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In this photo taken on Monday, Oct. 22, 2012, the hands of Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, right, who married his live-in partner Qiyaammudeen Jantjies, left, in South Africa, where gay marriage is recognized, during an interview with the Associated Press in Sevran, outside Paris. A plan to legalize same-sex marriage and allow gay couples to adopt was a liberal cornerstone of French President Francois Hollande's election manifesto earlier this year. It looked like a shoo-in, supported by a majority of the French, and an easy way to break with his conservative predecessor. But that was then, Now, as the Socialist government prepares to unveil its draft "marriage for everyone" law Wednesday, polls show wavering support for the idea and for the president amid increasingly vocal opposition in this traditionally Catholic country. Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, who married his live-in partner Qiyaammudeen Jantjies in South Africa, where gay marriage is recognized, is already seeking instruction from his local town council to get his marriage recognized in France as soon as he can. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
PARIS (AP) — A plan to legalize same-sex marriage and allow gay couples to adopt was a liberal cornerstone of Francois Hollande's election manifesto earlier this year. It looked like a shoo-in for the French President, supported by a majority of the country, and an easy way to break with his conservative predecessor. But that was then.
Now, as the Socialist government prepares to unveil its draft "marriage for everyone" law Wednesday, polls show wavering support for the idea and for the president himself amid increasingly vocal opposition in this majority Catholic country.
And it's not just religious and rural leaders speaking out; top figures within Hollande's own party also are at loggerheads over the plan. The Socialists are now dragging their feet, releasing the bill later than planned and delaying parliamentary debate on it until January.
The political hot potato has exposed divisions between urban France, where homosexuality is widely accepted, and the rural heartland, where conservative attitudes hold sway.
Unusually for this strictly secular country, it has also brought religious views to the foreground. Most French people identify as Catholic even if only a minority attend church. Archbishop Andre Vingt-Trois made it a point to defend heterosexual parents Sunday in a homily at the pilgrimage site in Lourdes in southern France. The pope weighed in last month, urging French bishops to oppose the bill, and France's chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim joined other religious leaders in his opposition.
Right-wing opposition to full-fledged gay marriage in France has generally centered on the impact on the traditional family. But some have been more strident.
One prominent Paris official warned that recognizing gay marriage could lead to legalizing polygamy, pedophilia and incest. Francois Lebel's comments drew particular attention, and condemnation, because he oversees the neighborhood that includes the presidential palace and he officiated at former President Nicolas Sarkozy's marriage to ex-supermodel Carla Bruni.
Attracting equal controversy, Christian Democrat Party leader Christine Boutin — who brandished a bible in France's National Assembly in 1998 to protest gay civil unions — has said the law could open the floodgates to moral decline.
"(Back in 1998) I said that civil unions would lead to gay marriage. Everyone said: 'Never. Not at all!' (But) it's just the natural direction. The logic of the situation is, that if we've got marriage (for all), we'll move towards polygamy. Why is it so shocking to predict this?"
France has allowed civil unions since 1999, and while they were initially seen as for gay or lesbian couples, they have proved hugely popular among heterosexuals, too. France would become the 12th country in the world — and the biggest so far in terms of economic and diplomatic influence, — to legalize same-sex marriage if the bill passes.
Meanwhile, two prominent conservatives with presidential ambitions are railing against gay marriage as they compete for the leadership of the main opposition party, the UMP. Jean-Francois Cope is calling for mass protests against the Socialists' plans, and Francois Fillon suggested he would seek to reverse the law if he's elected leader.
All the noise appears to be eroding support for same-sex rights and suggests the bill will be diluted or modified before it reaches a vote. Polls generally still show a majority favor gay marriage, though to a declining degree. And a recent poll by Ifop showed less than half now favor gay adoption, down from more than half in previous polls.
Gay couples recognize that it's an issue that is bound to provoke controversy on the country's right, but they remain optimistic that a law will come to pass — pointing out that most French have a much more liberal attitude than many anti-gay voices quoted in the press.
Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed, who married his live-in partner Qiyaammudeen Jantjies in South Africa, where gay marriage is recognized, is already seeking instruction from his local town council to get his marriage recognized in France as soon as he can.
"The population's already accepted that there are homo-parental families, that there are homosexual couples, and that in fact (France is) very late," Zahed said. "I think that a large majority of the population has acknowledged that we are lagging in France on these issues."
"It's encouraging that the majority of the country backs gay marriage," said the gay rights group Act Up. "We've won this — as a result of decades of fighting. But it also makes the trepidation and hesitation of the government even harder to believe, and this critical stage. Why do they lack the moral courage here?"
The proposed law is of great symbolic importance for Hollande, whose personal popularity is in decline and who says legalizing gay marriage and adoption is one of the things he wants to accomplish in his first year in office. But it is escalating into one of the most divisive issues in recent time, with splits even within his party's ranks.
Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has favored a minimalist law that would exclude access to medically assisted procreation such as in vitro fertilization. The parliamentary leader, Socialist Bruno Le Roux, has criticized the premier's cautious stance and will present an amendment allowing gay couples the right to such procedures.
Many have taken their protests to the streets.
"We're against (this law) in the name of the rights of the children because we want to protect the children against missing out unfairly on a daddy or a mommy," said Tugdual Derville, general director of Alliance Vita, an association of conservative groups, who staged demonstrations last week in cities around France.
Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. Even the politically neutral state child benefits agency has weighed in, criticizing the plan to scrap entries for "father" and "mother" in official records, replaced by "parent 1" and "parent 2".
The most vocal opposition is coming from rural France, where leaders from right and left are campaigning for a "conscience clause," which would allow mayors the right to refuse to perform same-sex marriages. Some 1,200 French mayors and their deputies have signed a petition protesting the law. But though they are protesting loudly, this figure represents just a small minority of the 150,000 mayors and deputies in France. Indeed, elsewhere, some mayors are in favor, and vociferously so. One mayor in Hantay, northern France, is even going so far as to plan a gay marriage on Nov. 10 — months before a bill could ever come into law.
After the draft law is presented to Wednesday's Cabinet meeting, it goes to the National Assembly for debate in January. Socialists hope that the absolute majority they won in June's parliamentary elections will be enough to push it through.
Thomas Adamson can be followed at http:/ /Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP


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It's not that I hate the gym, exactly. I just hate what it represents, the way its very existence amounts to a challenge unmet – a reminder that there are fit people in the world, and this is where they go to do the things that fit people do. Those aren't my people: athletic types with a surplus of self-regard, and the vanity to spend precious hours sculpting their deltoids or hoofing mindlessly on a treadmill. I sort of pity them. Even the ones who aren't ripped – those lean, dutiful health obsessives – are suspiciously preoccupied with self-preservation. So narrow is their pursuit of longevity that they overlook the soul and poetry of life while they're checking their heart rates and calculating their BMI.
So what if life's poetry accumulates to form a ham-size band of flesh around your middle? So what if it leaves you flabby and weak where you really want to be steely and solid? So be it. At least you've not mistaken fitness for something important in life.
I hadn't exactly let myself go. I'd flirted with decent shape before – decades of semi-regular running, a span of consistent yoga practice – but it was never done in concert with good nutrition and rarely involved real sacrifice. (I was one of the few yogis who would be tucking into a lamb chop a half-hour after rolling up my mat.) As I saw it, working out gave me license to consume what I wanted, like an insurance policy against slob-dom, but one whose protective qualities had diminished. The few times when I did make a concerted effort, I'd stick with it only long enough to be surprised at how easily the initial weight came off. Then I'd pat myself on the back and resume the old habits. Such was the level of my commitment.
At 6-foot-1, weight hovering between 198 and 203 – those are estimates; I only weighed myself at the doctor's office – I was, according to the accepted calculations of some unrealistic, faraway authority (in this case, the World Health Organization), considered "overweight." I guess I was a little soft, covered in a smooth, lifestyle-induced layer I'd accepted as the status quo. There was muscle under there, still bubbling beneath the surface, waiting to be called up to a boil, but lately it had cooled to a gentle simmer. And what I knew about male physiology was that, due to falling testosterone, decline was inevitable. At some point I'd lose the ability to build muscle. How long did I have before the flame went out completely?
I didn't want to find out.
There would never be a better time to get in shape. I was turning 45 in an America that was awash in training opportunities, nutritional advice, and whey protein shakes. Fitness had finally trended away from bulk-building and toward a new respect for the kind of lean strength found in rock climbers, not bodyguards. And if I were to make some progress, there'd be more ways to measure it than ever before. The kinds of tests and scans and performance-based diagnostic equipment that were once confined to Olympic training camps and East German preschools were now available to a regular schmo like me.
I wanted to take advantage of it. I would learn and sweat and get tested, and finally get in the kind of shape that would let me pursue any sport, fitness class, and physical challenge without fear of injury or abject humiliation.
OK, I'd settle for no more injuries. I'd had a few of those lately – more than in all my previous forty-some years. Minor knee surgery (torn meniscus) had left me with few exercise options – I couldn't run or jump rope, and riding my ill-fitting bike inflamed the tendinitis in my elbow. So I wound up at a local gym, pursuing a haphazard workout based solely on vanity, familiarity, and avoidance of the exercises I hated the most. I did crunches, flys, curls, bench presses. I even did those fussy little push-downs that work no part of your body other than the triceps. I ended up trashing my shoulder doing a set of irrationally exuberant push-ups on one of those giant green balls that people sometimes use as office chairs. At the same time, the tendinitis in my elbow returned like a wasp you had tried and failed to swat. More discouraging, my once flexible left hamstring had gone brittle on me, hardening into a cranky, tender band that made me walk like Walter Matthau.
All my efforts toward fitness had somehow pushed actual fitness further away. I'd gotten used to lying in bed, a triangle of discomfort – left knee, right elbow, left shoulder – mummy-like until the pain in my hamstring woke me up and reminded me that I had to take a leak.
But the injuries didn't hurt as much as the implication: I'd arrived at midlife flabby, feeble, and shying away from most physical challenges, even recreational ones. I was bowing out of invitations I wouldn't have thought twice about accepting a few years ago: Tough Mudders, CrossFit, bowling. (Yes, bowling.) When did I get so pathetic? I needed a professional to set myself straight. So I walked into a gym and asked for help. I tried to keep my goals humble and my vanity in check. I wanted to build muscle and lose fat, of course, but more fundamentally, I wanted to get balanced and aligned and strong, from the inside out. To reinforce the function-over-form prerogative I started the personal renovation in mid-September, the official end of the shirtless season.
Before I did any renovating, I needed to find out what kind of raw materials I was dealing with. Any man looking for a thorough assessment of his physical state would be hard-pressed to find a place better equipped than the Iris Cantor Men's Health Center at the Weill Cornell Medical College in Manhattan. It was conceived as a place where a man can see several specialists in one visit to get a full picture of his health. Once I arrived, urologist Dr. Steven Kaplan, the center's director, and his colleagues set about quantifying the metabolic me.
Their blood and urine tests yielded more information than a 44-year-old in reasonable health needs to know, including calculations of red blood cell distribution, iron saturation, and glucose, which were all fairly unremarkable. There's even a number to quantify the strength of my urinary stream. (Race horse, apparently.) There were more typical tests, too – ones that measured things like cholesterol levels and testosterone, which was surprisingly low, given my general susceptibility to road rage, distractibility, and other forms of male idiocy. But as both doctors remind me, as a healthy patient with no troubling symptoms (my breasts aren't sore, and I'm experiencing no sexual dysfunction), this was a minor deficiency I'd never be aware of otherwise.
The complete profile of my physical state is still only a sketch, and I'm already regretting my decision to sit for a portrait. Things can only get worse, I think as I remove my pants and lie flat on the Lunar iDXA body scan, a state-of-the-art GE diagnostic tool that will slowly scan my body and measure, with X-ray-enabled precision, what portion is fat and what portion is muscle. The six-minute scan produces a full-color rendering of the fat that's gathered around my middle and along my hips. Then it goes one better by also producing a multipage document calculating the body-fat density of every surface, every limb, each side of my torso, my hips, everything. It tells me that my more dominant right arm is 23.5 percent fat (hardly gunlike), while my left is even chubbier, at 26.2 percent. My android region around the waist, an area the literature cruelly describes as "fat often associated with apple-shape bodies," is 27.8 percent while the gynoid region around my hips, "fat associated with pear-shape bodies," is 26.2 percent. I have no idea what the difference is, but I wonder how hard I'll have to work before the body scan stops comparing me to fruit.
A few days later, Dr. Hugo calls me with test results and points out a few areas of concern: One is my LDL, that sinister cholesterol, which he has tallied at 110 mg/dL. It's not alarmingly high by any stretch, but it's "above optimal." The other is more exotic: an enzyme found in the liver, called AST, which Dr. Hugo tells me is high enough (93 IU/L) to indicate some "unhappiness." I've seen this movie before. "You might want to cut back on the alcohol," he suggests gently. And really, who am I to deny my liver a happy life?
One of the first things I discover under the tutelage of my Equinox trainers is that I've not paid nearly enough attention to my core. That vaguely defined network of muscles – roughly from below the chest to the tops of the knees – is nothing short of almighty. It is every bit as essential to functional fitness as its name implies. My trainers – Equinox training manager Vural Vural (who goes by the more succinct "V") and trainer David Juhn – have a deep and abiding respect for the core.
Equinox subjects new training recruits to a test. The Functional Movement Screen (the FMS) was developed by physical therapist-strength trainer Gray Cook, who sought out a uniform way to assess fitness beyond strength and flexibility. The FMS [see the Assessment: How Well Can You Move?, p. 98] involves few movements you typically see at a gym, and nothing you'd glimpse on Muscle Beach. Instead, it features simple stepping actions, basic squats, some rotated lunges, and one seemingly impossible motion that asks you to get on your hands and knees and then lift your right leg and right arm off the floor simultaneously.
None of this goes well. Of a possible 21, I score a 12. The number matters less than the dysfunction it represents: According to V, I am a casualty of the modern office environment – hunched, misaligned, and, having let some important muscle chains go fallow. In anatomical terms, I lack the all-important core competency, and my adductors – a group of muscles in the thigh – are dominant, as illustrated by the way my knees flare during the squat. Most important, I suffer from what V calls "glute amnesia," which not only contributes to my knee issues but also is kryptonite to core competency. "You spend so much time in a seated position at the office that you forget how to engage your glutes" [see Working-Stiff Workout, next page].
He has another name for the condition – "dumb ass" – but no matter what we call it, it's clear I'll get nowhere if my glutes and abdominal wall don't form a chain of musculature that is able to transfer power from my lower girdle (hips) to my upper girdle (shoulders), and from side to side. It's a key transaction that makes everything else possible. "Your core should be firing first on any activity you do," he tells me. "It's imperative to everything you do." After the first week – I train with each of the trainers once a week – I question whether I'm even sitting or climbing stairs correctly. Actually, I know the answer: I'm not.
For the next few weeks, no one asks me to do a crunch or a curl or a bench press. Most of the work we do uses my own body weight, an occasional medicine ball to squeeze between my knees (glute activation!), and some machines to improve rotational mobility in my torso. Vural keeps me on a strict diet of core activation. So while hunks of iron are being hoisted and swung around me, I lie on my back thrusting my hips in the air while V pokes at my butt and abs. I am an island of Jazzercise in an ocean of 300. V and I rarely wander in the more gratifyingly macho gym material – that's more the realm of David, who has me do pull-ups and such, but only after squats and low-to-high cable pulls for my torso. They are both sticklers for form and speak more like orthopedists than trainers.
It takes just a couple of weeks for me to shed some pounds and feel a slight shift in the age-old metabolic tug of war between fat and muscle. The results are mostly interior and invisible, but there is a new solidity forming beneath the surface. Walking feels different, with more awareness in my hips and better posture, more balance. One morning I reach down to tie my shoes and realize that I've lifted my foot instead. And I do this without falling over.
The twice-weekly sessions are challenging, with sets often ending in fatigue, but they're hardly sadistic. Though praise is hard to come by, there's little of the macho shaming that makes high school football such a misery. After one less-than-exhausting workout, I ask V when we're ready to increase the load. "You're not ready," he explains. "Let us build you up first," he tells me, "then we'll destroy you."
My new life is regimented but manageable. There is more restraint, less frivolity, and plenty of the sprouted-grain bread that evokes Boulder in the 1970s. My diet has been stripped of hot-fudge sundaes, Tuesday-night gimlets, and sides of bacon. Three weeks into the new regime, I open the fridge, scanning the shelves for some blueberries, some leftover cod, or a swallow of white wine, when I discover a trio of tall, shiny cans of my favorite beer standing neglected behind the almond milk. How long had I left them just standing there? I can't even remember the last time I had fries. I've become one of those people who eat those coarse, whole-grain crackers that resemble, with depressing accuracy, corrugated cardboard. I smear them with natural peanut butter, pile them high with tuna and tapenade, anything to bring flavor to the packing material that now somehow qualifies as a snack.
Thankfully, I've not had to count calories or weigh my food. I don't have a diet to follow. As it turns out, eating the things you're pretty sure you're supposed to eat and not eating the things you're pretty sure you're not supposed to eat is the diet. Another way to put it: I start thinking of flour as sugar and try to cut way down on sugar.
The one surprise involves breakfast. Joy Pape, a nutritionist recommended by the Cornell Weill Center, tosses out the zero-fat Greek yogurt (what I thought was a virtuous breakfast) because it lacks protein. She suggests an actual protein shake, which I come to love even if it's texturally impotent, lacking crunch, crust, and brown-sugar topping. I have a fairly sensible, wheat-free lunch most days. Dinner varies, but I try to eat a lot of fish, nothing more than a reasonable amount of starch, and lots of vegetables. I might have a cookie or some fruit for dessert, but I'm not standing in the pantry with an open bag of chocolate-chunk cookies, wolfing indiscriminately. The Greek yogurt I used to eat for breakfast has been elevated to "treat" status. I top it with blueberries and a paltry amount of homemade granola and call it dessert, that thing you eat before you fall asleep to the sound of your rumbling stomach.
My primary dietary weapon is the awareness that I now bring to everything I consume, particularly anything that includes bitters or cocktail onions. Even wine is suspect. The era of the bottomless glass of riesling is apparently over. For what must be the first time, I am conscious of the calories in every blessed, sweaty glass. I learned how to not get terribly plastered years ago, but now I was drinking for my health. It isn't fun or carefree or soulful in any sense, but it isn't difficult either. I get used to not having enough to drink.
After more than a month, my trainers and I are still focused on the unsexy, the functional, the invisible. This is fine by me, but it's still a blow to my inner meathead. V explains his medicine/candy philosophy: "I give some of what you want in terms of seeing results – burning fat, building muscle – while also giving you what you need." He doesn't check the size of my pecs or the definition in my arms, and when he steps back to assess me, it's my posture he's checking, and it's improving. "Pretty good," he says, poking me in the gut. "Tighten up."
So I do my lunges, my squats, my planks. Rotational stability and core competency are my twin objectives, though my posterior chain – the network of muscles that connects along the back of the body – also needs attention. V tells me it's the key to sitting up straight and engaging the rhomboids, the muscle situated between the spine and the shoulder blades, rather than pressing my shoulders into service and injuring them further. So I dutifully stick to back-opening pulls rather than pec-popping presses. When I do get my hands on some iron, I don't exactly lift it: I hold dumbbells by my side while I step on and off a bench press, or swing kettle bells to enhance my core. I hold them and do lunges and haul them up and down the gym corridor. Only occasionally do I press them overhead, but as part of a squat sequence that makes few claims on getting jacked.
When I'm not training with David or V, I do cardio: Two or three times a week, I strap on a heart rate monitor and climb on an Arc Trainer. As per their instructions, I don't hold the rail, relying on core and glute activation (what else?) to keep upright as I put myself through the paces. After a few minutes' warm-up, I do intervals [see the Cardio Project, p. 104], cranking up the level and incline for a minute on, two minutes off, all the while fiendishly gazing at the heart rate monitor on my wrist for a suitable spike. To me, this is the height of self-obsession, the exact fitness-minded myopia for which I've indicted others, and I love it. I soon become restless and dissatisfied when I don't hit 173 or higher during a workout.
In some small ways at least, I am becoming the gym type I envied and looked down upon: preoccupied with self-improvement, a little too pleased by my own progress. But it's fitness, not plastic surgery. I've earned the gains I've made, and making them isn't turning me into a preening narcissist. It's just making me stronger.
One day, I'm lying on my back between a rack of kettle bells and a bench press, squeezing a ball between my knees while V pokes me in the ass. "Tighten those glutes," he hisses as he tries to slap the ball loose. I'm gritting my teeth, intent on keeping the ball where it is, when I first spot the guy in the middle distance: a scrawny septuagenarian at the pull-up bar. Joe Lieberman in gym shorts. And I watch from the corner of my now sweat-stung eye as he hops up, gets himself comfortable, and knocks out a set of pull-ups like he's opening the trunk to his Lexus or bouncing his grandson on his knee. Just like that. Eight, 10, a dozen. I lose count. That's when I make up my mind: That guy, that skinny bastard who probably lost his virginity listening to Sinatra – I wanna be that guy.
Two months in and two days shy of my 45th birthday, I subject myself to the scale, the calipers (fat pinchers, I call them), and the numerical reality of it all. I wonder if the progress I feel I've made will be backed up with actual figures. The news is good: 186 pounds. BMI of 19 percent, down seven full percentage points. Thirteen pounds of fat.
I look at the scale, the chunky metal part settling on territory and on numbers not used to calculate my weight since the 1980s. I'd take a picture with my phone, but I'm afraid that holding it might tip me up to 187.No one ever tells you that you could stand to lose 10 or 15 pounds, until you go ahead and lose it. Then, walk into a party full of people you've known forever and haven't seen in months, and you'll know. "Oh, my God," a friend's petite wife says, looking up at what was once a double chin. "You lost weight. What, like, 30 pounds?" Guy friends embed their admiration in emasculating put-downs. "Oh, can I get my newly svelte friend a drink? I think we have some Tab in the fridge." However it's said, it is said, and it's striking how much heavier you must have looked to the world.
After close to three months, it's time to assess my real progress. Some changes are more quantifiable than others: I have lost between 12 and 14 pounds, brought my BMI down from 26 percent to 19 percent, and my VO2 Max up from 44.5 to 49.1. Dr. Hugo calls with a new set of test results: My LDL cholesterol has dropped from 110 mg/dL to 78 mg/dL, and the enzyme he was worried about has dropped from 93 to 37 IU/L, transporting my liver to a placid state.
But most important, I'm leaner, lighter, and more efficient. The difference is tangible and visible. Me minus seven percent, with more sinew than flab and the contours resembling actual musculature. (It turns out that a few weeks spent stepping on and off a bench press while holding dumbbells does more to harden your legs than 20 years of running.) But the real test, the one I most want to ace, is the FMS, that humbling survey I was subjected to at the start of all this.
It's not the cakewalk I hoped it would be: My inline lunge lacks the rock-solid stability I thought I'd earned, my squat results in a milder but still unsightly flaring of the knees, and I'm not much closer to achieving the core-reliant feat of simultaneously raising a right arm and leg from all fours. Still, I've improved core competency, opened up my chest while strengthening my back, and increased my ground stability. I score a 16 out of 21, up from my pathetic 12. "I've only scored a 20," Vural confides, in a way he thinks I might find comforting.
The truest test of functionality is actual function, of course, and I have to admit that every aspect of my physical life has improved. I sit up straighter and run with more purpose, less pain, and heightened muscular awareness. Yoga is no longer a spectacle of flailing limbs; my planks are steady and filled with purpose, and I'm strong and flexible where I was once feeble. I play tennis for the first time in months and find a torsional force generated in my middle. It starts in the hamstrings, moves up through the core, and transfers into a whiplike motion across my torso. No, really. It results in the kind of velocity and control that any tennis player can appreciate, and no one needs more than I do.
Few people would look at me now and think of ropey forearms, a rippling back, or a powerful chest. My shirtless visage in the locker room inspires neither envy nor fear. But I'm smaller and tighter than I imagined I would ever be, there are veins in my arms I didn't think existed, and the muscle beneath the surface is tuned up and ready to go.
In many ways, I'm on my way to the best shape I've been in since I was 16, in those few perfect years after you've grown out of boyhood but before you grow into the bad habits that will drag you toward certain decay – before you develop big ideas about the guy on the treadmill and the way you'll live your life. The clock has not stopped, but it's slowed just long enough to change course. At 45, that's all you can ask for.
The Test
Six minutes with GE's Lunar iDXA Body Scan tells you everything you ever wanted to know about your body composition but were afraid to ask. The scan lays bare, in stark and specific color detail, where the fat is. Hint: It's yellow. The scan on the left reveals a BMI of 26 percent with extra fat in the android (or waist) area. The scan on the right shows the same body, three months later and 13 pounds lighter, with a BMI of 19 percent.
The Assessment: How Well Can You Move?
The Functional Movement Screen, or FMS, gauges and assesses human movement patterns: simply, how well you move. On my first FMS, I scored a 12. "A 12 is not horrendous," physical therapist Gray Cook assures me, and he should know – he's the guy who invented the FMS. "That's the average at the NFL Combine. Now a lot of those guys scoring that poorly run unbelievably fast or hit unbelievably hard," – things I certainly don't – "but they're one-trick-ponies. We'll see marathoners get single digits on the FMS. They can run a marathon, but they'd die trying to climb a rock wall." Cook's research in the 1980s concluded that strength and flexibility weren't reliable predictors of injury, that people in good shape were getting injured at the same rate as those who weren't – so he developed the FMS, which measures symmetry, core stability, and motor control, which Cook says are huge factors in predicting injury. "Do you shift when you squat? Can you lie on your back and lift one leg as high as the other? Can you lunge with control? If you have asymmetries like these, they get compounded by mountain biking or downhill skiing or whatever. These aren't a complex series of movements. They only ask you to show an average range of motion. I think most martial arts instructors or Pilates instructors would look at a movement screen and say, 'Shit. If you can't do that, what are you standing in front of me for?'"
Three Crazy Exercises to Melt the Fat Away
Occasionally my trainers subject me to high-intensity bursts to burn fat. One day, David instructs me to leap from squatting position to full extension with arms overhead, laterally along the gym's long hallway. He calls these Frog Leaps, and they induce a lung-burning, heart-pounding speechlessness I haven't experienced since suicide drills in high school. Another day, David makes me crawl along the hallway on all fours, which is challenge enough, but then he makes me do it backward, leaving me flailing and shaking and humble all over again. Another day, V puts me on a treadmill with its power off, tells me to hold onto the bar, and run all out for 30 seconds. I gasp through the 60-second breaks in between, stop at five, and start coughing. "That's lactic coughing," V tells me, smiling. "It's what happens when you get lactic-acid buildup in your bloodstream from lack of oxygen."
The Cardio Project
VO2 Max is a technical way of describing cardiovascular capacity. It's a measurement of the amount of oxygen your body can utilize during an intense period of exertion. It's considered a reliable marker of cardio vascular fitness. So Ann Marie Miller, head coach at the Performance Center at Sports Center at Chelsea Piers, Manhattan's fitness megaplex, administers the test, putting me in a mask, plugging me into the machine, and putting me through my paces on a stationary bike. Her assessment: weak. So Miller assigns me a steady diet of intervals, knowing that repeating a cycle – ramping up my heart and recovering, ramping up and recovering – will reap greater benefits than maintaining a steady level. The recovery periods allow my body to repair and adapt to the higher levels. She shows me how to sync my Garmin GPS/heart rate monitor to a website (enewleaf.com) where I can upload my workouts, then leaves me to my own devices. It makes me wonder if I should go back and drop a few sprints into every slow-and-steady run I've taken since 1988. Three months later, she tests me again and this time, the news is better. Ann Marie gets visibly excited when the results begin to form on her laptop. "All right!" she exclaims. "Great job." My VO2 Max has improved, from 44.5 to 49.1 ml/kg/min. It's not an astounding leap in my eyes, but one she says she's "thrilled by," particularly since I did no bike training to get there.
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I want to use the RSA private key in my project using Java. I do have the key in file using PEM format. I want to use this private key into my project to decrypt the messages which are encrypted using my public key.
What is the method/standard classes I can use to read and decode the private key from the PEM file? I don't want to use the openssl or any other libraries/classes to do this. An example or sample code will be really helpful.
Vishal N


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Prior to tomorrow's game we'll be posting the final NL Central interview. I had planned to post it this evening, but I thought I'd throw something else together.
Anyone who has read much of anything of mine over the years knows that I'm not one of those people who goes nuts over pitch counts. That doesn't mean I don't pay attention or that I don't think there are certain things that should be done. I do. My opinion is that you take the starter out after 3 times through the order unless he's an elite pitcher. That's basically the idea and I don't want to dive too much into it because it's not really important.
In today's 6-3 Opening Day loss to the Pirates, Ryan Dempster had what I'd call a so-so start. At times he looked excellent and he made a couple huge mistakes. In the end, Dempster allowed 6 runs in 6.2 innings. Mistakes happen. These won't be the only ones Dempster makes this season and the ones today aren't any more or less important than ones he'll make down the road.
In those 6.2 innings Dempster threw 114 pitches. The previous three seasons Dempster threw 91, 98 and 95 pitches in his first start of the season. It was rather cold today at Wrigley Field. It's been cold early in the season before in Chicago. I was kind of surprised to see that in 2009 Dempster's second start he threw 110 pitches. The following year he threw 114 in his second start. Last year he threw 120 in his third start and 111 in his next.
Not being injured in the past doesn't mean he's going to be injury free in the future, but it's clear he's thrown high pitch counts very early in the season in the past. My initial reaction was probably a little too negative. I'd have preferred Dempster not throw over 110 pitches today, but I generally don't like to see pitchers on the mound at 110 pitches anyway.
It's not because of the potential of injury down the road. It's because by that time pitchers are almost always working on the order the fourth time and the offense has a significant advantage at that point. I also understand that managers would don't tend to take that into consideration even though it's something Greg Maddux has talked about many times. So it's clearly something that is talked about amongst the players and/or coaches. I think managers prefer to use their starters in fear of their bullpen or in fear of having to use too many relievers in the future.
It's probably not a good idea, but I don't think it should have irritated me either. Dempster has handled it in the past and was certainly near or above 100 pitches in his next to last start in Arizona. I hope we don't see him throwing over 110 pitches in several consecutive starts, but until that happens I think I overreacted.


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EVENT: 2012 Boston Marathon
EVENT DATE: Apr 16, 2012
Thanks for coming to the web-site and helping me reach my goal of $6,000 as a member of Team Hoyt.
As most of you know this is my first Boston Marathon and my first time raising money for charity, so I appreciate all of your support. If you're somehow not familiar with the Hoyt's please read their amazing story below and watch the video posted on the left.
Thanks again!
-Dan Quinn
HOYT FOUNDATION INC wrote -
Rick Hoyt was born in 1962 to Dick and Judy Hoyt. During child birth, Rick's umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck cutting off the supply of oxygen to Rick's brian. He was diagnosed as a spastic quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. Doctors advised Dick and Judy to institutionalize Rick because he was a vegetable. Dick and Judy refused and brought Rick home.
Dick and Judy could tell that Rick could comprehend his surroundings even though the medical doctors continued to insist Rick was a vegetable. In 1972, the Hoyt's took a second mortgage on their home, borrowing $5,000. They paid that amount to a group of skilled engineers at Tufts University that built an "interactive computer" for Rick. Rick was able to see the letters of the alphabet and select the ones he wanted by pressing a pad on the headrest of his wheelchair with his head, the only part of his body he can move voluntarily. The first words Rick ever "spoke" were "Go Bruins!" The Boston Bruins were in the Stanley Cup that year and it turned out Rick was a Bruins fan.
In the spring of 1977, Rick told his dad that he wanted to compete in a 5 mile road race to help raise money for a lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, a non-runner pushed Rick for the full 5 miles, and they finished next to last. Later that night, Rick typed "Dad, when I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped." And that is when it all started.
To date, Team Hoyt has finished 240 triathlons, 6 Ironman distance triathlons, 92 half marathons, 69 marathons, 32 Falmouth 7.1 milers, have a marathon PR of 2:40:47 and half marathon PR of 1:21:12. They are two of only 25 total members of the Ironman Hall of Fame, carried the Olympic torch in 1996 and rode a bike from Santa Monica, CA to Boston Harbor in 40 consecutive days.
Last August, the Hoyt's received an e-mail from Boston Bruins' defenseman Andrew Ference that read, "I wanted to let you know that the Boston Bruins watched and were inspired by your video prior to our Stanley Cup victory. It would be my honor to meet you and have you join me in Boston during my day with the Stanley Cup." And they did.
On Monday, April 16, 2012, Dick and Rick Hoyt will be running their 30th Boston Marathon. They will be joined by a team of 40 carefully selected athletes from Australia, Canada and across the United States to form the 2012 Team Hoyt Boston Marathon Team. The team will be runningt to raise money for the Hoyt Foundation, Inc., an IRS 501(c)(3) charity whose purpose is help integrate handicapped people into everyday activities so they may live fruitful and productive lives.
None of the funds raised go to administration of the Hoyt Foundation as it is 100% run by volunteers. The Hoyt Foundation gives gifts each year of $25,000 to the Easter Seals summer camp programs and, of course, to Children's Hospital-Boston for the Augementative Communications Enhancement Program.
This years team is made possible by our generous sponsor and principal sponsor of the Boston Marathon, John Hancock. We are very fortunate to be coached again this year by three time Boston Marathon Champion, former No. 1 ranked marathoner in the world, New York City Marathon Champion, Berlin Marathon Champion and former world record holder Uta Pippig.
Our team of both qualified and chairty runners have set a fundraising goal of $200,000 which would eclipse our former record by $75,000. Please give generously as our runners train, sweat, hurt and raise funds for the Hoyt Foundation, Inc. The Hoyt Foundation, Inc. is an IRS 501(c)(3) charity. Checks can be made payable to the Hoyt Foundation, Inc. and mailed to 241 Mashapaug Road, Holland, Massachusetts 01521.


text: DEKALB—Leighton Settle ran for 152 yards and three touchdowns, and Northern Illinois ran its home winning streak to 18 games Saturday with a 55-24 victory over Central Michigan in both teams' Mid-American Conference opener.Settle opened the scoring with an 11-yard run in the first quarter before adding a 6-yard TD in the second. In the fourth, he ran 46 yards down the sideline to help seal the victory for the Huskies (4-1), who closed the game on a 31-3 run.Jordan Lynch threw for 215 yards and a touchdown and added 144 yards rushing, and he and Keith Harris Jr. each scored on the ground. Mathew Sims kicked two field goals and ran 14 yards for a score on a fake field-goal attempt.Ryan Radcliff threw for 332 yards and two touchdowns, including a 92-yarder to Titus Davis, for the Chippewas (2-2), and Zurlon Tipton added a rushing score.


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Big Ten M5: 12.17.12 EditionPosted by Deepak Jayanti on December 17th, 2012
- Michigan redshirt sophomore Jon Horford injured himself again during the Wolverines' game with West Virginia game on Saturday. Horford, who had already missed 25 games last season because he broke his foot, dislocated his knee cap against the Mountaineers and had to be helped off the court into the locker room. The Michigan coaching staff hopes that Horford can return to action within three weeks, but because of his history with injuries, John Beilein may take his time to put his big man back into the rotation. Horford has averaged 2.1 RPG in 8.7 MPG so far this season, but he is experienced and his injury puts more pressure on freshman forwards Mitch McGary and Max Bielfeldt to continue to produce.
- More injury news, as Bill Carmody and the Northwestern coaching staff believe that Drew Crawford will be granted a fifth year of eligibility by the NCAA after being sidelined this season. Crawford described his back and neck injury as "searing pain" and will not have an opportunity to push the Wildcats towards their first NCAA Tournament bid this year. The Wildcats are 7-3 and will need seniors Reggie Hearn (14.1 PPG) and Jared Swopshire (9.1 PPG) to step up in Crawford's absence. Without Crawford on the floor, Carmody needs a go-to guy who will take the clutch shots and provide leadership, and besides his seniors, sophomore Dave Sobolewski (11.4 PPG) also has the potential to step into that role.
- Indiana head coach Tom Crean was not in a good mood after the Butler Bulldogs upset his team on Saturday, 88-86. The Bulldogs' Alex Barlow drove the ball into the lane during the final 10 seconds for the go-ahead basket but the Hoosiers did not have their big man, Cody Zeller, in the paint to alter the shot. Crean had substituted Remy Abell for Zeller and said that they were in a defensive set where everybody "switches up" and made it clear that he does not regret his decision to keep Zeller on the bench. Zeller scored 18 points in 37 minutes against the Bulldogs and shot 10-of-14 from the charity line. But without Butler's Andrew Smith in the game (he fouled out), Zeller would have had to defend quicker players on the switches during the final seconds, making it a tough call for Crean. When a #1 ranked team loses to a smaller school from the same state, it is likely that the coach's decisions will be questioned afterward by the assembled pundits and writers.
- After 12 games this season, it is increasingly obvious that Tubby Smith's guards – Austin Hollins (11.2 PPG), Andre Hollins (13.5 PPG) and Joe Coleman (10.0 PPG) – can score with the best of them. But Austin Hollins has grown into a very tough defensive player for the Gophers as well and cherishes his role as a defensive stopper while his fellow guards carry the offensive load against tougher competition. Hollins has the length that allows him to guard opposing point guards and also taller wings in the half court as Smith's Gophers continue to impress with an 11-1 record heading into conference play.
- Speaking of guards who understand their role and are intense on the defensive end, Michigan State's Brandan Kearney has quickly become one of Tom Izzo's favorite players this season. The sophomore guard has averaged 18.2 MPG and even though he only scores a couple of points per contest, he plays within the offense and has the "team-first" attitude which Izzo appreciates. With the recent injuries to guards Gary Harris and Travis Trice, Kearney has stepped into every spot as needed and done all of the little things such as grabbing a key offensive rebound or taking the wide-open shot off the double team. Kearney may not carry the scoring load for MSU this season, but he will continue to grow in Izzo's system as long as he improves his game and stays committed to defense.


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I just got a museum of OLD JBL speakers!! They are tearing an old theater down here and I went in and retrieved ALL of the sound system minus the amps etc.
This was a theater on a Army base that was built in 1940 with all JBL. Everything is 1940's vintage and in EXCELLENT CONDITION!!!!
Here is what I got:
(4) JBL D130 15" full range speakers - 16 ohm
(2) # 154-4 15" woofers 32 ohms
(2) coaxial 15" with big horns (unsure of model at this time.)
(1) 527-800 horn with driver 275
I would imagine that this stuff may be worth a pretty penny, as it has been untouched for 65 years!! and never abused, overdriven etc!
I am curious to learn more about these items and any input is appreciated.


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The Central Connecticut women's basketball team will be hosting Sacred Heart at Detrick Gym on Saturday afternoon. The Blue Devils and Pioneers are scheduled for a 1 p.m. tip on the court in Detrick Gymnasium. CCSU will honor its four senior student-athletes on the court prior to the game, with the presentation slated to begin at 12:40 p.m.
In addition to Senior Day, the Blue Devils will also be hosting their annual Play 4 Kay Game, which benefits the Kay Yow Cancer Fund.
CCSU will also be hosting a National Girls and Women in Sport Day event on Saturday morning in the Kaiser Bubble.
As always, fans can watch the game live on NECFrontRow.com.
Here are some notes on the Blue Devils heading into Saturday:
Today • The Blue Devils (9-15, 3-11 NEC) return home to New Britain to play the Pioneers of Sacred Heart (11-14, 8-6 NEC) on Senior Day. The Blue Devils are currently in ninth place, but still have a chance at claiming one of the final spots in the Northeast Conference Tournament. Sacred Heart cliniched its playoff berth last Monday with a victory over St. Francis Brooklyn. The Pioneers won the first meeting this season in Fairfield on Jan. 20.
Series History • The Pioneers hold a 25-7 advantage in the all-time Division I series between these programs, including a 77-59 victory at the Pitt Center earlier this season. Head Coach Beryl Piper is 5-10 against the Pioneers in her career and just 1-5 against Sacred Heart at home.
About the Seniors • The Blue Devil women's basketball program is saying goodbye to four student-athletes today during a special pregame ceremony. Seniors Brooke Bailey, Jaleen Thomas, Lauren Arbogast and Jessica Babe have all contributed as starters and key reserves for the Blue Devils during their careers.


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Events Calendar
Glow Fest
SGA Presents: Glow Fest
Date: September 14, 2019 - September 14, 2019
Time: 10 p.m.
Location: Cleary Family Auditorium, Kearney Hall
Hosted by SGA
Glow Fest features special guest DJ Mani and DJ Stewie Selecta Sha!
Open to students; free with a college ID. RSVP at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1AXnLIonQQ3HzMDyZgv-mblivOtqMIDlEcYzdjoeN5fc/edit


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TAMPA, Fla. -- The once- considered-untradeable Vernon Wells now has been dealt twice in 26 months.
And the outfielder, expected to start in leftfield for the Yankees once their deal with the Angels goes through, could end up helping his newest team in more ways than one.
Wells, who signed a seven-year, $126-million extension with the Blue Jays in December 2007, is owed $42 million over the next two seasons, with the Yankees expected to pay $13 million to $14 million of that total, a source said Monday.
Additionally, the structure of how that is paid out to Wells could help the Yankees in their quest to get their payroll under $189 million to avoid a stiff luxury-tax penalty, the source said.
It is a rather convoluted formula and the source did not spell it out in detail, other than to say that Wells' 2014 salary should have a limited impact on that season's payroll and could even earn the Yankees a credit. "Yes, that's possible,'' the source said.
The deal was not yet official as of Monday night, as Wells was scheduled to arrive in Tampa from Arizona to take his physical.
Although the acquisition of Wells doesn't alleviate most Yankees' fans dread about the upcoming season, there's reason to believe the 34-year-old can provide some much-needed outfield help.
"I don't think he's done,'' one AL scout said. "Not to make too much of the spring, but he was swinging the bat pretty well. Could see him thriving in that environment'' of low to no expectations.
Wells hit .361 with a .390 on-base percentage, four homers and 11 RBIs in 14 exhibition games with the Angels before being traded. The Angels dealt for Wells, then owed $89 million on his deal, in January 2011.
Even if the three-time Gold Glove winner -- though as a centerfielder -- struggles at the plate, he should provide a better defensive option than the Yankees have seen in spring training. They didn't see enough from one of their prospects, Zoilo Almonte, and recently released veteran Matt Diaz.
Juan Rivera, brought in to compete for an outfield spot with Diaz, has hit but is more likely to see time at first base in the absence of Mark Teixeira. Brennan Boesch, signed after being released by the Tigers, has been unimpressive and is sidelined with a rib-cage injury.
"Of what's available,'' one NL talent evaluator said of Wells' acquisition, "it's hard to knock it. Especially with the money breakdown.''
Curtis Granderson is expected to return in early May, and when that occurs, Wells will become the fourth outfielder. As a righthanded hitter, he still could see time against certain lefthanders and as the designated hitter.
The Yankees' primary DH is the lefthanded-hitting Travis Hafner.
Though he's largely been a disappointment since signing the extension with the Blue Jays, Wells has hit lefthanders reasonably well and contributed 31 homers in 2010 and 25 in 2011. In his career, he has hit .292 against lefthanders and .266 against righthanders.
Wells hit .230 with 11 homers and 29 RBIs in 77 games in an injury-shortened 2012.


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The visitor guest book: a tool to stay informed
A person with dementia may have many people involved in her circle of support; a neighbour who drops by regularly, family members and friends. As the disease progresses and the person receives more assistance, that circle may grow to include visits from service providers (such as social workers, occupational therapists, nurses, etc.) and volunteers. It can become difficult to remember all the comings and goings but also to be aware of who is involved and how they are contributing to the person's day.
A visitor guest book serves as a reminder of who has come to visit in the home, as well as how they spent their time together with the person with dementia. It can be helpful as a conversation starter for other visitors and for the person with dementia to remember everything that has happened in his day.
We encourage people with dementia or their caregivers to purchase an inexpensive notebook or a journal to be kept in a central, obvious location in the home where visitors will easily locate it (such as by the front door). Choose a design that you like and feel free to be creative. Use the guest book in your own unique ways; add photos, wishes the person with dementia has expressed, describe your visit and your conversations, or draw a picture to highlight your feelings.
Though it is best if the guest book is made so the person with dementia can enjoy it to the fullest, we encourage the following information to always be included:
- The date of visit
- Visitor's name
- How you spent your time together
- When you will come again (try to be as specific as you can)
If the person with dementia lives in a long term care home, check first to see if it is possible to leave a visitor guest book in the person's room.
An example from a care provider:
Date: January 24, 2015
Dear Joanne,
This is your home support worker, Anthony. Today, I came around 3:00pm to do the laundry and I made your favourite, mashed potatoes with broccoli and chicken for dinner.
It was nice talking to you today about your wife, Martha, and your dog, Pepper.
I will be coming back on January 26th, at 3:00pm.
See you in a few days.
An example from a friend or family member:
Date: April 12, 2015
Hi Dad,
This is your daughter Aisha; I've had a nice visit with you today at 1:00pm. We shared a tasty lunch together and had a good walk around the neighbourhood. We passed the convenience store where you told me that you used to buy your lottery tickets every weekend.
I will come on Wednesday, April 15th, for lunch time at 12:00pm. I will bring lunch so we can eat together at home. See you then.
Love you!


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Call it "mob justice" by way of airing Bernie Madoff's dirty laundry. Literally.
Unlike last year's auction of ill-gotten goods, comprised mostly of jewelry and other high-end objects owned by Madoff and his wife, Ruth, an auction this weekend will feature everyday pieces such as frying pans, wicker baskets, patio furniture, and unmentionables including Ruth Madoff's Prada panty hose and Bernie's designer boxers.
That's right. His boxers, size 40.
"The United States Marshal for the Southern District of New York has worked around the clock for the last 18 months to make sure we were obtaining and putting everything the Madoffs owned up for sale," said Roland Ubaldo, spokesman for the Marshals Service, which is running the auction. "Nothing has been spared. We are prepared to do what it takes to make sure restitution is granted for the victims of the Madoff Ponzi scheme."
Madoff pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to 150 years in prison after bilking investors of billions of dollars in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. Proceeds of the auction will go to the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Fund to be funneled to Madoff's many victims.
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The auction, set to take place Saturday at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers, marks the last of the couple's personal haul to be sold off in New York. According to the Bob Sheehan, partner of the auction house Gaston & Sheehan that is facilitating the auction, items are from the Madoffs' Upper East Side Manhattan apartment and their former home in Montauk, Long Island. Last year's auction, which sold items such as a boogie board with the "Madoff" name scrawled on the back and Madoff's Mets jacket, made close to $1 million. Sheehan expects Saturday's auction to bring in about $1.5 million.
"People are really interested in these deeply personal items that belonged to the couple," said Sheehan, as he held up a pair of worn velvet slippers with the fraudster's initials embroidered in gold thread. "Not only are they amazed by the excess displayed in what they owned, I think they want to say they own a piece of financial history."
The slippers, made by Italian designer Gianmaria Bucelletti have a starting price of $500 but are expected to fetch well over $2,000.
Amidst the banality of the items, many of which would be right at home at a suburban garage sale, are glimmers of the ostentatious lifestyle the couple led, such as a larger-than-life engagement ring owned by Ruth Madoff with a diamond center stone weighing in at 10.543 carats. Bidding for the ring is expected to start at $300,000-$350,000.
Ruth Madoff's collection of Art Deco jewelry is also up for grabs and includes two platinum diamond brooches, both with expecting starting bids of around $1,500.
Ruth Madoff's interest in Art Deco extended to her watch collection. A Tiffany & Co. ladies' diamond dress watch set in platinum has an starting bid price of $1,000. Her Cartier Art Deco style dress watch is set with 45 French cut black onyx pieces and a total of 169 rose cut diamonds. At the clasp, the ribbon strap is slightly frayed indicating this was a piece that was well worn to charity galas and nights on the town. Its starting price is $1,200, a fraction of what the retail price would be, according to a sales person in the watch department at Cartier.
The Madoffs' sheer display of excess can be seen not only in the high-end baubles but in multiple purchases of virtually the same item. Bernard Madoff had his own collection of luxury timepieces, including more than 20 bearing the Patek Philippe & Co. name. The other half included rare Rolexes, including a vintage Rolex Oyster chronograph wristwatch expected to sell for $25,000 to $30,000. The total value of the watches is well over $500,000.
Seventy five different colors of men's cashmere sweaters, hundreds of monogrammed custom made dress shirts and three hundred pairs of the same leather Belgium shoes were grouped together in separate lots.
"I think he probably called the maker of these shoes and sweaters and just said I want one of everything you have," said Sheehan. "By the looks of it, he has enough to wear something new and different every day and still have pieces left for the next year."
One apt item up for auction is a framed cartoon of Madoff drawn by political cartoonist David Brion. It's titled "A Broker and the Angry Exchanges" and has a caption reading, "Bernie Madoff's Stock Buying Rivalry Irks NYSE, Amex."
On the upper left side hand is scrawled in black ink "Forever More Peter & Bernie."
(Click here for more information on the Madoff property auction, which is being simulcast on the Internet. The full auction catalog is here in .pdf form. )
© 2013 MSNBC Interactive. Reprints


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December 4, 2005
Don't you love hand drawn animation?
ADDED: I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but computer animation makes me ill. Years ago, I walked out on "Antz," and I've never gone back. I've seen parts of computer animation films on TV, and I can see that the technology has become fairly good, but there is something wrong with it, something crucial missing -- emotion, humanity... something.
32 comments:
- John Thacker said...
When you say you dislike computer animation, do you mean all computer animation, or just 3D computer animation? 2D animation can be done using a computer (whether just for inbetweening or ink and paint, or more) and it looks much like traditional hand-drawn cels. (For example, often one draws the cels using a tablet or else scans them into a computer; then the computer program fills in the colors.)
For example, Beauty and the Beast had quite a lot of computer animation, especially in the ballroom scene.
- John Thacker said...
The Little Mermaid used digital ink and paint, as well. In fact, I don't think that any major animated movie in the last ten years has actually used hand-painted cels. Rather, the artists' drawings are scanned in and painted using a computer.
- Ann Althouse said...
John: I meant the 3D-looking stuff. (For real 3D animation, there's that Imax version of "Polar Express," which I'm sure would nauseate me.) I know "Beauty and the Beast" used computer assistance, and I think it's not that obtrusive, so I don't hate it. But I prefer the hand-drawn work.
- AMB said...
Ann: I agree and just commented to my wife the same thing Thursday when my two year old was watching Bambi. To my eyes, the new 3D stuff just does not hold up to the hand drawn animation of the past. I actually liked B&tB, had no problems, but I detest the feel of the 3D...it lacks, oh, a soul.
- Joe said...
Perhaps you're just stuck in uncanny alley
- amba said...
We discussed this before, and talked about how besides lacking soul or warmth or humanity -- it has that shiny featureless machine-made look -- it also lacks gravity. The characters appear weirdly weightless, as if they lived on a spaceship and had to wear Velcro-soled shoes to stick to the jogging track. That alone can induce nausea. The strange thing is that the old great hand animators at Disney and Warner Bros. somehow put that kinesthetic fact of life, the omnipresence of gravity, into their drawings. In fact it was one of their favorite things to play games with -- cartoon characters are forever walking off cliffs and not falling till they realize where they are.
- Lonesome Payne said...
This is related to another topic, I think: how computers have subtracted from rather than added to the fascination of special effects.
There used to be a fun question: "How did they do that?" The answer now, in 99% of cases: with computers. E.g, who cares?
I'm more amazed by the original King Kong - the creature himself - than I am by the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. (Which, by the way, is a terrible movie, and convinces me Laura Dern has/had a career for one reason only.)
- amba said...
Oh -- one of my favorite things in the world is claymation, which is incredibly painstaking to do. Some of the Academy Award-winning shorts made this way -- kind of rough, not slick -- were breathtaking. I remember one that sort of recapped the process of evolution. I wish I could remember the name of it.
- Ann Althouse said...
Laura Dern is great in "Citizen Ruth."
- Lonesome Payne said...
Never saw it, but I'll take your word for it. The way she acted in JP, it was hard to believe this person could ever accomplish more than being a random woman talking. Maybe it was the script and the direction.
- Dave said...
I hate hand-drawn animation. Give me Mr. Incredible over Ben & Jerry any day of the week.
Like comparing Euripides to Shakespeare.
- Balfegor said...
I was all ginned up to respond to John Thacker by pointing out that Ghibli didn't switch over to digital painting until Mononoke Hime . . and then I checked IMDB, only to discover it came out in 1997. Ghibli's previous film (Pompoko) seems to have been 1994, I have no idea whether Pompoko was hand painted or not.
Ah well.
I think hand-drawn animation is nice myself, and at its best, is far better than 3D animation. The problem, though, is that most hand-drawn animation is not much good. The oldest Disney stuff is okay, even if the timing tends to seem a bit unnatural (e.g. Snow White, Pinnochio), but I think they hit their peak around the time of Sleeping Beauty or so. From the later 60s on (e.g. The Jungle Book) their animation has great timing, and an excellent sense of weight, but it doesn't go anywhere. The most recent Disney animation (from The Black Cauldron on, I'd say) has a certain sameness to it. Their character animation feels like it's settled down into a kind of pantomime. They flounce, distractingly, in a way that no-one does in real life. I mean, I like all the movies from Little Mermaid on just fine -- those I've seen at least -- but it's missing a certain je ne sais quoi. Or rather, I think it's that they aren't capturing human motion as well as they used to.
The Japanese (well, Ghibli) have some great animators, but elements of their design (e.g. the dragon, in Sen to Chihiro, the giant wolves in Mononoke Hime) just don't seem well-designed to me -- their style seems about 40 years old, and comes off as dated, rather than classic. Ghibli's character animation is all very Miyazaki too, so the "house style," so to speak predominates almost as much as in with Disney. It was weaker in Umi ga Kikoeru, Mimi-wo Sumaseba, and Neko no Ongaeshi, none of which were directed by Miyazaki, and I think those animations are better for it.
The animators at the other Japanese studios -- like Production IG -- are often really good at conveying weight (e.g. Ghost in the Shell), but their animation sometimes suffers from the flatness that you see in the Korean animation Wonderful Days, or in Dreamworks' Prince of Egypt. I think it comes from bad tweening. Speaking of Production IG, though, they were behind an TV series (Kaze-monogatari / "Wind Story") which was done in a rather unusual style (i.e. not the usual anime-style), and that was fun to watch, as a work of animation. But the major animated feature films for the past while have not really appealed to me as animation.
- Ann Althouse said...
Ben and Jerry??
- Balfegor said...
"The answer now, in 99% of cases: with computers. E.g, who cares?"
Well, I do. I love reading about how people solved the kinds of problems that come up whenever 3D has to be integrated with real world video.
- Ann Althouse said...
Balfegor: You have very high standards. Why don't you give us a list of things you do approve of?
- Balfegor said...
It's not that my standards are high so much as that my tastes are pronounced. Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and 101 Dalmations are the Disney movies I think best for animation alone. 101 Dalmations is the first one, I think, to use rotoscoping to lift the animators' sketches directly onto the cels, which was neat in a number of scenes in subsequent films (e.g. the dancing scene in The Aristocats) in that it gave the lines more life and variety, but the subsequent films just don't really do anything with it. For more recent Disney films, I think Hercules was the most interesting as animation, since it represented a marked (and successful!) departure from the traditional Disney style.
For Ghibli, Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies are probably the best samples of the Ghibli style -- they're recent enough that they don't suffer from the static backgrounds and held frames of Nausicaa, and their style is less rigid than in the more recent Miyazaki / Takahata films (excluding one mentioned below). As mentioned before, Umi-ga Kikoeru has a pleasant style, and has character designs that push closer to real-life, with more life-like character animation too. On the other hand, it's basically an Asian Drama, though (albeit compressed to about 1 hour, rather than the usual 10hrs+), so it may not be for everyone. There's fun (silly) character animation in Neko no Ongaeshi, particularly for the Cat-King's procession and the Baron. Very sharp. And Ghibli's most experimental work -- My neighbours the Yamadas -- is worth watching too. Entirely computer coloured, except it's coloured to resemble watercolours (and the style is much more distinctive than the usual Ghibli style). There's a brief animation of a baseball game, shown on the television in one scene, that I thought was especially worthwhile.
On the other hand, some people I've shown Yamadas to have thought it looks awfully primitive, so your mileage may vary, as they say. De gustibus and all that.
- Balfegor said...
Oh, and how could I forget? I thought The Iron Giant was the best animated movie out of the US in years, when I saw it. I had to persuade a cousin to come with me as camouflage, though.
- Balfegor said...
Oh, heck -- and Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, and Jin-Roh are all excellent animations, better than the usual anime stuff. But they're all targeted towards older viewers (teens and up).
- Palladian said...
Human vision (and visual interpretation) is very, very sensitive to things like shape variance and color variance. We unconsciously store so much visual information that we are quite aware of when things don't move in the right way or are not illuminated correctly. The problem with digital animation (and especially CG when mixed with live action) is that it doesn't even begin to approach the complexity of the physical world: the randomness and complexity of patterns, the way light plays across surfaces, the way detail becomes less discernible as distance increases, all these things are quite far beyond our current processing power and so much more complex than even the better algorithms are capable of generating. For all the things that hand drawn animation "can't do", what it does have is the complex randomness of nature by virtue of it coming from the hand rather than from math. The coloring of animation cells is also quite different from digital color because the color of hand painted animation cells is the color of the pigments and dyes in the inks and paints as represented by photography. We are seeing color based on the actual physical refraction of light through the crystal structures and surfaces of particles of pigment and dye rather than a phosphor-generated field of hexadecimal color we get in digital animation. We may be looking at anthropomorphic mice running around lollipop land, but it still has weight and subtlety and complexity because however fantastical, we are essentially looking at photographs of things, of physical objects, of drawings. For all the amazing advances in computer technology and graphics, we're (at this point) still far, far more sensitive instruments.
It's the same reason the old Star Wars movies look so good: we're looking at actual physical models. Even bad models (I'm thinking Gamera Vs. Guiron) are less boring and fatiguing to watch because they're still more complicated and "right" than a totally computer generated scene.
- Dave said...
Ben & Jerry, Tom & Jerry...it's all the same trite crap, IMHO...
- Rick Lee said...
Let's see... Antz was a Dreamworks production, right? Ann, does this mean you've never seen the Pixar classics? Toy Story... Monsters Inc... Finding Nemo... The Incredibles... I think you've really missed out because of a bad experience. Toy Story's technology is probably dated now, but that doesn't take away from the STORY. I'll rush out to see a Pixar release any day.
- Ann Althouse said...
I've seen the first "Toy Story." I also saw a Pixar short with a baby and some toys, back in an animation festival, quite possibly the same one with "How to Kiss." I've seen bits of Monsters, Incredibles, Shrek, etc., on TV. I find these things more tolerable on TV. I really hate the enlarged images in the theater. Just thinking about the close-ups of the ant faces in Antz makes me ill. I'd rather stare into the Void.
- Joan said...
As I'm reading/writing here, my kids are watching Toy Story for probably the billionth time. It's a brilliant film, in nearly all respects, including the animation, which 10 years later holds up just fine. Pixar has never made a bad anything, IMO -- even their shorts are brilliant, full of heart and skill, populated by characters that resonate.
The Iron Giant is a movie that could've been by Pixar, but by happenstance, wasn't -- Brad Bird went on to make The Incredibles, a typically Pixar-perfect movie.
As my oldest has been home sick for a few days, I've been subjected to a lot of animation recently. I'm struck by how ugly nearly all TV animation is these days. Of course it's all crap, but do they have to make everyone so ugly on purpose? I guess it's how they distinguish themselves from each other -- in this show, everyone has huge feet, whereas in this other show, everyone has huge heads and tiny bodies. All I can say is: ewwww.
We rented Polar Express for the kids over Thanksgiving weekend; they loved it. It totally creeped me out, and I wasn't even paying attention -- I caught bits here and there from the kitchen while I was baking.
I guess my bottom line is that there's a lot of hideous stuff out there, and most of it is computer-generated. Pixar stands as the last bastion of quality, easily beating out Disney and Dreamworks. If you've been avoiding Pixar films because you don't like computer animation, you're in for a real treat.
- merkley??? said...
"something crucial missing -- emotion, humanity... something."
dude, talk about point one finger and you got three pointing back ---- none of those things are missing from ANY pixar production.
to each their own i suppose, but it sounds more like you're one of those weird nostalgic types who feels obligated to snark on new stuff.
- OddD said...
I largely agree with Ann; Pixar succeeds in spite of the animation not because of it.
For me, the nausea-inducing movie, though, was Mars Attacks. It was the most computer animation I'd ever seen, and it was fatiguing. Now, I rather like the movie in spite of that, and I've gotten to where the computer animation just looks dated, rather than horrible. (For dated but still wonderful in aesthetics, give me a good ol' matte, like in Wizard of Oz or When Worlds Collide.)
I think this is the other reason why Pixar succeeds: aesthetics seem to trump all else, and they dial back only to the degree that technology (and content) demands.
However, I think the negative reaction to computer animation is definitely an old brain thing. Someone born in 1995 both can spot computer animation more easily than older folks can, and isn't bothered by it. (When I went to see Spiderman, the five-year-old in the chair next to me, said loudly, and somewhat ironically(!), "Oooh! CGI!"
So much for suspension of disbelief.
- amba said...
Did anybody love "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" as much as I did? Not only was the interaction of live and animated "actors" brilliantly done, but a sly philosophical point about cultural differences was made by it. The Toons lived in a ghetto called Toontown. Their nature and worldview was so different from humans' that they actually had a different physics. I loved that both as a source of two-way comedy (toons in the human world, Bob Hoskins in the toon world) and as a metaphor.
- Lonesome Payne said...
I was talking off-topic about special effects, although you probably feel the same about that. But I suspect you're in a minority, always will be, referring to people actually interested in how digital problems are solved. Whereas almost everyone going to movies would be interested in details like how they made the tornado in Wizard of Oz. or how they made King Kong. I'm still interested in that and it's 70 years later. And even though you are interested in digitial stuff I'm sure that's not all you're interested in.
I maintain that for the great majority, digital details constitute one vast area called "snore." There's nothing to be done about it, is isn't like the movie industry will go back to spend the fortunes it would take to actually assemble cities and so on merely to appease me. But in a way I wish they would.
- Madfish Willie said...
The best animation I've ever seen was on a 1996 - 1998ish morning cartoon called Beat Wars: Transformers... the 3D effects were simply phenomenal... I've wondered why animated movies after that were not done to that particular standard.
- Lonesome Payne said...
Actually, now that I stop to consider, I don't really have the same grief about computer animation that I do about special effects. There was really no mystery in the old method: it was a whole lot of people drawing a whole lot of pictures. I accept it's possible to be genuinely creative in the digital world, in a way not unrelated to people drawing by hand.
It would be possible I guess to feel grief at losing the sheer skill of people drawing by hand. But a lot of people could do it, so maybe it's not inherently more difficult or more mysterious than being able to produce an image digitally.
Digitally touched-up singing: that's a different issue entirely. I want no part of it. Part of the amazingness of Sinatra or whoever was he didn't have that. It's not just the idea, it's the execution by an amazing individual. The two are connected in fact, the idea and the execution.
(Maybe that's why typos are so embarrassing. If you can't even place your fingers correctly, what does that say about your thought processes?)
- Balfegor said...
I think the fellow at Seward Street (http://jrhull.typepad.com/seward_street/) works in the computer animation industry, but he's posted before on the importance of preserving good draftsmanship skills (http://jrhull.typepad.com/seward_street/2004/11/drawing_still_m.html#more). And I think he's right. Elsewhere, I think he links to a description of the animation process for the Incredibles, in which animators would just draw on top of shots or animatics to explain how they should be corrected.
- katiebakes said...
Oh, you're missing out. Finding Nemo is a truly delightful movie.
The only time I think the computer animation looks creepy is when it depicts "real" as opposed to caricature-looking humans.
- Unknown said...
Note to John Thacker: The Little Mermaid was hand-painted. In fact, it was the last full-length Disney Feature Animation film that was painted on cells. I should know: I have 3 of them. The Prince and the Pauper, which followed Mermaid, was also hand-painted, but it was not full-length. The first Disney Animated movie that was painted on the computer was The Rescuers Down Under.


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DWTS Season 12 – Dancing With The Stars Dance Troupe: Six Secret Weapons (Video, Photos)
Entertainment Tonights did a nice little spread promoting the new Dancing With The Stars Dance Troupe last night. See this talented new six pack being interviewed and rehearsing for their next performance below.
For some extra fun, here are some photos of them from this past Tuesday night as well. I LOVE THESE COSTUMES!!
The New Dance Troupe will perform to OneRepublic's hit "All the Right Moves" Tuesday night for one of their numbers.
If you missed our earlier reportings on the new Dance Troupe, be sure to do so HERE.


text:
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text: Root Cause Analysis for Toddlers and Medical Eyeball Tweezers April 19, '12 Comments [51] Posted in Musings Sponsored By This has been a very stressful week. Our four year old had a piece of metal in his cornea. Twice. That's two different pieces over multiple days in the same eye. In one week. He's great now, no lasting damage and no vision trouble. That's not his eye pictured at right. He was having trouble sleeping and was complaining about his eye hurting. He's had eyelashes in his eye before so we check it out, didn't see much, and flushed with saline eye drops anyway. He wouldn't fall asleep and kept waking in a start. About 1 in the morning it was clear that he was in some considerable pain and wasn't going to sleep. We looked again with a bright flashlight. Turns out that little kids not only don't like standing still but they don't like staying still with a bright light in their eyeball. We did get a hint of something, right on the surface of the eye next to the pupil. I couldn't get it out with the edge of a tissue so we headed to the emergency room. The very kind doctor at the ER took a look with a slit lamp and exclaimed: "It's something metal!" She numbed the eye and tried to remove it but quickly decided it was out of her expertise and call the on call ophthalmologist. They woke up the eye surgeon and brought him in to check it out. We found ourselves with a tired toddler and a tired (but kind) eye doctor after 2am trying to get this metal out of his little eye with some kind of special set of medical eyeball tweezers. Again, may I mention that while my son is and was a trooper, no one likes to hear "eyeball" and "tweezers" in the same sentence, especially when combined into one super scary term: "medical eyeball tweezers." His patience exhausted, my baby fell asleep crying. The doctor said I got all the metal and 80% of the rust. Rust? Yes, rust. Rust that looks roughly like this. Iron rusts in the eye very quickly and creates a rust ring (iron oxide). That ring often needs to be removed as well usually with the equivalent of an "eyeball Dremel tool," like this one below. We were told to return the following day to get the remainder of the rust. We went home, tired but feeling reasonably comfortable that this strange thing was a fluke and that everything would be cool. The following day an attempt was made to get the last bit of rust but bless him, he wouldn't stay still so the we and doctor decided against further trauma. The chances are that the very small bit of rust will just dissipate. If not, we'd deal with it later when he's older. My son went to school and the next day came home complaining about his eye. The doctor had said it would feel like there was something in his eye (even though it had been removed) and that this was common. However, he couldn't sleep and insisted something was wrong. We have learned to listen to little people, even and especially at 2am. There was something new in his eye - the same eye. I could only assume that the doctor didn't get everything the last time. Off to the ER again (don't mess with eyes) but this time they were not wiling to wake up the eye doctor. We saw him a few hours later first thing in the morning. I asked if it was the same piece and he said, "no, it's the same eye but a different location. You can tell because the original rust ring is a marker." He was shocked to say the least. "In 30 years I've never seen someone get something in their eye twice. Not even in people who grind metal for a living." He tried to get it out but my baby wasn't having it. The decision was made (and not lightly) to use general anesthesia to perform the eye surgery procedure and get it out. This kind of thing requires one stays completely still and you just can't ask a 4 year old to do that. I just couldn't get my head around the idea that this was a new piece of metal. What if a third one showed up? What was he doing or what was he around to cause this? Was he banging metal cars together? Was it shavings off his metal bed? Maybe sandbox sand being thrown in the air? Something from our new car? My wife and I became obsessed with "root causing." I spent a day moving through my son's life, touching everything. Toys, beds, toothbrushes, car seats, furniture. No luck. We were at the hospital yesterday and he was put under and had the procedure done. The doctor said it was successful and not only did he get th second piece of metal out but also cleaned up the now two rust rings. We asked again, "How do we keep this from happening again?" The doctor said, "You've got to find the cause or it very well could reoccur. The thing is..." he reiterated, "I've never seen this, even in metal grinders or folks in manufacturing." We took baby home with a healthy dose of paranoia. Should he wear glasses until this is figured out? Then we had an idea. Where does a 4 year old come in contact with grinding metal. Why our son and not the other kids? Wait. Metal grinders. Where does my son go where metal grinds together? The playground swing. Specifically the tire swing. I've seen him spin on the swing for hours with his head parallel to the ground, eyes wide open looking at the clouds. I went to the playground, found the swing and touched the metal ball where the hip joint fits into the bearings. My finger came out covered in what looked like glitter. Metal shavings. The tire swing joint was dry and cold - effectively a metal grinder rotating directly over his eyes. There's nothing more satisfying than The Answer. I spoke to the principal of the school and he made some calls and actually spoke to the designer of the playground product who hooked him up with the designer of the swivel. They are swapping the Tire Swing Hanger for a Heavy Duty hanger that includes a rubber boot to cover the joint. This was a clear and satisfying end to a very painful experience for the little guy. I'm just happy we figured it out but I think we are going to be paranoid about eyeballs for a the foreseeable future. « Given I like reading Source Code by the ... | Blog Home | Create a great mobile experience for you... » About Scott Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author. About Newsletter Sponsored By Hosting By Comments [51] Share on: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or use the Permalink


text:
Chinese Tourists in Hawai'i
Dragon 'Em Around: We hopped on the bus with China's pioneers of leisure travel to see Hawaii through their bleary eyes.
(page 1 of 5)
Somewhere between Chen's Gourmet Buffet and the statue of King Kamehameha, Wayne Lu lost half his audience.
Lu is a tour guide for a Honolulu travel company called Dragon Tours & Travel, and his audience is a group of 30 vacationers from mainland China on the first day of a whirlwind, 12-day, eight-city tour of the United States.
Total Chinese Visitors to Hawaii
He met them in the morning at the airport, whisked them off to see the Arizona Memorial, then brought them to lunch at Chen's, an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet along Nimitz Highway. There, he made a prediction: "Fifty percent will fall asleep after lunch."
After a 15-hour trip to Honolulu from Shanghai, via Tokyo, the group was beat. By the time its motor coach stopped across from Iolani Palace, beside the Kamehameha statue, Lu's prediction had come true. Despite his amiable, nonstop patter, at least half the bus had nodded off.
"They always fall asleep after lunch," Lu said again, after his bleary-eyed charges descended from the motor coach to take photos beneath Kamehameha's outstretched arm.
Meet the weary pioneers of Chinese leisure travel, forerunners of a rapidly building new wave of wealthy and middle-class visitors from the People's Republic of China. Increasingly, you can find them piling out of buses at the usual tourist attractions, or forking out huge sums for designer handbags and watches at luxury shops in Ala Moana and Waikiki, or learning the hard way that haggling at the Apple Store will get you nowhere.
Although they make up a tiny fraction of the 7.2 million visitors overall that Hawaii saw last year, their numbers are growing quickly—from 28,664 in 2001 to 79,531 in 2011. Just as China's economy surpassed Japan's as the world's second-largest in 2010, so, too, could the number of Chinese tourists in Hawaii someday surpass the number of Japanese tourists.
"One day, in my opinion, it will happen," says Sadie Goo, China market brand manager for the Hawaii Tourism Authority. "Given that China's population is 1.4 billion, and they have so many wealthy people and so much disposable income, they will eventually be the No. 1 outbound source market in the world."
To make the acquaintance of these fledgling travelers with the potential to transform the face of Hawaii's visitor industry, HONOLULU Magazine shadowed Lu and his 30 travelers on their two-day tour of Oahu.
Fewer than 15 percent of Hawaii's Chinese tourists come to Hawaii as independent travelers, booking their own trips, following their own schedules, renting cars and confounding local drivers unfamiliar with China's first-is-right rule of the road. The majority of Chinese tourists in Hawaii today come with group tours, often part of steeply discounted, multi-city packages that jam as much Hawaii into as little time as possible.


text:
3D Printed Drugs Market Strategies and Insight Driven Transformation 2019-2025
The latest report on Global 3D Printed Drugs Market is prepared by Up Market Research that covers surveys from various coveted organizations across different geographical locations to come up with the assertive 100+ page report. The report consists of qualitative and competitive analysis of the key market developments, involving the challenges, competition, and opportunities available that may set trends in the 3D Printed Drugs market. The report bridges the historical data from 2014 to 2018 and forecasted till 2025.
Some of the key & emerging players that are part of the coverage and have being profiled are Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Hewlett Packard Caribe, BV, LLC, 3D Printer Drug Machine, FabRx Ltd
Click to get Global 3D Printed Drugs Market Research Sample PDF Copy Here @: https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/requested_sample/80604
Research analysts at Up Market Research have classified and compiled the data for both perspectives i.e. Qualitative and Competitive analysis.
Quantitative Data:
Market Data breakdown by key geographies, Type & Application/End-users
• 3D Printed Drugs Market Revenue & Growth Rate by Type [Spritam, Others] (Historical & Forecast)
• 3D Printed Drugs Market Revenue & Growth Rate by Application [Children, Elderly, Others] (Historical & Forecast)
• 3D Printed Drugs Market Revenue & Growth Rate by Each Region Specified (Historical & Forecast)
• 3D Printed Drugs Market Revenue, Volume & Y-O-Y Growth Rate by Players (Base Year)
Qualitative Data:
It would include chapters specific to market dynamics and the influencing factors affecting or driving the growth of the market. To list a few names of the sections involved are
• Industry Overview
• Global 3D Printed Drugs Market Growth Drivers
• Global 3D Printed Drugs Market Trend
• Restraints
• Opportunities in 3D Printed Drugs Market
• PESTEL Analysis
• Porter's Five Forces Model
• Patent & Trademark Analysis** [Licenses & Approvals by Players & Duration of Market Life Cycle]
• Competitive Landscape (SWOT Analysis by Players/Manufacturers)
• 3D Printed Drugs Market Development and Insights etc. [Covers Product/Service Launch, Innovation etc.]
• Investment & Project Feasibility Study**
• Regulatory Framework
** May vary depending upon availability and feasibility of data with respect to Industry targets
Detailed competitive landscape is covered to highlight important parameters that players are gaining along with the product/service evolution
- % Market Share, Revenue for each profiled company [Aprecia Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Hewlett Packard Caribe, BV, LLC, 3D Printer Drug Machine, FabRx Ltd]
- Consumption, Capacity & Production by Players
- Business overview and Product/Service classification
- SWOT Analysis
• Product/Service Landscape [Product/Service Mix with a comparative analysis]
• Recent Developments (Technology, Expansion, Manufacturing, R&D, Product Launch etc.)
Enquire for customization in Report @ https://www.upmarketresearch.com/home/enquiry_before_buying/80604
Major Topics Covered in this Report –
- Chapter 1 Study Coverage
- Chapter 2 Executive Summary
- Chapter 3 Market Size by Manufacturers
- Chapter 4 Production by Regions
- Chapter 5 Consumption by Regions
- Chapter 6 Market Size by Type
- Chapter 7 Market Size by Application
- Chapter 8 Manufacturers Profiles
- Chapter 9 Production Forecasts
- Chapter 10 Consumption Forecast
- Chapter 11 Upstream, Industry Chain and Downstream Customers Analysis
- Chapter 12 Opportunities & Challenges, Threat and Affecting Factors
- Chapter 13 Key Findings
- Chapter 14 Appendix
Important Features that are under offering & key highlights of the 3D Printed Drugs market report:
1) What Market data breakdown/segmentation does basic version of this report cover in addition to players?
Global 3D Printed Drugs Product Types In-Depth: Spritam, Others
Global 3D Printed Drugs Major Applications/End users: Children, Elderly, Others
Geographical Analysis: United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India & Central & South America.
2) Can we add or profile new company as per our need?
Yes, we can add or profile new company as per client need in the report. Final confirmation to be provided by research team depending upon the difficulty of the survey.
** Data availability will be confirmed by research in case of privately held company. Up to 3 players can be added at no added cost.
Buy Full Copy Global 3D Printed Drugs Report 2019 @ https://www.upmarketresearch.com/buy/3d-printed-drugs-market-2019
3) What all regional segmentation covered? Can a specific country of interest be added?
Currently, research report gives special attention and focus on following regions:
United States, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India & Central & South America
4) Is inclusion of additional Segmentation / Market breakdown possible?
Yes, inclusion of additional segmentation / Market breakdown is possible subject to data availability and difficulty of survey. However a detailed requirement needs to be shared with our research team before giving final confirmation to client.
To comprehend Global 3D Printed Drugs market dynamics in the world, mainly the worldwide 3D Printed Drugs market is analyzed across major global regions. Up Market Research also provides customized specific regional and country-level reports for the following areas.
• North America: United States, Canada, and Mexico.
• South & Central America: Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.
• Middle East & Africa: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Turkey, Egypt and South Africa.
• Europe: UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Russia.
• Asia-Pacific: India, China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, and Australia.
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