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WASHINGTON (AP) ? Far-reaching legislation to grant a chance at citizenship to millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on a solid bipartisan vote Tuesday night after supporters somberly sidestepped a controversy over the rights of gay spouses.
The 13-5 vote cleared the way for an epic showdown on the Senate floor on the measure, which is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities yet also gives the Republican Party a chance to recast itself as more appealing to minorities.
The committee's action sparked rejoicing from immigration activists who crowded into a Senate committee room to witness the proceedings. "Yes, we can!" they shouted as they clapped rhythmically to show their pleasure.
In addition to creating a pathway to citizenship for 11.5 million immigrants, the legislation creates a new program for low-skilled foreign labor and would permit highly skilled workers into the country at far higher levels than is currently the case.
At the same time, it requires the government to take costly new steps to guard against future illegal immigration.
There was suspense to the end of the committee's deliberations, when Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who serves as chairman, sparked a debate over his proposal to give same-sex and heterosexual spouses equal rights under immigration law.
"I don't want to be the senator who asks people to choose between the love of their life and the love of their country," he said, adding he wanted to hear from others on the committee.
In response, he heard a chorus of pleas from the bill's supporters, seconding private appeals from the White House, not to force a vote that they warned would lead to the bill's demise.
"I believe in my heart of hearts that what you're doing is the right and just thing," said one of them, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "But I believe this is the wrong moment, that this is the wrong bill."
In the hours leading to a final vote, the panel also agreed to a last-minute compromise covering an increase in the visa program for high-tech workers, a deal that brought Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah over to the ranks of supporters.
Under the compromise, the number of highly skilled workers admitted to the country would rise from 65,000 annually to 110,000, with the possibility of a further rise to 180,000, depending in part on unemployment levels.
Firms where foreign labor accounts for at least 15 percent of the skilled work force would be subjected to tighter conditions than companies less dependent on H-IB visa holders.
The compromise was negotiated by Hatch, whose state is home to a growing high tech industry, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. It is designed to balance the interests of industry, which relies increasingly on skilled foreign labor, and organized labor, which represents American workers.
AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka attacked the deal sharply as "anti-worker," although he also made clear organized labor would continue to support the overall legislation.
Robert Hoffman, senior vice president for government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, welcomed the deal. "We obviously want to keep moving the bill forward and building support for the legislation, and this agreement allows us to do so," he said.
The issue of same-sex spouses hovered in the background from the start, and as the committee neared the end of its work, officials said Leahy had been informed that both the White House and Senate Democrats hoped he would not risk the destruction of months of painstaking work by putting the issue to a vote.
"There have been 300 amendments. Why shouldn't we have one more?" he told reporters at one point, hours before called the committee into session for a final time to debate the legislation.
A few hours later, Republicans and Democrats both answered his question bluntly.
"This would fracture the coalition. I could not support the bill," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was a member of the bipartisan so-called Gang of Eight that drafted the core elements of the bill.
Republicans and Democrats alike also noted that the Supreme Court may soon issue a ruling that renders the controversy moot.
Despite the concern that bipartisan support for the legislation was fragile, there was no doubting the command over committee proceedings that backers held.
In a final reminder, an attempt by Sen. Ted Cruz., R-Texas, to delete the pathway to citizenship failed on a 13-5 vote.
In defeat, he and others said they, too, wanted to overhaul immigration law, but not the way that drafters of the legislation had done.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recalled that he had voted to give "amnesty" to those in the country illegally in 1986, the last time Congress took a major look at immigration. He said that bill, like the current one, promised to crack down on illegal immigration, but said it had failed to do so.
The centerpiece provision of the legislation allows an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally to obtain "registered provisional immigrant status" six months after enactment if certain conditions are also met.
Applicants must have arrived in the United States before Dec. 31, 2011, and maintained continuous physical presence, must not have a felony conviction of more than two misdemeanors on their record, and pay a $500 fine.
The registered provisional immigrant status lasts six years and is renewable for another $500. After a decade, though, individuals could seek a green card and lawful permanent resident status if they are up to date on their taxes and pay a $1,000 fine and meet other conditions.
Individuals brought to the country as youths would be able to apply for green cards in five years.
___
AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/senate-panel-approves-immigration-bill-235617777.html
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In April NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission took a huge panorama. From 438 miles above the Earth, the satellite shot a 6,000-mile-long, 120-mile-wide strip of planet from Russia to South Africa. It is aptly named ?The Long Swath.? Oh and it's 19.06 gigapixels.
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CANNES, France (AP) ? Before "Fruitvale Station," Michael B. Jordan was glimpsed sporadically in supporting roles on TV shows like "The Wire" and "Friday Night Lights," and in films like "Chronicle" and "Red Tails."
That changes emphatically with "Fruitvale Station," a Sundance hit that premiered Thursday night at the Cannes Film Festival. In the film, he plays Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old victim of the infamous 2009 police shooting on the Oakland, California, transit system.
To humanize Grant, first-time filmmaker Ryan Coogler fashioned the movie around his last day: Jordan hardly leaves the frame.
"When I first saw it, I was like, 'Man, can we cut to something else? I'm tired of looking at myself right now,'" Jordan said in an interview by the beach off the Croisette. "That's when it really sunk in that this is sink or swim. Sink or swim. Hope I'm swimming."
Not only is the 26-year-old Jordan swimming, he might as well be doing swan dives along the Riviera. He utterly commands "Fruitvale Station" with star-quality charisma and an honest naturalism.
"I wanted to show that I could carry a movie," he says. "That's the next step. I want to do films. I want to be a leading man. A lot was riding on this."
"Fruitvale Station," which was simply called "Fruitvale" before the Weinstein Co. picked up the film for release July 16, won both the Grand Jury prize and the Audience Award for a drama at Sundance. Cannes has a tradition of cherry-picking the best of Sundance. Much as "Beasts of the Southern Wild" did last year, "Fruitvale Station" is playing in this year's Un Certain Regard section.
Jordan, who says he was merely hoping the film would make it into Sundance, was excitedly enjoying himself at Cannes on Thursday. He's planning to stay at the festival a few days longer than necessary, "to drink a little more, stay up a little later."
"It's electric," says Jordan. "It's like March Madness. It's that time of year where everyone's just in it, talking about movies."
But he's also trying not to get ahead of himself.
"I don't want to be that ignorant American who comes over here and expects everyone to love it: 'Oh, you got to love it because it's hot over there,'" he says. "I want people to be excited about it because it really affects them."
"Fruitvale Station" has certainly been doing that, with raves for the film continuing at Cannes. Its power owes much to Jordan's performance, as he slowly ? through a routine day of running errands, fighting to keep a job, trying to live down an earlier stint in prison, and caring for his daughter ? fleshes out Grant beyond the simple posthumous photo in a newspaper.
"Something me and Ryan really wanted to show is spontaneity," he says. "It's about the humanity. It's about how people treat each other, regardless if they're black, white, orange, from wherever, whatever social background, how much money you got ? it doesn't matter."
Coogler, a native of the San Francisco Bay area where the film takes place, had Jordan specifically in mind for the part. A moment after meeting him, the director knew he had the magnetism of the sociable Grant.
"In everything that he was in, I wished the camera stayed on him," says Coogler. "He would be in a scene, and on TV, it leaves and goes on (to another character). I would be like, 'Man, we should be following that guy.'"
Jordan has had some memorable roles, including as the tragic, young, drug-dealing Wallace in the first season of "The Wire," and as Vince Howard, the troubled but good-hearted quarterback of "Friday Night Lights." The show, Jordan says, was the first time he got the material to "show what I can do."
The actor says he was "drooling at the bit" to play Grant. But perhaps the greater challenge to seeing his name atop the call sheet every day during shooting "Fruitvale Station" was that Jordan would be playing a real person, one whose family was intimately connected to the production.
"His daughter is going to have to watch this movie one day," he says. "I didn't want to let anybody down. I didn't want to see me up there. That was the biggest thing: I didn't want to see Mike up there."
Jordan has been in talks to play the Human Torch in Twentieth Century Fox's "Fantastic Four" reboot. He acknowledges the possibility, but says, "That's not real yet." The film is to be directed by Josh Trank, who cast Jordan as one of three high school friends who gain superpowers in "Chronicle."
If Jordan were to be cast in "Fantastic Four," he would be the rare black actor to assume a superhero role. Jordan acknowledges that some will prefer the continuity of the Human Torch remaining white, as he is in the comics. But he thinks the character's most identifiable qualities have little to do with race. (Jordan's character in "Chronicle" was also originally scripted as white.)
"I'm all about breaking barriers and changing stuff," says Jordan. "It's 2013. We've got a black president. Times have changed."
But whatever is to come for Jordan, it's clear he has big ambitions: "I want a career like Leo," he says. "I want a career like Ryan Gosling."
Smiling, Jordan says: "It feels good. It feels good to get to a place where I can be creative and selective about certain things I do. I'm really curious to see what's next."
___
Follow AP Entertainment Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jake_coyle
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jordan-finally-front-center-fruitvale-134641858.html
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Strap in, folks. Some of the top brass from Google's Android team are about to take the stage here at Google I/O, and maybe we'll get answers to a few of the burning questions from this year's conference. Plus, it's a chance for developers to chat directly with the other folks who make the magic happen.
It kicks off at 8:20 p.m. on the east coast, and 5:20 here in the west.
Join us for the liveblog after the break!
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/9m2lSnbPd28/story01.htm
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KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP) ? In a bid to safeguard biodiversity and the Caribbean's tourism-based economy, regional political leaders and corporate executives will gather Friday on billionaire Richard Branson's private island with the aim of protecting 20 percent of the region's coastal resources by 2020.
Participants are expected to announce various commitments to advance the "Caribbean Challenge," an initiative that is touted as the first comprehensive conservation endeavor in the region of scattered islands that has 10 percent of the world's coral reefs and some 1,400 species of fish and marine mammals.
To safeguard the Caribbean's future, Branson says politics and business-as-usual will have to change. The adventuring CEO and founder of the Virgin Group of companies is co-hosting the meeting of political and business leaders at Necker Island, his home in the British Virgin Islands where he has developed an ultra-exclusive eco-resort that showcases renewable energy technology and reintroduced flamingoes.
"It's just so important to get every single Caribbean country 100 percent behind protecting the wonderful sea life and the wonderful reefs and mangroves, and therefore the species that occupy our oceans," Branson said in a phone interview from the island.
British Virgin Islands Premier Orlando Smith and Grenada Prime Minister Keith Mitchell are also co-hosting the gathering of delegations from nine Caribbean countries, chiefs of resort companies and cruise lines, representatives of the World Bank, United Nations and other international bodies, private foundations and environmental groups.
The Nature Conservancy, an international conservation group headquartered in Virginia, is helping to sponsor the summit and has been providing technical assistance to participating governments for years. The conservancy touts the Caribbean Challenge, begun in 2008, as among the world's most ambitious conservation initiatives.
"The Caribbean is truly paradise under threat, and today's focus is a critical step toward a brighter future," Glenn Prickett, chief external affairs officer with the Nature Conservancy, said in an email.
If the Caribbean, the world's most tourism dependent region, takes strong steps now to protect its natural resources, conservationists say it will put itself in a far stronger position to protect its small economies and cope with future threats from climate change and ocean acidification due to greenhouse gases.
The challenges are many in the ecologically stressed Caribbean, which covers some 10,000 square kilometers (3,860 square miles). Once brilliant coral reefs have lost their luster due to warming waters and disease. Live coral cover has plummeted to an average of just 8 percent from 50 percent in the 1970s, the International Union for Conservation of Nature says. Three-fourths of the reefs are considered threatened, also degraded by overfishing, runoff pollution and coastal development.
"In the past, the Caribbean has not been great at protecting the eagle rays and the sharks and the reef fish and so on," Branson said.
Some of the Caribbean Challenge's participating countries ? Bahamas, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and the British Virgin Islands ? have already taken steps to reach their conservation targets.
The Dominican Republic has actually exceeded its 20 percent goal by creating more than 30 new protected areas in recent years. The Bahamas established the largest marine protected area in the region by expanding a national park in Andros from 185,000 acres to 1.28 million acres. Jamaica has set up several "no-take" fishing sanctuaries.
But there are questions about how deep the political will really is in a region with heavily indebted governments. Political leaders have long spoken about the need for protecting coasts, developing alternative energy sources and diversifying tourism-dependent economies but little has been accomplished. One country, Antigua & Barbuda, recently dropped out of the initiative for reasons that are not clear.
Branson said strong conservation efforts would pay off for years to come for a region where 70 percent of the people live in coastal settlements and a $20 billion tourism industry provides more than 2 million jobs.
"Many, many people who come to the Caribbean come because they want to enjoy the reef, they want to see the sea life on the reef," Branson said. "And therefore they want to see it better protected."
___
David McFadden on Twitter: http://twitter/com/dmcfadd
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/caribbean-talks-conservation-bransons-island-070032003.html
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May 15, 2013 ? New hardware could lead to wireless devices that identify and exploit unused transmission frequencies, using radio spectrum much more efficiently.
The way in which radio spectrum is currently allocated to different wireless technologies can lead to gross inefficiencies. In some regions, for instance, the frequencies used by cellphones can be desperately congested, while large swaths of the broadcast-television spectrum stand idle.
One solution to that problem is the 15-year-old idea of "cognitive radio," in which wireless devices would scan their environments for vacant frequencies and use these for transmissions. Different proposals for cognitive radio place different emphases on hardware and software, but the chief component of many hardware approaches is a bank of filters that can isolate any frequency in a wide band.
Researchers at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) have developed a new method for manufacturing such filters that should improve their performance while enabling 14 times as many of them to be crammed on a single chip. That's a vital consideration in handheld devices where space is tight. But just as important, the new method uses techniques already common in the production of signal-processing chips, so it should be easy for manufacturers to adopt.
There are two main approaches to hardware-based radio-signal filtration: one is to perform the filtration electronically; the other is to convert the radio signal to an acoustic signal -- a physical vibration -- and then convert it back to an electrical signal. In work to be presented in June at the International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems, Dana Weinstein, the Steve and Renee Finn Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Laura Popa, a graduate student in physics, adopted the second approach.
Resonant ideas
Both types of filtration use devices called resonators, and acoustic resonators have a couple of clear advantages over electronic ones. One is that their filtration is more precise.
"If I pluck a guitar string -- that's the easiest resonator to think of -- it's going to resonate at some frequency, and it's going to die down due to losses," Weinstein explains. "That loss is related to, basically, energy leaked away from that resonance mode into all other frequencies. Less loss means better frequency selectivity, and mechanical acoustic resonators have less loss than electrical resonators."
Acoustic resonators' other advantage is that, in principle, they can be packed more densely than electrical-filtration circuits. "Acoustic wavelengths are much smaller than electromagnetic wavelengths," Weinstein says. "So for a given frequency, my mechanical resonator is going to be much smaller."
But in practice, the number of acoustic resonators in a filtration bank has been limited. The heart of any device that converts electrical signals to mechanical vibrations, or vice versa, is a capacitor, which can be thought of as two parallel metal plates separated by a small distance.
"The capacitors change the impedance" -- a measure of the ease with which a wave propagates -- "that the antenna sees, so you may have unwanted reflections back into the antenna," Weinstein says. "Each capacitor from each filter is going to affect the antenna, and that's no good. It means I can only have so many filters, and therefore so many frequencies that I can separate my signal into."
Another problem with acoustic resonators is that turning them on or off -- a necessary step in the isolation of a particular transmission frequency -- requires giving each resonator its own electrical switch. Traditionally, an incoming radio-frequency signal has had to pass through that switch before reaching the resonator, suffering some loss of quality in the process.
Switching channels
Weinstein and Popa solve both these problems at a stroke. Moreover, they do it by adapting a technology already common in wireless devices: a gallium nitride transistor.
Almost all commercial transistors use semiconductors: materials, like gallium nitride, that can be switched between a conductive and a nonconductive state by the application of a voltage. In Weinstein and Popa's new resonator, the lower "plate" of the capacitor is in fact a gallium nitride channel in its conductive state.
Switching that channel to its nonconductive state is like removing the lower plate of the capacitor, which drastically reduces the capacitors' effect on the quality of the radio signal. In experiments, the MTL researchers found that their resonators had only one-fourteenth the "capacitive load" of conventional resonators. "The radio can now afford to have 14 times as many filters attached to the antenna," Weinstein says, "so we can span more frequencies."
Switching the channel to its nonconductive state also turns the resonator off, so the researchers' new design requires no additional switch in the path of the incoming signal, improving signal quality.
Finally, the new resonator uses only materials already found in the gallium arsenide transistors common in wireless devices, so mass-producing it should require no major modifications of existing manufacturing processes.
Commercial adoption of cognitive radio has been slow for a number of reasons. "Part of it is being able to get the frequency-agile components and do it in a cost-effective manner," says Thomas Kazior, a principal engineering fellow at Raytheon. "Plus the size constraint: Filters tend to be big to begin with, and banks of tunable filters just make things even bigger."
The MTL researchers' work could help with both problems, Kazior says. "We're talking about making filters that are directly integrated onto, say, a receiver chip, because the little resonator devices are literally the size of a transistor," he says. "These are all on a tiny scale."
"They can help with the cost problem because these resonator-type structures almost come for free," Kazior adds. "Building them is part of the semiconductor fabrication process, using pretty much the existing fabrication steps that you're using to build the transistor and the rest of the circuits. You just may need to add one, or two at the most, additional steps -- out of 100 or more steps."
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ELIZABETH, N.J. (AP) ? A homeless, hatchet-wielding hitchhiker who became an Internet hero earlier this year was arrested Thursday for allegedly beating a New Jersey lawyer to death inside his home.
Caleb "Kai" McGillvary, whose star turn as "Kai the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker" came after he intervened in an attack on a California utility worker, was arrested at a Philadelphia bus station, Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow said.
"I believe that everyone is a little safer with this person off the streets," the prosecutor said. Philadelphia police could not immediately be reached for comment.
McGillvary was charged with killing Joseph Galfy, Jr., a Clark, N.J. attorney found dead Monday. Romankow said he will be processed and sent to back to New Jersey, where his bail is set at $3 million.
Galfy's body was found two days after authorities said he met McGillvary in New York City. Galfy, 73, was found wearing only his underwear and socks by police who went to his home to check on his well-being.
Statements posted on McGillvary's Facebook page following the homicide indicated the encounter was sexual in nature, Romankow said, though he declined to go into specific detail.
On his Facebook page, McGillvary's last post, dated Tuesday, asks "what would you do?" if you awoke in a stranger's house and found you'd been drugged and sexually assaulted. One commenter suggests hitting him with a hatchet ? and McGillvary's final comment on the post says, "I like your idea."
A hatchet helped give McGillvary a brief taste of fame in February when he gave a rambling, profanity-laced 5-minute interview to a Fresno, Calif. television station about thwarting an attack on a Pacific Gas & Electric employee. The interview went viral, with one version viewed more than 3.9 million times on YouTube. He later appeared on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"
Kimmel asked him what people were saying to him since the Feb. 1 incident. "Hey, you're Kai, that dude with the hatchet," he responded.
McGillvary, who said in his TV appearance he prefers to be called "home-free" instead of homeless, traded on his newfound celebrity to meet fans across the country, according to Romankow.
McGillvary met Galfy on Saturday in Times Square, then spent at least two nights at his home on a cul-de-sac in Clark, a quite community about 20 miles west of New York, Romankow said. His movements after that included two trips to meet a fan in Asbury Park, a trip to Philadelphia and another to Glassboro in southern New Jersey before he took a train bound for Philadelphia, authorities said.
McGillvary swiftly gained notoriety in February after he intervened in an apparently unprovoked attack that led to charges including attempted murder.
McGillvary said he was riding in a car with a man who veered into the worker, got out of the car, then said "I am Jesus and I am here to take you home" before attacking. McGillvary said he then pulled a hatchet from his backpack and struck the driver in the head several times to subdue him, The Fresno Bee reported.
"That woman was in danger," Kai told KMPH-TV. "He just finished, what looked like at the time, killing somebody, and if he hadn't done that he would have killed more people."
Last month, the driver entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, according to The Fresno Bee.
In his television interview, McGillvary also said he'd once intervened in what he called a domestic violence situation.
A man "starts beating up on this woman who he calls his," McGillvary told the television station. "I started smashing him in the head and the teeth."
McGillvary also goes by the names Kai Lawrence, Caleb Kai Lawrence and Kai Nicodemus, prosecutors said.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/famed-hatchet-hitchhiker-arrested-nj-homicide-231626616.html
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Financial news items periodically remind us that there are a variety of ways to raise funding from any asset or class of investors. David Bowie sold bonds backed by revenue from Bowie's recordings in the late 90s, now crowds fund a wide range of music projects for artists without previous access to such funding. A trend towards funding individuals is also emerging though with a focus on such assets as royalties or projects such as new ventures.
I remember being startled at the news of Bowie Bonds in 1997.
Since then I've realized that anything can be turned into a security but it was a trailblazing maneuver. The outcome was not as good as hoped for investors but music investments seem like an inherently unstable commodity.
Ben Sisario at The New York Times recently wrote about songwriter Preston Glass's use of The Royalty Exchange to auction partial royalty income.
It's an interesting look at a financial service for musicians, one that focuses on an actual asset, however volatile.
A new service called Upstart is designed to connect investors with students and young entrepreneurs in exchange for a limited percentage of their income over a specific period of time.
A number of those seeking funding, some of whom have achieved funding, are focused on music:
Trevor Collins
"Virginia Tech graduate seeking to build his online music [education] platform" Cloud Conservatory.
Richard Washington
"USC Marshall School of Business graduate seeking funds to develop and extend his social mobile application for music."
Kara Drake
"NYU MBA leaving corporate track to launch Signalfy - a platform for discovering & promoting EDM...events."
Omri Mor
"Music producer and recent graduate building a music platform for supporting and discovering new artists and bands."
Melanie Plageman
"Duke University graduate looking to build an online music platform in Kenya."
Shefali Kumar Friesen
"Entrepreneur, producer & singer looking to take patent-pending mobile technology to market, and complete production of solo album."
That's quite an array of projects and emphasizes the entrepreneurial focus of Upstart.
Though some on Upstart are seeking to reduce student debt, it seems to have the most potential as a funding and launch platform for new startups.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
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NEW DELHI (AP) ? Bollywood's biggest star, Amitabh Bachchan, is willing to explore more Hollywood movies now that he's done his first.
Bachchan says he has never been offered Hollywood films before the 3-D extravaganza "The Great Gatsby," which opens the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday.
The 71-year-old said that at his age, it is difficult to expect that certain roles will come his way. "But yes, if there are people who want to cast me, I don't mind if something is offered," the Hindustan Times newspaper quoted him as saying in an interview published Tuesday.
The Indian screen legend has acted in more than 180 Indian films in a career spanning four decades.
Bachchan portrays Meyer Wolfsheim in director Baz Luhrmann's take on the classic American novel.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Mcguire and Carey Mulligan.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bollywood-star-bachchan-hopes-hollywood-roles-080413117.html
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The next time you take a bite of syrup-soaked pancake, ask yourself: What does that maple syrup really taste like? Do you detect a hint of spiced meat? Perhaps a whisper of mango? Or is that je ne sais quoi the flavor of oats?
If you think maple syrup always tastes like, well, maple, think again. This humble sweetener, born in backwoods cabins, has entered the highbrow world of gourmet food. Its flavor has been dissected like that of a fine wine, marketed as Vermont?s countryside in a bottle, and puzzled over by scientists trying to unravel the chemical complexities of taste.
It?s all part of a new campaign in Vermont to hitch maple syrup to the terroir movement that has people paying top dollar for coffee from a particular plantation in El Salvador or wine that captures the essence of the Loire Valley. The idea originated with University of Vermont anthropologist Amy Trubek, author of The Taste of Place, a book about terroir in America. Using a $45,000 grant from the U.S. Agriculture Department, she convened a group that included wine and cheese experts, a sensory scientist, maple producers, the state government?s Maple Specialist, and a Middlebury College chemist. In tasting sessions, meetings, and chemistry labs, they tried to pin down the flavors of maple syrup, and how it might connect to the Vermont landscape. The end result was a free guide the state?s agriculture department now gives sugar-makers, coaching them, essentially, to think more like wine snobs. It offers tips on tasting syrup, along with a thesaurus? worth of adjectives to describe its flavors, ranging from ?fresh butter? to ?leather.?
The question of terroir isn?t purely academic; it?s economic, too. If someone will pay $42 for 12 ounces of coffee beans, what could Vermont producers get for a pint of private reserve syrup? The guides were meant to show sugar-makers a new way of talking about their product. If they thought more like connoisseurs, maybe they could persuade customers to pay more, and catch the attention of folks who hadn?t considered syrup a gourmet item.
Earlier this spring, as the see-saw of freezing nights and daytime thaws got sap pumping through maple trees, my 7-year-old son and I ventured down a muddy path to a wooden hut 10 miles south of the Canadian border. I had come to wrap my tongue around two questions: How different could different maple syrups really taste? And could they ever taste different enough to make me want to pay a premium for something I pour on my pancakes?
Seth Wolcott-MacCausland was my guide. His family owns 170 acres of woods where they?ve made maple syrup for three decades. (He?s also a friend of a friend, and I?d once hired him to do some carpentry work on my house. Vermont is a very small world.) The Wolcott-MacCauslands sell their organic, single-source Green Wind Farms syrup mostly through gourmet shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. By coincidence, my son and I were joined that day by two Brooklynites, Tom O?Connor and Matt Pugliese, who had come to see the source of the syrup they sell on their specialty food website. O?Connor was charmed.
?It?s pretty cool,? he said as Julie Wolcott, Wolcott-MacCausland?s mother, drove a small, horse-drawn wagon through a maple grove, pausing to fill a tank on the wagon with sap from metal pails hung from the trees. ?It?s still very connected to the land.?
Wolcott emptied the sap from the tank into a system of pipes leading to the sugarhouse. That?s where the sap?s hint of sugar is concentrated into syrup?s jolt of sweetness. A sugar-maker filters and boils roughly 40 gallons of watery sap to make a single gallon of syrup. Inside the building, as plumes of steam rose from the boiling sap nearby, Wolcott-MacCausland lined up 11 jars of the family syrup, each a different hue of brown.
I had an anxious feeling reminiscent of final exams. I am not a supertaster. While I can usually tell a syrah from a pinot noir, that?s about where my tongue?s discerning ability ends. When people start opining about wine, I?m always reminded of the Saturday Night Live skit where three pretentious oenophiles muse over their glasses:
?Oh, she is ambitious. Is anyone getting a bit of aftershave lotion??
?Perhaps. And maybe a hint of snow, and electronics??
But I had my cheat sheet: the plastic guide paid for with the federal grant, with its syrup-tasting tips and 43 adjectives. Among the suggested descriptors were baked apple, brioche, condensed milk, caramel, mushroom, hay, and soy sauce.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=fa96ad41c504ac29ecf9f168b34d8006
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Solved! A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins here, with this beehive. Look at the honeycomb in the photo and ask yourself: (I know you've been wondering this all your life, but have been too shy to ask out loud ... ) Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon?
Bees, after all, could build honeycombs from rectangles or squares or triangles ...
But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. Always hexagons.
And not just your basic six-sided hexagon. They like "perfect" hexagons, meaning all six sides are of equal length. They go for the jewelers' version ? precise, just so. Why?
Well, this is a very old question. More than 2,000 years ago, in 36 B.C., a Roman soldier/scholar/writer, Marcus Terentius Varro, proposed an answer, which ever since has been called "The Honeybee Conjecture." Varro thought there might be a deep reason for this bee behavior. Maybe a honeycomb built of hexagons can hold more honey. Maybe hexagons require less building wax. Maybe there's a hidden logic here.
I like this idea ? that below the flux, the chaos of everyday life there might be elegant, reasons for what we see. "The Honeybee Conjecture" is an example of mathematics unlocking a mystery of nature, so here, with help from physicist/writer Alan Lightman, (who recently wrote about this in Orion Magazine) is Varro's hunch.
The Essential Honeycomb
Honeycombs, we all know, store honey. Honey is obviously valuable to bees. It feeds their young. It sustains the hive. It makes the wax that holds the honeycomb together. It takes thousands and thousands of bee hours, tens of thousands of flights across the meadow, to gather nectar from flower after flower after flower, so it's reasonable to suppose that back at the hive, bees want a tight, secure storage structure that is as simple to build as possible.
So how to build it? Well, suppose you start your honeycomb with a cell like this ... a totally random shape, no equal sides, just a squiggle ...
If you start this way, what will your next cell look like? Well, you don't want big gaps between cells. You want the structure tight. So the next cell will have to be customized to cling to the first, like this ...
And the third cell, once again, will have to be designed to fit the first two. Each cell would be a little different, and that means, says Alan Lightman ...
... this method of constructing a honeycomb would require that the worker bees work sequentially, one at a time, first making once cell, then fitting the next cell to that, and so on.
But that's not the bee way. Look at any YouTube version of bees building a honeycomb, says Alan, and you won't see a lot of bees lounging about, waiting for their turn to build a cell. Instead, everybody's working. They do this collectively, simultaneously and constantly.
So a "squiggle cell plan" creates idle bees. It wastes time. For bees to assemble a honeycomb the way bees actually do it, it's simpler for each cell to be exactly the same. If the sides are all equal ? "perfectly" hexagonal ? every cell fits tight with every other cell. Everybody can pitch in. That way, a honeycomb is basically an easy jigsaw puzzle. All the parts fit.
OK, that explains why honeycomb cells are same-sized. But back to our first question: Why the preference for hexagons? Is there something special about a six-sided shape?
Some shapes you know right away aren't good. A honeycomb built from spheres would have little spaces between each unit ...
... creating gaps that would need extra wax for patching. So can see why a honeycomb built from spheres wouldn't be ideal. Pentagons, octagons also produce gaps. What's better?
"It is a mathematical truth," Lightman writes, "that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares and hexagons."
So which to choose? The triangle? The square? Or the hexagon? Which one is best? Here's where our Roman, Marcus Terentius Varro made his great contribution. His "conjecture" ? and that's what it was, a mathematical guess ? proposed that a structure built from hexagons is probably a wee bit more compact than a structure built from squares or triangles. A hexagonal honeycomb, he thought, would have "the smallest total perimeter." He couldn't prove it mathematically, but that's what he thought.
Compactness matters. The more compact your structure, the less wax you need to construct the honeycomb. Wax is expensive. A bee must consume about eight ounces of honey to produce a single ounce of wax. So if you are watching your wax bill, you want the most compact building plan you can find.
And guess what?
? [The honeycomb is] absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax.
Two thousand thirty-five years after Marcus Terentius Varro proposed his conjecture, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, Thomas Hales, solved the riddle. It turns out, Varro was right. A hexagonal structure is indeed more compact. In 1999, produced a mathematical proof that said so.
As the ancient Greeks suspected, as Varro claimed, as bee lovers have always thought, as Charles Darwin himself once wrote, the honeycomb is a masterpiece of engineering. It is "absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax."
The bees, presumably, shrugged. As Alan Lightman says, "They knew it was true all along."
Alan Lightman's essay "The Symmetrical Universe," originally published in Orion Magazine, will be included in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew to be published early next year. I also recommend Ivars Peterson's essay in Science News, The Honeycomb Conjecture.
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If the term intervalometer leaves you scratching your head, but you have the perfect idea for the next viral timelapse video, Brinno's here to help. The company's new TLC200 Pro makes creating timelapses as easy as using a point-and-shoot camera. And thanks to a relatively large, extra-sensitive 1/3-inch sensor, it will capture beautiful results even when left filming over night.
And instead of assuming you know how to convert thousands of JPEG images into a video, the TLC200 Pro automatically compresses the timelapse into a single clip so it's easy to immediately upload. With a resolution of 1.3 megapixels we're not talking full 1080P HD quality here, but a minor step down to 720P which is more than adequate for the amateur timelapser. And on a set of four AA batteries it's promised the camera can capture up to 240,000 frames at a two second interval.
Pricing for the fixed-lens version of the TLC200 was just shy of $300, but since the new Pro model allows you to swap in alternate lenses for a different field-of-view, depth-of-field, etc. you can probably expect to pay a little more of a premium once it's available.
[Brinno via Damn Geeky]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/this-simple-device-makes-glorious-timelapses-easy-even-504505621
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At last week?s Digital Arts & Design grad showcase, six students from April?s graduating class presented their final portfolios, motion graphics work, and demo reels for friends, family, and faculty in the Entertainment Business Auditorium. Check out some of their work below.
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Myke Dobbins
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Jade Foster
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Taylor Holibaugh
Carlia Todmann (also pictured above)
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Jaslin Tonton
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Tyrell Turner
Source: http://www.fullsailblog.com/digital-arts-design-april-grad-showcase-photosvideo/
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By Iain Rogers MADRID (Reuters) - When Rafa Nadal returned to action in February after seven months out with a knee injury he never thought that just over three months later he would have another five titles in the bag, including two more Masters triumphs. The Spaniard, a former number one and the French Open champion, dropped to five in the world during his enforced absence before storming back to win in Sao Paulo, Acapulco, Indian Wells, Barcelona and now Madrid. ...
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/expect-googles-mobile-game-hub-214655725.html
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Remember being a little kid and taking toys apart to see what they were really made of?
Toronto-based artist and photographer Todd McLellan does. It became the inspiration for "Things Come Apart," a new book full of gorgeous and meticulously organized photographs of old school and modern tech broken down and laid bare.
Check out the cover of "Things Come Apart" published by Thames & Hudson below:
McLellan's book features 50 objects -- ranging from the high-tech (a BlackBerry, a MacBook) to the low-tech (a wagon, a bicycle) -- broken apart into 21,959 individual components altogether, all of which are arranged into "gadget porn" compositions that provide context to what makes our tools tick.
Some of McLellan's photographs distinctly show the different parts of an item, from the smallest of nuts and bolts to a front casing, clearly separated on the floor. Other photos show the items seemingly in mid-air explosion, high-speed photography capturing every piece of a gadget in a hypnotic free fall.
"Things Come Apart" will be available for purchase from Thames & Hudson on May 31. Check out some photographs from the book in the slideshow below, along with a behind the scenes video:
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/12/disassembled-tech-things-come-apart_n_3246170.html
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JOINT BASE LEWIS-MCCHORD, Wash. (AP) ? A military judge found Army Sgt. John Russell guilty of premeditated murder Monday in the 2009 killings of five fellow service members at a combat stress clinic in Iraq.
Russell now faces a sentencing phase of his court martial to determine whether he will face life in prison with or without the possibility of release.
The 14-year veteran from Sherman, Texas, had previously pleaded guilty to unpremeditated murder in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. Under the agreement, prosecutors were allowed to try to prove to an Army judge at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state that the killings were premeditated.
The judge, Army Col. David Conn, announced his decision Monday, following a streamlined court martial that concluded Saturday, said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield.
The shooting was one of the worst instances of soldier-on-soldier violence in the Iraq war and raised questions about the mental health problems for soldiers caused by repeated tours of duty.
Killed in the 2009 shooting in Baghdad were Navy Cmdr. Charles Springle, of Wilmington, N.C., and four Army service members: Pfc. Michael Edward Yates Jr., of Federalsburg, Md.; Dr. Matthew Houseal, of Amarillo, Texas; Sgt. Christian E. Bueno-Galdos, of Paterson, N.J.; and Spc. Jacob D. Barton, of Lenox, Mo.
Russell's lawyers argued that he was deluded by depression and despair at the time. An Army mental health board found that Russell suffered from severe depression with psychotic features and post-combat stress.
Russell had long sought help with sleep troubles and was stammering and crying for help in the days before the shooting. His commanders were so alarmed that they disarmed him and sent him for repeated visits to mental health clinics, said attorney James Culp.
But prosecutors argued that Russell was trying to paint himself as mentally ill in an attempt to win early retirement ? just as he was facing a sexual harassment complaint that could derail his career and his benefits.
The day before the killings, psychiatrist Michael Jones told him that a mental disability retirement would require "some kind of suicidal psychotic crisis," Maj. Daniel Mazzone said during closing arguments, according to the Los Angeles Times (http://is.gd/s087lg ).
But when Russell saw Jones again the next day, the psychiatrist said he had no intention of giving him "a golden ticket" out of the Army.
When Russell returned about an hour later, prosecutors say, he was looking for Jones, but wound up killing two patients, a bystander and two other mental health workers, including Navy Cmdr. Keith Springle, who had also briefly treated Russell in the days before the shootings. Jones escaped injury by jumping out a window.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/judge-soldier-premeditated-iraq-killings-174410123.html
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The image of the typical American mom has transformed significantly since Mother's Day celebrations first started a century ago. From today's declining More??
LiveScience.com - 43 mins agoOne in six high school students report being victimized via e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, Web sites or texting. Larry Greenemeier reports. More??
Scientific American - 22 hrs agoSource: http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/techblog
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Every year, for the last three years, I've asked Apple to consider what amounts to a Files.app and FilePicker control in iOS. It would be analogous to the Photos.app and ImagePicker control, but allow us to easily find, and easily open, all the documents we use on all our iPhones and iPads, every day. Now, on the eve of iOS 7, the need for better file handling -- not filesystem! -- remains, and if anything has become even more urgent. In a post-iCloud, post Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall world, how can Apple address it?
At the risk of making it obnoxiously clear, I don't think iOS needs a filesystem. Dropbox is a filesystem and while it's fantastic at what it does, it's the past, not the future. Apple doesn't seem to think iOS needs a filesystem either, but they haven't provided what's needed to make filesystems obsolete yet either. Hence, Dropbox. From Stuck between the Dropbox that was and the iCloud that isn't yet:
The [current iOS] architecture is unnecessarily dependent on apps. If I create a document in Text Editor 1, not only do I have to remember the document I created but, if I want to access it again, I also have to remember the app I created it in. If I later switch to a much better Text Editor 2, my document doesn't switch with me. I have to either copy and paste every document from Text Editor 1 into Text Editor 2, or keep a list of which documents are where. That's a non-trivial amount of cognitive overhead. If at some point I move on to Text Editor 3, or delete (or switch devices and don't re-install) Text Editor 1, it gets even worse. I have to track my documents over multiple access points, and perhaps even re-install old apps just to get back to the documents locked inside. It's a mess.
Decoupled, documents that present themselves to any app that supports editing their type, and apps that simply pull any document whose type they support, would be much simpler and better. A smart version of a document picker would remove the cognitive burden from users and let the system do all the heavy lifting.
Apple doesn't seem to think iOS needs a filesystem either, but they haven't provided what's needed to make filesystems obsolete yet either.
In a world with a Files.app, you'd just tap its icon on the Home screen, tap the type of document you want (the way you tap an album in Photos.app), and go to your document. Then you tap the document and choose where you want to open it. Conversely, you could open any document app -- text editor, presenter, spreadsheet, etc. -- tap the open button, and FilePicker would present you with every file (including iCloud files) that can be opened by that app. Again, with the ability to quickly filter to help with longer lists.
Faster still, you'd just type something in a search box and Spotlight would filter right to whatever you want.
Back before iOS 6 launched, I did a series of mockups on how Files.app could map to Photos.app, FilePicker could map to ImagePicker, and File Stream could map to Photo Stream. From How Apple could provide direct document access in iOS 6:
We didn't get better file handling in iOS 6, however. We got Passbook, a repository for tickets, cards, coupons, boarding passes, and more. And not without reason. From iOS 6 and why we got Passbook instead of Files.app:
It's easy to see why Apple gave Passbook that attention as well -- mobile ecommerce is going to be huge. Billions of dollars huge.
It's already in use everywhere from Starbucks to Delta airlines, and it's built in such a way that when/if Apple embraces radio transactions (be it via NFC or something else), Passbook should handle it as gracefully as CoreLocation handles GPS vs. Wi-Fi mapping. It's good now and could be terrific in the future.
But file handling on iOS isn't even good now, and needs to be terrific. It's far more personal, and will drive far less revenue, but great file handling is the difference between an operating system being truly useful and truly frustrating. Android has intents and sharing, Windows Phone has contracts. There's whole levels of app interoperability that iOS lacks at the moment.
I've evolved my thinking on Files.app and FilePicker somewhat since the pre-iOS 6 days. A flat repository with search, for example, is more future-proof than any single layer of folders or albums. A much better, more robust, and more useful version of Spotlight that has "just type" functionality similar to what webOS had, and BlackBerry 10 is rolling out, with the ability to see into iCloud and Files.app, would go a long way to making things easier and faster.
Apple could no doubt figure inter-app communication and file handling and do just enough to provide that functionality without compromising security.
The same way Apple knew "I want multitasking" was really "I want Pandora, Skype, and TomTom to work while I'm on the phone or browsing the web", and did just enough to provide that functionality without compromising battery life, Apple could no doubt figure out "I want inter-app communication" is really "I want to open and send my files where and when I want to open and send them", and do just enough to provide that functionality without compromising security.
Multitasking had a small group of different API, and inter-app communication would certainly require similar to truly address current pain points. Files.app and FilePicker would just be part of that, but an important, highly user-facing part. BackBoard, XPC, there are a lot of ways Apple could choose to handle these problems. I just hope screaming fast, ubiquitous file access is front and center come keynote time.
Six years into the mobile revolution iOS started and we're still stuck at the gates when it comes to file handling on iPhone and iPad. With iCloud, the need only grew greater. With fresh blood in control of the product, perhaps this year we'll see some movement. Perhaps rolled into more robust inter-app communications, perhaps on its own. Either way, I've been asking for it for a long time, other technologists have been asking for it for a long time, and other apps have tried to fill the gap that only system software can really fill.
What say you? Will iOS 7 finally be the time and version when great file handling comes to iOS? And if it does, will it be in the form of Files.app and FilePicker, something more, or something else?
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/Z6t0V0I6dHc/story01.htm
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By Kim Dixon and Patrick Temple-West, Reuters
WASHINGTON - A senior Internal Revenue Service official knew in 2011 that IRS agents were giving extra scrutiny to conservative Tea Party groups, according to documents from a watchdog office obtained by Reuters on Saturday.
In a scandal that has already embarrassed the IRS and become a distraction for the Obama administration, a report from the Treasury Department's Inspector General For Tax Administration (TIGTA) was expected to be issued publicly next week on the IRS practice, who knew about it and when.
As more information emerged over the weekend, the White House said President Barack Obama was concerned about the conduct of a few IRS employees.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said: "If the inspector general finds that there were any rules broken or that conduct of government officials did not meet the standards required of them, the president expects that swift and appropriate steps will be taken to address any misconduct."
The TIGTA report finds that Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS's tax-exempt groups unit, knew of the extra scrutiny as early as June 2011.
On Friday, in remarks that triggered a storm of controversy, Lerner publicly apologized at a legal conference in Washington for what she termed "inappropriate" targeting by the IRS of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
She said the practice was confined to an IRS office in Cincinnati and that it was "absolutely not" influenced by the Obama administration. She said none of the targeted groups was denied tax-free status.
The TIGTA report was requested last year by Republican Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of a congressional investigative panel, after he accused the IRS of targeting conservative groups.
TIGTA has found that the IRS singled out groups with the words "Tea Party" or "patriot" in their names for closer scrutiny, according to a TIGTA document.
IRS chief denied knowledge
In March 2012 in congressional testimony, then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said the IRS was not making it harder for conservative groups to become tax-exempt.
Shulman stepped down at the end of 2012 when his term ended. Steven Miller was named acting head of the agency.
The IRS said in a statement on Saturday that the TIGTA report was correct. The statement said officials in the IRS exempt organizations division knew of the screening and that "IRS senior leadership did not have this level of detail."
The statement said that while "mistakes were made," there "were not partisan reasons behind this."
Although part of the executive branch, the IRS is considered an independent agency and officials try to stay out of politics.
According to the TIGTA document, the IRS was singling out the conservative groups as early as March 2010.
The document says managers in the "determinations unit" told specialists to be on the lookout for applications from organizations linked to the Tea Party, a political movement that favors smaller government and fewer and lower taxes.
Changing criteria
The IRS screening criteria were broadened in July 2011 to cover "organizations involved with political, lobbying or advocacy" seeking tax exemption, according to a TIGTA timeline of events.
Further broadening of the criteria occurred in January 2012 and again in May 2012, the document said.
Issa has vowed to investigate the matter and the House committee he chairs has the power to issue subpoenas. At least one other congressional panel intends to hold hearings, giving Republicans multiple opportunities to hammer the agency and the White House over the affair that had been brewing for months.
Lerner said IRS agents in Cincinnati targeted conservative groups "without talking to managers." The staffers were trying to deal with a crush of applications for tax-exempt status by using key words to get through the paperwork faster, she said.
About 300 applications were initially flagged for closer scrutiny. Of those, 75 were chosen for that treatment based on the presence of the key words in their names.
Thousands of applications
Each year the IRS reviews as many as 60,000 tax-exempt applications from groups ranging from charities to labor unions. Some are classified as 501(c)(4) groups after the section of the tax code that makes them tax-exempt. Such organizations can collect money from anonymous donors and spend it on advertising.
To get and keep their tax-exempt status, 501(c)(4) groups cannot endorse a political candidate or a political party.
The number of groups seeking 501(c)(4) status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, coinciding in part with the surge of Tea Party enthusiasm. In 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court issued its "Citizens United" decision lifting government limits on corporate spending in federal elections.
Consumer groups have been pushing the IRS to clarify the standards for "social welfare organizations," as they are known in Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, to ensure that they are not abusing their tax-exempt status.
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