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শনিবার, ৩১ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Mitt Romney Takes the Slightest of Leads in Latest Florida Poll
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White Epic 4G Touch to grace Sprint come January, proves your wildest dreams can come true
White Epic 4G Touch to grace Sprint come January, proves your wildest dreams can come true originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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শুক্রবার, ৩০ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
The wonderful quail...and what Sen.Coburn should learn about it.
Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released his ?Wastebook? a week ago ? a list of 100 government-funded projects that are supposedly a waste of money.
Every campaign season, quite predictably, someone from the GOP makes a document like this, listing examples of spending that, in their view, represents the most egregious excesses of governmental spending. Counting on their voters not to know or understand anything about these projects (especially the way these are carefully framed) and aware that nobody in the mainstream media will be pointing and laughing at them, they push these memes onto the unsuspecting public.
Many of these projects are competitive grant-funded scientific research, already paid by NIH or NSF after a draconian process of peer-review of the grant proposals by the experts in the field.
Remember the autism fruitfly research that Sarah Palin thought was wasteful? John McCain?s deriding of important bear DNA research? The ?projector? at the Adler Planetarium? All horrendous misinterpretations of the actual research for the sake of scoring political points.
Just a campaign tactic to get people riled up against the ?pointy-heads?.
Unsurprisingly, this latest list contains quite a few volleys against science ? in service of politicking. A quick scan finds about a dozen scientific research projects already funded by federal grants, and I think some of the other bloggers on the network may cover some of them. I will focus on this one:
23) Rockin? Robins: Study Looks for Connections Between Cocaine and Risky Sex Habits of Quail ? (KY) $175,587
What common sense suggests, science has confirmed over and over again: namely, that cocaine use is linked to increased risky sexual behavior. Just to be sure, however, one federal agency thought it should test the hypothesis on a new subject: Japanese quail.
The University of Kentucky received a grant of $181,406 in 2010 from the National Institute of Health to study how cocaine enhances the sex drive of Japanese quail. In 2011, grant funding was extended and an additional $175,587 was provided for the study. The total awarded to the project will be $356,933.140
The study seeks to verify the clinical observations that indicated that cocaine use in humans may increase sexual motivation, thereby increasing the likelihood of the occurrence of high-risk sexual behavior. The researcher conducting the study highlighted how Japanese quail are ?ideal? animals to use when studying the link between sex and drugs because the birds readily engage in reproductive behavior in the laboratory. University of Kentucky?s website stated that quail provide a convenient and interesting alternative to standard laboratory rats and pigeons. This study is slated to continue through 2015.
Scicurious goes in great depth and detail about this particular line of research and why it is important ? check it out. I will instead point out what?s wrong about laughing at Japanese quail as a research model, since I spent ten years of my life doing research on it.
Let me start with the first statement that this research is done ?on a new subject: Japanese quail?. Maybe it is new to Coburn, but Japanese quail has been a pretty standard laboratory animal for about a century. Not wanting to dig through my file cabinets to find several dozen additional reviews on printed paper, I just did a quick Google Scholar search and found these few reviews on the usefulness and importance of this species in research: J.R.Cain and W.O.Cawley, 1914, Padgett, CA and Ivey, WD, 1959, Ellen P. Reese and T. W. Reese, 1962, A. E. Woodard, H. Abplanalp, W. O. Wilson, and P. Vohra, 1973, Ichilcik R and Austin JC., 1978, Huss D, Poynter G and Lansford R., 2008, Greg Poynter, David Huss and Rusty Lansford, 2009, Gregory F. Ball and Jacques Balthazart, 2010.
Note that these reviews span about a century. That?s not ?new?.
Also note that most of these reviews are behind the paywalls.
Not everyone in the country is deeply ideological. Most of the US voters are intelligent and open-minded. Every couple of years they need to go to the polls so they want to be making informed decisions. They will look for information, but will not spend too much time and effort (and certainly not money) finding it. So, it is deplorable that the side of reason, the Reality-Based community, is keeping its information hidden behind paywalls, while the side of Anti-Science is not just making it all free, but actively pushing their disinformation by every avenue and channel available. Why is it a surprise that the guys who deny reality keep winning? It is easy for snake-oil salesmen to make fun of stuff that most people cannot even access to read!
Why is Japanese quail such a good laboratory animal?
Japanese quail is sometimes called the ?mouse of bird research?. The two species are comparable in a number of important properties (see: Breeding Strategies for Maintaining Colonies of Laboratory Mice ? A Jackson Laboratory Resource Manual; Japanese Quail As A Laboratory Animal ? Avian Genetic Resource Laboratory (AGRL); Quail ? AnimalResearch.info).
For example, gestation in mice lasts 18-21 days. In quail, the eggs hatch in 16-17 days. Those are both extremely fast developmental times, making it easy to quickly breed a lot of experimental animals.
It takes about six weeks for both mice and quail to attain sexual maturity after they are born. Again, that is a very fast maturation rate, making it efficient for breeding in the lab.
Mice can have litters anywhere between two and 12 pups at a time. Quail can lay essentially an egg per day throughout the year, throughout their lives. Quail win on this one ? they can produce much more offspring per year. Efficient.
While techniques for genetic manipulation in quail lagged behind those of mice (just like those of mice lagged by many years behind Drosophila techniques), they are now available. It is now possible to make transgenic quail and use them in genetic research.
In many other aspects, quail is a better lab animal than the mouse (or rat or chicken). While laboratory strains of mice have been ?domesticated? for only a few decades, the quail has been fully domesticated for about 500 years ? it is poultry. While lab mice will rarely bite, they have to be handled with care ? on the other hand, you can CUDDLE with a quail if you want to!
A decade ago, cuddling with quail.
Unlike its wild counterparts which are long-distance migrants, laboratory strains of Japanese quail are very slow fliers. Unlike wild songbirds (that need to be caught outside which is stressful) which, if they get lose in the lab one needs an army of technicians with butterfly nets to catch it (stressed), I can?t even remember how many times I caught runaway quail in mid-flight, with one hand, barely looking (actually, many times I caught them in the dark, not seeing but just hearing and feeling where they might be flying). Then you huddle it, and pet it on the head and put it back in its cage. And you get a loving look back and perhaps a quail-style ?thank you? call. They are cute. But not as cute as many other species of birds, which makes it somewhat easier to overcome one?s reluctance to occasionally do something unpleasant to them, e.g., surgeries.
It is a hardy animal, very easy to keep, breed and feed, with minimal demands (which is why so many small farmers breed them around the world). They are social animals so they can be kept in groups. They are small and generally happy and content, so many more quail can be kept in a room without being stressed than, for example, one can keep comparatively enormous, slow-breeding, slow-maturing chicken in the room of the same size.
The lab rodents, like mice, have to be handled with utmost care, always keeping the threat of zoonozes in mind ? there are many diseases that can jump from mice to human and back. There is essentially nothing that can infect both a human and a quail, especially not in the isolated, climate-controled environments of a university laboratory.
Quail?s immune system is amazing. While one has to perform a completely sterile surgery on mice, in quail it is done so only because IACUCs (Institutional Animal Care and Use Commitees) recently started demanding this (discussion of the wastefulness of this approach can be left for some other time). I bet you could do a surgery on a quail with dirty fingers and a rusty pocket-knife and the only consequence would be that the bird?s white blood cells would heartily laugh at you. This is also the reason why quail has been under intense research in Immunology for decades ? if we learn something how the quail can be so resistant to essentially anything and everything in its environment, perhaps we can apply some of that knowledge to human medicine as well.
On the ?intelligence scale? of birds, the quail hits the rock bottom. It is, frankly, not that smart. And this is a good thing from the point of view of research on behavioral neuroscience. They ?don?t do? much thinking. They essentially go through the day like little automatons and most of their behaviors are routinized and stylized and automatic, like ?fixed-action patterns?. Thus, manipulating a particular brain area usually results in a particular change of a particular behavior. This is repeatable and replicable, without too much noise in the data (at least in comparison to some other species), so the statistics are reasonably easy to do and findings are pretty clear. This makes research useful and efficient ? sample sizes can be reasonably small.
There are very few species of animals about which we know as much as we do, and in so many areas of biology, as we understand the quail: embryonic development, genetics, physiology, metabolism, reproduction, immunology, endocrinology, neurobiology and behavior. With such a large amount of background information, it is much easier to make breakthroughs than when one is just starting to explore a new animal model (though as my regular readers know ? I am very much in favor of adopting new models, as well as just purely comparative research). Studying effects of cocaine on reproductive behavior is so much more efficient in a species in which we do not have to start from scratch ? we already know so much about its brain, behavior and reproduction, we can move on to more sophisticated studies than just the first exploratory ?basic experiments?. Thus we can make faster progress. This is an efficient approach.
Most research on quail has ? and often the same experiment simultaneously ? relevance to three different areas of human interest: understanding of basic biology, application to human biomedical research, and application for agriculture ? remember that quail is poultry.
Quail and chicken are very closely related. Each one of their genes is about 99% identical. In many ways, the quail is a model for the chicken. Instead of keeping just a few large, slow-breeding chickens in the lab, doing one slow experiment at the time, one can instead keep hundreds of quail in the same amount of space without stress, and do several fast, simultaneous experiments in the same amount of time. That is efficient. And that is how we can learn how to increase chicken (and turkey) productivity AND at the same time study how to make them healthy, unstressed and happy while doing so ? a very important aspect of Poultry Science research.
A big advantage of quail over rodents is in the research on sleep. Rodents are nocturnal. Rats and mice sleep more during the day than during the night. But their sleep is not consolidated ? they sleep in many short bursts: there are just more of these bursts during the day than night. On the other hand, quail is, like us, a diurnal animal. Quail are fully awake throughout the day and have a long consolidated sleep during the night (at least in short summer nights, while they may occasionally wake up during long winter nights?wow ? just like us!!!!)
Finally, my own past research combining the studies on circadian rhythms and clocks, thermoregulation, photoperiodism, seasonality and reproduction (see this for a follow-up in another species) has several areas of relevance. It helps us make smarter husbandry for the poultry industry. It is a great model for why human adolescents, once they hit puberty, have phase-delayed circadian rhythms (cannot fall asleep in the evening, then cannot wake up in the morning, just like quail). It helps to inform how to conserve endangered bird species, and to predict how the birds will respond to climate change.
Not too shabby for a small bird, right? You really want to make fun of it for the sake of politics? You are lucky the quail is just too nice to bite you back!
Related at Scientific American
Cocaine and the sexual habits of quail, or, why does NIH fund what it does?
The Guppy Project is not wasteful, Sen. Coburn.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=64e27abffe07c85d7b2df9f10ebbaaa3
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Bahrain to try 5 police officers for torture (AP)
MANAMA, Bahrain ? Five police officers will be put on trial in connection with the alleged torture of a detainee who later died in custody, the country's Information Affairs Authority said Friday.
The country's top prosecutor, Nawaf Hamza, said in a statement that two unnamed officers have been charged with torture and mistreatment and three others with negligence for failure to report the incident.
No details were provided about the five officers or the detainee. There were also no details about when and where the alleged torture took place.
The prosecution of the officers follows promises by Bahrain to address shortcomings highlighted in a scathing report on rights abuses in weeks of anti-government protests in the Gulf nation earlier this year.
A special commission authorized by Bahrain's Sunni rulers last month outlined the harsh treatment of anti-government protesters as state security forces tried to put down the largest of the uprisings to hit the Gulf. The 500-page report documented the use of torture, excessive force and fast-track trials by the government.
Earlier Thursday, Hamza said the Gulf kingdom has wrapped up an investigation into an alleged Iranian-linked terror cell and plans to put the eight suspects on trial next month.
Hamza said the unnamed suspects will be tried in the island nation's High Criminal Court on charges of espionage and of having ties to an outlawed group that uses terrorism to achieve its goals.
Bahraini authorities in November accused the group of having links to Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard and planning attacks against high profile sites, including the Saudi Embassy and a Gulf causeway linking Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Iran rejects the allegations.
Court hearings are to begin in early January.
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বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৯ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Conn. fire victim had career as safety chief
Rubble lies on the ground, Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, after the demolition of a house where a fire left five people dead on Christmas Day, in Stamford, Conn. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
Rubble lies on the ground, Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, after the demolition of a house where a fire left five people dead on Christmas Day, in Stamford, Conn. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
Rubble left after the demolition of a house where a fire left five people dead Christmas Day lies on the ground, Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, in Stamford, Conn. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
Yellow tape stretches across the driveway, Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, at the house where a fire left five people dead Christmas Day, in Stamford, Conn. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
Flowers sit at the base of a mailbox, Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, outside the house where a fire left five people dead on Christmas Day, in Stamford, Conn. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
Brayden Davis, 10, right, stands by as his mother, Jeanne Davis, and brother Rowan Davis, 7, lay down flowers Monday, Dec. 26, 2011, outside the house where a fire left five people dead on Christmas Day, in Stamford, Conn. The Davises live in the neighborhood but did not know the family who lived in the house. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? A man who died with his wife and three grandchildren in a house fire in Connecticut on Christmas had a long career as a safety chief at a liquor company in Kentucky and worked as a department store Santa Claus this season.
A day after fire swept through his daughter's upscale house in Stamford, Lomer Johnson was remembered fondly as a stickler for safety by a former boss at Louisville, Ky.-based liquor maker Brown-Forman Corp., where Johnson retired from his job as safety and security director several years ago.
"He spent his career trying to keep others safe," retired Brown-Forman executive Robert Holmes Jr. said Monday in a telephone interview. "And the irony is that he dies in a fire."
Neighbors said they were awakened by screams shortly before 5 a.m. Sunday and rushed outside to help but could do nothing as flames devoured the large Victorian home.
New York advertising executive Madonna Badger and a male acquaintance were able to escape the blaze, but her parents, who were visiting for the holidays, and her daughters were killed.
The Hartford Courant newspaper identified the remaining victims as Badger's mother, Pauline Johnson, and daughters, 10-year-old Lily and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah. The Johnsons lived in Southbury, about 45 miles northeast of Stamford.
The acquaintance was a contractor working on the home, police said. He was identified by the Stamford Advocate newspaper as Michael Borcina.
The severely damaged $1.7 million Victorian house situated along the Connecticut shoreline was torn down Monday after the buildings department determined it was unsafe and ordered it razed, local fire Chief Antonio Conte said.
Conte had no details on the investigation, and no information about the cause of the fire was released.
He told WFSB-TV that bodies were found on the second and third floors and on the stairway between the floors.
Johnson most recently worked as a Santa this year at the flagship store of Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, a store spokeswoman said.
"Mr. Johnson was Saks Fifth Avenue's beloved Santa, and we are heartbroken about this terrible tragedy," spokeswoman Julia Bently said in a statement.
Holmes, who worked with Johnson for more than a decade at Brown-Forman, remembered his co-worker as a big man with white hair and a commanding presence.
"He was a man of not a lot of words, but when Lomer spoke or gave his opinion, it was always well thought out," Holmes said.
He said he was a bit surprised that the longtime security chief had become a department store Santa but added, "I could see Lomer doing something like that because Lomer had a passion for people."
During Johnson's long career with Brown-Forman, whose many brands include Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey and Southern Comfort, he was responsible for security and safety at the company's headquarters and production plants. His responsibilities included helping plan fire drills, Holmes said.
"He spent his life as a safety professional making sure our facilities were safe from fire," Holmes said. "And in the event there was a fire, that people knew what to do in terms of getting out of the buildings."
Badger, an ad executive in the fashion industry, is the founder of New York-based Badger & Winters Group. She was treated at a hospital and was discharged by Sunday evening, a hospital supervisor said. Her whereabouts Monday were unknown.
Borcina was hospitalized Tuesday in stable condition, a nursing supervisor said.
Property records show Badger bought the five-bedroom, waterfront home for $1.7 million last year. The house was situated in Shippan Point, a wealthy neighborhood that juts into Long Island Sound.
The lot where the house stood was covered with charred debris and cordoned off by police with tape on Monday. Passers-by left floral bouquets, stuffed animals and candles.
Neighbor Tim Abbazia, who did not know the victims, said the fire occurred in a neighborhood where century-old homes are common and that it would make everyone assess fire safety. He said it could not have been any more tragic.
"Regardless of which day it happened, I don't think it could be any worse than it is," he said.
The fire was Stamford's deadliest since a 1987 blaze that also killed five people, Conte said.
___
Associated Press writers Bruce Schreiner in Louisville, Ky., and Tom Hays in New York contributed to this report.
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TouchPad Go gets reviewed; or the 7-inch war that never was
Full review of HP’s never announced, never released, 7-inch TouchPad Go, the webOS-powered iPad competitor that could have been Derek Kessler of our newly renamed sibling site, webOS Nation, has got his snarky, geeky hands on the krayt dragon of the gadget world, and done up a complete...
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/YZD_o1kN0sc/story01.htm
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বুধবার, ২৮ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Excessive levels of cancer-causing toxin found in Chinese milk
Published on Dec 27, 2011
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In this Nov 5, 2008 file photo, workers squeeze melamine-tainted milk into a drainage ditch leading to the sewage treatment plant at a Mengniu Dairy factory in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province. Mengniu, China's biggest milk producer, said it has destroyed a batch of milk after it was discovered to have excessive levels of a cancer-causing toxin, in another safety scare for the country's dairy industry. -- PHOTO: AP
SHANGHAI (AFP) - China has discovered excessive levels of a cancer-causing toxin in milk produced by one of the nation's leading dairy companies, the firm said, in the latest in a series of food safety alarms.
The government's quality watchdog found high levels of an aflatoxin, which is caused by mould, in milk produced by the Mengniu Dairy Group, the company said in a statement issued on Sunday.
Mengniu said the milk, produced at one of its plants in the south-western province of Sichuan, was tested before being sold so the contaminated milk never reached the market.
China is trying to crack down on product safety violations to reassure citizens and restore faith in the government after a series of high-profile scandals.
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Upcoming Space Missions for 2012 (ContributorNetwork)
As 2011 draws to a close, the year ahead, 2012, promises to be a year when some greatly anticipated space missions are scheduled to take place. They can be divided into unmanned, commercial, and international.
Unmanned Missions for 2012
The twin NASA GRAIL probes will arrive in lunar orbit on New Year's Day for a three month mission to examine the moon's gravity, as well as its interior and formation. The two satellites will create a map of the moon's variable gravity field by measuring the changes in distance between them due to gravitational variations.
The Dawn spacecraft, currently in orbit around the asteroid Vesta, will complete that phase of its mission in July. It will blast out of orbit and head toward the largest known asteroid, Ceres, where it is due to arrive in Feb 2015.
Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity is scheduled to land on the Martian surface on August 6. The SUV sized Mars rover will touch down with that will use a crane to gentler lower it to the ground after having its descent slowed by retro rockets and a parachute. If it successfully touches down, it will provide the most sophisticated and extensive unmanned examination of Mars yet.
Commercial Missions for 2012
If all goes well, the first cargo version of SpaceX's Dragon will launch on Feb 7 on board a Falcon 9 rocket. A few days later the cargo Dragon will rendezvous with the International Space Station. The crew of the ISS will take hold of the Dragon with a remote manipulator arm and berth it to an airlock. If all is successful, a new era of commercial cargo space missions will have been born, presaging crewed flights scheduled to take place in 2017.
Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has so far been engaged in glide tests, after having been dropped by its carrier plane, WhiteKnightTwo. It is hoped that powered flights of the SpaceShipTwo will commence sometime in 2012, bringing closer that era of paid passenger space flights to low Earth orbit.
International Space Missions for 2012
While NASA astronauts are compelled to pay for rides on the Russian Soyuz, due to the end of the space shuttle program, the Chinese space program will quicken its pace with two missions to its space station module prototype, the Tiangong-1. These missions will be the Shenzhou 9 and the Shenzhou 10. It is anticipated, pending an analysis of the unmanned mission of the Shenzhou 8, that one or both of these flights will carry a crew. That being the case, the crew of each mission will spend about two weeks docked to the Tiangong-1, according to Space Daily. One of the members of the Shenzhou 10 may well be China's first female astronaut.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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মঙ্গলবার, ২৭ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
So the Galaxy Nexus finally launches and the Verizon news train has seemingly re...
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thurrott: How Microsoft Can Fix Windows 8 in 2012 http://t.co/FDsTuP89
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[WATCH]: World of Goo for iPad Review
Thumbs Up, Comment and Subscribe if you love this game as much as I do. I take a look at the newly released World of Goo for iPad. This game has been one of my favorites since I first played it on the Mac. Now, with its touch controls it doesn?t get much better than this. Check out the video for all the details. Free Zollotech App: tinyurl.com Website: www.zollotech.com Follow me on Twitter www.twitter.com World of Goo for iPad Review World of Goo for iPad Review World of Goo for iPad Review World of Goo for iPad Review
Source: http://jonaslund.me/wordpress/blog/2011/12/watch-world-of-goo-for-ipad-review-2/
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Video: Queen Elizabeth?s husband hospitalized
Prince Philip, an active age 90, is taken to a hospital after suffering from chest pains. NBC?s Kate Snow reports.
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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/45780474/
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রবিবার, ২৫ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Police in Berkeley end overnight Occupy camping (Reuters)
BERKELEY, Calif (Reuters) ? A camp of anti-Wall Street protesters in Berkeley, California, has all but vanished under pressure from police, who have returned repeatedly to enforce a nighttime curfew, authorities said on Friday.
The Occupy Berkeley camp in the liberal Northern California college town was one of a dwindling number of similar sites where protesters camped overnight on public property.
Police in Berkeley made two arrests of people who refused to leave Civic Center Park on Thursday night, following another two arrests the night before, but most protesters left voluntarily, said Berkeley Police Lieutenant Andrew Greenwood.
Police leafleted the Occupy Berkeley camp on Wednesday, warning they would no longer tolerate violation of an ordinance that closes city parks between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. As a result, many protesters began packing up their tents.
The camp, which had about 50 tents at its height, had become increasingly violent, police said. And protesters told Reuters there were conflicts within their ranks as mentally ill people took up residence.
By Thursday afternoon, most tents were gone and public works employees guarded by police picked up tents and other items left behind, Greenwood said.
Protesters returned on Friday morning and pitched three tents. "It has been made clear to them that they will have to be out of there by 10 p.m.," Greenwood said.
The Occupy movement, which argues the U.S. economic system is unfair with too much wealth and power held by a few, began in New York in September and quickly spread to other cities.
But many of the encampments have since been cleared by authorities, often on the basis that they had become unsanitary or had growing safety and crime problems.
(Reporting by Laird Harrison: Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Jerry Norton)
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Steelers QB Roethlisberger out against Rams
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (7) walks off the field past San Francisco 49ers running back Frank Gore (21) after an NFL football game in San Francisco, Monday, Dec. 19, 2011. The 49ers won 20-3. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (7) walks off the field past San Francisco 49ers running back Frank Gore (21) after an NFL football game in San Francisco, Monday, Dec. 19, 2011. The 49ers won 20-3. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger (7) stands on the sidelines against the San Francisco 49ers during the fourth quarter of an NFL football game in San Francisco, Monday, Dec. 19, 2011. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
PITTSBURGH (AP) ? Pittsburgh quarterback Ben Roethlisberger will not start Saturday when the Steelers face the St. Louis Rams.
Roethlisberger is dealing with a sprained left ankle and did not practice this week following a 20-3 loss to San Francisco on Monday. He will be replaced by veteran Charlie Batch, who is 4-2 as a spot starter since joining the Steelers in 2003.
Roethlisberger said Wednesday he would prefer to play and believed his ankle was in pretty good shape after throwing for 330 yards and three interceptions against the 49ers. Yet he watched both practices this week in sweat pants as Batch took the snaps with the first team.
Roethlisberger last missed a start due to injury in 2009, when a concussion forced him to sit out a loss to Baltimore.
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The Higgs Boson Is Still Missing, But The LHC Just Found Its First New Particle [Physics]
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শনিবার, ২৪ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Mayor to SPD: Follow Federal Orders
Responding to a stern letter from the ACLU, Mayor Mike McGinn bent over backwards this afternoon to unequivocally announce that he will comply with the federal government's decree to clean up problems with excessive force at the Seattle Police Department.
"This morning I ordered Chief John Diaz to begin implementation of reforms outlined in the Department of Justice's report," McGinn said in a letter (.pdf). The mayor says he will impanel a public oversight board to oversee changes to the department, adding, "Let us be clear: we are committed to reform."
Facing the threat of a federal civil rights lawsuit if the city fails to comply "swiftly," McGinn says the city is already adopting several reforms:
1. Begin a "system of consistent supervision of patrol officers" on January 4.
2. Create a new "Force Review Board" and "Force Investigation" team to review use of force by Seattle police (the DOJ found that Seattle police used excessive force in 20 percent of all use-of-force incidents).
3. The Office of Professional Accountability, which administers internal discipline for misconduct, will simplify classifications for the outcome of its investigations to clearly identify which cases where they found evidence of wrongdoing.
4. Review all of the department's procedures "top to bottom."
5. Establish a new "Professional Standards" section.
"The Mayor's statement embracing the DOJ's recommendations for reform is a welcome and positive development," ACLU of Washington spokesman Doug Honig said in a statement late this afternoon. "The ACLU and other groups who wrote to the Mayor today look forward to working with City officials and the DOJ to bring about much-needed changes."
Source: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/12/21/mayor-orders-the-chief-to-follow-dojs-orders
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BHS varsity sports schedule for Dec. 16-28
BHS VARSITY SPORTS SCHEDULE
Friday, Dec. 16
Wrestling ? BHS @ Central Kitsap, 10 a.m.
Swimming ? BHS vs. Holy Names/O?Dea @ Queen Anne Pool, 1:35 p.m.
Gymnastics ? Mercer Island, Bellingham, Squalicum @ BHS, 6 p.m.
Basketball ? Nathan Hale @ BHS,? girls 6:15 p.m., boys, 8 p.m.
Saturday, Dec. 17
Wrestling ? BHS @ Central Kitsap, 10 a.m.
Wednesday, Dec. 21
Wrestling ? BHS in Olympic Shootout @ Port Angeles, 10 a.m., 6:30 p.m.
Friday, Dec. 23
Girls Basketball ?? BHS @ Kent Meridian, 5 p.m.
Wednesday, Dec. 28
Wrestling ? BHS @ North Mason, 10 a.m.
Boys Basketball ? BHS @ Olympic High, 5 p.m.
Girls Basketball ? Lake Washington @ BHS, 5 p.m.
Source: http://feeds.soundpublishing.com/~r/birsports/~3/KRx6KHdBl-4/135702053.html
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শুক্রবার, ২৩ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
Video: Enzyme that flips switch on cells' sugar cravings could be anti-cancer target
Video: Enzyme that flips switch on cells' sugar cravings could be anti-cancer target
Thursday, December 22, 2011Cancer cells tend to take up more glucose than healthy cells, and researchers are increasingly interested in exploiting this tendency with drugs that target cancer cells' altered metabolism.
Cancer cells' sugar cravings arise partly because they turn off their mitochondria, power sources that burn glucose efficiently, in favor of a more inefficient mode of using glucose. They benefit because the byproducts can be used as building blocks for fast-growing cells.
Scientists at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University have shown that many types of cancer cells flip a switch that diverts glucose away from mitochondria. Their findings suggest that tyrosine kinases, enzymes that drive the growth of several types of cancer, play a greater role in mitochondria than previously recognized.
The results also highlight the enzyme PDHK (pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase) as an important point of control for cancer cell metabolism.
"We and others have shown that PDHK is upregulated in several types of human cancer, and our findings demonstrate a new way that PDHK activity is enhanced in cancer cells," says Jing Chen, PhD, associate professor of hematology and medical oncology at Emory University School of Medicine and Winship Cancer Institute. "PDHK is a very attractive target for anticancer therapy because of its role in regulating cancer metabolism."
Chen and Sumin Kang, PhD, assistant professor of hematology and medical oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, are co-corresponding authors. Postdoctoral fellows Taro Hitosugi, Jun Fan and Tae-Wook Chung are co-first authors of the paper. Co-authors at Emory include Georgia Chen, PhD, Sagar Lonial, MD, Haian Fu, PhD, and Fadlo Khuri, MD. Collaborators at Yale University, Novartis and Cell Signaling Technology contributed to the paper.
Chen and his colleagues started out studying the tyrosine kinase FGFR1, which is activated in several types of cancer. Tyrosine kinases attach a phosphate to other proteins, making them more or less active. They found that FGFR1 activates the enzyme PDHK, which has a gatekeeper function for mitochondria.
"We used FGFR1 as a platform to look at how metabolic enzymes are modified by oncogenic tyrosine kinases," Chen says. "We discovered that several oncogenic tyrosine kinases activate PDHK, and we found that many of those tyrosine kinases are found within mitochondria."
This was a surprise because tyrosine kinases are usually thought to drive growth by being active next to the cell membrane, Chen says.
Introducing a form of PDHK that is insensitive to tyrosine kinases into human cancer cells forces the cells to grow more slowly and form smaller tumors in mice, they found. This indicates that PDHK could be a target for drugs that specifically target cancer cells' altered metabolism.
The experimental drug dichloroacetate (DCA), which inactivates PDHK, is being used in new clinical trials for cancer. Chen is collaborating with Haian Fu, professor of pharmacology and director of the Emory Chemical Biology Discovery Center, to find other, more potent inhibitors of PDHK.
###
The results were published online Thursday by the journal Molecular Cell. http://www.cell.com/molecular-cell/
Emory University: http://www.emory.edu
Thanks to Emory University for this article.
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সোমবার, ১৯ ডিসেম্বর, ২০১১
AP IMPACT: When your criminal past isn't yours (AP)
SAN FRANCISCO ? A clerical error landed Kathleen Casey on the streets.
Out of work two years, her unemployment benefits exhausted, in danger of losing her apartment, Casey applied for a job in the pharmacy of a Boston drugstore. She was offered $11 an hour. All she had to do was pass a background check.
It turned up a 14-count criminal indictment. Kathleen Casey had been charged with larceny in a scam against an elderly man and woman that involved forged checks and fake credit cards.
There was one technicality: The company that ran the background check, First Advantage, had the wrong woman. The rap sheet belonged to Kathleen A. Casey, who lived in another town nearby and was 18 years younger.
Kathleen Ann Casey, would-be pharmacy technician, was clean.
"It knocked my legs out from under me," she says.
The business of background checks is booming. Employers spend at least $2 billion a year to look into the pasts of their prospective employees. They want to make sure they're not hiring a thief, or worse.
But it is a system weakened by the conversion to digital files and compromised by the welter of private companies that profit by amassing public records and selling them to employers. These flaws have devastating consequences.
It is a system in which the most sensitive information from people's pasts is bought and sold as a commodity.
A system in which computers scrape the public files of court systems around the country to retrieve personal data. But a system in which what they retrieve isn't checked for errors that would be obvious to human eyes.
A system that can damage reputations and, in a time of precious few job opportunities, rob honest workers of a chance at a new start. And a system that can leave the Kathleen Caseys of the world ? the innocent ones ? living in a car.
Those are the results of an investigation by The Associated Press that included a review of thousands of pages of court filings and interviews with dozens of court officials, data providers, lawyers, victims and regulators.
"It's an entirely new frontier," says Leonard Bennett, a Virginia lawyer who has represented hundreds of plaintiffs alleging they were the victims of inaccurate background checks. "They're making it up as they go along."
Two decades ago, if a county wanted to update someone's criminal record, a clerk had to put a piece of paper in a file. And if you wanted to read about someone's criminal past, you had to walk into a courthouse and thumb through it. Today, half the courts in the United States put criminal records on their public websites.
Digitization was supposed to make criminal records easier to access and easier to update. To protect privacy, laws were passed requiring courts to redact some information, such as birth dates and Social Security numbers, before they put records online. But digitization perpetuates errors.
"There's very little human judgment," says Sharon Dietrich, an attorney with Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, a law firm focused on poorer clients. Dietrich represents victims of inaccurate background checks. "They don't seem to have much incentive to get it right."
Dietrich says her firm fields about twice as many complaints about inaccurate background checks as it did five years ago.
The mix-ups can start with a mistake entered into the logs of a law enforcement agency or a court file. The biggest culprits, though, are companies that compile databases using public information.
In some instances, their automated formulas misinterpret the information provided them. Other times, as Casey discovered, records wind up assigned to the wrong people with a common name.
Another common problem: When a government agency erases a criminal conviction after a designated period of good behavior, many of the commercial databases don't perform the updates required to purge offenses that have been wiped out from public record.
It hasn't helped that dozens of databases are now run by mom-and-pop businesses with limited resources to monitor the accuracy of the records.
The industry of providing background checks has been growing to meet the rising demand for the service. In the 1990s, about half of employers said they checked backgrounds. In the decade since Sept. 11, that figure has grown to more than 90 percent, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
To take advantage of the growing number of businesses willing to pay for background checks, hundreds of companies have dispatched computer programs to scour the Internet for free court data.
But those data do not always tell the full story.
Gina Marie Haynes had just moved from Philadelphia to Texas with her boyfriend in August 2010 and lined up a job managing apartments. A background check found fraud charges, and Haynes lost the offer.
A year earlier, she had bought a used Saab, and the day she drove it off the lot, smoke started pouring from the hood. The dealer charged $291.48 for repairs. When Haynes refused to pay, the dealer filed fraud charges.
Haynes relented and paid after six months. Anyone looking at Haynes' physical file at the courthouse in Montgomery County, Pa., would have seen that the fraud charge had been removed. But it was still listed in the limited information on the court's website.
The website has since been updated, but Haynes, 40, has no idea how many companies downloaded the outdated data. She has spent hours calling background check companies to see whether she is in their databases. Getting the information removed and corrected from so many different databases can be a daunting mission. Even if it's right in one place, it can be wrong in another database unknown to an individual until a prospective employer requests information from it. By then, the damage is done.
"I want my life back," Haynes says.
Haynes has since found work as a customer service manager, but she says that is only because her latest employer didn't run a background check.
Hard data on errors in background checks are not public. Most leading background check companies contacted by the AP would not disclose how many of their records need to be corrected each year.
A recent class-action settlement with one major database company, HireRight Solutions Inc., provides a glimpse at the magnitude of the problems.
The settlement, which received tentative approval from a federal judge in Virginia last month, requires HireRight to pay $28.4 million to settle allegations that it didn't properly notify people about background checks and didn't properly respond to complaints about inaccurate files. After covering attorney fees of up to $9.4 million, the fund will be dispersed among nearly 700,000 people for alleged violations that occurred from 2004 to 2010. Individual payments will range from $15 to $20,000.
In an effort to prevent bad information from being spread, some courts are trying to block the computer programs that background check companies deploy to scrape data off court websites. The programs not only can misrepresent the official court record but can also hog network resources, bringing websites to a halt.
Virginia, Arizona and New Mexico have installed security software to block automated programs from getting to their courts' sites. New Mexico's site was once slowed so much by automated data-mining programs that it took minutes for anyone else to complete a basic search. Since New Mexico blocked the data miners, it now takes seconds.
In the digital age, some states have seen an opportunity to cash in by selling their data to companies. Arizona charges $3,000 per year for a bundle of discs containing all its criminal files. The data includes personal identifiers that aren't on the website, including driver's license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
Other states, exasperated by mounting errors in the data, have stopped offering wholesale subscriptions to their records.
North Carolina, a pioneer in marketing electronic criminal records, made $4 million selling the data last year. But officials discovered that some background check companies were refusing to fix errors pointed out by the state or to update stale information.
State officials say some companies paid $5,105 for the database but refused to pay a mandatory $370 monthly fee for daily updates to the files ? or they would pay the fee but fail to run the update. The updates provided critical fixes, such as correcting misspelled names or deleting expunged cases.
North Carolina, which has been among the most aggressive in ferreting out errors in its customers' files, stopped selling its criminal records in bulk. It has moved to a system of selling records one at a time. By switching to a more methodical approach, North Carolina hopes to eliminate the sloppy record-keeping practices that has emerged as more companies have been allowed to vacuum up massive amounts of data in a single sweep.
Virginia ended its subscription program. To get full court files now, you have to go to the courthouse in person. You can get abstracts online, but they lack Social Security numbers and birth dates, and are basically useless for a serious search.
North Carolina told the AP that taxpayers have been "absorbing the expense and ill will generated by the members of the commercial data industry who continue to provide bad information while falsely attributing it to our courts' records."
North Carolina identified some companies misusing the records, but other culprits have gone undetected because the data was resold multiple times.
Some of the biggest data providers were accused of perpetuating errors. North Carolina revoked the licenses of CoreLogic SafeRent, Thomson West, CourtTrax and five others for repeatedly disseminating bad information or failing to download updates.
Thomson West says it was punished for two instances of failing to delete outdated criminal records in a timely manner. Such instances are "extremely rare" and led to improvements in Thomson West's computer systems, the company said.
CoreLogic says its accuracy standards meet the law, and it seemed to blame North Carolina, saying that the state's actions "directly contributed to the conditions which resulted in the alleged contract violations," but it would not elaborate. CourtTrax did not respond to requests for comment.
Other background check companies say the errors aren't always their fault.
LexisNexis, a major provider of background checks and criminal data, said in a statement that any errors in its records "stem from inaccuracies in original source material ? typically public records such as courthouse documents."
But other problems have arisen with the shift to digital criminal records. Even technical glitches can cause mistakes.
Companies that run background checks sometimes blame weather. Ann Lane says her investigations firm, Carolina Investigative Research, in North Carolina, has endured hurricanes and ice storms that knocked out power to her computers and took them out of sync with court computers.
While computers are offline, critical updates to files can be missed. That can cause one person's records to fall into another person's file, Lane says. She says glitches show up in her database at least once a year.
Lane says she double-checks the physical court filings, a step she says many other companies do not take. She calls her competitors' actions shortsighted.
"A lot of these database companies think it's `ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching,'" she says.
Data providers defend their accuracy. LexisNexis does more than 12 million background checks a year. It is one of the world's biggest data providers, with more than 22 billion public records on its own computers.
It says fewer than 1 percent of its background checks are disputed. That still amounts to 120,000 people ? more than the population of Topeka, Kan.
But there are problems with those assertions. People rarely know when they are victims of data errors. Employers are required by law to tell job applicants when they've been rejected because of negative information in a background check. But many do not.
Even the vaunted FBI criminal records database has problems. The FBI database has information on sentencings and other case results for only half its arrest records. Many people in the database have been cleared of charges. The Justice Department says the records are incomplete because states are inconsistent in reporting the conclusions of their cases. The FBI restricts access to its records, locking out the commercial database providers that regularly buy information from state and county government agencies.
Data providers are regulated by the Federal Trade Commission and required by federal law to have "reasonable procedures" to keep accurate records. Few cases are filed against them, though, mostly because building a case is difficult.
A series of breaches in the mid-2000s put the spotlight on data providers' accuracy and security. The fallout was supposed to put the industry on a path to reform, and many companies tightened security. But the latest problems show that some accuracy practices are broken.
The industry says it polices itself and believes the approach is working. Mike Cool, a vice president with Acxiom Corp., a data wholesaler, praised an accreditation system developed by an industry group, the National Association of Professional Background Screeners. Fear of litigation keeps the number of errors in check, he says.
"The system works well if everyone stays compliant," Cool says.
But when the system breaks down, it does so spectacularly.
Dennis Teague was disappointed when he was rejected for a job at the Wisconsin state fair. He was horrified to learn why: A background check showed a 13-page rap sheet loaded with gun and drug crimes and lengthy prison lockups. But it wasn't his record. A cousin had apparently given Teague's name as his own during an arrest.
What galled Teague was that the police knew the cousin's true identity. It was even written on the background check. Yet below Teague's name, there was an unmistakable message, in bold letters: "Convicted Felon."
Teague sued Wisconsin's Department of Justice, which furnished the data and prepared the report. He blamed a faulty algorithm that the state uses to match people to crimes in its electronic database of criminal records. The state says it was appropriate to include the cousin's record, because that kind of information is useful to employers the same way it is useful to law enforcement.
Teague argued that the computers should have been programmed to keep the records separate.
"I feel powerless," he says. "I feel like I have the worst luck ever. It's basically like I'm being punished for living right."
One of Teague's lawyers, Jeff Myer of Legal Action of Wisconsin, an advocacy law firm for poorer clients, says the state is protecting the sale of its lucrative databases.
"It's a big moneymaker, and that's what it's all about," Myer says. "The convenience of online information is so seductive that the record-keepers have stopped thinking about its inaccuracy. As valuable as I find public information that's available over the Internet, I don't think people have a full appreciation of the dark side."
In court papers, Wisconsin defended its inclusion of Teague's name in its database because his cousin has used it as an alias.
"We've already refuted Mr. Teague's claims in our court documents," said Dana Brueck, a spokeswoman for Wisconsin's Department of Justice. "We're not going to quibble with him in the press."
A Wisconsin state judge plans to issue his decision in Teague's case by March 11.
The number of people pulling physical court files for background checks is shrinking as more courts put information online. With fewer people to control quality, accuracy suffers.
Some states are pushing ahead with electronic records programs anyway. Arizona says it hasn't had problems with companies failing to implement updates.
Others are more cautious. New Mexico had considered selling its data in bulk but decided against it because officials felt they didn't have an effective way to enforce updates.
Meanwhile, the victims of data inaccuracies try to build careers with flawed reputations.
Kathleen Casey scraped by on temporary work until she settled her lawsuit against First Advantage, the background check company. It corrected her record. But the bad data has come up in background checks conducted by other companies.
She has found work, but she says the experience has left her scarred.
"It's like Jurassic Park. They come at you from all angles, and God knows what's going to jump out of a tree at you or attack you from the front or from the side," she says. "This could rear its ugly head again ? and what am I going to do then?"
___
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this report.
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Panetta: Libya needs time to control of militias (AP)
ANKARA, Turkey ? The U.S. needs to give Libya's leaders more time to gain control of the militias that overthrew Moammar Gadhafi before determining how to help the fledgling government, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Friday, a day ahead of his historic visit to Tripoli.
While eager to encourage a new democracy that emerged from Libya's Arab spring revolution, the U.S. is wary of appearing as trying to exert too much influence after an eight-month civil war.
At the same time, however, leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere worry about how well the newly formed National Transitional Council can resolve clashes between militia groups in the North African nation.
"The last thing you want to do is to try to impose something on a country that has just gone through what the Libyans have gone through," said Panetta, set to become the first U.S. defense chief to visit Libya.
"They've earned the right to try to determine their future. They've earned the right to try to work their way through the issues that they're going to have to confront," he said.
The continuing violence in Libya, including recent skirmishes between revolutionary fighters and national army troops near Tripoli's airport, reflects the difficulties that Libya's leaders face as they try to forge an army, integrating some of the militias and disarming the rest.
Officials acknowledge that process could take months, and that they can't force the militias to go along.
Panetta told reporters Friday that his visit to the Libyan capital will give him a better sense of the situation, and allow him to pay tribute to the people for bringing down Gadhafi and trying to establish a democratic government.
"It seems to me they are working through some very difficult issues to try to bring that country together," said Panetta. "It's not going to be easy. This is not a country that has a tradition of democratic institutions and representative government. This is going to take some work "
But he said he has seen indications that the Libyans are making progress.
"I think that any country like Libya that was able to do what they did and show the courage that they did in making the changes that took place there ? I'm confident that ultimately they're going to be able to succeed in putting a democracy together," he said.
Panetta said the U.S. is prepared to provide Libya any assistance it needs.
By traveling to Libya, however, Panetta was highlighting the different approaches that the U.S. and other countries are taking with respect to rebellions against tyrannical leaders.
The U.S. and NATO provided months of military power and assistance to the Libyan rebels, but officials have made it clear they do not intend to do the same in Syria despite the furor President Bashar Assad's crackdown on pro-reform demonstrators.
Panetta, who met with Turkish officials Friday, said they did not discuss any specific steps to increase pressure on Assad to step down.
But they talked about the need to work together with other nations to "get Assad to do the right thing."
At some point, he said, he believes that the type of uprisings that happened in Libya and elsewhere across the Middle East will take place in Syria.
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