Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/04/american-idol-power-poll-the-fantastic-5/
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Sunday, April 14, 2013
Saturday, April 13, 2013
Facebook Home now available for download
Launcher brings your friends' posts to you quicker (and prettier) than ever
OK, boys and girls. Now's the time to see what all the fuss is about over this Facebook Home thing. As promised, it's now available in the United States, for free, from the Google Play Store. (It's actually still propagating in Google Play as we write this. If you don't see it immediately, hang tight. It's coming.)
If you've somehow missed all the hullabaloo over the past week, Facebook Home is part custom launcher, part messaging client -- and all Facebook. You install it and get your friends Facebook posts front and center, in a nicely designed sort of lock screen called "cover feed." Then there's the "chat heads" messaging system -- it went live this morning in the Facebook Messenger app which pops up your friends profile pictures in little persistent bubbles. The traditional Facebook application is still there, of course.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/bwHhxK_r0CE/story01.htm
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Market Weekahead - Shares to track March WPI, earnings
Reuters Market Eye - Wholesale price inflation data due on Monday will be key in setting the tone for the week after data showing slowing consumer prices raised expectations the RBI will cut interest rates next month for a third time this year.
Wholesale prices are expected to have risen 6.40 percent in March from a year earlier, according to a Reuters poll, down from an annualised 6.84 percent advance in February.
Traders will also be closely eyeing earnings results from software services exporters after Infosys Ltd's
Tata Consultancy Service
Traders will also be eyeing Reliance Industries Ltd's
Stock markets will be closed on April 19 for a holiday.
KEY FACTORS/EVENTS TO WATCH
Monday: - March WPI data.
- Finance Minister P. Chidambaram travels to U.S. (Through April 19)
Tuesday: - Reliance Industries earnings
Wednesday: - HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services earnings
Friday: - Wipro earnings
- Markets closed for a holiday
(Reporting by Abhishek Vishnoi)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/market-weekahead-shares-track-march-wpi-earnings-112404128--sector.html
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As Apple Reportedly Nears Streaming Licensing Agreements For iRadio, Competitors Should Circle The Wagons
Apple is said to be getting very close to nailing down streaming licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Warner Music, according to sources speaking to The Verge. The report follows news from the NY Post that claimed Apple was well under where labels were expecting in terms of its streaming rates, and now says that Apple's service will pay fees pretty much on par with those paid by Pandora. If Apple does launch this service, it's about to become a lot harder to operate as a competitor in this space.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/9qCaOjeeVGA/
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Obama's Race to the Top: Model for Fostering Energy Innovation ...
President Barack Obama?s newly unveiled fiscal 2014 budget request supports a number of strong energy innovation policies, including an Energy Security Trust Fund to support next-generation transportation energy R&D and increased funding for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). Another promising proposal is a Race to the Top for grid modernization. This relatively modest $200 million program would be the first of its kind for energy and could be an interesting pilot project for using similar policy models to bridge the gap between energy research and the market.
The original Race to the Top was a $4 billion Education Department contest to spur educational reform at the state level. That program awarded points to states for implementing certain reforms or achieving benchmarks, such as turning around low-achieving schools, with the leading states receiving grants depending on their share of the federal population of children.
Earlier this year, a commission chaired by Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and National Grid US President Tom King recommended applying a comparable model to state energy efficiency policies. The commission report states, ?Best practices need wider dissemination?An energy productivity competition that similarly provides federal resources and rewards states for progress toward becoming more energy productive could spur significant advances in efficiency throughout the nation.? The president embraced the idea and proposed it in his 2013 State of the Union address: ?Those states with the best ideas to create jobs and lower energy bills by constructing more efficient buildings will receive federal support to help make it happen.?
The proposal in the president?s 2014 budget request expands on this idea to not only target energy efficiency, but grid modernization more broadly. Specifically, the budget request allocates $200 million to a Race to the Top program that would reward state governments for policies that involve ?modernizing utility regulations to encourage cost-effective investments in efficiency, including combined heat and power and demand response resources, and in clean distributed generation; enhancing customer access to data; investments that improve the reliability, security and resilience of the grid; and enhancing the sharing of information regarding grid conditions.? The goal is that the policy acts as an incentive for states, utilities, and local governments to implement aggressive policy reforms that cut energy waste pursuant of the president?s stated goal of doubling energy productivity by 2030.
Race to the Top for grid modernization is attractive from an innovation perspective because it ties performance to public investment. Linking research to performance and market goals has proven effective at ARPA-E, which is empowered to halt funding for award grantees if they fail to meet certain technology improvement benchmarks. Similarly, ITIF ? along with organizations like the Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, and World Resources Institute ? has called for tying the wind production tax credit to technology cost and performance improvements as a means of pushing the wind industry towards subsidy-independence.
Ultimately, energy innovation policies involve not only boosting support for R&D, manufacturing, and technology demonstration and transfer, but also improving how those policies are implemented. The Race to the Top is one potential way of more effectively leveraging federal research dollars. Of course, the grid modernization Race to the Top program exists only as a proposal on paper. But its existence, even just in paper form, is a promising sign that policymakers are thinking creatively about how to foster energy innovation.
Connect: 
Authored by:
Clifton Yin
Clifton Yin is a Clean Energy Policy Analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Prior to joining ITIF, he earned a Master of Public Policy degree with a focus on environmental and regulatory policy from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. His master?s thesis sought to use statistical analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of California?s Renewable Portfolio ...
See complete profile
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Alternative way to explain life's complexity proposed
Apr. 12, 2013 ? Evolution skeptics argue that some biological structures, like the brain or the eye, are simply too complex for natural selection to explain. Biologists have proposed various ways that so-called 'irreducibly complex' structures could emerge incrementally over time, bit by bit. But a new study proposes an alternative route.
Instead of starting from simpler precursors and becoming more intricate, say authors Dan McShea and Wim Hordijk, some structures could have evolved from complex beginnings that gradually grew simpler -- an idea they dub "complexity by subtraction." Computer models and trends in skull evolution back them up, the researchers show in a study published this week in the journal Evolutionary Biology.
Some biological structures are too dizzyingly complex to have emerged stepwise by adding one part and then the next over time, intelligent design advocates say. Consider the human eye, or the cascade that causes blood to clot, or the flagellum, the tiny appendage that enables some bacteria to get around. Such all-or-none structures, the argument goes, need all their parts in order to function. Alter or take away any one piece, and the whole system stops working. In other words, what good is two thirds of an eye, or half of a flagellum?
For the majority of scientists, the standard response is to point to simpler versions of supposedly 'irreducibly complex' structures that exist in nature today, such as cup eyes in flatworms. Others show how such structures could have evolved incrementally over millions of years from simpler precursors. A simple eye-like structure -- say, a patch of light-sensitive cells on the surface of the skin -- could evolve into a camera-like eye like what we humans and many other animals have today, biologists say.
"Even a very simple eye with a small number of parts would work a little. It would be able to detect shadows, or where light is coming from," said co-author Dan McShea of Duke University.
In a new study, McShea and co-author Wim Hordijk propose an alternative route. Instead of emerging by gradually and incrementally adding new genes, cells, tissues or organs over time, what if some so-called 'irreducibly complex' structures came to be by gradually losing parts, becoming simpler and more streamlined? Think of naturally occurring rock arches, which start as cliffs or piles of stone and form when bits of stone are weathered away. They call the principle 'complexity by subtraction.'
"Instead of building up bit by bit from simple to complex, you start complex and then winnow out the unnecessary parts, refining them and making them more efficient as you go," McShea said.
A computer model used by co-author Wim Hordijk supports the idea. In the model, complex structures are represented by an array of cells, some white and some black, like the squares of a checkerboard. In this class of models known as cellular automata, the cells can change between black and white according to a set of rules.
Using a computer program that mimics the process of inheritance, mutation, recombination, and reproduction, the cells were then asked to perform a certain task. The better they were at accomplishing the task, the more likely they were to get passed on to the next generation, and over time a new generation of rules replaced the old ones. In the beginning, the patterns of black and white cells that emerged were quite complex. But after several more generations, some rules 'evolved' to generate simpler black and white cell patterns, and became more efficient at performing the task, Hordijk said.
We see similar trends in nature too, the authors say. Summarizing the results of previous paleontological studies, they show that vertebrate skulls started out complex, but have grown simpler and more streamlined. "For example, the skulls of fossil fish consist of a large number of differently-shaped bones that cover the skull like a jigsaw puzzle," McShea said. "We see a reduction in the number of skull bone types in the evolutionary transitions from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal." In some cases skull bones were lost; in other cases adjacent bones were fused. Human skulls, for example, have fewer bones than fish skulls.
Computer simulations like Hordijk's will allow scientists to test ideas about how often 'complexity by subtraction' happens, or how long it takes. The next step is to find out how often the phenomenon happens in nature.
"What we need to do next is pick an arbitrary sample of complex structures and trace their evolution and see if you can tell which route they proceeded by, [from simple to complex or the opposite]. That will tell us whether this is common or not," McShea added.
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Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), 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:
- Daniel W. McShea, Wim Hordijk. Complexity by Subtraction. Evolutionary Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1007/s11692-013-9227-6
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/_NlcyV2uA1E/130412132407.htm
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Friday, April 12, 2013
Study finds copper reduces 58 percent of healthcare-acquired infections
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
New research has revealed that the use of Antimicrobial Copper surfaces in hospital rooms can reduce the number of healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) by 58% as compared to patients treated in Intensive Care Units with non-copper touch surfaces. In the United States, 1 out of every 20 hospital patients develops an HAI, resulting in an estimated 100,000 deaths per year. Although numerous strategies have been developed to decrease these infections, Antimicrobial Copper is the only strategy that works continuously, has been scientifically proven to be effective and doesn't depend on human behavior, according to a recently published study in the SHEA Journal of Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
"The implications of this study are critical," said Dr. Harold Michels, Senior Vice President of the Copper Development Association (CDA). "Until now, the only attempts to reduce HAIs have required hand hygiene, increased cleaning and patient screening, which don't necessarily stop the growth of these bacteria the way copper alloy surfaces do. We now know that copper is the game-changer: it has the potential to save lives."
Intensive Care Units See the Benefit of Copper Alloys
The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, was conducted in the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) of three major hospitals: The Medical University of South Carolina, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the Ralph H. Johnson Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Charleston, South Carolina. To determine the impact of copper alloy surfaces on the rate of HAIs, copper-surfaced objects were placed in each ICU, where patients are at higher risk due to the severity of their illnesses, invasive procedures and frequent interaction with healthcare workers. Patients were randomly placed in available rooms with or without copper alloy surfaces, and the rates of HAIs were compared. A total of 650 patients and 16 rooms (8 copper and 8 standard) were studied between July 12, 2010 and June 14, 2011.
Results of this study, that appeared last July in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, found that Antimicrobial Copper can continuously kill 83% of bacteria that cause HAIs within two hours, including strands resistant to antibiotics. The study compared copper to equivalent non-copper touch surfaces during active patient care between routine cleaning and sanitizing.
"Copper alloy surfaces offer an alternative way to reduce the increasing number of HAIs, without having to worry about changing healthcare worker behavior," said Dr. Michael Schmidt, Vice Chairman of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina and one of the authors of the study. "Because the antimicrobial effect is a continuous property of copper, the regrowth of deadly bacteria is significantly less on these surfaces, making a safer environment for hospital patients."
In study results, 46 patients developed an HAI, while 26 patients became colonized with MRSA or VRE. Overall, the proportion of patients who developed an HAI was significantly lower among those assigned to intensive care rooms with objects fabricated using copper alloys. There are currently hundreds of Antimicrobial Copper healthcare-related products available today, including IV poles, stretchers, tray tables and door hardware.
This study was so successful that an interdisciplinary team from UCLA began replicating this research in July 2012. The team is testing ICUs with Antimicrobial Copper at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
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Kellen Communications - NY:
Thanks to Kellen Communications - NY for this article.
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