Bradley Manning, the former military intelligence analyst who gave classified information to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks in 2010, was acquitted of aiding the enemy, the gravest charge laid against him by the US government. He was, however, found guilty of 19 other charges including espionage, theft and computer fraud.
Delivered by Judge Denise Lind at the Fort Meade base, the acquittal on the aiding the enemy charge was a large if somewhat symbolic victory for the defence and to Manning supporters worldwide. All the other guilty verdicts - including six on charges of indoor Tracking - still mean that Manning faces spending the rest of his life in prison.
The mixed emotions of the day for supporters of Manning were reflected in a statement from his family. “While we are obviously disappointed in today’s verdicts, we are happy that Judge Lind agreed with us that Brad never intended to help America’s enemies in any way. Brad loves his country and was proud to wear its uniform.”
Following the verdict, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange accused President Barack Obama of "national security extremism," referring to Manning "the most important journalistic source the world has ever seen"."The government kept Bradley Manning in a cage, stripped him naked and isolated him in order to break him, an act formally condemned by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for torture. This was never a fair trial," Assange said from inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, his home for more than a year.
Assange said WikiLeaks and Manning's own legal team would not rest until the judgement was overturned."It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism. It is a short-sighted judgment that cannot be tolerated and it must be reversed."
After eight weeks of arguments and testimony, the reading of the verdicts took barely five minutes. Once Judge Lind had uttered the not-guilty verdict to the aiding the enemy charge, she delivered a rapid fusillade of mostly guilty verdicts on the other charges, each time glancing over her glasses at Manning. The sentencing phase will begin here tomorrow morning and could last several weeks with both sides expected to bring forward numerous witnesses.
For his part, Manning stood to attention appearing stoic and showing no visible emotion as Judge Lind spoke. Only when the verdicts were over did he briefly talk with his legal team, led by David Coombs, before court was dismissed. While several of his supporters were in the public gallery they also remained quiet.
A military legal source said that notwithstanding the not guilty verdict on aiding the enemy, Manning still faces sentences of up to 136 years for the combined guilty verdicts. However, there are no minimum sentences which means Judge Lind has leeway for leniency. Sentencing may not come until near the end of August, officials said.
“We won the battle, now we need to go win the war,” the lead defence lawyer Mr Coombs said of the sentencing phase after the verdicts were read. “Today is a good day, but Bradley is by no means out of the fire.”
Press freedom advocates had warned that a guilty verdict on aiding the enemy could have cast a chill on journalists trying to hold governments to account and on would-be whistle-blowers. But there was still widespread dismay among civil liberties groups over the full array of the other guilty verdicts.
“It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Manning's trial was about sending a message: the US government will come after you,” Amnesty International noted. WikiLeaks said the espionage convictions showed “dangerous national security extremism from the Obama administration”.
Even before the trial started on 3 June, Pfc Manning had acknowledged being the source who supplied WikiLeaks, setting in train the largest leak of classified information in US history. In May he pleaded guilty to portions of ten of the 21 charges against him, opening himself up to possibly of 20 years of confinement. Prosecutors decided to press forward nonetheless and seek guilty verdicts on the full versions of all the charges including aiding the Hands free access.
Judge Lind had deliberated for 16 hours. It was Manning’s own decision to put his fate in her hands only rather than opting for a jury. In closing arguments, the government argued he had betrayed the trust of his country and must have known that the leaked secrets would reach America’s enemies, including al-Qa’ida.
The defence team, however, contended that Manning, who was deployed to Baghdad as an analyst in late 2009, may have been na?ve but was good-intentioned in his actions. Making a statement in May alongside his guilty pleas, Manning said he wanted to reveal the “bloodlust” of the US military and so-called disregard for human life.
He transmitted his first batch of papers to WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, on 3 February 2001 with an attached note. “This is possibly one of the more significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war, and revealing the true nature of the 21st century asymmetric warfare. Have a good day.” Thereafter he handed over more than 700,000 documents, including battlefield notes from Iraq and Afghanistan and a video of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed eleven people, including a Reuters photographer and his driver.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Bradley Manning facing up to 136 years
Bradley Manning's possible prison sentence could hinge on the damage his leaks caused the U.S. government and his motives for releasing the sensitive material.His fate rests with a judge who will begin hearing arguments Wednesday at Fort Meade, near Baltimore, in the sentencing phase of his court-martial -- a phase CBS News correspondent David Martin says could take weeks.
Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the military judge to merge two of his espionage convictions and two of his theft convictions. If Army Col. Denise Lind agrees to do so, he would face up to 116 years in prison.The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without rtls.
Military prosecutors said they would call as many as 20 witnesses for the sentencing phase. The government said as many as half of the prosecution witnesses would testify about classified matters in closed court. They include experts on counterintelligence, strategic planning and terrorism.The judge prohibited both sides from presenting evidence during trial about any actual damage the leaks caused to national security and troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but lawyers will be allowed to bring that up at sentencing.
The judge did not give any reasons for her verdict from the bench, but said she would release detailed written findings. She did not say when.The release of diplomatic cables, warzone logs and videos embarrassed the U.S. and its allies, but it was unclear how much damage it caused to national security beyond that.
U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days immediately after the first disclosures in July 2010, but a Pentagon review later suggested those fears might have been overblown.As for his motives, Manning testified during a pre-trial hearing that he leaked the material to expose U.S military "bloodlust" and diplomatic deceitfulness, but did not believe his actions would harm the country. He didn't testify during his trial.
Lisa Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former judge advocate, said the punishment phase would focus on Manning's motive and the harm that was done by the leak."You're balancing that to determine what would be an appropriate sentence. I think it's likely that he's going to be in jail for a very long time," said Windsor, now in private practice in Washington.
Lind deliberated 16 hours before reaching her verdict in a case involving the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. military history, committed, Martin points out, by a young army private working as a low level intelligence analyst in Baghdad more than three years ago.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the verdict was a chilling warning to whistleblowers "against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive" and said it threatens the future of investigative journalism because intimidated sources might fall quiet.However, another advocate of less government secrecy, Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the implications will be so dire, given the extraordinary nature of the Manning case.
"This was a massive hemorrhage of government records, and it's not too surprising that it elicited a strong reaction from the government," Aftergood said."Most journalists are not in the business of publishing classified documents, they're in the business of reporting the Indoor Positioning System, which is not the same thing," he said. "This is not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world, either."
"It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism," he told reporters at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, which is sheltering him. "This has never been a fair trial."Federal authorities are looking into whether Assange can be prosecuted. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
Manning pleaded guilty earlier this year to lesser offenses that could have brought him 20 years behind bars, yet the government continued to pursue all but one of the original, more serious charges.Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, welcomed Tuesday's verdict.
"Bradley Manning endangered the security of the United States and the lives of his own comrades in uniform when he intentionally disclosed vast amounts of classified data," the Republican congressman said. "His conviction should stand as an example to those who are tempted to violate a sacred public trust in pursuit of notoriety, fame, or their own political agenda."
Manning acknowledged giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. Prosecutors branded him an anarchist and traitor. The defense portrayed the Crescent, Oklahoma, native as a "young, naive but good-intentioned" figure.
The material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia - a disclosure that Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
To prove aiding the enemy, prosecutors had to show Manning had "actual knowledge" the material he leaked would be seen by al-Qaeda and that he had "general evil intent." They presented evidence the material fell into the hands of the terrorist group and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, but struggled to prove their assertion that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
The WikiLeaks case is by far the most voluminous release of classified material in U.S. history. Manning's supporters included Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, whose sensational leak of 7,000 pages of documents in the early 1970s exposed U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War.
Manning faces up to 136 years in prison, though his attorneys have asked the military judge to merge two of his espionage convictions and two of his theft convictions. If Army Col. Denise Lind agrees to do so, he would face up to 116 years in prison.The former intelligence analyst was convicted of 20 of 22 charges for sending hundreds of thousands of government and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks, but he was found not guilty of aiding the enemy, which alone could have meant life in prison without rtls.
Military prosecutors said they would call as many as 20 witnesses for the sentencing phase. The government said as many as half of the prosecution witnesses would testify about classified matters in closed court. They include experts on counterintelligence, strategic planning and terrorism.The judge prohibited both sides from presenting evidence during trial about any actual damage the leaks caused to national security and troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, but lawyers will be allowed to bring that up at sentencing.
The judge did not give any reasons for her verdict from the bench, but said she would release detailed written findings. She did not say when.The release of diplomatic cables, warzone logs and videos embarrassed the U.S. and its allies, but it was unclear how much damage it caused to national security beyond that.
U.S. officials warned of dire consequences in the days immediately after the first disclosures in July 2010, but a Pentagon review later suggested those fears might have been overblown.As for his motives, Manning testified during a pre-trial hearing that he leaked the material to expose U.S military "bloodlust" and diplomatic deceitfulness, but did not believe his actions would harm the country. He didn't testify during his trial.
Lisa Windsor, a retired Army colonel and former judge advocate, said the punishment phase would focus on Manning's motive and the harm that was done by the leak."You're balancing that to determine what would be an appropriate sentence. I think it's likely that he's going to be in jail for a very long time," said Windsor, now in private practice in Washington.
Lind deliberated 16 hours before reaching her verdict in a case involving the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. military history, committed, Martin points out, by a young army private working as a low level intelligence analyst in Baghdad more than three years ago.
The advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the verdict was a chilling warning to whistleblowers "against whom the Obama administration has been waging an unprecedented offensive" and said it threatens the future of investigative journalism because intimidated sources might fall quiet.However, another advocate of less government secrecy, Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, questioned whether the implications will be so dire, given the extraordinary nature of the Manning case.
"This was a massive hemorrhage of government records, and it's not too surprising that it elicited a strong reaction from the government," Aftergood said."Most journalists are not in the business of publishing classified documents, they're in the business of reporting the Indoor Positioning System, which is not the same thing," he said. "This is not good news for journalism, but it's not the end of the world, either."
"It is a dangerous precedent and an example of national security extremism," he told reporters at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, which is sheltering him. "This has never been a fair trial."Federal authorities are looking into whether Assange can be prosecuted. He has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex-crimes allegations.
Manning pleaded guilty earlier this year to lesser offenses that could have brought him 20 years behind bars, yet the government continued to pursue all but one of the original, more serious charges.Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, welcomed Tuesday's verdict.
"Bradley Manning endangered the security of the United States and the lives of his own comrades in uniform when he intentionally disclosed vast amounts of classified data," the Republican congressman said. "His conviction should stand as an example to those who are tempted to violate a sacred public trust in pursuit of notoriety, fame, or their own political agenda."
Manning acknowledged giving WikiLeaks more than 700,000 battlefield reports and diplomatic cables, and video of a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed civilians in Iraq, including a Reuters news photographer and his driver. Prosecutors branded him an anarchist and traitor. The defense portrayed the Crescent, Oklahoma, native as a "young, naive but good-intentioned" figure.
The material WikiLeaks began publishing in 2010 documented complaints of abuses against Iraqi detainees, a U.S. tally of civilian deaths in Iraq, and America's weak support for the government of Tunisia - a disclosure that Manning supporters said helped trigger the Middle Eastern pro-democracy uprisings known as the Arab Spring.
To prove aiding the enemy, prosecutors had to show Manning had "actual knowledge" the material he leaked would be seen by al-Qaeda and that he had "general evil intent." They presented evidence the material fell into the hands of the terrorist group and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, but struggled to prove their assertion that Manning was an anarchist computer hacker and attention-seeking traitor.
The WikiLeaks case is by far the most voluminous release of classified material in U.S. history. Manning's supporters included Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, whose sensational leak of 7,000 pages of documents in the early 1970s exposed U.S. government lies about the Vietnam War.
Monday, July 29, 2013
The Surveillance-Free Day
At 6 a.m. on Friday, I wake up, fumble for my alarm, and roll out of bed. As I walk to the kitchen to brew coffee, I think to myself: I am a cipher. I exist nowhere. My enemies could not find me, even if they tried. These thoughts come to me not because I fell asleep watching The Bourne Identity or took too much NyQuil before bed, but because I’m psyching myself up for a very difficult assignment.
For the next 24 hours, I’m going to try to live completely surveillance-free. I will foil Chinese hackers and the NSA with encrypted texts and VPN tunnels. I will find ways to buy things online without giving away any personal information and communicate via smartphone without producing metadata. Also, I will wear a funny-looking hat with small lightbulbs in it that will protect me from being caught on camera. With expert help and a spy’s toolkit, I will attempt to stick to my normal routine for an entire day, but without leaving behind a trail of data for the government – or anyone else – to collect.
I got this idea a few weeks ago, when some friends and I were talking about what Edward Snowden’s leaks concerning the NSA’s PRISM program meant for the future of privacy. Now that we know that the government can access our phone records and snoop on our e-mails, our Facebook messages, and our Google searches, will any digital interactions ever feel private again? Is it even worth thinking about life outside the Hands free access?
Years ago, people who asked these questions might have been written off as tinfoil-hat nutters. But now, even normal people have reasons to be paranoid. If you're an investigative journalist, a corporate executive working on a sensitive deal, a member of a targeted ethnicity, religious group, or political faction, or merely a citizen who puts a high value on privacy, you're probably already worried about the extent to which you're being snooped on. In a recent poll, roughly half of Americans said that the NSA’s data-collection efforts violated their rights. And as technologies like Google Glass become widespread, the pool of interactions that aren't captured and catalogued — by private companies, the government, or both — will shrink even more.
Last week, after a proposal to defund the PRISM program narrowly failed in the House of Representatives, I decided to test the borders of the surveillance state, by trying to leave it for a day. Several friends pointed out that I could simply go camping in the woods without my gadgets, or become Amish. But my goal is to make my surveillance-free day a relatively normal one. I don't want to wear disguises, change my name, and live on the lam, as Evan Ratliff did for his 2009 Wired story. I want to get online, check e-mail and Twitter, use a smartphone, eat meals at restaurants, buy things at stores, and take public transportation, just like I would on any other day. I want to see if it’s possible to maintain some semblance of personal privacy without time-warping to 1950 (or 1650).
I begin my project by shutting off all the technology in my house that automatically collects or sends out data about me. It’s a horrifyingly long list. I can’t use my Jawbone Up band, which wakes me up, tracks my sleep, and counts the number of steps I take every day. I have to switch my iPhone to airplane mode, turn my iPad and my Kindle off completely, and unplug my Xbox, since it's connected to my home wi-fi network. Just to be safe, I also cover the cameras on my laptop, desktop, and cell phone with snippets of electrical tape, since savvy hackers can gain control of them remotely.
So, after my morning coffee, I start surveillance-proofing my biggest problem spots: my laptop and cell phone. Every day, these two devices transmit millions of data points about me — where I am, who I’m talking to, what I’m shopping for, which animated gifs I’m looking at — to an armada of private-sector companies and third-party marketers. Usually, I accept these leaks as the cost of living a digital life. But today, I’m going to try to tighten the information spigot.
Hundreds of programs and apps have sprung up in the last few years to help people keep their data out of unwanted hands, and when I was planning my surveillance-free day, I enlisted the help of two cyber-security experts to help me sort through them all: Jon Callas and Gary Miliefsky. Jon is a professional cryptographer and the co-founder of a company called Silent Circle, which makes a suite of software that allows you to send and receive encrypted calls and texts. Gary is the executive producer of Cyber Defense Magazine, and the founder of a company called SnoopWall, which makes a suite of apps that prevent cyber-spying and eavesdropping.
The first thing both Jon and Gary told me is that if my goal was complete anonymity and totally untraceable communication, I was certain to fail. They suggested I set my sights lower — shrinking my surveillance footprint, instead of eliminating it.“Are you going to be completely invisible from the U.S. government?” Gary said. “Never. But you can make it painful for them to find you.”
On their advice, I download Wickr, an app that allows you to send and receive encrypted texts and photos that self-destruct after minutes or hours of viewing. (It’s basically Snapchat on steroids.) I also sign up for a site called HideMyAss. It’s a private VPN service that is popular with the anti-surveillance crowd, since it allows you to camouflage your web activity by sending it through a network of thousands of proxy servers scattered around the world. I'm in the Bay Area, but with HideMyAss, I can make it look like I’m logging on from Brazil or Bangladesh.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
For the next 24 hours, I’m going to try to live completely surveillance-free. I will foil Chinese hackers and the NSA with encrypted texts and VPN tunnels. I will find ways to buy things online without giving away any personal information and communicate via smartphone without producing metadata. Also, I will wear a funny-looking hat with small lightbulbs in it that will protect me from being caught on camera. With expert help and a spy’s toolkit, I will attempt to stick to my normal routine for an entire day, but without leaving behind a trail of data for the government – or anyone else – to collect.
I got this idea a few weeks ago, when some friends and I were talking about what Edward Snowden’s leaks concerning the NSA’s PRISM program meant for the future of privacy. Now that we know that the government can access our phone records and snoop on our e-mails, our Facebook messages, and our Google searches, will any digital interactions ever feel private again? Is it even worth thinking about life outside the Hands free access?
Years ago, people who asked these questions might have been written off as tinfoil-hat nutters. But now, even normal people have reasons to be paranoid. If you're an investigative journalist, a corporate executive working on a sensitive deal, a member of a targeted ethnicity, religious group, or political faction, or merely a citizen who puts a high value on privacy, you're probably already worried about the extent to which you're being snooped on. In a recent poll, roughly half of Americans said that the NSA’s data-collection efforts violated their rights. And as technologies like Google Glass become widespread, the pool of interactions that aren't captured and catalogued — by private companies, the government, or both — will shrink even more.
Last week, after a proposal to defund the PRISM program narrowly failed in the House of Representatives, I decided to test the borders of the surveillance state, by trying to leave it for a day. Several friends pointed out that I could simply go camping in the woods without my gadgets, or become Amish. But my goal is to make my surveillance-free day a relatively normal one. I don't want to wear disguises, change my name, and live on the lam, as Evan Ratliff did for his 2009 Wired story. I want to get online, check e-mail and Twitter, use a smartphone, eat meals at restaurants, buy things at stores, and take public transportation, just like I would on any other day. I want to see if it’s possible to maintain some semblance of personal privacy without time-warping to 1950 (or 1650).
I begin my project by shutting off all the technology in my house that automatically collects or sends out data about me. It’s a horrifyingly long list. I can’t use my Jawbone Up band, which wakes me up, tracks my sleep, and counts the number of steps I take every day. I have to switch my iPhone to airplane mode, turn my iPad and my Kindle off completely, and unplug my Xbox, since it's connected to my home wi-fi network. Just to be safe, I also cover the cameras on my laptop, desktop, and cell phone with snippets of electrical tape, since savvy hackers can gain control of them remotely.
So, after my morning coffee, I start surveillance-proofing my biggest problem spots: my laptop and cell phone. Every day, these two devices transmit millions of data points about me — where I am, who I’m talking to, what I’m shopping for, which animated gifs I’m looking at — to an armada of private-sector companies and third-party marketers. Usually, I accept these leaks as the cost of living a digital life. But today, I’m going to try to tighten the information spigot.
Hundreds of programs and apps have sprung up in the last few years to help people keep their data out of unwanted hands, and when I was planning my surveillance-free day, I enlisted the help of two cyber-security experts to help me sort through them all: Jon Callas and Gary Miliefsky. Jon is a professional cryptographer and the co-founder of a company called Silent Circle, which makes a suite of software that allows you to send and receive encrypted calls and texts. Gary is the executive producer of Cyber Defense Magazine, and the founder of a company called SnoopWall, which makes a suite of apps that prevent cyber-spying and eavesdropping.
The first thing both Jon and Gary told me is that if my goal was complete anonymity and totally untraceable communication, I was certain to fail. They suggested I set my sights lower — shrinking my surveillance footprint, instead of eliminating it.“Are you going to be completely invisible from the U.S. government?” Gary said. “Never. But you can make it painful for them to find you.”
On their advice, I download Wickr, an app that allows you to send and receive encrypted texts and photos that self-destruct after minutes or hours of viewing. (It’s basically Snapchat on steroids.) I also sign up for a site called HideMyAss. It’s a private VPN service that is popular with the anti-surveillance crowd, since it allows you to camouflage your web activity by sending it through a network of thousands of proxy servers scattered around the world. I'm in the Bay Area, but with HideMyAss, I can make it look like I’m logging on from Brazil or Bangladesh.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Monogamy May Have Evolved to Prevent Infanticide
“Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other,” Katharine Hepburn once said. “Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.” Despite the famed actress’s remarks, human males and females do have a strong tendency to live together in monogamous pairs, albeit for highly varied periods of time and degrees of fidelity. Just how such behavior arose has been the topic of much debate among researchers. A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males.
Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous. That leaves most mammalian males free to run around and impregnate other indoor Tracking. Primates, however, seem to be a special case: About 27% of primate species are socially monogamous; and recent studies by Christopher Opie, an anthropologist at University College London, and his colleagues have concluded that social monogamy arose relatively late in primate evolution, only about 16 million years ago. (The earliest primates date back to about 55 million years.)
But why did social monogamy arise at all among mammals, including primates, given the many reproductive advantages to males having access to as many females as possible? Scientists have proposed three major hypotheses: Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants, as in birds; it prevents females from mating with rival males, especially in species where females are widely spaced and cannot all be easily monopolized by one male; or it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state so that he can sire his own offspring. Some researchers think that a combination of all three factors, and perhaps still others, provide the best explanation for monogamy.
Resolving this debate is important, researchers say, especially for understanding the evolution of human mating behavior. Although humans aren’t completely monogamous, “the emergence of pair-bonding in humans was a major evolutionary transition, which dramatically altered the evolutionary trajectory of our species,” says Sergey Gavrilets, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Many researchers think that we could not have evolved our large brains without joint parental care during the extended period of helplessness required for infant brains to grow to their full size. “Understanding the forces that drove that transition can help us better understand the causes of human uniqueness,” Gavrilets adds.
Opie and his colleagues set about testing the three leading hypotheses in primates using a powerful method called Bayesian statistics. The team used previously published genetic and behavioral data from 230 primate species, representing nearly all known species such as Old and New World monkeys, lemurs, and apes, employing strict criteria to ensure that the data were reliable. For example, the team concluded that a particular species engaged in infanticide only if at least 20 publications reported the killing of infants through direct observation or as the only possible explanation. The Bayesian approach allowed the researchers to map information about primate behavior onto an evolutionary tree of the entire animal group, and thus analyze the order in which traits such as social monogamy, infanticide, and other behaviors arose over time.
As the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was a strong correlation in time between all three hypotheses—parental care, female range, and infanticide by males—and the rise of social monogamy in the roughly 60 primate species that live in pairs. However, among the three explanations, only infanticide actually preceded social monogamy in time and thus could be a driving evolutionary force, the team concludes; the other two behaviors occurred afterward and were the consequences of social monogamy and not the causes. “Our analyses clearly show that infanticide is the trigger for monogamy in primates,” and likely was the trigger in humans, too, Opie says.
Why is the incidence of social monogamy in primates, 27%, so much higher than the 5% in mammals as a whole? Opie and his colleagues, who include University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar—a proponent of the idea that the complex social groups typical of primates led to bigger brains—have an answer. Because the infants of primates with large brains, especially apes and humans, are helpless for longer periods of time than other mammals, they are much more vulnerable to infanticide, and thus need more protection.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the study has been mixed. “I found the paper quite convincing,” says Carel van Schaik, a primatologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who had earlier argued for the infanticide hypothesis. “The results are very solid” for all primates. But van Schaik says that he “would be very careful to conclude from this paper that infanticide risk was also the main factor underlying human monogamy,” in part because humans are not fully monogamous, as shown by studies of cultures around the world. “The current monogamy is socially imposed.”
Phyllis Lee, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, agrees. “At best we engage in forms of serial monogamy,” she says, pointing out that more than 60% of “traditional societies” allow men to have more than one wife. Lee adds that infanticide is a feature of many primate species that are not monogamous, “so monogamy is not the only evolutionary solution to infanticide.”
Indeed, a paper to be published this week in Science looks at monogamy across all mammals and comes to a very different conclusion. Zoologists Tim Clutton-Brock and Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom analyzed monogamy among 2545 nonhuman mammal species. In contrast to Opie’s conclusion in primates, they find in this larger sample that social monogamy arose among species where females were widely spaced and males could not monopolize several of them at once; infanticide did not seem to be a driver for monogamy among all mammals. Opie counters that wide spacing among females doesn’t apply to highly social, group-living primates, so that humans, and perhaps all primates, may be unusual among mammals. If so, he says, looking at mammals across the board might mask the special features of primate evolution.
All the same, Petr Komers, an ecologist at the University of Calgary in Canada and leading proponent of the female range hypothesis for social monogamy, says he finds the authors’ conclusions that infanticide was “the only possible driver to monogamy a bit surprising.” Komers’s own studies, like Clutton-Brock’s, found that among mammals, the highest correlation was between social monogamy and species whose females stayed put in limited ranges. “Monogamy does evolve in species where infanticide is unlikely,” Komers notes, such as in ungulates, or hoofed mammals. Thus no one factor is the “silver bullet” driving monogamy, Komers says, and researchers should be looking for an interplay of multiple explanations.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous. That leaves most mammalian males free to run around and impregnate other indoor Tracking. Primates, however, seem to be a special case: About 27% of primate species are socially monogamous; and recent studies by Christopher Opie, an anthropologist at University College London, and his colleagues have concluded that social monogamy arose relatively late in primate evolution, only about 16 million years ago. (The earliest primates date back to about 55 million years.)
But why did social monogamy arise at all among mammals, including primates, given the many reproductive advantages to males having access to as many females as possible? Scientists have proposed three major hypotheses: Monogamy provides more effective parental care for infants, as in birds; it prevents females from mating with rival males, especially in species where females are widely spaced and cannot all be easily monopolized by one male; or it protects against the risk of infanticide, which is very high among some primate species, including chimpanzees and gorillas, and is often explained by the desire of a rival male to quickly return a mother to a fertile state so that he can sire his own offspring. Some researchers think that a combination of all three factors, and perhaps still others, provide the best explanation for monogamy.
Resolving this debate is important, researchers say, especially for understanding the evolution of human mating behavior. Although humans aren’t completely monogamous, “the emergence of pair-bonding in humans was a major evolutionary transition, which dramatically altered the evolutionary trajectory of our species,” says Sergey Gavrilets, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Many researchers think that we could not have evolved our large brains without joint parental care during the extended period of helplessness required for infant brains to grow to their full size. “Understanding the forces that drove that transition can help us better understand the causes of human uniqueness,” Gavrilets adds.
Opie and his colleagues set about testing the three leading hypotheses in primates using a powerful method called Bayesian statistics. The team used previously published genetic and behavioral data from 230 primate species, representing nearly all known species such as Old and New World monkeys, lemurs, and apes, employing strict criteria to ensure that the data were reliable. For example, the team concluded that a particular species engaged in infanticide only if at least 20 publications reported the killing of infants through direct observation or as the only possible explanation. The Bayesian approach allowed the researchers to map information about primate behavior onto an evolutionary tree of the entire animal group, and thus analyze the order in which traits such as social monogamy, infanticide, and other behaviors arose over time.
As the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there was a strong correlation in time between all three hypotheses—parental care, female range, and infanticide by males—and the rise of social monogamy in the roughly 60 primate species that live in pairs. However, among the three explanations, only infanticide actually preceded social monogamy in time and thus could be a driving evolutionary force, the team concludes; the other two behaviors occurred afterward and were the consequences of social monogamy and not the causes. “Our analyses clearly show that infanticide is the trigger for monogamy in primates,” and likely was the trigger in humans, too, Opie says.
Why is the incidence of social monogamy in primates, 27%, so much higher than the 5% in mammals as a whole? Opie and his colleagues, who include University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar—a proponent of the idea that the complex social groups typical of primates led to bigger brains—have an answer. Because the infants of primates with large brains, especially apes and humans, are helpless for longer periods of time than other mammals, they are much more vulnerable to infanticide, and thus need more protection.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the study has been mixed. “I found the paper quite convincing,” says Carel van Schaik, a primatologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland who had earlier argued for the infanticide hypothesis. “The results are very solid” for all primates. But van Schaik says that he “would be very careful to conclude from this paper that infanticide risk was also the main factor underlying human monogamy,” in part because humans are not fully monogamous, as shown by studies of cultures around the world. “The current monogamy is socially imposed.”
Phyllis Lee, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom, agrees. “At best we engage in forms of serial monogamy,” she says, pointing out that more than 60% of “traditional societies” allow men to have more than one wife. Lee adds that infanticide is a feature of many primate species that are not monogamous, “so monogamy is not the only evolutionary solution to infanticide.”
Indeed, a paper to be published this week in Science looks at monogamy across all mammals and comes to a very different conclusion. Zoologists Tim Clutton-Brock and Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom analyzed monogamy among 2545 nonhuman mammal species. In contrast to Opie’s conclusion in primates, they find in this larger sample that social monogamy arose among species where females were widely spaced and males could not monopolize several of them at once; infanticide did not seem to be a driver for monogamy among all mammals. Opie counters that wide spacing among females doesn’t apply to highly social, group-living primates, so that humans, and perhaps all primates, may be unusual among mammals. If so, he says, looking at mammals across the board might mask the special features of primate evolution.
All the same, Petr Komers, an ecologist at the University of Calgary in Canada and leading proponent of the female range hypothesis for social monogamy, says he finds the authors’ conclusions that infanticide was “the only possible driver to monogamy a bit surprising.” Komers’s own studies, like Clutton-Brock’s, found that among mammals, the highest correlation was between social monogamy and species whose females stayed put in limited ranges. “Monogamy does evolve in species where infanticide is unlikely,” Komers notes, such as in ungulates, or hoofed mammals. Thus no one factor is the “silver bullet” driving monogamy, Komers says, and researchers should be looking for an interplay of multiple explanations.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
3D Printing And The Future Of Prosthetics
The latest development in prosthetic limbs didn’t begin in a hospital or a university lab. Instead, it started with a runaway table saw, a special effects artist and a 5-year-old.
When carpenter Richard Van As lost control of his table saw, it cost him two of the fingers on his right hand. As he recuperated, he searched for a replacement that would allow him to get back to work, only to discover that prosthetic fingers cost up to $10,000 per finger, an unaffordable amount for the Johannesburg, South Africa carpenter. Faced with the prohibitive cost of existing options, Van As crafted his own replacement finger from odds and ends around his shop. It worked — barely — and he continued searching for an affordable alternative.
Then he saw a video featuring Ivan Owen, a Bellingham, Wash., special effects artist who specializes in hands. In the video, Owen demonstrated a recent creation: a large puppet hand that used steel cables as tendons, allowing him to move the hand’s digits with ease. Van As contacted Owen immediately.Over the following months, Van As and Owen collaborated on possible designs for prosthetic fingers, trading ideas and fabricating prototypes. Soon thereafter, Owen flew to South Africa to visit Van As in person. While the two were hard at work, they received a call that would alter the course of their mission entirely.
It came from the mother of 5-year-old Liam Dippenaar. Liam suffers from Amniotic Band Syndrome, a condition causing him to be born without fingers on his right hand. Like Van As, Liam’s parents found the cost of prosthetics prohibitive, especially since he would outgrow them almost immediately. His mother had heard of their work, and hoped they might be able to help her son.
Days later, the pair fitted Liam with his first prosthetic hand. It was a crude thing, milled from aluminum, but it worked. Its fingers clenched and released with the motion of his rtls. Describing Liam’s first experiment with his new hand, Owen told NPR: ”You could see the light bulbs go off and he looked up and said, ‘It copies me.’ It was really an incredible moment.”
That moment made the pair consider the impact that an affordable prosthetic hand could have on the lives of thousands of people around the world. But the production process was still too difficult, too unrefined. That’s when Owen hit upon the idea of using 3D printing.Van As and Owen contacted MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of 3D printers. Upon learning about the pair’s mission, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis promptly donated two MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printers, sending one to Washington and the other to South Africa.
The MakerBots enabled the duo to decrease production time for their prototypes from weeks to less than half an hour. ”The impact that utilizing the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer had was incredible,” Owen recently told Space Daily. “It dramatically increased the speed at which we could prototype and try out ideas. It gave us the ability to both hold physical copies of the exact same thing, even though we were separated by 10,000 miles.”
With the MakerBots, Van As and Owen were able to create an inexpensive and accessible alternative to existing prosthetics. They dubbed the product “Robohand.”Functionally, the 3D-printed Robohand is similar to the version originally given to Liam Dippenaar. What’s different — even revolutionary — is the Robohand’s cost. With Van As and Owen’s designs and access to a 3D printer, a fully functioning Robohand can be produced for around $150.
This unprecedented level of affordability and accessibility are key tenets of the duo’s mission. They’ve published their designs — completely free and without any patent restrictions — on MakerBot’s Thingiverse, an online hub for 3D printing enthusiasts, where its been downloaded more than 3,500 times in just a few months. Van As himself has fitted more than 100 children with Robohands. None of them were asked to pay, even for materials.Robohand isn’t the only prosthetic being developed with 3D printing technology. Artificial limbs, replacement craniums, and 3D-printed faces have made an appearance in the last year alone. Even a duck got a 3D-printed foot.
This marriage of open source design and 3D printing points to a brighter future for those in need of prosthetic limbs. Van As and Owen are eager to see their designs shared, modified, and improved upon by users around the world. Soon, those in need may be able to design and produce their own prosthetics without leaving their living rooms.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
When carpenter Richard Van As lost control of his table saw, it cost him two of the fingers on his right hand. As he recuperated, he searched for a replacement that would allow him to get back to work, only to discover that prosthetic fingers cost up to $10,000 per finger, an unaffordable amount for the Johannesburg, South Africa carpenter. Faced with the prohibitive cost of existing options, Van As crafted his own replacement finger from odds and ends around his shop. It worked — barely — and he continued searching for an affordable alternative.
Then he saw a video featuring Ivan Owen, a Bellingham, Wash., special effects artist who specializes in hands. In the video, Owen demonstrated a recent creation: a large puppet hand that used steel cables as tendons, allowing him to move the hand’s digits with ease. Van As contacted Owen immediately.Over the following months, Van As and Owen collaborated on possible designs for prosthetic fingers, trading ideas and fabricating prototypes. Soon thereafter, Owen flew to South Africa to visit Van As in person. While the two were hard at work, they received a call that would alter the course of their mission entirely.
It came from the mother of 5-year-old Liam Dippenaar. Liam suffers from Amniotic Band Syndrome, a condition causing him to be born without fingers on his right hand. Like Van As, Liam’s parents found the cost of prosthetics prohibitive, especially since he would outgrow them almost immediately. His mother had heard of their work, and hoped they might be able to help her son.
Days later, the pair fitted Liam with his first prosthetic hand. It was a crude thing, milled from aluminum, but it worked. Its fingers clenched and released with the motion of his rtls. Describing Liam’s first experiment with his new hand, Owen told NPR: ”You could see the light bulbs go off and he looked up and said, ‘It copies me.’ It was really an incredible moment.”
That moment made the pair consider the impact that an affordable prosthetic hand could have on the lives of thousands of people around the world. But the production process was still too difficult, too unrefined. That’s when Owen hit upon the idea of using 3D printing.Van As and Owen contacted MakerBot, a Brooklyn-based manufacturer of 3D printers. Upon learning about the pair’s mission, MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis promptly donated two MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printers, sending one to Washington and the other to South Africa.
The MakerBots enabled the duo to decrease production time for their prototypes from weeks to less than half an hour. ”The impact that utilizing the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer had was incredible,” Owen recently told Space Daily. “It dramatically increased the speed at which we could prototype and try out ideas. It gave us the ability to both hold physical copies of the exact same thing, even though we were separated by 10,000 miles.”
With the MakerBots, Van As and Owen were able to create an inexpensive and accessible alternative to existing prosthetics. They dubbed the product “Robohand.”Functionally, the 3D-printed Robohand is similar to the version originally given to Liam Dippenaar. What’s different — even revolutionary — is the Robohand’s cost. With Van As and Owen’s designs and access to a 3D printer, a fully functioning Robohand can be produced for around $150.
This unprecedented level of affordability and accessibility are key tenets of the duo’s mission. They’ve published their designs — completely free and without any patent restrictions — on MakerBot’s Thingiverse, an online hub for 3D printing enthusiasts, where its been downloaded more than 3,500 times in just a few months. Van As himself has fitted more than 100 children with Robohands. None of them were asked to pay, even for materials.Robohand isn’t the only prosthetic being developed with 3D printing technology. Artificial limbs, replacement craniums, and 3D-printed faces have made an appearance in the last year alone. Even a duck got a 3D-printed foot.
This marriage of open source design and 3D printing points to a brighter future for those in need of prosthetic limbs. Van As and Owen are eager to see their designs shared, modified, and improved upon by users around the world. Soon, those in need may be able to design and produce their own prosthetics without leaving their living rooms.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
Growth based on cheap money
The chancellor will claim he's pulling off the well-known royal baby effect if, as expected, growth figures improve on Thursday. Prince Charles's birth in 1948 came as Britain entered a quarter-century of recovery, Prince William's heralded green shoots in 1982. Can Prince No-Name-Yet do it again?
The short answer is no. To hit what George Osborne originally promised his austerity would achieve, GDP has to rise by an impossible 5.3% in each of the next two years. Whose growth is it anyway? The great majority will see no improvement in living standards, with wages still falling behind inflation, year after year. And what kind of growth? Instead of his promised rebalancing, the bartender in the Treasury brings the down-and-out alcoholic a bottle of the rot-gut feelgood that put us all in the gutter in the first place. No productivity, no manufacturing, no exports, no investment but instead cheap money, zombie banks primed with quantitative easing who still won't lend, unsustainably low interest rates – and now Help to Buy to pump up house prices.
Homeowners may feel better by the election, able to remortgage and spend again – and what else matters? But we are back on the bottle big-time. Savings are falling, investment is down by a quarter since the crash and 158 countries invest more than Britain. Foreign investment into Britain has been good – but that's put at risk by Conservative euro-madness: as the Engineering Employers Federation said, it relies on access to EU markets.
So is this the time to spend ￡12bn on urging people to buy with a 5% deposit, not even restricted to first-time buyers, on properties up to ￡600,000? True, neither prices nor quantity of sales have reached pre-crash levels – but that's a dangerous benchmark. It's rare to see such a phalanx of loyal Tory-supporters, such as the Institute of Directors, throwing their hands in the air in horror as happened after Osborne's Help to Buy launch on Tuesday. By 2017 the scheme is supposed to end – but as with the Lawson-induced house-price bubble, how do you take the bottle away without another collapse, his critics asked?
Although home owning is falling, down to 64% of the population in 2011, property prices remain our national addiction: just count the number of stories a week gleefully predicting rises. Osborne is betting that homeowners will bring home the electoral bacon. But people now know apparent growth based on cheap money and artificial mortgages is fool's gold. Here is Labour's chance to be the wiser party, ready to sober up the real time Location system.
House prices are highly sensitive to government words and actions. Labour should say loudly and firmly that it will do everything in its power to freeze prices. Language and firm intent can chill expectations. Lay out a policy whose stated aim is to house people well and restore homes as a commodity like any other, not a one-way bet to wealth. Plan to build at least a million homes, instruct and enable local authorities and housing associations to build and force developers to use their hoarded land or sell it on. Freeze rents so they rise by no more than annual inflation to stop property being used as investment, redirecting that money productively. Warn that if prices still rise, from now on capital gains tax may be imposed on homes to chill the market. Do whatever it takes, and say so loudly.
Labour will borrow to invest outside the current spending straitjacket it has accepted for year one, that investment sum to be announced nearer the election. Why not describe that as the national mortgage, the nation borrowing to build massively to invest in the future generation, just as households do? A national mortgage to build would contrast well with Help to Buy inflating existing stock into new bubble prices.
The federal government may be one step closer to keeping tabs on consumers’ health care information with a new data hub compiling personal information from a host of government agencies and newly collected health status information.Some experts warn it could get even more invasive over time.The Data Services Hub will be the primary computer program to verify eligibility for Obamacare exchanges. But the program will collect and compile such massive amounts of information that lawmakers and experts are increasingly fearful of privacy infringement.
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan warned The Daily Caller News Foundation that the program is a “massive data grab” and will put citizens’ private information at risk.But the program, which has been receiving heat over the large amount of personal data it will connect from various government sources, will also add health status to the mix — an addition Meehan finds distrubing
Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Marilyn Tavenner, whose department will oversee the Hub, told lawmakers last week that the limited health information required will be relevant to the type of coverage they receive under Obamacare exchanges.
The government’s problem lies in an Obamacare requirement for a certain level of coverage for a certain price, creating “huge incentives for insurers to avoid the sick,” Cannon explained. “Insurers have to provide coverage to customers for $10,000 when the person uses $100,000 in medical care.”One attempt to alleviate price fixing problems is CMS’s Risk Adjustment Program, which would give subsidies to insurance companies with the sickest patients. But Cannon argues that this system will inherently lead to more government snooping.
“Well, how do they know which insurance companies have the sickest patients? The only way they can do that and keep costs under control is to delve into the illnesses that people have and the treatments they’re receiving to verify if these people are actually sick,” Cannon told TheDCNF. The adjustment will require more federal intrusion in the health of the masses.
And the Data Services Hub could be the means to that end. The hub is already set to collect what it calls “limited” personal health information, pertaining only to pregnancy status, blindness, and disability status.On top of these disclosures, Meehan warned that more and more information could be wrangled out of consumers. “When CMS articulates what they’re asking for now, they say ‘including but not limited to’ in all the descriptions,” the congressman told TheDCNF, leaving a window open to adding more federal agencies to the sharing program or increasing the amount of health information to be included in the Hub.
Cannon warns, “There’s a built-in need in Obamacare for the federal government to have more and more access to people’s medical information.” With such pressures on federal regulators it seems unlikely that the data sharing program, which two experts alleged in USA Today will be the “largest consolidation of personal information in the history of the republic,” will be limited to just three categories of health information.
Along with the federal government’s collection of ever-increasing amounts of personal health data comes increased security risks. Meehan told TheDCNF he is unsatisfied with CMS’s cyber security protocols, after his questioning during a House hearing last week forced Tavenner to admit she’d never attended an FBI or Department of Homeland Security briefing on preventing cyber attacks against the data hub.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
The short answer is no. To hit what George Osborne originally promised his austerity would achieve, GDP has to rise by an impossible 5.3% in each of the next two years. Whose growth is it anyway? The great majority will see no improvement in living standards, with wages still falling behind inflation, year after year. And what kind of growth? Instead of his promised rebalancing, the bartender in the Treasury brings the down-and-out alcoholic a bottle of the rot-gut feelgood that put us all in the gutter in the first place. No productivity, no manufacturing, no exports, no investment but instead cheap money, zombie banks primed with quantitative easing who still won't lend, unsustainably low interest rates – and now Help to Buy to pump up house prices.
Homeowners may feel better by the election, able to remortgage and spend again – and what else matters? But we are back on the bottle big-time. Savings are falling, investment is down by a quarter since the crash and 158 countries invest more than Britain. Foreign investment into Britain has been good – but that's put at risk by Conservative euro-madness: as the Engineering Employers Federation said, it relies on access to EU markets.
So is this the time to spend ￡12bn on urging people to buy with a 5% deposit, not even restricted to first-time buyers, on properties up to ￡600,000? True, neither prices nor quantity of sales have reached pre-crash levels – but that's a dangerous benchmark. It's rare to see such a phalanx of loyal Tory-supporters, such as the Institute of Directors, throwing their hands in the air in horror as happened after Osborne's Help to Buy launch on Tuesday. By 2017 the scheme is supposed to end – but as with the Lawson-induced house-price bubble, how do you take the bottle away without another collapse, his critics asked?
Although home owning is falling, down to 64% of the population in 2011, property prices remain our national addiction: just count the number of stories a week gleefully predicting rises. Osborne is betting that homeowners will bring home the electoral bacon. But people now know apparent growth based on cheap money and artificial mortgages is fool's gold. Here is Labour's chance to be the wiser party, ready to sober up the real time Location system.
House prices are highly sensitive to government words and actions. Labour should say loudly and firmly that it will do everything in its power to freeze prices. Language and firm intent can chill expectations. Lay out a policy whose stated aim is to house people well and restore homes as a commodity like any other, not a one-way bet to wealth. Plan to build at least a million homes, instruct and enable local authorities and housing associations to build and force developers to use their hoarded land or sell it on. Freeze rents so they rise by no more than annual inflation to stop property being used as investment, redirecting that money productively. Warn that if prices still rise, from now on capital gains tax may be imposed on homes to chill the market. Do whatever it takes, and say so loudly.
Labour will borrow to invest outside the current spending straitjacket it has accepted for year one, that investment sum to be announced nearer the election. Why not describe that as the national mortgage, the nation borrowing to build massively to invest in the future generation, just as households do? A national mortgage to build would contrast well with Help to Buy inflating existing stock into new bubble prices.
The federal government may be one step closer to keeping tabs on consumers’ health care information with a new data hub compiling personal information from a host of government agencies and newly collected health status information.Some experts warn it could get even more invasive over time.The Data Services Hub will be the primary computer program to verify eligibility for Obamacare exchanges. But the program will collect and compile such massive amounts of information that lawmakers and experts are increasingly fearful of privacy infringement.
Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Pat Meehan warned The Daily Caller News Foundation that the program is a “massive data grab” and will put citizens’ private information at risk.But the program, which has been receiving heat over the large amount of personal data it will connect from various government sources, will also add health status to the mix — an addition Meehan finds distrubing
Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Marilyn Tavenner, whose department will oversee the Hub, told lawmakers last week that the limited health information required will be relevant to the type of coverage they receive under Obamacare exchanges.
The government’s problem lies in an Obamacare requirement for a certain level of coverage for a certain price, creating “huge incentives for insurers to avoid the sick,” Cannon explained. “Insurers have to provide coverage to customers for $10,000 when the person uses $100,000 in medical care.”One attempt to alleviate price fixing problems is CMS’s Risk Adjustment Program, which would give subsidies to insurance companies with the sickest patients. But Cannon argues that this system will inherently lead to more government snooping.
“Well, how do they know which insurance companies have the sickest patients? The only way they can do that and keep costs under control is to delve into the illnesses that people have and the treatments they’re receiving to verify if these people are actually sick,” Cannon told TheDCNF. The adjustment will require more federal intrusion in the health of the masses.
And the Data Services Hub could be the means to that end. The hub is already set to collect what it calls “limited” personal health information, pertaining only to pregnancy status, blindness, and disability status.On top of these disclosures, Meehan warned that more and more information could be wrangled out of consumers. “When CMS articulates what they’re asking for now, they say ‘including but not limited to’ in all the descriptions,” the congressman told TheDCNF, leaving a window open to adding more federal agencies to the sharing program or increasing the amount of health information to be included in the Hub.
Cannon warns, “There’s a built-in need in Obamacare for the federal government to have more and more access to people’s medical information.” With such pressures on federal regulators it seems unlikely that the data sharing program, which two experts alleged in USA Today will be the “largest consolidation of personal information in the history of the republic,” will be limited to just three categories of health information.
Along with the federal government’s collection of ever-increasing amounts of personal health data comes increased security risks. Meehan told TheDCNF he is unsatisfied with CMS’s cyber security protocols, after his questioning during a House hearing last week forced Tavenner to admit she’d never attended an FBI or Department of Homeland Security briefing on preventing cyber attacks against the data hub.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Monday, July 22, 2013
A Bright Ray of Hope for Bradley Manning
Many people have worried about the fate of Bradley Manning, a lone soldier who informed the world of war crimes being committed by the War Machine that has devoured the American republic and turned its ravaging, profit-reaping fury on the world. As we all know, Manning is now in the iron grip of that Machine, facing the prospect of life in prison for his truth-telling, having already endured a long incarceration marked by episodes of relentless psychological torture. Many people quite reasonably dread what awaits Manning when the Military Court hands down its inevitable verdict against him.
But wait -- perhaps all is not lost after all. In the long dark night of our military imperium, a shaft of light, of hope, has suddenly appeared. And it comes from -- of all places -- the very pinnacle of the military justice system that is bearing down on Manning: the Court of Appeal of the Armed Forces of the United States.
For it turns out that if a military prisoner has faced the least mistreatment during incarceration, even a temporary abuse of due process, then all charges against him will be dropped and he can walk free. And since Manning has manifestly faced any number of abuses of due process and egregious mistreatment, then we can be supremely confident that the military Court of Appeal -- which enshrined this Solomonic principle in a recent case -- will act with perfect consistency and release Bradley Manning in good time, whatever the eventual outcome of his current trial.
Hutchins did was lead his team on a night raid against a private home in the Iraqi town of Hamdania. All he and his team did was break into the house, grab an innocent retired policeman named Hashim Ibrahim Awad, drag him down the road to the site of a IED attack, tie him up, shoot him dead in cold blood, then dump his body in the IED hole, remove the plastic restraints, and leave a stolen AK-47 rifle next to the corpse to pretend Awad was a terrorist who had been killed in a firefight. That's all Hutchins did. Oh yes, that, and have his men shoot Awad repeatedly in the face, in the hope of obliterating his identity. But family members recognized the body and demanded justice from their American military occupiers.
Then came the real crime, the misdeed that would later lead the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces of the United States to carry out its humanitarian intervention and indoor Tracking. As AP reports, Hutchins was arrested by the military brass and held "in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his 2006 interrogation in Iraq." Thus Hutchins -- who was facing a term of 11 whole years for kidnapping an innocent man, shooting him in the face then covering up the crime -- was released from custody last month by the Court of Appeals, which cited the six-day spell in solitary as the basis for overturning his conviction.
Who knew that the American military justice system was so fiercely adherent to due process that it would even let a killer go free on a "technicality," like a bunch of wimpy ACLU lawyers? Who knew they would act with such exemplary exactitude in applying letter of the law down to the last jot and tittle? Yet this is the principle they have firmly established with their ruling on Hutchins: the failure to safeguard a military prisoner's full panoply of legal rights in every respect must result in the overturning of any subsequent verdict against that prisoner, and his release from captivity.
I think we can all rest easier knowing that this principle will now be guiding the decisions of the U.S. military justice system from now on. For surely it will be applied universally, not only to Bradley Manning but also to, say, the captives in Guantanamo Bay, who are subject to the same military justice system. Surely, it cannot be that this strict adherence to the legal niceties will only be applied in cases where an American soldier has brutally murdered some worthless towelhead in some piece-of-sh*t foreign hellhole we had to invade for some reason or another a long time ago, so who cares anyway.
No, surely, that cannot be. For as our recent history clearly shows, the operators of our War Machine always adhere strictly and consistently to the highest and most noble principles, applying them to all equally, the great and the low, without fear or favor, or the slightest hypocrisy.
Additional research also indicates that social disengagement and loneliness are often considered to be routinely associated with physical limitations causing us to become even more isolated. I recently wrote a blog about the benefits of livable communities and making sure there are activities available that don't require getting in a car and therefore enhance the opportunities for mature adults to be socially connected regardless of your current health status.
Unfortunately, staying socially connected isn't as easy as just scheduling time. Even if you happen to have a lot of flexibility, your friends or family may not. So that said, schedule ahead and stick to a social calendar just like you would a work schedule. It takes a time investment to be social, but the rewards are immense.
Hobbies can be very enriching and relaxing. Being with other people who share your enthusiasm for gardening or antique cars is one of life's simple pleasures. Having trouble finding like-minded folks in your area? Ask around at your local community center. You can also try online forums for your hobby or post a meet-up in your area.
In addition, taking time to volunteer, exercise or get involved in a new field will open doors to socializing. My father has always been a gym enthusiast and in addition to his intense weight training workouts, he has a close-knit group at his health club that he sees on a regular basis. Working at a food co-op or animal shelter would be ideal for those looking for a regular activity that offers a tremendous opportunity to interact with others. In the case of the animal shelter, extensive studies have indicated that exposing older adults to animals reduces their sense of loneliness considerably.
During your 30 Bonus Years, it's an ideal time to get involved in a cause that you've always wanted to spend more time doing. Getting more hands-on and involved with an organization you may have financially supported over the years is great for your spirits. Immersing yourself in a cause can also re-define your purpose in life and connect you with people that are from a younger (or older) generation.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that technology does help keep older adults socially connected, especially if you live in a remote area. The key is to treat social media -- or discussion forums -- in a similar manner as if you're having a conversation. Don't just be a passive observer. Use private messaging, post your thoughts and start discussion threads -- get involved in the rapport.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
But wait -- perhaps all is not lost after all. In the long dark night of our military imperium, a shaft of light, of hope, has suddenly appeared. And it comes from -- of all places -- the very pinnacle of the military justice system that is bearing down on Manning: the Court of Appeal of the Armed Forces of the United States.
For it turns out that if a military prisoner has faced the least mistreatment during incarceration, even a temporary abuse of due process, then all charges against him will be dropped and he can walk free. And since Manning has manifestly faced any number of abuses of due process and egregious mistreatment, then we can be supremely confident that the military Court of Appeal -- which enshrined this Solomonic principle in a recent case -- will act with perfect consistency and release Bradley Manning in good time, whatever the eventual outcome of his current trial.
Hutchins did was lead his team on a night raid against a private home in the Iraqi town of Hamdania. All he and his team did was break into the house, grab an innocent retired policeman named Hashim Ibrahim Awad, drag him down the road to the site of a IED attack, tie him up, shoot him dead in cold blood, then dump his body in the IED hole, remove the plastic restraints, and leave a stolen AK-47 rifle next to the corpse to pretend Awad was a terrorist who had been killed in a firefight. That's all Hutchins did. Oh yes, that, and have his men shoot Awad repeatedly in the face, in the hope of obliterating his identity. But family members recognized the body and demanded justice from their American military occupiers.
Then came the real crime, the misdeed that would later lead the Court of Appeals of the Armed Forces of the United States to carry out its humanitarian intervention and indoor Tracking. As AP reports, Hutchins was arrested by the military brass and held "in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days during his 2006 interrogation in Iraq." Thus Hutchins -- who was facing a term of 11 whole years for kidnapping an innocent man, shooting him in the face then covering up the crime -- was released from custody last month by the Court of Appeals, which cited the six-day spell in solitary as the basis for overturning his conviction.
Who knew that the American military justice system was so fiercely adherent to due process that it would even let a killer go free on a "technicality," like a bunch of wimpy ACLU lawyers? Who knew they would act with such exemplary exactitude in applying letter of the law down to the last jot and tittle? Yet this is the principle they have firmly established with their ruling on Hutchins: the failure to safeguard a military prisoner's full panoply of legal rights in every respect must result in the overturning of any subsequent verdict against that prisoner, and his release from captivity.
I think we can all rest easier knowing that this principle will now be guiding the decisions of the U.S. military justice system from now on. For surely it will be applied universally, not only to Bradley Manning but also to, say, the captives in Guantanamo Bay, who are subject to the same military justice system. Surely, it cannot be that this strict adherence to the legal niceties will only be applied in cases where an American soldier has brutally murdered some worthless towelhead in some piece-of-sh*t foreign hellhole we had to invade for some reason or another a long time ago, so who cares anyway.
No, surely, that cannot be. For as our recent history clearly shows, the operators of our War Machine always adhere strictly and consistently to the highest and most noble principles, applying them to all equally, the great and the low, without fear or favor, or the slightest hypocrisy.
Additional research also indicates that social disengagement and loneliness are often considered to be routinely associated with physical limitations causing us to become even more isolated. I recently wrote a blog about the benefits of livable communities and making sure there are activities available that don't require getting in a car and therefore enhance the opportunities for mature adults to be socially connected regardless of your current health status.
Unfortunately, staying socially connected isn't as easy as just scheduling time. Even if you happen to have a lot of flexibility, your friends or family may not. So that said, schedule ahead and stick to a social calendar just like you would a work schedule. It takes a time investment to be social, but the rewards are immense.
Hobbies can be very enriching and relaxing. Being with other people who share your enthusiasm for gardening or antique cars is one of life's simple pleasures. Having trouble finding like-minded folks in your area? Ask around at your local community center. You can also try online forums for your hobby or post a meet-up in your area.
In addition, taking time to volunteer, exercise or get involved in a new field will open doors to socializing. My father has always been a gym enthusiast and in addition to his intense weight training workouts, he has a close-knit group at his health club that he sees on a regular basis. Working at a food co-op or animal shelter would be ideal for those looking for a regular activity that offers a tremendous opportunity to interact with others. In the case of the animal shelter, extensive studies have indicated that exposing older adults to animals reduces their sense of loneliness considerably.
During your 30 Bonus Years, it's an ideal time to get involved in a cause that you've always wanted to spend more time doing. Getting more hands-on and involved with an organization you may have financially supported over the years is great for your spirits. Immersing yourself in a cause can also re-define your purpose in life and connect you with people that are from a younger (or older) generation.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that technology does help keep older adults socially connected, especially if you live in a remote area. The key is to treat social media -- or discussion forums -- in a similar manner as if you're having a conversation. Don't just be a passive observer. Use private messaging, post your thoughts and start discussion threads -- get involved in the rapport.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Our last, best, hope?
I first used the internet in 1984/5 when I was a student at Cambridge University sitting at a dumb terminal on an IBM mainframe and discovered that we could email people both locally and at other universities. I didn’t know we were using the Internet, of course, because it was just ‘the network’. I had access when I worked at Acorn Computers, and in the early 1990′s ended up at PIPEX, the UK’s first commercial ISP.
A lot of my work at that time revolved around promoting the idea that the Internet was the right way to build the ‘information superhighway’ beloved of Al Gore, Tony Blair and others, rather than closed, proprietary technologies like AOL, Compuserve and the Microsoft Network. These systems were touted as the alternative to the insecure, unmanageable internet, and for a brief period it looked like they might triumph simply because of the marketing effort that went into them, but in the end it was the open net and the open web that came to provide the infrastucture for our networked economies and society.
In the last three decades the internet has become the pipe that delivers the world to us in all the ways that radio and TV used to and all the ways that radio and TV, as one-way broadcast media, never could. These days there are many countries where it makes far more sense to occupy the offices of the ISPs after a military coup than it does to take over the television stations.
This triumph comes at a cost. We have managed to avoid replacing the cacophony of the somewhat democratic open standards bazaar with a closed-minded architecture of control in which we would be expected to ask for permission to do anything, and would be reliant on Microsoft, AOL and those who they approve to maintain, develop and deliver innovation, and to charge what they liked for the privilege, but in the process we have built an internet that is almost impossible to manage.
We see it in the chaos of spam, malware and phishing, as well as the impossibility of creating effective filters for material that we’d prefer our children didn’t see, whatever the government may want to believe (and whatever PR hype they may persuade the Daily Mail to print). Many ISPs would probably prefer a safe, manageable network where they can control what their customers see and do and avoid takedown notices and copyright trolls and excessive legislation to manage illegal and ‘harmful’ content online. We know what that world looks like – it’s the content industries dream of compulsory digital rights management, premium services and Ultraviolet, but it doesn’t look that attractive to those of us who value the Internet’s creative potential and see it as the foundation of Indoor Positioning System.
We inherited a network which was designed to be open and permissive and to be used by nice people doing nice things. Over the last three decades it has been unleashed onto the world, and the openness of the network has meant that bad people have used it to do bad things, selfish people have used it to do selfish things, and governments have looked for ways to monitor it using the same features that the authors of Tor used to make it hard to monitor.
As a result today’s internet is more easily used for oppression than openness, and have seen how the US and UK, like China and others, have been reading as much net traffic as they can get their hands on, and how laws have been written to make such surveillance legal. The latest announcements on filtering mark a move towards deeper monitoring of the material UK net users are downloading, using the argument that we must ‘think of the children’ to justify this.
It may mark the point at which many ordinary users start to worry that the network they increasingly rely on for many aspects of their daily life is in fact the space in which they are most exposed, where their freedom to live their lives without being observed or suspected is most easily removed, because it is just as impossible to enforce the positive freedoms online as the negative ones. We can’t keep people safe from malware or spam, and we can’t tell them they can speak privately or speak openly without fear of reprisal.
ISPs have a real problem here. It’s the one outlined by Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith in their book ‘Who Controls the Internet?’, where they point out that whatever freedom we may seek online, the net is delivered to us by companies that have offices and employees and servers, all of which are located in the physical world. For a company to operate within a territory it has to obey the laws within that territory, and while it seems.
Lake Placid is a small village tucked away in New York's Adirondack Mountains that is best known as the home of 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics. Surrounded by thickly forested mountains and spread out over two lakes — Mirror Lake and the namesake Lake Placid — this scenic little village today is valued for its proximity to world-class hiking and skiing as well as the numerous athletic training facilities, camps, and tournaments that utilize its left-over Olympic infrastructure. This town gets a lot of visitors and is packed with hotels, motels and B&Bs to handle the tourist traffic.
The Golden Arrow, which overlooks Mirror Lake, has been owned and operated by the same family since Winifred and Stefanie Hoderied opened it up back in the 1970s. The hotel has seen some improvements and upgrades in the decades since, but the one thing that hasn't changed is the family running the show. Winifred and Stefanie passed the operational torch to their children, Jenn and Peter Holderied, and it's been the new generation who have overseen its emergence as a leader in green hotels.
They grab all the low-hanging green hotel fruit like encouraging their guests to use their towels more than once to cut down on unnecessary laundry loads and offer in-room recycling, but they take their environmental efforts a few steps further with their green roof, thermal solar panels, hot water heat recovery system, and crushed limestone beach (to counteract acid rain on Mirror Lake). We found a a lot of local and organic choices on the menu at Generations, the Golden Arrow's restaurant. That devotion to buying local extends to everything the hotel purchases and they try to reuse building materials whenever they renovate. Their kitchen grease gets hauled off by a local farmer who turns it into biodiesel. Hotel employees get a free lunch if they live within 10 miles and walk or bike to work. Those who live farther out receive a transportation stipend.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
A lot of my work at that time revolved around promoting the idea that the Internet was the right way to build the ‘information superhighway’ beloved of Al Gore, Tony Blair and others, rather than closed, proprietary technologies like AOL, Compuserve and the Microsoft Network. These systems were touted as the alternative to the insecure, unmanageable internet, and for a brief period it looked like they might triumph simply because of the marketing effort that went into them, but in the end it was the open net and the open web that came to provide the infrastucture for our networked economies and society.
In the last three decades the internet has become the pipe that delivers the world to us in all the ways that radio and TV used to and all the ways that radio and TV, as one-way broadcast media, never could. These days there are many countries where it makes far more sense to occupy the offices of the ISPs after a military coup than it does to take over the television stations.
This triumph comes at a cost. We have managed to avoid replacing the cacophony of the somewhat democratic open standards bazaar with a closed-minded architecture of control in which we would be expected to ask for permission to do anything, and would be reliant on Microsoft, AOL and those who they approve to maintain, develop and deliver innovation, and to charge what they liked for the privilege, but in the process we have built an internet that is almost impossible to manage.
We see it in the chaos of spam, malware and phishing, as well as the impossibility of creating effective filters for material that we’d prefer our children didn’t see, whatever the government may want to believe (and whatever PR hype they may persuade the Daily Mail to print). Many ISPs would probably prefer a safe, manageable network where they can control what their customers see and do and avoid takedown notices and copyright trolls and excessive legislation to manage illegal and ‘harmful’ content online. We know what that world looks like – it’s the content industries dream of compulsory digital rights management, premium services and Ultraviolet, but it doesn’t look that attractive to those of us who value the Internet’s creative potential and see it as the foundation of Indoor Positioning System.
We inherited a network which was designed to be open and permissive and to be used by nice people doing nice things. Over the last three decades it has been unleashed onto the world, and the openness of the network has meant that bad people have used it to do bad things, selfish people have used it to do selfish things, and governments have looked for ways to monitor it using the same features that the authors of Tor used to make it hard to monitor.
As a result today’s internet is more easily used for oppression than openness, and have seen how the US and UK, like China and others, have been reading as much net traffic as they can get their hands on, and how laws have been written to make such surveillance legal. The latest announcements on filtering mark a move towards deeper monitoring of the material UK net users are downloading, using the argument that we must ‘think of the children’ to justify this.
It may mark the point at which many ordinary users start to worry that the network they increasingly rely on for many aspects of their daily life is in fact the space in which they are most exposed, where their freedom to live their lives without being observed or suspected is most easily removed, because it is just as impossible to enforce the positive freedoms online as the negative ones. We can’t keep people safe from malware or spam, and we can’t tell them they can speak privately or speak openly without fear of reprisal.
ISPs have a real problem here. It’s the one outlined by Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith in their book ‘Who Controls the Internet?’, where they point out that whatever freedom we may seek online, the net is delivered to us by companies that have offices and employees and servers, all of which are located in the physical world. For a company to operate within a territory it has to obey the laws within that territory, and while it seems.
Lake Placid is a small village tucked away in New York's Adirondack Mountains that is best known as the home of 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics. Surrounded by thickly forested mountains and spread out over two lakes — Mirror Lake and the namesake Lake Placid — this scenic little village today is valued for its proximity to world-class hiking and skiing as well as the numerous athletic training facilities, camps, and tournaments that utilize its left-over Olympic infrastructure. This town gets a lot of visitors and is packed with hotels, motels and B&Bs to handle the tourist traffic.
The Golden Arrow, which overlooks Mirror Lake, has been owned and operated by the same family since Winifred and Stefanie Hoderied opened it up back in the 1970s. The hotel has seen some improvements and upgrades in the decades since, but the one thing that hasn't changed is the family running the show. Winifred and Stefanie passed the operational torch to their children, Jenn and Peter Holderied, and it's been the new generation who have overseen its emergence as a leader in green hotels.
They grab all the low-hanging green hotel fruit like encouraging their guests to use their towels more than once to cut down on unnecessary laundry loads and offer in-room recycling, but they take their environmental efforts a few steps further with their green roof, thermal solar panels, hot water heat recovery system, and crushed limestone beach (to counteract acid rain on Mirror Lake). We found a a lot of local and organic choices on the menu at Generations, the Golden Arrow's restaurant. That devotion to buying local extends to everything the hotel purchases and they try to reuse building materials whenever they renovate. Their kitchen grease gets hauled off by a local farmer who turns it into biodiesel. Hotel employees get a free lunch if they live within 10 miles and walk or bike to work. Those who live farther out receive a transportation stipend.
Read the full products at http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Slow talks could hasten Detroit bankruptcy filing
After several weeks of slow-moving talks, only one deal has been reached between the state-appointed emergency manager hired to fix Detroit’s finances and the more than 50 creditors, two public pension funds and unions jockeying for a piece of the billions of dollars the city owes them.
The slow process is frustrating some creditors who complain the city isn’t doing much to bargain with them beyond offering 10 cents on a dollar. They say bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr’s message to them has been a blunt — take it or leave it.
Though Orr has said he’s attempting to avoid the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, experts say the stalemates at the bargaining tables could push the city in that direction.
“I think Orr is going to get to the point where he has enough ammunition to justify a Chapter 9 if there are enough people not willing to get on the bus,” said James McTevia, a turnaround expert based north of Detroit in Bingham Farms. Bankruptcy may be the only option for a city that for years has crashed toward insolvency, he said.
Orr, who oversaw Chrysler LLC’s bankruptcy and real time Location system, briefed the city’s debt holders on June 14 on his plan to erase the city’s $17 billion in debt, warning that time was short and the chance of filing for bankruptcy was about 50-50. He vowed to reassess things from the meeting in 30 days. Since then, he and his team held several meetings with debt holders but few details of those talks have come from Orr’s office.
Bankruptcy comes with risks, experts say. Fees for things like parking and traffic tickets could increase as Orr looks for ways to raise money to pay creditors. Trash collection, grass cutting, snow plowing and other already limited essential services could be scaled back even more. More city workers could lose their jobs. And Detroit’s already poor image will take more hits.
“As bad as things get, sometimes they can get worse,” said Anthony Sabino, business law professor at St. John’s University’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business. “The additional layers of putting the fate of the city in the hands of a bankruptcy judge, the layers of legal expenses — there would be such a shattering of confidence it could be the point of no return for the city.”
Detroit is paying millions of dollars in legal bills and for consultants involved in Orr’s restructuring. Sabino said that would easily double in bankruptcy and legal costs for creditors would soar. Residents and Detroit business owners, like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert could become disenchanted.
“The city of Detroit has had decades of financial problems, and it is time to face those problems and move forward,” said Matt Cullen, the president and chief executive for Rock Ventures, which is the umbrella entity for Gilbert’s portfolio. “Just as the auto companies had to reinvent how they do business, so does the city of Detroit.”
Several creditors didn’t return phone messages or declined to talk with The Associated Press about the negotiations. One creditor, Peter Hayes, managing director and head of BlackRock’s Municipal Bonds Group, criticized Orr’s plan and said the emergency manager is breaking promises the city previously made on bond payments.
“Those who own Detroit (general obligation) bonds, either on their own or in pooled vehicles such as those we manage at BlackRock, will suffer the financial consequences of the emergency manager’s misguided plan,” Hayes wrote in a letter published this week in the Detroit Free Press.
It’s not clear if the settlement reached in principle late last week with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch will be enough to prod other creditors. Orr spokesman Bill Nowling wouldn’t reveal details because the deal had not been signed. Bank of America-Merrill Lynch spokesman Bill Halldin declined to comment.
New York-based Syncora Guarantee Inc., a trustee on city swap deals involving casino tax revenue, has butted heads with Orr by trying to limit the city’s access to some of the money after creditors are paid. Syncora also accused Orr of having no intention to negotiate in good faith. A county judge issued a temporary restraining order to keep $11 million per month being held up by Syncora flowing back into city coffers after Orr took the issue to court.
Another creditor, National Public Finance Guarantee Corp., the indirect subsidiary of MBIA Inc., which has about $100.7 million of insured exposure to Detroit’s general obligation debt and $2.4 billion of the city’s revenue secured debt, is continuing to meet with the city but is also “considering potential alternatives to the plan the city has provided,” said spokesman Kevin Brown.
The 75-year-old retired businessman checked out a tree lopper and a tape measure, two of the more than 100 tools available to patrons of the suburban Detroit library.
In a number of communities across the U.S., it's possible to borrow tools, musical instruments, fishing poles and much more from the local public library. The trend expands the traditional role of the library as a community resource for free knowledge. Libraries see the programs as a new way to offer residents a chance to learn – just not necessarily with a book.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
The slow process is frustrating some creditors who complain the city isn’t doing much to bargain with them beyond offering 10 cents on a dollar. They say bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr’s message to them has been a blunt — take it or leave it.
Though Orr has said he’s attempting to avoid the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, experts say the stalemates at the bargaining tables could push the city in that direction.
“I think Orr is going to get to the point where he has enough ammunition to justify a Chapter 9 if there are enough people not willing to get on the bus,” said James McTevia, a turnaround expert based north of Detroit in Bingham Farms. Bankruptcy may be the only option for a city that for years has crashed toward insolvency, he said.
Orr, who oversaw Chrysler LLC’s bankruptcy and real time Location system, briefed the city’s debt holders on June 14 on his plan to erase the city’s $17 billion in debt, warning that time was short and the chance of filing for bankruptcy was about 50-50. He vowed to reassess things from the meeting in 30 days. Since then, he and his team held several meetings with debt holders but few details of those talks have come from Orr’s office.
Bankruptcy comes with risks, experts say. Fees for things like parking and traffic tickets could increase as Orr looks for ways to raise money to pay creditors. Trash collection, grass cutting, snow plowing and other already limited essential services could be scaled back even more. More city workers could lose their jobs. And Detroit’s already poor image will take more hits.
“As bad as things get, sometimes they can get worse,” said Anthony Sabino, business law professor at St. John’s University’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business. “The additional layers of putting the fate of the city in the hands of a bankruptcy judge, the layers of legal expenses — there would be such a shattering of confidence it could be the point of no return for the city.”
Detroit is paying millions of dollars in legal bills and for consultants involved in Orr’s restructuring. Sabino said that would easily double in bankruptcy and legal costs for creditors would soar. Residents and Detroit business owners, like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert could become disenchanted.
“The city of Detroit has had decades of financial problems, and it is time to face those problems and move forward,” said Matt Cullen, the president and chief executive for Rock Ventures, which is the umbrella entity for Gilbert’s portfolio. “Just as the auto companies had to reinvent how they do business, so does the city of Detroit.”
Several creditors didn’t return phone messages or declined to talk with The Associated Press about the negotiations. One creditor, Peter Hayes, managing director and head of BlackRock’s Municipal Bonds Group, criticized Orr’s plan and said the emergency manager is breaking promises the city previously made on bond payments.
“Those who own Detroit (general obligation) bonds, either on their own or in pooled vehicles such as those we manage at BlackRock, will suffer the financial consequences of the emergency manager’s misguided plan,” Hayes wrote in a letter published this week in the Detroit Free Press.
It’s not clear if the settlement reached in principle late last week with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch will be enough to prod other creditors. Orr spokesman Bill Nowling wouldn’t reveal details because the deal had not been signed. Bank of America-Merrill Lynch spokesman Bill Halldin declined to comment.
New York-based Syncora Guarantee Inc., a trustee on city swap deals involving casino tax revenue, has butted heads with Orr by trying to limit the city’s access to some of the money after creditors are paid. Syncora also accused Orr of having no intention to negotiate in good faith. A county judge issued a temporary restraining order to keep $11 million per month being held up by Syncora flowing back into city coffers after Orr took the issue to court.
Another creditor, National Public Finance Guarantee Corp., the indirect subsidiary of MBIA Inc., which has about $100.7 million of insured exposure to Detroit’s general obligation debt and $2.4 billion of the city’s revenue secured debt, is continuing to meet with the city but is also “considering potential alternatives to the plan the city has provided,” said spokesman Kevin Brown.
The 75-year-old retired businessman checked out a tree lopper and a tape measure, two of the more than 100 tools available to patrons of the suburban Detroit library.
In a number of communities across the U.S., it's possible to borrow tools, musical instruments, fishing poles and much more from the local public library. The trend expands the traditional role of the library as a community resource for free knowledge. Libraries see the programs as a new way to offer residents a chance to learn – just not necessarily with a book.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
Thank You For Using The Internet
Between 1999 and 2001, the Napster peer-to-peer file sharing program was indispensable for millions. At its peak, the service drew 26.4 million monthly unique users, who spent a collective 6.3 billion minutes a month pilfering shared hard drives for free music. In just over two years, Napster managed to cripple and nearly destroy the music industry. At the same time, it conditioned a generation to see the internet as a place where almost anything can, and therefore should, be free.
Since its beginning, the internet and a broad, loose conception of “freedom” have been inextricably linked. The “first web page”, authored by Tim Berners Lee, described the web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents”. The notion of a “free and open internet” has animated some of the web’s biggest movements, from open source software to Wikipedia to, in some cases, outright theft. Broadband connections grew popular, leaving users continuously logged on. Regular internet users soon came to expect that almost every type of media they once paid for — music, movies, news — would be available for free, legally or rtls.
That era — let’s call it the internet’s free trial period — is coming to an end. In the 12 years since courts shut down Napster, the internet has taken its hatchet to every other branch of the media industry, deftly pruning ad dollars, jobs, and shaving away bottom lines. Now the reaction, opposite but never quite equal, and always late, is starting to take effect. The untamed and lawless expanses of web content are quickly being replaced by paywalls and monthly fees. And, surprisingly, we don’t really seem to mind all that much. Most of us don’t even seem to notice.
Before sites like Amazon and eBay legitimized the process, paying for anything online — either physical or digital — was widely perceived as a risky proposition. A 2001 New York Times article captures this consumer trepidation with e-commerce, quoting a survey in which over 20 percent of respondents were identified as either “fearful browsers” or “suspicious learners”.
In 2003 that all changed, with the launch of the iTunes music store. With the backing of all five major record labels, Apple and Steve Jobs turned the music industry on its head, introducing the first efficient, truly appealing system for buying a digital product online. Set at 99 cents a song, the low price point helped Apple sell a million songs in its first month of operation (over 50 million in its first year). But more importantly, it was a crucial first step in conditioning normal internet users to pay for media online.
“99 cents felt like the price point that would be just enticing enough,” Paul Vidich, a former executive vice president of Warner Music Group, and the first to suggest the 99 cent price point to Jobs, told BuzzFeed. “It was low enough that in that moment, when you’re doing that value equation in your head, it’s something you don’t have to think twice about before buying.” Vidich also credits iTunes’ simple interface and one-click purchasing, which made buying a painless, easily repeatable experience — even psychologically satisfying. “We made it very easy to have honest people act honestly, Vidich said. “Most people don’t desire to steal this stuff. There’ll always be the hacker vanity of getting it for free but the majority of people aren’t in that category. If you give people the right things in the right window in the right time, they’ll pay.”
The growth of iTunes and the music store was the beginning for paid media online. “I was confident and so was Steve that we’d have some success, but we did not anticipate it would be as big as it was,” Vidich confessed. At the time, Apple had no way of knowing it, but 99 cent songs were indeed the turning point, priming users for Apple’s next coup. When iTunes’ App Store caught fire, online digital purchases graduated from a regular semi-habit to a weekly, or even daily, part of life. Even free apps had to be “purchased” through the same system and with the same password, ingraining the behavior deeper and deeper with every mouse click and finger swipe. It’d be fair to assume that most regular iOS users don’t remember when they first added a credit card to their iTunes accounts.
Ten years later, iTunes has sold over 25 billion songs. It recently celebrated its 50 billionth app download. Other companies, like Amazon, which was armed with millions of credit-card linked profiles from selling physical goods, followed suit, building out their own vast digital libraries. Meanwhile, services like Netflix transformed from a DVD mailing service into a mammoth on-demand streaming video network with over 30 million paid subscribers. Platforms like Steam, once seen as a nuisance by the gaming community, quickly became the most trusted destination for game purchases, digital or otherwise, with over 54 million active user accounts.
The rise of paid sites like Netflix coupled with wildly effective crackdowns on online piracy and the shutdown of massive file sharing sites like Megaupload mean that it’s now often easier for the average internet user to pay a nominal monthly fee for a Netflix account than navigate the murky waters of illegal streaming and hands free access.
There’s a shift in reader sentiment as well. In 2010, Pew’s State of the Media report revealed that 82 percent of its 11,000 respondents would abandon their favorite news site if it introduced a paywall. In 2012, a study by DigiCareers posed the same question. This time, only 52 percent indicated they’d be willing to abandon their favorite site if it erected a paywall. Similarly, a report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted “a significant shift in public attitudes towards digital news, with more than twice as many people paying for digital news content than a year ago.”
As far as trends move, paid news’ is creaking along glacially. The percentage of enthusiastic paywall subscribers is still below 20 percent, but it’s growing — an encouraging sign for a business model that was widely predicted to fail at the outset. “Today’s paywalls are by no means perfect, [and] have a lot of big holes in them,” Magid Advisors’ president Mike Vorhaus told BuzzFeed. “But we’re all going to pay for more and pay for stuff we’re not used to paying for. And as a result, publishers of all kinds will continue do a better job figuring out what we value and packaging our content better and more efficiently.”
While we’re nowhere near the end of the “free” internet, the web’s untamed corners undoubtedly feel smaller; increasingly, they’re hardly “untamed” at all, subject to various levels of co-opting by the companies they appear to undercut. A recent Variety article on password sharing revealed that while 40 percent of Netflix and 36 percent of HBO Go subscribers share their login credentials, the streaming companies don’t seem all that worried. “Enabling freeloading could be a counterintuitively savvy promotional tool for getting potential customers hooked on a product they wouldn’t otherwise sample,” the article speculates. Adding credence to the theory, the study also notes that “forty-one percent of HBO non-subs said they were willing to fork over fees within the next six months, while 33% of Netflix non-subs said they were ready to pay, as well.”
Since its beginning, the internet and a broad, loose conception of “freedom” have been inextricably linked. The “first web page”, authored by Tim Berners Lee, described the web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents”. The notion of a “free and open internet” has animated some of the web’s biggest movements, from open source software to Wikipedia to, in some cases, outright theft. Broadband connections grew popular, leaving users continuously logged on. Regular internet users soon came to expect that almost every type of media they once paid for — music, movies, news — would be available for free, legally or rtls.
That era — let’s call it the internet’s free trial period — is coming to an end. In the 12 years since courts shut down Napster, the internet has taken its hatchet to every other branch of the media industry, deftly pruning ad dollars, jobs, and shaving away bottom lines. Now the reaction, opposite but never quite equal, and always late, is starting to take effect. The untamed and lawless expanses of web content are quickly being replaced by paywalls and monthly fees. And, surprisingly, we don’t really seem to mind all that much. Most of us don’t even seem to notice.
Before sites like Amazon and eBay legitimized the process, paying for anything online — either physical or digital — was widely perceived as a risky proposition. A 2001 New York Times article captures this consumer trepidation with e-commerce, quoting a survey in which over 20 percent of respondents were identified as either “fearful browsers” or “suspicious learners”.
In 2003 that all changed, with the launch of the iTunes music store. With the backing of all five major record labels, Apple and Steve Jobs turned the music industry on its head, introducing the first efficient, truly appealing system for buying a digital product online. Set at 99 cents a song, the low price point helped Apple sell a million songs in its first month of operation (over 50 million in its first year). But more importantly, it was a crucial first step in conditioning normal internet users to pay for media online.
“99 cents felt like the price point that would be just enticing enough,” Paul Vidich, a former executive vice president of Warner Music Group, and the first to suggest the 99 cent price point to Jobs, told BuzzFeed. “It was low enough that in that moment, when you’re doing that value equation in your head, it’s something you don’t have to think twice about before buying.” Vidich also credits iTunes’ simple interface and one-click purchasing, which made buying a painless, easily repeatable experience — even psychologically satisfying. “We made it very easy to have honest people act honestly, Vidich said. “Most people don’t desire to steal this stuff. There’ll always be the hacker vanity of getting it for free but the majority of people aren’t in that category. If you give people the right things in the right window in the right time, they’ll pay.”
The growth of iTunes and the music store was the beginning for paid media online. “I was confident and so was Steve that we’d have some success, but we did not anticipate it would be as big as it was,” Vidich confessed. At the time, Apple had no way of knowing it, but 99 cent songs were indeed the turning point, priming users for Apple’s next coup. When iTunes’ App Store caught fire, online digital purchases graduated from a regular semi-habit to a weekly, or even daily, part of life. Even free apps had to be “purchased” through the same system and with the same password, ingraining the behavior deeper and deeper with every mouse click and finger swipe. It’d be fair to assume that most regular iOS users don’t remember when they first added a credit card to their iTunes accounts.
Ten years later, iTunes has sold over 25 billion songs. It recently celebrated its 50 billionth app download. Other companies, like Amazon, which was armed with millions of credit-card linked profiles from selling physical goods, followed suit, building out their own vast digital libraries. Meanwhile, services like Netflix transformed from a DVD mailing service into a mammoth on-demand streaming video network with over 30 million paid subscribers. Platforms like Steam, once seen as a nuisance by the gaming community, quickly became the most trusted destination for game purchases, digital or otherwise, with over 54 million active user accounts.
The rise of paid sites like Netflix coupled with wildly effective crackdowns on online piracy and the shutdown of massive file sharing sites like Megaupload mean that it’s now often easier for the average internet user to pay a nominal monthly fee for a Netflix account than navigate the murky waters of illegal streaming and hands free access.
There’s a shift in reader sentiment as well. In 2010, Pew’s State of the Media report revealed that 82 percent of its 11,000 respondents would abandon their favorite news site if it introduced a paywall. In 2012, a study by DigiCareers posed the same question. This time, only 52 percent indicated they’d be willing to abandon their favorite site if it erected a paywall. Similarly, a report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism noted “a significant shift in public attitudes towards digital news, with more than twice as many people paying for digital news content than a year ago.”
As far as trends move, paid news’ is creaking along glacially. The percentage of enthusiastic paywall subscribers is still below 20 percent, but it’s growing — an encouraging sign for a business model that was widely predicted to fail at the outset. “Today’s paywalls are by no means perfect, [and] have a lot of big holes in them,” Magid Advisors’ president Mike Vorhaus told BuzzFeed. “But we’re all going to pay for more and pay for stuff we’re not used to paying for. And as a result, publishers of all kinds will continue do a better job figuring out what we value and packaging our content better and more efficiently.”
While we’re nowhere near the end of the “free” internet, the web’s untamed corners undoubtedly feel smaller; increasingly, they’re hardly “untamed” at all, subject to various levels of co-opting by the companies they appear to undercut. A recent Variety article on password sharing revealed that while 40 percent of Netflix and 36 percent of HBO Go subscribers share their login credentials, the streaming companies don’t seem all that worried. “Enabling freeloading could be a counterintuitively savvy promotional tool for getting potential customers hooked on a product they wouldn’t otherwise sample,” the article speculates. Adding credence to the theory, the study also notes that “forty-one percent of HBO non-subs said they were willing to fork over fees within the next six months, while 33% of Netflix non-subs said they were ready to pay, as well.”
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
India struggles with IT in schools
The computer room at New Delhi’s Lady Irwin primary school – a state-run establishment with 1,400 students – contains 14 desktop computers used to familiarise pupils aged between nine and 11 with digital technology.
The questions “What is an operating system?”, “What is a desktop?” and “What is an icon?” are written neatly on a chalkboard above the machines, which are not connected to the internet. Students practise using Microsoft Excel and Word, and graphics programs. “The kids love to draw and paint on the computer – and play games such as Angry Birds,” says Radhika Bist, a computer teacher.
Lady Irwin’s lessons reflect India’s fumbling but eager embrace of digital technology in education, as schools grapple with how to integrate computers into the curriculum and try to bridge the country’s vast digital divide.“Earlier, the question was ‘Should computers be brought into the schools?’,” says Ashutosh Chadha, head of corporate affairs for south Asia at Intel, the technology company. “Now we know that computers should be brought into schools, but for what, and how? What we still need to crack is the ‘how’?”
Access to computers and digital learning materials in the classroom – and the way these are used – depend heavily on students’ economic status, and the type of school they attend.Many private schools are investing in advanced digital education systems to enliven classes with interactive learning materials. Technopak Advisors, a consultancy, estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 of India’s 260,000 private schools have invested in some form of classroom technology.Companies such as Educomp, NIIT, Core Education & Technologies and Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, are promoting digital education systems. Wiring up a single class can cost about Rs200,000 ($3,300), but companies are often willing to bear the initial installation costs, then charge monthly user fees per student.
Technopak estimates India’s market for digital learning systems at about $500m a year, although the competition for orders is fierce, and private schools in smaller cities are among some of the biggest customers.“Second and third-tier cities are where there is a lot of rtls,” says Enayet Kabir, the head of Techno-pak’s education division. “Parents there realise their children will not have a location advantage, compared with children who live in the bigger cities, but there is a desire to give them a high-quality education.”
State governments are also trying to promote the use of computers in their schools, but efforts vary widely, from teaching basic computer literacy to using digital technology to enhance learning in every subject. Many such initiatives are still in development, leaving hundreds of millions of students with no access at all.Haryana, in northern India, has computer labs in more than 2,600 secondary schools to teach basic computing, and has a $50m project to give five schools full digital learning systems.
In the southwest, in Karnataka, whose capital Bangalore is a hub of India’s information technology industry, state authorities are trying to establish computer-aided learning centres in every state school: with five computers and CDs with educational material in local languages. So far, about 20 per cent have been received their equipment.
The many obstacles include the lack of internet connections, trained teachers and even people to set up the machines. In some state schools, administrators are so terrified that the computers will be damaged, they are never taken out of their boxes.In 2011, the Indian government announced what was supposed to be a groundbreaking scheme to provide highly subsidised, education-focused tablet computers to university students. The Aakash, produced by Datawind, was touted as the world’s cheapest tablet, selling at just $35. But so far, the government has ordered just 100,000 and the devices have been plagued by quality issues.
Meanwhile, the government of Uttar Pradesh has begun handing out free notebook computers to those graduating from state high schools and enrolling in higher education, fulfilling a campaign promise of Akhilesh Yadav, the chief minister. Hewlett-Packard has won a $515m order to supply 1.5m computers for the give-away over a seven-month period.
But Intel’s Mr Chadha says policy makers need to move beyond just giving out devices. “It’s not just about providing devices in a classroom or in the hands of students,” he says. “Are you providing connectivity? Do you have local content available to them? And are the teachers trained? All of these are important to help bridge the digital divide.”
Microsoft has added another piece to its "free" Office package for iPhone users—free as in “free with an Office 365 account,” that is. This time, Microsoft included an Outlook mail client and calendar…sort of. Called OWA (as in Outlook Web App) for iPhone, this app takes the behaviors and interface of the Outlook client on Windows Phone 8 and embeds them in an iOS application formatted for the iPhone. It's similar to what Microsoft did with the Office app released last month.
As its name suggests, OWA for iPhone is not a full-fledged Outlook client in that it’s limited to the single e-mail account associated with an Office 365 account. It does, however, have most of the functionality you’d expect from a phone mail client. It syncs contacts with the iPhone address book, pushes notifications for appointments and new mail, and generally does everything else that the Windows Phone 8 Outlook and Calendar apps do with a somewhat similar interface.
Microsoft has thrown in a few things to subvert the Apple ecosystem besides building the application in an HTML5 clone of its “Metro” interface. For example, when you set the location for a meeting in OWA’s calendar, you can search for the location with Bing Maps and attach the address and map information to the appointment. Other features of the Outlook and full Outlook Web clients, such as automatic creation of appointments based on the contents of e-mails and access to LinkedIn data on the sender of an e-mail, are also part of the OWA for iPhone client.
The OWA client adds an additional layer of security for people who put the app on their personal phone—a mobile PIN. You can add a four-digit PIN code to the app to protect access to your e-mail, allowing you to pass your phone to your bored child or spouse to play Plants vs. Zombies without worrying about exposing them to the horrors of your work life.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
The questions “What is an operating system?”, “What is a desktop?” and “What is an icon?” are written neatly on a chalkboard above the machines, which are not connected to the internet. Students practise using Microsoft Excel and Word, and graphics programs. “The kids love to draw and paint on the computer – and play games such as Angry Birds,” says Radhika Bist, a computer teacher.
Lady Irwin’s lessons reflect India’s fumbling but eager embrace of digital technology in education, as schools grapple with how to integrate computers into the curriculum and try to bridge the country’s vast digital divide.“Earlier, the question was ‘Should computers be brought into the schools?’,” says Ashutosh Chadha, head of corporate affairs for south Asia at Intel, the technology company. “Now we know that computers should be brought into schools, but for what, and how? What we still need to crack is the ‘how’?”
Access to computers and digital learning materials in the classroom – and the way these are used – depend heavily on students’ economic status, and the type of school they attend.Many private schools are investing in advanced digital education systems to enliven classes with interactive learning materials. Technopak Advisors, a consultancy, estimates that between 80,000 and 100,000 of India’s 260,000 private schools have invested in some form of classroom technology.Companies such as Educomp, NIIT, Core Education & Technologies and Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, are promoting digital education systems. Wiring up a single class can cost about Rs200,000 ($3,300), but companies are often willing to bear the initial installation costs, then charge monthly user fees per student.
Technopak estimates India’s market for digital learning systems at about $500m a year, although the competition for orders is fierce, and private schools in smaller cities are among some of the biggest customers.“Second and third-tier cities are where there is a lot of rtls,” says Enayet Kabir, the head of Techno-pak’s education division. “Parents there realise their children will not have a location advantage, compared with children who live in the bigger cities, but there is a desire to give them a high-quality education.”
State governments are also trying to promote the use of computers in their schools, but efforts vary widely, from teaching basic computer literacy to using digital technology to enhance learning in every subject. Many such initiatives are still in development, leaving hundreds of millions of students with no access at all.Haryana, in northern India, has computer labs in more than 2,600 secondary schools to teach basic computing, and has a $50m project to give five schools full digital learning systems.
In the southwest, in Karnataka, whose capital Bangalore is a hub of India’s information technology industry, state authorities are trying to establish computer-aided learning centres in every state school: with five computers and CDs with educational material in local languages. So far, about 20 per cent have been received their equipment.
The many obstacles include the lack of internet connections, trained teachers and even people to set up the machines. In some state schools, administrators are so terrified that the computers will be damaged, they are never taken out of their boxes.In 2011, the Indian government announced what was supposed to be a groundbreaking scheme to provide highly subsidised, education-focused tablet computers to university students. The Aakash, produced by Datawind, was touted as the world’s cheapest tablet, selling at just $35. But so far, the government has ordered just 100,000 and the devices have been plagued by quality issues.
Meanwhile, the government of Uttar Pradesh has begun handing out free notebook computers to those graduating from state high schools and enrolling in higher education, fulfilling a campaign promise of Akhilesh Yadav, the chief minister. Hewlett-Packard has won a $515m order to supply 1.5m computers for the give-away over a seven-month period.
But Intel’s Mr Chadha says policy makers need to move beyond just giving out devices. “It’s not just about providing devices in a classroom or in the hands of students,” he says. “Are you providing connectivity? Do you have local content available to them? And are the teachers trained? All of these are important to help bridge the digital divide.”
Microsoft has added another piece to its "free" Office package for iPhone users—free as in “free with an Office 365 account,” that is. This time, Microsoft included an Outlook mail client and calendar…sort of. Called OWA (as in Outlook Web App) for iPhone, this app takes the behaviors and interface of the Outlook client on Windows Phone 8 and embeds them in an iOS application formatted for the iPhone. It's similar to what Microsoft did with the Office app released last month.
As its name suggests, OWA for iPhone is not a full-fledged Outlook client in that it’s limited to the single e-mail account associated with an Office 365 account. It does, however, have most of the functionality you’d expect from a phone mail client. It syncs contacts with the iPhone address book, pushes notifications for appointments and new mail, and generally does everything else that the Windows Phone 8 Outlook and Calendar apps do with a somewhat similar interface.
Microsoft has thrown in a few things to subvert the Apple ecosystem besides building the application in an HTML5 clone of its “Metro” interface. For example, when you set the location for a meeting in OWA’s calendar, you can search for the location with Bing Maps and attach the address and map information to the appointment. Other features of the Outlook and full Outlook Web clients, such as automatic creation of appointments based on the contents of e-mails and access to LinkedIn data on the sender of an e-mail, are also part of the OWA for iPhone client.
The OWA client adds an additional layer of security for people who put the app on their personal phone—a mobile PIN. You can add a four-digit PIN code to the app to protect access to your e-mail, allowing you to pass your phone to your bored child or spouse to play Plants vs. Zombies without worrying about exposing them to the horrors of your work life.
Click on their website www.ecived.com/en/.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Does this undocumented family deserve to stay in Toronto?
They own two cars, a 3,000-sq-ft home by the lake and run a successful landscaping business that rings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue.By most accounts, they are the hardworking and well-established immigrants that Canada needs and wants.
Since their arrival from Mexico in 2007, however, the Dias family has lived a life of secrecy — off the population map and, by necessity, the radar of Canadian immigration officials.Jose Dias, his wife Sofia, both in their 40s, their adult son Carlos and daughter Antonia are among tens of thousands of people in Greater Toronto who live and work here without legal status.
Known as “the undocumented,” they are failed refugee claimants dodging deportation or those who overstayed temporary work, student or visitor visas. Many are economic migrants, often from developing countries, seeking work or a better lifestyle.With Toronto poised to become Canada’s first “sanctuary city,” which would open up municipally funded services to immigrants, legal or not, it raises the politically contentious question: Do these migrants deserve to stay?
The Dias family agreed to share their personal story though they asked that their names be changed to protect them from authorities. While their story may not represent the experience of all undocumented people, they say they want to show the human side to a vulnerable population. “We want Canadians to see the other side of the story and understand why we do the things we do,” says Antonia. “We want a better life, which is not possible in Mexico.”
In many ways the undocumented are indistinguishable from ordinary Canadians and well-integrated in the community. They work, though often for low pay. They lay shingles, labour on construction sites, indoor positioning system, clean offices and homes. They feed a whole industry, from employers who rely on cheap labour and job recruiters who take their cut to payday loan managers who charge fees to cash the illegal’s paycheques.
The undocumented live in a constant state of fear. If caught, they most certainly face deportation. So they rarely report a crime, go to a doctor’s office or complain about unfair treatment by employers. They avoid the public library, or any other government service, for fear it will prompt questions about their status. Some parents go so far as to keep their kids home from school.
A City of Toronto report estimates there are anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 undocumented migrants in the GTA, roughly 2 to 5 per cent of the population.Estimates are extremely unreliable, however, because no one is able to track such a transient population. City officials hope that by extending services to them, they will have a better grasp of the nature and extent of illegal migration.
In 2015, their numbers are expected to surge when four-year work permits for thousands of temporary foreign workers, currently here legally, expire under a 2011 federal law, potentially moving thousands more underground. Last year alone, 340,000 foreigners on work permits resided in Canada.
To manage the new reality, Toronto City Council has asked staff to report in the fall on ways to improve access to municipal services — public health, shelters, food banks, after-school day care, breakfast programs, emergency medical services — for residents without legal status. It also urged Ottawa to consider a form of amnesty by giving them permanent status.
The issue of illegal migration is highly controversial in the United States, as the Senate passed its landmark immigration bill in June that will allow its estimated 11 million non-status residents to stay legally while boosting crackdown on future illegal migration by hiring 20,000 new border patrol officers and completing an 1,100-kilometre fence to guard the border with Mexico.
By 1998 the couple, in their twenties, had three young kids under 10. Eager to earn more money for his family, Jose crossed the border with other migrantes indocumentados and spent a year in Houston doing drywall and framing. Each month he sent most of his paycheque back home.
“I didn’t want to go,” says Jose, a stocky man whose callused hands tell of years of hard labour. “But I had to go to support my family.”His goal, he says, was to make enough money so his kids could go to university instead of taking on labour jobs out of high school.
The $14-an-hour pay was 10 times more than he made back home and boosted the family’s standard of living. His two daughters and son were able enroll in karate and other after-school programs, and the family renovated their home.But Jose soon became homesick and returned to Mexico the following year.
He crossed the border again in 2005, this time to Los Angeles and again landed a job in construction. But a serious workplace accident cut his stay short. It also convinced him that he no longer wanted to be away from his family.
While on the job site cutting drywall, both his knees became caught in an electrical saw. He was loaded onto the employer’s truck and dumped at the entrance of a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery for torn ligaments. When discharged, he took the subway back to an apartment he shared with other Mexican workers. Scared, alone and with no English, he decided to pack up and go home.
“There were more job opportunities here than in the U.S., because there were so many illegal migrants fighting for jobs there,” Jose says of his decision to come to Canada.Sofia arrived eight months later, followed by their three children, all teenagers by then, in the summer of 2008.They arrived as tourists so didn’t need a visa to enter the country if they would only stay here under six months. That would change a year later when the Canadian government, in 2009, imposed visa requirements on all visitors from Mexico to curb a growing influx of refugees.
The family’s plan was to work and make as much money here as possible in the shortest time, perhaps a few years, and return home. Since they never filed a refugee claim, and Canada does not record visitors’ departures, the Dias family quietly settled into daily life without a paper trail.
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Since their arrival from Mexico in 2007, however, the Dias family has lived a life of secrecy — off the population map and, by necessity, the radar of Canadian immigration officials.Jose Dias, his wife Sofia, both in their 40s, their adult son Carlos and daughter Antonia are among tens of thousands of people in Greater Toronto who live and work here without legal status.
Known as “the undocumented,” they are failed refugee claimants dodging deportation or those who overstayed temporary work, student or visitor visas. Many are economic migrants, often from developing countries, seeking work or a better lifestyle.With Toronto poised to become Canada’s first “sanctuary city,” which would open up municipally funded services to immigrants, legal or not, it raises the politically contentious question: Do these migrants deserve to stay?
The Dias family agreed to share their personal story though they asked that their names be changed to protect them from authorities. While their story may not represent the experience of all undocumented people, they say they want to show the human side to a vulnerable population. “We want Canadians to see the other side of the story and understand why we do the things we do,” says Antonia. “We want a better life, which is not possible in Mexico.”
In many ways the undocumented are indistinguishable from ordinary Canadians and well-integrated in the community. They work, though often for low pay. They lay shingles, labour on construction sites, indoor positioning system, clean offices and homes. They feed a whole industry, from employers who rely on cheap labour and job recruiters who take their cut to payday loan managers who charge fees to cash the illegal’s paycheques.
The undocumented live in a constant state of fear. If caught, they most certainly face deportation. So they rarely report a crime, go to a doctor’s office or complain about unfair treatment by employers. They avoid the public library, or any other government service, for fear it will prompt questions about their status. Some parents go so far as to keep their kids home from school.
A City of Toronto report estimates there are anywhere between 100,000 and 250,000 undocumented migrants in the GTA, roughly 2 to 5 per cent of the population.Estimates are extremely unreliable, however, because no one is able to track such a transient population. City officials hope that by extending services to them, they will have a better grasp of the nature and extent of illegal migration.
In 2015, their numbers are expected to surge when four-year work permits for thousands of temporary foreign workers, currently here legally, expire under a 2011 federal law, potentially moving thousands more underground. Last year alone, 340,000 foreigners on work permits resided in Canada.
To manage the new reality, Toronto City Council has asked staff to report in the fall on ways to improve access to municipal services — public health, shelters, food banks, after-school day care, breakfast programs, emergency medical services — for residents without legal status. It also urged Ottawa to consider a form of amnesty by giving them permanent status.
The issue of illegal migration is highly controversial in the United States, as the Senate passed its landmark immigration bill in June that will allow its estimated 11 million non-status residents to stay legally while boosting crackdown on future illegal migration by hiring 20,000 new border patrol officers and completing an 1,100-kilometre fence to guard the border with Mexico.
By 1998 the couple, in their twenties, had three young kids under 10. Eager to earn more money for his family, Jose crossed the border with other migrantes indocumentados and spent a year in Houston doing drywall and framing. Each month he sent most of his paycheque back home.
“I didn’t want to go,” says Jose, a stocky man whose callused hands tell of years of hard labour. “But I had to go to support my family.”His goal, he says, was to make enough money so his kids could go to university instead of taking on labour jobs out of high school.
The $14-an-hour pay was 10 times more than he made back home and boosted the family’s standard of living. His two daughters and son were able enroll in karate and other after-school programs, and the family renovated their home.But Jose soon became homesick and returned to Mexico the following year.
He crossed the border again in 2005, this time to Los Angeles and again landed a job in construction. But a serious workplace accident cut his stay short. It also convinced him that he no longer wanted to be away from his family.
While on the job site cutting drywall, both his knees became caught in an electrical saw. He was loaded onto the employer’s truck and dumped at the entrance of a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery for torn ligaments. When discharged, he took the subway back to an apartment he shared with other Mexican workers. Scared, alone and with no English, he decided to pack up and go home.
“There were more job opportunities here than in the U.S., because there were so many illegal migrants fighting for jobs there,” Jose says of his decision to come to Canada.Sofia arrived eight months later, followed by their three children, all teenagers by then, in the summer of 2008.They arrived as tourists so didn’t need a visa to enter the country if they would only stay here under six months. That would change a year later when the Canadian government, in 2009, imposed visa requirements on all visitors from Mexico to curb a growing influx of refugees.
The family’s plan was to work and make as much money here as possible in the shortest time, perhaps a few years, and return home. Since they never filed a refugee claim, and Canada does not record visitors’ departures, the Dias family quietly settled into daily life without a paper trail.
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
Shipyard Handling Solutions from J D Neuhaus
With nearly 270 years of hoisting technology experience, the J D Neuhaus company have pioneered many substantial innovations in the field of air powered handling equipment and are now acknowledged as global market leaders utilising this technology. Their impressive range of hoists, covering lift capacities from 250kg up to a full 100 tonnes, are used worldwide within many heavy-industry applications including shipbuilding and offshore, covering newbuild, refits and repair as well as dismantling. Typical shipyard external applications include the installation and disassembly of rudder blades, shafts and propellers, while internal work includes heavy components for the engine room drive equipment as well as drive shafts and other general fitting out or installation work.
Compared with electrically operated hoists, the JDN air powered equipment offers a wider range of operations that can be safely undertaken in outdoor damp, dirty or even hazardous area locations as well as indoor operation in dusty or potentially explosive atmospheres. Typical performance advantages include easy installation with rtls, low-maintenance compact designs combining reduced weights and easy handling with 100% duty rating toughness. Operating air pressures range from 4 to 6 bar with lube-free performance ensuring non-pollution of the environment as exhaust air is oil-free. A range of optional pendant controllers are available to provide sensitive, infinitely variable speed controls for the safe and precise positioning of suspended loads. General insensitivity to dust, humidity and temperatures ranging from -20°C to +70°C helps to ensure an unlimited duty-cycle performance capacity.
The Profi Ti represents the major range of hoists in the JDN range. This covers a total of 19 products covering load capacities from 250kg up to an impressive 100 tonnes per unit. These hoists all incorporate a top suspension hook mounting so that multiple hoists can be utilised for single load handling, where oblique hoisting typically required for ship rudder or propeller mount/dismount operations can be accommodated (compliance with special safety precautions will also apply). These rugged products can also be used for horizontal pulling. Where horizontal movements of suspended loads up to 20 tonnes need to be accommodated, then the Profi Ti hoists can be mounted on trolley units for operation on overhead support rails even incorporating curves. The trolley horizontal movements can be achieved by manual, reel chain or fully motor operated, while anti-climb and anti-drop features are also incorporated. These are particularly suited for ship engine room operations where an optional low headroom trolley mount can also be made available.
These high performance, low-headroom products can be used with confidence in all areas where safety is a priority. They combine strength, reliability and speed with virtual silence of operation plus high speed lift and lower functions. For units up to 20 tonnes capacity an integrated emergency stop switch is incorporated into the main air supply. For all hoists over 1 tonne capacity, overload protection is provided as standard. Controlled load lowering in the event of total power loss can also be provided. The products are compact and based upon a modern design which minimises protruding parts which could be susceptible to damage. They offer fail-safe starting with a low maintenance vane motor. A planetary gearbox incorporates long-life grease lubrication while gears are manufactured from tempered or hardened high-grade steel. Load chains and hooks are also high tempered with a breaking strength of 5 x the nominal loads. An Ex classification according to EC Directive on Hazardous locations 94/9/EEC is provided as standard to levels Ex II 2 GD IIA T4 / II 3 GD IIB T4, or with increased spark protection to Ex II 2 GD IIC T4.
For general lighter duty lift operations, the JDN Mini series hoists can be ideally utilised. With load capacities of 125, 250, 500 and 980kg, these handy, flexible products are universally deployable as a general tool for shipyard operations. Their compact, lightweight construction ensures easy operation, while the products provide the same degree of performance, reliability, durability and safety as the heavier duty Profi range. A Mini Manipulator version allows loads to be lifted, manually traversed and positioned using only one hand, and an explosion rating Ex II 3 GD IIA T4 is ensured.
Other marine related products that can be supplied include hoists for underwater operation which have successfully been deployed for the removal, repair and eventual replacement of a damaged 50 tonne rudder on a fully loaded bulk cargo vessel while moored off the coast of Venezuela, a project that was featured on the National Geographic Channel's 'World's Toughest Fixes' programme. Other specialised equipment include hydraulically powered hoists designed for operation at extreme temperatures down to -45°C.
But then the Galaxy NX's initial negative is that it feels somewhat alien in the hand on account of its physical size and lack of many physical controls. The fusion of a smartphone-derived operating system merged with an interchangeable lens system does make sense, but the omission of physical buttons means almost everything runs through the power of the touchscreen. And that means taking the camera away from the eye and out of both hands more than a typical DSLR or compact system camera (CSC) user might otherwise. It's a different prospect, and one that took us a while to adapt to.
There is one exception to the touchscreen control - a large thumbwheel atop the camera that doubles up as a button to toggle between key settings, or when held down it dives into full Android OS complete with apps, Google Play and the like. It's certainly a useful control mechanism but we found it to be finicky - defaulting to adjust the shooting mode rather than the settings and without resounding clarity as to which settings were in play for adjustment.
After extended use the Galaxy NX's controls start to take; it forges into something more familiar, yet something entirely new. Before long we were fixed into our more typical way of shooting - aperture priority mode selected, thumbwheel used to stop up or down - but snapping away was a combination of tapping the touchscreen for compact-camera-like focus, along with using the included electronic viewfinder as we would with a DSLR or similar all-in CSC.
There are significant benefits to the Android operating system too - not least connectivity and sharing which, again, we'll address in more detail later - that quickly come into play. Simple things come to mind: press and drag on an image in playback while zoomed in to get a close-up look of the important parts at absolute size - which saves the faff with lots of buttons and directional-pad controls. Everything operates through the touchscreen, the gallery is far more organised than any other camera we've seen and apps loaded into the 16GB of internal storage can directly load up images to work with.
Click on their website www.ecived.com.
Compared with electrically operated hoists, the JDN air powered equipment offers a wider range of operations that can be safely undertaken in outdoor damp, dirty or even hazardous area locations as well as indoor operation in dusty or potentially explosive atmospheres. Typical performance advantages include easy installation with rtls, low-maintenance compact designs combining reduced weights and easy handling with 100% duty rating toughness. Operating air pressures range from 4 to 6 bar with lube-free performance ensuring non-pollution of the environment as exhaust air is oil-free. A range of optional pendant controllers are available to provide sensitive, infinitely variable speed controls for the safe and precise positioning of suspended loads. General insensitivity to dust, humidity and temperatures ranging from -20°C to +70°C helps to ensure an unlimited duty-cycle performance capacity.
The Profi Ti represents the major range of hoists in the JDN range. This covers a total of 19 products covering load capacities from 250kg up to an impressive 100 tonnes per unit. These hoists all incorporate a top suspension hook mounting so that multiple hoists can be utilised for single load handling, where oblique hoisting typically required for ship rudder or propeller mount/dismount operations can be accommodated (compliance with special safety precautions will also apply). These rugged products can also be used for horizontal pulling. Where horizontal movements of suspended loads up to 20 tonnes need to be accommodated, then the Profi Ti hoists can be mounted on trolley units for operation on overhead support rails even incorporating curves. The trolley horizontal movements can be achieved by manual, reel chain or fully motor operated, while anti-climb and anti-drop features are also incorporated. These are particularly suited for ship engine room operations where an optional low headroom trolley mount can also be made available.
These high performance, low-headroom products can be used with confidence in all areas where safety is a priority. They combine strength, reliability and speed with virtual silence of operation plus high speed lift and lower functions. For units up to 20 tonnes capacity an integrated emergency stop switch is incorporated into the main air supply. For all hoists over 1 tonne capacity, overload protection is provided as standard. Controlled load lowering in the event of total power loss can also be provided. The products are compact and based upon a modern design which minimises protruding parts which could be susceptible to damage. They offer fail-safe starting with a low maintenance vane motor. A planetary gearbox incorporates long-life grease lubrication while gears are manufactured from tempered or hardened high-grade steel. Load chains and hooks are also high tempered with a breaking strength of 5 x the nominal loads. An Ex classification according to EC Directive on Hazardous locations 94/9/EEC is provided as standard to levels Ex II 2 GD IIA T4 / II 3 GD IIB T4, or with increased spark protection to Ex II 2 GD IIC T4.
For general lighter duty lift operations, the JDN Mini series hoists can be ideally utilised. With load capacities of 125, 250, 500 and 980kg, these handy, flexible products are universally deployable as a general tool for shipyard operations. Their compact, lightweight construction ensures easy operation, while the products provide the same degree of performance, reliability, durability and safety as the heavier duty Profi range. A Mini Manipulator version allows loads to be lifted, manually traversed and positioned using only one hand, and an explosion rating Ex II 3 GD IIA T4 is ensured.
Other marine related products that can be supplied include hoists for underwater operation which have successfully been deployed for the removal, repair and eventual replacement of a damaged 50 tonne rudder on a fully loaded bulk cargo vessel while moored off the coast of Venezuela, a project that was featured on the National Geographic Channel's 'World's Toughest Fixes' programme. Other specialised equipment include hydraulically powered hoists designed for operation at extreme temperatures down to -45°C.
But then the Galaxy NX's initial negative is that it feels somewhat alien in the hand on account of its physical size and lack of many physical controls. The fusion of a smartphone-derived operating system merged with an interchangeable lens system does make sense, but the omission of physical buttons means almost everything runs through the power of the touchscreen. And that means taking the camera away from the eye and out of both hands more than a typical DSLR or compact system camera (CSC) user might otherwise. It's a different prospect, and one that took us a while to adapt to.
There is one exception to the touchscreen control - a large thumbwheel atop the camera that doubles up as a button to toggle between key settings, or when held down it dives into full Android OS complete with apps, Google Play and the like. It's certainly a useful control mechanism but we found it to be finicky - defaulting to adjust the shooting mode rather than the settings and without resounding clarity as to which settings were in play for adjustment.
After extended use the Galaxy NX's controls start to take; it forges into something more familiar, yet something entirely new. Before long we were fixed into our more typical way of shooting - aperture priority mode selected, thumbwheel used to stop up or down - but snapping away was a combination of tapping the touchscreen for compact-camera-like focus, along with using the included electronic viewfinder as we would with a DSLR or similar all-in CSC.
There are significant benefits to the Android operating system too - not least connectivity and sharing which, again, we'll address in more detail later - that quickly come into play. Simple things come to mind: press and drag on an image in playback while zoomed in to get a close-up look of the important parts at absolute size - which saves the faff with lots of buttons and directional-pad controls. Everything operates through the touchscreen, the gallery is far more organised than any other camera we've seen and apps loaded into the 16GB of internal storage can directly load up images to work with.
Click on their website www.ecived.com.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Sauk County family raises fish
Chris Meuiner said he is definitely a farmer with long days of hard work raising crops and livestock, but he has figured out how to do it without getting his hands in the dirt.
Chris and his parents, Donna and Norbert Meuiner, and an uncle, John Ringsdorf, operate KP Simply Fresh, a five-year-old aquaponics business near North Freedom in Sauk County. The family pioneered the first aquaponics system of its kind in Wisconsin five years ago and will be one of nearly a dozen fish farms in the state to hold open houses for the public July 20 for Wisconsin Aquaculture Day.
Aquaponics is a two-part system where fish — in this case tilapia — are raised in tanks. Nutrient-rich water from the tanks is pumped to 12- to 15-inch-deep grow beds with rafts of lettuce floating on top. Lettuce roots dangle into the water, drawing up nutrients for the plants before it is pumped clean back to the fish tanks.
Fish are not new to the Meuiners. Donna ran a tropical fish business in Milwaukee until their family of four children started growing and they moved out of the city.They shifted into game machines and supplied parlors all over the state. As gaming started to drop off in recent years, Norbert said he was looking for a new enterprise.“Now we thought, we like the rtls, why not go back into it? But around here we couldn’t raise enough fish to make a living,” he said.
They watched a TV show about aquaponics and liked the idea.Four people run the whole business. Donna plants, tends, harvests, packages, markets and delivers lettuce to nearby schools, hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, farmers markets and a growing number of restaurants.“I always say the best part of the whole scenario is that I also take the checks to the bank, and we eat lettuce every day,” she said, laughing.Lettuce grows to maturity in five to six weeks under a greenhouse cover and floating in 72-degree water.
“The advantage is when it’s 20 degrees out there’s not much going in the farming fields, but we’re still growing lettuce every day and pushing between 800 and 1,000 heads a week,” Chris said.They hope to boost production to 1,400 to 1,700 heads a week with the expansion.Donna markets the 20-or-so varieties of lettuce as chemical-free but not organic.
“There are chemicals that are allowed in organic farming that would kill my fish, so we don’t even use that,” she said. “If we have an issue, we use all biological controls, which simply means that I release lady bugs every other week, and they take care of whatever problem I have.”
There are no chemicals or growth hormones at the fish end of it either, because they would harm the plants. About 1,800 to 2,000 fish are kept in the system to support lettuce production.They are brought in as fingerlings and distributed among other tanks as they grow. Fish are harvested at about 2 pounds and shipped to an outside processor.
“We can sell every pound of fish that we can get, but we don’t always have fish available, because we need the nutrients from the fish to get the lettuce,” Norbert said. “The lettuce is our moneymaker. We lose money on every fish that we sell, but we don’t have to buy fertilizer.”
The expansion has been physically draining, Norbert said. The original setup had fish and grow beds in the same greenhouse. The expansion separated the two. Using no outside help, the family dismantled all the fish tanks, water supply and electrical and moved it to a different building. Four more grow beds were installed in the greenhouse.
Chris said the family knew they were getting into a labor-intensive business, but it wasn’t much different from the long days they had worked before.“It’s farming. It’s not celebrity, it’s not millions of dollars, and you’re married to your company,” he said.The plan is to grow the business enough to be able to hire employees to do the repetitive work and keep the family on the management side. The infrastructure of the expansion is in place and will be planted as soon as markets for additional lettuce can be found.
Between 300 and 400 visitors are expected to tour the business for Aquaculture Day July 20. Chris said the message he wants them to take home is that a combined food system like theirs is viable.“This is the farming of the future. Stuff like this is how we are going to feed the planet,” he said. “Right now we are harvesting between 800 and 1,000 heads of lettuce a week in a little 5,000 square feet of beds down there. It’s more to open people’s eyes to see what we can do.”
That’s particularly true in places like the Washington, D.C., area where service members, retirees and family members can choose from an array of top-notch civilian facilities to get their medical care, Army Col. Chuck Callahan told American Forces Press Service.
But with a gleaming 1.3-million-square-foot facility and a strategy centered on taking care of patients and their families, Callahan has set out to attract more of the 164,000 military health care beneficiaries in the region that currently use TRICARE to seek their care at Fort Belvoir.
“Because Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is not the only game in town, we must compete with civilian facilities who also want to care for our patients,” Callahan said. “My opinion is that the way to do that is to build a system that people want to come to.”
The new hospital stands in stark contrast to the 1950s-era DeWitt Army Community Hospital it replaced. Built in compliance with the congressionally mandated 2005 Base Realignment and Closure reorganization plan, the new hospital is part of a sweeping plan to improve the efficiency of military health care in the Washington, D.C., area.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Chris and his parents, Donna and Norbert Meuiner, and an uncle, John Ringsdorf, operate KP Simply Fresh, a five-year-old aquaponics business near North Freedom in Sauk County. The family pioneered the first aquaponics system of its kind in Wisconsin five years ago and will be one of nearly a dozen fish farms in the state to hold open houses for the public July 20 for Wisconsin Aquaculture Day.
Aquaponics is a two-part system where fish — in this case tilapia — are raised in tanks. Nutrient-rich water from the tanks is pumped to 12- to 15-inch-deep grow beds with rafts of lettuce floating on top. Lettuce roots dangle into the water, drawing up nutrients for the plants before it is pumped clean back to the fish tanks.
Fish are not new to the Meuiners. Donna ran a tropical fish business in Milwaukee until their family of four children started growing and they moved out of the city.They shifted into game machines and supplied parlors all over the state. As gaming started to drop off in recent years, Norbert said he was looking for a new enterprise.“Now we thought, we like the rtls, why not go back into it? But around here we couldn’t raise enough fish to make a living,” he said.
They watched a TV show about aquaponics and liked the idea.Four people run the whole business. Donna plants, tends, harvests, packages, markets and delivers lettuce to nearby schools, hospitals, nursing homes, grocery stores, farmers markets and a growing number of restaurants.“I always say the best part of the whole scenario is that I also take the checks to the bank, and we eat lettuce every day,” she said, laughing.Lettuce grows to maturity in five to six weeks under a greenhouse cover and floating in 72-degree water.
“The advantage is when it’s 20 degrees out there’s not much going in the farming fields, but we’re still growing lettuce every day and pushing between 800 and 1,000 heads a week,” Chris said.They hope to boost production to 1,400 to 1,700 heads a week with the expansion.Donna markets the 20-or-so varieties of lettuce as chemical-free but not organic.
“There are chemicals that are allowed in organic farming that would kill my fish, so we don’t even use that,” she said. “If we have an issue, we use all biological controls, which simply means that I release lady bugs every other week, and they take care of whatever problem I have.”
There are no chemicals or growth hormones at the fish end of it either, because they would harm the plants. About 1,800 to 2,000 fish are kept in the system to support lettuce production.They are brought in as fingerlings and distributed among other tanks as they grow. Fish are harvested at about 2 pounds and shipped to an outside processor.
“We can sell every pound of fish that we can get, but we don’t always have fish available, because we need the nutrients from the fish to get the lettuce,” Norbert said. “The lettuce is our moneymaker. We lose money on every fish that we sell, but we don’t have to buy fertilizer.”
The expansion has been physically draining, Norbert said. The original setup had fish and grow beds in the same greenhouse. The expansion separated the two. Using no outside help, the family dismantled all the fish tanks, water supply and electrical and moved it to a different building. Four more grow beds were installed in the greenhouse.
Chris said the family knew they were getting into a labor-intensive business, but it wasn’t much different from the long days they had worked before.“It’s farming. It’s not celebrity, it’s not millions of dollars, and you’re married to your company,” he said.The plan is to grow the business enough to be able to hire employees to do the repetitive work and keep the family on the management side. The infrastructure of the expansion is in place and will be planted as soon as markets for additional lettuce can be found.
Between 300 and 400 visitors are expected to tour the business for Aquaculture Day July 20. Chris said the message he wants them to take home is that a combined food system like theirs is viable.“This is the farming of the future. Stuff like this is how we are going to feed the planet,” he said. “Right now we are harvesting between 800 and 1,000 heads of lettuce a week in a little 5,000 square feet of beds down there. It’s more to open people’s eyes to see what we can do.”
That’s particularly true in places like the Washington, D.C., area where service members, retirees and family members can choose from an array of top-notch civilian facilities to get their medical care, Army Col. Chuck Callahan told American Forces Press Service.
But with a gleaming 1.3-million-square-foot facility and a strategy centered on taking care of patients and their families, Callahan has set out to attract more of the 164,000 military health care beneficiaries in the region that currently use TRICARE to seek their care at Fort Belvoir.
“Because Fort Belvoir Community Hospital is not the only game in town, we must compete with civilian facilities who also want to care for our patients,” Callahan said. “My opinion is that the way to do that is to build a system that people want to come to.”
The new hospital stands in stark contrast to the 1950s-era DeWitt Army Community Hospital it replaced. Built in compliance with the congressionally mandated 2005 Base Realignment and Closure reorganization plan, the new hospital is part of a sweeping plan to improve the efficiency of military health care in the Washington, D.C., area.
Read the full story at http://www.ecived.com/en/!
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Shells smash into Aleppo prison as rebels, regime clash
Shells smashed into a central prison in the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo, killing some prisoners, a rights group said Sunday, part of a long battle for control of the ancient city.The explosions killed six prisoners, said the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which communicates with a network of activists on the ground. The explosives hit on Friday night, the Observatory said. It was not clear who fired the shells.
With government forces stepping up offensives, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood called on the U.S. and Europe to send arms."Providing the Free Syrian Army and the revolutionary rebels with appropriate arms is more urgent now than at any time in the past," the movement wrote on social media sites. "We feel cheated and disappointed because the U.S. and Europe have backed out from arming the FSA," it said.
Last month the U.S. decided in principle to provide some weapons to rebel forces, though Western countries are concerned they might land in the hands of extremist Sunni Muslims fighting with the rebels.The forces include an al-Qaida-linked group which has been fighting for weeks to seize control of the prison in Aleppo, besieging it. The Observatory estimated some 120 prisoners have died in the jail since April from fighting, illness and rtls.
Syria's state run news agency SANA said "a number" of rebels were killed in the shelling but did not give an exact number.Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is near the border with Turkey. Many of its ancient monuments and its marketplace, once a magnet for tourists, have been destroyed in fighting.Rebels and government forces also clashed near the Shiite towns of Nubul and Zahra in Aleppo province, the Observatory and pro-rebel activists reported. The towns have been besieged since at least May by hard-line Sunni rebels seeking to dislodge their enemies.
The Observatory said fighting killed three regime troops, including one foreigner, code for a fighter from the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.Rebels claim that Assad's forces and Hezbollah fighters are in the two towns. A hard-line Sunni brigade warned last week it would punish Shiites for harbouring the forces, suggesting the towns' populations of some 40,000 Shiites could be targeted.
The fighting underscores the growing sectarian nature of the two-year uprising against Assad's regime. It began as peaceful protests but turned into an armed rebellion after a brutal government crackdown. It has since taken on regional dimensions, with Hezbollah fighters joining Assad's forces. Foreign Sunni fighters have joined predominantly Sunni Syrian rebels who are formed in bands ranging from secular to hard-line Islamists.
At home, Assad draws support largely from Syria's minorities, including fellow Alawites -- followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam -- as well as Christians, Shiites and Sunnis who fear the hard-line rebels.In recent weeks, Assad's forces, bolstered by Hezbollah fighters, have pushed back to seize rebel-held areas in several parts of Syria.
In the central Syrian city of Homs, Assad's forces fired mortar shells from a stronghold of buildings on the edge of the rebel-held area of Khaldiyeh, trying to flush out fighters, said two activists.Explosions could be heard as they spoke via Skype.The shells were exploding in the densely-built area surrounding the 13th-century mosque of Khalid Ibn al-Walid, famous for its nine domes and two minarets, said a Homs-based activist identified as Nedal. He said parts of the wall surrounding the historic complex were blown away. Other parts were damaged in previous rounds of fighting.Khaldiyeh-based activist Abu Bilal said fighters were low on weapons. He said the international community, despite promises to arm rebels, had left them hanging in Homs.
"They have sold Homs to the enemy," he complained.The U.N. warns the some 4,500 residents in besieged, rebel-held areas of Homs face a humanitarian catastrophe. On Friday, the divided U.N. Security Council failed to approve a statement calling on the Syrian government to allow immediate access to trapped civilians there. Russia, Syria's closest ally, demanded that the statement should also call for immediate access to the towns of Nubul and Zahra.
Private ownership of firearms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, creates an interesting dichotomy for American citizens and the recent blitzkrieg of anti-gun legislation has only served to heighten the resolve of the two diametrically opposed camps.
I don’t mean to oversimplify a complex issue, but here is how it generally breaks down: gun advocates proclaim that in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens, firearms are used every day for recreation, competition, to protect lives, homes, and personal property, as well as secure and safeguard personal liberties.
Individuals opposed to firearms, I believe, envision and portray guns primarily as agents of death and destruction, and as such, the number and types of firearms, ammunition, and magazines possessed by individual citizens should be strictly controlled and monitored by the federal government.
At present, U.S stock trading data offered by China's portals and vertical financial websites are usually delayed by 15 minutes or are operated with BATS (Better Alternative Trading System), a small-sized e-trading platform based in the U.S. that only offers real-time data for a limited number of stocks sold on US exchanges. The lack of real-time data has put Chinese investors at a disadvantage when trading on the primary exchanges in the U.S. At a time when traders buy and sell stocks very quickly based on the latest news, delayed information could no longer satisfy Chinese investors' demands.
Currently, investment in U.S stocks is heating up, but none of the financial institutions in China have been able to provide free real-time U.S exchange quotes to Chinese investors. "We are elated to place real-time market data in the hands of tens of millions of investors in China," said Brian Hyndman, Senior Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Data Products, "With NASDAQ Last Sale, Tencent subscribers have instant access to the best-priced stock quotes and last sale data in all U.S.-listed securities, enabling them to be better informed when making trading decisions."
Tencent Portfolio, as the only authorized mobile application approved by NASDAQ, can now provide free access to real-time updates of U.S stock-trading information on both the iPhone and Android platforms. Tencent is a fast-moving company and today's announcement is expected to ignite a reshuffling of the industry. Tencent Portfolio will not only stand out from competing stock applications, but will also stimulate the industry to pay close attention to offering real-time equity data services.
The Vice President of Tencent Mobile Media Product Huang Hai said, "The real-time quote service offered by Tencent Portfolio will cover all stocks listed in the U.S. exchanges. Following the rollout of free real-time data for the Hong Kong exchanges, we are now doing the same for the U.S. Tencent Portfolio aims to provide a free service to investors that includes the latest and most precise stock quotes so they can accurately grasp the investment opportunity."
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
With government forces stepping up offensives, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood called on the U.S. and Europe to send arms."Providing the Free Syrian Army and the revolutionary rebels with appropriate arms is more urgent now than at any time in the past," the movement wrote on social media sites. "We feel cheated and disappointed because the U.S. and Europe have backed out from arming the FSA," it said.
Last month the U.S. decided in principle to provide some weapons to rebel forces, though Western countries are concerned they might land in the hands of extremist Sunni Muslims fighting with the rebels.The forces include an al-Qaida-linked group which has been fighting for weeks to seize control of the prison in Aleppo, besieging it. The Observatory estimated some 120 prisoners have died in the jail since April from fighting, illness and rtls.
Syria's state run news agency SANA said "a number" of rebels were killed in the shelling but did not give an exact number.Aleppo, Syria's largest city, is near the border with Turkey. Many of its ancient monuments and its marketplace, once a magnet for tourists, have been destroyed in fighting.Rebels and government forces also clashed near the Shiite towns of Nubul and Zahra in Aleppo province, the Observatory and pro-rebel activists reported. The towns have been besieged since at least May by hard-line Sunni rebels seeking to dislodge their enemies.
The Observatory said fighting killed three regime troops, including one foreigner, code for a fighter from the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah.Rebels claim that Assad's forces and Hezbollah fighters are in the two towns. A hard-line Sunni brigade warned last week it would punish Shiites for harbouring the forces, suggesting the towns' populations of some 40,000 Shiites could be targeted.
The fighting underscores the growing sectarian nature of the two-year uprising against Assad's regime. It began as peaceful protests but turned into an armed rebellion after a brutal government crackdown. It has since taken on regional dimensions, with Hezbollah fighters joining Assad's forces. Foreign Sunni fighters have joined predominantly Sunni Syrian rebels who are formed in bands ranging from secular to hard-line Islamists.
At home, Assad draws support largely from Syria's minorities, including fellow Alawites -- followers of an offshoot of Shiite Islam -- as well as Christians, Shiites and Sunnis who fear the hard-line rebels.In recent weeks, Assad's forces, bolstered by Hezbollah fighters, have pushed back to seize rebel-held areas in several parts of Syria.
In the central Syrian city of Homs, Assad's forces fired mortar shells from a stronghold of buildings on the edge of the rebel-held area of Khaldiyeh, trying to flush out fighters, said two activists.Explosions could be heard as they spoke via Skype.The shells were exploding in the densely-built area surrounding the 13th-century mosque of Khalid Ibn al-Walid, famous for its nine domes and two minarets, said a Homs-based activist identified as Nedal. He said parts of the wall surrounding the historic complex were blown away. Other parts were damaged in previous rounds of fighting.Khaldiyeh-based activist Abu Bilal said fighters were low on weapons. He said the international community, despite promises to arm rebels, had left them hanging in Homs.
"They have sold Homs to the enemy," he complained.The U.N. warns the some 4,500 residents in besieged, rebel-held areas of Homs face a humanitarian catastrophe. On Friday, the divided U.N. Security Council failed to approve a statement calling on the Syrian government to allow immediate access to trapped civilians there. Russia, Syria's closest ally, demanded that the statement should also call for immediate access to the towns of Nubul and Zahra.
Private ownership of firearms, as guaranteed by the Second Amendment, creates an interesting dichotomy for American citizens and the recent blitzkrieg of anti-gun legislation has only served to heighten the resolve of the two diametrically opposed camps.
I don’t mean to oversimplify a complex issue, but here is how it generally breaks down: gun advocates proclaim that in the hands of responsible, law-abiding citizens, firearms are used every day for recreation, competition, to protect lives, homes, and personal property, as well as secure and safeguard personal liberties.
Individuals opposed to firearms, I believe, envision and portray guns primarily as agents of death and destruction, and as such, the number and types of firearms, ammunition, and magazines possessed by individual citizens should be strictly controlled and monitored by the federal government.
At present, U.S stock trading data offered by China's portals and vertical financial websites are usually delayed by 15 minutes or are operated with BATS (Better Alternative Trading System), a small-sized e-trading platform based in the U.S. that only offers real-time data for a limited number of stocks sold on US exchanges. The lack of real-time data has put Chinese investors at a disadvantage when trading on the primary exchanges in the U.S. At a time when traders buy and sell stocks very quickly based on the latest news, delayed information could no longer satisfy Chinese investors' demands.
Currently, investment in U.S stocks is heating up, but none of the financial institutions in China have been able to provide free real-time U.S exchange quotes to Chinese investors. "We are elated to place real-time market data in the hands of tens of millions of investors in China," said Brian Hyndman, Senior Vice President, NASDAQ OMX Global Data Products, "With NASDAQ Last Sale, Tencent subscribers have instant access to the best-priced stock quotes and last sale data in all U.S.-listed securities, enabling them to be better informed when making trading decisions."
Tencent Portfolio, as the only authorized mobile application approved by NASDAQ, can now provide free access to real-time updates of U.S stock-trading information on both the iPhone and Android platforms. Tencent is a fast-moving company and today's announcement is expected to ignite a reshuffling of the industry. Tencent Portfolio will not only stand out from competing stock applications, but will also stimulate the industry to pay close attention to offering real-time equity data services.
The Vice President of Tencent Mobile Media Product Huang Hai said, "The real-time quote service offered by Tencent Portfolio will cover all stocks listed in the U.S. exchanges. Following the rollout of free real-time data for the Hong Kong exchanges, we are now doing the same for the U.S. Tencent Portfolio aims to provide a free service to investors that includes the latest and most precise stock quotes so they can accurately grasp the investment opportunity."
Read the full story at www.ecived.com/en/!
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Video shows suspect stealing Riverdale police car
Police have released the dash-cam footage of the man who wriggled out of his cuffs in the back seat of a police cruiser, maneuvered into the front seat, stole the car and led officers on a two-county chase.
Riverdale police were called the morning of June 15 to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store, 4978 S. 1050 West, on reports of a male and female who were possibly intoxicated. When they arrived and found the pair stumbling around, appearing to be high on drugs, they handcuffed Gordon Graham, 35, and placed him in the back of a police cruiser while they searched his vehicle.
After Graham complained of heat, an officer opened the sliding window separating the back and front seats.That’s when Graham seized his opportunity. As the dash-cam footage shows, Graham gets his hands in front of him by working his hands underneath his body and sliding his legs through his arms. Pausing every so often to check that the coast is clear, he then somehow works his hands free from the cuffs.
Near the end of the video, Graham dives head first through the sliding window. Within 30 seconds, he drives away, just as officers saw that he had slipped into the driver’s seat.
As Graham drives off, another angle in the rtls, he narrowly misses hitting an officer, who lunges out of the way of the vehicle at the last moment. The video ends as Graham takes the car over a steep berm and onto the road.Graham lost the police, who had to scramble to get into another police car, but was later spotted in the Clinton-Roy area, where he’d abandoned the police cruiser. After a roughly two-hour search, police finally caught and arrested him.
“I thought I would have to sell a kidney.” That’s how Dean Hawkins describes the sense of trepidation he had when he approached his bank, NatWest, for ￡120,000 to purchase new premises for his CCTV business, Vistec Systems. He was shocked when the application went through “without a hitch”. “It was quite easy – a couple of phone calls, some forms and a meeting.”
He believes Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, when it says it has ￡20bn ready to lend to small firms, but can’t find the demand. “There is an assumption among business owners that you won’t get bank funding, but my attitude is, don’t ask, don’t get. I think the media have blown up the 'banks aren’t lending’ thing.”
He admits that his long track record with the bank – he’s been with them for 20 years – helped, and younger businesses might have a harder time securing credit. The key, he says, is “transparency” and keeping the lines of communication open with the bank even when “you don’t need anything”. “I’ve told others about my experience so hopefully more people will try making applications.”
Many business owners will recognise Tim Ewington’s experience of talking to the bank about a new facility. “We did look at securing [a conventional loan] but we quickly ended up where we are – invoice discounting,” says Ewington, who is co-founder of Shortlist Media, which publishes and distributes free weekly lifestyle magazines.
This form of finance, which sees cash advanced against unpaid invoices, is becoming increasingly popular among banks as an alternative to the humble overdraft. It provides banks with security against companies’ debtor books, so the loans don’t have a negative impact on a lender’s capital position, unlike an overdraft, which is unsecured.
For those with slow-paying customers, it can be a useful way of quickly getting your hands on your cash. Ewington is happy with the facility, but he says he’s sceptical about the ability of companies like his to access more significant chunks of bank
debt to finance ambitious expansion plans. “A lot of my friends run small businesses, too, and banks are not being generous to say the least. They’re very careful – which is why they prefer to offer invoice discounting, because it’s safe for them.” When Rupert Lee-Browne, chief executive of Caxton FX, wanted to raise money to hire staff and upgrade IT at his foreign exchange firm, he was offered bank funding. But it fell woefully short of what he felt his business needed.
He politely declined the offer and instead turned to an unusual source for the funds: his own customers. At the end of 2011, he secured ￡3.9m by offering a retail bond which pays an interest rate of 7.25pc. He saw it as a “great way to sidestep the banks”.
“Banks are lending money, but not enough, particularly to fast-growing businesses,” he said at the time. Has his view changed? “Banks will only lend a certain amount to certain customers – they are very restricted because of regulatory pressures.
“They want to lend money that is risk-free, so they don’t have to use their own capital to back the loan.” That means security demands on entrepreneurs. “I’m not prepared to give a personal guarantee to the bank. The bond was an effective way of raising money without any one organisation having a lien over the future of the company.”
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
Riverdale police were called the morning of June 15 to Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store, 4978 S. 1050 West, on reports of a male and female who were possibly intoxicated. When they arrived and found the pair stumbling around, appearing to be high on drugs, they handcuffed Gordon Graham, 35, and placed him in the back of a police cruiser while they searched his vehicle.
After Graham complained of heat, an officer opened the sliding window separating the back and front seats.That’s when Graham seized his opportunity. As the dash-cam footage shows, Graham gets his hands in front of him by working his hands underneath his body and sliding his legs through his arms. Pausing every so often to check that the coast is clear, he then somehow works his hands free from the cuffs.
Near the end of the video, Graham dives head first through the sliding window. Within 30 seconds, he drives away, just as officers saw that he had slipped into the driver’s seat.
As Graham drives off, another angle in the rtls, he narrowly misses hitting an officer, who lunges out of the way of the vehicle at the last moment. The video ends as Graham takes the car over a steep berm and onto the road.Graham lost the police, who had to scramble to get into another police car, but was later spotted in the Clinton-Roy area, where he’d abandoned the police cruiser. After a roughly two-hour search, police finally caught and arrested him.
“I thought I would have to sell a kidney.” That’s how Dean Hawkins describes the sense of trepidation he had when he approached his bank, NatWest, for ￡120,000 to purchase new premises for his CCTV business, Vistec Systems. He was shocked when the application went through “without a hitch”. “It was quite easy – a couple of phone calls, some forms and a meeting.”
He believes Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest, when it says it has ￡20bn ready to lend to small firms, but can’t find the demand. “There is an assumption among business owners that you won’t get bank funding, but my attitude is, don’t ask, don’t get. I think the media have blown up the 'banks aren’t lending’ thing.”
He admits that his long track record with the bank – he’s been with them for 20 years – helped, and younger businesses might have a harder time securing credit. The key, he says, is “transparency” and keeping the lines of communication open with the bank even when “you don’t need anything”. “I’ve told others about my experience so hopefully more people will try making applications.”
Many business owners will recognise Tim Ewington’s experience of talking to the bank about a new facility. “We did look at securing [a conventional loan] but we quickly ended up where we are – invoice discounting,” says Ewington, who is co-founder of Shortlist Media, which publishes and distributes free weekly lifestyle magazines.
This form of finance, which sees cash advanced against unpaid invoices, is becoming increasingly popular among banks as an alternative to the humble overdraft. It provides banks with security against companies’ debtor books, so the loans don’t have a negative impact on a lender’s capital position, unlike an overdraft, which is unsecured.
For those with slow-paying customers, it can be a useful way of quickly getting your hands on your cash. Ewington is happy with the facility, but he says he’s sceptical about the ability of companies like his to access more significant chunks of bank
debt to finance ambitious expansion plans. “A lot of my friends run small businesses, too, and banks are not being generous to say the least. They’re very careful – which is why they prefer to offer invoice discounting, because it’s safe for them.” When Rupert Lee-Browne, chief executive of Caxton FX, wanted to raise money to hire staff and upgrade IT at his foreign exchange firm, he was offered bank funding. But it fell woefully short of what he felt his business needed.
He politely declined the offer and instead turned to an unusual source for the funds: his own customers. At the end of 2011, he secured ￡3.9m by offering a retail bond which pays an interest rate of 7.25pc. He saw it as a “great way to sidestep the banks”.
“Banks are lending money, but not enough, particularly to fast-growing businesses,” he said at the time. Has his view changed? “Banks will only lend a certain amount to certain customers – they are very restricted because of regulatory pressures.
“They want to lend money that is risk-free, so they don’t have to use their own capital to back the loan.” That means security demands on entrepreneurs. “I’m not prepared to give a personal guarantee to the bank. The bond was an effective way of raising money without any one organisation having a lien over the future of the company.”
Click on their website http://www.ecived.com/en/.
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