinnable,’ he said, adding: ‘It all comes down on to which way you are willing to lose.’

…

After the controversy over the 2016 Academy Awards regarding the paucity of minority nominees which  extended into a conversation about the lack of opportunity for minorities, it seems Hollywood is being held to closer account on topics of race.

As for the science end of things, I guess we can expect a light sprinkling of relatively accurate information mixed in with fantasy science.

Good luck to everyone who enters the contest and may your science be as accurate as possible.

Exploring the science of Iron Man (prior to the opening of Captain America: Civil War, aka, Captain America vs. Iron Man)

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Not unexpectedly, there’s a news item about science and Iron Man (it’s getting quite common for the science in movies to be promoted and discussed) just a few weeks before the movie Captain America: Civil War or, as it’s also known, Captain America vs. Iron Man opens in the US. From an April 26, 2016 news item on phys.org,

… how much of our favourite superheros’ power lies in science and how much is complete fiction?

As Iron Man’s name suggests, he wears a suit of “iron” which gives him his abilities—superhuman strength, flight and an arsenal of weapons—and protects him from harm.

In scientific parlance, the Iron man suit is an exoskeleton which is worn outside the body to enhance it.

An April 26, 2016 posting by Chris Marr on the ScienceNetwork Western Australia blog, which originated the news item, provides an interesting overview of exoskeletons and some of the scientific obstacles still to be overcome before they become commonplace,

In the 1960s, the first real powered exoskeleton appeared—a machine integrated with the human frame and movements which provided the wearer with 25 times his natural lifting capacity.

The major drawback then was that the unit itself weighed in at 680kg.

UWA [University of Western Australia] Professor Adrian Keating suggests that some of the technology seen in the latest Marvel blockbuster, such as controlling the exoskeleton with simple thoughts, will be available in the near future by leveraging ongoing advances of multi-disciplinary research teams.

“Dust grain-sized micromachines could be programmed to cooperate to form reconfigurable materials such as the retractable face mask, for example,” Prof Keating says.

However, all of these devices are in need of a power unit small enough to be carried yet providing enough capacity for more than a few minutes of superhuman use, he says.

Does anyone have a spare Arc Reactor?

Currently, most exoskeleton development has been for medical applications, with devices designed to give mobility to amputees and paraplegics, and there are a number in commercial production and use.

Dr Lei Cui, who lectures in Mechatronics at Curtin University, has recently developed both a hand and leg exoskeleton, designed for use by patients who have undergone surgery or have nerve dysfunction, spinal injuries or muscular dysfunction.

“Currently we use an internal battery that lasts about two hours in the glove, which can be programmed for only four different movement patterns,” Dr Cui says.

Dr Cui’s exoskeletons are made from plastic, making them light but offering little protection compared to the titanium exterior of Stark’s favourite suit.

It’s clear that we are a long way from being able to produce a working Iron Man suit at all, let alone one that flies, protects the wearer and has the capacity to fight back.

This is not the first time I’ve featured a science and pop culture story here. You can check out my April 28, 2014 posting for a story about how Captain America’s shield could be a supercapacitor (it also has a link to a North Carolina State University blog featuring science and other comic book heroes) and there is my May 6, 2013 post about Iron Man 3 and a real life injectable nano-network.

As for ScienceNetwork Western Australia, here’s more from their About SWNA page,

ScienceNetwork Western Australia (SNWA) is an online science news service devoted to sharing WA’s achievements in science and technology.

SNWA is produced by Scitech, the state’s science and technology centre and supported by the WA Government’s Office of Science via the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.

Our team of freelance writers work with in-house editors based at Scitech to bring you news from all fields of science, and from the research, government and private industry sectors working throughout the state. Our writers also produce profile stories on scientists. We collaborate with leading WA institutions to bring you Perspectives from prominent WA scientists and opinion leaders.

We also share news of science-related events and information about the greater WA science community including WA’s Chief Scientist, the Premier’s Science Awards, Innovator of the Year Awards and information on regional community science engagement.

Since our commencement in 2003 we have grown to share WA’s stories with local, national and global audiences. Our articles are regularly republished in print and online media in the metropolitan and regional areas.

Bravo to the Western Australia government! I wish there  initiatives of this type in Canada, the closest we have is the French language Agence Science-Presse supported by the Province of Québec.

Accessing data the Marvel (comic book) way: uberframeworks and graphs

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For want of a better term I’m going to be calling the company, Marvel. It is an entertainment conglomerate based in the world of comic books and comic book heroes and the company has a data problem as David Lumb points out in his Nov. 27, 2013 article for Fast Company (Note: A link has been removed),

After 70 years of publishing, Marvel Entertainment has built up an incredible universe of heroes, villains, and super teams–a sea of data that no mere wiki can organize. At long last, Marvel has embarked on a mighty quest of its own: to create an entirely new graph database and search system to conquer continuity malaise by visualizing each character across the Marvel Universe.

Here’s how Lumb describes the problem,

The problem, like with any massive chunk of data, lies in getting the right data pieces in front of users–but for Marvel, the question becomes a semantic exercise. Just who is the character Hawkeye?

Well, he’s Clint Barton, except when he’s not; erstwhile sidekick Kate Bishop and villain Bullseye have taken the Hawkeye identity. He’s a member of the Avengers, except when he’s not; he’s also been part of the Thunderbolts and West Coast Avengers. He got his skills performing trick shots in a circus, except when he didn’t: He got them as an agent redeeming a murder conviction in the Ultimate universe and as a Black Ops SHIELD agent in the Marvel films.

According to the article, Peter Olson, Marvel’s VP of Web and Application Development, is in charge of developing the new database (Note: A link has been removed),

“We want an uberframework–the words ‘ontology’ and ‘taxonomy’ get thrown around a lot,” Olson said. “We want characters to appear as close to as possible from all their stories and iterations but, overall, we want the characters to bubble up to archetypes.”

…

Most databases are relational, most easily visualized as tables of rows and columns: … Marvel still has use for this kind of database that returns queries with solid, irrefutable answers, like listing all the issues they’ve sold for the above prices.

The new database, however, will run on graph theory, looking for relationships between characters, teams, and events. The graph above [image removed] displays relationships between characters, which would be extremely difficult for a relational database that might look for superheroes but leave out villains instead of showing more abstract values, like how popular/visible a character is across Marvel’s comic titles.

There is of course a business case for this new approach (Note: Links have been removed from the article excerpt),

… The Marvel graph database will find an answer based not only on book similarities but nuanced metadata, like writer or artist style. Better still, it’ll do what the venerable ComicBookDatabase cannot: confidently propose a list of essential story arcs for the new fan.
And lo, Marvel’s multimedia empire strikes again: Aside from Sony’s death grip on Spider-Man, Marvel holds the rights to all its major characters, so their recommendations aren’t limited to subscriber-only comics on its Marvel Unlimited service. Let loose the hounds of suggested merchandise! Of course, this also means those ultra-streamlined character pages will become the most seamless portals to every character’s stories that the Internet has ever seen.

This is a good article, which I recommend reading in its entirety, although I do have one suggestion for David Lumb and/or his editor,

… the company now depicts the same characters across multiple mediums … [emphasis mine]

The plural in this context (mass communications) should have been media. Mediums are a group of people who communicate with the dead, as one of my professors informed us all in an undergraduate communications course. He was a bit of hardliner on the topic,. I found out later there is a group that uses both; artists use either media or mediums (Grammarist).

Graph Databases, are covered in a Wikipedia essay, which has this to say about them (Note: Links and footnotes have been removed),

A graph database is a database that uses graph structures with nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data. By definition,[according to whom?] a graph database is any storage system that provides index-free adjacency. This means that every element contains a direct pointer to its adjacent element and no index lookups are necessary.

The essay also offers this illustration,

[Downloaded from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database]

[Downloaded from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_database]

Peter Olson, the VP who’s managing this new database for Marvel gave a talk at the Nov. 5 – 6, 2013 GraphConnect New York (City) meeting. His talk is described this way on the website (from the GraphConnect 2013 videos webpage),

Graphing the Marvel Universe – Peter Olson @GraphConnect NY 2013

This talk will give an overview of why graphs are such a powerful conceptual framework for modeling intellectual property and how Marvel uses them to represent the 70 years of fictional content from many different media that makes up the Marvel Universe.

The talk is approximately 40 mins. long and you can also find it here on Vimeo.

You can find more information (speakers, agenda, etc.) here about the Nov. 5 – 6, 2013 meeting in New York City and you can find out more about GraphConnect 2013 meetings in Boston, San Francisco, London (UK), and elsewhere by going here.