Wednesday, November 27, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day



Cubans to be allowed to charge visitors for using home telephones – NBC

HAVANA - Cubans have a new private enterprise opportunity — acting as "telecommunications agents" by essentially turning their homes into phone booths and charging neighbors by the minute to use their telephones.
The Labor Ministry rule announced Tuesday also says the "agents" will be able to offer Internet access at some point in the future.

Cuba has some 1.2 million fixed phone lines and 1.8 million cellphones for a population of around 11 million. Many domestic land lines are not equipped for making long-distance and international calls, though they can receive them.
The "agents" will have to charge the same as what state telecom monopoly Etecsa charges customers, with the company paying them a commission. International rates in Cuba can run as high as several dollars a minute.

The measure also authorizes the contractors to sell prepaid cellphone cards, collect phone bill payments and even offer Internet.
A woman sells paper and spools of thread at her private stall at the entrance of her home in Havana last month. About 200 areas of independent economic activity now allowed under President Raul Castro's reforms.

As with a number of the 200 or so areas of independent economic activity now allowed under President Raul Castro's reforms, the resolution seems geared toward regulating and taxing activities that are already common in the informal economy.
Cubans with long-distance lines already let neighbors use their phones for a fee, and there's also a black market for the sale of dial-up Internet minutes.

According to government figures, only 2.9 percent of Cubans say they have access to the full Web, though the real figure is believed to be higher accounting for the black market. More Cubans do have access to a domestic Intranet where they can browse homegrown websites and send and receive email.

Home Internet accounts are still closely restricted, though authorities have said they intend to begin offering them to the wider public next year.
Recently, authorities opened more than 200 public cyber-cafes across the island that charge about $4.50 an hour.


I wonder who the people are, or rather what their status is, who have home Internet already. What are the current restrictions? At any rate, they can now sell their services to the public in Cuba. I can see how that could be a popular business, as important as having Internet is in the US today. Long distance telephone service, also, is something we take for granted here, and prize highly. I wonder how lucrative these businesses are. It's a step forward for Cuba, apparently – I didn't realize how controlled the lives of the people in Cuba have been. This article is an eye-opener.





Full speed ahead for connected cars, but are they going the wrong way? – NBC

By M. Alex Johnson

Mitsubishi's EMIRAI concept car includes a touchscreen where a driver is supposed to write commands.
Why is it, Tarun Bhatnagar was wondering, that the "beautiful screen in the instrument cluster of my rental car can't provide me with a connected and safer driving experience?"

Bhatnagar, Google's director of Maps for Business, was describing how he used his phone's navigation app to get to the Los Angeles Auto Show last week. For the whole drive, he said, he had to balance the phone on his lap.

"That needs to change," Bhatnagar said in a keynote address at the show, which prominently featured a pavilion devoted to car tech.
Finding ways for drivers to safely use their cherished electronics is big business: What's called the connected car industry is projected to grow at a rate of 35 percent through 2019, to $132 billion, Transparency Market Research, an international market analytics firm, calculated last month.

The idea is to keep drivers' hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. But safety experts insist that's beside the point — your brain simply isn't built to concentrate on two (or more) activities at once, so it's impossible to make electronics safe to use behind the wheel, no matter how much money and technology you throw at it.

"All this creates a dilemma for automakers," acknowledged Derek Kuhn, vice president of QNX Software, which makes an operating system used in many of the leading car systems. "How do they place a bet on the future?"

The challenge, according to Kuhn, is to develop "a balanced environment where smartphones bring apps into the car, consumers enjoy the integration they desire, and automakers deliver a consistent, branded experience."

Scores of companies are spending a lot of money to meet that challenge:
• Ford Motor Co.'s Sync technology — which lets drivers make calls, play music, get directions and even send and receive texts, all by voice — will be available in more than 90 percent of Ford's 2014 vehicles, the company said at the L.A. Auto Show, where Jim Farley, the company's global vice president for marketing, called your car "the ultimate mobile device."

• General Motors Co.'s OnStar embedded system, which does many of the same things, will connect with your smartphone so you can run apps by voice at the wheel.
• Apple Inc. is already putting "eyes-free" versions of Siri and iTunes in some cars, designed to let drivers control them with buttons on the steering wheel. But Apple has far grander plans — it hopes to turn your car into a full four-wheeled Apple computer by embedding iOS 7 beginning next year.

Other in-the-works or planned technologies could turn your car into something out of "The Matrix" or "Minority Report":

• A startup called The NeXt Co. is raising money to produce Heads UP — which wirelessly projects your smartphone's screen onto your windshield, where you can use it by voice and gestures:
• Mitsubishi Electric is already on the second generation of its EMIRAI concept car, which senses your surroundings and biometrics and can pop up any of 18 function buttons on the steering wheel as it determines you need them. It even includes an armrest touch screen where you're supposed to write out commands with your finger.
• Government-funded researchers at Germany's Free University of Berlin are working on the "BrainDriver" — a soft head covering that reads your brain waves and translates them into driving commands. It's still in the demonstration phase; unfortunately, in road tests there's still "a slight delay between the intended command and the actual reaction of the car," the researchers say.

German researchers are working on a sensor array you wear on your head so the car can read your brain waves.
It's exciting stuff, but skeptics point to more than a decade of research that establishes that dividing your concentration on anything but the task of driving creates too much competition for mental processing.

This is true not just when you take eyes off the road to deal with a beeping, brightly lighted screen, they argue, but even when you listen to information without diverting your gaze. That means wearable tech like BrainDriver and Google Glass likely won't solve things.

Researchers call it "inattention blindness": You may be looking where you're going, but you don't really see it because your brain is crunching different data. That's true for simply listening to the radio, which can delay your reaction time by a half-second, researchers at the University of Utah concluded in June in a report for AAA's Foundation for Traffic Safety (.pdf).

(Half a second might seem trivial, but "a fraction-of-a-second delay would make the car travel several additional car lengths," the congressionally chartered National Safety Council found in a 2010 survey of data on distracted driving (.pdf). "When a driver needs to react immediately, there is no margin for error.")

Talking on the phone hands-free and using devices through speech recognition further lengthen that delay, the Utah report found. What makes the new data especially alarming is that the study controlled for manual distraction; that is, all of the tests specifically recorded tasks that drivers could perform without taking their hands off the wheel.

"This clearly suggests that the adoption of voice-based systems in the vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety," the report concluded.
Research like that is why the National Transportation Safety Board is pushing Congress and state legislatures to ban all drivers from using electronics, including phones — even if they use hands-free technology.

If anything, said Robert Rosenberger, an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, whizbang tech like iOS in the car and BrainDriver makes things worse because "it encourages people not to be cautious."
Video: In the first in-depth study of drivers’ brain activity as they attempt to multi-task, researchers found the more our minds are preoccupied, the more distracted our driving. NBC’s Tom Costello reports.

"They send the wrong message to drivers," Rosenberger told NBC News. "It implies to drivers that these things are safe."
David L. Strayer of the University of Utah, a lead researcher on the AAA study, put it more simply

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it," he said.


I vote for precluding the installation of these devices in cars, especially anything with a screen, or the device that you activate by “writing with your finger” while driving. I am guilty of only one distraction when I drive, but I don't find that it keeps me from driving safely – I keep my car radio tuned to NPR, which on my station in Jacksonville is almost all talk shows and news. It's low key and gives me something to think about besides the mammoth truck that is bearing down on me from behind. I find it keeps me from giving in to nerousness about driving, which is even more distracting than any radio program.

This story is about our increasing addiction to our electronic gadgets, which in this case are truly damaging. I hope Congress doesn't allow them to be installed in cars.






Warming oceans, not air, may be critical to melting ice sheets – NBC
Tia Ghose LiveScience

In the last 10,000 years, the Greenland Ice Sheet shrank to its smallest size around 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, when ocean temperatures were also quite high, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Nov. 22 in the journal Geology, suggests that ocean temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures, could be a critical factor in melting ice sheets in current global warming scenarios. Understanding the reaction ice sheets like the ones covering Greenland and Antarctica will have to climate change is important because the melting ice could contribute significantly to rising sea levels.
"We're particularly concerned about what the ice sheets are going to do, because when they melt, sea levels rise," said study co-author Jason Briner, a geologist at the University at Buffalo. [Image Gallery: Greenland's Melting Glaciers]

Current and past warming
One way to make predictions about the current warming period is to see how warming trends in the past affected the ice sheet, and the rivers of ice called glaciers that make them up.

As glaciers grow, they shove piles of debris and rubble aside, like giant bulldozers, forming rocky regions called moraines. Because moraines form only when glaciers get bigger, figuring out when moraines formed can provide clues to the ice sheet's size in the past.

In Greenland at some point in the last 10,000 years, the advancing ice sheet ploughed through several ocean basins, leaving piles of marine sediments and fossils such as clamshells in their wake. Briner and his team collected those fossils near the edges of the Greenland Ice Sheet. When organisms are alive, all the amino acids, or protein building blocks, in their body are left-handed, but after they die, the amino acids gradually flip to the mirror right-handed orientation. So in theory, the rate at which these proteins flip orientation can be used to figure out when the animals died.
To figure out that rate, the team dated some of the marine fossils using a technique involving carbon isotopes, or elements of carbon with different numbers of neutrons. Separately, they measured how many of the amino acids in the marine fossils had switched orientation.

By correlating the two, the team was able to date the marine fossils and determine that most of the moraines were formed — and the glaciers advancing — about 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.

Ocean temperatures
That suggests the ice sheet had reached its smallest point just before this time period, because there was more debris to push around as the glaciers grew.
Other climactic data has found that air at that time wasn't that warm, but ocean temperatures were quite high.

"We think about global warming and how the atmosphere is warming up — that it's like putting an ice cube in an oven," Briner told LiveScience. "But what happens if you drop an ice cube not in an oven, but in a warm bath?"
The new findings suggest that the warm bath may be most critical for melting ice sheets, by melting the glaciers at the edges of the ice sheet that are submerged in warm ocean waters.

"It's warm ocean water that can actually melt the snouts of these marine glaciers," Briner said.  


This article doesn't say why the oceans are warming. I was unable to find an article on the Internet which told why it is happening except for one which mentioned an increase in El Nino events. One did state that the colder depths tend to moderate rises in surface temperature, which is a cause for hope about the warming of the surface. I presume the surface of the ocean simply warms up as the atmosphere does. That is basically what this National Geographic article says. See below:

http://ocean.nationalgeographic.com/ocean/critical-issues-sea-temperature-rise/

As climate change has warmed the Earth, oceans have responded more slowly than land environments. But scientific research is finding that marine ecosystems can be far more sensitive to even the most modest temperature change.

Global warming caused by human activities that emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide has raised the average global temperature by about 1°F (0.6°C) over the past century. In the oceans, this change has only been about 0.18°F (0.1°C). This warming has occurred from the surface to a depth of about 2,300 feet (700 meters), where most marine life thrives.

When water heats up, it expands. Thus, the most readily apparent consequence of higher sea temperatures is a rapid rise in sea level. Sea level rise causes inundation of coastal habitats for humans as well as plants and animals, shoreline erosion, and more powerful storm surges that can devastate low-lying areas.

Stronger Storms

Many weather experts say we are already seeing the effects of higher ocean temperatures in the form of stronger and more frequent tropical storms and hurricanes/cyclones. Warmer surface water dissipates more readily into vapor, making it easier for small ocean storms to escalate into larger, more powerful systems.
Warmer seas also lead to melting from below of polar ice shelves, compromising their structural integrity and leading to spectacular shelf collapses. Scientists also worry that warmer water could interrupt the so-called ocean conveyor belt, the system of global currents that is largely responsible for regulating Earth's temperature. Its collapse could trigger catastrophically rapid climate changes.

Will It Continue?

The only way to reduce ocean temperatures is to dramatically reign in our emission of greenhouse gases. However, even if we immediately dropped carbon dioxide emissions to zero, the gases we've already released would take decades or longer to dissipate.



­

Israel Dreams Of A Future As An Oil Producer – NPR
by Emily Harris
­
There's an old joke that if Moses had turned right when he led Jewish tribes out of Egypt, Israel might be where Saudi Arabia is today — and be rich from oil. Consultant Amit Mor of Eco Energy says that joke is out of date.

"Israel has more oil than Saudi Arabia," he claims. "And it's not a joke."
But that oil will be difficult to reach, if it can be recovered at all. The oil he's talking about is not yet liquid but is trapped in rocks underground.
"Maybe, if technology will be proved viable, Israel can meet all of its needs from domestic production of oil," Mor says.

That is precisely the dream of Israel Energy Initiatives, an Israeli company backed by major U.S. investors.
"The motivation of our investors starts with the energy independence for Israel," says Relik Shafir, its CEO.

He explains that extracting the oil would be a long, slow process. The technology involves placing electric heaters in an 8-inch pipe about 1,000 feet below the ground.
"Through a slow heating process that may take two to three years, it turns the organic part of the rock into gases and liquids," Shafir says.
Commercial production is at least a decade away, and the hurdles aren't just technical. They are environmental and political as well.

Surrounded By History
A windy perch in a nature park south of Jerusalem gives a good view of the spot where a pilot project would go. It's next to farmland and a two-lane road. The road crosses the dry riverbed where David, in the biblical story, is said to have found the stone he used to kill the giant Goliath.

­ Sigal Sprukt, an environmental activist and local resident, looks over a valley that is believed to have oil. Israel Energy Initiatives, an energy company, is planning a pilot project to extract oil from shale in a slow heating method. But Sprukt says this "area is one of the last areas that are not ruined by cities."

Religious pilgrims are regular visitors here. On this day, a busload of Christians from Africa and another from the U.S. stop by. Local resident Sigal Sprukt worries that even a slow-paced oil industry would change the nature of this place.
"The area is one of the last areas that are not ruined by cities," Sprukt says. "The history of the Jewish people is all around here."

She says the gas discoveries off Israel's coast have already made Israelis feel more secure about meeting the country's energy needs.
"Right now, we don't need this oil," she says. "When we finish the gas, and you have the technology, a good technology, come back and do it here."

There are an estimated 400 billion barrels of oil trapped in rocks here. That's enough to cover Israel's current oil consumption for centuries. Meanwhile, a much smaller field of conventional oil is ramping up production.

Workers recently moved gigantic steel pipes in place for Givot Olam's sixth well. The publicly traded company has "proven and probable" reserves of 12.5 million barrels of oil. CEO Tovia Luskin expects to drill 40 wells eventually, plus build a pipeline to a refinery on the coast. Luskin is a Hasidic Jew, originally from Russia. He chose where to drill based on a passage from the Bible.

"After the first well, we had signs we could not walk away from," Luskin says. "We had a liter of oil, then we had a few barrels of oil, then we had a bit more barrels of oil. Now we're in production."

But Luskin is facing local opposition, too: Palestinian opposition. The land he's drilling is right up against the Israeli-built security barrier in and around the West Bank. Israeli officials don't want to discuss whether the field continues to the Palestinian side. Luskin says flatly that it is Jewish land.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority says it is preparing tenders for oil exploration in the West Bank.


I hope this land isn't on the Palestinian side – Israel claims parts of their land already. This may be one more problem between the two peoples. Other than that, this is a good thing. Our important international ally Israel will be richer now, and I expect so will we.



­
'The Knockout Game': An Old Phenomenon With Fresh Branding – NPR
by Gene Demby

This still from a video of an alleged "knockout game" assault has been played over and over on news reports on the supposed trend.
There are a few variations, but this is generally how "the knockout game" works: A teenager, or a bunch of teenagers, bored and looking for something to get into, spies some unsuspecting mark on the street. They size up the person, then walk up close to their target and — BLAM — punch him or her as hard as possible in an effort to knock the person out. The most brazen perpetrators even post the videos on sites like YouTube and Vine.

There are reports about "the knockout game" popping up all over the news. In St. Louis. In Hoboken, N.J. Brooklyn. Lansing, Mich.
In several instances, these attacks have been fatal. And they can be deeply and understandably traumatizing to victims.

Part of what unnerves people about this phenomenon is that it's described as a "game," a pastime of bored, delinquent young people. As Jamelle Bouie writes at The Daily Beast, "It's as if we're living in A Clockwork Orange, with our cities under siege by violent young men."

In a story in the Riverfront Times, a few young people said they'd participated in "knockout king" — one of the its various names — and said it was a pretty well-known activity in their neighborhood. (It's worth noting that this story is from two years ago. More on that in a second.)

Framing it as a game gives it a hook for the news media, but we already have a name for this type of thing: It's a random street assault, a terrible phenomenon, but not a new one. And the language that kids and the news media have latched onto makes it sound both sinister and casual. It dramatizes the behavior, perversely elevating it above the senseless street violence that happens every day and has happened for decades. (There were more than 750,000 assaults in 2011, according to the FBI.)
As Chris Ferguson, a psychologist who specializes in youth and violence, told the Riverfront Times, "For some reason everything involving teens gets called a game, no matter how little play behavior has to do with the motives."

There are plenty of good reasons to refer to this phenomenon simply as assault. For starters, the knockout game is pretty hard to distinguish, in cause and effect, from random attacks, according to the New York Times: "Police officials in several cities where such attacks have been reported said that the 'game' amounted to little more than an urban myth, and that the attacks in question might be nothing more than the sort of random assaults that have always occurred."

And officials in both the New York Times and the Riverfront Times stories pushed back hard on framing this activity as a game. "A kid arrested for assault may tell authorities it was a game because he doesn't want to tell anyone what the fight was really about," one St. Louis city official told the Riverfront Times.

And again, in the NYT:
[Officials] cautioned that they had yet to see evidence of an organized game spreading among teenagers online, though they have been reluctant to rule out the possibility.

There is particular concern within the department that widespread coverage could create the atmosphere where such a "game" could take hold in New York.
The name of the "game" itself isn't very precise. In recent years, "knockout" has also been used to refer to a game in which a bunch of kids try to make themselves pass out.

Every few years, the "trend" of bored delinquents assaulting random strangers gets some new designation. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was "wilding." In the mid-aughts in the the U.K., it was "happy-slapping." In recent years, the news media in my hometown, Philadelphia, was filled with stories of "flash mobs." (Every report on knockout gives it a different name, too: "point 'em out, knock 'em out," "one-hitter quitter," "knockout king.")

In a few of these incarnations, as in this most recent one, there are racial dimensions to the phenomenon. The current "knockout game," "wilding" and "flash mobs" all ostensibly involve young black kids inflicting violence on arbitrary white folks because of their race. In fact, one of the knockout game's other alleged names is more gruesomely racialized: "polar bear hunting." And with this, too, we already have some terminology: An attack on someone because of his or her race is a "hate crime." (Indeed, one of the people indicted in an alleged incident of the knockout game was charged with a hate crime.)

The first reference we could find to "the knockout game" goes back to 1992, when the Boston Globe reported on a case in East Cambridge, Mass., in which several young men fatally stabbed an MIT student after playing "knockout." None of the principals in that story was black.

But treating the knockout game as a separate phenomenon from street assaults also posits it as an altogether new thing that's on the rise. It isn't.
Ferguson told us that violent crime, and violent crime by young folks in particular, is down. Way down. The rate of violent crime among young people has fallen by nearly two-thirds over the past two decades. "We are seeing a massive decline in our country — of course, being the U.S., we had the furthest to fall compared to other countries," Ferguson said. "There's been a remarkable decline of violence, rape — [even] bullying, as much as it gets attention."

Ferguson went on: "Youth today are about as well-behaved as we have on record," he says. (He said that violent crime committed by people over the age of 50 has fallen less dramatically.)

Ferguson said that giving crimes names — here "the knockout game" — also helps gives them narratives. And once we have those categories, we begin to apply that label to any instance that fits the pattern. Ferguson said that now random assaults are being retroactively tagged as examples of the knockout game.
"If the narrative didn't exist, then people wouldn't be thinking along those lines," Ferguson said.

Indeed, as several observers have pointed out, many of the videos and cases being discussed in the current furor over the knockout game are over a year old. That Riverfront Times story we linked to above is from 2011. So if this is a new trend, it's been a "new trend" for quite a while now.

The way we frame this type of incident deeply influences how we process this type of incident. So if these assaults aren't new, and we already have language for them, and the incidents happen with relative infrequency over large swaths of time and space, is there any value in calling it "the knockout game"?


The good news in this article is that violent crime is less common now. This “game” is just another sign that the youths involved are more hardened than their age would tend to indicate. It goes beyond fighting over some disagreement about a girl. I wonder if severe penalties are being meted out by the courts – they should be. Random extreme violence for the fun of it or because of racial hatred should be cause for a prison term, without lenience due to their ages. Of course, that's just my opinion, but I do generally think that teenaged violence should be punished at the adult level.



­ The Horse Who Picked Up A Paintbrush – NPR
by Frank Deford
­ This is a Thanksgiving story about a horse. Actually, a horse artist. I don't mean an artist who paints horses, like Degas or Remington, but a horse who paints — and thereby also raises money for less fortunate horses.
Really.

Metro Meteor was a well-bred thoroughbred, foaled in 2003, who specialized in sprints on the turf. He competed at the top tracks, like Belmont and Saratoga, earning just short of $300,000 in purses. He was born with a knee condition, however, and he needed surgery twice to remove bone chips. Each time he came back a winner.

But his knees did him in, and he ended up losing cheap races at a minor-league track named Penn National. At last, the track vet wouldn't let Metro Meteor back into the starting gate. Gelded, he couldn't stand at stud, and, like a lot of broken-down thoroughbreds, Metro Meteor could have simply ended up as horse meat.

Metro wields a paintbrush as owner Ron Krajewski looks on at Motters Station Stables in Rocky Ridge, Md.
Jeffrey B. Roth/Reuters/Landov

But Ron Krajewski, an artist who lives in Gettysburg, Pa., and his wife, Wendy, adopted him. Soon, though, the Krajewskis found that the horse's knees were so bad they couldn't even mount him to ride trails.
Worse, a vet told them that Metro Meteor's condition was terminal. He had two years, maybe.

But the Krajewskis so loved their horse. And when Ron noticed that Metro Meteor liked to bob his head up and down, Ron somehow decided that if he put a brush in the horse's mouth where a bit used to be, and put a canvas in front of him where a finish line used to be, Metro Meteor could, yes, paint.

And, incredibly, he did. Big, colorful brushstrokes. Soon, in fact, the horse was the best-selling artist in Gallery 30 in Gettysburg. With half the money from his paintings, the Krajewskis sought to find a way to save Metro Meteor's life.

­And a young vet, Dr. Kim Brokaw, worked up an experimental treatment that reversed the bone growth. The knees are still a problem, but, thankfully, Metro Meteor can at least walk the trails now and, after all, an artiste has to devote more time to his craft.

And the rest of the money that Metro Meteor makes painting? It goes to the New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program, which helps retired thoroughbreds find homes and get new careers.

How many old horses can give thanks that an equine pal has donated almost $45,000 from the sale of his works to keep them alive and loved?
Now Metro Meteor has also signed a licensing agreement with Dream Green USA. The decorative pillows are my favorite. And, as Ron Krajewski says, his artist partner is "the unofficial spokeshorse for racehorse adoption."

So on Thursday, along with the turkey and stuffing, please pass Metro Meteor his favorite treats: oatmeal cookies and Twizzlers — yes, Twizzlers.


This is another happy story. Koko the gorilla and her “consort” Michael both paint and their paintings are up for sale. I even saw a video of an elephant painting a couple of years ago. I think animal brains are more similar to ours than we usually think, and for a good reason. One species has followed the others down the evolutionary line making changes in the original genetic makeup, not particularly with wildly differing mutations but with gradual smaller increments. Otherwise mice wouldn't make good substitutes for humans in laboratory testing. Much of the difference between us and the more intelligent animals is the fact that humans have flexible hands with an “opposable thumb,” and the proper vocal cords for talking and singing. I'm sure you've heard that before from anthropologists. I think it is true.