বুধবার, ৩১ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

Smart as a bird: Flying rescue robot will autonomously avoid obstacles

ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2012) ? Cornell researchers have created an autonomous flying robot that is as smart as a bird when it comes to maneuvering around obstacles.

Able to guide itself through forests, tunnels or damaged buildings, the machine could have tremendous value in search-and-rescue operations. Small flying machines are already common, and GPS technology provides guidance. Now, Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science, and his team are tackling the hard part: how to keep the vehicle from slamming into walls and tree branches. Human controllers can't always react swiftly enough, and radio signals may not reach everywhere the robot goes.

The test vehicle is a quadrotor, a commercially available flying machine about the size of a card table with four helicopter rotors. Saxena and his team have already programmed quadrotors to navigate hallways and stairwells using 3-D cameras. But in the wild, these cameras aren't accurate enough at large distances to plan a route around obstacles. So, Saxena is building on methods he previously developed to turn a flat video camera image into a 3-D model of the environment using such cues as converging straight lines, the apparent size of familiar objects and what objects are in front of or behind each other -- the same cues humans unconsciously use to supplement their stereoscopic vision.

Graduate students Ian Lenz and Mevlana Gemici trained the robot with 3-D pictures of such obstacles as tree branches, poles, fences and buildings; the robot's computer learns the characteristics all the images have in common, such as color, shape, texture and context -- a branch, for example, is attached to a tree. The resulting set of rules for deciding what is an obstacle is burned into a chip before the robot flies. In flight the robot breaks the current 3-D image of its environment into small chunks based on obvious boundaries, decides which ones are obstacles and computes a path through them as close as possible to the route it has been told to follow, constantly making adjustments as the view changes. It was tested in 53 autonomous flights in obstacle-rich environments -- including Cornell's Arts Quad -- succeeding in 51 cases, failing twice because of winds. The results were presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Portugal Oct. 7-12.

Saxena plans to improve the robot's ability to respond to environment variations such as winds, and enable it to detect and avoid moving objects, like real birds; for testing purposes, he suggests having people throw tennis balls at the flying vehicle.

The project is supported by a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cornell University. The original article was written by Bill Steele.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/SBxanr6uZfw/121030173047.htm

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সোমবার, ২৯ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

Labour conference: McGuire attacks 'reprehensible' failure to assess ...

Labour?s shadow minister for disabled people has attacked the government?s ?reprehensible? failure to carry out an assessment of the overall impact of its cuts and reforms on disabled people.

Anne McGuire said the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had ?refused point blank? to carry out such an assessment, despite the wide range of reforms and reductions in disabled people?s benefits and services over the last two years, such as cuts to social care, employment and support allowance (ESA), disability living allowance (DLA) and housing benefit.

Speaking at this week?s Labour party conference in Manchester, she said: ?They are sitting there with more expertise in the DWP than you can shake a stick at.

?We are not the only ones who have asked for it. Disabled people have asked for it. And they are totally ignoring it. I just think that is reprehensible.?

In June, the disabled crossbench peer Baroness [Jane] Campbell asked Maria Miller, at the time the minister for disabled people, why the government had still not carried out an assessment.

That followed a similar call in a report on disabled people?s right to independent living, by the joint committee on human rights.

McGuire also suggested this week that her party would not scrap the government?s ?fitness for work? test if it regained power, despite repeated claims by disabled campaigners that it had caused lasting and serious damage to thousands of disabled benefits claimants.

The work capability assessment (WCA) was introduced in the last 18 months of the Labour government, but disabled activists say it is still fundamentally flawed, pointing to links between the test and health relapses, episodes of self-harm and even suicides and other premature deaths, among those being assessed.

Last month, the mental health charity Rethink published a survey which found that more than eight in ten GPs said they had patients who had developed mental health problems because of the WCA. And in June, the British Medical Association voted to ?demand? an end to the WCA because of concerns over its impact on patients.

McGuire said most disabled people accepted that there needed to be an assessment of some kind to determine eligibility for out-of-work disability benefits.

She said that ?the principle of an arms-length assessment is not wrong? but that it needed to be managed properly, and her party was ?quite clear? that the WCA ?isn?t working?.

She said the government had failed to implement many of the recommendations of the independent reviews of the WCA carried out by Professor Malcolm Harrington.

McGuire is helping to lead a year-long review of the party?s disability policies, which is including a series of round-table discussions across the country ? they have taken place so far in Glasgow and Manchester ? and ?trying to engage with as many disabled people as possible?.

She said there was no point pre-empting the conclusions and recommendations of the review on the WCA. ?We have to talk to disabled people and their organisations because they are the ones in the front line on this.?

She said disabled people had ?no confidence? in the way the assessments were being carried out by Atos, the government?s private sector contractor, and said there had been ?some horror stories? from disabled people assessed by Atos.

But she said that she and her colleagues wanted to receive ?concrete? and ?chapter and verse? evidence of what was happening with the WCA and Atos.

But McGuire said she did not want to let DWP ministers ?off the hook?, because they were responsible for deciding the detailed content of the WCA and the new assessment for personal independence payment, the planned replacement for DLA.

And she said there was a ?real, genuine fear out there about what is happening,? with an ?across-the-board undermining of the financial support for disabled people?.

She said: ?You could be in a position of losing disability living allowance, living in a house that is too big for you [for housing benefit purposes], being taken off ESA [the new out-of-work disability benefit] after a year, the impact [of cuts] on your social care package??

She said MPs were beginning to see a ?significant rise? in the number of disabled people attending their advice surgeries with financial problems.

And she said there was ?anecdotal? evidence to suggest that ?very few people? were being awarded DLA, six months before the government begins to replace it with the new personal independence payment.

She said: ?People are saying it is almost impossible to get DLA at the moment. That has to be challenged with the government, whether or not that is a fact.?

3 October 2012

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

Source: http://www.disabledgo.com/blog/2012/10/labour-conference-mcguire-attacks-%E2%80%98reprehensible%E2%80%99-failure-to-assess-cuts-impact/

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শুক্রবার, ২৬ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

New clues to how the brain and body communicate to regulate weight

ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2012) ? Maintaining a healthy body weight may be difficult for many people, but it's reassuring to know that our brains and bodies are wired to work together to do just that -- in essence, to achieve a phenomenon known as energy balance, a tight matching between the number of calories consumed versus those expended. This careful balance results from a complex interchange of neurobiological crosstalk within regions of the brain's hypothalamus, and when this "conversation" goes awry, obesity or anorexia can result.

Given the seriousness of these conditions, it's unfortunate that little is known about the details of this complex interchange. Now research led by investigators at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) provides new insights that help bring order to this complexity. Described in the October 26 issue of the journal Cell, the findings demonstrate how the GABA neurotransmitter selectively drives energy expenditure, and importantly, also help explain the neurocircuitry underlying the fat-burning properties of brown fat.

"Our group has built up a research program with the overall goal of unraveling the 'wiring diagram' by which the brain controls appetite and the burning of calories," says senior author Bradford Lowell, MD, PhD, a Professor of Medicine in BIDMC's Division of Endocrinology and Harvard Medical School. "To advance our understanding to this level, we need to know the function of specific subsets of neurons, and in addition, the upstream neurons providing input to, and the downstream neurons receiving output from, these functionally defined neurons. Until recently, such knowledge in the hypothalamus has been largely unobtainable."

A pearl-sized region that directs a multitude of important functions in the body, the hypothalamus is the brain's control center for energy balance. This balance results when the brain receives feedback signals from the body that communicate the status of fuel stores and then integrates this with input from the external world as well as a person's emotional state to modify feeding behavior and energy expenditure.

In this new study, the researchers investigated a unique population of neurons that are located at the base of the brain in the arcuate nucleus of the hypothalamus. "We genetically engineered mice such that they have a specific defect that prevents these neurons from releasing the inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA," says Lowell. "Mice with this defect developed marked obesity and, remarkably, their obesity was entirely due to a defect in burning off calories," he explains, adding that food intake was entirely unaffected.

By next engineering another group of mice in which these neurons could be selectively turned on at different times, the team went on to show that the arcuate neurons act through a series of downstream neurons to drive energy expenditure in brown fat. Brown fat has been making headlines lately because many recent studies have revealed that, unlike energy-storing white fat, brown fat burns energy to generate heat. This process is called thermogenesis.

"Energy expenditure mediated by brown adipose tissue is critical in maintaining body weight and prevents diet-induced obesity. Its brain-based regulatory mechanism, however, is still poorly understood," says first author Dong Kong, PhD, an Instructor in Medicine in Lowell's laboratory. "Our discovery of a hypothalamus-based neurocircuit that ultimately controls thermogenesis is an important advance," adds Lowell. The investigators additionally found that when they turned on these neurons, energy expenditure was entirely dependent upon release of GABA. These results reveal that release of GABA from arcuate neurons selectively drives energy expenditure.

"Our findings have greatly advanced our understanding in the control of energy expenditure and have provided novel insights into the pathogenesis of obesity," says Kong.

The unique features of arcuate neurons are important because they could provide an opportunity to experimentally modify the brain's control of energy expenditure. Specifically, neurons receiving GABA-mediated signals from arcuate neurons are likely to play important roles in regulating energy expenditure, but not food intake.

"It is now important to fully delineate the upstream neurons that control these thermogenesis-regulating arcuate neurons, and also the downstream neurons that complete the 'circuit' to brown adipose tissue," Lowell adds. He and his colleagues have identified several specific types of neurons that act downstream of arcuate neurons, but more research is needed to provide a clear and definitive diagram. Such work could uncover new opportunities for pharmacologic interventions that might lead to effective treatments for obesity and its related complications such as diabetes.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Dong Kong, Qingchun Tong, Chianping Ye, Shuichi Koda, Patrick?M. Fuller, Michael?J. Krashes, Linh Vong, Russell?S. Ray, David?P. Olson, Bradford?B. Lowell. GABAergic RIP-Cre Neurons in the Arcuate Nucleus Selectively Regulate Energy Expenditure. Cell, 2012; 151 (3): 645 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.09.020

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/uVPGitGK6bs/121026153740.htm

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Are you too busy to be productive? | Dynamic Business ? Small ...

Being terminally busy seems to be an affliction of the modern age. If you aren?t constantly hanging off your phone and checking email, and if you don?t have every segment of your day scheduled, it is easy to feel that you are doing your job well enough, or you are not popular or important enough.?

Do you have days where you find yourself rushing around like a mad thing, yet at the end of it can?t think of one useful thing you have done? This could be a sign that you are too busy and not productive enough.

Believe it or not, there is actually another way.

Rather than rush around from one place to another, you might want to try slowing down and focusing on what you actually need to do. It sounds simple, but in a society where being constantly on the go is almost like a status symbol, doing less can be easier said than done.

Productivity is all about making the best use of your time. If you are feeling stressed out and like everything is getting on top of you, and if you don?t have time for the things or people you enjoy, then it is well worth your while to stop and think about whether everything you are doing is strictly necessary.

When you constantly take on too much, you run the risk of becoming burned out and you end up getting less done. Seem pointless? It probably is.

Being too busy and not productive enough can also cause major problems for your business. Nothing says ?unprofessional? like missed deadlines, unreturned phone calls and turning up late for meetings. By taking on too much, you can end up letting down clients and colleagues and getting a reputation for being flaky or unreliable. Clearing your schedule so that you cut out unnecessary appointments, and focus on what is important, could vastly improve the level of service you provide and help prevent things slipping through the cracks.

Just because you are busy does not mean you are getting a lot accomplished. If you feel like you probably can do more with your time, why not consider cutting out a few obligations? Although it may be tempting to use being busy as an excuse for forgetting to return calls or emails or missing out on that important meeting, doing so runs the risk of making you look less competent than someone with less on.

With increasing emphasis on work/life balance, and taking time out for ourselves, hopefully society is starting to catch up with common sense in terms of how much pressure we put on ourselves and how much we can realistically achieve.

Don?t fall into the trap of thinking that being busy means you are a high achiever! Improve your productivity, rather than just increase your busy-ness level, and you may find you get more done, and you actually have a bit of time for yourself. Now that?s success!

?

?

Source: http://www.dynamicbusiness.com.au/blogs/are-you-too-busy-to-be-productive-25102012.html

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বৃহস্পতিবার, ২৫ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

Large-Scale Algae Biofuels Currently Unsustainable, New Report Concludes

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124770/Large_Scale_Algae_Biofuels_Currently_Unsustainable__New_Report_Concludes

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Microsoft adds subsidized $99 250GB Xbox 360 and $149 Kinect bundle to lineup

11:54 PM

In May, Microsoft (MSFT) launched its first subsidized Xbox 360 for $99 with a two-year subscription to Xbox Live Gold. In the run up to the holidays, the company is now adding two more Xbox 360 models with subsidized pricing to the mix. Joining the existing $99 4GB Xbox 360 with Kinect?bundle is a $99 250GB Xbox 360 and a $149 250GB model with Kinect. Both new models will require a $14.99 per month subscription fee to Xbox Live for two years.

A firm release date hasn?t been announced yet, but the official Xbox website lists the new subsidized models as ?coming soon? with a reminder to ?check back later to see a full list of participating retailers.??Savvy shoppers who want to save a little money in the long run can take advantage of a $50 discount promotion on almost all Xbox 360 consoles or pick up a new holiday bundle.

Source: http://bgr.com/2012/10/23/subsidized-xbox-360-bundle-99-dollar-250gb-xbox-149-dollar-kinect/

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Obama and Bill Clinton to campaign together (The Arizona Republic)

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Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/258140719?client_source=feed&format=rss

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বুধবার, ২৪ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

Ultima dezbatere televizata Obama-Romney: 6,5 milioane de mesaje pe Twitter

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IKEA Will Grow More Wood Than It Uses by 2020, Touts Clean Energy, Efficiency Commitments


Seth W/CC BY-SA 2.0

IKEA has unveiled a new sustainability strategy, outlining the mega-retailers' green plans through 2020.

Entitled "People & Planet Positive", the plan has three main areas supporting the notion, in the words of IKEA's Chief Sustainability Officer, "that sustainability should not be a luxury good; it should be affordable for everyone."

In terms of energy usage, IKEA plans on investing $1.95 billion in renewable energy by 2015?a figure including investments dating back to 2009?and by 2020 will produce as much renewable energy as it consumes. Already, solar panels installed on its buildings, and the wind farms it owns across six European nations, account for 27% of all the electricity it consumes. To date the company is slightly under halfway to its 2015 commitment on investment.

The plan also aims to improve energy efficient of of IKEA operations by at least 20% by 2020.

In terms of wood usage, IKEA has pledged to grow as least as much wood as it uses by 2020. By 2017, the amount of certified sustainable wood it uses will increase four-fold from the amount purchased today, meeting half of all its wood usage for the year.

Announced earlier this month, IKEA also plans to increase the energy efficiency of the products it sells by 2016, convert all lighting products it sells to use LED bulbs and selling induction cooktops.

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/ikea-grow-more-wood-than-it-uses-2020.html

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See All Of The 'Cloud Atlas' Transformations In This New Featurette

As the raves roll in for "Cloud Atlas," the latest effort from the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, it may all seem a bit overwhelming if you haven't seen the multi-storied mash-up of races and genders. It's all a little confusing to the common outsider. What does appeal to everyone, however, is seeing Halle Berry as [...]

Source: http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2012/10/23/cloud-atlas-featurette/

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Rumble The Aces expected to shine in Find us on Facebook A3 ...

Rumble The Aces expected to shine in Find us on Facebook A3 Novice 750

Rumble The Aces will be looking to pull off a surprise in the The Find us on Facebook A3 Novice 750 at Harold?s Cross in Ireland on Monday, October 22, 2012. He is a decent performer, but has never appeared in a Grade OR contest before, which will put him under immense pressure.

The young greyhound does not have a lot of experience, but he is confident enough to take on the best in the business. He just needs a couple of strong results in order to gain the momentum require for shining at this level.

Speed will not make a big difference in the 750 yard event, which is scheduled to start at 20:55 GMT. The one who saves some energy for the ending moments of the race will definitely have a better chance of bagging the cash prize of ?255.

Most of the runners lined up for action at Harold?s Cross have been unable to perform with consistency in recent times, which will make the competition interesting. The punters will not be enjoying this situation, as they will be the ones risking their money at the end of the day.

According to the bookies, the best chances of victory are with Greenisle Giant, despite that fact that he does not have a lot of experience. He will enter the event with a starting price of 7 to 4 and will definitely be looking for a strong run.

However, the Mulcahy?s trainee might not manage to get the attention of the punters, as he is far too inconsistent. He was extremely quick in his first ever Grade OR event, as he finished first in it. He followed that up with another victory in a lower class, but things have not worked out well for him since then.

The white and black dog finished sixth in his most recent race in this class and will have to be at this best in order to make a strong impression today.

On the other hand, Rumble The Aces has been doing a really good job in longer distance events, as his stamina is very good. He will not let anyone dominate the proceedings and will fight until the end.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely of the writer?s and do not reflect bettor.com?s official editorial policy.

Source: http://blogs.bettor.com/Rumble-The-Aces-expected-to-shine-in-Find-us-on-Facebook-A3-Novice-750-a196599

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মঙ্গলবার, ২৩ অক্টোবর, ২০১২

Mass. firm in meningitis case: Officials inspected

AAA??Oct. 23, 2012?6:55 PM ET
Mass. firm in meningitis case: Officials inspected
By JAY LINDSAYBy JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press?THE ASSOCIATED PRESS STATEMENT OF NEWS VALUES AND PRINCIPLES?

Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick gestures during a news conference regarding the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for the meningitis outbreak during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick gestures during a news conference regarding the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for the meningitis outbreak during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Dr. Madeleine Biondolillo, Director of the Mass. Bureau of Healthcare Safety, right, leaves at the conclusion of a news conference regarding the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for the meningitis outbreak during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. From left are Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick, Mass. Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bigby and Biondolilo. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick arrives for a news conference regarding the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for the meningitis outbreak during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Dr. Madeleine Biondolillo, Director of the Mass. Bureau of Healthcare Safety, addresses reporters during a news conference regarding the Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for the meningitis outbreak during a news conference at the Statehouse in Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012. The outbreak of meningitis, an inflammation of the lining of the brain and spinal cord, has sickened nearly 300 people, including 23 who died, in more than a dozen states. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

(AP) ? An attorney for a Massachusetts company linked to a deadly meningitis outbreak says it's "hard to imagine" state regulators didn't know the scale of its operations because it's worked so closely with them.

The statement by New England Compounding Center attorney Paul Cirel (sih-REL') came Tuesday after Gov. Deval (deh-VAL') Patrick announced the state has moved to revoke the company's operating license.

State officials say they found unclean conditions at the company and evidence it was making drugs for general distribution, a violation of its license.

Patrick says he's ordered regulators to conduct surprise inspections at similar types of pharmacies.

The company's attorney says regulators have always had complete access to the facility and inspected it last summer. He says the company's transparency shows its good-faith intention to operate within the bounds of its license.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-10-23-Meningitis%20Outbreak/id-d3368804484b4caf9b368eee9f313165

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BBC faces more fallout on Savile scandal

LONDON (AP) ? The BBC faced growing fallout Monday over sexual abuse allegations against a popular children's TV entertainer, as Prime Minister David Cameron accused the broadcaster of changing its story about why it killed a news segment on the accusations.

The powerful broadcaster tried to stem the damage, saying in a statement that a top editor had stepped down from its BBC Newsnight program after he was found to have given incomplete, inaccurate explanations for the decision to keep an investigation of the late Jimmy Savile from being broadcast in December.

The scandal is one of the worst to rock the BBC, long a key player in British public life and often cited as one of the most trusted sources of accurate, unbiased information.

"The BBC is a public service broadcaster that depends on the public trust, and anything that suggests it hasn't been truthful undermines that trust," Conservative Party lawmaker Rob Wilson told The Associated Press. "That's why this is such an important issue for them."

Police are investigating accusations against Savile and say there may be more than 200 potential victims of the entertainer, the longtime host of the BBC's "Top of the Pops" and "Jim'll Fix It," recognized for his garish track suits and platinum hair.

The BBC's tough statement about editor Peter Rippon deepened the suspicion that there had been a cover-up. It is suspected of pulling the Newsnight segment because of its harsh portrayal of Savile, who was hailed as a popular fixture in children's TV when he died at 84 last year.

Wilson said the BBC has tried to evade responsibility for its long tolerance of Savile.

"They were sidestepping the story, hoping it would go away," he said. "The BBC was saying the cultural issues that led to this were in the past, but when we saw BBC looking at the Jimmy Savile issue and finding out uncomfortable things, they appeared to want to cover it up."

The BBC's backtracking prompted unusual criticism from the prime minister.

"The nation is appalled, we are all appalled by the allegations of what Jimmy Savile did and they seem to get worse by the day," Cameron said, accusing the BBC of changing its story about why it decided not to broadcast the piece.

Tim Burt, a managing partner of the Stockwell Communications crisis management firm, said BBC faces a major blow to its reputation at a time when it is entering delicate negotiations with the government about the terms of its charter.

??????????? "So to have a civil war inside on a matter of editorial judgment and the handling of potentially criminal investigations could not have come at worse time," he said.

??????????? The BBC plans to air its own investigation into its actions on a show Monday night.

Rippon is the first BBC figure directly blamed for the broadcaster's failure to properly report on abuse claims. He is stepping down immediately for the duration of the investigation.

The BBC Trust, the corporation's governing body, conceded there had been "inaccuracies in the BBC's own description of what happened in relation to the Newsnight investigation."

The BBC says Rippon's explanation of his decision in a blog post earlier was "inaccurate or incomplete in some respects."

BBC is publicly funded through its license fees and various commercial enterprises; it enjoys a large degree of independence from government but is subject to legislation passed by Parliament.

In a statement released Monday, the BBC cited three problems with Rippon's initial statements about why the segment was not aired.

The BBC said Rippon's blog indicated that Newsnight staff had no evidence against the BBC when in fact there were allegations that some of the abuse happened on BBC premises.

It also faulted Rippon for saying that all the abuse victims interviewed by the program had told police about the abuse, when in some cases the women had not done so, meaning that police were "not aware of all the allegations" against Savile.

In addition, BBC said Rippon had indicated that there was no evidence that anyone working at the Duncroft school was aware of allegations that Savile had abused girls there, when in fact there were indications that "some of the Duncroft staff knew or may have known about the abuse."

_______

Associated Press writers David Stringer and Robert Barr in London contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bbc-faces-more-fallout-savile-scandal-151127792.html

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Jordan says it foils al-Qaida-linked terror plot

(AP) ? Jordanian authorities have arrested 11 suspected al-Qaida-linked militants for allegedly planning to attack shopping malls and Western diplomatic missions in the country, the government said Sunday.

The plot is the first to be unveiled since a triple hotel bombing in Amman almost seven years ago, which killed 60 people. Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the attack, citing its rejection of Jordan's alliance with the United States and its 1994 peace treaty with Israel.

Jordanian officials and Arab diplomats have been voicing concern over stability in the kingdom, which lies at a precarious corner in the Middle East, neighboring hot spots Syria, Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

The officials and diplomats, insisting on anonymity because they are not allowed to make statements to the press, have warned of possible plots to destabilize the kingdom. They say militants seek to use its territory as they consolidate their foothold in Syria ? which lies on Jordan's northern border.

Announcing the foiled plot, government spokesman Sameeh Maaytah told an impromptu press conference that the suspects are all Jordanian and are in police custody.

"They were plotting deadly terror attacks on vital institutions, shopping centers and diplomatic missions," he said. "They sought to destabilize Jordan," he said. "They plotted against Jordan's national security."

Jordan's state TV broadcast headshots of the suspects ? all in their 20s and 30s with most of them sporting long beards ? identifying them as "militants."

A statement by Jordanian intelligence said an investigation showed that the group "adopts the ideology of al-Qaida" and that it nicknamed its terror plot as "9/11 the second" ? a reference to the Amman hotel blasts, which happened on Nov. 9, 2005.

Since June, the suspects have been surveying targets across the country, bringing in rockets from Syria to use in the alleged plot, the statement said.

The militants sought to carry out their attacks in stages, it added, with initial attacks on shopping centers and foreigners in Jordanian hotels, followed by more deadly strikes with powerful explosives and chemicals on Western diplomatic missions and unspecified "vital national sites."

One attack involved firing rockets at a district in the Jordanian capital that houses the U.S., British and other diplomatic missions as well as housing for expats and Western diplomats.

The statement said al-Qaida "explosive experts" based in Iraq and elsewhere have assisted the suspects with manufacturing home-made explosives.

The statement did not say when the suspects were arrested, but Maaytah ? the government spokesman ? said Jordanian intelligence apprehended them in the past few days.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2012-10-21-Jordan-Terror%20Plot/id-418159b556324976ba88caf7d2288585

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Beluga whale mimics human speech

Many of us talk to our pets, but we don't expect them to talk back. A beluga whale has bucked this trend by learning to imitate human speech. (Listen to it here.)

Noc was captured in 1977 when he was still a juvenile. By 1984, he was making unusual sounds. One day, a diver in his tank surfaced unexpectedly asking who had called to him to get out. It turned out that the cries of "out, out, out" had come from Noc.

"We were sceptical at first," says Sam Ridgway of the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, California. So his team analysed Noc's sound waves. "They were definitely unlike usual sounds for a [beluga], and similar to human voices in rhythm and acoustic spectrum," he says. Pressure sensors placed in Noc's nasal cavities revealed he was making the sounds using the same mechanism as his normal calls.

There have been anecdotal reports of belugas imitating human speech, but this is the first time they have been analysed, says Justin Gregg of the Dolphin Communication Project in Mystic, Connecticut.

Talking seal

A few other animals have also mimicked human speech, notably parrots and a harbour seal called Hoover.

Famous mimics like lyrebirds do so to defend territories and attract mates, while katydids lure cicadasSpeakerMovie Camera by mimicking their mating calls. Gregg thinks belugas are more likely to be social mimics, for instance learning a different "dialect" when they join a new group.

Belugas have a range of vocal tricks up their sleeves. A recent study showed that they can also learn to "label" objects with different sounds, and then choose from a selection of objects based on the sound they had heard (International Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol 25, p 195).

Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.08.044

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Windows 8 vs. iPad Mini: Smackdown of the Decade?

There is probably no battle we will see that will better define the futures of the new post Steve Jobs Apple and Steve Ballmer's revitalized Microsoft than this week's dueling launches. Apple is defined as the company that focuses tightly and drives people to its products, while Microsoft's strength is in the breadth of partners that collectively have the power to obliterate all challengers.


Source: http://ectnews.com.feedsportal.com/c/34520/f/632000/s/24be08d9/l/0L0Stechnewsworld0N0Crsstory0C763990Bhtml/story01.htm

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George McGovern dies; lost 1972 presidential bid

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) ? George McGovern once joked that he had wanted to run for president in the worst way ? and that he had done so.

It was a campaign in 1972 dishonored by Watergate, a scandal that fully unfurled too late to knock Republican President Richard M. Nixon from his place as a commanding favorite for re-election. The South Dakota senator tried to make an issue out of the bungled attempt to wiretap the offices of the Democratic National Committee, calling Nixon the most corrupt president in history.

But the Democrat could not escape the embarrassing missteps of his own campaign. The most torturous was the selection of Missouri Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton as the vice presidential nominee and, 18 days later, following the disclosure that Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression, the decision to drop him from the ticket despite having pledged to back him "1,000 percent."

It was at once the most memorable and the most damaging line of his campaign, and called "possibly the most single damaging faux pas ever made by a presidential candidate" by the late political writer Theodore H. White.

After a hard day's campaigning ? Nixon did virtually none ? McGovern would complain to those around him that nobody was paying attention. With R. Sargent Shriver as his running mate, he went on to carry only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia, winning just 38 percent of the popular vote in one of the biggest landslides losses in American presidential history.

"Tom and I ran into a little snag back in 1972 that in the light of my much advanced wisdom today, I think was vastly exaggerated," McGovern said at an event with Eagleton in 2005. Noting that Nixon and his running mate, Spiro Agnew, would both ultimately resign, he joked, "If we had run in '74 instead of '72, it would have been a piece of cake."

A proud liberal who had argued fervently against Vietnam War as a Democratic senator from South Dakota and three-time candidate for president, McGovern died at 5:15 a.m. Sunday at a Sioux Falls hospice, family spokesman Steve Hildebrand told The Associated Press. McGovern was 90.

McGovern's family had said late last week that McGovern had become unresponsive while in hospice care, and Hildebrand said he was surrounded by family and lifelong friends when he died.

"We are blessed to know that our father lived a long, successful and productive life advocating for the hungry, being a progressive voice for millions and fighting for peace. He continued giving speeches, writing and advising all the way up to and past his 90th birthday, which he celebrated this summer," the family said in the statement.

A funeral will be held in Sioux Falls, with details announced shortly, Hildebrand said.

A decorated World War II bomber pilot, McGovern said he learned to hate war by waging it. In his disastrous race against Nixon, he promised to end the Vietnam War and cut defense spending by billions of dollars. He helped create the Food for Peace program and spent much of his career believing the United States should be more accommodating to the former Soviet Union.

Never a showman, he made his case with a style as plain as the prairies where he grew up, sounding often more like the Methodist minister he'd once studied to become than longtime U.S. senator and three-time candidate for president he became.

And he never shied from the word "liberal," even as other Democrats blanched at the word and Republicans used it as an epithet.

"I am a liberal and always have been," McGovern said in 2001. "Just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be."

McGovern's campaign, nevertheless, left a lasting imprint on American politics. Determined not to make the same mistake, presidential nominees have since interviewed and intensely investigated their choices for vice president. Former President Bill Clinton got his start in politics when he signed on as a campaign worker for McGovern in 1972 and is among the legion of Democrats who credit him with inspiring them to public service.

"I believe no other presidential candidate ever has had such an enduring impact in defeat," Clinton said in 2006 at the dedication of McGovern's library in Mitchell, S.D. "Senator, the fires you lit then still burn in countless hearts."

George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in the small farm town of Avon, S.D, the son of a Methodist pastor. He was raised in Mitchell, shy and quiet until he was recruited for the high school debate team and found his niche. He enrolled at Dakota Wesleyan University in his hometown and, already a private pilot, volunteered for the Army Air Force soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Army didn't have enough airfields or training planes to take him until 1943. He married his wife, Eleanor Stegeberg, and arrived in Italy the next year. That would be his base for the 35 missions he flew in the B-24 Liberator christened the "Dakota Queen" after his new bride.

In a December 1944 bombing raid on the Czech city of Pilsen, McGovern's plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire that disabled one engine and set fire to another. He nursed the B-24 back to a British airfield on an island in the Adriatic Sea, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. On his final mission, his plane was hit several times, but he managed to get it back safety ? one of the actions for which he received the Air Medal.

McGovern returned to Mitchell and graduated from Dakota Wesleyan after the war's end, and after a year of divinity school, switched to the study of history and political science at Northwestern University. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees, returned to Dakota Wesleyan to teach history and government, and switched from his family's Republican roots to the Democratic Party.

"I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American," he said.

In the early 1950s, Democrats held no major offices in South Dakota and only a handful of legislative seats. McGovern, who had gotten into Democratic politics as a campaign volunteer, left teaching in 1953 to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party. Three years later, he won an upset election to the House; he served two terms and left to run for Senate.

Challenging conservative Republican Sen. Karl Mundt in 1960, he lost what he called his "worst campaign." He said later that he'd hated Mundt so much that he'd lost his sense of balance.

President John F. Kennedy named McGovern head of the Food for Peace program, which sends U.S. commodities to deprived areas around the world. He made a second Senate bid in 1962, unseating Sen. Joe Bottum by just 597 votes. He was the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate from South Dakota since 1930.

In his first year in office, McGovern took to the Senate floor to say that the Vietnam war was a trap that would haunt the United States ? a speech that drew little notice. He voted the following August in favor of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution under which President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated the U.S. war in the southeast Asian nation.

While McGovern continued to vote to pay for the war, he did so while speaking against it. As the war escalated, so did his opposition. Late in 1969, McGovern called for a cease-fire in Vietnam and the withdrawal of all U.S. troops within a year. He later co-sponsored a Senate amendment to cut off appropriations for the war by the end of 1971. It failed, but not before McGovern had taken the floor to declare "this chamber reeks of blood" and to demand an end to "this damnable war."

McGovern first sought the Democratic presidential nomination late in the 1968 campaign, saying he would take up the cause of the assassinated Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. He finished far behind Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who won the nomination, and Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who had led the anti-war challenge to Johnson in the primaries earlier in the year. McGovern later called his bid an "anti-organization" effort against the Humphrey steamroller.

"At least I have precluded the possibility of peaking too early," McGovern quipped at the time.

The following year, McGovern led a Democratic Party reform commission that shifted to voters' power that had been wielded by party leaders and bosses at the national conventions. The result was the system of presidential primary elections and caucuses that now selects the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees.

In 1972, McGovern ran under the rules he had helped write. Initially considered a longshot against Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, McGovern built a bottom-up campaign organization and went to the Democratic national convention in command. He was the first candidate to gain a nominating majority in the primaries before the convention.

It was a meeting filled with intramural wrangling and speeches that verged on filibusters. By the time McGovern delivered his climactic speech accepting the nomination, it was 2:48 a.m., and with most of America asleep, he lost his last and best chance to make his case to a nationwide audience.

McGovern did not know before selecting Eagleton of his running mate's mental health woes, and after dropping him from the ticket, struggled to find a replacement. Several Democrats said no, and a joke made the rounds that there was a signup sheet in the Senate cloakroom. Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, finally agreed.

The campaign limped into the fall on a platform advocating withdrawal from Vietnam in exchange for the release of POWs, cutting defense spending by a third and establishing an income floor for all Americans. McGovern had dropped an early proposal to give every American $1,000 a year, but the Republicans continued to ridicule it as "the demogrant." They painted McGovern as an extreme leftist and Democrats as the party of "amnesty, abortion and acid."

While McGovern said little about his decorated service in World War II, Republicans depicted him as a weak peace activist. At one point, McGovern was forced to defend himself against assertions he had shirked combat.

He'd had enough when a young man at the airport fence in Battle Creek, Mich., taunted that Nixon would clobber him. McGovern leaned in and said quietly: "I've got a secret for you. Kiss my ass." A conservative Senate colleague later told McGovern it was his best line of the campaign.

Defeated by Nixon, McGovern returned to the Senate and pressed there to end the Vietnam war while championing agriculture, anti-hunger and food stamp programs in the United States and food programs abroad. He won re-election to the Senate in 1974, by which point he could make wry jokes about his presidential defeat.

"For many years, I wanted to run for the presidency in the worst possible way ? and last year, I sure did," he told a formal press dinner in Washington.

After losing his bid for a fourth Senate term in the 1980 Republican landslide that made Ronald Reagan president, McGovern went on to teach and lecture at universities, and found a liberal political action committee. He made a longshot bid in the 1984 presidential race with a call to end U.S. military involvement in Lebanon and Central America and open arms talks with the Soviets. Former Vice President Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination and went on to lose to President Ronald Reagan by an even bigger margin in electoral votes than had McGovern to Nixon.

He talked of running a final time for president in 1992, but decided it was time for somebody younger and with fewer political scars.

After his career in office ended, McGovern served as U.S. ambassador to the Rome-based United Nation's food agencies from 1998 to 2001 and spent his later years working to feed needy children around the world. He and former Republican Sen. Bob Dole collaborated to create an international food for education and child nutrition program, for which they shared the 2008 World Food Prize.

Clinton and his wife, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said in a statement Sunday that while McGovern was "a tireless advocate for human rights and dignity," his greatest passion was helping feed the hungry.

"The programs he created helped feed millions of people, including food stamps in the 1960s and the international school feeding program in the 90's, both of which he co-sponsored with Senator Bob Dole," they said, adding, "We must continue to draw inspiration from his example and build the world he fought for."

McGovern's opposition to armed conflict remained a constant long after he retired. Shortly before Iowa's caucuses in 2004, McGovern endorsed retired Gen. Wesley Clark, and compared his own opposition to the Vietnam War to Clark's criticism of President George W. Bush's decision to wage war in Iraq. One of the 10 books McGovern wrote was 2006's "Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now," written with William R. Polk.

In early 2002, George and Eleanor McGovern returned to Mitchell, where they helped raise money for a library bearing their names. Eleanor McGovern died there in 2007 at age 85; they had been married 64 years, and had four daughters and a son.

"I don't know what kind of president I would have been, but Eleanor would have been a great first lady," he said after his wife's death in 2007.

One of their daughters, Teresa, was found dead in a Madison, Wis., snowdrift in 1994 after battling alcoholism for years. He recounted her struggle in his 1996 book "Terry," and described the writing of it as "the most painful undertaking in my life." It was briefly a best seller and he used the proceeds to help set up a treatment center for victims of alcoholism and mental illness in Madison.

Before the 2008 presidential campaign, McGovern endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination but switched to Barack Obama that May. He called the future president "a moderate," cautious in his ways, who wouldn't waste money or do "anything reckless."

"I think Barack will emerge as one of our great ones," he said in a 2009 interview with The Associated Press. "It will be a victory for moderate liberalism."

___

Online:

McGovern Center for Leadership and Public Service: http://www.mcgoverncenter.com

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? Walter R. Mears, who reported on government and politics for The Associated Press in Washington for 40 years, covered George McGovern in the Senate and in his 1972 presidential campaign.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/george-mcgovern-dies-lost-1972-presidential-bid-120229782--politics.html

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Teaching Jobs in Canada - powered by Education Canada Network


Teacher's Pet Educational Services is currently accepting applications for the following positions:

Tutoring - High School Sciences (all)

(Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, Calgary)

As an experienced teacher, you will conduct one-on-one tutorials either in your home/office, local library or in the student's home. You determine which location(s) you would like to work from and which subjects you will tutor. Part time positions are available.

Applicants must have a Bachelor of Education degree, or other degree, or be enrolled in a post-secondary program.
Previous teaching experience is an asset.

Source: http://jobsearch.educationcanada.com/index.phtml?a=v&j=113370

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Voice software helps study of rare Yosemite owls

In this July 2012 photo released by the National Park Service, two juvenile Great Gray Owls are shown on a tree branch in Yosemite National Park. The unique Great Gray Owls of Yosemite National Park, left to evolve after glacial ice separated them from their plentiful Canadian brethren 30 millennia ago, are both a mystery and concern to the scientists charged with protecting them. (AP Photo/National Park Service)

In this July 2012 photo released by the National Park Service, two juvenile Great Gray Owls are shown on a tree branch in Yosemite National Park. The unique Great Gray Owls of Yosemite National Park, left to evolve after glacial ice separated them from their plentiful Canadian brethren 30 millennia ago, are both a mystery and concern to the scientists charged with protecting them. (AP Photo/National Park Service)

(AP) ? In the bird world, they make endangered condors seem almost commonplace.

The unique Great Gray Owls of Yosemite, left to evolve after glacial ice separated them from their plentiful Canadian brethren 30 millennia ago, are both a mystery and concern to the scientists charged with protecting them.

With fewer than 200 in existence in this small pocket of the Sierra Nevada, the slightest disturbances by humans can drive the extremely shy birds from their nests, disrupting sporadic mating cycles that ebb and flow annually depending upon food availability.

So this summer, researchers found a way to abandon their traditional heavy-handed trapping, banding and the blasting of owl calls in favor of the kind of discrete, sophisticated technology used by spies and forensic scientists.

They hope to lessen human influence on this subspecies of owls prized for the potential insights their survival offers into habitat-specific evolution.

"Even if it takes only 15 minutes to trap a bird, it's traumatic for them in the long term," said Joe Medley, a PhD candidate in ecology at UC Davis who perfected computer voice recognition software to track the largest of North America's owls. "With a population this small, we want to err on the side of caution in terms of the methods we use to get data."

Medley placed 40 data-compression digital audio recorders around the mid-elevation meadows typically favored by the owl known as Strix nebulosa Yosemitensis, hoping to identify them by their mating, feeding and territorial calls.

He ended up with 50 terabytes of owl calls mixed with airplanes flying overhead, frogs croaking, coyotes yipping, bears growling and even the occasional crunch of fangs on pricy microphones ? so much data it would have taken seven years to play back.

He then designed algorithms for an existing computer program that would search for the specific frequency and time intervals of the Great Gray Owls' low-pitched hoot "whooo-ooo-ooo-ooo." The program could discern males and females from juveniles, and even identify nesting females calling for food to help determine reproduction success. The results are still being analyzed.

"It's capable of searching a week's worth of data in an hour. What I was left with was owls and a host of other things that fell in the same bandwidth," Medley said.

Most of the world's Great Gray Owls make their homes in northern hemisphere boreal forests, though a few live as far south as Oregon and Idaho. The giants with piercing yellow eyes and 5-foot wingspans have adapted so well to snow that they can dive face-first through up to a foot of it to catch the voles they hear creeping underneath. Their dish-shaped faces work to amplify sound.

During the last ice age 30,000 years ago, a small population in and around what would become the glacially carved landscape of Yosemite was cut off from the others to evolve on their own in a warmer, less snowy climate.

Those owls, now numbering just a couple of hundred, are on California's endangered species list. The giant condors, once nearly extinct, number around 400 in California and the Southwest, and are on the federal endangered list.

"These (owls) exist nowhere else in the world, and where they do occur is a pretty amazing location," said Joshua Hull, a researcher with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and adjunct professor at the University of California, Davis. "These are going in a different evolutionary direction than the others, and we don't know where that is right now."

Scientists from Yosemite, the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife, with funding from the Yosemite Conservancy, are working to gain a greater understanding of what those differences mean. So far, DNA studies have noted distinct genetic variations between the separated groups in addition to the different food sources and nesting patterns the southern birds have adapted. The birds have very subtle differences in color.

"That's important to know because if it's genetically different, we should try to keep it that way," Hull said. "You wouldn't want to bring in individuals from Oregon to supplement a unique population."

The major threats to their continued survival are the mosquito-borne West Nile Virus ? and humans. A female believed to be the cohort's most reliable breeder was struck and killed by a car in the park in August, prompting slower speed limit warnings to protect the low-flying raptors that rarely lift more than 20 feet above ground.

Because of their rarity, they are highly sought out by birdwatchers whose presence in meadows can deter mating and food foraging, the researchers say. That's why no one will reveal exactly where in the park they are.

"They will abandon their nests if disturbed," said Steve Thompson, Yosemite's branch chief of wildlife management. "It's an extremely low population very vulnerable to natural- and human-caused events. They don't have the ability to rebound the way more abundant species do. We're very protective of them."

So protective that the owls will no longer be trapped to draw blood for studies. Instead researchers are collecting molted feathers to extract and amplify DNA to track lineage, mating patterns, population size, survival rates and even genetic mutations that might occur as the climate changes yet again.

"Genetic mutations occur randomly. It's just chance whether those mutations are advantageous or deleterious to the population," Thompson said. "And all of this is happening over tens of thousands of years, so to me as a biologist it's really exciting to have this demonstration of how evolution occurs."

____

Reach Tracie Cone on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TConeAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2012-10-21-Yosemite's%20Unique%20Owls/id-70a39461ef534b658401e661630af31c

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For those parents who have kids in daycare/preschool have you ...

I am planning on just having a party for my soon to be 4 year old son at his daycare which he is now in the pre-k room. I don?t have any kids in my family and his father has just a few. So I thought since there are many children there this would be a good idea. Has anyone done this if so how was it? Any ideas? His daycare isn?t real tight on certain rules.

LOL, no. There are so many reasons why I wouldn?t.

I would not want other parents to feel obligated to buy my child a birthday gift just by virtue of being in the same daycare room.
I would never expect or ask staff at our daycare to offer such a service, they are so busy already, I couldn?t imagine asking them to host a birthday party.
Daycares often have a fairly structured routine to follow so children get fed on time, get outside, have circle, etc. that I don?t know how throwing a birthday party would even fit into that.
I would much prefer to have their birthday party other than somewhere they have to go every day. They would be much more comfortable at home, with family and close friends.

We don?t have any family nearby. We have a few friends with children their age, but we keep our parties fairly small. My girls are 3 and 5.

Source: http://www.sevaa.org/daycare/for-those-parents-who-have-kids-in-daycarepreschool-have-you-ever-held-a-party-there-instead-of-home

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Blast in Syrian capital kills at least 13

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) ? A taxi rigged with explosives blew up near a police station in the Syrian capital Sunday, killing at least 13 people even as the U.N. envoy to the nation's crisis was visiting Damascus to push his call for a cease-fire in talks with President Bashar Assad.

Syria's SANA state news agency said 29 people were also wounded in the blast in the Bab Touma neighborhood, a popular shopping district largely inhabited by Syria's Christian minority.

Once largely immune to the violence that has swept over Syria since the anti-Assad revolt began in March 2011, Damascus has become a frequent target of bombings in recent months. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday's blast, but Islamist groups fighting alongside the rebels have claimed to be behind bomb attacks against security targets in the capital.

Two Syrian officials speaking from the scene said the taxi blew up 50 meters (yards) from Bab Touma's main police station. The officials insisted on anonymity because they were not allowed to brief the media.

An Associated Press reporter at the site of the blast said blood stained the street and sidewalks, shards of glass littered the pavement from shattered shop windows and the charred hulks of at least four cars littered the street.

Vegetable vendor Mohammad Hanbali, 27, said several people wounded in the blast were lying on the street when he rushed to help.

"It's a cowardly act, carried out by terrorists," said Hanbali, who was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the left leg.

SANA put the death toll at 13, while the anti-regime Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 10 people were killed in the blast.

In another part of capital, U.N. and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi met with Assad as part of his push for a cease-fire between rebels and government forces for the four-day Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, which begins Oct. 26.

Brahimi told reporters following a closed-door meeting that he met earlier with Syrian opposition groups inside and outside the country to discuss his truce plan. He said he received "promises" but not a "commitment" from them to honor the cease-fire.

He noted that he "found an overwhelming response" from Assad's opponents to his cease-fire plan and that "all of them have said that it's a good idea which they support."

He declined to reveal Assad's response to his plan, viewed as a preliminary step toward a larger deal.

But SANA said Assad assured Brahimi that he supported his effort, but did not say whether he committed to a truce.

"The president said he is open to any sincere effort to find a political solution to the crisis on the basis of respecting the Syrian sovereignty and rejecting foreign interference," SANA said.

It said Assad also stressed that a political solution must be "based on the principle of halting terrorism, a commitment from the countries involved in supporting, arming and harboring terrorists in Syria to stop doing such acts."

?Syrian authorities blame the anti-government uprising that began in March last year on a foreign conspiracy and accuse Saudi Arabia and Qatar, along with the U.S, other Western countries and Turkey, of funding, training and arming the rebels, whom they describe as "terrorists."

For months, Turkey served as headquarters for the leaders of the ragtag Free Syrian Army before the rebel group shifted its command to Syria. Turkey also hosts many meetings of the Syrian National Council opposition group. Relations between Turkey and Syria, once close, have been deteriorating since the crisis began last year and Ankara became one of President Bashar Assad's harshest critics.

Brahimi said he was "hopeful that the eid in Syria will be calm if not happy." He said that he will return to Syria after the holiday. "If we find that this calm is actually achieved during the Eid and continued, we will try to build on it," he added.

"The Syrian people expect more than a truce for a few days and it is their right, but all we can promise is that we will work hard to achieve their aspirations," he said.

Brahimi arrived in Damascus Friday after a tour of Middle East capitals to drum up support for the cease-fire. A range of countries including Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Germany have backed the idea.

Syrian government forces and rebels have both agreed in the past to internationally brokered cease-fires only to then promptly violate them, and there is little indication that either is willing to stop fighting now.

Elsewhere, in the northern city of Aleppo, a suicide bomber detonated his explosive-laden car in front of the French-Syrian Hospital at al-Zohour Street, causing material damage, but no casualties, SANA said. It said the blast wounded several passers-by, but did not disclose their number.

Anti-regime activists say more than 33,000 people have been killed since the anti-Assad revolt started.

___

Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blast-syrian-capital-kills-least-13-122101357.html

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