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Everyone seems to agree that the key to the success of Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy was years of careful planning before production ever began. Now Bryan Bishop writes at The Verge that in what can only be described as the most honest promotional video of all time, we find out why the Hobbit trilogy turned out to be such a boring mess. In the clip Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and other production personnel confess that due to the director changeover — del Toro left the project after nearly two years of pre-production — Jackson hit the ground running but was never able to hit the reset button to get time to establish his own vision. Once the new director was hired, the harried crew members had to scramble to redesign everything to suit Jackson’s vision, but they could barely even keep up with the production schedule, let alone prepare anything in advance. At some junctures in the process, Jackson found himself essentially having to improvise on set because there was nothing really prepared for his actors to do. “You’re going on to a set and you’re winging it, you’ve got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you’re making it up there and then on the spot," said Jackson. "I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it ][…] even from a script point of view Fran [Walsh], Philippa [Boyens] and I hadn’t got the entire scripts written to our satisfaction so that was a very high pressure situation.”

But wait, "Peter has never made a secret of the fact that he took over the Hobbit directing job with very little preparation time remaining before shooting had to begin. It was a challenge he willingly took on. His comments are an honest reflection of his own personal feelings at times during the movie's production." says a spokeman for Jackson. "Somebody has decided to create this cut-down, using only the sections of The Gathering Clouds that discuss the difficulties faced, not the positive ways they were addressed and overcome – which are also covered in this and other featurettes."

Billy Witz reports at the NYT that the friendly sport of curling suddenly has become roiled in controversy over — what else? — the brooms. The crux of the debate is fabric -- specifically, something called directional fabric. The use of this material in broom pads is the latest escalation in an arms race among manufacturers, whereby the world’s best curlers can guide the 44-pound stone around a sheet of ice as if it were controlled by a joystick. Many of the sport’s top athletes, but not all of them, signed an agreement last month not to use the newest brooms. But with few regulations on the books and Olympic qualifying tournaments underway this month, the World Curling Federation has stepped in and issued new rules that set severe restrictions on the types of brooms that can be used. “There’s definitely some anger over it,” says Dean Gemmell. “In curling, we’re generally known for being pretty friendly with most of your opponents. Even at the big events, you see the top players hanging out. But it’s sort of taken that away this year, that’s for sure.”

It was prototype brooms made by BalancePlus that were the focus of complaints at the Toronto tournament, but Scott Taylor, president of BalancePlus, says they were never intended for sale, and were meant to demonstrate the problems that the reversed fabrics could cause. Players say the brooms allowed sweepers to "steer" the rock much more than they were comfortable with, and even slow them down. The brooms have been compared to high-tech drivers that allow amateur golfers to hit the ball as far as a pro, or the advanced full-body swimsuits that were banned from competition in 2010 for providing an unfair advantage. Of his company’s high-tech broom, Taylor says: “This isn’t good. It’s like hitting a golf ball 500 yards.”

Robert Platt Bell writes at his blog "Living Stingy" about Lenny, a library of videos which play recordings to telemarketers trying to sell services (or scams). Lenny picks up calls and answers them with pre-recorded audio clips from a doddering Australian man, sometimes keeping telemarketers on the phone for over 20 minutes. "Lenny confounds and confuses, but sounds totally real," writes Bell. "Some telemarketers talk to him for nearly a half-hour, before they figure out that he's either a recording - or senile." According to developer Mango, Lenny is a program that uses voice recognition techniques to detect when a telemarketer is through speaking. When Lenny doesn’t hear anything, he says his next prompt. If the telemarketer doesn’t speak, or speaks too quietly, Lenny will ask them to speak up. This makes him sound more “real”. After the 16th prompt, Lenny starts over. The current “record” of sorts is a pair of telemarketers who were kept occupied by Lenny for over 38 minutes. Want to talk to Lenny, or transfer a telemarketer to him? Here's how.

But who is the real Lenny? According to Internet chatter he’s an actor in Brisbane, Australia — though clearly of English origin — who made his recordings for an company that wanted to respond in kind to time-wasting callers. About 2013, however, the original Lenny stopped working, so Mango and other tech-types decided to recreate him based on the published recordings. “The dishonest telemarketers are the ones that Lenny is really intended for,” explains Mango.

According to a recent study of 27 schools, about one-quarter of female undergraduates said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services. Now Natasha Singer reports at the NYT that in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence. One of the most interesting features of Callisto is a matching system — in which a student can ask the site to store information about an assault in escrow and forward it to the school only if someone else reports another attack identifying the same assailant. The point is not just to discover possible repeat offenders. In college communities, where many survivors of sexual assault know their assailants, the idea of the information escrow is to reduce students’ fears that the first person to make an accusation could face undue repercussions.

"It’s this last option that makes Callisto unique," writes Olga Khazan. "Most rapes are committed by repeat offenders, yet most victims know their attackers. Some victims are reluctant to report assaults because they aren’t sure whether a crime occurred, or they write it off as a one-time incident. Knowing about other victims might be the final straw that puts an end to their hesitation—or their benefit of the doubt. Callisto’s creators claim that if they could stop perpetrators after their second victim, 60 percent of campus rapes could be prevented." This kind of system is based partly on a Michigan Law Review article about “information escrows,” or systems that allow for the transmitting of sensitive information in ways that reduce “first-mover disadvantage" also known to economists as the "hungry penguin problem". As game theorist Michael Chwe points out, the fact that each person creates her report independently makes it less likely they’ll later be accused of submitting copycat reports, if there are similarities between the incidents.

AP reports that the American Medical Association has called for a ban on direct-to-consumer ads for prescription drugs and implantable medical devices, saying they contribute to rising costs and patients' demands for inappropriate treatment. According to data cited in an AMA news release, ad dollars spent by drugmakers have risen to $4.5 billion in the last two years, a 30 percent increase. Physicians cited concerns that a growing proliferation of ads is driving demand for expensive treatments despite the clinical effectiveness of less costly alternatives. “Today’s vote in support of an advertising ban reflects concerns among physicians about the negative impact of commercially-driven promotions, and the role that marketing costs play in fueling escalating drug prices,” said AMA Board Chair-elect Patrice A. Harris, M.D., M.A. “Direct-to-consumer advertising also inflates demand for new and more expensive drugs, even when these drugs may not be appropriate.”

The AMA also calls for convening a physician task force and launching an advocacy campaign to promote prescription drug affordability by demanding choice and competition in the pharmaceutical industry, and greater transparency in prescription drug prices and costs. Last month, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report saying that a high cost of prescription drugs remains the public’s top health care priority. In the past few years, prices on generic and brand-name prescription drugs have steadily risen and experienced a 4.7 percent spike in 2015, according to the Altarum Institute Center for Sustainable Health Spending.

Fast Coexist reports on the Edible Insect Desktop Hive, a kitchen gadget designed to raise mealworms (beetle larva), a food that has the protein content of beef without the environmental footprint. The hive can grow between 200 and 500 grams of mealworms a week, enough to replace traditional meat in four or five dishes. The hive comes with a starter kit of "microlivestock," and controls the climate inside so the bugs have the right amount of fresh air and the right temperature to thrive. If you push a button, the mealworms pop out in a harvest drawer that chills them. You're supposed to pop them in the freezer, then fry them up or mix them into soup, smoothies, or bug-filled burgers. "Insects give us the opportunity to grow on small spaces, with few resources," says designer Katharina Unger, founder of Livin Farms, the company making the new home farming gadget. "A pig cannot easily be raised on your balcony, insects can. With their benefits, insects are one part of the solution to make currently inefficient industrial-scale production of meat obsolete."

Of course, that assumes people will be willing to eat them. Unger thinks bugs just need a little rebranding to succeed, and points out that other foods have overcome bad reputations in the past. "Even the potato, that is now a staple food, was once considered ugly and was given to pigs," says Unger adding that sushi, raw fish, and tofu were once considered obscure products. "Food is about perception and cultural associations. Within only a short time and the right measures, it can be rebranded. . . . Growing insects in our hive at home is our first measure to make insects a healthy and sustainable food for everyone."

National Security experts Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin write in the NYT that in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Paris, most Americans probably feel despair, and a presentiment that it is only a matter of time before something similar happens here. "But such anxiety is unwarranted. In fact, it’s a mistake to assume that America’s security from terrorism at home is comparable to Europe’s. For many reasons, the United States is a significantly safer place. While vigilance remains essential, no one should panic." According to Simon and Benjamin the slaughter in France depended on four things: easy access to Paris, European citizens happy to massacre their compatriots, a Euro-jihadist infrastructure to supply weapons and security agencies that lacked resources to monitor the individuals involved - problems the United States does not have — at least not nearly to the degree that Europe does, undermining its ability to defend itself.

For example, Europe’s external border controls allow for free border-crossing inside most of the European Union, making it life simple for criminals. But the United States doesn’t have this problem. Pretty much anyone coming to the United States from Middle Eastern war zones or the radical underground of Europe would need to come by plane, and, since 9/11, we have made it tough for such people to fly to the United States. The United States has another advantage: an intelligence, law enforcement and border-control apparatus that has been vastly improved since the cataclysm of 9/11. Post-9/11 visa requirements and no-fly lists weed out most bad actors, and both the Bush and Obama administrations demanded that countries in our visa waiver program provide data on extremists through information-sharing pacts called HSPD-6 agreements. "None of this should lead American authorities, or the American people, to settle into a false sense of security," conclude Simon and Benjamin adding that "what the Paris attacks show is that the world needs America’s intelligence and security resources even more than its military might."

T-Mobile said last week that it would let customers watch as many movies as they wanted on services like Netflix and HBO as well as all other kinds of video, without having it count against their monthly data plans. But the NYT editorializes that there are real concerns about whether such promotions could give telecommunications companies the ability to influence what services people use on the Internet, benefiting some businesses and hurting others. Earlier this year, the FCC adopted net neutrality rules to make sure that companies like T-Mobile, Verizon and Comcast did not seek to push users toward some types of Internet services or content — like video — and not others. The rules, which telecom companies are trying to overturn in court, forbid phone and cable companies to accept money from Internet businesses like Amazon to deliver their videos to customers ahead of data from other companies. The rules, however, do not explicitly prevent telecom companies from coming up with “zero rating” plans like the one T-Mobile announced that use them treat, or rate, some content as free.

"Everybody likes free stuff, but the problem with such plans is that they allow phone and cable companies to steer their users to certain types of content. As a result, customers are less likely to visit websites that are not part of the free package." T-Mobile has said that its zero-rating plan, called Binge On, is good for consumers and for Internet businesses because it does not charge companies to be part of its free service. "Binge On is certainly better than plans in which websites pay telecom companies to be included," concludes The Times. "But it is not yet clear whether these free plans will inappropriately distort how consumers use the Internet."

The field of psychology has been recently been embarrassed by failed attempts to repeat the results of classic textbook experiments, and a mounting realization that many papers are the result of commonly accepted statistical shenanigans rather than careful attempts to test hypotheses. Now Ed Yong writes at The Atlantic that Anna Dreber at the Stockholm School of Economics has created a stock market for scientific publications, where psychologists bet on published studies based on how reproducible they deemed the findings. Based on Robin Hanson's classic paper "Could Gambling Save Science," that proposed a market-based alternative to peer review called "idea futures," the market would allow scientists to formally "stake their reputation", and offer clear incentives to be careful and honest while contributing to a visible, self-consistent consensus on controversial (or routine) scientific questions.

Here's how it works. Each of 92 participants received $100 for buying or selling stocks on 41 studies that were in the process of being replicated. At the start of the trading window, each stock cost $0.50. If the study replicated successfully, they would get $1. If it didn't, they'd get nothing. As time went by, the market prices for the studies rose and fell depending on how much the traders bought or sold. The participants tried to maximize their profits by betting on studies they thought would pan out, and they could see the collective decisions of their peers in real time. The final price of the stocks, at the end of two-week experiment, reflected the probability that each study would be successfully replicated, as determined by the collective actions of the traders. In the end, the markets correctly predicted the outcomes of 71 percent of the replications—a statistically significant, if not mind-blowing score. “It blew us all away,” says Dreber. “There is some wisdom of crowds; people have some intuition about which results are true and which are not,” adds Dreber. “Which makes me wonder: What's going on with peer review? If people know which results are really not likely to be real, why are they allowing them to be published?”

BBC reports that Budi Waseso, the head of Indonesia's anti-drugs agency has proposed building a prison island guarded by crocodiles to house death-row drug convicts and says crocodiles make better guards than humans - because they cannot be bribed. "We will place as many crocodiles as we can there," says Waseso. "You can't bribe crocodiles. You can't convince them to let inmates escape." Waseso says only traffickers would be kept in the jail, to stop them from mixing with other prisoners and potentially recruiting them to drug gangs. The plan, reminiscent of James Bond's "Live and Let Die" movie escape, is still in the early stages, and neither the location or potential opening date of the jail have been decided. Anti-drugs agency spokesman Slamet Pribadi confirmed authorities were mulling the plan to build “a special prison for death row convicts” Indonesia already has some of the toughest anti-narcotics laws in the world, including death by firing squad for traffickers, and sparked international uproar in April when it put to death seven foreign drug convicts, including Australians Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Despite the harsh laws, Indonesia’s corrupt prison system is awash with drugs, and inmates and jail officials are regularly arrested for narcotics offences.