Over 75 countries to simultaneously broadcast Doctor Who 50th Anniversary special

Date: 01.10.2013Last updated: 01.10.2013 at 22.34

Category: BBC Worldwide

BBC show will be enjoyed by millions across six continents in BBC Worldwide global simulcast and cinema extravaganza

Click to tweet: Over 75 countries to simultaneously broadcast #DoctorWho 50^th Anniversary special http://bbc.in/16UyK6b via @BBCWpress

BBC Worldwide today announces that the special 50^th Anniversary episode of Doctor Who, the world’s longest running and most successful sci-fi series will, for the first time ever, be broadcast simultaneously to millions of viewers worldwide in a global simulcast on 23^rd November 2013. 

From Canada to Colombia, Brazil to Botswana and Myanmar to Mexico, fans in at least 75 countries spanning six continents will be able to enjoy the episode in 2D and 3D* at the same time as the UK broadcast, with more countries expected to be confirmed within the next month. The US, Australia and Canada have also signed up for the simulcast which will be shown in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America and Africa. In addition to Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, the one-off special, entitled The Day of the Doctor stars former Time Lord David Tennant as well as Billie Piper, and John Hurt. 

On top of the worldwide TV broadcast, hundreds of cinemas in the UK and across the world also plan to screen the hotly anticipated special episode simultaneously in full 3D, giving fans the opportunity to make an event of the occasion and be part of a truly global celebration for the iconic British drama series.  Details about tickets for the anniversary screening will be announced in due course.    

Tim Davie, CEO of BBC Worldwide comments: “Few TV shows can still lay claim to being appointment viewing but Doctor Who takes this to another level. In its 50^th Anniversary year we wanted to create a truly international event for Doctor Who fans in as many countries as possible and the simultaneous broadcast and cinema screening of the special across so many countries will make for a fitting birthday tribute to our Time Lord.”

Steven Moffat, Showrunner for Doctor Who and Executive Producer of the 50^th Anniversary episode adds: “The Doctor has always been a time traveller - now he's travelling time zones. On the 23rd of November, it won't be the bad guys conquering the Earth - everywhere it will be The Day of the Doctor!”

The free-to-air 3D coverage will be available to those with access to a 3D TV set and to the BBC’s HD Red Button service.  This is part of the BBC’s two-year trial experimenting with 3D production and distribution, which has also included selected coverage from Wimbledon 2012 and the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The 50^th Anniversary weekend for Doctor Who in November will also see over 20,000 fans gather at London’s ExCel for the official celebration event which will feature appearances from cast old and new including Matt Smith and former Doctors Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker and Tom Baker. Further information on the event can be found at www.doctorwho.tv

Since 1963 Doctor Who has been one of the best loved dramas and certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful sci-fi series ever.  The show has received numerous awards across its 50 years and has seen huge commercial success with over 10 million DVDs and 8 million action figures sold globally.  It is also the number one BBC show on iTunes in the UK. BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the UK broadcaster distributes Doctor Who to over 200 territories across the world. 

WANT MORE ENERGY? SKIP THE COFFEE, AND CALL YOUR MOM INSTEAD

IF YOUR TANK IS RUNNING LOW, IT'S TIME FOR A "MICROBURST"--A LESSON LEARNED FROM TENNIS THAT PACKS A BIG ENERGY PAYOFF INTO A SMALL ACTIVITY.

BY: LAURA VANDERKAM

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We have plenty of time for the things that matter to us.

If we work 50 hours a week, it shouldn’t be hard to find five of those hours to invest in activities that would nurture our careers and grow our organizations. The problem is that in the midst of back-to-back meetings and email firefights, we often lack the energy to do these meaningful things that would make us more productive.

So how do we get more energy? The answer may be, in part, the long frowned-upon practice of making personal phone calls from work.

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY ISN’T THE ONLY THING THAT BOOSTS ENERGY. INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE IS ALSO ENERGIZING, THOUGH IT HAS TO BE THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

The science of energy management is a growing area of research, especially in the corporate context, as companies adopt wellness programs. Recently, Janet Nikolovski and Jack Groppel, both with Wellness & Prevention, Inc. (a Johnson & Johnson company), released a white paper on the power of what they call “microbursts.” (A download is available here.)

A microburst is a small activity that has a big energy payoff. Groppel reports that the concept comes from tennis, which he studied while working with the U.S. Professional Tennis Association. Elite players turn out to have very structured recovery rituals in the 20 seconds between points. “The theory--that a tennis player can get a trough of recovery in 20 seconds--is a very powerful learning,” he says. The insight is that it doesn’t take much time to change your energy levels significantly. If you recover right, even though you’ve just done something very hard, you can do something else very hard again soon.

To test this, Groppel and Nikolovski asked people in multiple organizations to monitor their energy levels through the day. While people started off strong, energy levels fell quickly through the day, and, depressingly, stayed low even when people got home to their loved ones. This is why many of us spend all evening watching TV.

But when coached to use microbursts--in particular, small bits of physical activity like taking the stairs and walking briskly for five minutes every hour--people’s energy levels changed considerably. An hour after a microburst, people reported that their energy levels were still twice as high as before. “You see that curve shift,” says Nikolovski. “People have more energy throughout the day. But most important, they had more energy after they went home. Walking home to their loved ones, they weren’t drained and exhausted.”

The most fascinating part of their work, though, is their finding that physical activity isn’t the only thing that boosts energy. Interacting with people is also energizing, though it has to be the right people. “Talking to a coworker wasn’t nearly as energizing as talking to a loved one,” Nikolovski says. They plotted various energy boosters on a 1-10 point scale and compared these to the default energy booster: coffee. “When you go to reach for energy, you reach for caffeine,” Nikolovski says. People who’d had a coffee in the 30 minutes before reporting their energy levels scored a 6.8. People who’d talked to a loved one? They scored around 7 on the 1-10 point scale.

In other words, if you need a pick-me-up at work, calling a loved one is better than an espresso.

To be sure, personal phone calls don’t always linger in the microburst state. Really connecting with a loved one can take more than two to five minutes. Done right, such connections also require actively disengaging from work matters for a bit. “The worst thing is if while you’re talking you’re multitasking,” Groppel says. But if such connections can make for more energized employees, the boost in productivity may be worth the trade-off in time.

The Former President Of Trader Joe's Is Opening Up A Restaurant For Expired Food

Americans waste a lot of food, often due to dubious "best if used by" labels. Trader Joe's Doug Rauch is opening up a prepared food joint that will whip up affordable dishes from our throwaways.

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3018354/heres-an-idea/the-former-president-of-trader-joes-is-opening-up-a-restaurant-for-expired-foo 

Years ago, I used to spend certain Sunday mornings visiting a dilapidated cabin lovingly referred to as the "Food Church." For $2, visitors could have access to an array of recently expired Trader Joe's items--everything from frozen pizza and sushi to apples and kale. Unlike many places that proffer expired food, the Food Church wasn't just for the low-income and homeless. It was for anybody who wanted to grab perfectly good food items before they were thrown away.

Now the former president of Trader Joe's, Doug Rauch, is opening a brick-and-mortar store in Dorchester, Massachusetts, that sells only prepared items created with recently expired produce. Dubbed the Daily Table, the shop will focus on the 90% of food bought by Americans that's thrown away prematurely. And it will be cheap enough that some people might actually consider going there instead of less healthy fast food restaurants.

In an interview with NPR, Rauch describes the Daily Table as a "a hybrid between a grocery store and a restaurant" that takes recently expired food and whips it up into delicious meals that can compete in price with the burgers and fries sold at fast food chains like McDonald's.

Rauch explains to NPR:

It's the idea about how to bring affordable nutrition to the underserved in our cities. It basically tries to utilize this 40 percent of this food that is wasted. This is, to a large degree, either excess, overstocked, wholesome food that's thrown out by grocers, etc. ... at the end of the day because of the sell-by dates. Or [it's from] growers that have product that's nutritionally sound, perfectly good, but cosmetically blemished or not quite up for prime time. [So we] bring this food down into a retail environment where it can become affordable nutrition.

Convincing people that expired food is not going to make them sick will be a challenge; a recent NRDC report found that food labels like “use by,” “best before,” and “sell by” are confusing to consumers, and as a result, 160 billion pounds of food are wasted in the U.S. every year. But Rauch tells NPR that at least one big brand in the food industry uses recently expired items from its stores in hot food served to customers the next day. It's not a safety problem--it's a PR problem.

David & Goliath:Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Malcolm Gladwell: Guru of the Underdogs

His latest gospel of success further romanticizes the Davids of the world and underrates the Goliaths.

TINA ROSENBERGSEP 18 2013, 8:24 PM ET

in

Mickey Duzyj

 

By Malcolm Gladwell

• Little, Brown

So David had the advantage all along. His victory was not a miracle; the slingshot was the superior weapon. Goliath’s size and heavy armor—his assurance of victory in a close-contact battle—guaranteed that he couldn’t lumber out of the way of a rock traveling 34 meters a second. David won by turning Goliath’s great advantage into his undoing. Therein lies an exhilarating moral, says Malcolm Gladwell, and he proceeds to spin illustrative tales about “underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants,” as the subtitle of his latest book puts it.
Gladwell, who half a decade ago brought us tales of top dogs in Outliers: The Story of Success, is still worrying the same bone: Who gets ahead, and how? His own story exemplifies one tried-and-true formula: keep asking that question and offering inspirational anecdotes as answers. In Outliers, he promoted what he has called “an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.” Don’t be fooled by the meritocratic myth that success is the product of God-given qualities such as intelligence and talent. In fact, Gladwell argued, the achievements that we chalk up to natural ability or individual resolve owe a great deal to factors we underappreciate: historical timing, the career paths seized by immigrant parents, family wealth, the opportunity to put in thousands of hours of practice. Society has more control over who succeeds than we imagine; our talent pool could be much bigger than it is.
As plenty of reviewers pointed out, there was a flip side to Gladwell’s upbeat message. For genetic determinism, he swapped in cultural determinism—hardly the liberation it seemed. The hidden factors he played up in his account of success are distributed, if anything, even less fairly than talent and intelligence. And the income and class distinctions that govern their allocation are rapidly becoming more inequitable.
But Gladwell is not one to be daunted. In David and Goliath, he’s armed with fables chosen to dispel such fatalism. What we assume to be entrenched advantages, he says, don’t always offer the edge we may expect: top dogs beware. What’s more, personal hurdles, family troubles, social inequities—though they may look like disadvantages—can propel misfits further than risk-averse meritocrats dream. In his pages, the underdogs win, mostly by dint of the sort of upstart individual agency he downplayed in Outliers. Of course they do. That’s why Gladwell includes their stories. Yet you’ll look in vain for reasons to believe that these exceptions prove any real-world rules about underdogs. In life, it’s hard to turn obstacles into blessings, and giants are by now adept at the art of battling insurgents.
The story most likely to resonate with Gladwell’s audience addresses the plight of anxious overachievers, rather than the predicament of the truly disadvantaged. Always at the top of her class in her public high school outside Washington, D.C., Caroline Sacks (a pseudonym) had pursued an avid interest in science since childhood. She chose to attend Brown rather than the University of Maryland—and because she went to a great university instead of a good one, Gladwell argues, she ended up abandoning her goal of a science degree.
She “had never not excelled” academically. But at Brown, her organic-chemistry class gave her “just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy.” Sacks dropped science and switched to liberal arts. If she’d gone to Maryland, Gladwell says, she would have been spared a crisis of confidence and never would have veered away from a field that she loved—and that promised a more lucrative future.

But just because many successful people struggled growing up doesn’t mean, alas, that many people who grew up struggling are successful.

The moral of the story is not exactly that underdogs will triumph: quite the contrary. To switch to another of Gladwell’s favorite metaphors, the point is that being a big fish is very helpful, even when picking the small pond means forgoing the high-status allure of the big pond. Second-rate schools can promote first-rate achievement, whereas more-selective environments can squelch it. For example, Gladwell cites a study showing that, in the first six years after receiving their doctorate, research economists published more, and in more-prestigious journals, if they had been standouts at a bottom-tier school than if they had been not-quite-stars at the best schools.
It’s a bracing corrective to our hyper-meritocratic obsession with the college rat race. (And if Gladwell’s right, I can save myself several hundred grand when application time rolls around for my three kids.) But more to the point, in a book about underdogs, what does Gladwell’s discussion of Sacks’s story really have to say to those with further to climb? In an endnote, he teases out the implications of the idea for affirmative action—a subject he also addressed in Outliers, in a notably different spirit. There he invoked a University of Michigan Law School study that tracked the fates of some of the school’s minority students, whose undergraduate GPAs and scores on the LSAT tended to be lower than those of their white peers. Graduates went on to do every bit as well as their white colleagues in the real world—evidence for Gladwell that in elite-school admissions, the academic ranking of qualified applicants is irrelevant. Here he cites a study comparing two groups of black students who got into elite law schools thanks to affirmative action. One group enrolled, and the other instead ended up at second-choice schools. The students who attended the good-but-not-great schools were far more likely to graduate, pass the bar, and become lawyers, Gladwell reports. Now he emphasizes that special boosts may backfire.
If there is a lesson here, it is to be cautious when deriving neat rules about “the Power of Context,” a phrase from Gladwell’s earlier book The Tipping Point. He doesn’t square Sacks’s story with evidence of the perils of so-called undermatching, when students aim lower than their qualifications would suggest. We don’t learn whether Sacks needed financial aid, but many high-performing, low-income students never consider applying to schools like Brown. Instead they go to nonselective schools close to home. But there they do worse than comparable students do at elite schools, and they drop out at higher rates, largely—though not only—because of cost. Among other things that a place like Brown can offer is an aid package that may make the tuition more affordable than even in-state prices.
Sacks’s tale doesn’t line up with Gladwell’s other stories either, which converge on the opposite theme. She dropped out of her difficult science major at Brown because she felt inadequate. Many successful entrepreneurs, we learn fromDavid and Goliath, are dyslexic and felt stupid growing up. But they didn’t quit or lose confidence. They struggled, developing compensatory strategies that spurred them onward. In the same vein, Gladwell reports that a disproportionate number of eminent people—including British prime ministers and American presidents—lost a parent in childhood. It’s yet more grist for the romantic view that early wounds beget winners. Except when they don’t: as Gladwell notes, almost in passing, prisoners are also far more likely than the general population to have suffered that blow as children.
Gladwell calls Sacks’s troubles an “undesirable difficulty … But there are times and places where struggles have the opposite effect.” Which times and places? How do we distinguish a desirable difficulty from an undesirable one? What turns an underdog into a prime minister rather than a gang member? Gladwell doesn’t attempt to explain—but we know the answer. What can transform a handicap into an advantage is having other advantages. If you are intelligent and blessed with loving parents able to provide you with the right education, and you find sources of confidence to draw on, then it’s possible you could end up like Gary Cohn, one of the dyslexics Gladwell profiles: he’s the president of Goldman Sachs. But just because many successful people struggled growing up doesn’t mean, alas, that many people who grew up struggling are successful.
As for the art of battling giants, by now the secrets of insurgents’ success are more widely known—not least to the giants—than Gladwell gives signs of appreciating in his chapters on armies, governments, and political movements. The moral of the stories he tells may have been lost on the Philistines, but has since sunk in: more is not always more. Gladwell tells how the British Army fueled rather than quelled the Irish Republican Army’s defiance with its heavy hand in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He describes civil-rights activists in Birmingham using political jujitsu—turning an opponent’s overwhelming force back against him—when they lured Bull Connor into setting attack dogs on peaceful teenagers, producing photos that appalled the world.
But that was half a century ago, and the tactics have been refined—and countered and codified—since then. “Sometimes, the More Force Is Used, the Less Effective It Is,” says The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, warning that disproportionate power can undermine political legitimacy. The advice, published by the military in 2006, may not always be followed, but it is a major lesson of the manual—surely the very definition of conventional wisdom. Claiming the political high ground is the goal, which is indeed one that the Davids of this world can achieve with flexibility, creativity, patience, and intense commitment.
But it is much easier for the Goliaths to do so. Superior force is a disadvantage only because it often blinds a giant to all other strategies. Deployed without subtlety, it favors the enemy. Yet disproportionate power, guns, and money, when used intelligently and in the service of building legitimacy, are rather effective. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong—Gladwell is right about that. Betting on their victory, though, is still the way to go

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