Thursday, October 17, 2013
U.S. Government Will FINALLY Reopen! House Republicans Caved & The #Shutdown Is OVER!
Evidence suggests early Britons ate roasted toads
In this photo provided by The University of Buckingham and taken Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, artifacts gathered from an archaeological site known as Blick Mead are cleaned and sorted in Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London, England. Archaeologists said Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013 that an excavation about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt toad bone which suggests they snacked on amphibians thousands of years before the practice became associated with the French. (AP Photo/Justine Kibler)
In this photo provided by The University of Buckingham and taken Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, artifacts gathered from an archaeological site known as Blick Mead are cleaned and sorted in Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London, England. Archaeologists said Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013 that an excavation about a mile (1.6 kilometers) from Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt toad bone which suggests they snacked on amphibians thousands of years before the practice became associated with the French. (AP Photo/Justine Kibler)
LONDON (AP) — Britons sometimes make fun of the French for feasting on frog. But now a new discovery suggests their prehistoric ancestors may have had a taste for toad.
The University of Buckingham said Wednesday that a promising excavation near Stonehenge has unearthed a host of clues about the diet of prehistoric Britons. Among them: A tiny, partially burnt leg bone which suggests the hunter-gatherers living in what's now known as the United Kingdom snacked on amphibians.
The charred bone was found alongside the remains of fish and aurochs — the wild ancestor of today's cattle — at a site called Blick Mead in the town of Amesbury, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) west of London.
Natural History Museum and University College, London, researcher Simon Parfitt said that the dig had provided experts a glimpse of a Mesolithic menu that also included fish, hazelnuts, berries, deer, and boar. He called the discovery of what appeared to be leftovers from a meal of roast toad "really intriguing."
"Being English, we don't eat frogs," he noted.
The toad finding has yet to be peer-reviewed, and one expert — Bournemouth University archaeologist Tim Darvill — expressed skepticism over what he called "the frog story."
Still, he and other outside experts voiced excitement about the dig where the bone was found, with Darvill calling it "the most significant find in the Stonehenge landscape for many years."
Andy Rhind-Tutt, a former mayor of Amesbury and the chairman of the Amesbury Museum and Heritage Trust, said the dig was turning up thousands of flint tools and animal bones, pointing to what he said may turn out to be a major prehistoric settlement just over a mile (about 2 kilometers) from the world-famous circle of standing stones.
Parfitt said the find suggests "that there's more to the site than just Stonehenge.
"There's a much deeper history to the specialness of that place," he said.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-10-16-Britain-Toad%20for%20Dinner/id-ca679ecc9a2d41f8b79ee9ef6b9028a7Related Topics: Ink Master Washington Navy Yard Placenta National Tequila Day von miller
Smart Reviews From Stupid Celebrities: ‘All Is Lost’ An Open Water Thriller
Warning: there’s barely dialogue in this film. There is no need for a script. It is all carried out in actions. And boy, what a terrifying experience! It takes a heavyweight actor to breathe life into this film. And that superstar actor is Robert Redford. He’s the main character of ‘All Is Lost,’ and ...
Copyright - Stupid Celebrities Gossip 2013. If you see this content on any other website, it has been stolen. Please report.
Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2013/10/smart-reviews-from-stupid-celebrities-all-is-lost-a-doomed-sea-adventure/Similar Articles: Mexico vs Panama Heisenberg eagles 9 news catherine zeta jones
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Les News, 101613
Mischa's Breakdown, Bey's New Song? McCartney Supports Miley
- • Torsoswaps are a thing now. [Buzzfeed]
- • Sigourney Weaver believes that gorillas are superior to humans. [Queerty]
- • Nina Dobrev and Derek Hough are dunzo. [PopSugar]
- • Mischa Barton has she suffered a “full-on breakdown”. [GossipCop]
- • The Portland Trailblazers are the first NBA team to officially support marriage equality. [Towleroad]
- • You want a Bigotti? You better work, bitch. [Oh La La]
- • Elle magazine completely covers up Melissa McCarthy on their cover. [Newser]
- • Google Maps reunites families. [Heavy]
- • Is BeyoncĂ© planning to release a new single on December 3? [Idolator]
- • Afrojack drops a new track. [arjanwrites]
- • Paul McCartney is Team Miley. [Starpulse]
- • Wrecking Ball acoustic. [Global Grind]
- • The first couple of Canada. [LaineyGossip]
- • Jeremy Jackson (Baywatch) is 33, John Mayer is 36, Wendy Wilson of Wilson Phillips is 44, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers is 51, Suzanne Somers (Three’s Company) is 67 and Angela Lansbury is 88 years old. Click HERE to see who else is celebrating a birthday today.
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CDC Director: In the Shutdown, 'We Are Juggling Chainsaws'

The CDC’s Emergency Operations Center in Atlanta, from which it monitors disease outbreaks around the world.
Left: Currently. Right: Before the shutdown began.
We’re now on the sixteenth day of the federal shutdown. As I write, the Senate has announced a deal to avoid a debt default and open the government. It remains to be seen whether that will work, or how fast. Yesterday, on Day 15, I had a long conversation with Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about what this shutdown has meant for his agency, its employees, and the health of Americans, and the world. I have lightly edited the conversation for clarity.
Maryn McKenna, WIRED: You’re on Day 15 of sending home 68 percent of your 13,000-person staff, in Atlanta and around the world. How is the CDC coping?
Thomas R. Frieden, CDC: Every day this goes on, it gets harder to manage. We’re used to juggling things at CDC, but this is like juggling chain saws.
We’ve got two-thirds of our staff out. The exempt staff, the ones who are here, are here just because of a happenstance of how they’re paid: They are people who are on multi-year money, or grant money, or people in the Commissioned Corps, the uniformed Public Health Service. Of the people who are furloughable, 95 percent are furloughed.
I walk through the offices and talk to the remaining staff to thank them for being here. A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, “We have no idea what we’re missing right now.” For years people have asked me, ‘Do you sleep well, knowing all these terrible threats we face?” And I’ve always said, “I sleep great because I know we have fantastic staff on watch.” And now I’m not sleeping.
MM: Can you go into a little more detail about the staff you kept and lost?
TRF: About 2,500 are on what’s informally called good money; they’re paid for by grants or PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) or the President’s Malaria Initiative or mandatory Vaccines for Children Program. So they’re not on an annual appropriation. And then another 900 or so are commissioned officers. They can be redeployed, so we’re using them to manage everything from databases to feeding lab animals. But of the remaining 9,500 people at CDC, we’ve only got 500 here.
We went through every center, every office, every division, every branch, every team, and said: For whom do we have a legally acceptable argument to say, if they’re not here, it would be either “an imminent threat to health,” that’s the phrase, or “a risk to property”? And those we could keep.
I said to folks in Washington on Day 1 of this: What we find to be an imminent threat to health on Day 1 is going to be very different on Day 10 or 15. So we’re having to bring back two or three people here, four or five people there, because problems are getting out of hand. And pretty much everyone is working without pay.
MM: How have your programs been affected? For instance, foodborne outbreaks – lots of people are concerned about the Salmonella outbreak in chicken right now – or flu surveillance?
TRF: The broader question is, what are the outbreaks that we don’t know about? At any one time, we’re investigating 25 or 30 clusters of illness. Initially we had sent home the vast majority of the staff working on foodborne disease. When it became clear that [the shutdown] was going to go on more than a week, we called a bunch of them back. But our monitoring systems throughout the agency are working at really skeletal levels and that means we have more blind spots, we may be slower to respond, and we may be less effective at prevention.
For instance, here’s what we’re responding to right now: An outbreak of Legionella in a residential facility in Alabama. An outbreak of tuberculosis in another state. An investigation of a fatal case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever on an American Indian Reservation in Arizona where we’ve been working for two years to control that disease. A serious healthcare-associated infection outbreak in Baltimore. A cluster of infants who have been dying, or getting severely ill, in another part of the country. A cluster of meningitis in a university in the northeast that is going to require a very complicated response. An outbreak of hepatitis B in healthcare.
‘For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread.’
Every day in this country, there are births and deaths and hospitalizations and surgical procedures and emergency department visits and infections, and HIV and TB, and people who get sick from contaminated foods. For every day that goes by, there’s a less intensive investigation, less effective prevention of situations like this. If I had to use one phrase to describe what’s happening: This is a self-inflicted wound.
MM: In other parts of the government – at the National Institutes of Health, for instance – scientists have spoken about having to shut down their experiments, euthanize their lab animals. Is any research at CDC imperiled?
TRF: Sure – though part of the problem is that with so many people out, we don’t have perfect visibility, so I’m not sure of everything that’s being damaged. We’ve asked to bring people in for a half-day to identify things like that. For instance: We’re studying tickborne diseases. We had to call someone in to feed the ticks, because if the tick colonies die, the research is lost. There are other problems for which we are running clinical trials and had to stop enrollment. That means those trials will have to go on for longer. And that’s going to cost lots of money.
“A woman who was the only person on her floor said to me, ‘We have no idea what we’re missing right now.’”
We’ve also got training programs that we’re very concerned about. People come for a one-year training, they lose a month of it, they may lose their certification. We may have to pay them to stay on another month at the end of that. Quite a few of our Epidemic Intelligence Service officers (the CDC’s front-line disease detectives, who serve two years) are not Commissioned Corps and therefore are not here. What will we do when their two years are up and they didn’t receive their full training? That’s a good question.
MM: What will it take to bring the CDC up to full strength when this situation is over? It sounds as though you can’t just flip a switch.
TRF: I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. For every day of government shutdown, about one million emails at CDC go unread – millions of pieces of information. I just authorized someone to come back to look at reports from the laboratories that deal in select [biowarfare] agents. Our inspectors are all furloughed, but their inspected entities actually report directly to their designated inspector to say whether they’ve got a problem. No one has checked those emails.
There’s stuff like that all over the agency. We were about to scale up our efforts to increase HPV vaccination to prevent cervical cancer. We have healthcare-associated infection work in every state. You almost don’t know where to start.
Plus, there are huge staff issues here. All of us have a mass of emotions about the shutdown: frustration; anxiety, about what are we missing; guilt, about why are we not doing the things we have committed to. And there’s anger, that we aren’t being allowed to serve the people we want to serve.
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Feedly updated with speed improvements, new widget
Feedly 17 also includes new 'discover' section, Galaxy Gear support
RSS reader Feedly emerged as one of the major players in the news-reading world following the demise of Google Reader earlier in the year. And now the Feedly app for Android has undergone a major overhaul, bringing improved performance across the board, as well as new features and an updated home screen widget.
Feedly says the new version of the app boasts 300% faster start times, as well as a new, more fluid scrolling experience. There've also been some visual changes, with fonts being re-tooled for easier readability. And a long-standing gripe — the auto-refresh feature when switching back to the app — has been addressed too. What's more, there's a new "discover" section within the app, populated with some of the day's most popular stories.
Other changes include new Facebook SDK integration and support for Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch. (A reference to Android 4.4 KitKat support being added was quickly scrubbed from the changelog — make of that what you will.)
In any case, Feedly users can grab the latest version of the app from Google Play right now. Hit the link up above to get downloading.
Source: Feedly Blog

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Study ties chemical to possible miscarriage risk
FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012 file photo shows a sculpture made of empty water bottles in Burlington, Vt. New research presented by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine on Monday, Oct. 14, 2013 suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)
FILE - This Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2012 file photo shows a sculpture made of empty water bottles in Burlington, Vt. New research presented by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine on Monday, Oct. 14, 2013 suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot, File)
BOSTON (AP) — New research suggests that high levels of BPA, a chemical in many plastics and canned food linings, might raise the risk of miscarriage in women prone to that problem or having trouble getting pregnant.
The work is not nearly enough to prove a link, but it adds to "the biological plausibility" that BPA might affect fertility and other aspects of health, said Dr. Linda Giudice, a California biochemist who is president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The study was to be presented Monday at the group's annual conference in Boston. Last month, ASRM and an obstetricians group urged more attention to environmental chemicals and their potential hazards for pregnant women.
BPA, short for bisphenol-A, and certain other environmental chemicals can have very weak, hormone-like effects. Tests show BPA in nearly everyone's urine, though the chemical has been removed from baby bottles and many reusable drink containers in recent years. The federal Food and Drug Administration says BPA is safe as used now in other food containers.
Most miscarriages are due to egg or chromosome problems, and a study in mice suggested BPA might influence that risk, said Dr. Ruth Lathi, a Stanford University reproductive endocrinologist.
With a federal grant, she and other researchers studied 115 newly pregnant women with a history of infertility or miscarriage; 68 wound up having miscarriages and 47 had live births.
Researchers analyzed blood samples from when the women were discovered to be pregnant and divided them into four groups based on BPA levels. Women in the top quarter had an 80 percent greater risk of miscarriage compared to those in the bottom group even though they were similar in age and other factors. However, because the study is relatively small, there was a big range of possible risk — from only slightly elevated to as much as 10 times higher.
"It may be that women with higher BPA levels do have other risk factors" for miscarriage that might be amplified by BPA, Lathi said.
The study is not cause for alarm, but "it's far from reassuring that BPA is safe" for such women, she said.
To minimize BPA exposure, avoid cooking or warming food in plastic because heat helps the chemical leak out, she said. Don't leave water bottles in the sun, limit use of canned foods and avoid handling cash register receipts, which often are coated with resins that contain BPA.
"It's impossible to avoid it completely," Lathi said.
___
Follow Marilynn Marchione on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MMarchioneAP
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/bbd825583c8542898e6fa7d440b9febc/Article_2013-10-14-US-MED-Chemicals-Fertility/id-17b395956aa94e9ba67b5e67c9db0ec6Similar Articles: Miley Cyrus Pregnant Kliff Kingsbury teresa giudice
China Gives Mesaured Response To Possible U.S. Default
China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. debt — totaling more than $1.3 trillion. Chinese media are using the American budget struggle as an implicit justification for China's system.
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Should Self-Driving Cars Obey Speed Limits?

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This article originally appeared on Brad Templeton’s site Robocars.
In many countries, including the United States, the speed limit is a rather nebulous thing. It's posted, but on many roads hardly anybody obeys it. Almost every driver speeds regularly, and anybody going at or below the limit on a clear road outside the right lane is typically an obstruction to traffic—they will find themselves being tailgated or passed at high speed on the left and right.
Half of Germany's Autobahns have no specific speed limit, but they have a better safety record. For a brief time, Montana's highways also had no set limit. In France they take a different approach. The Autoroute limit is 130 kph (81 mph), and almost nobody exceeds it; in fact the vast majority go under it. Reportedly, this is because the police are serious about it and will ticket you for any excess.
In the United States, it's not that way. A ticket for going 1 mph over the limit is an extremely rare thing. It usually signals a cop with another agenda or a special day of zero-tolerance enforcement. In fact, many drivers feel safe from tickets up to about 9 mph over the limit. Tickets happen there, but the major penalties require going faster, and most police like to go after that one weaving, racing guy who thinks the limit does not apply to him.
The limit is a number, but it is not especially magic. It's not like one is safe at 65 mph and reckless at 66 mph, even though that's how the law is written. Rather, the risk from accidents increases gradually with speed. The risk of having an accident is harder to measure, but the severity of an accident is related to the square of the speed of impact.
There is a speed at which we may judge the accident risk is above acceptable limits. This speed is not a single number. It varies from driver to driver and from car to car. It varies from hour to hour, from weather condition to weather condition, and from road to road. As the Autobahn's lower accident rate shows, some drivers are safer at very high speeds on well-designed roads than other drivers are at 50 mph on lesser roads.
And while the Germans are content to do it, the United States is not prepared to officially let drivers decide what the right speed for acceptable safety is. Rather it is done unofficially and irregularly.
So how does a self-driving enter this world of few hard-and-fast rules? There are two common schools of thought:
- As with its ancestor, the cruise control, the operator of a robocar can set the car to operate at any speed within its general limits, regardless of the road speed limit. The moral and safety decisions rest with this person.
- The vehicle must be programmed to not break the speed limit, nor allow its operator to do so. It must be aware of all limits and obey them.
I believe the first choice is both better and more likely. It's more likely because the public has a strong love for having control of their cars, even if it is automated. Attempts to put in speed limiters by law have all been rejected, and cars are routinely sold able to go much faster than any allowed speed limit. Some cars feature speed limiters due to European New Car Assessment Program rules and high European ticket costs, and some cars with very large engines have speed limiters that block them from doing truly crazy speeds, though these can be disabled for racetrack use. (Some people also seek speed limiters for children or parking valets, but don't want them for themselves unless they are one ticket away from losing their license.) In Canada, a truck driver successfully sued to have a court declare a speed limiter put on him was an unconstitutional violation of his basic freedoms.
People generally don't want their technology to disobey them or enforce the law. It's similar to the digital rights management battle in music players.
I think it's more interesting to examine whether limiting vehicles to the speed limit is the right thing to do. At first blush, considering that slower generally means safer, it seems as though such limits would improve safety. This turns out not to be true if, as seems likely, the driver of a robocar can take the wheel and operate it manually—especially if conventional vehicles remain on the road.
A vehicle limited to the speed limit will be going much more slowly than traffic on most U.S. freeways and be forced to drive in the right lane. This is actually a poor lane to drive in, because it means interacting with many cars merging onto the highway. This also means greater variation in speed as cars brake for merges and exits. This is also where the below-limit drivers are found.
This less comfortable ride, plus the longer travel time, will create a great temptation to manually take the wheel on many highways. Here's where some math comes in. If we presume the robocars have an accident rate that is just 50 percent of the human driver rate, the driver is doubling her risk by taking the wheel. If we presume accident risk is 25 percent higher at 75 mph than at 65 mph, this applies to both the vehicle and the human driver moving at that speed. In fact, it is likely the vehicle would do a better job at the higher speed or it would not be rated for that speed at all. The vehicle will know the exact shape of the road and the capability of its tires, and adjust this as it travels to do a better job.
On many roads all lanes are moving faster than the limit. The limited car would become an obstruction to traffic.
Another interesting piece of math revolves around the reason people speed—they want shorter trips. While a trip in a robocar is not nearly so much wasted time as having to drive yourself, consider that human drivers have a fatal accident every 180 million miles of highway driving (at 75 mph,) and let's presume robocars get good enough to have one every 360 million miles at 65mph, and one every 300 million miles at 75mph.
Let's consider time spent driving as 20 percent productive. People have conversations when not alone, do phone calls, and listen to audiobooks and news. Let's consider time in a robocar as 70 percent productive—you can do many productive things, but it's not quite as good as being at a desk or at home. These numbers are arbitrary guesses, but you can fill in your own. At 16 hours per day, there are 5,800 productive hours in a year.
If robocars are constrained to 65mph, then 360 million miles of driving takes 5.5 million hours and has one fatality. We have 660 years of productive time saved and 282 years nonproductive.
Humans at 75 mph would use 4.8 million hours and have two fatalities. That’s 82 years productive time and 740 years nonproductive.
A robocar allowed 75 mph also uses 4.8 million hours with 1.2 fatalities. That's 575 years spent productive and 246 years nonproductive.
In other words, comparing the 65 mph constrained robocar with robocars and people going 75mph:
- If nobody takes the wheel manually because they want to go faster, going 65mph saves 0.2 fatalities but costs 36 years of productive time, about half a lifetime.
- If everybody takes the wheel to go faster, there are 0.8 extra fatalities and more than 6 full 80-year lifetimes of productive time is spent driving.
- If just 20 percent of people take the wheel, we get 1.2 fatalities and 129 extra years of productive time lost.
Clearly the option where people take the wheel is inferior for all. People have many opinions about how they would contrast 0.2 fatalities with 36 years of life wasted. On a pure time basis, 0.2 fatalities probably maps to about 8 years since on average half a lifetime is lost in a fatality. But you may view a death as far more tragic than 80 years of 16-hour days spent wasted, since that is spread out over many people. But there is an argument that even the pure "nobody switches to manual" scenario is not necessarily better, or only marginally better, and the reality is that plenty of people would switch (or simply not get a robocar at all) making the move a clear loss. By the time 20 percent of people are taking the wheel because they are in a hurry, the speeding robocar is clearly the superior result by any metric—based on these assumptions.
Yes, math that puts values on human lives is complex and difficult, though I think that it's easier to see an equivalence between lost time and lives than it is to see one between dollars and lives.
Nonetheless, I believe the math and other arguments clearly show that robocars should be allowed to move faster than the speed limit so long as they are rated suitably safe in the particular conditions, and the bulk of other traffic is also doing this.
The French system is almost surely better. With the fixed 130 kph (80 mph) limit, there is no issue to resolve. Robocars would be able to easily move the speed of traffic, and people would not disengage just to drive faster than the limit with the strict enforcement.
It should be noted that higher speeds use more fuel, at least at these levels. This is an independent variable, however. People routinely value their time more than the fuel cost and want to go faster, no matter what the means of transportation. If their car won't go faster and waste energy when they tell it to, they will take the manual controls. The way to solve energy waste is to put the environmental concerns into the price of the fuel.
Speeding is just one of the code violations almost everybody does. There are many other examples. One that Google reported early on was handling a four-way stop. They found that if they were not a little aggressive in asserting their turn at the stop, others would quickly grab the slot, and the car would sit waiting for a long time. So they programmed the car to try to go on its turn even if somebody else was also trying to steal the slot, though it will eventually yield in a true game of chicken. Fortunately, there is always somebody who will be polite and yield when it was not their turn.
Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/robocars_do_they_need_speed_limits.html
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Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Softbank invests over $1 billion in Finnish game developer Supercell
Japanese carrier SoftBank and gaming company GungHo Online Entertainment are investing US$1.5 billion for a 51 percent stake in Finnish game developer Softcell, highlighting how hot this sector has become.
This influx of cash will help Supercell become a global game company, CEO Ilkka Paananen said in a blog post Tuesday.
The combination of tablets, mobile and the free-to-play business model has created a new market for games that will be accessible to billions of people -- more than ever before in the history of games, according to Paananen.
Supercell has been a success since it first started developing games for tablets in 2011, with the development of "Clash of Titans" and "Hay Day," which are both among the top grossing iOS games.
SoftBank will invest 80 percent of the $1.5 billion and GungHo, which SoftBank owns a controlling stake in, will pay the rest. But even with this change of ownership, Supercell will still very much remain a Finnish company.
Paananen wrote: "I think more and more people in this country are realizing that there is life after Nokia!"
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New Mix: Sleigh Bells, Omar Souleyman, Blood Orange, More
Clockwise from upper left: Sleigh Bells, Blood Orange, Mind Spiders, James Vincent McMorrow
Courtesy of the artists
On this episode of All Songs Considered, NPR Music's Stephen Thompson stops by in his 1984 Dodge Omni to pick up hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton for a trip down Memory Lane, revisiting artists they discovered years ago.
Stephen's most recent Good Listener column asked the question: "How do you get your parents into new music?" The gang talks about the dynamic of sharing music between generations, which prompts Stephen to play a cut both he and his mother love: Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car."
Also on the show: hear why Björk loves the sound of Syrian musician Omar Souleyman; Dev Hynes returns with a new album under the name Blood Orange; Sleigh Bells turn up the gain with a noisy and thrilling pop-rock record; and Irish singer James Vincent McMorrow takes a surprising turn from folk to R&B.
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Is It Too Soon To Worry About Holiday Retail Sales?
The calendar says October, but retailers and economists are already analyzing the holiday shopping season. With budget battles gripping Washington and an economy that's still recovering, there are mixed feelings about how far shoppers will open their wallets.
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Earnings schedule for the week of 10/14/2013
Major companies scheduled to report quarterly earnings next week:
Tuesday
Coca-Cola Co. reports quarterly results before the market open.
Johnson & Johnson reports quarterly results before the market open.
Citigroup Inc. reports quarterly results before the market open.
Yahoo Inc. reports quarterly results after the market close.
Intel Corp. reports quarterly results after the market close.
CSX Corp. reports quarterly results after the market close.
Wednesday
Mattel Inc. reports quarterly results before the market open.
Bank of America reports quarterly results before the market open.
PepsiCo reports quarterly results before the market open.
American Express reports quarterly results after the market close.
eBay reports quarterly results after the market close.
IBM Corp. reports quarterly results after the market close.
Thursday
UnitedHealth Group reports quarterly results before the market open.
Goldman Sachs reports quarterly results before the market open.
Philip Morris International reports quarterly results before the market open.
Verizon Communications reports quarterly results before the market open.
Union Pacific reports quarterly results before the market open.
AMR Corp. reports quarterly results before the market open.
Google Inc. reports quarterly results after the market close.
Capital One Financial reports quarterly results after the market close.
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. reports quarterly results after the market close.
Friday
General Electric Co. reports quarterly results before the market open.
Morgan Stanley reports quarterly results before the market open.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/earnings-schedule-week-10-14-191322375.html
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Voxer Adds A Web Version To Its Push-To-Talk Business Messaging ...
Voxer, the mobile messaging app that started out 2013 with a little notoriety (thanks to Facebook cutting off its API access), is today taking the next step in its transformation into a paid enterprise push-to-talk and chat product: the company is launching Voxer for Web, a version of the service that links up the company’s paid Voxer for Business iOS and Android apps with a desktop version.
Priced as part of the company’s bigger Voxer for Business service — rates for that are currently $4.95/user/month but are going up to $9.95/user/month January 1, 2014 for sign-ups after then — the web version will help Voxer transform from one that can be used as a person-to-person communication system into a more unified product, to also include those who are in a stationary place and need to communicate with many workers at once. Think dispatchers for taxi or other delivery servicees. (As for the price hike, Voxer also says that for those who sign up before the end of December, they will get the lower pricing option applied until October 2014).
Voxer for Web essentially takes several of the features from the company’s existing mobile apps for business users and extends them to desktop computers, with the ability to push live and messaged audio, sending images and text messages and chat. Added features include the ability to have multiple chats open on a single screen; and voice messages, texts and images sent from a whole team. Users can also listen to multiple chats in live mode — similar to what you get in lower-quality existing dispatch services.
Itamar Kandel, COO at Voxer, tells us that the company has gone for a web version in response to requests from businesses. “We’ve heard from customers across a variety of industries that need to enable their mobile workforces and desk workers to collaborate,” he said. “Voxer for Web addresses this by providing a unified experience while also including unique features that will enable administrators and dispatchers to monitor multiple conversations, people or teams – all from a computer.”
He notes that the idea is that this not just signifies an increase in functionality, but also in terms of the kinds of businesses that Voxer is targeting. “Our vision is that mobile will be for the moving workforce, whereas desktop is ideal for businesses that have large workforces that vox and need to communicate quickly with a central person, such as a dispatcher,” he said. “By adding the ability to send messages from a desktop, we have increased our addressable market tenfold, and can now service the communication needs of not just mobile employees but also the needs of the entire organization. Voxer for Web will serve as the connective tissue between the mobile and stationary workforces.”
Voxer’s consumer product — which stands apart from other messaging apps like WhatsApp for being primarily focused on voice-based exchanges — has had tens of millions of downloads, with a particular surge in 2012, the same year it raised a large $30 million round.
The company today is not revealing how many enterprises have signed up to Voxer for Business (we’re asking). It’s unlikely to be a volume play like the consumer product, but it represents a couple of different and important evolutions for the company. The first and most obvious is the startup’s move to targeting a paying audience with its products, and along with that a push to make Voxer into an enterprise-class company, complete with stronger service levels, security and a roll-out of features that are needed and demanded by those paying customers.
The second is how Voxer has become, yes, one of the many to tap into the bigger consumerization trend, taking a product originally created for average consumers and applying it to the enterprise market — but it is one with a twist. Voxer is also a sign of how in fact even consumer products can come out of enterprise beginnings: founder Tom Katis apparently first came up with the idea out of his own experiences as a communications specialist with the military in Afghanistan.
In making the switch to business users, Voxer is not exactly entering unchartered territory. It competes against those services also with origins in consumer apps from the likes of Sprint, with its Nextel push-to-talk service.
Perhaps more importantly for Voxer, there are a number of other messaging services and dispatch messaging services that are specifically aiming at the same market it is. Take taxi services, one of Voxer’s key targets. (In a press release announcing the new web version, it quotes Tom Brennan, owner of Future Cab: “Voxer has played a central role in my company, allowing my team to constantly be in touch with each other and with me.” He lives in Virginia Beach and operates a service in New York from there, apparently.) There are dozens of companies out there already, some working on legacy systems that require special in-car equipment; but many more riding on the explosion of mobile networks and mobile handsets to run services. Competitors include T Dispatch and PC Dispatch (which I’m guessing are close rivals), Digital Dispatch, TaxiCaller, AutoCab and many more.
Whether Voxer’s additional functionality, letting users send pictures and more, its strong brand recognition on the consumer side, and Katis’ connections to VC money and subsequent networks, will be enough to set it apart and win new customers, will be worth watching.
Voxer has raised some $30 million to date with backers including Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital, SV Angel, TC-founder Michael Arrington’s CrunchFund, Chris Dixon, Roger McNamee, Windcrest Partners and Webb Investment Network.
Voxer is a Walkie Talkie application for smartphones. Voxer lets you send instant audio, text and photo messages to your friends (one or more!). Messages stream live as you talk and your friends join you live or listen later.
Voxer is available for iOS and Android devices.
→ Learn more
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/14/voxer-adds-a-web-version-to-its-push-to-talk-business-messaging-app/
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Monday, October 14, 2013
This Isn't Your Granny Smith's Harvesting Technology
In West Michigan, it's apple harvest time. That may conjure up images of picturesque orchards and old-fashioned fun: growers harvesting apples and then selecting them by hand.
Think again.
Robotic arms, computer vision and high-resolution photography are helping Michigan growers wash, sort and package apples at top speeds in the business — think 2,000 apples per minute.
With this modern technology, farmers are expanding production and getting Galas and Ginger Golds from Michigan orchards to grocery stores faster and more cheaply.
That's especially important during bumper crop years like 2013, when Michigan apple growers are expected to bring in a potentially record-setting 30 million bushels.
Rob Steffens, an apple grower on West Michigan's fertile "fruit ridge," has about 280 acres of orchards northwest of Grand Rapids. He packs 800 to a 1,000 apple trees into each acre, which is about three times as many trees as his father grew on the land.
With so many new trees, Steffens and other Michigan growers needed a way to process all those extra apples faster and more cheaply.
So Steffens pooled his resources with six other farmers to build a $7 million apple packing plant. It's where his apples are sorted, washed, waxed and readied for shipping to grocery stores.
Wooden crates with "Steffens" stamped on them stack up against one wall in the warehouse. A machine picks up the crates and dumps the apples onto a sort of water conveyor belt. The three-foot-wide river of bobbing apples moves quickly, as a machine sorts the fruit.
Then the apples go through a tunnel filled with flashing lights.
"Really, this is the brains of that," Steffens says, as he points to the tunnel. "This takes a picture of each apple — I think it's between 25 and 29 times a second."
The computer then forms a 3D model of each apple so it can figure out the fruit's size, color and quality. The apples are sorted by weight and color in a fraction of a second. Bruised or misshapen apples are rejected.
"See, and it's kicking out fruit like this," Steffens says as he points to a blemish no bigger than a dime on the skin of one of the rejected apples.
The high-tech machine means the growers can process and pack way more fruit with the same amount of workers. On a typical day, the machine can scan almost 2,000 apples a minute.
"It's processing at an astonishing rate," says horticulturist Randy Beaudry, at Michigan State University.
But this new technology, he says, is what Michigan apple growers need to compete with other states.
"If, for instance, a large box store says, 'OK, we want fruit that are between 2.5 and 2.75 inches.' And they want them 80 percent red with coloration. And they want zero defects — Michigan growers can get that fruit," he says. "And they can do it within a few hours time."
Each year, Michigan is typically only behind Washington and New York state in terms of apple bushels. That has a lot to do with good weather and luck. But it's also because growers have been changing their orchards. Growers have been ripping out older, taller apple trees and replacing them with smaller ones, Beaudry says.
"The trees are shorter. They're closer together," he says. "We create what we call fruiting walls. That's a relatively recent innovation, but it's part of a long-term trend to reduce the size of apple trees, so that they're harvested more easily and more efficiently. So we don't need as much labor."
More and more technology is needed to move labor-intensive agricultural products like apples efficiently to market, Beaudry says.
Fortunately for us, the end result still tastes like an old-fashioned Michigan apple in October.
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Saturday, October 12, 2013
Traumatic sports injuries tracked, prevented with high-tech mouthguard

Devin Coldewey
NBC News
5 hours ago

Mark Dillon
The Mamori mouthguard and app.
A young Irish inventor, concerned with the lack of attention paid to head injuries in full-contact sports, has invented a mouthguard with built-in sensors that can tell someone on the sidelines when a player has received a serious — yet invisible — injury.
The ongoing controversy about concussions in the NFL provides a powerful backdrop for Mark Dillon's invention. Ice hockey, in addition to Gaelic football, inspired him to address the problem.
"At the moment in Ireland, head injuries have gotten a lot of coverage in our national sport, Gaelic football," wrote Dillon in an email to NBC News. "Helmets provide a great deal of protection but unfortunately concussion is unavoidable."
And one of the biggest problems is that it can occur without anyone's knowledge. One ice hockey player received a severe concussion, taking him out of the game, and it wasn't until after a week and multiple tests and doctors that it was determined that he had, in fact, been concussed for several days before the incident — and stacking concussions can have dire, even fatal consequences.
What if, Dillon wondered, the original concussion and others like it could be detected and treated instantly? A few sensors on the player would be able to determine when a shock received was serious enough to cause head injury. So Dillon began work on embedding such sensors in players' gear, first in a helmet and later the mouthguard.
A tiny accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer, along with a wireless chip and battery, are all packed into the device, which Dillon calls "Mamori" (Japanese for "protect"). The inertial sensors constantly monitor for movement and relay that information in real time to a laptop on the sidelines. If a player takes a hit, the force involved is immediately known, and if the impact falls above the threshold where a concussion is likely, medical care can be given instantly.
"As far as I know, there are currently no other products similar to Mamori on the market," wrote Mark. "I would love to see this product make a big impact on the lives of athletes and sports fans around the world.
Mamori is a finalist for the James Dyson Award, in which hundreds of university-level design and engineering students compete for cash and recognition. Fourteen other projects will be evaluated personally by inventor (and vacuum tycoon) Sir James Dyson, with the winner receiving $45,000 and a bit extra for their school. You can browse the rest of the finalists here.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/663301/s/325ad2bd/sc/13/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Ctechnology0Ctraumatic0Esports0Einjuries0Etracked0Eprevented0Ehigh0Etech0Emouthguard0E8C11379332/story01.htm
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