Word: natality
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...imitating Nintendo, Microsoft would try to leapfrog past Nintendo. "We did explore whether we thought a motion-based controller was a true next step or a transition step," Mattrick says. "And for us, we decided it was a transition step." So about 18 months ago he started up Project Natal...
...Microsoft tends to name its internal projects after cities. Natal is a city in Brazil, which is where Alex Kipman, one of the key engineers on Project Natal, comes from. What Mattrick and Kipman decided to try to do was to get rid of the controller altogether. They wanted a technology that would enable a gamer to control the game just by moving his or her arms and legs and other body parts. The gamer would become the controller. (Read "Why Video Games Are an Excellent Economic Indicator...
...find your body's various joints (it tracks 48 of them), how to keep track of multiple players at the same time, how to tell your Hawaiian shirt apart from the colorful wallpaper behind you, and so on. Microsoft even did an acoustic study of living rooms, so Project Natal can tell when you're talking, when your buddies are talking and when somebody in the game is talking, so it knows whom to take voice commands from...
...Hollywood, but the country now churns out a steady roll of its own excellent small films. The year before Tsotsi won its Oscar, South Africa missed out on one for Yesterday, the story of an HIV-infected mother bringing up her daughter in dirt-poor KwaZulu Natal. In 2007 came Bunny Chow, a hip black-and-white comedy about three comedians traveling to a festival that recalled early Spike Lee. Last year featured Jerusalema, a sophisticated thriller about the rise and fall of a Johannesburg slumlord - a kind of South African American Gangster - which made its star, Rapulana Seiphemo...
...natal screening presents a valid opportunity to combat many diseases, and we are still significantly far from the sinister world of designer babies outlined by cynics and satirists. However, as science allows us to advance further and further in pursuit of perfection, we should be aware of the implications of each medical achievement. Safety checks must be imposed to prevent a loss of balance, as tumbling to the bottom of this particular slippery slope would be disastrous...