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Sen. John McCain on Wednesday compared a comment he made during his 2008 presidential bid to one made by his party's 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, which is similarly drawing heavy Democratic flak.
At the time, McCain later pedaled back on his comment.
Clips recorded secretly at a May fundraiser and released Monday showed Romney saying 47% of the electorate are dependent on government. He said they see themselves as victims, and would "vote for the president no matter what."
Criticism from Democrats piled on. At a news conference Monday evening, Romney said the comments were "not elegantly stated." His campaign has said the comments were aimed at criticizing expanding entitlement programs.
McCain, a high-profile supporter of Romney and a senator from Arizona, defended the candidate Wednesday on AC360, saying the comments were being misunderstood.
Filed under: 2012 Election • Mitt Romney • Senator John McCain
I'm sorry but this is the second time Mitt has said he doesn't care about poor people. I guess it's true.
I think Mitt Romney meant that 47% of the country feels some sort of entitlement. They feel the government owes them more than they get. I think they feel they are paying too high of taxes. They believe the government should get out of debt, but they don't want to be the ones to pay for it. I think Mitt Romney believes that 47% of Americans have already made up their mind to vote for Obama and he is not going to try to persuade them otherwise in 50 days. He also believes the statistic that 47% of the country doesn't pay income tax. The problem is that he threw them all in the same boat. In reality, those 3 groups of 47% overlap, but they are not all the same. Certainly there are people who believe they are entitled to more, who grudgingly pay their "fair share" because the government forces them to. They are people who will vote for lower taxes and more benefits. Those people do pay income tax, but the are in the 47% of people who feel entitlement, who won't vote for Romney. The statistics are all there, and I think they are accurate. The only reason we are debating this is because he said the 47% who won't vote for him IS THE SAME 47% who don't pay any taxes, and that is simply not factually correct. I think if he were really pressed to explain it, that would be his explanation.
Anderson Cooper goes beyond the headlines to tell stories from many points of view, so you can make up your own mind about the news. Tune in weeknights at 8 and 10 ET on CNN.
Questions or comments? Send an email
Want to know more? Go behind the scenes with AC361°


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Keep your heart with all diligence; for from it flow the springs of life.
– Proverbs 4:23
It is well documented that the risk of heart disease is 2–4 times higher in people with diabetes as compared to the general population. In fact, the risk is so high that two in three people with diabetes die from heart disease or stroke. However, when you have diabetes, it is uncontrolled blood glucose levels that place you at the highest risk for heart disease. Uncontrolled blood glucose levels and related complications may contribute to the development of fatty deposits on the insides of your blood vessels. This is referred to as atherosclerosis, the "hardening of the arteries" that can reduce the amount of blood flow to the heart, brain, and limbs.
What this means for people with diabetes is that they may develop heart disease at an earlier age than others and that their chance of having a heart attack is as high as that of a person without diabetes who has already had a heart attack. While women who don't have diabetes see their risk of heart disease increase dramatically after menopause, women with diabetes have an increased risk even before menopause, because diabetes cancels out the protective effects of higher levels of estrogen. Also, heart attacks in people with diabetes tend to be more serious, being more likely to result in death.
Assessing your risk factors
In addition to uncontrolled blood glucose levels, there are other risk factors for heart disease that are common among people with diabetes. Since many of them can be treated effectively, your cardiovascular risk factors should be assessed by your physician at least once a year. Timely diagnosis allows you to develop a plan with your diabetes care team to prevent or treat existing heart disease. The following factors contribute to heart disease risk:
Genetics. Heart disease tends to run in families, and so does diabetes. When you have diabetes, your risk for heart disease may be higher if a family member has had a heart attack at a younger age (before 55 years old for men and before 65 years old for women).
Central weight. Carrying extra weight around your waist raises your risk of heart disease. You may have heard central weight distribution referred to as an "apple-shaped" weight pattern (as opposed to "pear-shaped," where extra weight is concentrated in the hips and legs). Your risk further increases if you are obese. For that reason, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute now recommends taking both body-mass index and waist circumference into consideration when assessing a person's risk of heart disease. Men who are both obese and have a waist circumference of 40 inches or larger, and women who are obese and have a waist circumference of 35 inches or larger are at very high risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Abdominal fat is associated with an increase the body's production of low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or "bad") cholesterol. A high level of LDL cholesterol or a high proportion of small, dense LDL cholesterol particles raises the risk of heart disease.
High blood pressure. Chronic high blood pressure affects the majority of people with diabetes. High blood pressure is a major risk factor for atherosclerosis and heart disease and can contribute to other blood vessel problems in diabetes, as well.
Dyslipidemia. Having high total blood cholesterol, high LDL cholesterol, high triglycerides, and low HDL cholesterol raises the risk of heart disease. Cholesterol and triglycerides are collectively called blood lipids, and any combination of abnormal lipid levels is called dyslipidemia. People with Type 2 diabetes very often have high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and a high proportion of small, dense LDL cholesterol particles, which are more harmful than normal LDL cholesterol particles.
Smoking. Smoking doubles your risk of developing heart disease. Smoking causes narrowing of the blood vessels and deprives them of oxygen, an important nutrient to the circulatory system.
Diabetes ABCs
In an effort to draw public attention to the connection between diabetes and heart disease and stroke, the American Diabetes Association and the American College of Cardiology have joined together in an educational initiative that focuses on the acronym "ABC." The letters stand for "A1C," "Blood Pressure," and "Cholesterol."
People with diabetes are encouraged to be aware of their A1C (also called HbA1c or glycosylated hemoglobin) level, blood pressure level, and cholesterol levels. It is hoped that increased awareness of these numbers, what they mean to a person's health, and what a person's target numbers are for good health will lead to more discussion with health-care providers and more action taken to bring levels into target range.
To read more about the ABCs, how often they should be measured, and recommended goals for most people with diabetes, see "ABCs of Diabetes."
Modifying your lifestyle
The benefits of the healthy lifestyle habits that are recommended for the management of diabetes extend to your heart health, as well. A healthy lifestyle includes healthy eating, getting regular physical activity, maintaining a healthy weight, and stopping smoking if you smoke.
Healthy eating. Good nutrition is vital for anyone, and for people with diabetes it is an important part of their treatment plan. If you haven't already worked with a dietitian to design an individualized meal plan, ask your diabetes care team for a referral to a registered dietitian. It is best to work with a dietitian who specializes in diabetes.
The good news is that you can tackle blood glucose, blood pressure, and blood lipid levels head-on with the right nutrition intake. Common recommendations include increasing the amount of fiber in your meal plan, which may help lower blood cholesterol. Foods such as oat bran, oatmeal, whole-grain breads and cereals, dried beans and peas (such as kidney beans, pinto beans, and black-eyed peas), fruits, and vegetables are all good sources of fiber.
Monitoring your fat intake can also be important for cholesterol control. Fat should make up no more than 30% of your total energy intake, and most of that fat should be monounsaturated or polyunsaturated. Limiting the amount of saturated fat, trans fat, and cholesterol you eat can help to lower your blood cholesterol levels.
Efforts to control your blood pressure may include reducing your sodium (or salt) intake.
Physical activity. Performing regular physical activity or exercise can improve blood glucose control, help control weight, improve your overall well-being, and reduce your risk for heart disease. To achieve these results, performing at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week and/or at least 90 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise a week is recommended. The activity should be distributed over at least three days of the week, with no more than two consecutive days without physical activity. People with Type 2 diabetes are additionally encouraged to do resistance exercises targeting all major muscle groups three times weekly, as long as they have no contraindications, or medical reasons not to perform resistance exercise.
Before increasing your level of physical activity or starting a formal exercise plan, discuss your plans with your diabetes care team. Your health-care providers may want to conduct certain medical tests prior to exercise, especially if you have been sedentary. In addition, you and your diabetes care team should talk about how to control your blood glucose levels during exercise and when to make adjustments to your usual diabetes regimen. (For more about physical activity, see "Staying Active.")
Healthy weight. The goals you set with your diabetes care team for staying active and eating healthfully should help you to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. If you need to lose weight, a sensible, gradual weight loss plan is most likely to result in permanent weight loss. Increasing your physical activity while consuming fewer calories will help to make sure the weight you are losing is fat and not muscle.
Stopping smoking. If you smoke, quitting is highly recommended because of the detrimental effects smoking has on the blood vessels and heart. That is not to say it is easy. The first step is deciding that you are willing to quit, then working with your diabetes care team to decide on a plan that will work for you.
If lifestyle changes alone don't bring your blood glucose, blood pressure, and blood cholesterol levels into target range, drug therapy may be necessary. Some people are reluctant to take drugs, particularly if they are experiencing no symptoms or don't feel bad on a day-to-day basis. But while high blood glucose, high blood pressure, and cholesterol disorders may cause no or few symptoms in the early stages, over time they can do real damage to your internal organs, which will cause symptoms, so it is important to treat them early.
Regularly monitoring your A1C level, blood pressure, and blood lipids will provide you and your diabetes care team with the information needed to make decisions about your need for drug therapy. Remember, medication is not the enemy if it helps keep your "ABCs" in order.
Aspirin therapy is considered in some people with diabetes, such as those with an increased cardiovascular risk. It has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attack by 30% and the risk of stroke by 20%. However, aspirin therapy is not for everyone, so you should consult your physician before you start to take aspirin regularly. Your physician will take into consideration your age, your heart disease risk factors, other drugs you might be taking, and your heart health history in making a recommendation regarding aspirin therapy.
Symptoms of heart disease
Angina, or pain that occurs when a blood vessel to the heart is narrowed and blood flow is reduced, is a common sign of heart disease. The pain can vary in severity from one episode to the next and can include chest discomfort or pain that radiates to your shoulders, arms, jaw, or back, especially during exercise. The pain may go away when you rest or take a medicine that your physician prescribes for the angina. Angina does not typically cause permanent damage to the heart muscle, but it is a symptom of diminished blood flow to the heart and a warning of an increased risk of having a heart attack.
When a blood vessel that flows to the heart becomes blocked and blood flow to the heart is inhibited, a heart attack occurs. If not enough blood reaches a part of the heart muscle, permanent damage will result.
Men and women tend to have somewhat different symptoms when having a heart attack. Common symptoms of a heart attack in men include the following:
- Chest pain, pressure, or discomfort
- Pain or discomfort in the arms, back, jaw, neck, or stomach
- Shortness of breath
- Sweating
- Nausea and sometimes vomiting
- Dizziness or a feeling of light-headedness
Common symptoms of a heart attack in women include these:
- Unusual fatigue
- Sleep disturbances
- Shortness of breath
- Diffuse discomfort
- Depression
Regardless of sex, not everyone who has a heart attack has all the symptoms. In fact, some people, particularly those with diabetes, may have very subtle symptoms or none at all. This is usually because of nerve damage caused by diabetes, which may result in lack of pain during a heart attack.
If you believe you are having a heart attack, don't delay: get emergency help immediately. Keep in mind that treatment is most effective if given within an hour of a heart attack and can prevent damage to the heart that may be permanent.
Another common form of heart disease is congestive heart failure, a chronic condition in which the heart cannot pump blood properly, causing tiredness and weakness, and fluid builds up inside body tissues. If the buildup is in the lungs, breathing becomes difficult. Fluid buildup can also result in swelling in the feet, legs, and abdomen. Uncontrolled blood glucose levels in people with diabetes may lead to small blood vessel (microvascular) disease, which contributes to loss of heart-muscle tone, resulting in congestive heart failure. People with diabetes have at least twice the risk of congestive heart failure as those without diabetes.
Staying heart-healthy
While having diabetes does increase your risk for heart disease, it doesn't make it inevitable. Work with your diabetes care team to learn all you can about the risks you have, the ongoing options for treatment, and the best action plan to keep you in good health. After all, it is truly a matter to take to heart!

subset: commoncrawl


text: Unless the seller is requesting a public discussion on an item's value, please discuss price/offers in PMs. Don't like the price? Move on or PM and make an offer, or PM suggesting a price change if you feel so bold. If you want to discuss what a pedal might be worth (without targeting other ILFers), discuss it in the Gear section.


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As you most likely know already, Apple's iPhone has a recessed headphone port, sunk several millimeters below the rest of its metal top surface. Consequently, if you own pre-iPhone earphones made by any company except Apple, there's a very good chance that they won't physically connect to the iPhone, so you have two options: buy new earphones, or buy an adapter. We've previously reviewed a number of different adapter options, including Griffin's Headphone Adapter for iPhone, Belkin's Headphone Adapter for iPhone, Monster Cable's iSplitter 200 Headphone Jack Splitter, Griffin's SmartShare Headphone Splitter, and RadTech's ProCable Stereo Audio Extender for iPhone. All of these accessories fit iPhone's headphone port and enable you to connect your favorite old earphones without a hassle. But what are you supposed to do when a phone call comes in?
Shure's Music Phone Adapter MPA-3c ($40) is the only adapter of the bunch to take a bigger-picture approach to iPhone headphone port modification. Rather than just connecting your old earphones to the iPhone, MPA-3c adds to them an in-line microphone and control button box, which is found at one end of its cable. In so doing, it converts your earphones into a complete alternative to the iPhone Stereo Headset included by Apple in every iPhone box, capable of interrupting audio immediately to handle phone calls. Because the microphone needs to be near your mouth, Shure's extension cable is nearly three feet long—six or seven times longer than the ones in other adapters—and includes a lapel clip to keep the microphone at neck level. It's best suited to earphones, such as Shure's, that split off at around your neck level into two separate cables.
Our photographs here show MPA-3c with Shure's SE210 and SE530 earphone models, neither of which is included; our reviews section highlights many other earphone options. With such earphones, you disconnect half the cable, put it away, and replace it with the MPA-3c; the length and fit are perfect, even without using the lapel clip. You're now microphone-equipped and ready to go.
When we tested a near-final prototype of the MPA-3c, callers could hardly tell the difference between Shure's microphone and the one in Apple's iPhone Stereo Headset. But in our more complete testing of the final production version of the MPA-3c—currently available only in very limited quantities—we found Shure's microphone to have certain decided advantages and disadvantages relative to Apple's.
Shure accurately claims that its microphone system enhances "intelligibility regardless of background noise;" our callers said that a slight treble boost made our voices sound easier to understand, relative to the warmer, less crisp sound of Apple's Headset. However, they differed on whether they preferred the MPA-3c's sound to that of the Stereo Headset, as all three callers noted that they could hear significantly more background noise with Shure's more sensitive microphone, which Apple's screened out. Two of the callers said that they could hear everything—footsteps, opening and closing cabinets, television sounds, etcetera—going on around us, whereas the same sounds were either much less obvious or entirely absent when using Apple's free headset. Our third caller felt that the crisper, more intelligible voice made up for the additional background noise MPA-3c introduced.
Shure also includes a silver button on back to let you do the same things the iPhone Stereo Headset's button can do, namely take or end calls, play or pause music, and skip forward one track at a time with a double button press. The button works exactly as expected: single clicks start or finish calls, and switch between paused and playing modes for audio. Quick double-clicks skip forward a track in the current collection of playing songs. The bulbous button box on MPA-3c is easier to click than the neat but small version on Apple's Headset.
Our overall impression of MPA-3c was positive, but with certain caveats. While the Adapter is the first of its kind for the iPhone and unquestionably useful for those who want to add microphone and limited remote control features to certain prior premium headsets, proper mic sensitivity, positioning, and noise filtering remain tricky, and Shure has delivered an option that's good but not amazing in most regards. You're paying $40 to add a good mic to superior, expensive earphones, and for that price, it's reasonable to expect that the mic would markedly outperform the one you get for free with the iPhone. Our testing suggests that experiences will vary from person to person and environment to environment on that point.
Whether MPA-3c is the right option for you will depend as much on the quantity of background noise in your typical usage environments as on the prior pair or earphones you hope to use it with. Without a doubt, it is best-suited to use with Shure's and certain other companies' split-cable earphones, rather than full-cabled ones, and spaces that are less frequently interrupted by ambient noise. That said, even under less than optimal usage conditions, it still adds features that no other current iPhone adapter can offer, and is therefore immediately worthy of your consideration if you're trying to find a way to update your mic-less earphones for true iPhone compatibility.
Our Rating
Company and Price
Company: Shure, Inc.
Website: www.Shure.com
Model: MPA-3c
Price: $40
Compatible: iPhone, RAZR V3i


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As of Nov. 5, signups of premises under the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) were at 423,781, or about 30% of premises in the U.S. But aside from premises registration, what other progress has been made with NAIS?
I'm in the clearance process for the business plan, and I expect a public release in early to mid December. It will get down to the core material work that has to be done to make a successful animal ID system work.
One of the things we're really going to focus on is how to get at and achieve 48-hour traceability by building on the strength of what's worked so well in the past. So it's building on the existing efforts with brucellosis eradication, bovine tuberculosis (TB) programs, Johne's, pseudorabies — to really use our existing disease programs as a platform to be able to achieve 48-hour traceability in the event of a disease outbreak.
We're setting up the ability for these programs to migrate into radio-frequency ID (RFID). USDA just purchased about 1.5 million RFID tags for use in the disease programs. We'll start with TB first. So that now as we start doing TB trace-outs and testing, we will use an RFID tag in cows we test. That helps greatly on manpower, labor and accuracy, because when you have to come back and test a second time, everything is already using RFID.
The government will absorb these costs, just as it covers those costs today with TB and TB tracebacks.
We'll start with TB, and I hope to be able to pilot this program in a similar way with brucellosis, but we're working on the details of how to move forward on that with some of the bangs vaccinations efforts in the same way.
The lesson I strongly heard from the countryside is that if animal ID is going to work and work well, it needs to work for USDA's own disease programs, and that's what we're really embracing and moving forward with. One of the key things is our half-dozen databases around the country for each of the disease programs, and we're doing the investment work to make sure they can communicate with each other so that you can quickly mine that data in the event of needing to do traceback.
What's the status of the NAIS business plan?
It's really very close to release. A few draft versions of the plan were handed out at the Animal Health Association meeting in late October. I'm waiting on some of those veterinarians to provide feedback. But I'm hoping by the first week or two of December to be able to have a public release of that plan.
We'll also put it up on the NAIS Web site (www.usda.gov/nais) and seek comments on it. But I really want something out there that gives a 3-5 year vision of where we're going as well as what we've already achieved with animal ID.
I think I'll have some good, solid commonsense news for folks. We're basically able to achieve 48-hour traceability on poultry today. We can easily achieve 48-hour traceability by 2009 on pork. We can probably achieve it in sheep by building on the scrapie-surveillance program. And then the real work begins with what we have to do with cattle, both dairy and beef.
What does Mike Johanns' exit as USDA Secretary mean for NAIS?
The high priority of work on animal ID hasn't changed, largely because this is about preparedness in the event of catastrophic disease. And so it's very removed from the politics of who is sitting directly in the USDA Secretary's chair.
R-CALF USA has requested a moratorium on any further premise registration efforts, and that NAIS, or any other similar systems under any other name, be de-funded at once. What's the mood of support in Congress for NAIS? What level of federal support are we looking at for next year?
It's sad when an organization that purports to speak for cattlemen and actually has a veterinarian as its president would take a position against a disease-control and eradication effort. I'm greatly saddened and disappointed by that turn.
As far as prospects in Congress, I will be taking the business plan up to the appropriators and sharing it with them. They want to know what the investment has been for the last several years, as well as the direction of the program. I think the transparency in this business plan will respond to their needs and concerns.
The House ag appropriations committee last spring proposed no additional funding for this next fiscal year for animal ID. The Senate proposed about $19 million in funding. The two groups haven't yet worked their differences out in conference. They had wanted to see the business plan, which I'll have delivered to them well before they are in conference, so I'm very optimistic about continued support for animal ID.
Where individual animal ID is concerned, how big of a motivator for those opposed is the concern about hidden income currently kept beyond the scrutiny of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) via cash or barter transactions?
I've heard that speculation, but I can't speak to how valid it is. It would certainly be disappointing if we ultimately were to find that our nation's animal health is being threatened by folks trying to avoid taxes.
The thing I do know is that with the safeguards we have built into the confidentiality in animal ID, I can provide assurances to folks that we have never provided the information from ID to another federal agency. Neither the Environmental Protection Agency or the IRS can access this ID information. This is truly a database about animal health and being able to notify farmers and ranchers in the event of a catastrophic disease outbreak.
If people want to see the merits of having good preparation and planning as it pertains to animal health, take a look at the United Kingdom right now. What could have been a devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease this fall appears at this stage to be well contained.
With the benefit of hindsight, is there a strategy that perhaps USDA could have followed to move the NAIS process along more effectively? Or would the effect have been the same regardless of the approach?
I think everyone would acknowledge that if we had started with the basics of the kind of work we're doing now, with building upon the strength and experience of the existing disease programs if we'd really embraced that from the very beginning and used that as the first step that we might have been able to avoid some of the pitfalls that have been experienced.
But hindsight is always easier.
Do you think perhaps that USDA trying to bite off more than it could chew was an issue with NAIS acceptance? Should USDA have started with a more species-specific strategy than one that was across the board?
There's a lot of merit to having the very comprehensive system that we've got. When you look around the globe, most of the other countries just have one or two species. They didn't tackle as wide a range as we have, but I think that long-term, when this is up and running, we're going to have a system that will be the envy of folks around the globe.
What about the horse side of NAIS?
In the business plan, we're going to draw a distinction between competition horses and pleasure horses. I've clearly heard concern from folks with just a couple of pleasure horses that never leave the place wondering why they need to do it. We don't have to give those as high as a priority as horses that are on the racing, show or rodeo circuit. So we see that as the right place to put the emphasis. And given the recent outbreaks on equine herpes, I think the competition-horse sector will be very welcoming to these adjustments under ID plans.
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Lockheed Martin To Begin Final Assembly Of Mars Spacecraft
DENVER (CBS4) - Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County is hard at work on the next mission to Mars.
Instead of exploring the surface, the Maven Project will be the first to study the upper atmosphere of the red planet.
Lockheed Martin just got the go-ahead from NASA to move ahead to the next phase, which includes initial construction and testing.
Maven is due to launch in November of next year.
Below is the official release from Lockheed Martin:
Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT] has begun the assembly, test and launch operations (ATLO) phase for NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft. MAVEN is scheduled to launch in November 2013 and will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.
ATLO represents a critical stage of the program because it is when the spacecraft begins to take form and culminates with its launch. Over the next five months technicians will install the subsystems on the main spacecraft structure, comprising avionics, power, telecomm, mechanisms, thermal systems, and guidance, navigation and control. The propulsion system was installed earlier this year and in mid-August the spacecraft was powered up with flight software for the first time.
During ATLO science instruments are being delivered to Lockheed Martin's Littleton, Colo. facility for integration with the spacecraft. Once the spacecraft has been fully assembled, it will undergo rigorous environmental testing in early 2013.
"I think it's very timely that we started assembly of MAVEN during the centennial year of our corporation," said Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. "Helping our customers rise to the challenge of tomorrow and discover new things is inherent to our core values and our team is thrilled to begin this next phase of the MAVEN mission."
On Sept. 10 the MAVEN project officially received authorization to transition into the next phase of the mission, Phase D, after completing a series of independent reviews which cover not only technical health of the project but also programmatic health (schedule and cost). The key decision meeting was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington and was chaired by NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
MAVEN is a robotic exploration mission with the goal to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. It will determine how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time.
MAVEN's principal investigator is based at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The university will provide science operations, build instruments, and lead Education/Public Outreach. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the project and is building two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., will build the spacecraft and perform mission operations. The University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory is building instruments for the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides Program management via the Mars Program Office, as well as navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.
Headquartered in Bethesda, Md., Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs about 120,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. The corporation's net sales for 2011 were $46.5 billion.
For more information about MAVEN visit:
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Obama's uncle quietly released from jail
Officials released President Obama's uncle from Plymouth County jail yesterday after holding him for more than two weeks on an immigration detainer for violating an order to return to his native Kenya in 1992.
US officials refused to disclose any other information about Onyango Obama, who remained in the United States undetected until Framingham police arrested him Aug. 24 on drunken driving and other charges.
Yesterday, federal immigration officials refused to say whether the 67-year-old Framingham resident posted bond, whether they are keeping track of his whereabouts, or even whether they are still seeking his deportation, raising questions about public accountability in the case.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement website confirmed Obama's release by listing him as "not in custody.''
Although the website confirmed it, Brian P. Hale, an agency spokesman, said he would not comment on the case because privacy laws and the agency's policies prohibit it. He said the database is accurate, however.
As a result of the immigration agency's refusal to discuss the case, it is unclear what happened to Obama after he left the Plymouth County House of Correction - or whether he could be returned to jail.
An official at the Plymouth County House of Correction who would not give his name said yesterday afternoon that Obama was no longer in custody. He had been taken to Burlington, where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has offices, he said.
In Framingham, the people who shared a modest frame house with Obama on a residential street said they did not know where he was. A co-worker at Conti Liquors, where Obama worked, said they had not heard of his release.
His Cleveland lawyers, Margaret Wong and Scott Bratton, were unavailable for comment, and an assistant said they had not been notified that he was released.
Onyango Obama was the half-brother of the president's late father. At the time of his arrest, Obama allegedly told Framingham police, "I think I will call the White House'' to arrange bail.
But last week the White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said the president did not expect his uncle to receive special treatment.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tougher limits on immigration, said the immigration agency should be more transparent, especially in a case involving a relative of the president. She said the public deserves to know the circumstances of Obama's release, since he violated a deportation order and is accused of drunken driving. In a criminal court, she said, that would be public information.
Obama pleaded not guilty in Framingham District Court to charges of drunken driving, negligent operation, and failing to yield.
"This whole nonsense about privacy is a policy,'' Vaughan said. "It's not the law. It's a choice that [the immigration agency] is making. I think it's very cowardly on [the agency's] part, to be honest. Their behavior shows that they don't want to be accountable to anybody.''
Obama is the second relative from the president's distant paternal side to have violated immigration law. Onyango Obama's younger sister, Zeituni Onyango, violated a deportation order and lived quietly in Boston public housing until days before her nephew's historic election in 2008, when her illegal status was leaked to the media. Based in part on the leak, and her increased exposure, a Boston immigration judge granted her asylum last year.
Onyango Obama came to America in 1963 to attend a prestigious preparatory school in Cambridge but dropped out and was initially ordered to leave the country in 1989. He appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, but lost in 1992.
Earlier this month, Bratton said Obama would fight deportation and hoped to remain in the United States. Obama has lived here for almost 50 years, since he was a young man under the limited supervision of the president's late father.
Obama had worked for the past five years at Conti Liquors in Framingham, where he was praised as a good worker and beloved employee.
Maria Sacchetti can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com. Follow her on Twitter at @mariasacchetti. Kathleen Burge of the Globe staff contributed to this report.


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The Red Queen.
Ah. The Theater... Where modernism meets literature from days gone by. Zach Theatre is producing a children's play based (loosely) around Alice in Wonderland. The play starts on their smallest stage, in the intimate Whisenhunt Theater. Around the time "Alice" falls into Wonderland the audience is divided up into groups and each group follows a character, identified by a playing card suite, on a journey through the middle of the story, across multiple exterior locations on the Zach campus.
It's an interesting concept and I'm almost tempted to come back for one of the school day shows to see how they corral 150 kids and teachers, moving them from location to location. But that isn't my worry. Today, my task was to tag along with one group and get images to use for marketing and public relations.
We started our rehearsal around 11:45am and spent the first twenty minutes or so in the theater before being disgorged into the bright sunlight of an unusually warm, March day. It was near 80 degrees by noon and in the direct sun it felt unnaturally warm. The wide range of lighting was also a good test for the camera of the day.
The Red Queen and Alice.
"Battle of the Blond, Stray Hairs."
(click to see bigger).
My source at the theater mentioned that there might be an audience for today's dress rehearsal. I imagined a theater full of elementary school children --- pre-lunch. I wanted to use a camera on which I would not have to change lenses or worry about maneuvering around in tight spaces. I also wanted a camera that would handle a dark theater and bright, Texas sun. Toss in a camera with a wide ranging zoom lens and an EVF and, in my world, you are speccing out a Sony RX10ii. And a Sony RX10 (v.1) as a back-up. You know the specifications. But here's quick recap: 20 megapixel, one inch sensor. Good noise handling at higher ISOs (up to 3200 in dark spaces). A killer lens that goes from 24-200mm at f2.8. Nail it the first time auto white balance. WYSIWYG EVF. Small, quiet, competent. (more>)
We started in the darkness of the small theater. It's still equipped with lower powered, tungsten lights and the levels are such that we get ISO 1600, 1/160th of second shutter speed and f2.8. In my book that counts as low light. Another peccadillo of the small theater is that all of the lighting is mounting on an overhead grid and it comes in at too high of an angle. I'm always watching for the actors to pick up their chins to get the light on their faces just right....
Outside it was every bit of full on, noon, Texas sunlight. But since this was a dress rehearsal with constant movement from place to place we didn't have the luxury of diffusing, reflecting or using flash to tame the very broad range of the direct sunlight. I depended on the Sony, high dynamic range sensor technology and their DRO feature to get open shadows without unduly blowing highlights. It worked well, even in scenes that were predominantly backlit.
I had the RX10ii in hand and a small, Domke bag over my left shoulder. The bag held the second camera, three extra batteries, a cellphone and my sunglasses. My black sweat shirt felt good in the theater when we got started but I couldn't wait to take it off after twenty minutes in the sun. Good thing I remembered to wear a black t-shirt underneath and a good thing I have deodorant in my swim bag.
For any outside shot that was situated in open shade I tried to position myself with the sunlight backgrounds behind me and the open shade as the only thing the camera could see. Inside, I shot with the lens wide open but outside I worked at ISO 100, f5.6 and whatever the matching shutter speed was.
In the past, because of the tight deadlines for turning around images, I shot in Jpeg but my current computer is fast and agile so I've started shooting the Zach material in Raw. I still shoot a crazy number of files. Especially for a show like this where I have no idea of what it's all going to look like or where we're going to end up at any time.
With the Nikon cameras I can choose a compressed Raw and I can choose between a 12 bit and a 14 bit file. With the Sony there is no fine parsing of the file details --- you either shoot Raw or you shoot Jpegs and that's the choice you get. I shot 32 gigabytes of raw but I was able to edit down to about 1,000 deliverable files. When you shoot raw you'll consider yourself smarter if you shoot everything with manual settings. That way there's no variation in the coverage of a scene (unless you intentionally change settings) and what this means is that everything stays the same in terms of exposure, color balance, tonality, etc. from the first frame to the last of each scene. You can choose one image, fine tune the hell out of it, and then apply the setting parameters across all the files in that set. It's a very fast way to work. (more>)
As is typical of a Zach Theatre show, all the talent was really professional, and well rehearsed. They could have handled an audience today with aplomb. The same can be said for my Sony RX10ii. It's a chameleon of a camera. It can be almost "hands off" automatic or view camera-like intricate, depending on your personality and your needs. I only wish I could go back and do it all over again in video --- just to see what that would have looked like. (more>)
Light bouncing in under a covered areas from a sidewalk.
We set up a little group shot at the end.
Of course, I fear any change in routine so it was anxiety producing to go from the "known" theater space to eight different exterior locations, all with different lighting characteristics. But I managed to get it done and to my satisfaction. There are times a bigger camera might have yielded different results; a more blurred background, for instance. But in terms of getting the job done I couldn't have asked for a more fluid and competent tool than my little Sony. What a fun thing to do before lunch time.
All of my post processing today was done in Lightroom.
Take a class: Become more skilled and knowledgable. Have more fun.
One of the original Craftsy Photo Classes and
still one of the best!
I met Lance a couple of weeks ago in Denver
and found him to be really fun and knowledgeable
this class reflects what he teaches in hands-on
workshops in Ireland and Iceland, as well as
cool places around the U.S.
How to make what we shoot into a cohesive
train of visual thought.


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Elm & Akard, Photographer J. C. Deane, and The Crash at Crush
by Paula Bosse
Yessirree! Elm & Akard, 1936/1937… (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
One of the best collections of historical Dallas photos — and certainly one of the easiest to access online — can be found in SMU's DeGolyer Library. I can't say enough good things about the astounding quality of their vast collection or the willingness to make large scans of their photos available online, free to share, without watermarks (higher resolution images are available for a fee, for publication, etc.). I love you, DeGolyer Library (and all the people and entities behind your impressive digitization process)!
When going through recently uploaded photos, I came across photos from different decades showing the same intersection: the southeast corner of Elm and Akard streets (now the 1500 block). The building appears to be the same in each of the photos, and that is interesting in itself — but I was excited to find a connection in one of them to one of my favorite weird Texas historical events.
And that is the photo below. It's a cool photo — there's some sort of parade underway. This is Elm Street looking toward the east (or, I guess, the southeast), and the photographer is just west of Akard Street. At the bottom left of the photo is the United States Coffee & Tea Co. (which I wrote about here); in the background at the right is the Praetorian Building on Main; and just left of center is the Wilson Building addition under construction (which dates this photo to 1911). But the building that interested me the most is the one at the bottom right, the one at the southeast corner of Elm and Akard. I noticed "Deane's Photo Studio" on the exterior of the upper part of the building. I recognized the name, having seen it on various Dallas portraits over the years, but now I realize there were two photographers named Deane in Dallas in the first half of the 20th century: Granville M. Deane (who had a longer career here) and his brother, Jervis C. Deane — J. C. Deane was the photographer who occupied the upper-floor studio at 334 Elm (later 1502 Elm) between 1906 and 1911. His studio was above T. J. (Jeff) Britton's drugstore.
Elm Street, looking east from Akard, 1911 (DeGolyer Library, SMU)
J. C. Deane (born in Virginia in 1860) worked as an award-winning photographer around Texas, based for much of his career in Waco. He was in Dallas only a decade or so, leaving around 1911, after a divorce, noting in ads that he had to sell his business as he was "sick in sanitarium." After leaving Dallas he bounced around Texas, working as a studio photographer in cities such as Waco and San Antonio. I have been unable to find any information on his death.
The reason that J. C. Deane holds a place in the annals of weird Texas history? He was one of the photographers commissioned to photograph the supremely bizarre publicity stunt now known as The Crash at Crush, wherein a crowd upwards of 30,000 people gathered in the middle of nowhere, near the tiny town of West, Texas, in September, 1896, to watch the planned head-on collision of two locomotives (read more about this here). Long story short: things did not go as planned, and several people were injured (a couple were killed) when locomotive shrapnel shot into the crowd — one of those badly injured was J. C. Deane who was on a special platform with other photographers. For the sake of the squeamish, I will refrain from the details, but Deane lost his right eye and was apparently known affectionately thereafter as "One Eye Deane." (For those of you not squeamish, I invite you to read all the gory details, related by Deane's wife, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News which appeared on October 1, 1896, here.) The photos below are generally credited to Deane, back when he was just good ol' happy-go-lucky "Two-Eye Jervis." (All these photos are larger when clicked.) (Scroll down to the bottom of the page for a link to contemporary coverage of the event as reported in The Dallas Morning News.)
I've been fascinated by the Crash at Crush ever since I heard about it several years ago, and now I know there's a Dallas connection — and photos of the building where he worked.
Back to Elm Street.
For a brief time (a few months in 1936?) the building was referred to as the "Hutton-Drake Building" and a major renovation of the old building began at the beginning of 1936, when the whole of Dallas was on overdrive to spruce up the city ahead of the crush of Centennial visitors. Here's an undated "before" photo….
The architect's drawing of the remodeled Deco delight….
And, because I love this photo so much, here it is again — the finished, revamped building:
Southeast corner of Elm & Akard, 1936/1937, via DeGolyer Library, SMU
What the heck kind of craziness is this?! I mean I LOVE it, but… it's very… unusual. I would absolutely never have guessed that this building had been in downtown Dallas. And it appears to be the same building seen in the 1911 photo, just with a very fashion-forward new face. Those little hexagonal windows! Along with that fabulous B & G Hosiery sign, there was a nice little bit of art deco oddness sitting there at the corner of Elm and Akard. The Kirby Building, seen at the far right, seems like a creaky older statesman compared to this overly enthusiastic teenager. The businesses seen here — Ellan's hat shop, B & G Hosiery, and Berwald's — were at this corner together only in 1936 and 1937. I could find nothing about this very modern facelift — if anyone knows who the architect is behind this, please let me know! (See a postcard which features a tiny bit of this fabulous building here — if the colors are correct, the building was green and white.)
In November, 1941, Elm Street's Theater Row welcomed a new occupant, the Telenews theater, which showed only newsreels and short documentaries. By that time the A. Harris Co. had purchased the building at the southeast corner of Elm and Akard and expanded into its upper floors. Telenews opened at the end of 1941 and Linen Palace was gone from this Elm Street location by 1943, dating this photo to 1941 or 1942.
Elm Street, 1941/1942 (DeGolyer Library, SMU)
All of these are such great photos. Thanks for making them available to us, SMU!
Sources & Notes
The three Dallas photos are from the George A. McAfee collection of photographs at the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University — some of the photos in this large and wonderful collection were taken by McAfee, some were merely photos he had personally collected. The top photo (taken by McAfee) is listed on the SMU database with the title "[Looking Southeast, Corner of Elm and Akard, Kirby Building at Right]" — more info on this photo is here. The second photo, "[Looking East on Elm West of Akard / Praetorian Building (Main at Stone) Upper Right Center]" is not attributed to a specific photographer; this photo is listed twice in the SMU database, here and here. The third photo, "[Looking East on Elm from Akard on "Theatre Row" (Including on North Side on Elm from Left to Right — Telenews, Capitol, Rialto, Palace, Tower, Melba and Majestic]," appears to have been taken by McAfee, and it, too, appears twice in the online digital database, here and here. (I've updated this post with additional photos from the DeGolyer Library relating to the building's remodeling in 1936 — links are below the images.)
The three photos from the "Crash at Crush" event are attributed to Jervis C. Deane, and were taken on September 15, 1896 along the MKT railroad line between West and Waco; the images seen above appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on Sept. 16, 1962. More on the Crash at Crush from Wikipedia, here — there is a photo there of the historical marker and, sadly, Jervis Deane's name is misspelled. Sorry, Jervis!
Read the Dallas Morning News story of the train collision aftermath in the exciting article lumberingly titled "CRUSH COLLISION: The Force of the Blow and Damage Done. Boilers Exploded with Terrific Force, Scattering Fragments of the Wreckage Over a Large Area. The Showers of Missiles Fell on the Photographer's Platform Almost as Thick as Hail – Description of the Scene," here.
The southeast corner of Elm and Akard is currently home to a 7-Eleven topped by an exceedingly unattractive parking garage — see the corner on Google Street View here.
There is a handy Flashback Dallas post which has TONS of photos of Akard Street, several of which have this building in it: check out the post "Akard Street Looking South, 1887-2015," here.
Copyright © 2018 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.


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Gitcher Stage Four winner here
July 3, 2012 § 6 Comments
Okay, so I didn't exactly nail it yesterday when I predicted that Jean-Christophe Peraud was gonna bring home the bacon.
On the other hand, it's a Wednesday night before July the 4th, and instead of being out with friends, hooking up, and letting some studmuffin or hot chick or both lick coke off your nipples, you're reading a stupid cycling blog. So don't tell me I'm the loser.
Prediction for Turdy France Stage Four
Stage Four is a repetition of Stage Two, only more so. It's long. It's flat. It's boring. It's stupid. The only people who will enjoy this are the ones who are actually in France, drunk by 9:00 AM, lying prostrate in a ditch while a studmuffin or hot chick or both licks coke off their nipples. Everyone else who even pretends to care or be interested or, Dog forbid, set aside time to watch this Xanax stage is hopeless.
After carefully analyzing this featureless borefest, here's my prediction. Take it to the fucking bank: Jean-Christophe Peraud will win the stage and pull on yellow.
Why Peraud? Not because, at age 34, he was the oldest Tour rookie last year by almost a hundred years. Not because he's a mountain biker and therefore taps out after 45 minutes. Not because of his legendary septicemia that he got after that nasty crash.
Peraud is going to spank the shit out of the competition tomorrow because he's been training with a cryogenic suit. You know how they froze Ted Williams so they could cure him later, and how except for the fact that his frozen head kept falling on the floor and losing big chunks he was all set to be thawed someday and made good as new?
Well, that's what the Ag2R Mondiale team has been doing.
"Fuck you, Wankmeister, you're so full of shit."
No…FUCK YOU. And after the fucking, read this link. Peraud will be minimally inflamed after the last hard stage finish at Baloney-on-Toast due to the cryotherapy suit. He's going to rip the panties off the peloton and deliver a world-class fucking. You watch.
The best of the rest
Saggs: He has no hope of a third win. It's impossible. Forget about it. Why? Because that little fucktard "running salute" he did 300 yards in front of the next dude whose brains were draining out his ear was too hideous. The gods of Anquetil won't allow that shit for a stage that finishes in Rouen.
Fabs: Another day in yellow. Maybe he'll buy some better hair pomade with the bonus. Who knows? @mmmaiko doesn't care, as long as he maket twattle.
Horseface: He's going to melt quicker than a pat of butter on a cougar's belly. Then they'll smear him all over the road.
Humpty Ugly: Humpty will, after injecting three quarts of testosterpoetinruggedmaxxx2 into his butt and thighs, crush the field sprint. No one will come close. His gigantism, wrapped out at 3900 watts, will power the Tour's telecommunication satellites for the next week. Pay close attention to his left arm, though, as he suppresses that Dr. Strangelove "achtung" salute with his right hand.
Mullet: Crash. Lose 2-3 minutes waiting for a bike change. Get all nervous and upset and start doing butterfly strokes in the nearby ditch. Regret hiring a swimming coach for his doping program.
Check in tomorrow to see how right I am. Winning!
§ 6 Responses to Gitcher Stage Four winner here
I kept reading despite the fact that apparently you read cyclingnews.com. No wonder your picks suck worse than Saggs. .
You kept reading because you've already finished beating off and you're too lazy and stupid to read a real book.
I reckon that is why a certain Canadian + all of the Norwegian, Baltic and Russian cyclists are so strong, when they go outside in winter they get cryotherapie for free, 9 months out of the year ! I'm moving to North Cape next week…
I think it's their drugs.
I have to agree with the author about flat stages (and sprinters) in general….what sacrilege to the sport of cycling that some mega ego pusstard can suck wheel for, like, 1,000,000 miles only to jump around at the last possible second and shamelessly take the stage. This is, of course, followed by a victory salute / dance / jerkoff that would make an NFL player slink with shame. And since Mr. Sprinter and his like minded competitors are seemingly ignorant of the laws of physics (which state that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time) there's always the good chance that one of the real riders is going to be taken out in a needless crash. Yep, I love me the flat stages.
I wish that I wanted to watch the flat stages, and after years of fast forwarding to the finish, I finally found a way. I'll share it now.
I'm an F1 fan, and in particular, a Mark Webber fan. I want him to win — don't know why. But having something to cheer for, no matter how unlikely it is to occur, has the unintended result of taking an otherwise boring event and making it interesting from beginning to end. Webber rarely wins, but sometimes, just sometimes, he does.
Mark Cavendish (aka Horseface) rarely crashes. But every once in awhile…..
Today's stage – payday!!
"The author" is insane. You have just agreed with an insane person. But thanks!


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The U.S. medical system is absurdly expensive. You knew that already. But you probably didn't realize just how absurdly expensive it is compared to other countries.
These 21 graphs (one of them you'll see above) from the International Federation of Health Plans, via Ezra Klein, start to paint the picture. The average routine office visit in the U.S. is three-times more expensive than in Canada. The average CT scan is five-times more expensive than in Canada. And as a share of GDP, our health care costs are an ignominious colossus towering over the rest of the world:
In the U.S. health care system, everything costs more. Being in a hospital cost more. Because our drugs cost more (prescription drug prices can be 10X the rate in the UK or Germany). And our doctors cost more (a US family physician makes 3X her German counterpart). Because their education costs more (the education for a German physician's education is nearly free). And on it goes.
Why is American health care so expensive? Books could be written about this topic. And books have been written about this topic. In The Healing of America, T. D. Reid explored why American medicine falls behind other countries in quality while it races far ahead in cost of care.
Near the end of the book, Reid expands on two big reasons why U.S. health care is so expensive: (1) Unlike other countries, the U.S. government doesn't manage prices; and (2) the complications created by our for-profit system adds tremendous costs.
First, it really starts with the prices. While some developed countries have one health care insurance plan for everybody — where the government either sets prices or oversees price negotiations — the U.S. is unique in our reliance on for-profit insurance companies to pay for both essential and elective care. Twenty cents from every $1 goes, not to health care, but to "marketing, underwriting, administration, and profit," he says. In a system where government doesn't negotiate prices down, prices will be higher. In a system where for-profit companies need profit margins and advertising, prices will be higher.
Second, the absurd complexity of U.S. health care creates its own costs. There is a separate health care system for seniors, veterans, military personnel, Native Americans, end-stage renal failure, under 16 in a poor family, over 16 in a poor family, and working for the federal government, Reid writes. That's on top of hundreds of private plans:
All these systems require another inefficiency — the existence of compilers, middlemen who compile the bills doctors submit and shuttle them thru the payment system. The US Government Accountability Office concluded that if we could get administrative costs of our medical system down to the Canadian level, the money saved would be enough to pay for health care for all the Americans who are uninsured.
It's not like all this money buys us nothing. Complexity creates jobs, for high- and low-skilled workers alike. American health care is the world's envy in some categories, especially in cancer care, wait times, and access to new technologies for affluent and insured families. We have the highest share of adults (90 percent) who report being in good health. The OECD average is 69 percent. But in terms of coverage and cost, we rank embarrassingly low among developed countries. It would be nice to say this is a bug of the American medical system. But it's a feature. It's a choice we've made. In some countries, government sets a lower price and doesn't charge patients for marketing and margins. To this model, we've essentially said: No, thanks.


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This week, Nitin Nohria, the dean of Harvard Business School, took the opportunity to do something bold. Speaking to an audience of 600 alumni and guests at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, he apologized. Women at Harvard, he said, could feel "disrespected, left out, and unloved by the school." "I'm sorry on behalf of the business school," he continued. "The school owed you better, and I promise it will be better."
What was the business school's sin? Offensive treatment of female students and professors; a corrosive sexism devaluing women as business leaders ever since they were first admitted in 1963.
And what does "better" look like? Nohria announced plans to increase the number of female protagonists in Harvard case studies from 9 percent to 20 percent during the next five years. Because Harvard case studies are a gold standard in business school courses around the world, this promise to represent more financial problem-solvers as female "would have a big impact on the way leadership is taught," according to John Byrne at CNN Money. Nohria also said he would "work relentlessly" to make "the entire school … more open and encouraging to women."
Frankly, I hope that any school charging $50,000 a year in tuition would be open and encouraging to everyone it admits. This whole mea culpa smacks of gesture and performance: Nohria's one concrete vow, to teach woman-centered case studies one-fifth of the time, feels underwhelming in a world where we make up half of the population. But maybe I'm expecting too much? Open contrition is a new look for Harvard Business School, groomer of trading-floor kings and boardroom honchos. When a willingness to admit fault, to question tradition, comes from entitlement-and-privilege land, perhaps that's reason enough to celebrate.
Nohria's appointment is part of the school's ongoing effort to move away from a culture straight out of "The Wolf of Wall Street." As Jodi Kantor wrote in a much-discussed New York Times piece last September, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust hired him in part to repair gender relations at the business school: http://nyti.ms/1cqwmdG. That New York Times story burned a hole in the school's reputation with its scenes of sexism (such as the hazing of female students and professors, grading bias, and an obsession with women's looks and wealth). But it also described how school officials were responding to the mess: note-takers in classrooms to track who spoke when, sexual violence workshops, class participation training, and courses structured around woman-friendly "problem solving teams" rather than lectures.
And the measures appear to be working. In 2013, Nohria told his audience, a record 41 percent of first-year HBS students were women, up from 25 percent two decades ago. The gender grade gap has closed since the reforms took effect in 2011, and last year women made up almost two-fifths of the highest-ranking scholars in the graduating class. In her New York Times story, Kantor quoted a female professor who worried that socially engineered gender equality at Harvard might fail to prepare female students for the real, bloody business of business. "Are we trying to change the world 900 students at a time?" the professor asked. Judging from Nohria's extraordinary mea culpa on behalf of the school, maybe they are.


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With Democrats promising to beef up federal gun laws, the renewed gun-control debate sparked by the horrific slayings in a Connecticut elementary school is beginning to play out in Congress. But a new survey of California's next congressional delegation signals the stark divide ahead: Calls for immediate and vigorous action on one side, and mostly silence on the other.
An exclusive survey of California members of the next Congress, undertaken by the Bay Area News Group and the Los Angeles News Group, found that all of the 32 House Democrats who responded support re-enacting some version of the federal assault weapons ban that expired in 2004, and many would consider more stringent new gun controls.
No California Democrat said Americans have an absolute constitutional right to a weapon such as the .223 Bushmaster rifle and 30-round magazines that Adam Lanza used to execute 26 people — including 20 children — on Friday in Newtown, Conn. Some referred to such firearms as "weapons of war" that have no place in private ownership.
But the newspapers' survey found the state's Republican House members all but silent. Only one of the California's 15 GOP House members specifically answered the four questions posed by the newspapers: Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Granite Bay, took a stand against increased gun control.
Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona, declined to discuss gun control until after a full investigation of Lanza's rampage is done. Rep.-elect Doug LaMalfa, R-Oroville, said "restricting the rights of those who follow the law will only empower those who choose to break the law," but wouldn't answer specific questions. All other Republicans either were said to be unavailable for comment or never returned calls and emails. Thirty-two of the state's 38 House Democrats responded to the survey.
A handful of moderate, pro-gun Democrats around the nation in recent days have signaled new willingness to consider gun control. But in a closely-divided Congress, with Republicans holding a majority in the House of Representatives, it would take supporters in both parties to tighten U.S. gun laws that are some of the loosest among developed nations.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, said she's "deeply disappointed" by her Republican peers' reticence.
"Everyone feels hollowed out by this, and people really want to know where we stand," she said.
Backlash from the Newtown massacre continued Tuesday. President Barack Obama said he supports re-enactment of the federal assault weapons ban. Private equity firm Cerberus, in which the California State Teachers' Retirement System is an investor, said it will sell the parent company that makes the Bushmaster rifle used in the attack. And Dick's Sporting Goods, with more than 500 stores in 44 states, said it's suspending sales of some rifles.
The newspapers' survey also found Democrats gave mixed reviews to the idea of requiring background checks, including mental-health screening, for all members of a household where guns are kept; Lanza reportedly used weapons that were owned by his mother. Many were willing to discuss the idea of requiring gun owners to take courses, get licenses and register all firearms similar to what states already require for cars.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the California Democratic Congressional Delegation's chair, said her members want action.
"If Republicans want to change, we'll work with them," said Lofgren, D-San Jose, noting other mass shootings "didn't seem to move the dial on the other side of the aisle. I hope that something this appalling might stir my colleagues to action."
A CBS News poll in April had found 39 percent of adults nationwide believed gun control laws should be made more strict, 13 percent said they should be made less strict and 41 percent said they should be kept as they are; a new poll conducted Friday through Sunday found 57 percent now want stricter laws, 9 percent want less strict laws, and 30 percent say they should stay as they are.
Chuck Michel, attorney for the California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation, said this isn't the right time to discuss reform. His organization — the National Rifle Association's California affiliate — will make its opinions known soon enough, he said, but for now won't engage in debate "out of respect and sympathy for the victims."
"Politicians pushing legislative wish lists so soon after the slayings are shameless opportunists taking advantage of an emotionally charged situation to advance a pre-existing agenda," he said.
The NRA said in a statement Tuesday that it's "shocked, saddened and heartbroken" by the Newtown slayings and is "prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."
The NRA wields significant influence. The Sunlight Foundation — a nonprofit, nonpartisan government transparency watchdog — reports the NRA spent 73 times what the leading pro-gun control advocacy organization, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, spent on lobbying in the 112th Congress, and 3,199 times what the Brady Campaign spent on the 2012 election.
The NRA has "obstructed any kind of gun safety and gun control measures," said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland. "It's time to care more about our children, it's time to care more about our country than about a special interest group that really has been controlling the agenda."
The Democrats' agenda for now includes re-enacting an updated version of the federal assault weapons ban, to be introduced by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Feinstein's bill would ban more than 100 specific firearms plus others with certain features, as well as magazines holding more than 10 rounds; it would grandfather in any weapons legally owned when the law is enacted. The 1994 version was written to sunset in 2004, and Republicans have consistently opposed all efforts to renew it.
But McClintock said "such laws tend to create a society in which criminals are as well-armed as ever and law-abiding citizens are rendered increasingly defenseless." Citizens have a constitutional right to defend themselves with firearms, he said, and the Bushmaster rifle might look like a military assault weapon "but functions with the same firing mechanism as many handguns, sports and target rifles."
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, the survivor of a shooting herself, said California's gun controls are among the nation's strictest and should be a model for federal law — or perhaps exceeded.
"We're way ahead of the curve," she said, "but it still is not enough."
Los Angeles News Group reporters Josh Dulaney and Andrew Edwards contributed to this report. Josh Richman covers politics. Contact him at 510-208-6428. Follow him at Twitter.com/josh_richman. Read the Political Blotter at IBAbuzz.com/politics.


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Weekend Word Wrap
Today's Word Wrap keeps on with our tradition of bringing you the hippest, most happening new words being coined, as they're coined... well, okay, with at least a 5-second delay, "˜cause a blog that brands itself as SMART certainly don't wanna go lookin' all stupid and bleep.
Today's sparkling entries come to you via the good folk over at Word Spy:
guyliner n. Eyeliner designed for and used by men. (Citations) rejuvenile n. An adult who enjoys activities and things normally associated with children. —adj., v.— rejuveniling pp. (Citations) SMUM n. A woman who finds motherhood and her children tedious and uninteresting. [Acronym from Smart, Middle-Class, Uninvolved, Mother.] (Citations) face blindness n. Difficulty recognizing faces or telling faces apart. Also: face-blindness. —face-blind adj. (Citations) aireoke (air.ee.OH.kee) n. Playing air guitar and singing to prerecorded music; playing air guitar in a public performance. Also: air-eoke. [Blend of air guitar and karaoke.] (Citations)
And if you've never heard aireoke, but think you might have the talent "" or just like making a fool of yourself onstage, be sure to check out aireoke.com and their cool blog. It's air-eokay in my book. Heavens, did I just coin a new word? aireokay -- adj. a decent aireoke performance, a well played air-guitar


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06/28/2017 New Piling and Drilling Rig LRB 16 from Liebherr
Liebherr presents the LRB 16, which is an all-round piling and drilling rig for diverse applications within the deep foundation sector. The machine gets its name from the sledge's travel distance, which is approximately 16 m. With a longer leader, the piling and drilling rig is also now available as a LRB 18.
Special emphasis is on the compact design of the LRB 16 with an operating weight of barely 48 t, which results in low ground pressure. The robust undercarriage offers excellent stability, which can be further increased with the optional rear supports.
As a standard, the new piling and drilling rig is fitted with sophisticated control and assistance systems. Attachment recognition offers not only time recording for the respective attachment. The performance figures are also transmitted with the aid of LiDAT, Liebherr's own data transmission system. An improvement for slurry wall application is the obstacle recognition, which enables the timely recognition of obstacles in the soil. This protects both the attachment and the basic machine.


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Tagged: Cubs
4/19 "You have to keep working"
A veteran who has been in the game for a while, has success, you just assume you're going to go out every single year and the numbers are going to be there. When you start slow like I have — I think I have three hits in 40 plus at-bats — it's something you never forecast, you don't see it coming. You keep working hard. When I was younger, if this would've happened, I would've been sent down and been in full panic. I keep my routine the same. It's one of those things where you don't get confidence until the ball starts falling. You have to keep working, I have to keep doing my thing in the outfield to help my team win when I'm not helping at the plate. I have to wait for that day to come when I find my swing. When guys struggle, they either come out of it or they don't. Guys who have been around long enough and have had success, they come out of it. You just don't know when.
— Marlon
4/2 There's nothing like being a Cub
I've tried to explain to guys like Ian Stewart, David DeJesus, Chris Volstad what it's like to play at Wrigley and to be a Cub. You come into town and love playing at Wrigley but it's completely different when you're an actual Cub and have 39,000 cheering for you. It takes me back to some things that Derrek Lee was telling me when I first came in about the excitement and what Billy Williams has told me — there's nothing like being a Cub. You don't know until you actually put the uniform on and get to run out there and hear the fans cheering out there. I was explaining how I sort of salute left center field, center field and right center field, and I told them they need to come up with a salute or something to acknowledge the bleacher bums. It's one of those things that you can't explain that feeling until you're actually out there. These guys get to go through that this year.
This is going to be a hustling team. I've been on teams where my hustle stood out and it's not going to stand out on this team. That's a good thing. It shouldn't be that way; it shouldn't be, "That guy hustles, that guy hustles." You should say, "Oh, my gosh, that team is always coming. The Tampa Bay Rays, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Texas Rangers, the Philadelphia Phillies are always going hard. We're going to be that team, too.
I told those guys, being in Chicago, on and off the field, there's nothing like it.
— Marlon
3/9 On new OF coach Dave McKay
Dave has his style, and it makes sense why the Cardinals and the A's were the best baserunning teams in baseball, why their outfield was fundamentally sound and they never made mistakes. Playing quality baseball is what he's about. He simplifies everything. There's certain things he does at first base that I've never heard of first base coaches doing but it makes so much sense. On singles or doubles, he'll be in front of us instead of being out in the coaches' box. On ground balls. we know when they're hit to us, nobody's on, we're supposed to catch and throw it in. But, hey, catch it like an infielder, and not just that, let's reinforce it, let's work on it every single day, and that's the first thing we do is ground balls, catch it like an infielder, catch it like an infielder. You might not see one error this year from an outfielder where the ball with nobody on base, the ball is hit right to him, regardless of the field, how fast it is, how slow it is, how much it snakes. Baserunning, hitting the base with your right foot. It's very simple but at the same time, do you really do it? With him, its reinforcing it, doing it over and over and over again. Yesterday, I hit a pop fly and I was running around and I was caught in between and hit it with my left foot and I ran by him, and he said, "You hit it with the wrong foot." We're learning. That's what I think the staff is about. He brings that quality of baseball to this team. We have a lot of young guys but we have older guys like me and we get to learn. I love learning new things and that's what he brings to the table.
— Marlon
1/19 Offseason update
Note: Marlon will resume posting on his blog when Spring Training begins. In the meantime, check out what he's doing to get ready for 2012:
11/21 Giving thanks
A little background: The family of a young Atlanta man, Brett D., wrote to the Cubs in hopes of reaching out to Marlon Byrd. Brett was suffering from compartment syndrome, which is something Marlon also had to deal with in college. Compartment syndrome is a serious condition that involves increased pressure in a muscle compartment. It can lead to muscle and nerve damage and problems with blood flow. Brett had undergone three surgeries, and was having a difficult time. Marlon wrote a letter to Brett, and then met him in Atlanta last August during the Cubs' series. The two talked about their experiences and compared scars. Brett's family was moved by Marlon's generosity.
Here, Marlon talks about his experience with compartment syndrome. At Thanksgiving, it's the perfect time of year to give thanks — to family, to doctors, and to pro ballplayers who take time to inspire fans.
I started having pain in my leg in November 1996. It was my sophomore year at Georgia Tech. After three days of pain, I couldn't take it anymore. I finally went to see a specialist at St. Joe's. I went in, and the same day, they had emergency surgery and they cut open my leg and found out I had an infection called compartment syndrome. What happens is, it's an infection and your muscle starts to swell and it cuts off the circulation to the nerves that run underneath. Your muscle stops getting the blood flow. If you don't catch it or release it to let the muscles breathe, it dies. I got very lucky. I had Dr. George Cierny. His specialty is everything, and you usually don't see that with surgeons. He's an amazing, brilliant man. He went in, removed the muscle, put beads in my leg to kill the infection.
He didn't say, "You're done, we need to go ahead and cut the leg off, we can't do anything with it." He put the beads in to kill the infection, and said, "Let's wait a day or two and let me think it through." After thinking it through, he said, "We're going to wait, clean this up, make sure the infection goes away, close it back up. We'll have you rehab all the adjacent muscles and see if we can get you to walk again."
I had the first surgery, and the whole thing was, OK, first we're going to get rid of the infection. The second surgery was, Let's clean it up, close it up, and get him on his way and see if we can strengthen all the adjacent muscles around and go from there. It went from November '96 when they cleaned it all up, and in January '97, I had my final surgery when they reconnected all the tendons to adjacent muscles. I had to rehab my leg, and make it strong again — strong enough so by the time I came back from having the cast and having it held in one position for so long, it wasn't so weak. That was Jan. 31, '97. From all of that — having the surgery, having to learn to stand up, being able to balance, learn to walk again, underwater treadmill, pick it up — gosh, from that point, my last surgery, I tried playing in June or July of '98, and couldn't do it, couldn't move. It was terrible.
At the same time, I was overweight. I went to the doctor, and said, "I don't know if I can play." He said, "Marlon, this is a career-ending injury. Second, we did this for you to walk. Third, if you ever want to be anything athletically on the field, you have to drop weight." I went on a diet, dropped 90 pounds in five months. I think that's how I got my work ethic coming back from this. I played one year of junior college ball after not playing for two years, and ended up being drafted in the 10th round by the Phillies. I hit like .460 and 16 home runs and had a great season. I think it's because I enjoyed baseball, there was no pressure. I wasn't trying for anything else. It was play baseball, finish your college career and then move on. I got lucky and got drafted.
I came close to having my leg amputated. I don't know if this would've happened, but I believe if I went to a doctor who didn't think outside of the box like Dr. Cierny did, I would've been dead, and they would've amputated.
I meet people when I hear stories and talk to them and just try to be there, that positive influence. The kid I met, Brett, was like, "Man, I wake up with pain every day," and I said, "So do I." Everything he said, I'd say, "So do I." I pulled up my pants leg and he saw my leg. All of a sudden it hit him. He said, "You have the same scar as me." It was the same injury. How many professional players do you see lose a muscle in their lower body and continue to play sports? It's supposed to be career-ending.
Dealing with the injury made me realize that I could do anything I put my mind to. First off, they said, "You're done playing," and I didn't believe that. Second, they said, "Drop the weight and I believe you can play." I believed that and did it. Then I got a phone call from this scout and he said, "The Phillies are thinking of drafting you." I realized I could play professional baseball. That's pretty cool. That wasn't my thought process — my thought process was play baseball, have fun and whatever happens, happens. I thought I'd be done after college.
I believed in me. I was never, "Why did this happen to me?" That never happened. It was one of those things — wow, this happened, now I have to deal with it, so what do I do?
— Marlon
10/20 Changing the culture
I can't really talk about the culture of winning because I haven't been on a team that's been to the playoffs. But at the same time, I was on teams that were on their way. I saw the beginning and I saw right before the teams started to win. I was on the Phillies coming up and got traded in '05. In '06, they were one game away, and '07 was the first trip to the playoffs and that started their dynasty now. I saw the culture change over there. I saw them building within. I saw the young guys — we would have second- and third-rounders who would come in, high school kids who got paid big bucks, and their first year in Spring Training, and if they came in and weren't in shape, they got rid of them. There was no b.s. involved in that organization as far as teaching and development. If you weren't their type of player you had to go, it didn't matter what they paid you.
Of course, nowadays, guys are getting paid more but at the same time, it didn't happen that way. That culture in Tampa, they don't mess with their top pick. When they had the first pick overall, they didn't miss. And they produce. Same thing in Texas. That culture over there completely changed. In 2007, I came in and it seemed like it was a good team but the team really didn't come together like you wanted, didn't really have that chemistry. It was a great group of guys but it didn't come together. Then, there was the influx of Mike Maddux and an influx of Ron Washington and an influx of Nolan Ryan, and they brought in all the right players. That was a huge step they made. From '07 to '08 to '09, from 2007-08, getting beat down by the Angels, then us almost making the playoffs in 2009. But dominating the Angels changed everything in the AL West. You saw that last year in 2010. How the Rangers played, they weren't scared of anybody.
It starts at the top. That's automatic. I like what Pat Gillick says: "I'm not here to rebuild, I'm here to remodel." That's what he does and that's what he did in Philly. That's what Nolan did in Texas. It starts at the top but you have to put every single piece together. Ron Washington comes in and he says, "I need a Ron Washington team." What did they do? They gave him a Ron Washington team — a team with speed, a team with defense, a team with pitching, a team with timely hitting. Now it seems like all the guys they have there are superstars.
What Pat Gillick did in Philly, he kept bringing in the right players and not just big name players, but players who are big names and they produce at the same time. Changing that culture, it's not an easy thing to do. You need the right people in place at the top. Then you have to pick the right people all the way down.
— Marlon
10/2 "I don't shut down"
The season's over, but I've got work to do. I'm different. I'm big on having my body ready. Playing center field, especially at my age, I have to make sure I can go out there and just run around like crazy for nine innings. The first two weeks after the season ends, I'll eat nothing but raw vegetables. I do a detox and cleanse my whole body. Do steam showers every day. I do epsom salt baths for six minutes every night, just to draw out everything. Once a week, I'll do dead lifts, as heavy as possible, probably like 415 pounds, one rep, six sets of that.
I don't shut down. There's no such thing to me. I feel if you shut down, then you have to rev back up. I don't want to start back up further down from where I started. After a two-week span, I start doing my lifting, about the middle of October, and start getting into it slowly. In November, it's more getting my core strength and flexibility back along with my lifts and I'll do a lot of kettlebell stuff, kettlebell movements. In December, I start boxing and get my sprinting in and go a little heavier and start work on getting my strength up. That's when I start doing my traveling and go to San Francisco to work with Victor Conte and his group. I go down to Florida and work with my trainer there, Terrence Thomas — I've been with him seven years, going on eight years now.
I have to talk to Rudy about when I should come out and start hitting. Usually I start hitting Jan. 1. This year I might start a little earlier and get a week with him sometime in December, probably right before the Christmas holidays.
In January, I ramp it up. January is full power moves and I do my heavy workouts and transfer it more into my in-season routine. I'm hitting, throwing, doing my boxing, doing my sprinting. That's it, all day long.
— Marlon
9/7 Passing the torch
In Spring Training 2002, I had lunch with Doug Glanville right after one of our practices. People who don't know, Doug played in Chicago, but he was the center fielder in Philly before I was there. He took me to lunch. I didn't know what he wanted to talk about. We sat down, and the first thing he said was, "It's inevitable." I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "It's inevitable. You're going to come and take my job and I will go somewhere else. My job right now is to make sure, as much as possible, that you're ready to come to the big leagues."
He said, you're the young guy. What happens in baseball, he explained, is the young guy comes up and take the older guy's job, and the older guy goes somewhere else to play. Then, someone comes up and takes center field from you. It's the cycle of baseball. It's just the way things go in life.
I had the chance to do that in Texas. I did that with Julio Borbon. I wish I had another year with him to make sure he was fine, but at the same time, he was ready. I have a similar chance to do that here with Brett. You don't know how long until he's ready. I don't know long I'm going to be here. That word "inevitable" — it's going to happen. He's a great talent out there, five tools, very explosive. But at the same time, you can't come up here and dominate at the big leagues. You have to have that baseball I.Q., and I think it's important for veterans like me to pass the torch and make sure whoever comes in behind me is 100 percent ready.
I'll take him out to lunch. At the end of 2009, every road trip, Julio and I went to lunch. We sat and talked. Andruw Jones, too. We'd sit and have conversations. It's one of those things where I don't have to look over my shoulder because I know there's always somebody coming.
That's the way it works. When Brett's ready, I'll move on. That's just the nature of the game and I accept that and I understand that. I want him when he comes up to go through all the good times and know everything negative that I've gone through in baseball — being outrighted, being designated — I don't want him to have to go through that. I want him to come here ready.
— Marlon
8/20 On Hendry: "He worked hard"
First of all, what a great baseball man. I had the chance to spend almost two years with Jim and loved everything about him. There aren't many guys like him in the game who are completely honest with their players, they love their players, they love their team. What impressed me the most is not him bringing three division titles here — '03, '07 and '08 — or almost getting to the World Series, or everything he's accomplished in this game, being here for 17 years. I have even more respect for him because of how he handled this situation. Knowing he was going to be out, handling the trades, doing what's best for this organization, signing all the guys he signed from the Draft, working as hard as he did. He signed our first rounder 15 minutes before the deadline. He worked hard for the Cubs knowing he's not going to be the GM — that's something that is so impressive to me.
There are probably a lot of fans happy that he's gone and are mad at Jim and mad at the Cubs but at the same time, it's not his fault. You have to look at the moves he made over the years. You have to look at the hard decisions he had to make, like trading Sammy Sosa, and the good decisions he made, giving guys money who really deserved it, making trades to bring guys over here like Aramis Ramirez — you can't forget about that. Working with no money like he did this year and going to get Matt Garza and Carlos Pena and bringing back Kerry Wood. He signed Mark DeRosa, and traded him because they wanted a left-handed bat, and brought in Milton Bradley. He thought he was the guy and it didn't work out. At the time, it was the right move and everyone agreed it was. He put all that together.
He's a good baseball man. Regardless of what anybody says about him, he did his job the right way. He worked harder than any GM I've ever known and I've been around a few. It's a credit to him how he came into the game, 17 years with the Cubs, and how he ended up with this organization. I think Tom Ricketts and his family have a lot of respect for him. It'll be interesting to see what happens when he takes over another organization and we'll see what he does over there.
— Marlon
7/31 That's how the game is played
The dude was trying to break up a double play. Holliday plays hard. You have to appreciate the way he plays. He's not labeled as a dirty player. He didn't go spikes up. The only thing that made it look bad was that he slid late. That's it. Whether he could reach the bag or not, I don't know. If I'm in that situation, and I'm playing to win, trying to get to a pennant race, I'd do the same exact thing. Even though we're second to last and in fifth place in this division, I still try to flip infielders. It's as simple as that. I try to play winning baseball, and that's all that is.
You call a play dirty when a guy is going out there trying to hurt somebody and that's not what he did. If Holliday wants to go in and hurt somebody he will. He's 6-4, 235, 240 pounds. That's him playing hard. The way we take it when we see it is we want to defend our players at the time. When you go back and really look at it and how the game is played and how it should be played, there's nothing wrong with that. If the umpires want to make their call and say he was too far off, so be it. Being dirty or being malicious, it's not even close.
— Marlon


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FedEx Office to Use Canon, HP Gear
DALLAS—FedEx Office, an operating company of FedEx Corp., has formed an alliance with Canon U.S.A. and HP to create a network of printing and imaging capabilities, giving customers access to leading-edge technologies and a new machine fleet.
Effective this month, FedEx Office (formerly FedEx Kinko's) will utilize Canon and HP as sole-source providers in their respective printing device categories, and will deploy more than 12,000 new Canon and HP machines across more than 1,800 locations in the United States and Canada. The majority of the document imaging equipment will be installed during the next 12 months, laying the foundation for a range of new products and services.
The new network is expected to provide benefits such as:
• Leading technology: The new devices that will be deployed include Canon's imageRUNNER Advance multifunction products (MFP) and imagePRESS digital press systems. In addition, HP is delivering innovations in the form of online and cloud printing applications.
• Consistency: The devices will be the same across most locations, creating a uniform customer experience in terms of printing quality and equipment operation. New software tools from Canon will also enable FedEx Office employees to monitor the installed device fleet to ensure optimum working status and reduce potential downtime delays.


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