SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Computer-maker Lenovo has hired tech-savvy actor Ashton Kutcher to help design and pitch its latest line of tablets, dubbing the Hollywood star a "product engineer" who can bring his ideas along with his image.
It's the latest tech foray for the "Two and a Half Men" performer who recently starred in a biopic about innovative giant Steve Jobs and has invested venture capital in more than a dozen Silicon Valley startups.
The deal was announced Tuesday at a Lenovo live-streamed event in Los Angeles. Lenovo's first video advertisements for the new Yoga Tablet feature Kutcher acting as a product tester in his boxers, a spacesuit and aboard an airplane.
The company said Kutcher will do more than just advertise.
"This partnership goes beyond traditional bounds by deeply integrating him into our organization as a product engineer as we look at developing the next wave of products," said Lenovo spokesman David Roman.
Kutcher — who in recent years has appeared in ads for snack chips and cameras — said of Lenovo, "Entrepreneurship is part of their DNA, and I couldn't ask for a better fit."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Lenovo, with headquarters in Beijing and in Research Triangle Park, N.C., acquired IBM's computer business in 2005 and became the world's top PC-maker ahead of HP in the third quarter. But, like other manufacturers, it has struggled with waning consumer demand for desktop and laptop models.
It's one of several Asian tech companies seeking to loosen Apple's grip on China's tablet market with less expensive Android models.
Vice President Joe Biden swears in Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) as his mother, Carolyn, holds a Bible on Thursday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Vice President Joe Biden swears in Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) as his mother, Carolyn, holds a Bible on Thursday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Cory Booker is a Yale-educated lawyer and erstwhile tweeter who, as mayor of Newark, N.J., displayed a knack for grabbing headlines while building a mixed legacy as the troubled city's leader.
He's also black, and Thursday at noon the 44-year-old Democrat was sworn in as a U.S. senator, making Congress's upper chamber just a tiny bit more diverse in more ways than one.
Booker, who on Oct. 16 was elected as New Jersey's first black senator, will join Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina as the chamber's only black senators.
Scott, a former congressman, was appointed to temporarily fill retired Sen. Jim DeMint's unexpired term and is running in 2014 for the right to serve out the term's final two years.
The last elected black senator? That would be Barack Obama of Illinois, back in 2004. Obama and Booker form half of an elite group: Only four African-Americans have ever been elected to the U.S. Senate and served. Five, including Scott, were appointed.
As Booker starts his Senate career we thought we'd take a quick dive into the demographics of our Congress. We have drawn on the detailed work the Congressional Research Service does profiling each successive Congress — including the current 113th.
Booker Will Help Lower Average Age
In her analysis of the 113th, Jennifer Manning of the CRS reported that the average age of members "is among the highest of any Congress in recent U.S. history."
That means Booker, born in 1969, will bring a dash of youthful diversity to the Senate, where the average age is 62. He replaces the man who had been the oldest serving senator — New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, who died in June at 89.
But the average age is going down. Manning reports that the average for senators elected in 2012 was 53, down from 57.1 in 2008.
The U.S. House is younger, but not by much: The average current age is 57; the average age of those elected last year was 49.2 years.
Lautenberg Was Old, But Not Oldest Ever
The oldest senator in U.S. history was Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who was 99 years old when he stepped down in January 2003. Thurmond, who died six months later at age 100, was also the longest-serving senator, chalking up nearly a half century.
The distinction of being the dean of senators, age-wise, now goes to Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, who is 80. The youngest? Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn., who was born in 1973.
The oldest House member is Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, who was born in 1933; the youngest is Rep. Patrick Murphy, D-Fla., who was born 50 years later.
Booker Makes History, But Ethnic Diversity Is House Story
With Booker sworn in, joining fellow New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, the Garden State becomes the first in the nation to have an African-American and Hispanic serving in the U.S. Senate at the same time.
A milestone, to be sure.
Booker also joins Obama, and former senators Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois Democrat, and Edward William Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, as the nation's only elected black senators.
But Senate diversity remains more a tale of women than ethnicity. There are 20 female senators, 16 Democrats and four Republicans.
The real diversity story is playing out on the Democratic side of the aisle in the U.S. House. There, Manning of the CRS reports, women and minority representatives are a caucus majority.
Eighty-two women serve in the House, 62 of them Democrats, and 20 Republicans. CRS reports that there are 43 black House members, including two delegates, all Democrats; and 34 Hispanic/Latino members, including a delegate and Puerto Rican resident commissioner, of which 27 are Democrats. Twelve House Democrats are Asian or Pacific Islanders.
Women, Predominantly Democrats, Set Record
Jeanette Rankin of Montana was the first woman elected to the U.S House, back in 1917. It's worth noting that it wasn't until 1920 that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote — and that was a year after Rankin's term ended, reports R. Eric Peterson, a specialist in American government at CRS.
Over on the Senate side, the first woman to serve was Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia, appointed in 1922 after the death of her senator husband.
The House, Peterson reports, was 95 percent male until the 102nd Congress of 1991-1992. In the succeeding decade, the percentage of women in both the House and the Senate grew at its historically highest rate, he says.
Booker's Law Background: Not So Groundbreaking
In his analysis of congresses dating back to 1945, Peterson found that law was consistently the most commonly reported occupation or professional background of U.S. senators.
"Lawyers have occupied between one-third and half of Senate seats in each Congress studied since 1945," he reported, with the peak in 1971-1973 of more than half.
Business and banking were reported as the second most common occupations among senators since 1945.
House members reported much more diverse occupational backgrounds, though law was the most commonly cited over time, Peterson found.
Booker worked as a staff attorney for the Urban Justice Center in Newark, but quickly jumped into his political career, winning a seat on the city council in 1998.
Not all cameras have an aperture-priority mode. If yours has one, you should use it. All the time. It'll give you more control over the look of your photos without having to dive into the complexities of full-manual exposure controls. ...
New York City (AFP) - Fannie Mae Thursday sued nine giant banks plus the British Bankers Association over some $800 million in losses due to alleged rate-rigging manipulation in the latest fallout from the Libor scandal.
Fannie Mae, citing recent settlements involving four of the banks, said it lost $332 million in interest-rate swaps with the defendant banks, with the other losses in trades with other counterparties.
Ingress is finally available to the public. Since its release it has required invites from friends; that restriction has now been lifted. It is good timing as Niantic recently announced a worldwide tour for devoted Ingress fans and players.
If you have been waiting patiently for an invite or just haven't checked it out yet, now is your chance. You will have to choose whether to join the Resistance or the Enlightened. Once you choose, get ready for an amazingly intense, fun and time consuming experience. Ingress has been quite the hit and removing the invite restriction will surely draw many more players in. Click the link if you want to check out Ingress.
We're used to thinking of the moon as a cold and unassuming lump of rock—but new research suggests that it could have been made of a strange magma mush for hundreds of millions of years before it solidified into the object we now see every night.
Nike Snowboarding made this little edit of legendary skateboarder and artist Natas Kaupas. He talks about creativity, passion, enjoyment, all leading towards his delivery as art director for Nike's recent video release, Never Not.
Be sure to check out Never Not Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't already.
Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
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Cellular tail length tells disease tale
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Carol Thorbes cthorbes@sfu.ca 778-782-3035 Simon Fraser University
Simon Fraser University molecular biologist Lynne Quarmby's adventures in pond scum have led her and four student researchers to discover a mutation that can make cilia, the microscopic antennae on our cells, grow too long. When the antennae aren't the right size, the signals captured by them get misinterpreted. The result can be fatal.
In a newly published paper in the science journal Current Biology, the researchers discovered that the regulatory gene CNK2 is present in cilia and controls the length of these hair-like projections.
This discovery is important because cilia, or flagella, dangle from all of our cells. Their ability to propel some cells, such as sperm, and allow molecular communication in others, for example cellular responses to hormones, determines how we develop from embryos and how our bodies function in adulthood.
When cilia are too short or too long they cause various human hereditary diseases and deformities, such as too many fingers or toes, blindness and Polycystic Kidney Disease, which affects one in 600 people.
Quarmby and her doctoral student Laura Hiltonsenior and lead authors, respectively, on this paperare among the few scientists globally who study cilia-disassembly as opposed to -assembly.
A crucial part of all cells' lifecycle is their cilia's disassembly before cell division and assembly after it. The gene LF4 is a known assembly regulator, and, prior to this study, scientists thought that assembly speed controlled cilia's ultimate length or shrinkage. But Quarmby and Hilton have discovered that disassembly speed is also important, and that the regulatory gene CNK2 plays a key role in controlling it.
Similar to how a balance between water pressure and gravity determines the height of a fountain's stream, a balance of assembly and disassembly speed determines cilia's length. When growing and shrinking happen simultaneously cilia length remains constant.
Pond scum's algae make good lab models for analyzing this because they reproduce quickly, and they have cellular structure and cilia that closely parallel ours. Quarmby and Hilton have been mucking about with pond scum for years and recently started studying algae cilia with defective CNK2 and LF4 genes.
After discovering that cilia with either defective gene are abnormally long, they created an algae cell with four cilia, instead of the normal two, with two of the four engineered to glow green.
Along with two SFU undergrad students and a University of Toronto undergrad, Quarmby and Hilton watched as the fluorescent green tag began to appear at the tip of the untagged pair of cilia.
"We were able to deduce how the mutations affected the cilia's assembly and disassembly by measuring how much and how quickly green fluorescence appeared at the tip of the untagged cilia," explains Quarmby.
"We knew that we had something important when we saw that cells bearing mutations in both CNK2 and LF4 had the most extraordinarily long cilia. They were unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.
"My student Laura ran this experiment and oversaw our undergrad researchers. It gave us unique insights into the potentially key role disassembling cilia have in deciding the tails' length. Further investigation will help us understand how ciliary malfunction causes a progression of diseases."
The SFU undergrads working with Quarmby and Hilton were Kavisha Gunawardane and Marianne Schwarz. The UofT student was Joo Wan (James) Kim.
###
Simon Fraser University is Canada's top-ranked comprehensive university and one of the top 50 universities in the world under 50 years old. With campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, B.C., SFU engages actively with the community in its research and teaching, delivers almost 150 programs to more than 30,000 students, and has more than 120,000 alumni in 130 countries.
Simon Fraser University: Engaging Students. Engaging Research. Engaging Communities.
Simon Fraser University
Public Affairs/Media Relations (PAMR)
778.782.3210 http://www.sfu.ca/pamr
Contact:
Lynne Quarmby (West Van. resident), 778.782.4474, quarmby@sfu.ca
Laura Hilton (North Van. resident), 778.782.4598, lkh@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Photos: http://at.sfu.ca/UzEqCZ
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
How old is social media? Maybe we can date it from the birth of Facebook in February 2004. Or perhaps we can go back to 2002, to when Friendster was founded. Or even way, way, way back to digital antiquity – back to 1997, when Reid Hoffman founded the first social media website, SocialNet.
No, social media is actually older, 2,000 years older, than Facebook, Friendster or SocialNet. That’s the view at least of Tom Standage, the digital editor of the Economist, whose new book Writing In The Wall: Social Media – The First 2,000 Years makes the intriguing argument that social media has actually been around since the Romans. It’s the industrial top-down media of the last 150 years, Standage told me, that is the historical anomaly. Social media, he explains, “scratches a prehistorical itch” for personalized news, opinion and gossip. So rather than a waste of time or a distraction, he insists, Facebook and Twitter are actually something that satisfies us as human-beings.
Standage is too good a historian to argue that nothing about social media is new. He acknowledges, for example, that the globalized, instantaneous and searchable nature of social networks are truly new. Yet Standage’s comparisons of contemporary social media with Roman papyrus letters or hand-printed tracts of the Reformation really do suggest that social media goes a lot further back than 1997. “The only surprising things about social media,” Standage dryly concludes, “is that we are surprised by it.”
Just five days after UFC president Dana White announced a light heavyweight bout between Antonio Rogerio Nogueira and Alexander Gustafsson for the promotion's return to London, England on March 8, the UFC has been forced to change its plans.
"Minotouro" has withdrawn from the fight due to a lingering back injury, sources close to the situation confirmed with MMAFighting.com before White also confirmed the news with Ariel Helwani.
White added that there are no plans for Gustafsson's next fight yet. Gustafsson's team also said it heard the news but didn't know who the Swedish fighter will draw next.
Nogueira, who is expected to be ready to fight again in May, hasn't fought since his unanimous decision victory over Rashad Evans at UFC 156 in February. During his UFC career, the Brazilian light heavyweight has pulled out of multiple bouts due to injury, cancelling matches against Rich Franklin, Mauricio Rua,as well as Gustafsson back in April 2012. The same back injury forced him out of his UFC 161 rematch against Rua.
Gustafsson vs. Nogueira was scheduled to headline the first of six events in Europe next year. The card will take place at the O2 Arena in London.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., with House GOP leaders, speaks with reporters following a Republican strategy session, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. At left is Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. House GOP leaders Tuesday floated a plan to fellow Republicans to counter an emerging Senate deal to reopen the government and forestall an economy-rattling default on U.S. obligations. But the plan got mixed reviews from the rank and file and it was not clear whether it could pass the chamber. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Imagine that someone asked you to name the one group of people who've earned the right to spend less time at the office next year. To just relax. Because, darn it, they've really busted their humps in 2013, and everyone is extremely pleased with the job they're doing.
We're guessing "United States Congress" wouldn't be at the top of your list.
Well, guess what? Congress, the group of esteemed lawmakers who brought you the government shutdown of 2013, has announced that they plan to be in session for fewer days next year.
The news came from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who announced the schedule on Twitter.
Follow the links and you'll get to this handy-dandy schedule (PDF) that lists the days when Congress will be in session. The grand total for 2014: 113 scheduled days. In 2013, the expected total was 126 days.
To be fair, members of Congress spend a considerable amount of time in their districts. As RollCall puts it, "the work doesn't end when lawmakers leave Washington."
Still, the shorter session begs the question: Why? Not to mention that the shorter session has the potential to be more bad PR for a group in the single-digit job-approval ratings and, as of early October, less popular than cockroaches.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., with House GOP leaders, speaks with reporters following a Republican strategy session, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2013. At left is Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. House GOP leaders Tuesday floated a plan to fellow Republicans to counter an emerging Senate deal to reopen the government and forestall an economy-rattling default on U.S. obligations. But the plan got mixed reviews from the rank and file and it was not clear whether it could pass the chamber. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Imagine that someone asked you to name the one group of people who've earned the right to spend less time at the office next year. To just relax. Because, darn it, they've really busted their humps in 2013, and everyone is extremely pleased with the job they're doing.
We're guessing "United States Congress" wouldn't be at the top of your list.
Well, guess what? Congress, the group of esteemed lawmakers who brought you the government shutdown of 2013, has announced that they plan to be in session for fewer days next year.
The news came from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who announced the schedule on Twitter.
Follow the links and you'll get to this handy-dandy schedule (PDF) that lists the days when Congress will be in session. The grand total for 2014: 113 scheduled days. In 2013, the expected total was 126 days.
To be fair, members of Congress spend a considerable amount of time in their districts. As RollCall puts it, "the work doesn't end when lawmakers leave Washington."
Still, the shorter session begs the question: Why? Not to mention that the shorter session has the potential to be more bad PR for a group in the single-digit job-approval ratings and, as of early October, less popular than cockroaches.
There is "no way" the NSA's newly revealed surveillance activities could have been legal, asserted Fred Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University. "There is obviously a big security issue here," Cate explained. "It puts us in an almost surreal position, especially as there is no way that the NSA could truly differentiate between U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens."
The National Security Agency has tapped fiber-optic cables that connect Google's and Yahoo's overseas servers and accessed vast amounts of data including email and other personal information, according to a Wednesday report in The Washington Post.
Included in the data culled by the NSA is information on hundreds of millions of users, many of whom are American, the Post reported, citing documents obtained by NSA contractor Edward Snowden along with interviews with other officials.
The NSA's acquisition directorate reportedly sent millions of records daily from internal Yahoo and Google networks to a data warehouse at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters.
'Not True'
The NSA balked at the idea that it was looking into the personal information of American citizens.
"NSA has multiple authorities that it uses to accomplish its mission, which is centered on defending the nation," NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told TechNewsWorld. "The Washington Post's assertion that we use Executive Order 12333 collection to get around the limitations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and FAA 702 is not true.
"The assertion that we collect vast quantities of U.S. persons' data from this type of collection is also not true," Vines added. "NSA applies Attorney General-approved processes to protect the privacy of U.S. persons, minimizing the likelihood of their information in our targeting, collection, processing, exploitation, retention and dissemination."
NSA is "a foreign intelligence agency," Vines concluded, "and we're focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only."
'We Are Outraged'
Both Google and Yahoo stressed that they did not participate in the NSA's data collection.
"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links," said David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer. "We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems.
"We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks," Drummond added. "It underscores the need for urgent reform."
Similarly, "we have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers," Yahoo spokesperson Lauren Armstrong told TechNewsWorld. "We have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."
'A Gross Violation'
It's unclear exactly how the NSA achieved this tap, but the Post report suggests that "anything flowing between Google's data servers would be vulnerable, which means both metadata and content of millions of emails, among other things," Trevor Timm, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pointed out.
Was the surveillance legal?
"The U.S. government thinks it is," Timm told TechNewsWorld. "We think it's a gross violation of the privacy rights of Americans and those abroad.
"Congress will act to make sure this will never happen again, and tech companies will implement changes to make sure the NSA can't do it again even if they tried," he added.
"There is obviously a big security issue here," Cate explained. "It puts us in an almost surreal position, especially as there is no way that the NSA could truly differentiate between U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens, as they claim."
A Fine Line
Of course, these revelations are just the latest in what's becoming a long stream of leaks about government surveillance.
"The truth is, even with all the public leaks and media reporting to date, presumably there's still much we neither know nor have the ability to accurately/fairly understand in full context," Jeffrey Silva, senior policy director for telecommunications, media and technology at Medley Global Advisors, told TechNewsWorld.
"Questions about the legality and appropriateness of certain government surveillance -- especially in the post-9/11 world -- are apt to persist on an ongoing basis with every new revelation," Silva added.
"The government may need to make a stronger case, and repeat it often, that expanded surveillance is a price that must be paid in the post-9/11era if U.S. citizens want to be safe," he concluded. "At the same, there's the question of whether current level of government surveillance, that even if legal, amounts to overkill and an unnecessary intrusion on American privacy."
A Chill Down the Spine
In the bigger picture, the revelations are "like layers of an onion," suggested Tim Erlin, director of IT risk and security strategy at Tripwire. "This period of information security history will do more to spur a renewed interest in verifiable security, including end-to-end encryption and distributed systems for validation, than anything we've seen in a long time."
The fact is, however, "we've tacitly agreed to allow our personal data be aggregated in large organizations like Google, Yahoo and Facebook," Erlin told TechNewsWorld. "These companies have so much intelligence that they have become too attractive as intelligence targets."
Indeed, "the companies involved should be the ones with most concerns," said Cate. "This is not good for their business."
Moreover, "when you look at it with the tapestry of all the programs that we've seen come to light," he added, "that is when the cold chill goes down your spine."
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked a judge's ruling that found the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk policy was discriminatory and took the unusual step of removing her from the case, saying interviews she gave during the trial called her impartiality into question.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the rulings by U.S. District Judge Shira A. Scheindlin will be stayed pending the outcome of an appeal by the city.
The judge ruled in August the city violated the Constitution in how it carried out its program of stopping and questioning people. The city appealed her findings and her remedial orders, including a decision to assign a monitor to help the police department change its policy and the training program associated with it.
During arguments, lawyers in the case said the police department hasn't had to do anything except meet with a monitor since the judge's decision. But the city said police officers are afraid to stop and frisk people now and the number of stop-and-frisks has dropped dramatically.
The three-judge appeals panel, which heard arguments on the requested stay on Tuesday, noted that the case might be affected in a major way by next week's mayoral election.
Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio, who's leading in polls, has sharply criticized and promised to reform the NYPD's stop-and-frisk technique, saying it unfairly targets minorities. He said he was "extremely disappointed" in Thursday's decision.
The appeals court said the judge needed to be removed because she ran afoul of the code of conduct for U.S. judges in part by compromising the necessity for a judge to avoid the appearance of partiality. It noted she had given a series of media interviews and public statements responding to criticism of the court. In a footnote, it cited interviews with the New York Law Journal, The Associated Press and The New Yorker magazine.
The judge said Thursday that quotes from her written opinions gave the appearance she had commented on the case in interviews. But she said a careful reading of each interview will reveal no such comments were made.
The 2nd Circuit said cases challenging stop-and-frisk policies will be assigned to a different judge chosen randomly. It said the new presiding judge shall stay all proceedings pending further rulings by it.
After a 10-week civil trial that ended in the spring, Scheindlin ruled that police officers violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people by wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men with the stop-and-frisk program. She appointed an outside monitor to oversee major changes, including reforms in policies, training and supervision, and she ordered a pilot program to test body-worn cameras.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented plaintiffs in the case, said it was dismayed that the appeals court delayed "the long-overdue process to remedy the NYPD's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk practices" and was shocked that it "cast aspersions" on the judge's professional conduct and reassigned the case.
The city said it was pleased with the federal appeals court ruling. City lawyer Michael Cardozo said it allows for a fresh and independent look at the issue.
Stop-and-frisk, which has been criticized by civil rights advocates, has been around for decades, but recorded stops increased dramatically under Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration to an all-time high in 2011 of 684,330, mostly of black and Hispanic men. A lawsuit was filed in 2004 by four men, all minorities, and became a class action case.
About 5 million stops have been made in New York in the past decade, with frisks occurring about half the time. To make a stop, police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime is about to occur or has occurred, a standard lower than the probable cause needed to justify an arrest. Only about 10 percent of the stops result in arrests or summonses, and weapons are found about 2 percent of the time.
Supporters of changes to the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program say the changes will end unfair practices, will mold a more trusted police force and can affect how other police departments use the policy. Opponents say the changes will lower police morale but not crime.
The judge noted she wasn't putting an end to the stop-and-frisk practice, which is constitutional, but was reforming the way the NYPD implemented its stops.
Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
NYU-Poly researchers tease out cues that impact schooling fish behavior
Brooklyn, New York Recent studies from two research teams at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) demonstrate how underwater robots can be used to understand and influence the complex swimming behaviors of schooling fish. The teams, led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, published two separate papers in the journal PLOS ONE.
These studies are the latest in a significant body of research by Porfiri and collaborators utilizing robots, specifically robotic fish, to impact collective animal behavior. In collaboration with doctoral candidate Paul Phamduy and NYU-Poly research scholar Giovanni Polverino, Porfiri designed an experiment to examine the interplay of visual cues and flow cueschanges in the water current as a result of tail-beat frequencyin triggering a live golden shiner fish to either approach or ignore a robotic fish.
They designed and built two robotic fish analogous to live golden shiners in aspect ratio, size, shape, and locomotion pattern. However, one was painted with the natural colors of the golden shiner, the other with a palette not seen in the species. The researchers affixed each robot to the inside of a water tunnel, introduced a live golden shiner fish, and observed its interactions with the robot. While the robot's position remained static, the researchers experimented with several different tail-beat frequencies.
"When the fish encountered a robot that mimicked both the coloration and mean tail-beat frequency for the species, it was likeliest to spend the most time in the nearest proximity to it," Porfiri said. "The more closely the robot came to approximating a fellow golden shiner, the likelier the fish was to treat it like one, including swimming at the same depth behind the robot, which yields a hydrodynamic advantage," he explained.
While flow cues created by tail-beat frequency proved to be a critical trigger for shoaling behavior, coloration proved slightly dominant. "Even at tail-beat frequencies that were less than optimal for the live fish, the shiners were always more drawn to the naturally colored robot," Porfiri added.
Robot speed and body movement were the main focus of another study, also published in PLOS ONE, in which Porfiri teamed with NYU-Poly postdoctoral fellow Sachit Butail and graduate student Tiziana Bartolini. This time, the subject was the zebrafish, and the robot was a free-swimming unit with the coloration, size, aspect ratio, and fin shape of a fertile female member of the species.
The researchers placed the robot in a shared tank with shoals of live zebrafish, aiming to determine if the fish would perceive the robot as a predator, and whether visual cues from the robot could be used to modulate the fishes' social behavior and activity. The team used a remote control to drive the robot in a circular swimming pattern, while varying its tail-beat frequency. For comparison purposes, they also exposed the fish to the robot in a fixed position, beating its tail.
Experiments showed that while the zebrafish clearly did not perceive the swimming robot as one of their ownthey maintained greater distance from the robot than they did to each otherthe robot was still an effective stimulus for modulating their social behavior.
When the robot was held still in the tank, the live fish showed high group cohesion, along with a strong polarizationmeaning the fish were likely to be close to each other and oriented in the same direction. As the robot's tail-beat frequency increased, it had a profound impact on the group's collective behavior, causing a spike in the cohesion and a small but detectable decrease in polarizationthe fish largely milled together and even matched their speeds to that of the robot as it reached a certain tail-beat frequency.
"This shows us that the fish are responding to more than one stimulusit's not just the flow cues, it's the combination of visual and flow cues that influence the collective response," Porfiri said.
Porfiri is a leading researcher in the field of ethoroboticsthe study of robot-animal interaction. Studies like these advance multiple areas of science, including the development of an experimental animal model based on lower-order species such as fish, with robots providing a consistent, infinitely reproducible stimulus. The use of robots to influence collective animal behavior is also viewed as a potential means to protect marine wildlife, including birds and fish, in the wake of environmental hazard.
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Mitsui USA Foundation.
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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The secret's in the (robotic) stroke
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
NYU-Poly researchers tease out cues that impact schooling fish behavior
Brooklyn, New York Recent studies from two research teams at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) demonstrate how underwater robots can be used to understand and influence the complex swimming behaviors of schooling fish. The teams, led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, published two separate papers in the journal PLOS ONE.
These studies are the latest in a significant body of research by Porfiri and collaborators utilizing robots, specifically robotic fish, to impact collective animal behavior. In collaboration with doctoral candidate Paul Phamduy and NYU-Poly research scholar Giovanni Polverino, Porfiri designed an experiment to examine the interplay of visual cues and flow cueschanges in the water current as a result of tail-beat frequencyin triggering a live golden shiner fish to either approach or ignore a robotic fish.
They designed and built two robotic fish analogous to live golden shiners in aspect ratio, size, shape, and locomotion pattern. However, one was painted with the natural colors of the golden shiner, the other with a palette not seen in the species. The researchers affixed each robot to the inside of a water tunnel, introduced a live golden shiner fish, and observed its interactions with the robot. While the robot's position remained static, the researchers experimented with several different tail-beat frequencies.
"When the fish encountered a robot that mimicked both the coloration and mean tail-beat frequency for the species, it was likeliest to spend the most time in the nearest proximity to it," Porfiri said. "The more closely the robot came to approximating a fellow golden shiner, the likelier the fish was to treat it like one, including swimming at the same depth behind the robot, which yields a hydrodynamic advantage," he explained.
While flow cues created by tail-beat frequency proved to be a critical trigger for shoaling behavior, coloration proved slightly dominant. "Even at tail-beat frequencies that were less than optimal for the live fish, the shiners were always more drawn to the naturally colored robot," Porfiri added.
Robot speed and body movement were the main focus of another study, also published in PLOS ONE, in which Porfiri teamed with NYU-Poly postdoctoral fellow Sachit Butail and graduate student Tiziana Bartolini. This time, the subject was the zebrafish, and the robot was a free-swimming unit with the coloration, size, aspect ratio, and fin shape of a fertile female member of the species.
The researchers placed the robot in a shared tank with shoals of live zebrafish, aiming to determine if the fish would perceive the robot as a predator, and whether visual cues from the robot could be used to modulate the fishes' social behavior and activity. The team used a remote control to drive the robot in a circular swimming pattern, while varying its tail-beat frequency. For comparison purposes, they also exposed the fish to the robot in a fixed position, beating its tail.
Experiments showed that while the zebrafish clearly did not perceive the swimming robot as one of their ownthey maintained greater distance from the robot than they did to each otherthe robot was still an effective stimulus for modulating their social behavior.
When the robot was held still in the tank, the live fish showed high group cohesion, along with a strong polarizationmeaning the fish were likely to be close to each other and oriented in the same direction. As the robot's tail-beat frequency increased, it had a profound impact on the group's collective behavior, causing a spike in the cohesion and a small but detectable decrease in polarizationthe fish largely milled together and even matched their speeds to that of the robot as it reached a certain tail-beat frequency.
"This shows us that the fish are responding to more than one stimulusit's not just the flow cues, it's the combination of visual and flow cues that influence the collective response," Porfiri said.
Porfiri is a leading researcher in the field of ethoroboticsthe study of robot-animal interaction. Studies like these advance multiple areas of science, including the development of an experimental animal model based on lower-order species such as fish, with robots providing a consistent, infinitely reproducible stimulus. The use of robots to influence collective animal behavior is also viewed as a potential means to protect marine wildlife, including birds and fish, in the wake of environmental hazard.
###
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Mitsui USA Foundation.
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.edu.
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Magnetic 'force field' shields giant gas cloud during collision with Milky Way
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Charles Blue cblue@nrao.edu 434-296-0314 National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.
This discovery could help explain how so-called high velocity clouds (HVCs) remain mostly intact during their mergers with the disks of galaxies, where they would provide fresh fuel for a new generation of stars.
Currently, the Smith Cloud is hurtling toward the Milky Way at more than 150 miles per second and is predicted to impact in approximately 30 million years. When it does, astronomers believe, it will set off a spectacular burst of star formation. But first, it has to survive careening through the halo, or atmosphere, of hot ionized gas surrounding the Milky Way.
"The million-degree upper atmosphere of the Galaxy ought to destroy these hydrogen clouds before they ever reach the disk, where most stars are formed," said Alex Hill, an astronomer at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and lead author of a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. "New observations reveal one of these clouds in the process of being shredded, but a protective magnetic field shields the cloud and may help it survive its plunge."
Many hundreds of HVCs zip around our Galaxy, but their obits seldom correspond to the rotation of the Milky Way. This leads astronomers to believe that HVCs are the left-over building blocks of galaxy formation or the splattered remains of a close galactic encounter billions of years ago.
Though massive, the gas that makes up HVCs is very tenuous, and computer simulations predict that they lack the necessary heft to survive plunging through the halo and into the disk of the Milky Way.
"We have long had trouble understanding how HVCs reach the Galactic disk," said Hill. "There's good reason to believe that magnetic fields can prevent their 'burning up' in the halo like a meteorite burning up in Earth's atmosphere."
Despite being the best evidence yet for a magnetic field inside an HVC, the origin of the Smith Cloud's field remains a mystery. "The field we observe now is too large to have existed in its current state when the cloud was formed," said Hill. "The field was probably magnified by the cloud's motion through the halo."
Earlier research indicates the Smith Cloud has already survived punching through the disk of our Galaxy once and -- at about 8,000 light-years from the disk -- is just beginning its re-entry now.
"The Smith Cloud is unique among high-velocity clouds because it is so clearly interacting with and merging with the Milky Way," said Felix J. Lockman, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, W.Va. "Its comet-like appearance indicates it's already feeling the Milky Way's influence."
Since the Smith Cloud appears to be devoid of stars, the only way to observe it is with exquisitely sensitive radio telescopes, like the GBT, which can detect the faint emission of neutral hydrogen. If it were visible with the naked eye, the Smith Cloud would cover almost as much sky as the constellation Orion.
When the Smith Cloud eventually merges with the Milky Way, it could produce a bright ring of stars similar to the one relatively close to our Sun known as Gould's Belt.
"Our Galaxy is in an incredibly dynamic environment," concludes Hill, "and how it interacts with that environment determines whether stars like the Sun will continue to form."
###
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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Magnetic 'force field' shields giant gas cloud during collision with Milky Way
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
31-Oct-2013
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Contact: Charles Blue cblue@nrao.edu 434-296-0314 National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.
This discovery could help explain how so-called high velocity clouds (HVCs) remain mostly intact during their mergers with the disks of galaxies, where they would provide fresh fuel for a new generation of stars.
Currently, the Smith Cloud is hurtling toward the Milky Way at more than 150 miles per second and is predicted to impact in approximately 30 million years. When it does, astronomers believe, it will set off a spectacular burst of star formation. But first, it has to survive careening through the halo, or atmosphere, of hot ionized gas surrounding the Milky Way.
"The million-degree upper atmosphere of the Galaxy ought to destroy these hydrogen clouds before they ever reach the disk, where most stars are formed," said Alex Hill, an astronomer at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and lead author of a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. "New observations reveal one of these clouds in the process of being shredded, but a protective magnetic field shields the cloud and may help it survive its plunge."
Many hundreds of HVCs zip around our Galaxy, but their obits seldom correspond to the rotation of the Milky Way. This leads astronomers to believe that HVCs are the left-over building blocks of galaxy formation or the splattered remains of a close galactic encounter billions of years ago.
Though massive, the gas that makes up HVCs is very tenuous, and computer simulations predict that they lack the necessary heft to survive plunging through the halo and into the disk of the Milky Way.
"We have long had trouble understanding how HVCs reach the Galactic disk," said Hill. "There's good reason to believe that magnetic fields can prevent their 'burning up' in the halo like a meteorite burning up in Earth's atmosphere."
Despite being the best evidence yet for a magnetic field inside an HVC, the origin of the Smith Cloud's field remains a mystery. "The field we observe now is too large to have existed in its current state when the cloud was formed," said Hill. "The field was probably magnified by the cloud's motion through the halo."
Earlier research indicates the Smith Cloud has already survived punching through the disk of our Galaxy once and -- at about 8,000 light-years from the disk -- is just beginning its re-entry now.
"The Smith Cloud is unique among high-velocity clouds because it is so clearly interacting with and merging with the Milky Way," said Felix J. Lockman, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, W.Va. "Its comet-like appearance indicates it's already feeling the Milky Way's influence."
Since the Smith Cloud appears to be devoid of stars, the only way to observe it is with exquisitely sensitive radio telescopes, like the GBT, which can detect the faint emission of neutral hydrogen. If it were visible with the naked eye, the Smith Cloud would cover almost as much sky as the constellation Orion.
When the Smith Cloud eventually merges with the Milky Way, it could produce a bright ring of stars similar to the one relatively close to our Sun known as Gould's Belt.
"Our Galaxy is in an incredibly dynamic environment," concludes Hill, "and how it interacts with that environment determines whether stars like the Sun will continue to form."
###
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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