Sunday, June 30, 2013

New Mexico has new judge

Posted at: 06/29/2013 11:06 AM
By: Mike Anderson, KOB Eyewitness News 4

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) - Gov. Susana Martinez has appointed a Clovis attorney to a fill a vacancy on the Ninth Judicial District Court bench.

The appointment of Fred Van Soelen was announced Friday.

He fills the spot left by the retirement of Judge Teddy Hartley.

The governor's office says Van Soelen has practiced law for more than 14 years in New Mexico.

He was the Ninth Judicial Deputy District Attorney in Clovis before taking his current associate position at the Harmon Law Office.

While Van Soelen worked for the Ninth Judicial District, he was also an instructor at Clovis Community College.

(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

Source: http://www.kob.com/article/stories/s3083599.shtml?cat=500

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City Parks & Rec offers sports and holiday festivities | Business ...


Clrksvlparks&rec-topspot-color logo_image001The Clarksvelle Department of Parks and Recreation issues its weekly events report with Independence Day celebration events and special sports opportunities for youngsters of all ages.

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Free Sports Tournaments ?

Get out on the court and show everyone what you?ve got!? Free 5-on-5 basketball and 7-on-7 flag football tournaments will be held as part of the Mayor?s Summer Night Lights program!? These sports tournaments are open to ages 11-14, 15-17, and 18 and up.? Those wanting to play must be at the location no later than 5:45 p.m. to sign up.? Free food and drinks will be provided!

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Basketball tournaments will be held at Bel-Aire Park, Summit Heights and the Kleeman Center.? Teams must have five players. The schedule of basketball is as follows:

  • Bel-Aire Park ? June 24
  • Kleeman Center ? July 1
  • Summit Heights ? July 3
  • Bel-Aire Park ? July 8
  • Kleeman Center ? July 15
  • Summit Heights ? July 17
  • Bel-Aire Park ? July 22
  • Kleeman Center ? July 29
  • Summit Heights ? July 31
  • Bel-Aire Park ? August 5

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Flag football tournaments will be held at Pettus Park.? Teams must have seven players.? Tournaments will be:

  • June 26
  • July 10
  • July 24
  • August? 7

DoggiePalooza2010The 6th Annual Doggie Palooza will be held June 29 after being previously rained out. This free event is from 1 to 4 p.m., at the Heritage Park Bark Park. Bring your pooch for a day full of demonstrations, contests, prizes and more!

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Independence Day Celebration

Join your friends and neighbors? as Clarksville celebrates our nation?s independence with the 6th annual Independence Day
Lighting Up The Cumberland Fireworks-16Celebration at a new location!?Enjoy the festivities on Wednesday, July 3, at Liberty Park offering food, fun and entertainment for the entire family.? Activities begin at 6 p.m. and will include performances by local bands Brio and The Beagles and will
conclude with the city?s largest fireworks display starting at 9:30 p.m.!

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Guests are encouraged to park at the 7-acre grass area adjacent to the park, or at the old Josten?s building, located at 1312 Hwy 48/13. Clarksville Transit System will provide free rides to and from the parking areas beginning at 4 p.m. with the last bus departing from Liberty Park at 10:30 p.m.

Wonder Kids Triathlon

Don?t miss the first-ever Wonder Kids Triathlon, presented by Jack in the Box, to be held August 3!? This event is open to boys and girls ages 3-12 and will take place at the New Providence Pool and surrounding property.

junior_triathlon_05Wonder Kids Triathlon participants will participate in three legs of the event, swimming, biking and running.? Courses vary depending on age:

  • 3-5Yrs: 25m Swim, 300yd Bike, 100yd Run
  • 6-8Yrs:?50m Swim, 600yd Bike, 300yd Run
  • 9-12Yrs: 100m Swim, 1mile Bike, 1/2mile Run

All floatation devices must be Coast Guard approved.

Cost is $25 per child and pre-registration is required with a limit of 100 participants in this year?s event so register early!? Cost covers t-shirt, medal, swim cap and goodie bag.? Registration can be completed at recpro.cityofclarksville.com, at our Community Centers or Main Office, no later than July 29.? Register by July 12 to guarantee correct shirt and swim cap size.

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Source: http://businessclarksville.com/news/city-parks-rec-offers-sports-and-holiday-festivities/2013/06/29/51963

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Saturday, June 29, 2013

From Egypt petition drive, a new grassroot wave

CAIRO (AP) ? Teenager Gehad Mustafa wears an ultraconservative veil over her face and was raised in a family of staunch Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Yet for the past weeks, she has been walking though chaotic street markets and crowded subway stations, collecting signatures on a petition demanding Islamist President Mohammed Morsi step down.

The months-long petition campaign by the group "Tamarod," Arabic for "rebel," is now culminating in nationwide protests Sunday in which the opposition hopes to bring out millions to force Morsi out of office, a year after his inauguration.

But Tamarod's organizers say they are not stopping there. No matter what happens on Sunday, they say they have created through their petition drive a real grassroots network, an opposition version in the spirit of the Islamists' expert street organizing, and have brought forth a sort of second generation of street activists, like Mustafa, after the first that led the revolt against autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

They want to use that network going ahead, to keep the public involved and to pressure the secular and liberal opposition parties, who the activists say have wasted opportunities through infighting and fragmentation, to get their act together.

On a recent day, Tamarod's main office, steps away from Cairo's Tahrir Square, was bustling with several dozen volunteers as young as 13 and as old as their 50s and 60s. University professors, government employees, students and housewives sipped tea, smoked and chatted while going through the organization's prize possession: the sheaves of signed petitions still coming in from around the country, filling the office.

The pages of signatures, they say, are proof of how deeply the country of 90 million has turned against the Muslim Brotherhood. They plan to announce their full count ahead of Sunday's protests but have claimed to have as many as 20 million signatures, which they collate, confirm and record in a database in a precise operation, knowing their count will be questioned.

Among the volunteers was 17-year-old Mustafa. She said she turned against Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood after the first protesters were killed under his administration in late 2012. "I saw the reality," she said. "You told us that the blood of the martyrs will not go in vain. But there were more ... falling under your rule."

She joined Tamarod, which launched in late April, and volunteered to canvas the street for signatures. At one point, while passing out petitions in the subway, a man wearing the beard of a Muslim conservative attacked her, pulling the veil off her face. But other commuters then wrestled the man away in support of her.

"This strengthened me. I felt what I am doing is right," she said.

Organizers say Tamarod mushroomed across the country. Founded by five activists, its leadership is a central group of about 25, connected to a network of coordinators in Egypt's 27 provinces, each with a team of volunteers in towns and villages.

The signatures are effectively a database of the dissatisfied: Each signatory puts his or her name, province of residence and national ID number.

Collecting signatures in itself is a breakthrough, overcoming Egyptians' engrained resistance to signing onto any paper presented by a stranger, especially political, from the Mubarak days when doing so could get you a visit from state security or even arrested. Volunteers carrying the petitions brought politics into every corner ? weddings, slum alleys, buses and subways. Volunteers included strangers to political campaigning, from men selling cigarettes in kiosks to impoverished women selling in vegetable markets.

Ahmed el-Masry, one of the founders of Tamarod, calls the success "astonishing."

"I can't tell how many members out there. I can think that millions of Egyptians are members," he said.

"At one point, people gave up (on Morsi) ... it reached a point where a new class of Brothers are gaining higher status in society that to join them, you have to let your beard grow. We reached a point where no one is heard but the president and his tribe."

Brotherhood officials cast doubt on the signatures, claiming forgeries and multiple names. While Morsi says peaceful demonstrations are a legitimate form of expression, he and his allies also say Mubarak loyalists are behind the campaign and protests, trying to use the streets to topple an elected leader.

A spokesman for the Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party said he sympathizes with some activists in Tamarod ? "the young revolutionaries who had great expectations out of the revolution. Due to their inexperience and age, they wanted to see change too fast and too soon and that is what I call frustration."

But Abdel-Mawgoud el-Dardery said "opportunist politicians" are exploiting them for their political agenda and that former regime elements are exploiting both the politicians and the activists.

"There is unholy alliance among these groups. They have insisted on having one enemy and that is President Morsi," he said.

Tamarod activists say it is they who are leading the politicians of the mainly liberal and secular opposition parties and factions, trying to drag them into a better connection with the public. The campaign's plan calls for Morsi to leave, the chief justice of the Supreme Constitutional Court to become a largely symbolic interim president while a technocrat Cabinet governs, a panel would write a new constitution and presidential elections would be held in six months.

Ahmed Abdu, one of the first Tamarod street campaigners, said the group will pressure the opposition to coalesce behind a candidate.

If they can't get organized "we will pick one away from all the top leaders of opposition and we will be able to rally support to him."

He blamed liberal parties for running multiple candidates in last year's presidential election, which resulted in a runoff between Morsi and a former Mubarak prime minister, forcing people to choose between an Islamist and a loyalist of the regime just ousted.

"I hope they don't let us down again," Abdu said.

Tamarod's nationwide network and pavement-pounding methods contrast with many of the political parties, which have struggled to establish a nationwide presence. That is in large part what opened the way for the Muslim Brotherhood, an 83-year-old organization that has highly disciplined cadres nationwide, and harder-line Islamist with their own organizations to dominate parliament elections in late 2011-early 2012, to ensure the constitution passed a December referendum, and to boost Morsi to victory.

Tamarod's volunteers ? some former Morsi supporters, others who disliked him from the start ? had varying stories of what brought them to the campaign. Most said they were dismayed by what they call the Brotherhood's opportunism and determination to control the system rather than reform state institutions and police. That is a frequent refrain from critics of Morsi. His allies insist they are not trying to monopolize, that opponents have refused to work with them and that old regime loyalists have sabotaged their attempts at reform.

At the Tamarod office, Doaa Mohammed, a young Justice Ministry employee, said the day after Morsi's election, a man on the street spit at her face and yelled, "Tomorrow, Morsi will get rid of you all."

Mohammed wears a stylish scarf covering her hair, less strict than the more cloaking coverings and veils that hard-liners believe women should wear.

She said managers in her ministry were replaced by Brotherhood sympathizers.

"From day one, I have been treated like a second-class citizen. The Sister enjoys higher status than me just because she belongs to the group," she said, referring to the Muslim Sisters, the women's branch of the Brotherhood.

The heart of Tamarod is its petitions. Through Facebook and Twitter, volunteers could download the form, copy it and distribute them among friends and family members or hit the streets for signatures, then get back in touch with coordinators to return the papers.

At the Tamarod office, a psychology university lecturer-turned-volunteer explained how the papers are sorted by province, counted, scanned and entered into a database to ensure there are no doubled ID numbers and that the numbers ? which have prefixes by province ? match where they're said to come from. Much of the work takes place in a room labeled "Control Room. No Entry."

Secrecy is tight. The university lecturer spoke on condition of anonymity ? he goes by the nickname "Maestro" ? so he could not be singled out for pressure by anyone trying to get to the petitions. He said only two of the founders know the whereabouts of the originals of the signed forms and are responsible for moving them every few days to new locations.

"We are working in the daylight but they don't want us to work in the daylight," he said and added, "we are holding a pen and a paper. This is our weapon. And this is how we tell them, Enough"

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-petition-drive-grassroot-wave-225403775.html

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FDA Gets Tough on Tobacco

As the Food and Drug Administration this week announced the rejection of four proposed tobacco products, experts voiced hope that the federal government can diminish tobacco use through regulation.

The FDA's decision Tuesday marked the first time tobacco products were subject to federal oversight. The FDA also authorized two new tobacco products though they are versions of what's already on the market.

The FDA's authorizations come four years after the passage of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the FDA the ability to regulate any new tobacco products put on the market.

"[The] historic announcement marks an important step toward the FDA's goal of reducing preventable disease and death caused by tobacco," FDA commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg said in a statement.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, tobacco smoke and secondhand smoke is responsible for the death of 443,000 Americans each year. Experts said the FDA's regulations were just one small step towards diminishing the use of tobacco in the U.S.

Dr. Richard Hurt, founder and director of the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center in Minneapolis, said he was pleased the FDA had started to regulate products, although he remained concerned that it took the FDA four years to make a final decision about six products.

"This is just the toe in the water of the FDA's regulation," said Hurt. "All of us in the tobacco field have been waiting for them to do something."

Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, admitted that the process "has taken time," but believed it would become more streamlined in the future.

"As all involved parties continue to gain more experience, FDA expects the process to move much more quickly," Zeller told reporters during a call on Tuesday.

Some 4,000 tobacco products await FDA authorization. Approximately 3,500 of those products are already on the market because they beat a deadline that would have held them off the market pending FDA authorization. They are allowed to remain on the market unless the FDA issues an order saying they do not meet specific standards.

The products that were authorized were two different kinds of Newport non-menthol cigarettes from the Lorillard Tobacco Co. The FDA said they would be allowed on the market because they did not raise different public health questions than comparable products already on the market. By law, the FDA cannot name the four products that were rejected or their manufacturers.

The FDA said there could be a number of reasons new tobacco products do not get authorization, such as if they raise questions of public health, or if there was a lack of data on their impact on public health or incomplete test data.

The FDA's authorization did not mean the products were any healthier than other tobacco products. The FDA authorizes the products on the basis that they will not present more harm to the public health than a comparable product already on the market.

Though the two products passed FDA muster under the guidelines of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, that does not allow Lorillard to claim they have FDA approval, because they do not meet the criteria of being "safe and effective" for users.

Lorillard Tobacco CEO Murray Kessler said he was "pleased" with the FDA's ruling.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Health/experts-hope-regulations-fda-tough-tobacco/story?id=19497517

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Friday, June 28, 2013

Tunisia frees feminist trio who staged topless protest against Islamist-led government

Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP - Getty Images

Members of the radical protest group Femen, (from left) Josephine Markmann, Pauline Hillier and Marguerite Stern raise their fists upon arrival at Orly airport on Thursday in Paris.

By Tarek Amara, Reuters

TUNIS, Tunisia -- A Tunisian court on Wednesday decided to release three European feminist activists who staged a topless protest in Tunis last month against the Islamist-led government.

The release of the three women -- one German and two French members the women's rights group, Femen -- could ease the anger of the European Union, Tunisia's main economic ally.

They were sentenced to four months in jail for indecency earlier this month after their May 29 protest to call for the release of fellow activist Tunisian Amina Tyler.

Tyler, 18, remains in custody, awaiting trial. She was arrested in Kairouan on May 19 after she hung a feminist banner from the wall of a mosque and tried to bare her breasts, on the same day that the Islamist Ansar al-Sharia group held a rally in the city that authorities tried to ban.

The decision to jail the three European women angered France, Germany and the European Union who urged the Islamist-led government to reform its laws on freedom of expression.

"The court sentenced these three activists to four months suspended jail terms... (the) women would leave Tunisia as soon as possible", one of their lawyers, Souhaib Bahri, told Reuters.

Anis Mili / Reuters, file

Police officers detain an activist from the feminist group Femen during a protest against the arrest of their Tunisian member Amina Tyler, in front of Tunisia's Ministry of Justice in Tunis May 29, 2013.

Witnesses said the women left the prison of Manouba late on Wednesday night.

Marguerite Stern and Pauline Hillier of France and Josephine Markmann of Germany apologized on Wednesday during their appeals hearing.

"I didn't think it was going to shock Tunisians to that extent. I would never do it again. We want to return to our country and our loved ones," Hillier said.

Femen has staged protests across Europe, mainly against Russia's detention of the all-female Pussy Riot punk band last year.

The new government is led by a moderate Islamist party, Ennahda, but hardline Islamist Salafists are seeking a broader role for religion, alarming a secular elite which fears this could undermine individual freedoms, women's rights and democracy.

Tunisia was the first country to be rocked by an "Arab Spring" uprising, inspiring similar revolutions in Egypt and Libya.

Secular groups say the Islamist-led government is trying to stifle freedom of expression and creativity, but the government strongly denies this.

Related:

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663309/s/2de1f2fe/l/0Lworldnews0Bnbcnews0N0C0Inews0C20A130C0A60C270C191710A950Etunisia0Efrees0Efeminist0Etrio0Ewho0Estaged0Etopless0Eprotest0Eagainst0Eislamist0Eled0Egovernment0Dlite/story01.htm

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Reputation Changer


The Internet has given a lot of power to the consumer?buyers of goods and services have many, many ways to sing a business's praises online or destroy its reputation. This has resulted in a new service industry called Online Reputation Management (ORM). Fortune 500 businesses and even celebrities are often clients of such services, but with one service called Reputation Changer, even small-to-mid-sized businesses can keep tabs on their online reputation. It's a very interesting service and, if your business has an online presence, it's worth a look.

How It Works
Reputation Changer is a cloud-based service that monitors any keywords you enter (such as your business name). The company also offers assistance in improving online reputation by manipulating search engines to push negative content about an individual or business further down in search results. The monitoring part is free.

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Reputation Changer is not the biggest name in the ORM business. That is arguably, Reputation.com. However, Reputation.com does not offer a trial account for small to mid size businesses to test?not even the monitoring capabilities. With Reputation.com, you can sign up and cancel anytime, but to test the service out, you do have to sign up for it. The ability to test-drive reputation monitoring with Reputation Changer is a definite plus for small businesses.

You can create a free account at reputationchanger.com (it doesn't even require a credit card).You sign in the first time, and are asked to enter up to three keywords to search against. This creates a campaign.

Seeing as I'm not a business owner, I tested Reputation Changer by entering my first and last name. Once I did a dashboard displayed. This interface contains quite a bit of information and activity and the UI is aptly referred to as the "Command Center." This gives the user quite a bit of insight and information into their or their business's online reputation. The company tells me that the Command Center interface and tools are what set them apart from other ORM services.

Command Center
There are several different panels on the dashboard. In one, you are presented with a listing of any URLs to sites containing your keyword?the top-ranked URLs are displayed first. For example, at the top of the list was my PCMag bio information, likely the most searched or viewed URL containing my name.

There's a drop down list above this panel that allows you to switch the view to find URLs in the three major search engines: Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

The listed URLs are shown by their ranked position. Next to each, you can flag a URL as "negative" meaning it contains content on the site that can hurt a reputation. Now, Reputation Changer also has underlying algorithms that allow it to find and flag negative content for you. The service recognizes more than 100 negative domains and keywords that contain terms such as "fraud."

On the left panel from the URL listings, you can see how many negative listings a keyword tallies up. You can also here view how many times your keyword was searched. Two lower panels display related keywords and reputation alerts?these are notifications of any recent content on the Internet that contains your keywords.

I created another trial account (you can only have one campaign in the free account) and used a keyword containing a restaurant that had recently closed in my neighborhood, Manganaro's. The two abrasive sisters who ran the place were subject to a lot of criticism online. Sure enough, when I looked at the URL listings for this restaurant's name, there were several flagged as negative by Reputation Changer (a few links are to Yelp.)

Reputation alerts can also show postings in social media about your keyword. I asked a friend on Facebook to create a message tagging me and then delete it. Sure enough, I saw that person's post in Reputation Alerts, and I kept seeing it after it was deleted, days later. My concern about this feature is how up-to-date it is. You could be worrying about negative comments or posts online that no longer exist on a live server.

Reputation Monitoring
With a free account, you can also initiate active monitoring. By clicking "Reputation Monitoring" on the tabs at the top of the interface, you are given the option to add your keywords or a URL for monitoring. You can also send alerts to an email address.

One of the cleverest features is Auto Complete. You know when you type in words in Google and it will auto complete a search term? Well, Reputation Changer also monitors any auto-completed search terms associated with your keyword. Example: my keywords are my first and last name. Google auto complete shows my name auto-completing with "pc mag," "email," and "Linkedin." Reputation Changer automatically picked up on this and monitors these search terms.

The High Price of a Good Reputation
There is a lot to this service, more than I covered in this review. But, you may be asking, OK, so if I get negative reviews and see negative content on the Internet about me or my business how do I fix it? Well, monitoring is free. Fixing that negativity is not. For a fee, the company will provide ways to help bury negative content really deep down in searches. They do this in myriad ways: By creating reviews on sites Reputation Changer hosts, by posting favorable comments?essentially bombarding your keyword with positivity, and keeping the negativity down. That type of salvage will cost you, though.

This is how Reputation Changer makes money. To help an individual or business save face costs at least $5,000. Subscribing as a paid client also gives you more tools and features in the Command Center Additionally, without changing the problems that lead to the bad reviews in the first place, it's likely these sorts of review would crop up again.

Some may question the tactics of this type of service, I know I did. However, businesses (and people) are very vulnerable to attack from the open stage that is the Internet. It only takes one disgruntled customer, who is online-savvy, to really demean your business or service, and they may do so unfairly. Reputation Changer and other ORM services, give you a chance to be active in keeping intact a good reputation for your business, or yourself. It's a fascinating market and one of the first services we've reviewed in this space. I do think the free service offers much benefit to SMBs who want to track what the online community is saying about their business and for that, it gets four out of five stars for SMB services.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/WK4BxNnOI-Y/0,2817,2421194,00.asp

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Solar power heads in a new direction: Thinner

June 26, 2013 ? Most efforts at improving solar cells have focused on increasing the efficiency of their energy conversion, or on lowering the cost of manufacturing. But now MIT researchers are opening another avenue for improvement, aiming to produce the thinnest and most lightweight solar panels possible.

Such panels, which have the potential to surpass any substance other than reactor-grade uranium in terms of energy produced per pound of material, could be made from stacked sheets of one-molecule-thick materials such as graphene or molybdenum disulfide.

Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, says the new approach "pushes towards the ultimate power conversion possible from a material" for solar power. Grossman is the senior author of a new paper describing this approach, published in the journal Nano Letters.

Although scientists have devoted considerable attention in recent years to the potential of two-dimensional materials such as graphene, Grossman says, there has been little study of their potential for solar applications. It turns out, he says, "they're not only OK, but it's amazing how well they do."

Using two layers of such atom-thick materials, Grossman says, his team has predicted solar cells with 1 to 2 percent efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity, That's low compared to the 15 to 20 percent efficiency of standard silicon solar cells, he says, but it's achieved using material that is thousands of times thinner and lighter than tissue paper. The two-layer solar cell is only 1 nanometer thick, while typical silicon solar cells can be hundreds of thousands of times that. The stacking of several of these two-dimensional layers could boost the efficiency significantly.

"Stacking a few layers could allow for higher efficiency, one that competes with other well-established solar cell technologies," says Marco Bernardi, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Materials Science who was the lead author of the paper. Maurizia Palummo, a senior researcher at the University of Rome visiting MIT through the MISTI Italy program, was also a co-author.

For applications where weight is a crucial factor -- such as in spacecraft, aviation or for use in remote areas of the developing world where transportation costs are significant -- such lightweight cells could already have great potential, Bernardi says.

Pound for pound, he says, the new solar cells produce up to 1,000 times more power than conventional photovoltaics. At about one nanometer (billionth of a meter) in thickness, "It's 20 to 50 times thinner than the thinnest solar cell that can be made today," Grossman adds. "You couldn't make a solar cell any thinner."

This slenderness is not only advantageous in shipping, but also in ease of mounting solar panels. About half the cost of today's panels is in support structures, installation, wiring and control systems, expenses that could be reduced through the use of lighter structures.

In addition, the material itself is much less expensive than the highly purified silicon used for standard solar cells -- and because the sheets are so thin, they require only minuscule amounts of the raw materials.

John Hart, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and art and design at the University of Michigan, says, "This is an exciting new approach to designing solar cells, and moreover an impressive example of how complementary nanostructured materials can be engineered to create new energy devices." Hart, who will be joining the MIT faculty this summer but had no involvement in this research, adds that, "I expect the mechanical flexibility and robustness of these thin layers would also be attractive."

The MIT team's work so far to demonstrate the potential of atom-thick materials for solar generation is "just the start," Grossman says. For one thing, molybdenum disulfide and molybdenum diselenide, the materials used in this work, are just two of many 2-D materials whose potential could be studied, to say nothing of different combinations of materials sandwiched together. "There's a whole zoo of these materials that can be explored," Grossman says. "My hope is that this work sets the stage for people to think about these materials in a new way."

While no large-scale methods of producing molybdenum disulfide and molybdenum diselenide exist at this point, this is an active area of research. Manufacturability is "an essential question," Grossman says, "but I think it's a solvable problem."

An additional advantage of such materials is their long-term stability, even in open air; other solar-cell materials must be protected under heavy and expensive layers of glass. "It's essentially stable in air, under ultraviolet light, and in moisture," Grossman says. "It's very robust."

The work so far has been based on computer modeling of the materials, Grossman says, adding that his group is now trying to produce such devices. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of utilizing 2-D materials for clean energy" he says.

This work was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/8FVH4mhCcNE/130626153926.htm

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Democrats Wake Up (Taegan Goddard's Political Wire)

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Thursday, June 27, 2013

Surre.al Launches A Kickstarter Campaign To Fund A Cross-Device, 3D Virtual World

surreal logoSurreal Games, an independent game studio created by the co-founders of mobile gaming company Cellufun, is looking to Kickstarter to fund what it says will be a 3D virtual world (also called Surre.al) that will work across devices and provide access to a wide variety of game environments. The target for the campaign (which should be live here) is $100,000. If that doesn't seem like much money for a big, ambitious gaming project, well, the team already raised $300,000 in angel funding, and it has been developing the technology for the past 18 months. You can see a demo of Surre.al in the video below, and as CEO Arthur Goikhman (he's also one of the Cellufun co-founders), "It's not just a gleam in our eye."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/OsRQ4APFCpI/

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Instagram for BlackBerry, Windows Phone not coming ?anytime soon?

Melissa Etheridge is taking the freedoms affirmed for her on Wednesday when the Supreme Court found that anti-gay marriage advocates had no standing to appeal the ruling that had overturned California's Prop 8, by announcing she will marry her partner, Linda Wallem.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/instagram-blackberry-windows-phone-not-coming-anytime-soon-212554517.html

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Helping many people boosts social standing more than helping many times

Helping many people boosts social standing more than helping many times [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 26-Jun-2013
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Contact: Tim Wall
walltj@missouri.edu
573-882-3346
University of Missouri-Columbia

Research could guide business and political decisions as well as charity work

A business may build a better reputation as a good corporate citizen by donating $100,000 to ten charities, as opposed to $1million to one charity, suggested University of Missouri anthropologist Shane Macfarlan. Contrary to earlier assumptions in theoretical biology, Macfarlan's research found that helping a greater number of people builds a positive reputation more than helping a few people many times. The results of this research can offer guidance to businesses and politicians on how to improve their public images.

"Good reputations are good business. For example, buyers tend to purchase from merchants with numerous positive ratings on internet-based commerce websites, such as Amazon and eBay," said Shane Macfarlan, post-doctoral anthropology researcher in MU's College of Arts and Science. "Beyond the realm of commerce, the power of a positive reputation may have influenced the evolution of language and cooperation in our species. In our study, we found that an individual's reputation improves more after helping a greater number of people compared to performing a greater number of helpful acts for fewer people."

For example, a politician hoping for reelection may wish to back legislation that benefits many people, as opposed to giving tremendous help to a smaller group, noted Macfarlan. Political scientists recently contacted Macfarlan about applying his findings to public figures and their attempts to build positive reputations.

In his research, Macfarlan studied the work habits and reputations of men in a remote village on the Caribbean island of Dominica. The isolation of the village reduced outside influences on reputation and allowed the study to focus solely on the effects of specific behaviors on social standing.

On the island of Dominica, the men were all involved in the production of bay oil, a tree leaf extract used to make cosmetics by companies such as Burt's Bees. Bay oil production is labor intensive, so village men require assistance from each other. Macfarlan identified why some men attracted both many volunteer helpers and the respect of their peers, while other men had few helpers and little regard in the community.

"Helping numerous other men led to individuals achieving higher regard among their peers," Macfarlan said. "However, other men, who helped a smaller number of people, would end up with a worse reputation, although both men performed a similar total number of helping acts. Moreover, men with the best reputations received a greater amount of assistance from a greater number of people when they needed it most, whether it was in agricultural production or assistance after disasters, such as hurricanes."

Previously, researchers creating computer models of reputation-based cooperation had only considered the effect of the number of acts of cooperation on reputations, not the breadth of cooperation. Macfarlan's real-world observations of how reputations are built could lead to improvements in modeling human social interaction.

###

The study, "Cooperative Behavior and Pro-social Reputation Dynamics in a Dominican Village," was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Proceedings B is the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the rapid publication and broad dissemination of high-quality research papers, reviews and comment and reply papers. The scope of the journal is diverse and is especially strong in organismal biology.


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Helping many people boosts social standing more than helping many times [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 26-Jun-2013
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Contact: Tim Wall
walltj@missouri.edu
573-882-3346
University of Missouri-Columbia

Research could guide business and political decisions as well as charity work

A business may build a better reputation as a good corporate citizen by donating $100,000 to ten charities, as opposed to $1million to one charity, suggested University of Missouri anthropologist Shane Macfarlan. Contrary to earlier assumptions in theoretical biology, Macfarlan's research found that helping a greater number of people builds a positive reputation more than helping a few people many times. The results of this research can offer guidance to businesses and politicians on how to improve their public images.

"Good reputations are good business. For example, buyers tend to purchase from merchants with numerous positive ratings on internet-based commerce websites, such as Amazon and eBay," said Shane Macfarlan, post-doctoral anthropology researcher in MU's College of Arts and Science. "Beyond the realm of commerce, the power of a positive reputation may have influenced the evolution of language and cooperation in our species. In our study, we found that an individual's reputation improves more after helping a greater number of people compared to performing a greater number of helpful acts for fewer people."

For example, a politician hoping for reelection may wish to back legislation that benefits many people, as opposed to giving tremendous help to a smaller group, noted Macfarlan. Political scientists recently contacted Macfarlan about applying his findings to public figures and their attempts to build positive reputations.

In his research, Macfarlan studied the work habits and reputations of men in a remote village on the Caribbean island of Dominica. The isolation of the village reduced outside influences on reputation and allowed the study to focus solely on the effects of specific behaviors on social standing.

On the island of Dominica, the men were all involved in the production of bay oil, a tree leaf extract used to make cosmetics by companies such as Burt's Bees. Bay oil production is labor intensive, so village men require assistance from each other. Macfarlan identified why some men attracted both many volunteer helpers and the respect of their peers, while other men had few helpers and little regard in the community.

"Helping numerous other men led to individuals achieving higher regard among their peers," Macfarlan said. "However, other men, who helped a smaller number of people, would end up with a worse reputation, although both men performed a similar total number of helping acts. Moreover, men with the best reputations received a greater amount of assistance from a greater number of people when they needed it most, whether it was in agricultural production or assistance after disasters, such as hurricanes."

Previously, researchers creating computer models of reputation-based cooperation had only considered the effect of the number of acts of cooperation on reputations, not the breadth of cooperation. Macfarlan's real-world observations of how reputations are built could lead to improvements in modeling human social interaction.

###

The study, "Cooperative Behavior and Pro-social Reputation Dynamics in a Dominican Village," was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Proceedings B is the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the rapid publication and broad dissemination of high-quality research papers, reviews and comment and reply papers. The scope of the journal is diverse and is especially strong in organismal biology.


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?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/uom-hmp062613.php

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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Cloning mice: For the first time, a donor mouse has been cloned using a drop of peripheral blood from its tail

June 26, 2013 ? From obesity to substance abuse, from anxiety to cancer, genetically modified mice are used extensively in research as models of human disease. Researchers often spend years developing a strain of mouse with the exact genetic mutations necessary to model a particular human disorder. But what if that mouse, due to the mutations themselves or a simple twist of fate, was infertile?

Currently, two methods exist for perpetuating a valuable strain of mouse. If at least one of the remaining mice is male and possesses healthy germ cells, the best option is intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), an in vitro fertilization procedure in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg.

However, if the remaining mice cannot produce healthy germ cells, or if they are female, researchers must turn to cloning. Somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) produces cloned animals by replacing an oocyte's nucleus with that of an adult somatic cell. An early version of this process was used to produce Dolly the sheep in 1996.

Since then, SCNT techniques have continued to advance. Earlier this year, researchers at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, even devised a technique to avoid the diminishing returns of recloning the same cell; success rates increased from the standard three percent in first-generation clones to ten percent in first-generation and 14 percent in higher-generation clones.

The type of somatic cell used for this process is critical and depends largely on its efficiency in producing live clones, as well as its ease of access and readiness for experimental use. While cumulus cells, which surround oocytes in the ovarian follicle and after ovulation, are currently the preferred cell type, Drs. Satoshi Kamimura, Atsuo Ogura, and colleagues at the RIKEN BioResource Center in Tsukuba, Japan, questioned whether white blood cells (a.k.a., leukocytes) collected from an easily accessed site, such as a tail, would be effective donor cells. Such cells would allow for repeated sampling with minimal risk to the donor mouse.

There are five different types of white blood cells and, as expected, the researchers found that lymphocytes were the type that performed the most poorly: only 1.7 percent of embryos developed into offspring. The physically largest white blood cells, and thus the easiest to filter from the blood sample, were granulocytes and monocytes. The nuclei of these cells performed better, with 2.1 percent of the embryos surviving to term, compared to 2.7 percent for the preferred cell type, cumulus cells.

The granulocytes' performance was poorer than expected due to a much higher rate of fragmentation in early embryos (22.6 percent): twofold higher than that of lymphocyte cloning and fivefold higher than cumulus cell cloning. The researchers were unable to determine what could be causing the fragmentation and intend to perform further studies to improve the performance of granulocyte donor cells.

Although the blood cells tested did not surpass the success rate of cumulus cells in this study, the researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, that mice can be cloned using the nuclei of peripheral blood cells. These cells may be used for cloning immediately after collection with minimal risk to the donor, helping to generate genetic copies of mouse strains that cannot be preserved by other assisted reproduction techniques.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/GDH_lb66SVk/130626153920.htm

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UT Arlington engineer to design prototype that predicts flash flooding

UT Arlington engineer to design prototype that predicts flash flooding [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 25-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Herb Booth
hbooth@uta.edu
817-272-7075
University of Texas at Arlington

City of Fort Worth flood-prone creeks to be studied

A UT Arlington water resources engineer is developing a first-of-its-kind prototype that would allow the City of Fort Worth to more effectively dispatch emergency personnel to save lives and property when flash flooding occurs.

D.J. Seo, an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has received a $310,000 grant from the City of Fort Worth, the National Science Foundation and the National Weather Service to use very high-resolution rainfall data from a new weather radar system for high-resolution monitoring and prediction of flash flooding. The research, a collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Colorado State University, is part of NSF's Accelerating Innovation Research program.

Seo said Fort Worth emergency responders could see an effective lead time of up to 30 minutes in many flash-flooding situations.

"The prototype will provide timely and location-specific information of what's happening currently and in the immediate future when flash flooding occurs," Seo said. "The City officials can use that information to help dispatch emergency personnel at the right time and to the right place."

The weather radar system is part of a partnership among The University of Texas at Arlington, the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center; the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the National Weather Service and many other cities and universities across North Texas.

Amy Cannon, an engineer with the Fort Worth Transportation and Public Works Department, said Seo's research also would look at Zoo Creek and Edgecliff Branch in Fort Worth for real-time inundation mapping.

"These are areas that need accurate, timely flood predictions. Dr. Seo's prototype will give us an advantage in these flooding hot spots," Cannon said. "Utilizing better information through the prototype will give us an advantage in helping protect people and property during flood events."

Khosrow Behbehani, dean of the UT Arlington College of Engineering, said Seo's work would have other benefits beyond flash-flood forecasting.

"Once Dr. Seo's modeling is completed, it could very easily be adapted to study the impact of development on rainfall-runoff response in an urban area. It also could examine the emergency preparedness of a city's infrastructure for water hazards," Behbehani said. "I could also see that urban areas can use this innovative system in the future to improve their water conservation programs. That's especially important in North Texas when water conservation is needed in times of drought."

The new CASA system provides very high-resolution rainfall and other data every minute compared with every five to six minutes with the existing systems. The new system focuses on a more concise area, giving forecasters detailed information to better monitor and track storms and precipitation. Because the CASA system is designed to observe the atmosphere closer to the ground, the system requires an extensive network of radars.

UT Arlington was the first institution in the North Texas region to install a CASA weather radar system. The system sits atop Carlisle Hall on the main campus. Similar systems have been installed or are scheduled to be installed at The University of North Texas in Denton and elsewhere in Fort Worth and Addison. Plans call for eight sites initially throughout North Texas.

Seo will collect real-time data from the CASA system and integrate that with information from geographic information system maps through hydrologic and hydraulic modeling.

"The strength of the CASA system is that it provides spatially detailed information at a very high temporal frequency," Seo said. "What makes this research more exciting is that this is the first system of its kind in the country because North Texas is the first metropolitan area to deploy a network of CASA radars."

###

Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, CASA is a consortium of nine universities, government agencies and industry partners. The North Central Texas Council of Governments is coordinating participation of area municipalities. The University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive research institution of about 33,800 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Research activity has more than tripled over the past decade to $71.4 million last year with an emphasis on bioengineering, medical diagnostics, micro manufacturing, advanced robotics and defense and Homeland Security technologies, among other areas. Visit http://www.uta.edu to learn more.


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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


UT Arlington engineer to design prototype that predicts flash flooding [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 25-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Herb Booth
hbooth@uta.edu
817-272-7075
University of Texas at Arlington

City of Fort Worth flood-prone creeks to be studied

A UT Arlington water resources engineer is developing a first-of-its-kind prototype that would allow the City of Fort Worth to more effectively dispatch emergency personnel to save lives and property when flash flooding occurs.

D.J. Seo, an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has received a $310,000 grant from the City of Fort Worth, the National Science Foundation and the National Weather Service to use very high-resolution rainfall data from a new weather radar system for high-resolution monitoring and prediction of flash flooding. The research, a collaboration with the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Colorado State University, is part of NSF's Accelerating Innovation Research program.

Seo said Fort Worth emergency responders could see an effective lead time of up to 30 minutes in many flash-flooding situations.

"The prototype will provide timely and location-specific information of what's happening currently and in the immediate future when flash flooding occurs," Seo said. "The City officials can use that information to help dispatch emergency personnel at the right time and to the right place."

The weather radar system is part of a partnership among The University of Texas at Arlington, the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center; the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the National Weather Service and many other cities and universities across North Texas.

Amy Cannon, an engineer with the Fort Worth Transportation and Public Works Department, said Seo's research also would look at Zoo Creek and Edgecliff Branch in Fort Worth for real-time inundation mapping.

"These are areas that need accurate, timely flood predictions. Dr. Seo's prototype will give us an advantage in these flooding hot spots," Cannon said. "Utilizing better information through the prototype will give us an advantage in helping protect people and property during flood events."

Khosrow Behbehani, dean of the UT Arlington College of Engineering, said Seo's work would have other benefits beyond flash-flood forecasting.

"Once Dr. Seo's modeling is completed, it could very easily be adapted to study the impact of development on rainfall-runoff response in an urban area. It also could examine the emergency preparedness of a city's infrastructure for water hazards," Behbehani said. "I could also see that urban areas can use this innovative system in the future to improve their water conservation programs. That's especially important in North Texas when water conservation is needed in times of drought."

The new CASA system provides very high-resolution rainfall and other data every minute compared with every five to six minutes with the existing systems. The new system focuses on a more concise area, giving forecasters detailed information to better monitor and track storms and precipitation. Because the CASA system is designed to observe the atmosphere closer to the ground, the system requires an extensive network of radars.

UT Arlington was the first institution in the North Texas region to install a CASA weather radar system. The system sits atop Carlisle Hall on the main campus. Similar systems have been installed or are scheduled to be installed at The University of North Texas in Denton and elsewhere in Fort Worth and Addison. Plans call for eight sites initially throughout North Texas.

Seo will collect real-time data from the CASA system and integrate that with information from geographic information system maps through hydrologic and hydraulic modeling.

"The strength of the CASA system is that it provides spatially detailed information at a very high temporal frequency," Seo said. "What makes this research more exciting is that this is the first system of its kind in the country because North Texas is the first metropolitan area to deploy a network of CASA radars."

###

Funded by a National Science Foundation grant, CASA is a consortium of nine universities, government agencies and industry partners. The North Central Texas Council of Governments is coordinating participation of area municipalities. The University of Texas at Arlington is a comprehensive research institution of about 33,800 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Research activity has more than tripled over the past decade to $71.4 million last year with an emphasis on bioengineering, medical diagnostics, micro manufacturing, advanced robotics and defense and Homeland Security technologies, among other areas. Visit http://www.uta.edu to learn more.


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?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/uota-uae062513.php

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Wallenda walks tightrope high over Ariz. gorge

LITTLE COLORADO RIVER GORGE, Ariz. (AP) ? Nik Wallenda studied the plunging walls of the Little Colorado River Gorge before stepping out on a quarter-mile tightrope cable. "Whoo! That's an amazing view."

With that observation, the well-known aerialist embarked Sunday afternoon on a walk without a safety net or harness, 1,500 feet above the Little Colorado River Gorge in northeastern Arizona.

The successful, 22-minute walk on the 2-inch-thick steel cable was monitored by people around the world via television and computer screens during a broadcast of Wallenda's most ambitious stunt yet.

They watched as the winds tested the Florida daredevil, and listened as he called on God to calm the swaying cable and as he paid homage to his famed great-grandfather. The stunt was the leading trending topic on Twitter on Sunday afternoon.

"It was unbelievable," he told reporters later. "It was everything I wanted it to be. It was extremely emotional. I got to the other end and started crying."

Hundreds of people watched from the remote site on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona that led them past roadside vendors selling traditional jewelry and about a dozen protesters who consider the area sacred.

During his walk above the dry river bed near the Grand Canyon, Wallenda paused and crouched twice as winds whipped around him and the rope swayed. Gusts had been expected to be around 30 mph. He said they sent dust flying into his eyes.

"It was strenuous the whole way across. It was a battle. The winds were strong, they were gusty," he told reporters. "But there was never a point where I thought, 'oh my gosh, I'm going to fall.'"

Wallenda stepped slowly and steady throughout, murmuring prayers to Jesus almost constantly along the way. He jogged and hopped the last few steps.

"Thank you Lord. Thank you for calming that cable, God," he said about 13 minutes into the walk.

The Discovery Channel broadcast the event live. He wore a microphone and two cameras, one that looked down on the river bed and one that faced straight ahead.

The 34-year-old Sarasota, Fla., resident is a seventh-generation high-wire artist and is part of the famous "Flying Wallendas" circus family ? a clan that is no stranger to death-defying feats.

His great-grandfather, Karl Wallenda, fell during a performance in Puerto Rico and died at the age of 73. Several other family members, including a cousin and an uncle, have perished while performing wire walking stunts.

Nik Wallenda grew up performing with his family and dreamed of crossing the Grand Canyon since he was a teenager. Sunday's stunt comes a year after he traversed Niagara Falls earning a seventh Guinness world record.

Despite those successes, his next goal is in question. New York's police commissioner said Monday that Wallenda's hope of tightrope walking between the famous Chrysler and Empire State buildings was too dangerous. "I would say no," Raymond Kelly said when asked about the possibility.

At the Grand Canyon, about 600 spectators watching on a large video screen on site cheered him on as he walked toward them. A Navajo Nation ranger, a paramedic and two members of a film crew were stationed on the canyon floor.

The ranger, Elmer Phillips, he got a little nervous when Wallenda stopped the first time. "Other than that, a pretty amazing feat," Phillips said.

Discovery's two-hour broadcast showcased the Navajo landscape that includes Monument Valley, Four Corners, Canyon de Chelly and the tribal capital of Window Rock.

Wallenda already is eyeing his next stunt, which he hopes will take him between the Chrysler and Empire State buildings in New York. As a nod to his Internet audience, he said he also would ask his Facebook and Twitter followers what the next challenge should be

But he said he would give up tightrope walking altogether if his wife and children ever asked him.

"That's a serious talk that we'll have. But absolutely, it weighs on heavy on me," he said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wallenda-walks-tightrope-high-over-ariz-gorge-075557957.html

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Where Is Edward Snowden? Ecuador Foreign Minister Says He Doesn't Know

MOSCOW ? Russia's foreign minister bluntly rejected U.S. demands to extradite National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, saying Tuesday that Snowden hasn't crossed the Russian border.

Sergey Lavrov insisted that Russia has nothing to do with Snowden or his travel plans. Lavrov wouldn't say where Snowden is, but he lashed out angrily at Washington for demanding his extradition and warning of negative consequences if Moscow fails to comply. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday urged Moscow to "do the right thing" and turn over Snowden.

"We consider the attempts to accuse Russia of violation of U.S. laws and even some sort of conspiracy, which on top of all that are accompanied by threats, as absolutely ungrounded and unacceptable," Lavrov said. "There are no legal grounds for such conduct of U.S. officials."

The defiant tone underlined the Kremlin's readiness to challenge Washington at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are strained over Syria and a Russian ban on adoptions by Americans.

U.S. and Ecuadorean officials said they believed Snowden was still in Russia. He fled there Sunday from Hong Kong, where he had been hiding out since his disclosure of the broad scope of two highly classified U.S. counterterror surveillance programs. The programs collect vast amounts of Americans' phone records and worldwide online data in the name of national security.

Lavrov claimed that the Russian government found out about Snowden's flight from Hong Kong only from news reports.

"We have no relation to Mr. Snowden, his relations with American justice or his travels around the world," Lavrov said. "He chooses his route himself, and we have learned about it from the media."

Snowden booked a seat on a Havana-bound flight from Moscow on Monday en route to Venezuela and then possible asylum in Ecuador, but he didn't board the plane. Russian news media have reported that he has remained in a transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, but journalists there haven't seen him.

A representative of WikiLeaks has been traveling with Snowden, and the organization is believed to be assisting him in arranging asylum. The organization's founder, Julian Assange, said Monday that Snowden was only passing through Russia and had applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and possibly other countries.

A high-ranking Ecuadorean official told The Associated Press that Russia and Ecuador were discussing where Snowden could go, saying the process could take days. He also said Ecuador's ambassador to Moscow had not seen or spoken to Snowden. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, hailed Snowden on Monday as "a man attempting to bring light and transparency to facts that affect everyone's fundamental liberties."

He described the decision on whether to grant Snowden asylum as a choice between "betraying the citizens of the world or betraying certain powerful elites in a specific country."

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said the U.S. had made demands to "a series of governments," including Ecuador, that Snowden be barred from any international travel other than to be returned to the U.S. The U.S. has revoked Snowden's passport.

"We're following all the appropriate legal channels and working with various other countries to make sure that the rule of law is observed," President Barack Obama told reporters.

Some experts said it was likely that Russian spy agencies were questioning Snowden on what he knows about U.S. electronic espionage against Moscow.

"If Russian special services hadn't shown interest in Snowden, they would have been utterly unprofessional," Igor Korotchenko, a former colonel in Russia's top military command turned security analyst, said on state Rossiya 24 television.

The Kremlin has previously said Russia would be ready to consider Snowden's request for asylum.

The Interfax news agency, which has close contacts with Russian security agencies, quoted an unidentified "well-informed source" in Moscow as saying Tuesday that Snowden could be detained for a check of his papers. The report could reflect that authorities are searching for a pretext to keep Snowden in Russia.

Snowden is a former CIA employee who later was hired as a contractor for the NSA. In that job, he gained access to documents that he gave to newspapers The Guardian and The Washington Post to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an authoritarian government.

Snowden also told the South China Morning Post newspaper in Hong Kong that "the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data." He is believed to have more than 200 additional sensitive documents in laptops he is carrying.

Some observers said in addition to the sensitive data, Snowden's revelations have provided the Kremlin with propaganda arguments to counter the U.S. criticism of Russia's crackdown on opposition and civil activists under President Vladimir Putin.

"They would use Snowden to demonstrate that the U.S. government doesn't sympathize with the ideals of freedom of information, conceals key information from the public and stands ready to open criminal proceedings against those who oppose it," Konstantin Remchukov, the editor of independent daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said on Ekho Moskvy radio.

Putin has accused the U.S. State Department of instigating protests in Moscow against his re-election for a third term and has taken an anti-American posture that plays well with his core support base of industrial workers and state employees.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/edward-snowden-ecuador_n_3493911.html

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Monday, June 17, 2013

Oil posts small loss after hitting high for year

NEW YORK (AP) -- The price of oil fell slightly after it climbed to a high for the year Monday, as the market waits to see the results of this week's Federal Reserve policy meeting.

Benchmark oil for July delivery fell 8 cents to finish at $97.77 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Earlier, crude rose to $98.74, the highest level since mid-September.

Concern that the conflict in Syria could spread and disrupt oil supplies from key producing countries has boosted oil. Jim Ritterbusch, president of oil consultancy Ritterbusch and Associates, speculated that the White House's decision to arm rebels in the country has added $2 to the price of a barrel.

But Ritterbusch and others questioned how much more of a "security premium" could be packed into the price of oil.

"We still have some difficulty associating a minor escalation in the Syrian conflict with any significant supply disruptions from nearby oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq," Ritterbusch said in a daily note to clients.

Julian Jessop, head of commodities research at Capital Economics, predicted in a note to clients that the U.S. and its allies would respond to any disruption in supplies by releasing oil from strategic reserves in order to suppress any price spike.

Hopes that the U.S. Federal Reserve will maintain its aggressive stimulus measures have also lifted oil and U.S. stock markets. The central bank's policy of ultra-low interest rates has made riskier assets like stocks and oil more attractive than low-yielding bonds.

Some investors worry that long-term interest rates could spike when the Fed tightens monetary policy, threatening the economic recovery. The Fed concludes a two-day policy meeting Wednesday.

The Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard and Poor's 500 index each rose Monday.

The election of Hasan Rowhani as president of Iran helped contain some of the upside in the price of oil. Considered a moderate, Rowhani's election is being viewed as lowering the potential of further conflict in the Middle East, which supplies around a third of the world's crude.

In the U.S., the average price for a gallon of gasoline dropped about 1.5 cents to $3.61. Prices in the Great Lakes region have retreated after soaring for the past month when refinery outages caused a shortage of supplies.

Brent crude, a benchmark for many international oil varieties, fell 46 cents to end at $105.47 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange in London.

In other energy futures trading on the Nymex:

? Wholesale gasoline fell 4 cents to finish at $2.86 a gallon.

? Heating oil dropped 1 cent to end at $2.95 per gallon.

? Natural gas advanced 14 cents to finish at $3.88 per 1,000 cubic feet.

___

Pablo Gorondi in Budapest and Pamela Sampson in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/oil-posts-small-loss-hitting-193101254.html

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Mad Men Review: 'The Quality of Mercy'

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/mad-men-review-the-quality-of-mercy/

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Toshiba 39L2300U


Not long ago, if you walked into a store with $1000 to spend on an HDTV you'd have to settle for one with a small 720p screen and almost no features whatsoever. Nowadays, that same $1000 gets you a much larger full HD screen, and in some cases, neat features like 3D and networking capabilities, as seen with the Vizio E601I-A3. With the Toshiba L2300U series you can get a fairly big 1080p screen with a 120Hz refresh rate, good audio output, and a relatively sharp LED backlit picture, but that's about it. This bare-bones HDTV line is not only light on features but its color accuracy is off and its black levels are weak. We tested the 50-inch 50L2300U ($999.99 list) , and while it's a serviceable HDTV there are better deals to be had for the money.

Editors' Note: This review is based on tests performed on the Toshiba 50L2300U, the 50-inch model of the series. Besides the screen-size difference, the?39-inch $529.99 39L2300U is otherwise?identical in features, and while we didn't perform lab tests on this specific model, we expect similar performance.

Design and Features
The 50L2300U's?3.5-inch deep cabinet is relatively thick for an LED-backlit HDTV. Thin (0.8-inch) glossy black bezels frame the top and sides of the panel, while the 1-inch bottom bezel is done up in a gun metal gray finish with a remote sensor and power indicator light on the right side. The screen comes with a rectangular plastic stand that matches the set's bottom bezel. It doesn't do a very good job of supporting the 33.5 pound cabinet and was pretty wobbly after we put it together. You'd be better off mounting this TV on a wall, if possible.

This set only comes with three HDMI ports, two of which are at the rear of the cabinet facing inconveniently outward. They are joined by a set of shared component/composite AV ports, a VGA (PC video) input, a cable/antenna jack, and two audio jacks (digital-out and analog-in). The third HDMI port shares space on the left side of the cabinet with a single USB port and four control buttons (Volume Up/Down, Channel Up/Down, Power, and Input). Unlike the Vizio E601I-A3 and Sony Bravia KDL-50EX645, the 50L2300U does not support Internet connectivity, and as such, lacks any Web services. It also doesn't have 3D capabilities.

The 7-inch remote is a basic wand with 34 buttons and four directional arrow keys for navigating the settings menus. None of the keys are backlit, but the white labeling stands out and is easy to read. The 50L2300U offers plenty of picture settings; there are five presets (Dynamic, Standard, Movie, Game, and PC) and the usual Brightness, Contrast, Color, Tint, and Sharpness adjustments. In the Advanced menu you can fine-tune color levels by enabling the ColorMaster option, allowing you to access the BaseColor Adjustment menu where you can adjust hue, saturation, and brightness levels for red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, and magenta colors. Here you can also adjust Gamma and Color Temperature settings, enable the Auto Brightness and DynaLight (black level correction) options, and switch on the Edge Enhancer for a sharper picture.

There are also a good selection of audio settings that coax solid output from the down-firing speakers. You won't rattle the windows with this set but the Audyssey ABX switch provides a decent bass boost and a bit more pop than you'd expect from HDTV speakers. The Stable Sound feature, which prevents sudden changes in volume when channel surfing, is a useful option.

Performance
The 50L2300U handles 1080p content reasonably well but, doesn't produce the dark blacks necessary for intricate shadow detail and a high contrast ratio. Using a Klein K10-A colorimeter, SpectraCal's CalMAN 5, and images from the DisplayMate HDTV diagnostic utility, I measured a peak brightness of 251.76 cd/m2?and a black level of 0.1836 cd/m2, neither of which are very impressive (the black levels were particularly high). The resulting 1,371:1 contrast ratio can be blamed for the murky shadow detail I observed while watching underwater scenes from the movie?Piranha?on Blu-ray, and is disappointing compared with the Editors' Choice budget HDTV, the RCA LED42C45RQ's?admittedly middling 1,796:1 contrast ratio. Motion handling, on the other hand, was very good, thanks to the panel's 120Hz refresh rate.

Color accuracy was sketchy; as shown in the CIE chart above, reds were oversaturated, greens were a bit light, and whites were a bit warm. The closer each dot is to its color box the more accurate the color. The light green reproduction didn't have an obvious effect as far as tinting goes, but the hot reds had skin tones looking more flushed than they should be. A full calibration would likely correct this problem and the 50L2300U certainly has the controls to perform one, but a full color calibration is a time-consuming process that can be expensive if you're not familiar with the process yourself. Viewing angle performance was good; there was a slight loss of luminance when viewed from around 60-degrees from center, but colors remained true.

The 50L2300U used 87 watts of power during testing in standard mode and 69 watts in movie mode. That's significantly better than the Sony Bravia KDL-50EX645?(106 watts in standard mode and 92 watts in Eco mode) and comparable to the LG 55LM6700?(67 watts).

Conclusion
The Toshiba 50L2300U isn't a top performer and it isn't packed with features. It is affordable, however, and gets you into a 120Hz big-screen HDTV for under a grand. It doesn't use a lot of power and offers better than average audio output, but its out of the box color accuracy could be better and its black level performance is weak. If you're itching for a big screen HDTV and have limited funds, this model will fill the bill, but there are better choices out there, including the Vizio E601I-A3, which offers a bigger screen and both wired and wireless Ethernet capabilities. Or, if you can live with a smaller 46-inch screen, our Editors' Choice for budget HDTVs, the RCA LED46C45RQ, offers better color accuracy for less than half the list price of the 50L2300U.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/bcceHqzWbcM/0,2817,2420557,00.asp

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