TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011, AT 3:07 PM Obama Gets Firsthand Look at a Tornado Damage
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
As my default Calendar replacement app, Fantastical has been on the home screen of my iPhone since its release nearly a year ago. As one of the few pieces of productivity software that I use regularly, I was extremely nervous about how the app was going to change with its iOS 7 update.
I shouldn’t have worried. Fantastical 2, out today, is one of the best examples of taking the opportunity presented by Apple’s iOS 7 update and using it for more than just a visual ‘re-skin’. It’s a fitting return for the only calendar app to have ever hit the #1 spot on Apple’s paid charts.
If you’re unfamiliar with Fantastical, its strengths are a natural language parsing engine that lets you dash off regular phrases like ‘meet with Joe at noon on Tuesday at The Crab Shack’ and end up with a fully inputted calendar entry without ever typing in any numbers. It’s clever and powerful and almost always works exactly how you want it to. This is coupled with a unique layout that places either a ‘day ticker’ of 1 week or a monthly calendar above a simple continuous agenda of appointments.
For the second time in as many weeks, we’ve seen a very popular app with a distinctive feel re-imagined for iOS 7 with great results. While it could be argued that Tweetbot had an even more pronounced visual language, Fantastical hit some notes pretty hard that it couldn’t have been easy to give up.
Flexibits’ Michael Simmons says that the decisions made in the re-working of the app went far beyond how to make the visual language of the app fit in with iOS 7. Yes, the staples along the top of the virtual ‘calendar’ are gone, but there are also deeper changes that make a real difference in how useful the app is.
One of the biggest examples of this is the trademark ‘lens’ that sits in the center of the ‘day ticker’ in Fantastical. The old design was very heavily influenced by a ‘real’ magnifying glass, of the type that you’d slide over a desk calendar or log book to read a certain entry. The new design retains some of the magnification aspects, but gets winnowed down visually so it doesn’t punch you in the eyeballs with its cleverness as much any more. But the design changes didn’t stop there.
“We moved it to position one, so you can see the full week ahead,” says Simmons. He notes this as an example of one of the hard decisions that was made to make the app work better, rather than cling to the conventions established in the original. The added context of a couple of extra days ahead in the ticker is welcome, and a good choice.
There have been some other additions as well, background syncing is in full effect, making sure that appointments and reminders are at your fingertips when you open the app. Test Expander support has been added for keyboard shortcuts. It supports Apple’s dynamic text sizing for the trademark list of items. The customized keyboard in the event creation view now features an additional row of number keys for those times when you want to enter times or dates quickly without having to swap keyboard.
There is also now a beautifully expanded landscape week view, which animates in context to give you a bigger eye on your current week ahead.
And, at last, there is now extensive reminder support built right in to Fantastical.
Deep Reminders Support
The reminders support, says Simmons, goes far beyond adding support for ‘to do’ actions with tick boxes in the list view. The whole app was re-thought to make reminders an integral part of your calendar. Not only do you get color coded list options for completed and uncompleted reminders, the parser has also been customized, adding thousands of trigger words that let you automatically add items as reminders.
You’ll notice that the composer now has a toggle to force an item you’re creating to be a Reminder, but simply typing a trigger phrase will also create a reminder. ‘To-do, ‘remind’, remind me’ will all work, and hundreds of others.
Of course, all of this is integrated with Apple’s Reminders app. And it all supports geo-fencing to trigger on arrival to or departure from a location.
One example of how well thought out those reminders are: you don’t just get a list of all of you ongoing, undated items in the list. This would clutter up the display and become meaningless over time. Only the items you’ve attached a date or time to show up here. This retains the list’s status as your ‘agenda’, only showing you the stuff you must get done on a timely basis.
The new iOS 7 background notification support means that you can also now set alarms, using keywords like ‘alarm’. Previously, because of Apple’s restrictive backgrounding rules for apps, these would only trigger if they were synced to Calendar and that app sent the alert. Now, you can set alarms right within Fantastical and have them synced to the desktop version and triggered in the background.
At A Bargain
One of the most powerful things about the original Fantastical — and which gets retained in the new version — is that it was truly a calendar built from the ground up for how we use our mobile phones. There have been some other notable entries since like Sunrise, but the simple swipe-able interface of the app and powerful timeline view still makes it a standout.
Fantastical 2 is out on the App Store today as a $2.99 paid upgrade, which fits in with another trend we’re seeing. Developers who put in a significant amount of work on an iOS 7 update are charging for the new versions of the apps. Tweetbot did it and had major success on the App Store charts — while receiving a significant amount of blowback from users who saw it as a money grab.
As far as I’m concerned, paying a couple of bucks for a productivity app, especially one as essential, and great, as Fantastical is an easy choice. This is an app that I will open thousands of times over the next few years, and rely on heavily to make sure I’m where I am when I need to be. After an initial sale period, the app will go up to $4.99, which is still a bargain.
NASA eyes a 'decoupled' Tropical Depression Raymond
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Rob Gutro robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Satellite data shows that the lower level circulation of Raymond decoupled from the middle layer of the storm. When a Tropical Depression decouples, it means the layers of circulation in the atmosphere are no longer "stacked" on top of each other. NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on Raymond that showed the strongest storms, associated with a mid-level circulation center, had broken away from the center.
Think of a tropical cyclone as having several layers of circulation, a lower level, mid-level and upper level. When one of those levels is pushed away from the others, much like pushing the middle of a haystack, the storm weakens. That's what has happened to Raymond.
On Oct. 29 at 4:59 p.m. EDT, NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Raymond, still a tropical storm and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument captured an infrared image. The AIRS images revealed that the coldest cloud top temperatures, and highest, strongest storms were pushed away from the center of circulation. AIRS data also showed some high clouds associated with Raymond were streaming to the east-northeast and over the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. The image of the AIRS infrared data was created at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Tropical Storm Raymond weakened to a depression early on Oct. 30 and is expected to dissipate later in the day.
The National Hurricane Center noted that Raymond decoupled over the night of Oct. 29. Satellite data shows that the low-level center was a couple of hundred nautical miles to the southwest the mid-level circulation that includes an area of strong convection (rising air that forms thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone). Microwave satellite data also showed that Raymond has elongated, which is another sign of weakening.
To make matters worse for Raymond, its moving into cooler sea surface temperatures and running into dry air - two more factors that will sap its strength.
On Oct. 30 at 5 a.m. EDT/0900 UTC, Tropical Depression Raymond's maximum sustained winds were near 35 mph/55 kph and it was weakening. The center of the depression was located near latitude 19.6 north and longitude 115.7 west, about 440 miles/705 km west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Raymond was moving toward the northeast near 6 mph/9 kph and is expected to turn north while degenerating to a remnant low pressure area.
###
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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NASA eyes a 'decoupled' Tropical Depression Raymond
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Rob Gutro robert.j.gutro@nasa.gov NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Satellite data shows that the lower level circulation of Raymond decoupled from the middle layer of the storm. When a Tropical Depression decouples, it means the layers of circulation in the atmosphere are no longer "stacked" on top of each other. NASA's Aqua satellite captured infrared data on Raymond that showed the strongest storms, associated with a mid-level circulation center, had broken away from the center.
Think of a tropical cyclone as having several layers of circulation, a lower level, mid-level and upper level. When one of those levels is pushed away from the others, much like pushing the middle of a haystack, the storm weakens. That's what has happened to Raymond.
On Oct. 29 at 4:59 p.m. EDT, NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Raymond, still a tropical storm and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument captured an infrared image. The AIRS images revealed that the coldest cloud top temperatures, and highest, strongest storms were pushed away from the center of circulation. AIRS data also showed some high clouds associated with Raymond were streaming to the east-northeast and over the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. The image of the AIRS infrared data was created at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Tropical Storm Raymond weakened to a depression early on Oct. 30 and is expected to dissipate later in the day.
The National Hurricane Center noted that Raymond decoupled over the night of Oct. 29. Satellite data shows that the low-level center was a couple of hundred nautical miles to the southwest the mid-level circulation that includes an area of strong convection (rising air that forms thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone). Microwave satellite data also showed that Raymond has elongated, which is another sign of weakening.
To make matters worse for Raymond, its moving into cooler sea surface temperatures and running into dry air - two more factors that will sap its strength.
On Oct. 30 at 5 a.m. EDT/0900 UTC, Tropical Depression Raymond's maximum sustained winds were near 35 mph/55 kph and it was weakening. The center of the depression was located near latitude 19.6 north and longitude 115.7 west, about 440 miles/705 km west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California. Raymond was moving toward the northeast near 6 mph/9 kph and is expected to turn north while degenerating to a remnant low pressure area.
###
Text credit: Rob Gutro
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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A contentious and costly battle is taking shape in Colorado around the practice of hydraulic fracturing. In November, four communities will vote on local ballot issues seeking to limit or ban fracking. A similar measure is on the ballot in Ohio. Proponents say they're worried about health and environmental effects of the practice.
Voters in communities in Ohio and Colorado will decide measures this coming Tuesday that would ban or limit the practice of hydraulic fracturing. Across the U.S., campaigns questioning the health and safety of fracking for natural gas are heating up. Grace Hood of member station KUNC reports on the effort in Fort Collins, Colorado.
GRACE HOOD, BYLINE: Most look forward to having some downtime over the weekend, but not Kelly Giddens.
(SOUNDBITE OF KNOCKING)
KELLY GIDDENS: Hi. My name's Kelly. I'm with Citizens for a Healthy Fort Collins.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: OK.
GIDDENS: We're the ones that ran the petition on the five-year moratorium on fracking. Did you hear about that?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah, I did.
HOOD: A campaign organizer, Giddens spent a recent Saturday delivering flyers door-to-door to get the word out about Ballot Issue 2-A. The moratorium would be in addition to restrictions the city council passed earlier this year on hydraulic fracturing.
GIDDENS: This is really not about banning energy. We're not trying to turn people's lights out.
HOOD: A mother of four, Giddens says she's worried about the health implications of living nearby fracking operations.
GIDDENS: We're just trying to make sure that our kids don't wind up sick, you know. And we think that if there's problems, we need to talk about the issues.
RAY MARTINEZ: To me, in a nutshell, what it boils down to is you are asking the voters to vote for a lawsuit.
HOOD: Ray Martinez is campaign chair for the Fort Collins Alliance for Reliable Energy, which opposes the measure. Martinez says the moratorium could invite legal action. He cites the recent example of Longmont, Colorado, where citizens banned fracking in 2012.
MARTINEZ: And they're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation, which is exactly what they were warned about would happen if this passed. And they got it.
HOOD: The city of Longmont is actually engaged in two lawsuits. Across the country, citizens are pressing for local limits on hydraulic fracturing. That's according to Mark Schlosberg with Food and Water Watch, an advocacy group that's coordinating anti-fracking efforts from New York to California.
MARK SCHLOSBERG: You know, really, everywhere in between, communities are coming together to try to protect themselves from fracking. Three-hundred-eighty-three communities nationally have passed measures against fracking, and that number continues to grow.
HOOD: Food and Water Watch financially contributed to the Colorado groups seeking to place limits on fracking this fall. At a recent natural gas conference in Colorado, the economic consequences of the ballot measures were a topic of discussion. Scott Hall is CEO of Black Diamond Minerals, one of two companies that have operating agreements with the city of Fort Collins.
He says a moratorium would prevent him from developing leased mineral rights, a loss that could cost millions, possibly tens of millions of dollars.
SCOTT HALL: And if I can't drill and I can't develop, I've really taken a tremendous loss on just trying to lease that - the money I've already put into it, let alone the potential opportunity.
HOOD: The Colorado Oil and Gas Association is spending heavily to oppose ballot measures in four communities across the state. For Kelly Giddens, it's one more reason why she's giving up her weekends to get the word out about the fracking moratorium.
GIDDENS: So there's a state study coming out mid-2016 that's going to study some of the effects, and we are wanting to wait until that's over before we make a decision about whether to let fracking in our community.
HOOD: After listening to Giddens' pitch, Fort Collins resident Alex Vanderheiden says she's leaning toward supporting the measure, but hasn't filled out her mail-in ballot yet.
ALEX VANDERHEIDEN: Quite honestly, I don't know a lot about it, and don't know how it really affects me personally. So I haven't gotten that involved in it.
HOOD: Vanderheiden will have to decide by Tuesday, November 5th. In Ohio, voters in two cities will also weigh bans, and fracking opponents in California are increasingly targeting local governments after a push for a statewide moratorium was unsuccessful earlier this year. For NPR News, I'm Grace Hood in Fort Collins, Colorado.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
Contact: Katie Delach katharine.delach@uphs.upenn.edu 215-776-6063 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Lowering the cost of health care requires lowering the cost of medical education
PHILADELPHIA The costs of medical education must be reduced as part of efforts to reign in health care costs more generally, according to a Perspective published online this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The currently high costs of medical education which at some schools rise above $60,000 per year are sustainable only if physician salaries remain high, which the authors, led by a physician from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, say is less likely because of efforts to reduce health care costs.
Noting that students leave medical school with debt that often exceeds $150,000, the authors argue: "If we want to keep health care costs down and still have access to well-qualified physicians, we need to keep the cost of creating those physicians down by changing the way that physicians are trained. From college through licensure and credentialing, our annual physician-production costs are high, and they are made higher by the long time we devote to training."
"People wonder whether we are in a bubble market in medical education," says lead author David A. Asch, MD, MBA, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Health Care Innovation at Penn Medicine. In bubble markets, such as the recent US housing market and the dotcom bubble of 2000, prices rise based on speculation rather than intrinsic value, as people buy houses or stocks with the hope of reselling them to those with even more optimistic views of their valuation. When clearer thinking returns, those who haven't sold are left having overpaid, holding an asset they cannot unload. "In the case of medical education, students buy their education from medical schools and resell that education in the form of services to patients. Medical education can remain expensive only so long as there are patients, insurers, and employers who are willing to pay high prices for health care. But if prices for physician services decline, then the cost of medical education will have to decline too, or people won't be willing to pay for medical school in the first place," Asch says.
The authors warn that high debt-to-income ratios drive students away from less financially rewarding fields. "Debt-to-income ratios reveal how much a student has to go into the hole financially for education compared to what a graduating student might earn," says Asch. "For example, it costs approximately the same to become an orthopedist, psychiatrist, or primary care physician, but orthopedists earn much more."
That might suggest that there is already a medical education bubble for psychiatry and primary care, but as bad as the debt-to-income ratios might be for those fields, they are even worse for some other fields outside of medicine. The authors note that veterinary medicine is closer to a bubble market situation, which could burst when potential students recognize that the high costs of becoming a veterinarian aren't matched by high income later.
As the cost of education in general rises, students might naturally be expected to focus more on those fields that provide a better balance between cost and return. "Veterinary education is vulnerable, medicine less so. Business education still seems to be a good buy." But, Asch asks, "Do we really want a world populated only by MBAs?"
"Doctors do well financially," says Asch, "but the cost of becoming a doctor is rising faster than the benefits of being a doctor, and that is catching up to primary care more quickly than orthopedics, and that ratio is close to overtaking the veterinarians." While only about 20 percent of health care costs are attributable to physician payments, physicians' earnings have been sluggish since the early 2000s. The authors note that a burst bubble can be averted if schools see these changes coming before their students do and lower their prices.
###
Co-authors on the perspective are Sean Nicholson, PhD, Cornell University and the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Marko Vujicic, PhD of the American Dental Association.
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; Chester County Hospital; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Chestnut Hill Hospital and Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
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Is medical education in a bubble market?
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
30-Oct-2013
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Contact: Katie Delach katharine.delach@uphs.upenn.edu 215-776-6063 University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Lowering the cost of health care requires lowering the cost of medical education
PHILADELPHIA The costs of medical education must be reduced as part of efforts to reign in health care costs more generally, according to a Perspective published online this week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The currently high costs of medical education which at some schools rise above $60,000 per year are sustainable only if physician salaries remain high, which the authors, led by a physician from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, say is less likely because of efforts to reduce health care costs.
Noting that students leave medical school with debt that often exceeds $150,000, the authors argue: "If we want to keep health care costs down and still have access to well-qualified physicians, we need to keep the cost of creating those physicians down by changing the way that physicians are trained. From college through licensure and credentialing, our annual physician-production costs are high, and they are made higher by the long time we devote to training."
"People wonder whether we are in a bubble market in medical education," says lead author David A. Asch, MD, MBA, Professor of Medicine and Director of the Center for Health Care Innovation at Penn Medicine. In bubble markets, such as the recent US housing market and the dotcom bubble of 2000, prices rise based on speculation rather than intrinsic value, as people buy houses or stocks with the hope of reselling them to those with even more optimistic views of their valuation. When clearer thinking returns, those who haven't sold are left having overpaid, holding an asset they cannot unload. "In the case of medical education, students buy their education from medical schools and resell that education in the form of services to patients. Medical education can remain expensive only so long as there are patients, insurers, and employers who are willing to pay high prices for health care. But if prices for physician services decline, then the cost of medical education will have to decline too, or people won't be willing to pay for medical school in the first place," Asch says.
The authors warn that high debt-to-income ratios drive students away from less financially rewarding fields. "Debt-to-income ratios reveal how much a student has to go into the hole financially for education compared to what a graduating student might earn," says Asch. "For example, it costs approximately the same to become an orthopedist, psychiatrist, or primary care physician, but orthopedists earn much more."
That might suggest that there is already a medical education bubble for psychiatry and primary care, but as bad as the debt-to-income ratios might be for those fields, they are even worse for some other fields outside of medicine. The authors note that veterinary medicine is closer to a bubble market situation, which could burst when potential students recognize that the high costs of becoming a veterinarian aren't matched by high income later.
As the cost of education in general rises, students might naturally be expected to focus more on those fields that provide a better balance between cost and return. "Veterinary education is vulnerable, medicine less so. Business education still seems to be a good buy." But, Asch asks, "Do we really want a world populated only by MBAs?"
"Doctors do well financially," says Asch, "but the cost of becoming a doctor is rising faster than the benefits of being a doctor, and that is catching up to primary care more quickly than orthopedics, and that ratio is close to overtaking the veterinarians." While only about 20 percent of health care costs are attributable to physician payments, physicians' earnings have been sluggish since the early 2000s. The authors note that a burst bubble can be averted if schools see these changes coming before their students do and lower their prices.
###
Co-authors on the perspective are Sean Nicholson, PhD, Cornell University and the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Marko Vujicic, PhD of the American Dental Association.
Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $4.3 billion enterprise.
The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 16 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $398 million awarded in the 2012 fiscal year.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania -- recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center; Chester County Hospital; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Chestnut Hill Hospital and Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine.
Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2012, Penn Medicine provided $827 million to benefit our community.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Web videoconferencing may get easier after a decision by Cisco Systems that should help bring widely used technology into browsers.
Cisco announced in a blog post Wednesday that it plans to make its codec based on the H.264 standard available as a free, open-source download from the Internet. Also on Wednesday, Mozilla said it would add the technology to Firefox.
H.264 is a standard for real-time video that is widely used by Cisco and other vendors. It hasn't become a native part of the major browsers because it requires royalty payments to MPEG LA, which licenses the technology. In order to make H.264 available for browsers, Cisco will not pass on its licensing costs for the codec.
Without a native codec in browsers that works with major videoconferencing platforms, users have had to download an application or plug-in before doing a video chat in a browser, said Nemertes Research analyst Irwin Lazar. That often means dealing with security settings that try to block new software, plus installing updates to the software over time. Google includes its own VP8 video codec free in the Chrome browser, but Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla have steered clear of VP8, Lazar said. H.264 is the standard that can get browser users connected to other videoconferencing platforms, he said.
Cisco wants to clear a path to getting H.264 included in WebRTC, a set of multimedia features in the HTML5 standard. The Internet Engineering Task Force is scheduled to choose a video codec for WebRTC at a meeting next week in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service , IDG News Service
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for the IDG News Service. More by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
So this is completely terrifying. In a you will probably pee a little bit as you watch this GIF kind of way. In a holy crap wait a minute this isn't a video game right kind of way. No, no it is not. This is what it looks like to take a direct hit from a tank shell in real life. You can see it blast out of the barrel and head straight for your face.
President Barack Obama speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Protesters interrupt President Barack Obama as he speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama speaks at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall about the federal health care law, Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2013. Faneuil Hall is where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Obama's rival in the 2012 presidential election, signed the state's landmark health care law in 2006, with top Democrats standing by his side. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
BOSTON (AP) — President Barack Obama chose the site where Massachusetts' health care system became law to promote his signature health insurance program, arguing that the state plan also faced initial setbacks and low enrollment but in time gained popularity and became a success.
"All the parade of horribles, the worst predictions about health care reform in Massachusetts never came true," he said. "They're the same arguments that you're hearing now."
The Massachusetts' law provided the model for the federal health insurance overhaul. Obama spoke in Boston's historic Faneuil Hall, where Massachusetts Republican Gov. Mitt Romney was joined by the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy to sign the state's 2006 health care overhaul bill.
The president pointed to benefits already available under the 3-year-old health care law, including ending discrimination against children with pre-existing conditions and permission to keep young people on their parents' insurance plans until they turn 26.
But he conceded the troubled launch of the open enrollment period that began Oct. 1.
"I am not happy about it," he said.
Underscoring the president's challenge, the HealthCare.gov website was down, because of technical difficulties, during his remarks. Republicans say the current computer dysfunction is more reason to repeal the law, and they're pressing Obama administration officials for an explanation.
Obama also tried to clarify the most recent controversy surrounding the law — the wave of cancellation notices hitting small businesses and individuals who buy their own insurance. Obama repeatedly had vowed that people who liked their insurance would be able to keep it.
The cancellation notices apply to people whose plans changed after the law was implemented or don't meet new coverage requirements. The president said those changes ensure that all Americans are able to get quality coverage.
He said that because of government subsidies, most people who must get new policies will pay less than they do now. But he acknowledged that "a fraction of Americans with higher incomes" will likely pay more.
Romney took issue with Obama's characterization of the Massachusetts health care law. In a statement, he said "had President Obama actually learned the lessons of Massachusetts health care, millions of Americans would not lose the insurance they were promised they could keep, millions more would not see their premiums skyrocket and the installation of the program would not have been a frustrating embarrassment." During the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney had pledged to work for the repeal of Obama's health care law if elected.
Obama, who lived in Boston while a student at Harvard University, was in town for a World Series game day, but his spokesman said he didn't plan to make a side trip to Fenway Park, mindful of the impact his security entourage has on the public.
While in Boston, Obama also spoke at a fundraiser for House Democrats, where about 60 people dined on Spanish-influenced fare, followed by Red Sox cookies honoring the World Series game being played in town the same night.
Invoking the school shooting in nearby Connecticut and the Boston Marathon bombing, Obama said it had been a "challenging year." He said he had hoped the tragedies would presage a new spirit of cooperation in Congress, but Americans got obstruction, instead.
"However low people's estimations were of Washington before the shutdown," Obama said, "they're lower now."
___
Associated Press writer Steve LeBlanc in Boston contributed to this report.
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Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler
FILE - This is a Friday, May 18, 2012 file photo of President Barack Obama, right, greets President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso on Barroso's arrival for the G8 Summit at Camp David, Md. The backlash in Europe over U.S. spying is threatening an agreement that generates tens of billions of dollars in trans-Atlantic business every year _ and negotiations on another pact worth many times more. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
FILE - This is a Friday, May 18, 2012 file photo of President Barack Obama, right, greets President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso on Barroso's arrival for the G8 Summit at Camp David, Md. The backlash in Europe over U.S. spying is threatening an agreement that generates tens of billions of dollars in trans-Atlantic business every year _ and negotiations on another pact worth many times more. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)
BRUSSELS (AP) — The backlash in Europe over U.S. spying is threatening an agreement that generates tens of billions of dollars in trans-Atlantic business every year — and negotiations on another pact worth many times more.
A growing number of European officials are calling for the suspension of the "Safe Harbor" agreement that lets U.S. companies process commercial and personal data — sales, emails, photos — from customers in Europe. This little-known but vital deal allows more than 4,200 American companies to do business in Europe, including Internet giants like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Revelations of the extent of U.S. spying on its European allies is also threatening to undermine one of President Barack Obama's top trans-Atlantic goals: a sweeping free-trade agreement that would add an estimated $138 billion (100 billion euros) a year to each economy's gross domestic product.
Top EU officials say the trust needed for the negotiations has been shattered.
"For ambitious and complex negotiations to succeed, there needs to be trust among the negotiating partners," EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said Wednesday in a speech at Yale University.
At the very least, the Europeans are expected to demand that the U.S. significantly strengthen its privacy laws to give consumers much more control over how companies use their personal data — and extend those rights to European citizens, maybe even giving them the right to sue American companies in U.S. courts.
The Europeans had long been pressing these issues with the Americans. But since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began to leak surprising details on the extent of U.S. surveillance in Europe, the European demands have grown teeth.
"I don't think the U.S. government can be convinced by arguments or outrage alone, but by making it clear that American interests will suffer if this global surveillance is simply continued," said Peter Schaar, the head of Germany's data protection watchdog.
One sanction the European Union could slap on the U.S. would be to suspend the Safe Harbor deal, which allows American businesses to store and process their data where they want. It aims to ensure that European customers' data are just as safe as in Europe when handled in the U.S.
"But if you look at the U.S. legal environment, there is no adequate legal protection for EU citizens," said the European Parliament's leading data protection lawmaker Jan Philipp Albrecht after talks with U.S. officials in Washington.
By signing up for the self-reporting scheme supervised by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, U.S. companies gain the right to move data about their business and consumers back and forth between the EU and the U.S. as needed.
Without it, U.S. firms would face either a lengthy and complicated case-by-case approval procedure by European data protection authorities, or a technological nightmare of having to ensure that European data is stored and processed only on servers within the 28-nation bloc. That would be costly and in some cases impossible — and could force U.S. businesses to stop servicing European customers.
"There is really no viable alternative in the near-term," said Chris Babel, chief executive of San Francisco-based TRUSTe, which helps American firms get Safe Harbor certification from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
He estimates that U.S. companies would face tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue and additional costs to redesign their technological infrastructure.
Facebook declined to comment on what a suspension of Safe Harbor would mean. Microsoft hailed the agreement for establishing "legal certainty" but declined to elaborate. Spokespeople for Google, Apple and Amazon could not immediately be reached.
Of course, any suspension would hurt Europe as well, just as the 28-nation bloc is emerging from a recession. Consumers and businesses would find themselves without U.S.-based services from flight-booking websites to email providers.
Options available to the EU include suspending or ending the agreement, or demanding that the United States enact more powerful data protection laws that include substantial fines for companies that don't keep data safe.
Germany, Europe's biggest economy, said Wednesday that it also wants to see changes in Safe Harbor.
"We share the opinion that the Safe Harbor agreement needs significant improvements," Interior Ministry spokesman Philipp Spauschus said.
U.S. Federal Trade Commission chief Edith Ramirez said Safe Harbor has nothing to do with the surveillance scandal, and urged Europeans not to damage what she called a commercial agreement that works well.
"It cannot be right ... to conflate the distinct issues raised by the use of personal data to advance private commercial interests and to protect national security," she said Monday in Brussels.
But the EU's Reding made clear that the status quo is not an option.
"The existing scheme has been criticized by European industry and questioned by European citizens: They say it is little more than a patch providing a veil of legitimacy for the U.S. firms using it," she said Tuesday in Washington.
Her agency is reviewing Safe Harbor and will present its results by the end of the year. The EU Commission could suspend the agreement or seek amendments to it rather easily, without the usual lengthy procedures of having to seek approval from all EU member states or the European Parliament.
An even bigger battle looms over already contentious free-trade talks between the world's two biggest economies. Trade volume between the United States and the European Union totaled 800 billion euros last year.
Reding warned this week that the lack of data privacy safeguards in the U.S. could "easily derail" the talks, which resume in December and are expected to be concluded within a year.
It appears certain that as part of the negotiations the EU will insist on tougher U.S. data protection in line with new European laws.
That legislation lets users instruct companies to fully erase their personal data — the so-called right to be forgotten — as well as limiting user profiling, requiring greater transparency from companies and mandating prior consent. Plus they contain stiff fines for violations.
"Otherwise, the European Parliament may decide to reject" the EU-U.S. free trade deal, Reding said.
The most significant action taken in Brussels so far has been a vote by the European Parliament urging Europe to stop sharing bank transfer data with U.S. law enforcement in terror investigations.
But that resolution would need approval from the European Commission — and from all 28 national governments, a long and uncertain process.
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Frank Jordans and Geir Moulson in Berlin and Deb Riechmann in Washington contributed reporting from Berlin.
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Follow Juergen Baetz on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz
Tesla’s West Coast Supercharger Corridor opened today, making it possible for owners of the Model S to travel free between San Diego and Vancouver, using Highway 101 and Interstate 5. This makes a Supercharger reachable within 200 miles to over 99 percent of Californians and 87 percent of those in Oregon and Washington.
A lot of attention has been paid to Tesla’s efforts to make a coast-to-coast trip in one of its vehicles a reality, via Superchargers and other charging stations, but blanketing the West Coast means that Tesla S owners can now travel from essentially the Mexican border to within the Canadian one without paying any money to fill their cars, and with a minimal amount of charging time required. Superchargers can charge a Tesla S to a capacity worth around 200 miles of driving distance in just 30 minutes, and the stations are positioned near restaurants and shopping centers to give you something to do while your car powers up.
To promote the new corridor, Tesla is having two Model S vehicles make the trip from San Diego to Vancouver, and they’ll be pushing updates to their various social media properties along the way. Spoiler alert: those cars are definitely going to make it without incident.
Supercharger rollout continues globally, with Tesla announcing plans in September to cover 100 percent of the population of Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark and Luxembourg, and 90 percent of the population in England, Wales, and Sweden with a station within 320 kms by the end of 2014. Getting past that basic excuse of “I can’t buy one, there’s nowhere to charge” is clearly a huge part of the company’s global rollout strategy, which is why each of these Supercharger network expansions is a big win for Tesla and for founder Elon Musk.
We weren't expecting to like the Pixma MG7120 as much as we did, as we're predisposed against printers with high black ink costs. But the overall experience and print quality softened our stance. At $200 (as of 10/30/2013) it's about as good as you'll get in a photo-oriented MFP, but yes, we'd prefer pay a bit less per page for ink.
Design includes front-loading cartridges
The Pixma MG7120 has a beveled-edge design distinct to certain Canon printers of the last several years, and other design improvements that were introduced last year with its cousin, the Pixma MG6320. You control the printer using an upper front touch panel: A 3.5-inch touchscreen display contains most functions, with contextually lit buttons that show up as needed. It has a very short learning curve. You lift that panel to access the ink cartridges, instead of lifting up the entire scanner bed, as with most multifunctions. You can connect via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB.
Paper capacity is limited: 125 sheets of plain paper in the bottom cassette, and 20 sheets of 4-by-6-inch or 5-by-7-inch photo paper in the photo tray found directly above that. Flip over the photo tray, and you'll find the optical media tray, which inserts into a slot just above the output tray. The output tray itself is immediately above the paper trays and opens automatically when printing or copying. There's no automatic document feeder (ADF) for scanning or copying multi-page documents, which isn't unusual for a home-oriented printer, but we like it when we see it. The HP Photosmart 7520 is a like-priced competitor that has an ADF (and—ahem—cheaper ink).
Next to the ouput tray, another front panel folds out to reveal three card slots: Secure Digital, Compact Flash, and Memory Stick. You may print via any of them as well as Wireless Pictbridge.
The Pixma MG7120 comes with the usual array of remote printing features (email, Wi-Fi, though no NFC), and Canon has apps for both Android and iOS. The top-mounted scanner bed is A4/letter-sized with a lid that telescopes an inch or so to accommodate thicker materials.
Canon's My Image Garden is the main software application used for scanning, editing, printing to optical discs, and keeping track of images, But the company also provides utilities for viewing images on the desktop and launching various features of the printer (scan, copy, edit, etc.) They're especially handy if you're dedicating an office PC for printer chores, limiting the amount of time you must spend hunting through the applications for the feature you need. For occasional use, they're probably overkill.
Six-ink system produces great photos
To get the best results from the Pixma MG7120, you'll need to use good photo paper, which will always set you back a few dimes. But Canon could do better with the ink costs.The Pixma MG7120 uses a six-color system: black, pigment black, cyan, gray, magenta, and yellow. All are available in both standard and high-yield ('XL') capacities. In standard capacity, black pages cost about 5 cents, and four-color pages 16.6 cents. This is not counting the extra photo-black and photo-gray, which contribute miniscule amounts to a non-photo page. The XL-capacity cartridges are only slightly cheaper: 4.6 cents per page for black, and 12.7 cents for all four colors. If you print occasionally—tickets, web pages, and the like—then the MG7120 has decent costs. If you print lots of monochrome business documents, not so much.
The quality of the Pixma MG7120's output is where it earns its keep. Photos are superb for a $200 photo printer, and the color palette is nicely balanced, neither overly warm or cold. Text is sharp, and there was nary a defect in large areas of black, which is where you'll usually spot any problems with a print system. No striations, no banding, no muddled edges. Good stuff here.
Performance is better than average for a photo printer. Subjectively, we never felt like we were waiting an overly long time for output to arrive—especially when using draft mode, whose quality is good enough for most everyday applications (and will stretch your ink a lot further). By the numbers, the Pixma MG7120 printed text and mixed monochrome pages at an aggregate 8.6 pages per minute on the PC and 7.9 on the Mac. 4-inch by 6-inch photos printed at 2.7 per minute to plain paper and 1.7 per minute to glossy stock. A full 8.5-inch by 11-inch photo printed on the Mac took just over two minutes.
Scans were decently fast, at just under a half-minute at 600 dpi and just under a minute at 1200 dpi. Copies arrived at a sprightly 5 pages per minute.
The good outweighs the ink
The Canon Pixma MG7120 color inkjet multifunction delivers extremely nice photos, and text quality that's just this side of laser. It also automatically duplexes and has some of the easiest controls the company has produced to date. It's a printer well worth considering, even with its somewhat pricey inks.
Jon L. Jacobi Jon Jacobi, PCWorld
Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks. More by Jon L. Jacobi
Melissa Riofrio Senior Editor, PCWorld
The daughter of a mechanical engineer, Melissa grew up playing with machine parts and still loves getting into the nuts and bolts of how things work. She is never happier than when she is on a factory tour. More by Melissa Riofrio
It's no secret that Facebook likes its targeted advertising. However, that affinity may soon blossom into a full-fledged love affair. The social network's Ken Rudin tells the Wall Street Journal that his company is testing a system which targets ads based on where users' mouse cursors hover; it can also tell whether or not mobile users see their news feeds. Neither tracking technology is new, but the scale of behavioral data collection would be unprecedented when Facebook has almost 1.2 billion users. Don't be too quick to close your account in protest, though. Rudin notes that there won't be a decision on the technology for another "couple of months," and it may never see the light of day. If you don't like the idea of Facebook monitoring your on-screen habits, we'd suggest making yourself heard.
Y Combinator-incubated legal startup Lawdingo is announcing that it has raised another $690,000 in funding.
The company’s goal is to make it more convenient and affordable for users to connect with a lawyer (in contrast to a service like LegalZoom, which offers legal forms rather than actual consultation with an attorney). Users can search the site and browse profiles based on a lawyer’s location and expertise, then schedule an appointment or talk to them right then.
Founder and CEO Nikhil Nirmel said one of the more popular features, which was added since I last wrote about the company, is the ability to “get a call now” — Lawdingo can instantly connect users with a relevant lawyer by phone. Lawyers provide Lawdingo with their availability, so when a request comes in, the system reaches out to the ones who are available and have relevant expertise until it finds one who’s free to talk.
Nirmel added that this is an efficient way for lawyers to find new clients. They’re available for these conversations because lawyers “don’t operate as much on a strict appointment schedule … Unless they’re in court, they can still take client calls.”
The business model has also been tweaked, with Lawdingo abandoning a plan where lawyers bid to promote their listings. The company has since gone back to the flat subscription fee that it started out with.
Lawdingo now has lawyers in every state, with the biggest concentration in California, New York, and Massachusetts (Nirmel said there are more than 200 lawyers listed in each of those states). To address the challenge of managing supply and demand in different categories, he said his team built a feature that will automatically spend more money in targeted advertising when the site needs to attract more clients in a given area.
Speaking of advertising, Lawdingo also produced the tongue-in-cheek marketing video that I’ve embedded below. Nirmel said his aim is to “lighten up the legal industry,” which he said “takes itself too seriously — they’re a service provider like everyone else.”
Nirmal participated in the Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator program earlier this year but has since moved to New York. Lawdingo’s 15-person team remains distributed in multiple locations, with Nirmal using tools like GitHub and Skype to manage everyone. When pressed on whether this is actually an effective way to run a company, he replied, “Truthfully, I don’t know how large it can scale, but for now, I think it works well.”
The new funding comes from angel investors (and funds run by angel investors) including Nathaniel Stevens, Kartik Hosanagar, Gene Alston, Altair Capital, Atsany Captial, and Andrew Moroz. It brings Lawdingo’s total funding to $850,000.
We're used to hearing about military camouflage, which has been used to hide everything from ships to whole towns. But there are plenty of less explicit forms of large-scale camouflage out there—like the architectural sort, which ranges from hiding buildings just below the ground plane to coating them in mirrors.
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