protelli is from Kuwait, has been a member for 11 years and last logged in 11 years ago.
|
Trade Policy:
In honor of  Thursday night's NBA draft, The Associated Press takes a  look at the best and worst all-time picks for each of the league's 30 franchises. A lawmaker in Greece’s right-wing Golden Dawn party was accused of trying to punch the mayor of Athens, but missing and hitting a 12-year-old girl instead. Which of the three sentences in this quiz should come first in the paragraph? Why? US court rules that CIA must give fuller response to ACLU's lawsuit seeking access to records on drone attacksIn a rebuke of government secrecy, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the CIA must give a fuller response to a lawsuit seeking the spy agency's records on drone attacks.The CIA's claim that it could neither confirm nor deny whether it has any drone  records was inadequate, because the government, including Barack Obama himself, has clearly acknowledged a drone programme, the court said.The ruling was unanimous from a three-judge panel of the court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit.However, the American Civil Liberties Union is likely a long way from getting access to CIA records. Its lawsuit now heads back to a trial court, where the CIA could invoke other defenses against the records request.The civil liberties group brought its suit under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act.Obama and his senior advisers call the aerial drone programme essential to US attacks on al-Qaida militants in countries such as Yemen. The strikes have at times ignited local anger and frayed diplomatic relations.Initially, the CIA said security concerns prevented it from even acknowledging the existence of records. The ACLU countered that government officials had already acknowledged the drone programme in public statements from 2009 to 2012.The question became whether the statements by Obama, former CIA director Leon Panetta and former counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, now the CIA chief, amounted to an official acknowledgment.Judge Merrick Garland wrote for the appeals court that it would be a fiction to pretend otherwise.Quoting a 1949 US supreme court opinion, he wrote, "There comes a point where … courts should not be ignorant as judges of what know as men" and women.A US Justice Department spokeswoman said she was not  aware of the ruling and could not comment immediately.Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the ruling would make it more difficult for the government to deflect questions about drones."The public surely has a right to know who the government is  killing, and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders," Jaffer said in a statement.DronesCIAUS constitution and civil libertiesUS foreign policyUnited Statesguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian  News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds As developers  build more housing in East Harlem, the 96th Street dividing line between the neighborhood and the Upper East Side is becoming murky. 'I have always loved these books but I think this is one of the best ones I have ever read'This was sharp and fast, it also had a lot of detail and once I started reading it I could not stop till I finished it. The secret passage and the important stolen paper's livened things up so much! And the tutor being the thief which was genius! I have always loved these books but I think this is one of the best ones I have ever read. These are really exciting books to read. There is always a surprise.Want to tell the world about a book you've read? Join the site and send us your review!Children and teenagersChildren's books: 8-12 yearsAdventure (children and teens)Enid Blytonguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds A Supreme Court ruling on a key provision of the Voting Rights Act could have a dramatic effect on the low-profile world of county commissions and school boards. The 12-year-old amateur Ye Wocheng, the youngest player to compete on the European Tour, missed the cut at the China Open in Tianjin. Conservationists report lack of budding plants, animals returning to hibernation and migrating birds held back by wintry weatherOne hundred years ago, on the official first day of spring, the Anglo-Welsh war poet and naturalist Edward  Thomas set off from Clapham Common in London to cycle and walk to the Quantock Hills in Somerset. The record of his journey, called In Pursuit of Spring, became  a nature-writing classic, telling of exuberant chiffchaffs and house martins, daffodils and cowslips in full flower and "honeysuckle in such profusion as I had never before seen".Had Thomas taken the same route today, he might not have seen very much wildlife – and could well have frozen. Mist and fog, rain, a bitter north wind, and temperatures just above freezing are forecast for , the first "official" day of spring.The runup, says the Met Office, has been marked by deep snow blanketing much of eastern Scotland, temperatures as low as -8C in Oxfordshire, very few daffodils blooming in Wales, weather warnings in the north of England, nature hibernating and occasional bursts of spring sunshine.It is, says Matthew Oates, a naturalist working with the National Trust, the opposite of the same time last year, when a heatwave combined with a drought and resulted in wildfires, hosepipe bans, packed beaches and record sales of ice cream and garden plants. Back then, he says, the daffodils were nearly over by 21 March, the bluebells were well out, and the birds had long been nesting."There is an eternal push-and-pull relationship between spring and winter. The battle is usually at its fiercest during February, but can last well into April. This is a very late spring indeed. The trees are barely out. There's a bit of hawthorn and blackthorn and some pussy willow, but they are way off leafing. There's absolutely no sign of chestnuts, the bluebells have barely moved, the primroses are very slow and the micro niche finder review up from Europe are being held back by the northerly winds. Only the rooks are keeping going. They just don't care about the cold. They are building their nests wonderfully."Conservationists have been taken by surprise after a decade  or more of warm weather arriving on average two weeks earlier than it used to."We have had just 22 sightings across Britain of horse chestnut trees in budburst. This time last year we had 129. I asked 300 colleagues to look out for ladybirds, thinking there would be lots,  and not one has been seen," says Dr Kate Lewthwaite, who manages the Woodland Trust's Nature's Calendar project, which records the first signs of the seasons. "The trend has been for warmer springs. This is quite exceptional. But it's been stop-start. You get a  few mild days when everything happens and then it stops. We've had three peaks of activity so far."Scotland has been  particularly hard hit, says Deborah Long of Plantlife Scotland. "In the garden crocuses are late while snowdrops are still looking good. The wood anemones and lesser celandines are just showing leaf but the blackthorn, one of first shrubs to flower in spring, is still in tight bud. There is no sign of the spike in bluebells yet."Instead, groups such as the Bat Conservation Trust, Buglife and Butterfly Conservation are reporting minimum life above ground and species such as frogs and lizards going back into hibernation. "It seems that spring has been postponed," says Long. "It started but it's halted. Plants have just stopped. But spring in Scotland is never usual. You never know what you are getting."Opinions are divided over the impact of a cold, late spring. "Those creatures that do emerge will find little in the way of food such as insects," says the Woodland Trust's assistant conservation adviser, Kay Haw. "Dormice and hedgehogs spend most of their time before hibernation fattening themselves up so they can survive this dormant  period. But if they do not have enough fat reserves, perhaps because of a lack of food or an extended period of hibernation due to a long, cold winter, they can die."Bats are a similar story, and, even if they did come out, there would be virtually no insect food around because it is just too cold for most invertebrates at the moment."With the next few days unlikely to see much change, the £5bn-a-year British garden industry is hoping that  April and May will turn its financial fortunes around. "When the sun comes out, so do the people," says Tim Briercliffe, director of business development at the Horticultural Trades Association. "Garden centres and nurseries can expect to take 40% of their income in March, April and May. March is supposed to be the warm-up for the season but this year has been truly awful. There are not many lawnmowers being used. As far as we are concerned, spring hasn't started yet."Because spring is so late this year, it could be "dazzling" when it comes, says Oates. "It certainly will happen. And when it does, it could be absolutely spectacular. It will erupt, we will have lift-off. Everything could come at one time. The danger is that the magnificence of spring will then just run headlong into summer. It may be a case of blink and you miss it."Oates quotes Thomas, writing about the wait for an early 20th-century blast of spring: "It is not yet spring. Spring is being dreamed, and the dream is more wonderful and blessed than ever was spring.""That's it," says Oates. "It expresses perfectly  the first day of spring 2013."SpringWildlifeConservationAnimalsPlantsBiologyTrees and forestsWeatherJohn Vidalguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The three tales in “Pawn Shop Chronicles†involve robbery, meth and an Elvis impersonator. Phallic fossil worms shed light on vertebrate evolution Besides joining the crowds on Tokyo’s shopper-clogged streets, you can take a cruise, see a Buddhist temple or partake of a kaiseki dinner on the 45th floor of a luxury hotel. In Sendai, a city of 1 million that now has little power or gas and where nearly all shops are closed, survival is ruled not by the law of the jungle but by the orderly rhythms of long queues. A magnetic phenomenon newly discovered by MIT researchers could lead  to much faster, denser and more energy-efficient chips for memory and computation.The findings, reported in the journal Nature Materials, could reduce the energy needed to store and retrieve one bit of data by a factor of 10,000, says the paper’s senior author, Geoffrey Beach, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. The paper’s co-authors are graduate students Satoru Emori and Uwe Bauer, postdoc Sung-Min Ahn, and  Eduardo Martinez of the University of Salamanca in Spain.Beach says that hints of the new phenomenon have been reported for several years, but these had remained unexplained until now. The new results could overcome “a lot of what had seemed like fundamental limitations†in the control and use of magnetic materials, he says, adding: “It’s a whole new approach to  the design of magnetic materials.â€It turns out the key to this phenomenon lies not in the magnetic materials themselves, but in what’s next to them: In this case, the team used very thin films of a ferromagnetic material, deposited on a metal base, and with a layer of an oxide material on top — a sort of ferromagnet sandwich. The behavior of the ferromagnetic layer, it turns out, depends on the metal that layer rests upon.Ferromagnetic materials, including the familiar bar magnets, have a north and a south pole. When such materials are used for data storage, such as on a computer’s hard disk, separate tiny “domains†on their surface can have these poles pointing either up or down, representing ones and zeros. Normally, when a ferromagnetic material is exposed to a current, these domains are pushed along the surface in the forex growth bot as the electron flow.But previously, in rare cases, the movement was in the opposite direction, puzzling researchers. The MIT team found that when the thin ferromagnetic film was deposited on a slab of platinum, it exhibited this backward flow — which Beach likens to being dragged upwind. But under circumstances that were identical, except that the film was deposited on the metal tantalum, the magnetic domains flowed in the normal direction — meaning that the key was not in the ferromagnet itself, but in its next-door neighbor. Both platinum and tantalum are nonmagnetic, so they would not ordinarily be expected to affect magnetic behavior.It turns out that in either case, an unexpected effect alters how magnetic domains switch from one orientation to the other. Normally, when the spin orientation changes from one domain to the other (say, from “up†to “downâ€), the direction of that change is random. But in these thin-film sandwiches, spin rotations are aligned, consistently either turning clockwise or counterclockwise. The researchers showed that because of this peculiar effect, current can push domains with much more force than in conventional materials, and the direction that the domains move can be engineered simply by selecting the nonmagnetic metal underneath the magnet.Such asymmetrical behavior is called a chiral effect; the researchers say this is the first demonstration of chiral behavior in magnetic domains.“There are very few systems in nature that have this preferred way to rotate,†Beach says. Among the few are the molecules that form the basis for life, such as those that assemble into DNA molecules. Additionally, a few magnetic materials have shown this property, “but only in very exotic structures,†he says: at temperatures just slightly above absolute zero, and only in a perfect single crystal.The new phenomenon, by contrast, is seen “at room temperature and well above room temperature, and in devices that are ideally suited for integration into electronic devices,†Beach says.In the new ferromagnetic sandwiches, the forces pushing the magnetic domains are 100 times greater than in conventional ferromagnetic storage systems. Since the power needed to move the domains varies with the square of these forces, Beach says, such a system could be 10,000 times more efficient than existing technology.With that, “all of a sudden these go from just looking interesting to being competitive even with very entrenched technology,†Beach says. And because these structures  are compatible with existing manufacturing methods,  he predicts, “these things are going to be out there and making a difference very soon.â€Emori, the paper’s lead author, says that there are now several kinds of memory systems, from the ones within a computer’s internal memory to those on hard disks or solid-state USB thumb drives. Theoretically, by harnessing these new effects, he says, “all of these could be satisfied by one material.â€This is “a very important, major advance,†says Robert Buhrman, a professor of engineering and senior vice provost for research at Cornell University. The MIT research, he says, is part of “a very intense effort worldwide to efficiently control the motion of ferromagnetic domain walls in thin-film nanostructures for future very high-performance data-storage and nonvolatile logic operations.â€Buhrman adds, “This work has answered several important questions raised by earlier studies as to how a current pulse can very rapidly move domain walls in a preferred direction.†Besides providing those answers, he says, it “raises new questions for follow-on work.â€â€œIt’s really a whole new class of magnetic materials,†Beach says. “It opens up possibilities that it would have been difficult to even speculate about a couple of years  ago.â€The work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. Oracle and NetSuite are to jointly offer cloud services to mid-size business customers. Politicians and newspapers paid tribute to the victim, Parween Rahman, who was shot dead by unidentified assassins on Wednesday evening. Face to face with the one-time 'cyber-diva' who some now call a 'technophobe'Bedraggled from a walk in the rain, Sherry Turkle shows up begging for a latte. She's left her wallet in her hotel room. She's exhausted, she says, and could  do with a coffee. "You can see  it's not my most perky morning. But I'm really thrilled to be meeting with you."These aren't just pleasantries – Turkle has a serious point to make. As professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT and the founder and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, she has spent over three decades studying the way people interact with machines, and is growing increasingly worried about the amount of human interaction people are happy to delegate to robots or carry out over phones and computers. As a human, within seconds of meeting her in person, I can interpret the complexities of her mood – the tired part, and the happy to be here part. "This is a complex dance that we know how to do to each other," she says. A dance she fears is being forgotten.Turkle wasn't always this interested in technology. Born in Brooklyn in 1948, she studied in Paris before returning  to do her PhD in sociology and psychology at Harvard. By 1978 she had just written her first book, on French psychoanalysis, when MIT hired her to study the sociology of sciences of the mind. "I began to hear students talking about their minds as machines, based on the early personal computers they had." They'd use phrases like "debugging" or "don't talk to me until I clear my buffer". "I'd never heard any of this stuff before."So Turkle began to study the way that artificial intelligence was taking hold in everyday life, at a time when these interactions with machines were pretty raw. She "literally was at the right place at the right time."The place being MIT, home to some of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and social robotics, and the birthplace of perhaps the most sophisticated, and endearing, social robots. Turkle tested these anthropomorphic robots on children, "computer virgins". In one study she observed how children would bond with the fat burning furnace download were programmed to respond with human-like emotions, in a way they wouldn't with other toys. "This becomes a tremendously significant relationship for the child," she says, "and then it will get broken or disappoint, and the child will go ballistic. My research group went berserk at how much damage we felt we'd done."Turkle was "smitten with the subject and stayed with it for 30 years". In the early days she was labelled as a "cyber diva". "People thought I was very pro-computer. I was on the cover of Wired magazine." Then things began to change. In the early 80s,"we met this technology and became smitten like young lovers," she says, but today our attachment is unhealthy. In her latest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Turkle says we have reached a point she calls the "robotic moment" – where we delegate important human relationships, in particular interactions at "the most vulnerable moments in life" – childhood and old age – to robots. "We are so worried about Asperger's, so worried about the way we communicate with faces. To me, as somebody who likes technology, this is just playing with fire."Turkle frequently takes calls from journalists seeking comments on the latest story about robots in nursing homes, teacherbot programmes or nannybots to look after children. She sees married couples who prefer to have their fights online. "My studies of funerals are hilarious," she says. "Everybody's texting. When I ask them about it, they say, 'Yeah, I do it during the boring bits.' So that's the question: what's does it mean as a society that we are there for the boring bits?"She is particularly concerned about the effect on children. "I am a single mum. I raised my daughter, and she was very listened to." Today our phones are always on, and always on us. Parents are too busy texting to watch their kids, she cautions. There's been a spike in playground accidents. "These kids are extremely lonely. We are giving everybody the impression that we aren't really there for them. It's toxic." This is what she means by "alone together" – that our ability to be in the world is compromised by "all that other stuff" we want to do with technology.For many these are  inconvenient truths, and lately Turkle has come to be seen as a naysayer, even a technophobe. She is no longer the cover girl for Wired. "This time they didn't even review my book." In fact, the initial reviews of Alone Together, Turkle says, can be summarised as "everybody likes Facebook, can't she just get with the programme?" This, she adds, is unfair to the 15 years of research behind it. "I mean, give me the credit. I didn't do a think piece. I was reporting. People tell me they wish [iPhone companion] Siri were their best friend. I was stunned. You can't make this stuff up."Turkle is optimistic that people will begin to want to reclaim their privacy, to turn back to their relationships with real people. Yet she concedes that the lure of technology is such that it's a  tough challenge. "Online you become the self you want to be." But the downside? We lose the "raw, human part" of being with each other. She points to our early morning meeting, for example. She's tired, and we could have done the interview over Skype. "Online I am perfect," she says. "But what's the worst that can happen here? You write a story that says, 'Bedraggled from her walk in the rain, she shows up begging for a latte? So what? You pretty much see me as I am. And I'm willing to say that's a good thing."ComputingRobotsSocial sciencesSociologyMIT - Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyArtificial intelligence (AI)Social networkingEmailguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds 'This book has few words and mostly pictures so is good for pre-school children'A tiny mouse wants to find the biggest creature in the world. On his journey the mouse meets other animals; all decide to find the biggest creature. The mouse is really cute, it is my favourite animal in the book and the pictures are really real. This book has few words and mostly pictures so is good for pre-school children.Want to tell the world about a book you've read? Join the site and send us your review!Children and teenagersAnimalsChildren's books: 7 and underguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Carmelo Anthony expects to return to the New York Knicks' lineup Wednesday night against the Orlando Magic. For many companies, moving their web-application servers to the cloud is an attractive option, since cloud-computing services can offer economies of scale, extensive technical support and easy accommodation of demand fluctuations.But for applications that depend heavily on database queries, cloud hosting can pose as many problems as it solves. Cloud services often partition their servers into “virtual machines,†each of which gets so many operations per second on a server’s central processing unit, so much space in memory, and the like. That makes cloud servers easier to manage, but for database-intensive applications, it can result in the allocation of about 20 times as much hardware as should be necessary. And the cost of that overprovisioning gets passed on to customers.MIT researchers are developing a new system called DBSeer that should help solve this problem and others, such as the pricing of cloud services and the diagnosis of application slowdowns. At the recent  Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, the researchers laid out their vision for DBSeer. And in June, at the annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD), they will unveil the algorithms at the heart of DBSeer, which use google sniper 2.0 to build accurate models of performance and resource demands of database-driven applications.DBSeer’s advantages aren’t restricted to cloud computing, either. Teradata, a major database company, has already assigned several of its engineers the task of importing the MIT researchers’ new algorithm — which has been released under an open-source license — into its own software.Virtual limitationsBarzan Mozafari, a postdoc in the lab of professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden and lead author on both new papers, explains that, with virtual machines, server resources must be allocated according to an application’s peak demand. “You’re not going to hit your peak load all the time,†Mozafari says. “So that means that these resources are going to be underutilized most of the time.â€Moreover, Mozafari says, the provisioning for peak demand is largely guesswork. “It’s very counterintuitive,†Mozafari says, “but you might take on certain types of extra load that might help your overall performance.†Increased demand means that a database server will store more of its frequently used data in its high-speed memory, which can help it process requests more quickly.On the other hand, a slight increase in demand could cause the system to slow down precipitously — if, for instance, too many requests require modification of the same pieces of data, which need to be updated on multiple servers. “It’s extremely nonlinear,†Mozafari says.Mozafari, Madden, postdoc Alekh Jindal, and Carlo Curino, a former member of Madden’s group who’s now at Microsoft, use two different techniques in the SIGMOD paper to predict how a database-driven application will respond to increased load. Mozafari describes the first as a “black box†approach: DBSeer simply monitors fluctuations in both the number and type of user requests and system performance and uses machine-learning techniques to correlate the two. This approach is good at predicting the consequences of fluctuations that don’t fall too far outside the range of the training data.Gray areasOften, however, database managers — or prospective cloud-computing customers — will be interested in the consequences of a fourfold, tenfold, or even hundredfold increase in demand. For those types of predictions, Mozafari explains, DBSeer uses a “gray box†model, which takes into account the idiosyncrasies of particular database systems.For instance, Mozafari explains, updating data stored on a hard drive is time-consuming, so most database servers will try to postpone that operation as long as they can, instead storing data modifications in the much faster — but volatile — main memory. At some point, however, the server has to commit its pending modifications to disk, and the criteria for making that decision can vary from one database system to another.The version of DBSeer presented at SIGMOD includes a gray-box model  of MySQL, one of the most widely used database systems. The researchers are currently building a new model for another popular system, PostgreSQL. Although adapting the model isn’t a negligible undertaking, models tailored to just a handful of systems would cover the large majority of database-driven Web applications.The researchers tested their prediction algorithm against both a set of benchmark data, called TPC-C, that’s commonly used in database research and against real-world data on modifications to the Wikipedia database. On average, the model was about 80 percent accurate in predicting CPU use and 99 percent accurate in predicting the bandwidth consumed by disk operations.“We’re really fascinated and thrilled that someone is doing this work,†says Doug Brown, a database software architect at Teradata. “We’ve already taken the code and are prototyping right now.†Initially, Brown says, Teradata will use the MIT researchers’ prediction algorithm to determine customers’ resource requirements. “The really big question for our customers is, ‘How are we going to scale?’†Brown says.Brown hopes, however, that the algorithm will ultimately help allocate server resources on the fly, as database requests come in. If servers can assess the demands imposed by individual requests and budget accordingly, they can ensure that transaction times stay within the bounds set by customers’ service agreements. For instance, “if you have two big, big resource consumers, you can calculate ahead of time that we’re only going to run two of these in parallel,†Brown says. “There’s all kinds of games you can play in workload management.†I first met David Farrell in 1993, when I was researching the history of movie stills photography. Farrell's career as an outstanding film stills man has not been as widely recognised as his other, earlier photographic work. However, his naturally easy-going manner was ideally suited to the task, and he excelled in this field, producing not only the required portraits and scene stills, but also many revealing and spontaneous behind-the-scenes shots of director, stars and film crews at work.He is probably best known for his photos of Peter Sellers on two of the Pink Panther movies, though they are often uncredited. He first met Sellers when the actor visited the set of the 1976 film Mohammad, Messenger of God, on location in north Africa. A camera enthusiast himself, Sellers had brought with him his latest acquisition, a new slimline Polaroid camera. Farrell spent some time with the star, sharing his ideas on photography and struck up a friendship that led soon after to an involvement with Inspector Clouseau.PhotographyPeter SellersJoel Finlerguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Lil Wayne kicked off his America's Most Wanted summer package tour in Birmingham Alabama Tuesday alm[...] The Atlanta Falcons have found their replacement for Michael Turner by agreeing to terms with free agent Steven Jackson on a three-year, $12 million deal. Charged with advocating on behalf of small firms, the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy has come under fire for allegedly allegedly promoting the policy interests of large corporations. During a congressional hearing last week, one advocacy group executive urged federal investigators to probe the department, which she said has “systematically consorted with big business to pursue an agenda of undercutting health, safety and environmental agencies.†Read full article |
Contact:
You have to be logged in to contact this member. |
protelli's Latest Sheets Feed protelli's Latest Requests Feed
Latest Sheets (0)
Member has not submitted any sheets yet.
Latest Requests (0)
Member has not requested any sheets yet.
Latest Friends (0)
Member has not added anyone as friend yet.