Jan. 30, 2013 ? A natural disaster can bring out the best in older children, prompting 9-year-olds to be more willing to share, while 6-year-olds become more selfish. Researchers at the University of Toronto, the University of Chicago, and Liaoning Normal University made this finding in a rare natural experiment in China around the time of a horrific earthquake.
A crucial difference between the two age groups emerged one month after the disaster. The 6-year-olds' willingness to share in a test measuring altruism dropped by a third, while among 9-year-olds, willingness to give to others nearly tripled. Three years later, children in the age groups returned to pre-earthquake levels of altruism.
"The study provides the first evidence to suggest that experiencing a natural disaster affects children's altruistic giving significantly," said Kang Lee, university distinguished professor at the University of Toronto.
"The immediate negative effect of the earthquake on 6-year-olds suggests that altruism at that age is still fragile," Lee said.
"We think that empathy is the intervening variable," said Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, a member of the research team and a study co-author. The study demonstrates the developmental differences in the growth of empathy, Decety explained.
As a child grow up, the prefrontal cortex matures with improved connections among the circuits involved with emotion. "As they grow older, children become able to better regulate their own vicarious emotions and understand better what they feel, and they are more inclined to act pro-socially," said Decety.
"Even with the group of 9-year-olds, we show that not only are they more altruistic and give more than the 6-year-olds, but those 9-year olds with higher empathy scores donated significantly more than 9-year-olds with lower scores," Decety added.
The journal Psychological Science will publish the study in an upcoming issue in a paper titled "Experiencing a Natural Disaster Alters Children's Altruistic Giving." Lee, who is a professor at the Eric Jackman Institute of Child Study, was a lead author. Two Chinese academics, Hong Li and Yiyuan Li from Liaoning Normal University also were part of the team.
In early 2008, the researchers were in Sichuan, China, working on a study on empathy and altruism among children and had completed the first portion of it. In May 2008, an earthquake struck the region and killed 87,000 people.
The team immediately decided to change the course of their study and explore what the experience of a disaster might mean to the children's concern for others.
In the study, the team tested children's altruism by having them individually pick 10 favorite stickers from a set of 100. Afterward, they were told some of their classmates were not included in the test and asked if they would give up some of the stickers for them to enjoy. Without the researcher watching, children would put stickers into an envelope and seal it if they wanted to share. The amount of stickers they chose to give up was determined to be a measure of altruism.
The children also were given a standard test of empathy, which gauged their reactions to seeing animated vignettes of people who are injured. Nine-year-olds had significantly higher scores on empathy on the test than 6-year-olds.
Although there was a significant impact on altruism one month after the disaster, the study showed that groups of 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds had similar levels of altruism in follow-up tests three years after the disaster -- equivalent to the levels observed among 6-year-olds and 9-year-olds immediately before the earthquake.
"Experience with adversity, though generally having negative impacts on children, may in fact be beneficial, at least for older children, in evoking empathy toward others and in turn enhancing their altruistic giving, albeit temporarily," said Hong Li, also a lead author of the paper.
The John Templeton Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Chinese National Science Foundation supported this research.
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Children these days do considerably less exercising compared to their peers in previous decades. This particular insufficient exercise has resulted in weight problems and customarily abnormal amounts of health and fitness among kids.
?
More kids, than ever before take part in organized sports activities. These actions act for them as a very important social outlet. Nevertheless, they just don?t supply the fitness-building chance which free activities for example tag as well as hopscotch has typically supplied.
?
The majority of youth sports activities are aimed toward developing particular performance abilities such as striking a ball. They just don?t deal with the necessity for kids to cultivate general strength, stamina and versatility.
?
Moreover, the majority of today?s kids spend much less time working out than in traveling in cars as well as pc and television. To change this pattern, families have to start earlier. Exercise starting in childhood aids in preventing chronic sickness in the future. Kid?s hearts, lung area, muscles, as well as bones can?t develop without exercise.
?
When compared with children that lead inactive lives, energetic children generally have bigger as well as stronger minds, greater muscle tissue, less fat and more powerful bones. Study during the last 4 decades clearly links lung and heart health and fitness with significantly lower rates of heart stroke and cardiovascular disease.
?
Advantages of physical exercise for children consist of:
?
Elevated dimension and quantity of arteries within the heart as well as muscles. This particular result in much better blood flow.
Elevated flexibility associated with blood vessels. This particular lessens the likelihood of a circulation system breaking pressurized to result in blood loss or heart stroke.
Increased moving efficiency from the heart
Elevated capability to handle stress. This particular decreases the unwanted effects of force on the body.
reduced level of cholesterol levels and other bloodstream fats
Reduced or regular blood pressure. This particular decreases the chance of cardiac problems.
Enhanced feeling of well-being as well as self-esteem.
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THE church holding the funeral mass of Det Gda Adrian Donohoe is already full ahead of the service which begins later today.
Mourners have been arriving since 10am this morning.
Already arrived at the church are Ann McCabe, wife of slain Det Gda Jerry McCabe, Justice Minister Alan Shatter, David Forde, the northern justice minister, Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan, Fianna F?il leader Micheal Martin and numerous other Garda and political figures, including Northern Ireland Secretary of State Teresa Villiers.
The 1,000 capacity church is already full.
President Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina have also arrived, as have Taoiseach Enda Kenny, Tanaiste Eamon Gilmore, Finance Minister Michael Noonan, Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin, Social Protection Minister Joan Burton, Health Minister James Reilly, Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte, Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald, Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney, Arts Minister Jimmy Deenihan, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and former justice minister Dermot Ahern.
More to follow
- Fiach Kelly
Comments that are judged to be defamatory, abusive or in bad taste are not acceptable and contributors who consistently fall below certain criteria will be permanently blacklisted. Comments must be concise and to the point. The moderator will not enter into debate with individual contributors and the moderator's decision is final. The comment facility is removed after 48 hours.
Google is sounding a warning klaxon about a proposed law change in Germany which aims to strengthen copyright law for press publishers by requiring search engines and online news aggregators to pay a royalty to display snippets of copyrighted text ? such as the first paragraph of an article displayed within a Google News search. If the ancillary copyright law passes, fines would be imposed for unlicensed use of publishers? snippets.
The draft ancillary copyright law (online here in German) gets its second reading today (German law requires three readings before a law can be passed), and is backed by the majority of the governing coalition ? having being included in the coalition agreement between the Christian Democratic Union and the Free Democratic Party.
Currently displaying text snippets is free and legal in Germany so Google argues that the proposed amendement is a complete legal reversal.?The issue is known as ?Leistungsschutzrecht?f?r Presseverleger? in German, and has also?colloquially been dubbed a ?Google tax?.
Mountain View is of course ideologically opposed to the proposal ? calling it a ?mad law? and arguing that it breaks the ?founding principle? of the Web?s hyperlink-based architecture. From a business perspective the company questions why it should have to pay for helping publishers to acquire readers. ??We are bringing massive traffic to the publishers? websites,? Google Germany spokesman?Dr.?Ralf?Bremer told TechCrunch. ?We cannot see a reason why we should pay them for bringing them the readers.?
Setting aside the inconvenience to its business, Google also argues that?the law will be damaging for web users because it will make it harder for them to find German documents because the context provided through use of snippets will be lost. Why should German publishers be treated differently to other publishers, it says. There?s no question of Google agreeing to pay for the snippets ? you can imagine the company viewing that path as a slippery slope leading to an avalanche of copyright claims falling on its head.
There?s little doubt Google is being directly targeted by the proposed law. It specifically cites search engines as the target entity for the additional publisher ?protection? ? and Google is far and away the dominant search engine in Germany. But Mountain View claims the law is not just going to cause it pain ? but could also apply more broadly to other online companies and startups that make use of text snippets.
The text of the current draft of the law states that the proposed protection ?is only against systematic access to the?publishing performance by the search engine providers? (translated from German via Google Translate)?? and goes on to add that?other web users are not included (?such as Blogger, other industrial companies in the economy,?Associations, law firms and private and voluntary users?). However Google says the wording of the draft law also references ?suppliers of search engines and suppliers of such services, who process content similar to search engines? as falling within its remit ? a vague definition that it says could even apply to social networks.
?The question ? which services are meant by the latter [portion of the draft law's wording] ? is controversially debated. The latest interpretations, we have seen, assume that Twitter, Facebook and the like will also be affected,? said Bremer. He argues that every web service or information-based startup that wants to use publishers? snippets could potentially be affected ? adding that many such companies won?t have ?Google-levels of resources? to ensure they are able to comply.
?As soon as this law comes into place there will have to changes made by every platform working on the web,? he said. ?It?s not just a law about Google? it?s about the entire startup scene that we have in Germany, and especially in Berlin. Because potentially every company that works on the web has to deal with snippets, more or less, in their business.?
?From the day this law comes into place, every company that wants to use these snippets? would have to reach out to publishers and call them individually ? ?hi, can you please allow me to use your snippets and what do I have to pay for that?? And if you understand there are more than 1,200 publishers you can imagine that it is simply not possible,? he added.
Another problem with the draft law, as Google tells it, is that it does not nail down the definition of a snippet ? meaning it would be left to courts to decide whether a snippet means a few sentences, a few words or even just a URL. ?It is not even sure the pure hyperlinks are free because some hyperlinks contain part of the text,? Bremer added.
If the law is passed ? and Bremer concedes it looks likely, thanks to the backing of the governing coalition ??Google says it would have to pull German snippets from search results. Setting aside the ideological position of not being willing to pay for something it believes should be free to use, it argues that the legal risk of displaying snippets when the law is so ambiguous would be too ?fraught?.
According to Bremer Germany?s big publishing houses originally lobbied for the law change. He describes them as politically well connected ? and also points out that it?s an election year in Germany this year, arguing that politicians are more likely to want to cosy up to publishers than counter their wishes. ?Pressure from the publishers is really high to get this law done within the coming months,? he said.
Bremer said today?s second reading ? which will involve input from a panel of eight experts (ostensibly independent but three of whom Google argues ?belong to the publishers? lobby?) and at which Mountain View has not been invited to speak ??could be ?the last change to get this law off the table or to shape it in a way that is not so dangerous today for the web architecture?. Google?s hope, says Bremer, is for the governing coalition to listen to the views of the independent experts and think again.
?The arguments against this law are very strong. The arguments for this law are very weak,? he added.
So what about the arguments for the proposed law? German publisher Axel Springer?? whose publications include the newspapers Die Welt and Bild ? is an active supporter of the proposals. Asked to respond to Google?s arguments against the copyright extension,?Christoph Keese,?Senior Vice President of?Investor Relations and Public Affairs for the company and chair of the joint copyright committee of Germany?s newspaper and magazine association, told TechCrunch that ?Google?s statements are unfair and disproportionate? and ?in no way represent what this law is really about?.
Keese also rebutted criticisms about the potential scope of the law, claiming it will ?have no effect on the right to quote or link?, and that ?citations and links stay free?.
He continued:
It is neither ?mad? nor will it harm users, the internet, open society or information pluralism. To the contrary: This reform brings German copyright law much closer to the US concept where publishers traditionally enjoy strong rights. Over here publishers have no rights on their own to this very date even though music, film, television and performing arts have enjoyed ancillary rights since the mid sixties.
What this reform does is very simple: It establishes on opt-in model for commercial copies of content and parts of content. This will lead to license agreements between publishers and aggregators.
On the specific point about the impact on startups, Keese argued that being as the pricing for licensing the snippets will be ?reasonable? then ?no business model shall be discouraged?,?adding:
We have carefully considered impact on the thriving start-up culture especially in Berlin. There will be no negative effects. To the contrary: New innovative business models will arrive built on legally licensed content. Even before the law comes to effect we observe rising demand by start ups seeking investment and licensing opportunities.
This law will help establish a market for aggregator content which at the moment is non-existent. Google (>90% market share) displays monopolistic behavior by trying to impose its legal view on publishers to protect its margin. While publishers respect Google?s technological and entrepreneurial achievements we are not prepared to give content away for free. Search indexing is more than welcome. But aggregators have gone far beyond that.
The royalty rate that publishers would charge has not been determined yet. On the question of pricing, Keese said: ?Parliament has not decided yet if it wants the right to be exercised through a collecting society or not. Absent this decision it would be premature to speculate about pricing.?
September 7, 1998
NASDAQ:GOOG
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world?s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company?s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google?s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
Google yesterday started to offer the Nexus 4?once again in the Google Play stores in the U.S., Canada and Germany, and today it's started to roll it out to the rest of the markets where it quickly went out of stock last year. Users can now order the devices in the?UK, France,?Spain?and ?Australia,?with shipping times of around 1-2 weeks, although more exact times might be given at checkout. [Australia is not live yet, we've been told.]
DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) ? A hard-line Palestinian military commander who rebelled against leader Yasser Arafat to form his own rival party died in Damascus on Tuesday, according to his representatives and hospital officials. Said Musa Maragha, better known by his nom de guerre, "Abu Musa," was 86.
They said Maragha died of cancer.
Maragha, a Jordanian of Palestinian descent, defected from the Jordanian army in 1970 over tensions between the military and Palestinian fighters who were using the kingdom as a base to carry out attacks against Israel.
Palestinian fighters were pushed out of Jordan in 1971 in battles with Jordanian forces that killed thousands, mostly Palestinians, later known as "Black September."
Many fighters, including Maragha, fled to Lebanon.
There he joined the Fatah movement, headed by charismatic leader Arafat. Fatah at the time was aiming to destroy Israel and create a Palestinian state in its place, demanding the return of hundreds of thousands Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced from their homes during the 1948 Mideast war surrounding the creation of the Jewish state.
Decades later, the movement changed its goal to establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel in territories seized in the 1967 Mideast war ? the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, while still demanding the return of the refugees to Israel.
Maragha quickly rose through the ranks of ragtag Palestinian fighting forces. By 1976, he was Fatah's chief military operative in south Lebanon, where Palestinians had carved out an enclave to attack neighboring Israel.
Maragha also involved Palestinians in Lebanon's 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, battling Syrian forces that intervened to assist Christian militias against their Muslim and leftist rivals.
Maragha rebelled against Arafat in 1982, after Israel invaded southern Lebanon and bombed the capital, Beirut, pushing out Palestinian fighters. Arafat and much of the Palestinian leadership fled to establish a base in Tunisia. Other fighters fled to Algeria and Yemen.
Maragha wanted Arafat to hold military commanders accountable for fleeing from the fighting. He argued against leaving Beirut, wanting to stay as close as possible to Israel's borders.
A year later, he established a rival group, called "Fatah Uprising." The group received the backing of the Assad regime in Syria, which sought to weaken Arafat.
He ultimately left to Damascus, where he joined the Syria-allied Palestinian National Alliance, a group that rejected negotiations with Israel.
The alliance failed to gain significant traction among Palestinians.
Maragha slowly slipped into obscurity following interim peace accords signed between Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel, starting in 1993.
He was born in the biblical village of Bethany, near Jerusalem, a Palestinian town known now by its Arabic name, Azariyeh.
It was not immediately clear where or when Maragha would be buried. Representatives said there was heavy fighting between Syrian rebels and government forces around the cemetery in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in Damascus.
He is survived by four children.
___
Mohammed Daraghmeh contributed reporting from Ramallah, West Bank.
Windows now includes a functional built-in firewall, so consumers expect any third-party firewall to either offer a lot more than Windows does or to come as a freebie. Comodo Firewall (2013) does both. It's completely free, and it includes a wide range of features beyond the expected. Comodo's 2013 edition has gotten a serious makeover, with top-to-bottom streamlining of its user interface.
Like many other products, Comodo Firewall has a main window dominated by a big green security status icon. However, equal emphasis goes to a landing zone for applications to be sandboxed; more about the sandbox feature later on. When you want to dig deeper, you click the Tasks link which visibly "flips" the main window revealing a variety of available security tasks.
New in this edition, Comodo installs a desktop widget that offers a quick view of your security status. Clicking a button on the widget opens the product's main window. It also offers links to launch your browsers in sandboxed (protected) mode, and to follow Comodo on Facebook or Twitter.
Firewall Functions Like Windows Firewall (and almost every third-party firewall), Comodo had no trouble putting all of my test system's ports in stealth mode. None of my port scans or other Web-based attacks could even detect the test system. A few firewalls, including Outpost Firewall Pro 8, go a step further, actively detecting and blocking port scan attacks.
The flip side of personal firewall protection is what we call program control. The firewall keeps track of what sorts of Internet and network access programs request and allows only appropriate communication. In its default Safe Mode, Comodo automatically configures permission for trusted programs. When an unknown program attempts a connection, it asks the user whether to allow or block the connection.
Like Outpost, Comodo gives the user a choice beyond simply allowing or blocking the program. Predefined rulesets make it easy to configure a program for the type of access appropriate to, for example, a Web browser, or an email client. Other presets relate to the type of access allowed. For example, it's easy to configure a program to allow normal outbound access but block it from receiving inbound connections.
High-end firewalls like what you get in Norton Internet Security (2013) or Kaspersky Internet Security (2013) handle program control internally, with no reliance on user decisions. When a firewall does involve the user in trust decisions, it's important that the firewall catch every attempt at access. Leak test programs try to connect with the Internet "under the radar," undetected by program control.
In its default configuration, a dozen leak tests I tried slipped right past Comodo's protection, making their connections undeterred. However, when I enabled the Behavior Blocker (more about the Behavior Blocker shortly) it detected suspicious activity in every case and offered to run the samples in isolation. Some managed a connection even so, but they didn't get through undetected. ZoneAlarm directly blocked sneaky Internet connection attempts by about three quarters of these samples.
Many modern malware attacks slip into victim systems by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in the operating system, the browser, or essential applications. To test Comodo's exploit protection I attacked the test system using 30 exploits generated by the Core IMPACT penetration tool. Like ZoneAlarm Free Firewall 2012, Comodo didn't actively block any of these at the network level and also didn't block their attempts to drop files on the test system. Only the fact that the test system was fully patched prevented it from being compromised. Norton, by contrast, detected every exploit at the network level and identified most by name.
Comodo doesn't expose any significant settings in the Registry; a malicious program couldn't disable it by setting protection to "OFF" in the Registry. However, I had no trouble killing off its processes using Task Manager. That's surprising, because with the previous edition such an attempt yielded "Access Denied." I also managed to set its essential services to be disabled. After reboot it re-enabled some, but not all, of them. This firewall could do with a little toughening up. The same attacks on ZoneAlarm bounced off harmlessly.
When you eat, not just what you eat, may play a role in weight loss, finds a new study from Spain.
During the study, which investigated overweight women participating in a weight-loss program, those who ate lunch later in the day (after 3 p.m.) lost 25 percent less weight over a 20-week period than women who ate lunch earlier.
Researchers found this difference even though the two groups did not differ in the number of calories they ate each day, the amount of physical activity they engaged in, their levels of appetite hormones or their sleep duration, all factors known to influence weight regulation.
The findings agree with those of earlier animal studies that suggest meal timing affects weight gain. For instance, in a study published last year, mice that were allowed to eat whenever they wanted gained more weight than mice who had their meal times restricted, even though both groups consumed the same number of calories.
The results suggest that "eating late may impair the success of weight-loss therapy," the researchers write in the Jan. 29 issue of the International Journal of Obesity.
However, the researchers note the study only found an association and not a cause-effect link. Future studies of weight loss should randomly assign people to eat meals at certain times of day to confirm the findings, they said.
The study examined 420 overweight women enrolled in a weight-loss program. The women received nutritional education and recommendations on the number of portions to eat from each food group, but were not told what time of day to eat.
In this Mediterranean population, lunch is the main meal of the day, comprising 40 percent of a person's daily calories.
Women who ate lunch after 3 p.m. lost about 17 pounds during the study period, compared to 22 pounds in ?women who ate lunch before 3 p.m. The timing of other meals did not appear to play a role in weight loss, the researchers said.
Because the women reported their food intake and physical activity, it's possible inaccuracies in reporting could have influenced the results, the researchers said.
Exactly how meal timing affects weight gain, independent of calorie intake, is not known, said study researcher Frank Scheer, associate neuroscientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. But previous research in animals suggests meal timing affects metabolism, Scheer said.
Each organ has its own clock, and eating at odd times may cause these clocks to get out of synch with the body's master clock in the brain, affecting the way the body uses and stores energy, Scheer said.
Some studies have also suggested that eating breakfast helps keep people full longer, reducing calorie intake for the rest of the day. [See Cake for Breakfast? Study Says Go for It.]
Pass it on: Eating meals later in the day may affect weight loss.
Follow Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner, or MyHealthNewsDaily @MyHealth_MHND. We're also on Facebook& Google+.
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President Barack Obama accepts a signed basketball from Miami Heat forward LeBron James as he welcomes the the NBA basketball champion Miami Heat, to the East Room of the White House, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama accepts a signed basketball from Miami Heat forward LeBron James as he welcomes the the NBA basketball champion Miami Heat, to the East Room of the White House, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
President Barack Obama stands with LeBron James, fifth from left, Dwayne Wade, third left, and coach Erik Spoelstra, right, as he honors the NBA champions Miami Heat basketball team in the East Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama honored the Miami Heat for winning the 2012 NBA Championship title after falling short just a year before.
"Everybody doing their part, is what finally put the Heat over the top," Obama said, as he welcomed the team to the White House Monday to celebrate their victory.
The Heat defeated the Oklahoma City Thunder in five games in the NBA Finals last June.
The president also recognized the franchise's work off the court. He thanked them for supporting military service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Obama said one of the things he's proudest of is that many of the team members? including LeBron James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade? "take their roles as fathers seriously."
"For all the young men out there who are looking up to them all the time, for them to see somebody who cares about their kids and is there for them day in and day out, that's a good message to send," Obama said.
Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said the team hopefully will serve as an inspiration to the nation of what can be done "when you come together and sacrifice your egos for a greater goal" and "hard-hat work ethic."
James, who presented Obama with an autographed basketball, said the team including members that hail from Illinois, Texas, Michigan, Ohio and South Dakota were honored to be in the executive mansion.
"We're in the White House right now, which is like, like 'mama I made it,'" James said, as the audience laughed and cheered.
The crowd of well-wishers included actress Gabrielle Union, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Congresswomen Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Frederica Wilson. The Heat last visited the White House after winning the 2006 title.
>>21 million people wun went on cruises last year and more expected this year.
>>yes. your include, bempverages sometimes and you get to see multiple destinations in one vacation.
>>you want us to book even though it's snowing outside or maybe because it's snowing.
>>you don't have to travel during wave season, but you should, because cruises offer the best deals.
>>buyer beware
. what do you
need to know
before you book?
>>shop around. just as flights and hotel prices tend to fluctuate, cruise prices do, too. they can be cheaper one day than the next. do your research.
>>and do some homework about the ship that you might be spending a week on?
>>older ships perhaps coming up for renovations,
cruise lines
offer good deals on those and brand new ships, inaugural voyages. april for the caribbean, april, may, september for europe, cheaper prices.
>>let's talk about specifics.
royal caribbean
,
majesty of the seas
. what do i
need to know
?
>>it was renovated about five years ago, a
climbing wall
, spa, loads of restaurants. they have a really good, fantastic value cruise to the bahamas. $209 per person. that includes a $50 on-board credit. it goes to their keys, a private keys.
>>$209 per person? that's very cheap.
>>exactly.
>>disney dream, this is like going to disneyland but you're on the open seas?
>>exactly. it starts at $399 for adults and $141 for children. and that, you'll see all your favorite disney characters there. there's a mickey pool, nemo pool, musicals, screenings and parties. disneyland at sea.
>>i've got three little kids. i understand it's all about the kids. as an adult, am i going to go slightly batty on this cruise?
>>you're a huge mickey fan, aren't you?
>>are there things for adults to do?
>>lots of things. lounges and bars. plus it's second to none. if you don't want to see your children all weekend --
>>take them on a
disney cruise
. you never have to see them.
>>exactly.
>>this one is called the breakaway.
>>brand new cruise going from england to new york at the end of april. it costs from $999 per person.
>>priceyer.
>>but that includes your flight to london. i looked at flights this morning and couldn't find one for that much money. brand spanking new ship. it holds 4,000 people. it's like a five-
star hotel
at sea. incredible restaurants, spas, fantastic bars.
>>at the end of april you won't get super warm weather but at least it will be nice out on the open seas?
On Sunday, I wrote about my public statistics session at ScienceOnline. Today, I?ll tell you a little about my other session, Hands-on Math, co-moderated by Matthew Francis. If you come to our session, you might get to take home a mathematical surface of your very own.
Meet Ellie. She may look like an oddly shaped pillow, but she is much, much more.
Ellie, a surface of genus 2. More pillows should have genus.
In the first place, Ellie is a surface with genus 2. She has two holes, which you can see a little better in this picture.
A top-down view of Ellie, demonstrating the fact that she does indeed have genus 2.
Surfaces show up all over the place in mathematics, and Ellie is a very interesting surface with a lot of properties to explore. For example, she is a translation surface. These surfaces are formed by taking a polygon in the Euclidean plane, in this case an L-shaped piece of fabric, and gluing (or sewing) parallel sides of the same length together.
An L-shaped piece of fabric labeled with identifications to make it into a translation surface. Edges with the same symbol will be sewn together.
I?ll let Diana Davis?s ?Dance Your Ph.D.? video explain it another way.
Cutting Sequences on the Double Pentagon, explained through dance from Diana Davis on Vimeo.
In the first scene, whenever the dancer crosses one of the edges of the double pentagon, she re-emerges in another part of the screen because we are to imagine that the figure is glued up, with sides of the same colors identified.
Translation surfaces are just fun to play with on their own, but they also arise naturally when we study billiards on polygons. For example, in an L-shaped billiard table, what kinds of trajectories can the cue ball take? Believe it or not, we can study surfaces like Ellie to find out. By the way, this is not an entirely academic exercise: mathematician Moon Duchin actually came across one of these L-shaped tables on a trip to South Africa.
An L-shaped billiard table. Image: Moon Duchin.
A plain old single-holed torus is another example of a translation surface. The polygon in that case is a square or rectangle.
A diagram indicating the way to glue sides of a rectangle together to form a torus.
An animation showing the gluing process.
We can see that no matter where we stand on the torus, the ground is very smooth around us. That?s because if we look at what happens to the corners of the square, they are all identified together, but there is exactly 360??of angle around them. With the L-shaped table, this is a little different. Once again, all of the corners are identified to the same point, but now we have way more than 360? around that point.
When the identifications are made, the blue vertices are all the same point. The green arcs around the blue points help us count the amount of angle around this point. Here we can see that we have three circles' worth, 1080?.
That funny point, which is hard to photograph, is often called a cone point. I made Ellie because I wanted to have a touchable model of a surface that is kind of like the surfaces I study, which have these funny cone points. She is not exactly the same as my surfaces because her skin is modeled on the boring Euclidean plane rather than the sexier hyperbolic plane that I work with. But I don?t have any vast sheets of fabric made from hyperbolic crochet, and the hyperbolic surfaces wouldn?t fit into 3-dimensional space properly anyway, so Ellie is the closest thing I have.
Which brings us back to the purpose of this post: to invite you to the fun world of math you can make and touch at our hands-on math session. We?ll be talking about some of the subjects I?ve brought up here: topology, geometry, and dynamical systems, and we?ll be making surfaces from fabric and paper. Matthew is a physicist, and he?ll introduce some of the ways these mathematical concepts come up in physics.
If you think you might come to the session, we would really appreciate it if you could let us know on the wiki. I know these decisions are often made at the last minute, and that?s totally fine. But a general idea of the number interested will help us with bringing the right amount of fabric. If you can?t come, you can follow us on Twitter by using the hashtag #HandsOnMath.
Are you planning to setup an office which is complete in computer equipment, networking tools, and other IT infrastructure? If so, one of the many things you might be concerned with right now is how to pick the right server option that fits your newly established business. The truth is, there are many alternatives out there and it is easy to get lost with every tech solution presented by IT resellers and retailers.
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When it comes to uploading files into private archives, dedicated servers also works best for medium to large population staff because these types of servers are known for being able to handle huge amounts of traffic, storage data, or bandwidth. That means, if you run an intranet in your office or a shared virtual workspace, your dedicated server can handle it.
The only slight downside of dedicated servers is that you need to handle all the maintenance, software or hardware upgrades, and technical troubleshooting on your own.
Cloud Servers
These are servers which can be found "in the cloud", or in simpler language, servers that can be accessed, modified and configured online. This type of server is relatively new in the industry and it is revolutionary because it allows people and companies to send and store their data while using minimal hardware. Through a cloud server, a web administrator can easily control other servers within a virtual private network. File sharing and archiving is also made much easier through this amazing option.
Blade Servers
Blade servers function pretty much like any other high-end server, but the only difference is that it is optimized to conserve space and energy within your work environment. Because of its modular design, blade servers can easily fit in very small office space. This is ideal for companies who are just starting out to do business. These types of start-up business can still enjoy smooth employee communication and IT processes even with minimum space and budget.
One of the best ways to save money on your server and data storage device purchases is to get your IT equipment from an independent IT reseller. This way you can have a wide array of server options to choose from, as well as lower markup rates. Many companies save thousands of dollars per year by doing this.
SANTA MARIA, Brazil (AP) ? A fast-moving fire roared through a crowded nightclub in southern Brazil early Sunday, within seconds filling the space with flames and a thick, toxic smoke that killed more than 230 panicked partygoers who gasped for breath and fought in a stampede to escape.
It appeared to be the world's deadliest nightclub fire in more than a decade.
Firefighters responding to the blaze at first had trouble getting inside the Kiss nightclub because bodies partially blocked the club's entryway.
Witnesses said a flare or firework lit by band members started the blaze in Santa Maria, a university city of about 260,000 people. Officials at a news conference said the cause was still under investigation ? though police inspector Sandro Meinerz told the Agencia Estado news agency the band was to blame for a pyrotechnics show and that manslaughter charges could be filed.
Television images showed black smoke billowing out of the Kiss nightclub as shirtless young men who had attended a university party joined firefighters using axes and sledgehammers to pound at windows and hot-pink exterior walls to free those trapped inside.
Bodies of the dead and injured were strewn in the street and panicked screams filled the air as medics tried to help. There was little to be done; officials said most of those who died were suffocated by smoke within minutes.
Within hours a community gym was a horror scene, with body after body lined up on the floor, partially covered with black plastic as family members identified kin.
Outside the gym police held up personal objects ? a black purse, a blue high-heeled shoe ? as people seeking information on loved ones looked crowded around, hoping not to recognize anything being shown them.
Guido Pedroso Melo, commander of the city's fire department, told the O Globo newspaper that firefighters had a hard time getting inside the club because "there was a barrier of bodies blocking the entrance."
Teenagers sprinted from the scene after the fire began, desperately seeking help. Others carried injured and burned friends away in their arms. Many of the victims were under 20 years old, including some minors.
"There was so much smoke and fire, it was complete panic, and it took a long time for people to get out, there were so many dead," survivor Luana Santos Silva told the Globo TV network.
The fire spread so fast inside the packed club that firefighters and ambulances could do little to stop it, Silva said.
Another survivor, Michele Pereira, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper that she was near the stage when members of the band lit flares that started the conflagration.
"The band that was onstage began to use flares and, suddenly, they stopped the show and pointed them upward," she said. "At that point, the ceiling caught fire. It was really weak, but in a matter of seconds it spread."
Guitarist Rodrigo Martins told Radio Gaucha that the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, started playing at 2:15 a.m. "and we had played around five songs when I looked up and noticed the roof was burning"
"It might have happened because of the Sputnik, the machine we use to create a luminous effect with sparks. It's harmless, we never had any trouble with it.
"When the fire started, a guard passed us a fire extinguisher, the singer tried to use it but it wasn't working"
He confirmed that accordion player Danilo Jacques, 28, died, while the five other members made it out safely.
Police Maj. Cleberson Braida Bastianello said by telephone that the toll had risen to 233 with the death of a hospitalized victim. He said earlier that the death toll was likely made worse because the nightclub appeared to have just one exit through which patrons could exit.
Survivors said security guards briefly tried to block people from exiting the club. Brazilian bars routinely make patrons pay their entire tab at the end of the night before they are allowed to leave.
Officials earlier counted 232 bodies that had been brought for identification to a gymnasium in Santa Maria, which is located at the southern tip of Brazil, near the borders with Argentina and Uruguay.
Federal Health Minister Alexandre Padhilha told a news conference that most of the 117 people treated in hospitals had been poisoned by gases they breathed during the fire. Only a few suffered serious burns, he said.
Brazil President Dilma Rousseff arrived to visit the injured after cutting short her trip to a Latin American-European summit in Chile.
"It is a tragedy for all of us," Rousseff said.
Most of the dead apparently were asphyxiated, according to Dr. Paulo Afonso Beltrame, a professor at the medical school of the Federal University of Santa Maria who went to the city's Caridade Hospital to help victims.
Beltrame said he was told the club had been filled far beyond its capacity during a party for students at the university's agronomy department.
Survivors, police and firefighters gave the same account of a band member setting the ceiling's soundproofing ablaze, he said.
"Large amounts of toxic smoke quickly filled the room, and I would say that at least 90 percent of the victims died of asphyxiation," Beltrame told The Associated Press by telephone.
"The toxic smoke made people lose their sense of direction so they were unable to find their way to the exit. At least 50 bodies were found inside a bathroom. Apparently they confused the bathroom door with the exit door."
In the hospital, the doctor "saw desperate friends and relatives walking and running down the corridors looking for information," he said, calling it "one of the saddest scenes I have ever witnessed."
Rodrigo Moura, identified by the newspaper Diario de Santa Maria as a security guard at the club, said it was at its maximum capacity of between 1,000 and 2,000, and partygoers were pushing and shoving to escape.
Santa Maria Mayor Cezar Schirmer declared a 30-day mourning period, and Tarso Genro, the governor of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, said officials were investigating the cause of the disaster.
The blaze was the deadliest in Brazil since at least 1961, when a fire that swept through a circus killed 503 people in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro.
Sunday's fire also appeared to be the worst at a nightclub since December 2000, when a welding accident reportedly set off a fire at a club in Luoyang, China, killing 309.
In 2004, at least 194 people died in a fire at an overcrowded nightclub in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Seven members of a band were sentenced to prison for starting the flames.
A blaze at the Lame Horse nightclub in Perm, Russia, killed 152 people in December 2009 after an indoor fireworks display ignited a plastic ceiling decorated with branches.
Similar circumstances led to a 2003 nightclub fire that killed 100 people in the United States. Pyrotechnics used as a stage prop by the 1980s rock band Great White set ablaze cheap soundproofing foam on the walls and ceiling of a Rhode Island music venue.
The band performing in Santa Maria, Gurizada Fandangueira, plays a driving mixture of local Brazilian country music styles. Guitarist Martin told Radio Gaucha the musicians are already seeing hostile messages.
"People on the social networks are saying we have to pay for what happened," he said. "I'm afraid there could be retaliation".
___
Sibaja reported from Brasilia. Associated Press Writers Stan Lehman and Bradley Brooks contributed to this report from Sao Paulo.
Slovenia's Tina Maze celebrates after winning an alpine ski, women's world Cup slalom, in Maribor, Slovenia, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss by posting an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and clocked a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course. (AP Photo/Pier Marco Tacca)
Slovenia's Tina Maze celebrates after winning an alpine ski, women's world Cup slalom, in Maribor, Slovenia, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss by posting an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and clocked a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course. (AP Photo/Pier Marco Tacca)
Slovenia's Tina Maze celebrates after winning an alpine ski, women's world Cup slalom, in Maribor, Slovenia, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss by posting an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and clocked a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course. (AP Photo/Pier Marco Tacca)
Slovenia's Tina Maze celebrates after winning an alpine ski, women's world Cup slalom, in Maribor, Slovenia, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss by posting an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and clocked a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course. (AP Photo/Pier Marco Tacca)
Slovenia's Tina Maze celebrates after winning an alpine ski, women's world Cup slalom, in Maribor, Slovenia, Sunday, Jan. 27, 2013. Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss by posting an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and clocked a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course. (AP Photo/Pier Marco Tacca)
MARIBOR, Slovenia (AP) ? Overall World Cup leader Tina Maze rebounded from a close loss with an emphatic slalom victory before her home fans Sunday. The Slovenian has now won in four disciplines this season.
Maze, who lost Saturday's giant slalom by 0.08 seconds to Lindsey Vonn, led after the opening run and finished her two runs in 1 minute, 33.68 seconds down the Radvanje course.
"It's so amazing to win here," said Maze, who celebrated with a cartwheel with her ski boots on. "Everybody is cheering for me."
Frida Hansdotter of Sweden finished second, a distant 0.86 seconds behind. Kathrin Zettel of Austria was third, 1.13 back.
American teenager Mikaela Shiffrin moved up from 13th after the opening run to finish sixth and maintained a 13-point lead ahead of Maze in the slalom standings.
The 17-year-old Shiffrin had won the past two slaloms and has three wins overall this season. In the opening run, she was fastest in the top section and second fastest in the last section, but U.S. coach Alex Hoedlmoser said she had three big mistakes in the middle.
Vonn finished 36th in the first run and failed to qualify for the second leg. Both runs were held in clear conditions, with the temperature below freezing.
In the overall standings, Maze has more than twice as many points as her nearest challenger, Maria Hoefl-Riesch, the Olympic slalom champion who went out in the first run.
Maze leads Hoefl-Riesch 1,654-806, and Vonn is third with 740 points.
Vonn won two slaloms four seasons ago, but the event has become her weakest discipline. She hadn't even entered a slalom since last season's World Cup finals.
It was Maze's seventh win of the season and first in slalom. She now needs only a downhill win to hold victories in all five disciplines this season.
Only two women have won in all five disciplines in a season ? Austria's Petra Kronberger in 1990-91 and Croatia's Janica Kostelic in 2005-06. The only man to do it was Marc Girardelli in 1988-89.
Maze's super-G win in St. Anton two weeks ago gave her wins in each discipline over her career.
"Tina is sensational this season," Zettel said. "She has shown her class here once again."
A special city event is scheduled for Moscow on Tuesday, the last race before the Feb. 5-17 world championships in Schladming, Austria.
Only two more traditional slaloms remain this season, although the parallel city event ? a mix between slalom and giant slalom ? also counts toward the slalom standings.
Google's Chrome security team has taken the wraps off its latest Pwnium competition. This time out, the target is Chrome OS on a Samsung Series 5 550, and as ever, the company's putting its money (and nerd cred) where its mouth is, offering up a $Pi million in rewards (that's a lofty $3.14159 million) for the third round of the competition. Amongst the payouts are $110,000 for a "browser or system level compromise in guest mode or as a logged-in user, delivered via a web page" and $150,000 for a "compromise with device persistence -- guest to guest with interim reboot, delivered via a web page." The company is also putting some weight behind the upcoming Pwn2Own competition, which goes down at CanSecWest in Vancouver in March. More info on both can be found at the source link below.
Jan. 27, 2013 ? The spread of breast cancer to distant organs within the body, an event that often leads to death, appears in many cases to involve the loss of a key protein, according to UC San Francisco researchers, whose new discoveries point to possible targets for therapy.
In the January 27, 2013 online edition of Nature Cell Biology, UCSF scientists describe for the first time how the protein, known as GATA3 -- which is abnormal or absent in many cases of human breast cancer -- normally acts downstream in biochemical pathways to prevent the distant spread of cancer, an event called metastasis.
The discovery points to a biochemical control point that simultaneously holds in check several key events required for tumor cells to successfully spread.
"When GATA3 is present, it turns off many genes that are active in metastasis," said Zena Werb, PhD, a UCSF professor of anatomy who led the research. "We now have identified the molecular mechanisms involved."
The key finding of the new study is that GATA3 acts downstream biochemically to activate a molecule -- obscure until now -- called microRNA29b. MicroRNA29b in turn stops protein production from other genes that play vital roles in metastasis.
The absence or loss of GATA3 can free cancerous cells to break free from their defined roles and tethers within a tumor, to move away from the tumor mass, to induce cancer-promoting inflammation, and to stimulate the development of new blood vessels that can help spreading cancerous cells regrow as tumors in new locations.
"People knew that some of these genes were turned on in some cancers, but they did not know they were turned on because GATA3 and microRNA29b were turned off," Werb said. "If you have 20 genes that are becoming less active all at once due to microRNA29b, it could have a profound effect."
Working with mice, the researchers found that restoring microRNA29b to one of the most deadly types of breast cancer stopped metastasis. But the researchers also found that if they knocked out the microRNA29b, tumors spread even in the presence of GATA3, suggesting that microRNA29b can be the driver of metastasis.
In the mouse models of breast cancer studied by Werb's team, GATA3 normally restrains cancerous cells from breaking away from the main tumor and migrating to other organs.
It might be possible, Werb said, to develop drugs that inhibit breast cancer metastasis by re-activating these controls in cancerous cells that have lost the normal protein.
Many researchers who study early stages of cancer focus on abnormal genes and proteins that cause cells to expand their numbers rapidly, a hallmark of cancer.
However, the ability to spread to distant places and to eventually cause lethal complications requires not only cell division and tumor growth, but also changes in how the cancerous cell negotiates with its surroundings. This relationship must be altered to permit cancer to spread, according to earlier research findings by Werb and others.
"Many of the key processes in cancer that GATA3 suppresses take place outside the cell, in the surrounding environment," she said.
GATA3 is a master control for luminal cells, which line the milk-carrying ducts of the breast. In essence, GATA3 dictates the defining characteristics of a normal breast cell, Werb said.
Luminal breast cancers are the most common form of the disease, and the hormones estrogen and progesterone drive their growth. Loss of the normal GATA3 protein as luminal breast cancers evolve is associated with a greater risk of death, Werb said, and occurs in roughly 10 percent of luminal breast cancer cases.
But, along with many other proteins, GATA3 also is absent in "triple negative," breast cancers, which are more often fatal. Triple negative breast cancers, which disproportionately affect black women and younger women, do not depend on the hormones, nor do they require a third growth factor, called HER2.
Triple negative breast cancers, which account for roughly one-in-five breast cancers, have been more difficult to target successfully with newer treatments.
"The targeting we would like to do is to give back microRNA29b specifically to breast tumor cells to prevent metastasis," Werb said.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Francisco, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
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Journal Reference:
Jonathan Chou, Jeffrey H. Lin, Audrey Brenot, Jung-whan Kim, Sylvain Provot, Zena Werb. GATA3 suppresses metastasis and modulates the tumour microenvironment by regulating?microRNA-29b expression. Nature Cell Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ncb2672
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
As a group of senators unveil their bipartisan proposal for immigration reform today and President Obama heads west this week to rally support for his own ideas, a separate bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives is on the verge of finalizing its own designs for comprehensive immigration reform.
The discussions, which top aides close to the talks discussed on the condition that they not be identified, are described as "Washington's best-kept secret."
Last week, House Speaker John Boehner spilled the beans on the secret group, revealing that the lawmakers had been "meeting for three or four years now" and that they are almost ready to present their proposals publicly.
"They basically have an agreement. I've not seen the agreement. I don't know all the pitfalls, but it's, in my view, the right group of members," Boehner, R-Ohio, told the Ripon Society last week during remarks that were closed to the press, as first reported by The Hill. "My theory was that if these folks could work this out, it'd be a big step in the right direction."
Multiple sources say those involved in the talks include Democratic Reps. Xavier Becerra (California), Luis Gutierrez (Illinois), Zoe Lofgren (California), and Republican Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (Florida), Sam Johnson (Texas) and John Carter (Texas). Spokespersons for each congressional office refused to confirm or deny their representative's participation in the talks on the record. Additional members have also participated, according to sources intimately involved in the talks.
The House's not-yet-finalized proposal is expected to address five general areas of immigration reform, according to aides close to the negotiations. Secure the border, implement a permanent E-verify system nationwide, reform the visa system, address the predicament of how to handle immigrants already in the country illegally in a "fair" and "legal manner" while determining how to handle those who have applied for legal immigration and are currently waiting in line, and reform the immigration system for future applicants.
"We don't want to create an advantage for people who came into the country illegally or overstayed visas while millions of others wait in line," one insider said. "We have to reform the legal immigration system so you have a system that people will go through rather than go around."
Sources said that the talks are so far along, there are draft proposals written into legislation language awaiting final approval before the plan is introduced in the House. One source hinted that the group's proposal could be unveiled in the days surrounding the president's State of the Union address, which is scheduled Feb. 12.
Although he would not confirm his personal participation in the talks, Diaz-Balart, the president of the Congressional Hispanic Conference, admitted that both political parties have used immigration as a campaign tool instead of working earnestly to address the problem. He said he wondered whether there are enough members willing to work across party lines "to solve an issue everybody knows is broken."
"The American people realize that the immigration system is broken, absolutely broken, from A to Z. The question is are we going to continue, knowing that it's broken, to ignore it or are we going to try to solve it? What you're seeing now is a true effort to fix what's broken," Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said during a phone call Monday. "What I saw today in the Senate is encouraging, and in the House, pretty soon we'll be able to show a lot of work has been done."
The mysterious discussions have taken on an increased level of urgency now that President Obama has been sworn in for a second term in office. Last week, the president also met with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, including Becerra and Gutierrez, at the White House. During that meeting the president identified immigration reform as his top legislative priority. One source said if Congress fails to enact a comprehensive overhaul of the nation's immigration laws by the end of the year, it won't happen until after 2016 when there is a new president.
Lawmakers are considering "deferred adjudication," which would hold anyone accountable who entered the country illegally without kicking them out of the country. While the details are still being worked out, sources explained one proposal under consideration would require anyone who entered the country illegally to plead guilty before a federal court, pay a penalty and serve a probation-type sentence.
"We don't want anyone skipping line," another congressional aide close to the talks said. "If they broke the law, they have to pay a price."
The amount of the fine is among the final 'unclosed issues' as discussions near completion, aides say. Lawmakers are also attempting to settle how quickly to implement the e-verify system. While some lawmakers prefer to enforce the check within one year, others want to delay implementation for two years.
Democrat participants joined the group with the blessing of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and regularly updated her on the informal talks, according to a senior Democratic leadership aide. President Obama has also been aware of the secret discussions the past four years, one source added.
The effort has been ongoing for years with as many as 20 lawmakers involved in talks, but half of the members of the original working group left the House of Representatives after the last election, according to multiple sources. The group met at least once a week every week that the House was in session over the past two years. Sometimes members met up to three times per week, and never for less than an hour, making the success of keeping the meetings secret even more remarkable.
For a party that is anxiously trying to reshape its public perception after being defeated up and down the ballot last November, many top Republicans now appear ready to embrace politically gutsy changes to the law.
Ahead of the immigration blitz this week, former Republican vice president nominee Rep. Paul Ryan, who is not part of the working group, called immigration "a good thing."
"We're here because of immigration. That's what America is. It's a melting pot. We think this is good. We need to make sure it works," Ryan, R-Wis., said on "Meet the Press" Sunday. "There are Republicans and Democrats, many of us are talking to each other, that can come together with a good solution to make sure that this problem is fixed once and for all."
Still, there are some conservatives who warn that the Senate's proposal would amount to amnesty and encourage further illegal immigration.
"When you legalize those who are in the country illegally, it costs taxpayers millions of dollars, costs American workers thousands of jobs and encourages more illegal immigration," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, wrote in a statement today. "By granting amnesty, the Senate proposal actually compounds the problem by encouraging more illegal immigration."
One of the House's most ardent advocates for strengthening border security, Rep. Steve King, said he has not been asked for any input and doubted its chances to produce an effective plan.
"If you want a particular result, appoint the people that will produce the result that you want," King, R-Iowa, said about the secret discussions during a phone call Monday. "I don't know when eight senators were smarter than 100, or a dozen members of the House were smarter than 435 members. Secret meetings reinforce the people inside the door and isolate folks outside of the door."
Best friends influence when teenagers have first drinkPublic release date: 28-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Richard Lewis richard-c-lewis@uiowa.edu 319-384-0012 University of Iowa
U. Iowa study notes friends' access to alcohol as main reason
Chances are the only thing you remember about your first swig of alcohol is how bad the stuff tasted. What you didn't know is the person who gave you that first drink and when you had it says a lot about your predisposition to imbibe later in life.
A national study by a University of Iowa-led team has found that adolescents who get their first drink from a friend are more likely to drink sooner in life, which past studies show makes them more prone to abusing alcohol when they get older. The finding is designed to help specialists predict when adolescents are likely to first consume alcohol, with the aim of heading off problem drinking at the pass.
"When you start drinking, even with kids who come from alcoholic families, they don't get their first drinks from their family," says Samuel Kuperman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the UI. "They get their first drinks from their friends. They have to be able to get it. If they have friends who have alcohol, then it's easier for them to have that first drink."
The basis for the study, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, is compelling: One-third of eighth graders in the United States report they've tried alcohol, according to a 2011 study of 20,000 teenagers conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health. By 10th grade, more than half say they've had a first drink, and that percentage shoots to 70 percent by their senior year.
"There's something driving kids to drink," explains Kuperman, corresponding author on the paper. "Maybe it's the coolness factor or some mystique about it. So, we're trying to educate kids about the risks associated with drinking and give them alternatives."
Kuperman and his team built their formula from two longstanding measures of adolescent drinking behaviorthe Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics and Alcoholism and the Achenbach Youth Self Report. From those measures of nearly two-dozen variables and a review of the literature, the UI-led team found five to be the most important predictors: two separate measures of disruptive behavior, a family history of alcohol dependence, a measure of poor social skills, and whether most best friends drink alcohol.
The researchers then looked at how the five variables worked in concert.
Surprisingly, a best friend who drank and had access to alcohol was the most important predictor. In fact, adolescents whose best friend used alcohol were twice as likely to have a first drink, the researchers found. Moreover, if considered independently of the other variables, teenagers whose best friends drank are three times as likely to begin drinking themselves, the study found, underscoring the sway that friends have in adolescents' drinking behavior.
"Family history doesn't necessarily drive the age of first drink," notes Kuperman, who has studied teen drinking for more than a decade. "It's access. At that age (14 or 15), access trumps all. As they get older, then family history plays a larger role."
The current study drew from a pool of 820 adolescents at six sites across the country. The participants were 14 to 17 years old, with a median age of 15.5, nearly identical to the typical age of an adolescent's first drink found in previous studies. More than eight in 10 respondents came from what the researchers deemed high-risk families, but more than half of the teenagers had no alcohol-dependent parents.
Tellingly, among those adolescents who reported having had drunk alcohol, nearly four in ten said their best friends also drank.
The result underscores previous findings that teenagers who have their first drink before 15 years of age are more likely to abuse alcohol or become dependent. It also supports the screening questions selected in the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the American Academy of Pediatrics initiative to identify and help youth at risk for alcohol use, the researchers write.
Kuperman, whose faculty appointment is in the Carver College of Medicine, says he hopes to use the study to delve into the genetics underpinning alcoholism, chiefly tracking adolescents who use alcohol and see whether they have genes that match up with their parents if they also are problem drinkers.
"We're trying to separate out those who experiment with alcohol to those who go on to problematic drinking," he says.
###
Contributing authors include John Kramer from the UI; Grace Chan and Victor Hesselbrock, University of Connecticut Health Center; Leah Wetherill, Indiana University School of Medicine; Kathleen Bucholz, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; Danielle Dick, Virginia Commonwealth University; Bernice Porjesz and Madhavi Rangaswamy, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn; and Marc Schuckit (principal investigator on the grant), University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
The National Institutes of Health (grant number: 5 U10 AA008401), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the study.
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Best friends influence when teenagers have first drinkPublic release date: 28-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Richard Lewis richard-c-lewis@uiowa.edu 319-384-0012 University of Iowa
U. Iowa study notes friends' access to alcohol as main reason
Chances are the only thing you remember about your first swig of alcohol is how bad the stuff tasted. What you didn't know is the person who gave you that first drink and when you had it says a lot about your predisposition to imbibe later in life.
A national study by a University of Iowa-led team has found that adolescents who get their first drink from a friend are more likely to drink sooner in life, which past studies show makes them more prone to abusing alcohol when they get older. The finding is designed to help specialists predict when adolescents are likely to first consume alcohol, with the aim of heading off problem drinking at the pass.
"When you start drinking, even with kids who come from alcoholic families, they don't get their first drinks from their family," says Samuel Kuperman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the UI. "They get their first drinks from their friends. They have to be able to get it. If they have friends who have alcohol, then it's easier for them to have that first drink."
The basis for the study, published this month in the journal Pediatrics, is compelling: One-third of eighth graders in the United States report they've tried alcohol, according to a 2011 study of 20,000 teenagers conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health. By 10th grade, more than half say they've had a first drink, and that percentage shoots to 70 percent by their senior year.
"There's something driving kids to drink," explains Kuperman, corresponding author on the paper. "Maybe it's the coolness factor or some mystique about it. So, we're trying to educate kids about the risks associated with drinking and give them alternatives."
Kuperman and his team built their formula from two longstanding measures of adolescent drinking behaviorthe Semi-Structured Assessment for the Genetics and Alcoholism and the Achenbach Youth Self Report. From those measures of nearly two-dozen variables and a review of the literature, the UI-led team found five to be the most important predictors: two separate measures of disruptive behavior, a family history of alcohol dependence, a measure of poor social skills, and whether most best friends drink alcohol.
The researchers then looked at how the five variables worked in concert.
Surprisingly, a best friend who drank and had access to alcohol was the most important predictor. In fact, adolescents whose best friend used alcohol were twice as likely to have a first drink, the researchers found. Moreover, if considered independently of the other variables, teenagers whose best friends drank are three times as likely to begin drinking themselves, the study found, underscoring the sway that friends have in adolescents' drinking behavior.
"Family history doesn't necessarily drive the age of first drink," notes Kuperman, who has studied teen drinking for more than a decade. "It's access. At that age (14 or 15), access trumps all. As they get older, then family history plays a larger role."
The current study drew from a pool of 820 adolescents at six sites across the country. The participants were 14 to 17 years old, with a median age of 15.5, nearly identical to the typical age of an adolescent's first drink found in previous studies. More than eight in 10 respondents came from what the researchers deemed high-risk families, but more than half of the teenagers had no alcohol-dependent parents.
Tellingly, among those adolescents who reported having had drunk alcohol, nearly four in ten said their best friends also drank.
The result underscores previous findings that teenagers who have their first drink before 15 years of age are more likely to abuse alcohol or become dependent. It also supports the screening questions selected in the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the American Academy of Pediatrics initiative to identify and help youth at risk for alcohol use, the researchers write.
Kuperman, whose faculty appointment is in the Carver College of Medicine, says he hopes to use the study to delve into the genetics underpinning alcoholism, chiefly tracking adolescents who use alcohol and see whether they have genes that match up with their parents if they also are problem drinkers.
"We're trying to separate out those who experiment with alcohol to those who go on to problematic drinking," he says.
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Contributing authors include John Kramer from the UI; Grace Chan and Victor Hesselbrock, University of Connecticut Health Center; Leah Wetherill, Indiana University School of Medicine; Kathleen Bucholz, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; Danielle Dick, Virginia Commonwealth University; Bernice Porjesz and Madhavi Rangaswamy, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn; and Marc Schuckit (principal investigator on the grant), University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
The National Institutes of Health (grant number: 5 U10 AA008401), the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded the study.
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Public release date: 28-Jan-2013
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