Sunday, March 31, 2013

Alert cleared at Eiffel Tower after bomb threat

Thomas Coex / AFP - Getty Images

French police stand guard near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on March 30, 2013. The Eiffel Tower was evacuated after an anonymous phone call announced an attack, said a police source. The perimeter of the monument was secured and about 1,400 people were evacuated shortly before 9 p.m.

By Nancy Ing and Becky Bratu, NBC News

Police evacuated about 1,400 tourists and staffers at the Eiffel Tower for two hours after an anonymous individual called in a bomb threat Saturday, but people were later allowed to return.

French media reported police had lifted the security alert around 10 p.m. local time, saying the threat appeared to be a hoax. The public was allowed to return once investigators completed the search for suspicious devices.

The call received at 7 p.m. local time warned of a possible attack at 9:30 p.m. local time.

Investigators used sniffer dogs to search the Eiffel Tower for any explosive devices.

French police have received similar calls in the past and have always evacuated the famous tourist attraction as a precaution. The tower was evacuated at least once last year and twice in 2011, according to The Associated Press.

News website Le Parisien reported that police said the threat was called in from a telephone booth in a Paris suburb.


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Three dozen indicted in Atlanta cheating scandal

ATLANTA (AP) ? Juwanna Guffie was sitting in her fifth-grade classroom taking a standardized test when, authorities say, the teacher came around offering information and asking the students to rewrite their answers. Juwanna rejected the help.

"I don't want your answers, I want to take my own test," Juwanna told her teacher, according to Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard.

On Friday, Juwanna ? now 14 ? watched as Fulton County prosecutors announced that a grand jury had indicted the Atlanta Public Schools' ex-superintendent and nearly three dozen other former administrators, teachers, principals and other educators of charges arising from a standardized test cheating scandal that rocked the system.

Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faces charges including conspiracy, making false statements and theft because prosecutors said some of the bonuses she received were tied to falsified scores. Hall retired just days before the findings of a state probe were released in mid-2011. A nationally known educator who was named Superintendent of the Year in 2009, Hall has long denied knowing about the cheating or ordering it.

During a news conference Friday, Howard highlighted the case of Juwanna and another student, saying they demonstrated "the plight of many children" in the Atlanta school system.

Their stories were among many that investigators heard in hundreds of interviews with school administrators, staff, parents and students during a 21-month-long investigation.

According to Howard, Juwanna said that when she declined her teacher's offer, the teacher responded that she was just trying to help her students. Her class ended up getting some of the highest scores in the school and won a trophy for their work. Juwanna felt guilty but didn't tell anyone about her class' cheating because she was afraid of retaliation and feared her teacher would lose her job.

She eventually told her sister and later told the district attorney's investigators. Still confident in her ability to take a test on her own, Juwanna got the highest reading score on a standardized test this year.

The other student cited by Howard was a third-grader who failed a benchmark exam and received the worst score in her reading class in 2006. The girl was held back, yet when she took a separate assessment test not long afterward, she passed with flying colors.

Howard said the girl's mother, Justina Collins, knew something was wrong, but was told by school officials that the child simply was a good test-taker. The girl is now in ninth grade, reading at a fifth-grade level.

"I have a 15-year-old now who is behind in achieving her goal of becoming what she wants to be when she graduates. It's been hard trying to help her catch up," Collins said at the news conference.

The allegations date back to 2005. In addition to Hall, 34 other former school system employees were indicted. Four were high-level administrators, six were principals, two were assistant principals, six were testing coordinators and 14 were teachers. A school improvement specialist and a school secretary were also indicted.

Howard didn't directly answer a question about whether prosecutors believe Hall led the conspiracy.

"What we're saying is, is that without her, this conspiracy could not have taken place, particularly in the degree that it took place. Because as we know, this took place in 58 of the Atlanta Public Schools. And it would not have taken place if her actions had not made that possible," the prosecutor said.

Richard Deane, an attorney for Hall, told The New York Times that Hall continues to deny the charges and expects to be vindicated. Deane said the defense was making arrangements for bond.

"We note that as far as has been disclosed, despite the thousands of interviews that were reportedly done by the governor's investigators and others, not a single person reported that Dr. Hall participated in or directed them to cheat on the C.R.C.T.," he said later in a statement provided to the Times.

The tests were the key measure the state used to determine whether it met the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools with good test scores get extra federal dollars to spend in the classroom or on teacher bonuses.

It wasn't immediately clear how much bonus money Hall received. Howard did not say and the amount wasn't mentioned in the indictment.

"Those results were caused by cheating. ... And the money that she received, we are alleging that money was ill-gotten," Howard said.

A 2011 state investigation found cheating by nearly 180 educators in 44 Atlanta schools. Educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in, investigators said. Teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation, creating a culture of "fear and intimidation," the investigation found.

State schools Superintendent John Barge said last year he believed the state's new accountability system would remove the pressure to cheat on standardized tests because it won't be the sole way the state determines student growth. The pressure was part of what some educators in the system blamed for their cheating.

A former top official in the New York City school system who later headed the Newark, N.J. system for three years, Hall served as Atlanta's superintendent for more than a decade, which is rare for an urban schools chief. She was named Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators in 2009 and credited with raising student test scores and graduation rates, particularly among the district's poor and minority students. But the award quickly lost its luster as her district became mired in the scandal.

In a video message to schools staff before she retired in the summer of 2011, Hall warned that the state investigation launched by former Gov. Sonny Perdue would likely reveal "alarming" behavior.

"It's become increasingly clear that a segment of our staff chose to violate the trust that was placed in them," Hall said. "There is simply no excuse for unethical behavior and no room in this district for unethical conduct. I am confident that aggressive, swift action will be taken against anyone who believed so little in our students and in our system of support that they turned to dishonesty as the only option."

The cheating came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.

Most of the 178 educators named in the special investigators' report in 2011 resigned, retired, did not have their contracts renewed or appealed their dismissals and lost. Twenty-one educators have been reinstated and three await hearings to appeal their dismissals, said Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Stephen Alford.

APS Superintendent Erroll Davis said the district, which has about 50,000 students, is now focused on nurturing an ethical environment, providing quality education and supporting the employees who were not implicated.

"I know that our children will succeed when the adults around them work hard, work together, and do so with integrity," he said in a statement.

The Georgia Professional Standards Commission is responsible for licensing teachers and has been going through the complaints against teachers, said commission executive secretary Kelly Henson. Of the 159 cases the commission has reviewed, 44 resulted in license revocations, 100 got two-year suspensions and nine were suspended for less than two years, Henson said. No action was taken against six of the educators.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/3-dozen-indicted-atlanta-cheating-scandal-214241949.html

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Exhibit of Jews in Germany raises interest, ire

(AP) ? "Are there still Jews in Germany?" ''Are the Jews a chosen people?"

Nearly 70 years after the Holocaust, there is no more sensitive an issue in German life as the role of Jews. With fewer than 200,000 Jews among Germany's 82 million people, few Germans born after World War II know any Jews or much about them.

To help educate postwar generations, an exhibit at the Jewish Museum features a Jewish man or woman seated inside a glass box for two hours a day through August to answer visitors' questions about Jews and Jewish life. The base of the box asks: "Are there still Jews in Germany?"

"A lot of our visitors don't know any Jews and have questions they want to ask," museum official Tina Luedecke said. "With this exhibition we offer an opportunity for those people to know more about Jews and Jewish life."

But not everybody thinks putting a Jew on display is the best way to build understanding and mutual respect.

Since the exhibit ? "The Whole Truth, everything you wanted to know about Jews" ? opened this month, the "Jew in the Box," as it is popularly known, has drawn sharp criticism within the Jewish community ? especially in the city where the Nazis orchestrated the slaughter of 6 million Jews until Adolf Hitler's defeat in 1945.

"Why don't they give him a banana and a glass of water, turn up the heat and make the Jew feel really cozy in his glass box," prominent Berlin Jewish community figure Stephan Kramer told The Associated Press. "They actually asked me if I wanted to participate. But I told them I'm not available."

The exhibit is reminiscent of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann sitting in a glass booth at the 1961 trial in Israel which led to his execution. And it's certainly more provocative than British actress Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box at a recent performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Eran Levy, an Israeli who has lived in Berlin for years, was horrified by the idea of presenting a Jew as a museum piece, even if to answer Germans' questions about Jewish life.

"It's a horrible thing to do ? completely degrading and not helpful," he said. "The Jewish Museum absolutely missed the point if they wanted to do anything to improve the relations between Germans and Jews."

But several of the volunteers, including both German Jews and Israelis living in Berlin, said the experience in the box is little different from what they go through as Jews living in the country that produced the Nazis.

"With so few of us, you almost inevitably feel like an exhibition piece," volunteer Leeor Englander said. "Once you've been 'outed' as a Jew, you always have to be the expert and answer all questions regarding anything related to religion, Israel, the Holocaust and so on."

Museum curator Miriam Goldmann, who is Jewish, believes the exhibit's provocative "in your face" approach is the best way to overcome the emotional barriers and deal with a subject that remains painful for both Jews and non-Jews.

"We wanted to provoke, that's true, and some people may find the show outrageous or objectionable," Goldmann said. "But that's fine by us."

The provocative style is evident in other parts of the special exhibition, including some that openly raise many stereotypes of Jews widespread not only in Germany but elsewhere in Europe.

One includes a placard that asks "how you recognize a Jew?" It's next to an assortment of yarmulkes, black hats and women's hair covers hanging from the ceiling on thin threads. Another asks if Jews consider themselves the chosen people. It includes a poem by Jewish author Leonard Fein: "How odd of God to choose the Jews. But how on earth could we refuse?"

Yet another invites visitors to express their opinion to such questions as "are Jews particularly good looking, influential, intelligent, animal loving or business savvy?"

Despite the criticisms, the "Jew in the Box" has proven a big hit among visitors.

"I asked him about the feelings he has for his country and what he thinks about the conflict with Palestine, if he ever visited Palestine," visitor Panka Chirer-Geyer said. "I have Jewish roots and I've been to Palestine and realized how difficult it was there. I could not even mention that I have Jewish roots."

On a recent day this week, several visitors kept returning to ask questions of Ido Porat, a 33-year-old Israeli seated on a white bench with a pink cushion.

One woman wanted to know what to bring her hosts for a Shabbat dinner in Israel. Another asked why only Jewish men and not women wear yarmulkes. A third inquired about Judaism and homosexuality.

"I guess I should ask you about the relationship between Germans and Jews," visitor Diemut Poppen said to Porat. "We Germans have so many insecurities when it comes to Jews."

Viola Mohaupt-Zitfin, 53, asked if Porat felt welcome as a Jew living among Germans "considering our past and all that."

Yes, Porat said, Germany is a good place to live, even as a Jew. But the country could do even more to come to terms with its Nazi past, he added. He advised the would-be traveler that anything is permissible to bring to a Shabbat dinner as long as it's not pork.

"I feel a bit like an animal in the zoo, but in reality that's what it's like being a Jew in Germany," Porat said. "You are a very interesting object to most people here."

Dekel Peretz, one of the volunteers in the glass box, said many Germans have an image of Jews that is far removed from the reality of contemporary Jewish life.

"They associate Jews with the Holocaust and the Nazi era," he said. "Jews don't have a history before or after. In Germany, Jews have been stereotyped as victims. It is important that people here get to know Jews to see that Jews are alive and that we have individual histories. I hope that this exhibit can help."

Still, not everyone believes this is the best way to promote understanding.

Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal from the Jewish Chabad community in Berlin said Germans who are really interested in Jews and Judaism should visit the community's educational center.

"Here Jews will be happy to answer questions without sitting in a glass box," he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-03-29-Germany-Jew%20In%20The%20Box/id-161d996566be4fb08dc639c60569954e

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MLB polishes At Bat 13 on iOS and Android ahead of Opening Day ...

Opening Day App Updates Available Today

Updates Available for At Bat & At The Ballpark for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android; Beat The Streak Presented by Dunkin' Donuts for iPhone & iPod touch

MLB.COM AT BAT 13 DEBUTS ON BLACKBERRY Z10

NEW YORK, March 29, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- MLB Advanced Media, the interactive media and Internet company of Major League Baseball and an award-winning mobile app developer, today announced the Opening Day updates to its suite of mobile applications, including the highest grossing sports app of all-time, At Bat, will be available across their respective supported devices. The list of apps includes At Bat, At The Ballpark and Beat The Streak Presented by Dunkin' Donuts. In addition, MLB.com At Bat 13 is making its debut on the new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone with features including MLB.TV live video streaming.

MLB.com AT BAT

MLB.TV Premium subscribers again may upgrade to At Bat 13 for free on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch and Android devices, unlocking all premium features. Fans also may subscribe to MLB.com At Bat 13 for the one-time annual fee of $19.99. iOS users may pay $2.99/month using the recurring billing option available through the App Store.
MLB.com At Bat 13 for the BlackBerry Z10, available only for a one-time annual fee of $19.99, will give fans access to the app's features, developed and optimized for the device's mobile computing system. Those include: the Free MLB.TV Game of the Day; MLB.TV Premium subscriber login to watch every out-of-market game live and on-demand; home and away radio broadcasts; in-progress highlights; Gameday pitch tracking with realistic ballpark renderings; Condensed Games; Classic games library; league and team news, schedules and statistics; standings; and favorite team selection.

AT BAT FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS ? OPENING DAY 2013

Multi-platform live audio access for At Bat 13 subscribers, offering account portability to listen to live games on Mac/PC desktops and laptops
Universal iOS and Android support for At Bat 13 subscribers, full feature accessibility across select supported smartphones and tablets
Sortable batting, pitching and fielding statistics
Re-designed individual team pages
Updated news section interface
Expanded video highlight integration
Classic games video library archive
Re-architected app navigation
Additional push notification options
Favorite team enhancements
Searchable highlight library expansion to include access to complete video archives
Closed captioning for live video

MLB.com AT THE BALLPARK

The ultimate mobile companion when visiting any of the 30 Major League Baseball ballparks. MLBAM has built the app to be customizable for each ballpark from a foundation of interactive features, including mobile check-in, social media integration, offers, rewards and exclusive content.

AT THE BALLPARK FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS ? OPENING DAY 2013

Re-architected My Journal section
Manually input all ballpark visits, dating back to 2005
Upload and share personal photos from all ballpark visits, dating back to 2005
View team statistics and watch video highlights from games attended
Ballpark and player entrance music
Social media clubhouse, including social rewards for select clubs
Updated tickets section, featuring special offers by club
Seat and experience upgrade functionality (select ballparks only)
Passbook integration for digital ticket delivery and storage (select clubs only)
Re-designed user interface

MLB.com BEAT THE STREAK PRESENTED BY DUNKIN' DONUTS

Maybe season #13 will be the lucky one. Entering its teenage years without a grand prize winner, Beat The Streak Presented by Dunkin' Donuts, free-to-play, gives fans the opportunity to achieve fantasy baseball immortality by surpassing the legendary consecutive games hitting streak record of 56 and claiming a $5.6 million grand prize in the process. Tens of millions of streaks started. No grand prize winner. Yet...

BEAT THE STREAK FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS ? OPENING DAY 2013

Get pick results by push notification as well as improved reminder notifications
New 2013 game rule: A streak won't end if a user forgets to make a pick
Easily follow live game scoring for your picks in MLB.com At Bat
For more information on app and feature availability by platform, visit MLB.com.

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/29/mlb-at-bat-13-opening-day-updates/

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Saturday, March 30, 2013

North Korea turns up volume by silencing final military hot line

What happens now?

By Robert Marquand,?Staff writer / March 27, 2013

South Korean Army soldiers patrol along a barbed-wire fence near the border village of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday. North Korea said Wednesday that it had cut off a key military hot line with South Korea that allows cross-border travel to a jointly run industrial complex in the North.

Ahn Young-joon/AP

Enlarge

North Korea's edgy game of war talk continued?at ever higher volumes today with the announcement that it will cut off the last military hot line with South Korea.

Skip to next paragraph Robert Marquand

Staff writer

Over the past three decades, Robert Marquand has reported on a wide variety of subjects for?The Christian Science Monitor, including American education reform,?the wars in the Balkans, the Supreme Court, South Asian politics, and the oft-cited "rise of China." In the past 15 years he has served as the Monitor's bureau chief in Paris, Beijing, and New Delhi.?

Recent posts

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?Under the situation where a war may break out any moment, there is no need to keep North-South military communications,? said the regime, according to the Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang.

The severed line of communication comes as the North, under young and new President Kim Jong-un, has said it is moving into its highest military alert status and has threatened to target Hawaii and Guam with rockets, after last month conducting its third nuclear test.?

The escalating rhetoric has brought a new agreement between US and South Korean officials that would dictate military action should the North cross the border, shell islands, or harm shipping in the kind of low-level actions Pyongyang has attempted in recent years.?

US military officials called the North Korean statement ?bellicose.??Many have expressed doubt that North Korea?s rockets have the range to reach US bases in Guam and Hawaii, but a few, including the?editor of Jane?s Defense Weekly, estimated they could reach US military bases in Japan, according to USA Today.?

Yesterday the small, poor state that is anchored by devotion to the Kim family dynasty, and is now nearly entirely dependent on China for basic sustenance but has also devoted considerable resources to its military, repeated a longstanding threat to turn Seoul into a ?sea of fire,? among other similarly colorful threats.

Earlier this year, the North said it would no longer answer?a hot line at the Demilitarized Zone. The hot line that the country is now threatening to shut down linked the two Koreas at the?Kaesong industrial park, created in the North during the warming winds of unification in the 2000s. The economic complex has long been a symbol of the potential for North-South cooperation.?

The New York Times today notes the North?s threat on the hot line follows comments from?Park Geun-hye,?the newly elected president of South Korea, that North Korea needed to end its nuclear threats in order to gain better traction with the South:

?If North Korea provokes or does things that harm peace, we must make sure that it gets nothing but will pay the price, while if it keeps its promises, the South should do the same,? she said during a briefing from her government?s top diplomats and North Korea policy-makers. ?Without rushing and in the same way we would lay one brick after another, we must develop South-North relations step by step, based on trust, and create sustainable peace.?

Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, a veteran Korea-watcher once based in Seoul, tells The Christian Science Monitor that Pyongyang's main grievance appears to be recent United Nations sanctions targeted at the North.

Mr. Snyder argues that the meaning of the North?s sudden blustery behavior will only become clearer ?once the question of the consolidation of [Kim Jong-un?s] power becomes clearer.?

Agence France-Presse today said that a significant meeting among party elites and power brokers in the closed world of Pyongyang is about to take place.

"They will discuss how to handle the nuclear issue, inter-Korean relations and North Korea's longstanding demand for a peace treaty with the United States," Professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul told AFP.

Comparisons between the new Kim and his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the patriarch of North Korea, are flowing freely, since there is a resemblance between the two. But Snyder notes that too little is yet known of the young Kim, who took over from his father Kim Jong-il last year, and that his youth is not necessarily a plus in such a high-stakes game.

?Right now the song is the same, but the volume is a lot louder. We don?t know his risk tolerance yet ? does he understand the game he is playing??

The US-South Korea military agreement follows a recent scrapping by the North of the historic legal armistice that effectively ended the Korean war in the 1950s. It came on the anniversary of the infamous sinking of the Choenan Navy vessel in 2010, which resulted in the deaths of 46 South Korean sailors, something that has had powerful emotional resonance in the South. (The Choenan was raised from the ocean floor, and forensics by the South claim the vessel was torpedoed by the North, something the North denies.)?

USA Today quotes an Asia-watcher who feels the key to dealing with Pyongyang runs through Beijing:

US diplomats should talk to their Chinese counterparts and say, "Your ally North Korea is acting in a very belligerent and destabilizing way," said [Richard] Bush, who heads the Brookings Institution Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. "They're acting in ways that are contrary to the principles you [China] have laid out. The situation is somewhat dangerous. You need to restrain your ally."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/P8CCMVqq_nQ/North-Korea-turns-up-volume-by-silencing-final-military-hot-line

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Stephen Baldwin admits he failed to pay NY taxes

NEW CITY, N.Y. (AP) ? Stephen Baldwin has admitted in court that he failed to pay New York state income taxes for three years.

The actor agreed Friday to pay $400,000 in back taxes, interest and penalties. The judge says $100,000 of that already has been paid.

Baldwin pleaded guilty to a charge of repeated failure to file income taxes.

The judge says that if Baldwin pays back the rest of the money within a year, the charge will be taken off his record. If not, he'll be sentenced to five year's probation.

Baldwin went to court between appearances on "All-Star Celebrity Apprentice." He's the youngest of the four acting Baldwin brothers.

He says he received bad advice from lawyers and accountants.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stephen-baldwin-admits-failed-pay-ny-taxes-154945741.html

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Low-power use for mobile devices: 60 GHz radio frequency chip

Mar. 29, 2013 ? As the capacity of handheld devices increases to accommodate a greater number of functions, these devices have more memory, larger display screens, and the ability to play higher definition video files. If the users of mobile devices, including smartphones, tablet PCs, and notebooks, want to share or transfer data on one device with that of another device, a great deal of time and effort are needed.

As a possible method for the speedy transmission of large data, researchers are studying the adoption of gigabits per second (Gbps) wireless communications operating over the 60 gigahertz (GHz) frequency band. Some commercial approaches have been introduced for full-HD video streaming from a fixed source to a display by using the 60 GHz band. But mobile applications have not been developed yet because the 60 GHz radio frequency (RF) circuit consumes hundreds of milliwatts (mW) of DC power.

Professor Chul Soon Park from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and his research team recently developed a low-power version of the 60 GHz radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC). Inside the circuit are an energy-efficient modulator performing amplification as well as modulation and a sensitivity-improved receiver employing a gain boosting demodulator.

The research team said that their RFIC draws as little as 67 mW of power in the 60 GHz frequency band, consuming 31mW to send and 36mW to receive large volumes of data. RFIC is also small enough to be mounted on smartphones or notebooks, requiring only one chip (its width, length, and height are about 1 mm) and one antenna (4x5x1 mm3) for sending and receiving data with an integrated switch.

Professor Park, Director of the Intelligent Radio Engineering Center at KAIST, gave an upbeat assessment of the potential of RFIC for future applications:

"What we have developed is a low-power 60-GHz RF chip with a transmission speed of 10.7 gigabits per second. In tests, we were able to stream uncompressed full-HD videos from a smartphone or notebook to a display without a cable connection. Our chip can be installed on mobile devices or even on cameras so that the devices are virtually connected to other devices and able to exchange large data with each other."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/wDhOcuqbnp4/130329161245.htm

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Marijuana Tax Under Consideration by Cash-Starved States

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/marijuana-tax-under-consideration-by-cash-starved-states/

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Why the biblical epic is back in Hollywood ? especially on cable (+video)

After decades of slim pickings for faith-based programming, Hollywood and cable channels are turning back to biblical and religious themes, and, notably, big audiences.

By Gloria Goodale,?Staff writer / March 27, 2013

This publicity image shows Diogo Morcaldo as Jesus, right, in a scene from "The Bible," on History Channel. After a hiatus, religion is back on cable television and on the big screen.

AP Photo/History, Joe Alblas

Enlarge

From a new six-hour ?Jesus of Nazareth? to History Channel's 10-hour epic "The Bible" and GSN?s popular ?The American Bible Challenge? ? not to mention Amish, Jewish, and Mormon-themed scripted and unscripted shows ? the TV landscape is?suffused with heavenly programming.

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Add a gaggle of Bible-based feature films headed to the local cineplexes in the near future, and it?s pretty clear that Hollywood has gone and got religion in a pretty serious way, say industry insiders as well as media and religion experts.

This is both a shift from recent trends and a return to earlier days in Tinsel Town.?Hollywood certainly had a history of Biblical epics stretching for decades, from Cecil B. DeMille's ?The Ten Commandments" (1923) to Franco Zefferelli?s ?Jesus of Nazareth? (1977).?But religion had fallen out of fashion in more recent decades, especially on broadcast television. Now it's back, primarily on cable, as well as in film.

The industry has become increasingly vocal in support of progressive causes, says Ben Bogardus, journalism professor at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. This has led to an "echo chamber? in which the teams in the writer?s rooms for popular sitcoms and dramas only hear their own views reinforced by like-minded colleagues.

With writers wanting to push the envelope on progressive issues and seeing religious groups as tending to oppose such ideas, he says, what developed was a??very insular attitude about religion in many parts of the entertainment industry.?

Hollywood?s big epiphany about the importance of the religious segment of the viewing audience came in 2004, when Mel Gibson?s independently made ?Passion of the Christ? stunned the industry with its nearly half-billion-dollar box office worldwide.

?There is a big community of people who want to watch shows that respect their commitment and faith,? says Paul Lauer, CEO of Motive Entertainment in Santa Monica, who marketed ?Passion.?

After "Passion," studios tried to ramp up their faith-based offerings, with mixed results. Studios created faith-based divisions and hired scholars and archeologists. But New Line Cinema's epic "The Nativity Story" (2006) fell flat at the box office. Studios were chastened.

Still, Hollywood has many churchgoers in its midst who have kept a low profile over the years, says Mr. Lauer, ?What has changed is they are coming out of the closet and making their presence felt, as the industry has expressed more interest in reaching that audience.?

Faith-based programming has been more successful on cable television, where costs are lower and producers are constantly trolling for new ideas. ?Like most television forms, faith-based productions cycle in and out of popularity just like variety, comedy, and drama. They can also be evergreens ? in April of 2012, 'The Ten Commandments' won the evening for ABC playing for the umpteenth time during the Easter/Passover season,? points out Allen Sabinson, dean of Drexel University?s Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, via e-mail.

?From a business point of view, these often expensive productions can be financed with partners from across the world contributing to the production costs in return for broadcast rights in their own territories. These are stories that play across borders and continents,? he says.

As for what?s behind this latest wave, Mr. Sabinson suggests that the current social and political climate has primed the pump for inspirational programming. ?Their renewed popularity is related in part to the fact that there are so many problems in the world today, and these timeless stories provide some comfort and relief from the daily headlines on war, disasters, and economic troubles,? he says.

The surge in faith-based programming finding an audience is no surprise, agrees Julie Byrne, an expert in media and religion at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. ?Religion is one of the most distinctive aspects of the American identity,? she says.

?Faith and God are largely pass? in most European countries,? she adds, but it is still a very active force in American life. She points to the 2008 PEW Religious Landscape Survey that found 85 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian. ?If you add to that figure additional people who might believe in God but are not necessarily Christian or any other specific religion, you have a large media-consuming population ready for shows that speak to their interests.?

Audiences should have no illusions about the financial motivation behind this surge, suggests Wil Gafney, a professor at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

"It is no accident that the History Channel 'Bible' series is accompanied by a massive marketing campaign, includes Bible study guides and a follow-up novel,? she points out, adding, ?it is also the case that studios copy each other when they think one or another has an idea that is likely to sell.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/Y1MIfQ80FqE/Why-the-biblical-epic-is-back-in-Hollywood-especially-on-cable-video

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'Biggest cyberattack in history' turns out to be overblown

Is it "the biggest cyberattack in history"? Or just routine flak that network-security providers face all the time?

News websites across the Western world proclaimed Internet Armageddon today (March 27), largely due to a New York Times story detailing a "squabble" between the spam-fighting vigilantes at Spamhaus and the dodgy Dutch Web-hosting company Cyberbunker.

"Fight Jams Internet," the Times headline said. "Global Internet slows," the BBC proclaimed in the wake of the Times' story. Both websites alleged that Netflix streaming was slowing down as a result.

The reality is less exciting, though still serious. The Internet disruptions, which were centered in Western Europe, appear to be largely over, and were largely unnoticed even when occurring.

But, if anything, the incident may prompt a fix for a basic security flaw in the Domain Name System that serves as one of the underpinnings of the Internet.

"Despite the work that has gone into making the Internet extremely resilient, these attacks underscore the fact that there are still some aspects of it that are relatively fragile," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at San Francisco-based network-security provider nCircle.

Too much information

Cyberbunker appears to be behind a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that first tried to first take down Spamhaus, then Spamhaus' network-reliability provider CloudFlare, and finally this past Saturday (March 23) hit CloudFlare's own bandwidth providers in Europe.

Boston-based Akamai Networks told the Times, and Spamhaus told the BBC, that the last round of attacks peaked at 300 gigabits per second, possibly the largest amount of bandwidth ever recorded during a DDoS attack.

According to a CloudFlare blog posting, the attack was launched on March 18 and immediately involved a tactic called DNS amplification, in which unprotected Domain Name System (DNS) servers are used to flood targeted servers with huge amounts of useless information, tying up bandwidth and processing time.

The attacks increased in volume during the week, finally peaking on Saturday when, according to CloudFlare, half of the infrastructure on the London Internet Exchange, an Internet node connecting several large-scale networks, was tied up by the attack. (CloudFlare is based in Palo Alto, Calif., but runs a global network.)

DNS servers are essentially the phone books of the Internet. Every Internet-connected device, from your computer to your smartphone, uses them to match a website address that humans use, such as "www.technewsdaily.com," with an Internet Protocol address that computers and routers use, such as "207.86.128.60."

DNS servers are essential, yet many remain "open," which means they will accept lookup requests from anyone, not just their specified clients.

Attackers make lookup requests using the IP addresses of their targets, then request tons of information, which ends up flooding the targeted servers with huge amounts of DNS information.

[5 (Probably) American Cyberweapons]

Did two wrongs make a bigger wrong?

Spamhaus, a group of related companies based in London and Geneva, was started in 1998 to track and combat email spam and spammers. It maintains a blacklist of Web-hosting companies known to host spammers, and a whitelist of known "clean" Web hosts.

Both lists are used by Internet service providers around the world, and Spamhaus is partly responsible for the huge drop in email spam in recent years.

Some Web-hosting companies have complained they've been unfairly placed on the Spamhaus blacklist. Spammers have launched DDoS attacks against Spamhaus' website and servers. (There's even a "Stophaus" website based in Russia and dedicated to combating what it calls Spamhaus' "underhanded extortion tactics.")

It appears Cyberbunker has both complained and attacked.

Cyberbunker bases its operations in a decommissioned NATO bunker, built to withstand a nuclear war, in the southern Netherlands. The company was founded in 1998 by a group of hackers who proclaimed the "Republic of Cyberbunker," a sovereign state "surrounded by the Netherlands on all borders."

The company pledges not to ask questions about what its clients are up to.

"In most cases we have no idea as to who or where our customers actually are," the Cyberbunker site proclaims. "Customers are allowed to host any content they like, except child porn and anything related to terrorism. Everything else is fine."

Such a policy has attracted some unsavory clients, including the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, and, according to Spamhaus, the cybercrime gang known as the Russian Business Network. Cyberbunker also claims to have been raided by a Dutch police SWAT team, which apparently found nothing incriminating on the premises.

It was Cyberbunker's alleged hosting of spammers that caused Spamhaus to place both Cyberbunker and its ISP on the Spamhaus blacklist in the fall of 2011.

As a result, Cyberbunker's ISP dropped it as a client, but both the ISP and Cyberbunker posted long manifestos about why Spamhaus was evil.

The issue seems to have lain dormant until March 18, when a false Anonymous campaign called "Operation Stophaus" was proclaimed on the online bulletin board Pastebin.

It listed a litany of complaints against the "tax-circumventing self-declared Internet terrorists" of Spamhaus, then added a variant of the Anonymous "We Are Legion" tagline.

That posting may have been cover for the DDoS attacks that began the same day. In a statement to the New York Times, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who claimed to speak for Cyberbunker, and whose Google+ page gives his residence as "Republic Cyberbunker," affirmed that the Dutch hosting company was behind the attacks.

"Nobody ever deputized Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the Internet," Kamphuis told the newspaper. "They worked themselves into that position by pretending to fight spam."

It's hard to see how such an attack can be legally justified. The Netherlands has famously lax laws governing the Internet and other digital communications, but odds are Cyberbunker will be facing another SWAT raid very soon.

Fixing a hole

For his blog posting, CloudFlare's Matthew Prince used the headline "The DDoS That Almost Broke the Internet." That's not entirely accurate, since the problems were rather localized.

However, the attack may prompt an overhaul of the DNS system. Prince and others have been vocal about the need to lock down most or all DNS servers so they no longer respond to lookup requests from anyone.

That move would go against the model of openness and accessibility that's guided the Internet for 40 years. The idea has always been that any Internet-connected device can reach any other using any path, and open DNS servers are essential to that model.

But the problem of DNS-amplified attacks has been growing exponentially in just the past few months.

The ongoing attacks against U.S. bank websites which began last September use the tactic, and have reached 100 Gbps at times.

If this week's unrelated attacks truly did hit 300 Gbps, the end to the open-DNS server model may be inevitable.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow Paul Wagenseil?@snd_wagenseil. Follow us?@TechNewsDaily,?Facebook?or?Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/truth-behind-biggest-cyberattack-history-210723787.html

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New York state passes third on-time budget in a row

By Martyn Herman LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) - Whether by design, necessity, self-interest or because of all three, nurturing youngsters has become fashionable for England's elite with no expense spared in the hunt for the new Wayne Rooney or Steven Gerrard. The length and breadth of the country, scouts from top clubs are hoovering up promising footballers barely old enough to tie their bootlaces in a bid to unearth the 30 million pounds ($45.40 million) treasures of the future. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/york-state-passes-third-time-budget-row-141823285--business.html

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Tips To Make Your Travels More Memorable

This article will give you advice on how to have a pleasant trip, whether you are traveling to visit relatives, or to go on a cruise. Take the time to plan your vacation according to this advice for a truly relaxing experience.

Make sure to research the current status of social and political events and occurrences in the foreign country you'll be visiting. The Consular Affairs Bureau has a regularly updated list of potential situations that could be dangerous for foreign travelers. This resource can help keep you out of situations that may threaten your well-being.

It is not uncommon to provide the housekeeper and bell hop with a tip. For these services, a good tip for housekeeping would be from $2-$5 per day, and $1 per bag of luggage. If you treat the staff well, then they will treat you well.

Prior to booking your hotel you should read reviews of the different resorts or hotels you are considering. This is the easiest way to save yourself a bad traveling experience. Customer reviews and feedback that is overwhelmingly negative is usually a good indicator of somewhere to avoid.

When taking a vacation abroad, bring along local currency so you have money to spend right away. You do not want to find yourself stranded late at night with no way to exchange your money. Many banks can offer currency exchange before you depart or most airports have a currency exchange that you can use prior to getting on the plane. That way you can enjoy yourself and not worry upon arrival.

Brush your dogs prior to putting them in your car when going on a trip. This helps to cut down on how much hair will blow around the car. Make sure to pack dog essentials, like water and food bowls, along with waste bags for your dog.

Travel with bottled water when traveling outside of the country. Because other countries do not purify their water, you can get many illnesses from drinking it. Do not forget to use bottled water for teeth brushing as well. Tap water can still make you sick this way.

When traveling by air, wear lightweight, comfortable shoes that can be easily slipped on and off. You might have to take them off quickly for security checks. Also, being comfortable is key during travel, to keep you from getting too tired and stressed. You don't need a lot of support for a little walking and a lot of sitting. Wearing sandals like flip flops or Crocs is a great way to stay comfortable on your flight.

Anytime you are traveling, be aware of all your belongings the entire time. If you have a purse with you, keep it close to your body at all times. Do not carry a bag with easy access to any of the pockets. When you are buying a bag keep these things in mind.

Always bring an extra pair of glasses on your trip. In doing this, you have a readily accessible spare pair in case your primary ones are damaged. Pack them with your regular luggage, not your carry-on, so they won't risk being stolen.

Follow these tips and your next vacation should be the relaxing trip you dreamed of. Can you start making a list and preparing for your upcoming trip now?

Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com/Article/Tips-To-Make-Your-Travels-More-Memorable/4510072

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Friday, March 29, 2013

Swarming robots could be the servants of the future

Mar. 28, 2013 ? Swarms of robots acting together to carry out jobs could provide new opportunities for humans to harness the power of machines.

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical.

The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.

The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority.

Dr Roderich Gross, head of the Natural Robotics Lab, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, says swarming robots could have important roles to play in the future of micromedicine, as 'nanobots' are developed for non-invasive treatment of humans. On a larger scale, they could play a part in military, or search and rescue operations, acting together in areas where it would be too dangerous or impractical for humans to go. In industry too, robot swarms could be put to use, improving manufacturing processes and workplace safety.

The programming that the University of Sheffield team has developed to control the robots is deceptively simple. For example, if the robots are being asked to group together, each robot only needs to be able to work out if there is another robot in front of it. If there is, it turns on the spot; if there isn't, it moves in a wider circle until it finds one.

Dr Gross said: "We are developing Artificial Intelligence to control robots in a variety of ways. The key is to work out what is the minimum amount of information needed by the robot to accomplish its task. That's important because it means the robot may not need any memory, and possibly not even a processing unit, so this technology could work for nanoscale robots, for example in medical applications."

This research is funded by a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. Additional support has been provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e12RicAy1Q

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Sheffield, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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/top_news/top_technology/~3/t0u6bm1TWas/130328125325.htm

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Taylor Swift to guest star on Fox's 'New Girl'

FILE - This Jan. 9, 2013 file photo shows Taylor Swift at the People's Choice Awards at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. A new girl is coming to Fox's ?New Girl?: Taylor Swift. A representative for the Grammy-winning singer said Thursday, March 28, 2013, that Swift will appear on the May 14 season finale of the hit show. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, file)

FILE - This Jan. 9, 2013 file photo shows Taylor Swift at the People's Choice Awards at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles. A new girl is coming to Fox's ?New Girl?: Taylor Swift. A representative for the Grammy-winning singer said Thursday, March 28, 2013, that Swift will appear on the May 14 season finale of the hit show. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, file)

(AP) ? A new girl is coming to Fox's "New Girl" and her name is Taylor Swift.

A representative for the Grammy-winning singer said Thursday that Swift will appear on the May 14 season finale of the hit show. No other details were provided.

"New Girl" stars actress-singer Zooey Deschanel as the awkward, but bubbly Jessica Day, who lives with three male roommates.

Swift appeared in the 2010 romantic comedy "Valentine's Day" and guest starred on "CSI" in 2009. The 23-year-old launched her "Red" world tour this month.

___

Online:

http://taylorswift.com/

http://www.fox.com/new-girl/

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2013-03-28-People-Taylor%20Swift/id-a6289f8d2fc64775aa6488e7c58a8d97

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Obama Implores Congress, 'Shame on Us If We've Forgotten' Newtown'

ABC News' Jim Avila and Mary Bruce Report:

President Obama today vowed to never forget the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre as he made an emotional and poignant plea for Congress to take action against gun violence.

"The entire country was shocked, and the entire country pledged we would do something about it and that this time would be different," the president said as he stood in the East Room of the White House with 21 mothers working to combat gun violence in America.

"Shame on us if we've forgotten. I haven't forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we've forgotten," he said, channeling the anger and frustration he expressed in the days after the December shooting in Connecticut.

READ MORE: Newtown Gunman Had Arsenal

Adopting a somber tone, the president told the audience, which included the parents of victims of the Newtown shooting, that "we've cried enough" and it's time for Congress to act on the proposals put forth by Senate Democrats.

"Tears aren't enough. Expressions of sympathy aren't enough. Speeches aren't enough," Obama said. "What we're proposing is not radical. It's not taking away anybody's gun rights. It's something that if we are serious, we will do. And now's the time to turn that heartbreak into something real."

The president demanded that Congress not get "squishy" because time has passed since the deadly shooting and rebuked the "powerful voices" that oppose pending gun-control measures, saying they are "interested in running up a clock" and preventing tougher from happening.

"They're doing everything they can to make all our progress collapse under the weight of fear and frustration. ? Their assumption is that people will just forget about it," he said.

Outside Washington, Obama said, the majority of Americans back his proposals to curb gun violence, which include expanded background checks and improved safety at schools.

"Right now, 90 percent of Americans - 90 percent - support background checks that will keep criminals and people who have been found to be a danger to themselves or others from buying a gun.

"More than 80 percent of Republicans agree. More than 80 percent of gun owners agree. Think about that. How often do 90 percent of Americans agree on anything?" he said to laughter from the audience. "It never happens."

The president also urged a vote on a "measure that would keep weapons of war and high-capacity ammunition magazines that facilitate these mass killings off our streets." The controversial assault weapons ban will not, however, be part of the package that Senate Democrats will introduce next month.

Obama said the votes in the Senate represent the best chance in more than a decade to reduce gun violence and he urged Americans to "raise your voices and make yourselves unmistakably heard."

"We need everybody to remember how we felt a hundred days ago," the president said, "and make sure that what we said at that time wasn't just a bunch of platitudes, that we meant it."

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-implores-congress-shame-us-weve-forgotten-newtown-180409269--abc-news-politics.html

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Part of Berlin Wall removed in pre-dawn operation

BERLIN (AP) ? For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the hated symbol of the division of Europe, a gray, concrete mass that snaked through neighborhoods, separating families and friends. On Wednesday, it took hundreds of police to guarantee the safe removal of 15 feet (less than 5 meters) of what's left of the wall.

Construction crews, protected by about 250 police, hauled down part of the three-quarter of a mile (1.3-kilometer) strip of the wall before dawn to provide access to a planned luxury apartment complex overlooking the Spree River.

Even though most of the strip remains intact, the move angered many Berliners, who believe that developers are sacrificing history for profit.

The site, known as the East Side Gallery, has become a major tourist attraction, painted by 120 artists with colorful scenes along the gray concrete tiles.

It is the longest remaining portion of the 96-mile (155-kilometer) wall that surrounded Western-occupied West Berlin from 1961 until the peaceful revolution against the communist East German government in 1989. At least 136 people were killed trying to escape over the wall.

The flap over the future of the East Side Gallery flared last month with the announcement that developers wanted to tear away part of the wall. The announcement triggered a series of protests, including one attended by American celebrity David Hasselhoff.

Hasselhoff is remembered here fondly for his song "Looking for Freedom" that became the unofficial anthem of the 1989 revolution.

"It's like tearing down an Indian burial ground," Hasselhoff said during the March 17 protest. "It's a no-brainer."

After the protests, demolition work was suspended while local politicians and the investors looked for alternative access to the apartment site, located in the heart of the German capital.

When no other access route could be found, the main investor, Maik Uwe Hinkel, decided to resume the project. Work began at 5 a.m. Wednesday when few people were out on the streets.

In an emailed statement, Hinkel said the removal of parts of the wall was a temporary move to enable trucks to access the building site. He said that after four weeks of fruitless deliberations with city officials and owners of adjacent property, he was no longer willing to wait.

As word of the demolition spread, small crowds of Berliners turned out to watch although no one sought to block the effort.

"I can't believe they came here in the dark in such a sneaky manner," said Kani Alavi, the head of the East Side Gallery's artists' group. "All they see is their money. They have no understanding for the historic relevance and art of this place."

The irony of Berliners trying to preserve part of what was once a hated symbol of repression reflects a growing public belief that the German capital needs to preserve symbols of its past ? both the good and the bad ? for future generations.

Much of Adolf Hitler's capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and the 1945 Soviet ground assault that ended World War II in Europe.

With the end of the Cold War, however, Germans have worked to preserve other sites, including those that do not flatter the country.

A museum to Nazi atrocities has been built over the site of Gestapo headquarters. Tourists can wander through dungeon-like prisons operated by the Soviets and the East German secret police ? as well as underground complexes built in the west of the city to protect civilians against nuclear attack.

It's all designed to allow new generations to understand the painful history behind a country that is now Europe's economic powerhouse.

"The Berlin Wall is the most significant symbol of the division of Berlin," said Maria Nooke, the deputy director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. "On the one hand it illustrates the repression in East Germany, on the other hand it symbolizes how Germans peacefully overcame that repression."

It took years for Berliners ? both easterners and westerners ? to develop such feelings for the wall.

"After a while, there was a growing need to deal with that part of history and to preserve it for future generations," Nooke said.

In an effort to give visitors and Berliners a taste of life in a divided city, a 70-meter (-yard) stretch of the wall on Bernauer Strasse was restored to its original state, including an East German watchtower from which guards would shoot at people trying to scale the structure.

The East Side Gallery was recently restored at a cost of more than 2 million euros ($3 million) to the city. It is now covered in colorful murals painted by about 120 artists.

Scenes include the famous image of a boxy East German Trabant car that appears to burst through the wall; and a fraternal communist kiss between Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German boss Erich Honecker.

"I heard it on the radio, so I quickly took my son to nursery school and then came here," said Jana Voigt, a kindergarten teacher who grew up in East Berlin. "I feel so betrayed that they tore down that piece of the wall while I was asleep. They knew that so many Berliners don't want the wall to be touched."

She said part of the wall needs to be protected for future generations "in order to understand what happened here."

Karl-Heinz Richter was a 17-year-old teenager when he tried to escape from East Berlin three years after the wall was erected. His escape failed and he was jailed.

"What you see happening now is capitalism in its purest form: it's all about money and power, history doesn't matter anymore. That's disgusting." he said. "For me the wall is a holy site. I'm outraged that they would even dare to touch it."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/part-berlin-wall-removed-pre-dawn-operation-185011250.html

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Computer chips: Building upward safely

Mar. 27, 2013 ? A computer model provides important clues for the production of tightly packed electronic components.

Greater numbers of ever-smaller components are required to fit on computer chips to meet the ongoing demands of miniaturizing electronic devices. Consequently, computer chips are becoming increasingly crowded. Designers of electronic architectures have therefore followed the lead of urban planners and started to build upward. In so-called 'three-dimensional (3D) packages', for example, several flat, two-dimensional chips can be stacked on top of each other using vertical joints.

Controlling the properties of these complex structures is no easy task, as many factors come into play during production. Faxing Che and Hongyu Li and co-workers from the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics, Singapore, have now developed a powerful modeling method that allows large-scale simulations -- and optimization -- of the fabrication process, which provides welcome assistance to designers.

Among the challenges of producing tightly packed computer chips is the need to prevent warpage of the underlying silicon wafer as electronics components are stacked on it. Warpage leads to a number of unwanted effects. "Strong warpage can cause wafer breakage, it makes tight packing more difficult and some processing machines cannot handle high-warpage wafers," explains Li. The degree of warpage depends on many design and process parameters, and optimizing the procedure experimentally is time-consuming and costly.

Using their computer model, Che and Li studied a wide range of parameters that influence the warpage of an 8-inch diameter silicon wafer. They focused, in particular, on how a silicon substrate responds to the deposition of layers of copper -- through which electrical currents eventually flow. "This is the first time that a model has been able to predict warpage [at] the level of the entire wafer," says Li. Moreover, the stress on the wafer can be determined accurately. The calculated values agreed well with experimental data. Importantly, with the computer simulations, the researchers could explore regimes that cannot be easily studied experimentally, such as how the depth of the connections between layers influences wafer warpage.

The next goal is to simulate even larger wafers with variable connection sizes, explains Li. "Today, there are two industry standards for 3D packaging applications, 8-inch and 12-inch wafers, but the latter are becoming increasingly important," she says. The team's model is applicable to these larger wafers, too, but it requires optimization. Currently, Che, Li and their co-workers are collecting warpage and stress data for 12-inch wafers. They will use these data for developing their model further, according to Li.

The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute of Microelectronics

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

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


Journal Reference:

  1. Faxing Che, Hongyu Y. Li, Xiaowu Zhang, Shan Gao, Kenghwa H. Teo. Development of Wafer-Level Warpage and Stress Modeling Methodology and Its Application in Process Optimization for TSV Wafers. IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology, 2012; 2 (6): 944 DOI: 10.1109/TCPMT.2012.2192732

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/matter_energy/technology/~3/gt35Y3moD-8/130327162352.htm

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Swarming robots could be the servants of the future

Mar. 28, 2013 ? Swarms of robots acting together to carry out jobs could provide new opportunities for humans to harness the power of machines.

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical.

The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.

The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority.

Dr Roderich Gross, head of the Natural Robotics Lab, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, says swarming robots could have important roles to play in the future of micromedicine, as 'nanobots' are developed for non-invasive treatment of humans. On a larger scale, they could play a part in military, or search and rescue operations, acting together in areas where it would be too dangerous or impractical for humans to go. In industry too, robot swarms could be put to use, improving manufacturing processes and workplace safety.

The programming that the University of Sheffield team has developed to control the robots is deceptively simple. For example, if the robots are being asked to group together, each robot only needs to be able to work out if there is another robot in front of it. If there is, it turns on the spot; if there isn't, it moves in a wider circle until it finds one.

Dr Gross said: "We are developing Artificial Intelligence to control robots in a variety of ways. The key is to work out what is the minimum amount of information needed by the robot to accomplish its task. That's important because it means the robot may not need any memory, and possibly not even a processing unit, so this technology could work for nanoscale robots, for example in medical applications."

This research is funded by a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant within the 7th European Community Framework Programme. Additional support has been provided by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e12RicAy1Q

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Story Source:

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