The week in Tech: Five must-know things

This week we looked at new phones and games, considered the endless possibilities for Facebook's new search tool and wondered whether Apple will release another "big new product" this year. Here's what you need to know about the week in Tech:

1) Has Apple's innovation machine stalled?

It seems like everyone has an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac these days. Apple products are everywhere — but that may not necessarily be a good thing, as some experts worry that the company has reached its saturation point.

Apple stocks slumped on Monday after The Wall Street Journal reported the company decreased orders for parts of the iPhone 5.

USA TODAY's Scott Martin took a look at a few more signs of impending trouble for the company:

• Loss of the "wow" factor — Apple hasn't had an "industry-changing invention" since the release of the first iPad three years ago.

• Where's the Apple TV? — Rumors abound that the company is going to release a TV set, but studios and cable providers have said they don't want to work with Apple.

• Stock market slump — Apple's stock has dropped about 29% since September, and the company needs to either sell more existing products or introduce a dynamic new product to boost their stock prices.

Apple has to think fast and go big before whispers that Apple has "lost its magic" become widespread opinion.

2) Facebook announces Graph Search feature

Facebook is poised to give Google some serious competition with the launch of a new search tool designed to connect users based on common interests. The new search feature brings together likes and dislikes posted by your Facebook friends and others in your network. Graph Search could, for instance, give you a list of friends who likeStar Wars and Harry Potter, or it could tell you what Mexican restaurants your friends have visited.

Graph Search also has the potential to make a few love connections, just in time for Valentine's Day. The search will allow single users to explore the interests of not just friends but also friends of friends.

But what about privacy? Facebook said it is aware about privacy concerns that could come up with Graph Search, and the search engine will only cull from a user's Facebook "Likes" for now.

Experts told USA TODAY's Jon Swartz that Graph Search could give Facebook a serious edge over dating sites such as Match.com, location services like Foursquare and the world's most popular search engine, Google.

3) Baig: Amplified phone uses tablet display for captioning

Patient grandkids with hearing-impaired grandmothers, take note: The new Ensemble cord phone from Clarity makes it easier than ever to have a conversation with those who are hard of hearing.

The phone amplifies sound up to 50 decibels and comes with a built-in touchscreen that displays real-time captioning for phone conversations.

You might be skeptical of this service if you've ever seen mistranslated closed captioning on a TV show or movie. But don't worry: When you make or receive a call, your conversation is transcribed and captioned by a real person, not a machine.

USA TODAY's Ed Baig took a test run on the Ensemble phone and said the device is not without its flaws. The phone's transcript is "decent but imperfect," and the set doesn't come with a speakerphone. But Baig said the Ensemble is overall a good pick for members of its target audience: "My elderly mom, after trying it out on a few calls, told me that she thinks Ensemble is 'a very good idea.' Like any good son, I agree."

4) NASA: Mars rover ready to start drilling

The quest for signs of life on Mars continues! NASA announced on Tuesday that the Curiosity rover is ready to start drilling rock layers at the "Yellowknife Bay" basin in the Gale Crater. The basin is lined with veined, flat rocks that reveal the paths that water currents once made.

To say that NASA staffers are excited to start drilling is an understatement: Richard Cook of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said of their latest discovery, "We've let the scientists into a candy store."

5) Temple Run sequel hits App Store

The popular iOS mobile game Temple Runis back with a new sequel that promises to be a "bigger, better, more awesome and beautiful version" of the popular game, according to Keith Shepherd of Imangi Studios.

USA TODAY's Mike Snider said Temple Run 2 ups the stakes by making players swing on zip lines, steer a mine cart and other adventures more perilous than the simple running and jumping of the first game. Users can collect coins as they run through the game, and they can buy add-ons to upgrade the game.

If you want to check out the game for yourself, it's available on the iTunes store for free.

Lance Amstrong And Oprah Interview

Lance Armstrong's two-part interview with Oprah Winfrey finishes Friday night on OWN. Join us at 9 p.m. ET for live commentary and reaction throughout the 90-minute interview.

You can find OWN on your channel lineup by clicking here. Oprah.com will also be streaming the interview.

9:28 p.m. ET -- "She believes the truth will set you free," Lance says of his first wife. "We believe differently on a lot of things," he finishes, without a trace of irony.

9:26 p.m. ET -- "I'd be lying if I said," Lance begins. I'd complete the quote, but it really doesn't matter, does it?

9:21 p.m. ET -- Lance is asked about the picture he tweeted of him laying around with his seven yellow jerseys. He's still really, really, proud of it, despite his statements to the contrary.

9:18 p.m. ET -- "I think I deserve it," Lance says of his right to run in things like the Austin 10K and Chicago Marathon. "I deserve to be punished, I don't think I deserve the death penalty." Spoken like a man on death row.

9:16 p.m. ET -- Oprah: "What do you say to those millions of people who believed?" Armstrong: "I say I understand your anger, your sense of betrayal. Um, you supported me forever, uh, through all this, and you believed and I lied to you. And I'm sorry. I will spend -- I will spend, and I am committed to spending, as long as I have to to make amends, knowing full well I won't get many back."

9:15 p.m. ET -- Oprah shows a video of Lance during a 2005 deposition saying he doesn't care about money, just the support of "hundreds of millions of people." When she turns to Lance after the clip ends, Oprah's "come on, dude" says it all. She didn't even need to ask a question.

9:14 p.m. ET -- "I don't -- I don't think so," Lance says when Oprah asks whether he thinks his use of PEDs contributed to his original cancer diagnosis.

9:08 p.m. ET -- Stepping down from Livestrong was his most humbling moment. Oh, I think he'll have a different opinion after getting up from this interview.

9:07 p.m. ET -- It's Friday night. If Lance drew 3.2 million on Thursday, the most-watched TV night of the week, tonight's number will be considerably lower. Going on OWN was a calculated risk: Armstrong must have hoped he'd have a lot of viewers watch him while Oprah gave him a sympathetic interview. She's dont anything but. He probably would have been better to go on 60 Minutes after the AFC championship and getting 25 million viewers to hear all his excuses. Then again, maybe not.

9:05 p.m. ET -- Oprah says Livestrong has raised over $500 million for cancer research. "It was the best thing for the organization," Lance says of leaving, "but it hurt like hell."

9:02 p.m. ET -- The most emotional Lance has been over the past 92 minutes is when he talks about Nike dumping him. I hope you can sleep well tonight, Phil Knight.

9:00 p.m. ET -- "Do you feel dis-graced," Oprah asks, oddly cutting the word into two. "Of course," Lance says, as if he's heard a similar question be-fore.

8:57 p.m. ET -- Amtrak recently released a study saying the odds of seeing two train wrecks in your lifetime are very slim. Not if you're watching Lance and Oprah again tonight!

8:52 p.m. ET -- The first part of the Lance/Oprah interview attracted 3.2 million viewers to OWN on Thursday night. For comparison's sake, that's 1.9 million less viewers than watched the critically-reviled and quickly-canceled drama Mob Doctor on Fox. And 300,000 more people watched OWN last year when Oprah interviewed Whitney Houston's daughter. As a result, look for Oprah to try to work in questions about Bobby Brown, The Bodyguard and cocaine tonight.

Lance Armstrong on 'Oprah': I used performance-enhancing drugs, 'bullied' detractors

Lance Armstrong finally confessed his doping sins to talk show host Oprah Winfrey on Thursday but the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) has now challenged the disgraced cyclist to do the same under oath.

USADA, who exposed the seven-times Tour de France

winner as a drug cheat, said in a statement that Armstrong's admission to a worldwide television audience was a good first step but that the 41-year-old needed to do more.

"Tonight, Lance Armstrong finally acknowledged that his cycling career was built on a powerful combination of doping and deceit," said USADA chief Travis Tygart in a statement released shortly after the gripping 90-minute interview.

"His admission that he doped throughout his career is a small step in the right direction.

"But if he is sincere in his desire to correct his past mistakes, he will testify under oath about the full extent of his doping activities."

Armstrong, who has been stripped of his seven Tour wins and a bronze medal from the 2000 Sydney Olympics, took Winfrey's quickfire, probing questions head on, owning up to the type of drug use that has tainted the sport he said he loves.

With cycling reeling from doping scandals and its place at the Olympics said to be under threat, Armstrong said he would do what he could, if called upon, to help rebuild its tattered image.

"I love cycling and I say that knowing that people see me as someone who disrespected the sport, the color yellow," Armstrong told Winfrey.

"If we can, and I stand on no moral platform here, if there was a truth and reconciliation commission, and I can't call for that, if they have it and I'm invited I'll be first man through the door."

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) also called on Armstrong this week to reveal under oath what he knows about doping in cycling.

The 90-minute broadcast will be followed Friday with a second part on the Oprah Winfrey Network on Friday, the second installment of a 2½-hour interview taped on Monday.

The first interview

Armstrong opened the interview by saying “yes” to taking the banned energy boosting substance EPO, testosterone, HGH, cortisone and employing blood-doping practices and transfusions.

He said he started using in the “EPO generation” of the mid-1990s.

And he said that without using the performance-enhancing drugs, he would not have been able to win the seven Tour de France titles.

He also expressed regret at how he had “bullied” those who painted his success as fraudulent.

He sued his former masseuse, Emma O’Reilly, after she had revealed that he had wrongly backdated a prescription for banned cortisone after he tested positive for it in 1999.

“She’s one of those people I have to apologize to,” Armstrong said. “She got run over, got bullied. We sued so many people. I have reached out to her to make amends.”

Winfrey asked Armstrong why he has sued people when he knew they were telling the truth.

“It’s a major flaw,” he said. “A guy who wanted to control every outcome. To never forgive me, I understand that. I have started that process to speak to those people directly.”

Copyright © 2013, Reuters

Dear Abby's Legacy

Two men had recently bought a house together in San Francisco, and the neighbors were annoyed. The men were entertaining "a very suspicious mixture of people," the neighbors wrote, asking: "How can we improve the neighborhood?"

"You could move," Dear Abby replied.

That zinger, contained in the 1981 collection "The Best of Dear Abby," was such classic Abby — real name, Pauline Friedman Phillips — that it moved her daughter to burst into laughter Thursday when reminded of it, even though she had just returned from the funeral of her mother. The elder Phillips had died a day earlier at age 94 after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.

"People weren't really talking about homosexuality back then," Jeanne Phillips, who now writes the famous syndicated column, said. "But you know, there wasn't a subject my mother wouldn't take on."

As the world said goodbye to Dear Abby on Thursday, the Web was full of her snappiest one-liners, responses to thousands of letters over the decades that she wrote in her daily column. But her admirers noted that behind the humor and wit was a huge heart, and a genuine desire to improve people's lives.

"She really wanted to help people," said Judith Martin, the etiquette columnist known as Miss Manners. "Yes, she wrote with humor, but with great sympathy. She had an enormous amount of influence, and for the good. Her place in the culture was really extraordinary."

AP

The long-running "Dear Abby" column first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1956. Phillips was hardly experienced, but she had managed to snag an interview for the job. A skeptical editor allowed her to write a few sample columns, and Phillips was hired.

She wrote under the name Abigail Van Buren, plucking the name Abigail from the Bible and Van Buren from American history. Her column competed for decades with that of Ann Landers, who was none other than her twin sister, Esther Friedman Lederer (she died in 2002.) Their relationship was stormy in their early adult years, but they later regained the closeness they'd had growing up in Sioux City, Iowa.

Carolyn Hax, who writes her own syndicated advice column, feels that one can't speak of one sister without the other, so influential were they both, and at the same time.

"Any of us who do this owe them such a debt," she said. "The advice column was a backwater of the newspaper, and now it is so woven into our cultural fabric. These columns are loved and widely read, by people you wouldn't expect. That couldn't have happened without them."

In a time before confessional talk shows and the nothing-is-too-private culture of the Web, the sisters' columns offered a rare window into Americans' private lives and a forum for discussing marriage, sex and the swiftly changing mores of the 1950s, '60s and '70s.

The two columns differed in style, though. While Ann Landers responded to questioners with homey, detailed advice, Abby's replies were more flippant and occasionally risqué, like some collected for her 1981 book.

Dear Abby: My boyfriend is going to be 20 years old next month. I'd like to give him something nice for his birthday. What do you think he'd like? — Carol

Dear Carol: Nevermind what he'd like, give him a tie.

Dear Abby: I've been going with this girl for a year. How can I get her to say yes? — Don

Dear Don: What's the question?

Jackie Chan to America: “It’s not me. It’s you.”

HONG KONG — Jackie Chan may have stirred up a maelstrom in the US, but inAsia, he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

Last month, the 58-year-old action star claimed in an interview that the US is “the most corrupt” country in the world, and argued that Chinese citizens should keep criticisms of their country to themselves.

“If you talk about corruption, the entire world, the America, has no corruption? [It is] the most corrupt in the world,” he said in a Dec. 13 broadcast on Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV.

When the comments spread to the American press last week, they sparked widespread controversy.

Yet while the comments aroused indignation in the US, where Chan built his film career, they have done nothing to dent the popularity of his new film, "CZ12" (short for Chinese Zodiac).

Released in China on Dec. 20, the film has broken box-office records in China, earning over $130 million. Strong performances in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have already helped to make "CZ12" the second-highest grossing Chinese-language film of all time.

As director, writer, choreographer, and producer of the film — his 101st — Chan touched every aspect of the project, winning a Guinness World Record for the number of credits on a single film. He has said that "CZ12" will be his last “major action film,” marking an end to the most significant chapter in his career.

More from GlobalPost: The best foreign films that didn't make the Oscars cut

In both its subject matter and its Asian success, "CZ12" underscores the extent to which the star of "Rumble in the Bronx" and "Rush Hour" has pivoted his career away from America, and toward China.

The plot of "CZ12," which is nominally the sequel to two Indiana Jones-style Chan movies from the 1980s and early 1990s, follows a markedly more nationalist, even revanchist, arc than its predecessors. Instead of seeking a magic sword, or Nazi gold, as in the previous films, Chan’s band of adventurers is on a quest to steal 12 ancient Chinese statues that were taken by Anglo-French forces during the Opium Wars of the 1840s.

Spurred on by a beautiful, didactic Chinese antiques preservation activist named Coco, who periodically delivers speeches on the perfidy of imperialists and the righteousness of repatriating China’s historic relics, Jackie eventually sacrifices himself to save a dragon statue from falling into a volcano. (Spoiler alert: He survives.)

The patriotic themes of the movie, however historically justified, have unsettled some critics, who felt that Chan’s script comes a bit too close to aping the Communist Party line.

“Entire pages of pedantic dialogue sound like they were scripted by a government official,” said Andrew Sun of the South China Morning Post.

“Regardless of what one believes about historical propriety and national rights, "CZ12" is not the place to debate them, and after the third lecture on the foreign raiders and auction houses that profit from 19th century pillages, the subject simply becomes exhausting,” said Hollywood Reporter.

More from GlobalPost: Hollywood bends to Beijing's will

Jackie Chan’s evolution toward a more vocal pro-Beijing stance has become more pronounced in both his movies and his politics. His previous film, the patriotic epic "1911," diligently and solemnly portrayed the military uprising that led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. While not quite propaganda, the movie was criticized for mythologizing its heroes, and neglecting aspects of history deemed unsavory to the Communist Party narrative.

More striking is the stridency of Chan's public statements. Over the last several years, Chan has become increasingly controversial in Hong Kong, his hometown, after repeatedly denigrating the city’s civil liberties in comparison to the mainland.

In 2010, he said that “in the 10 years after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, I can gradually see, I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not … I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

In fact, the same week that he called America “the most corrupt,” Chan told a Chinese magazine that Hong Kongers’ right to protest should be limited, saying that “The authorities should stipulate what issues people can protest over and on what issues it is not allowed.”

Following the comment, activist Wang Dan called for a Hong Kong boycott of "CZ12," which may have contributed to its relatively weak box-office earnings of $1.38 million in the territory.

Even in mainland China, where the film is a runaway hit, many ordinary people are turned off by Chan's reactionary views. Many users on Weibo, China's Twitter, heaped derision on his anti-US remarks, suggesting he is now more concerned about currying favor in Beijing than in Hollywood.

"How many years of service has he given to the Party?" asked one user. “Presumably he's paving the way to join the Party after he can no longer shoot movies,” said another.

There may be truth to the observation that Chan, like many Hollywood studios, is shifting his focus to China's vast and growing movie-viewing market. In 2012, the size of China's box office surged by a third to $2.7 billion, beating Japan to become the second largest in the world. And thanks to government policies strictly limiting the number of foreign films allowed in the country, Chinese-made movies like "CZ12" have an inherent advantage.

Photos from GlobalPost: Inside China's film industry

Despite some backlash, there's no denying that Chan's nationalistic tone does play well with parts of the Chinese populace. On Weibo, many people applauded and even celebrated his boldness in criticizing the US and defending China.

“I am also anti-American! I support Big Brother Jackie!” wrote one. “This is the truth about America!” said another. "It's there that Brother Chan cannot speak the truth openly."

Of course, Jackie Chan has not given up on the US market entirely. He has confirmed that he will appear in the next of Sylvester Stallone's unkillable franchise, "The Expendables 3." And Chan will see whether his comments have affected American fans when "CZ12" comes to American shores in the spring or summer of 2013.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/130116/jackie-chan-america-movies