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This product has been discontinued, the information below is for reference purposes only.
Key features:
- Megapixel Banding: 50 to 50.9 megapixels
- Model: EOS 5DS
- MegaPixel (Effective Resolution): 50.6 megapixels
Please also consider:
- Sony Alpha A7 IV Mirrorless Digital Camera with 28-70mm Lens
- Black
- Fujifilm X-T30 II Mirrorless Digital Camera
- Body only, Silver
- Sony Alpha A7 III Mirrorless Digital Camera
- Body only
- Ricoh GR III Street Edition Digital Camera
- Nikon Zfc Mirrorless Camera with 16-50mm Lens
- Fujifilm X-Pro3 Mirrorless Digital Camera
- Body only, Dura Silver
Please note that many of our devices are import versions and may not come with a local charger. In those cases, a plug adapter will be included in the box. The item may be inspected for quality by Expansys staff prior to shipping.
Canon EOS 5DS Digital SLR Camera Description
The Canon EOS 5DS is a tough, full-frame DSLR with a 50.6 megapixel full frame CMOS sensor. Features include Dual DIGIC 6 processors for super-fast image processing, 61-point AF, 5fps continuous shooting, reduced mirror vibration for maximum sharpness and USB 3.0 interface.
Capture extraordinary detail
The 50.6 megapixel full frame CMOS sensor is capable of recording extraordinary levels of detail. The ultra-high resolution enables extensive cropping and still delivers stunning image quality. Even the built in 1.3x and 1.6x cropped shooting modes produce 30.5 and 19.6 megapixel files, respectively.
Fast image processing & responsiveness
Enjoy fast image processing and camera responsiveness - even with the large amounts of data captured by the 50.6-MP sensor - thanks to the Dual DIGIC 6 processors. You can catch all the action with an unrivalled ability to capture 50.6-MP resolution images at 5fps while USB 3.0 connectivity allows fast tethered shooting and remote camera control.
61-point wide-area autofocus
Focus quickly and precisely, even in low-light conditions using a 61-point AF System. 41 cross-type focus points, including five extra-sensitive double cross-type, provide extra accuracy.
AF Point Selection
Use all 61 AF points together, or group them into moveable zones that cover off-centre subjects. Alternatively, select just a single AF point to focus precisely on a specific part of the scene.
Advanced subject tracking and recognition
EOS Intelligent Tracking and Recognition (iTR) AF technology uses colour and face information to recognise and track subjects as they move around the frame. AF responsiveness can be customised using a simple tool, which adjusts the focus tracking according to the shooting environment and subject, so that other objects passing momentarily in front of the subject don't interfere with focusing.
Weather sealing
Carry on shooting with confidence, whatever the conditions, thanks to weather-sealed controls that protect against water and dust, and a durable magnesium alloy construction.
Intelligent Viewfinder II
Enjoy a bright (approx.) 100 percent image with a customisable information overlay. 1.6x and 1.3x crops can be masked in the viewfinder and capured as JPEG files.
Dual memory card slots
CompactFlash and SD memory card slots enable automatic back up of files as you shoot, allowing easy sharing with clients and extending storage capacity.
High dynamic range imaging
Preserve the detail in highlight and shadow areas using HDR imaging. Ideal for shooting landscape and still-life shots it combines three images of different exposures: standard, underexposure and overexposure.
Multi exposure
Create stunning composite images in-camera using Multiple Exposure mode, which overlays images on top of each other with a choice of automatic multiple exposure control options.
Reduced mirror vibration for maximum sharpness
The EOS 5DS uses Canon's Mirror Vibration Control System to reduce vibrations caused by internal movements within the camera, which can spoil image sharpness and reduce resolution. Cams are used to drive the mirror up and down in a more controlled fashion, avoiding any sudden stops and also softening the shutter-release sound.
Full HD EOS movies
Capture Full HD EOS Movies, with creative manual control over picture and sound.
Timer shooting functions
Create great time-lapse movies with a built-in, pre-programmable interval timer. For extreme long-exposure photography, the shutter can be locked up in bulb mode for a specified time.
Fine Detail Picture Style
Prioritise gradations and detail captured by the highresolution sensor using Fine Detail Picture Style, which also provides adjustable in-camera sharpening parameters like threshold and fineness for JPEG files - so you can deliver high impact images directly from the camera.
Key features at a glance:
- A full-frame 50.6 megapixel CMOS sensor, and DIGIC 6 processing, deliver extraordinary resolution.
- Shoot continuously at 5 fps, with dual DIGIC 6 processors.
- USB 3.0 connectivity delivers fast tethered performance.
- Use 61 AF points to focus quickly and accurately, and EOS iTR AF technology to track moving objects.
- Set-up the EOS 5DS customisable controls just as you like, and configure the layout of its Custom Quick Control screen.
- Capture Full HD EOS Movies, with creative control at your fingertips.
- Create time-lapse projects in-camera.
Shipping Weight: 1.58kg
Technical Details
- Megapixel Banding: 50 to 50.9 megapixels
- Model: EOS 5DS
- MegaPixel (Effective Resolution): 50.6 megapixels
- Sensor Size (WxH mm): 36 x 24 mm
- Max Image Resolution: 8688 x 5792
- Lens Fitting : Canon EF
- Compatible storage media (card not supplied): SDXC, CompactFlash, SD Card, SDHC Card
- Continuous Shooting Speed (fps): 5fps
- Exposure Modes: Program, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Picture Modes, Manual
- Metering Modes: Evaluative, Partial Metering, Centre Weighted, Spot
- ISO Speed Range: 100 - 12800
- Exposure Compensation: Yes
- Built in Flash: No
- Auto Exposure Bracketing: Yes
- White Balance Modes: Auto, Preset, White Balance Bracketing, Custom
- Connection Type: USB 3.0, HDMI
- Focusing Modes: One-shot AF, AI Servo AF, Continuous AF, Manual
- Audio Recording: Yes
- Movie Mode: Yes (with Sound)
- Tripod Thread: Yes
- Video Out: HDMI
- Body Dimensions (WxHxD) mm: 152 x 116.4 x 76.4mm
- Weight (g): 845g
Canon EOS 5DS Digital SLR Camera Reviews
- 凄い高画質
- 安く購入出来て良かったです 商品の到着が早くていいですねー
- お買い得なモンスターマシンですね


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No, NASA is not announcing the existence of alien life
An agency official responded to an Anonymous video that went viral
An agency official responded to an Anonymous video that went viral
An agency official responded to an Anonymous video that went viral
Don't count on first contact any time soon.
A NASA official quashed the claim that the agency is "poised" to announce the existence of alien life. A video from the hacker group Anonymous made the claims, and it has since gone viral with more than 2.4 million views.
"Contrary to some reports, there's no pending announcement from NASA regarding extraterrestrial life," tweeted Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
In a second tweet, he added "Are we alone in the universe? While we do not know yet, we have missions moving forward that may help answer that fundamental question."
The video quoted Zurbuchen during an April congressional hearing on the search for life in space, where he discussed recent discoveries that are bringing scientists closer to finding answers to the cosmic question.
"Our civilization is on the verge of discovering evidence of alien life in the cosmos," he said.
"Taking into account all of the different activities and missions that are specifically searching for evidence of alien life, we are on the verge of making one of the most profound and unprecedented discoveries in history."

subset: commoncrawl


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"Failure is inevitable. Success is elusive." – Steven Spielberg
If failure seems like the worst thing that can happen, take heart. Everyone experiences it at one point or another. Most people try to learn from their mistakes, preferring to regard an outcome that is less than successful as a learning experience rather than an outright failure. The truth is that it may take repeated attempts before success is achieved, so adopting a positive attitude and sticking with the plan is a much better approach than simply giving up.
If success is what you're after, yet you keep stumbling and feel like you never quite get there, there are some approaches you can take to ultimately achieve the outcome you desire. Keep these steps in mind:
If it doesn't work out the first time, or the approach you used was less than effective, do a careful analysis of what you did to determine when, where and why it didn't prove successful. The only way you're going to get past a failure and achieve success is to recognize patterns, so you can learn from your mistakes.
Use this as a learning experience.
While it may seem difficult, make a conscious effort to look at mistakes and failures as a learning experience, part of the growth process you need to go through on your way to success. If you continue to regard failure as your lot in life, you'll never find the success you seek. This is a law of self-fulfilling prophecy. You need to envision success to achieve it.
Cultivate flexibility.
Be flexible and willing to revise your plans, modify your goals and adopt and implement the latest and most current information as it becomes available.
Seek support.
Seek the advice and support of loved ones and friends. If you have people in your network you trust, talk with them about your goals and your efforts to achieve them. Sometimes all it takes to get you past a stumbling block is the reassurance from those who care about you that you can do it. Other times, you'll receive suggestions and tips that may prove helpful. In any case, you're not in this alone. You have allies. Make use of them.
Remain diligent.
Another cardinal characteristic of successful people is diligence. Be diligent and never give up. Success may take longer than you think. For this reason, you need to be diligent in your efforts and determined to keep going no matter what obstacles you encounter. Remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare. Slow and steady ultimately wins the race.
Replenish your goals list.
Always have new goals to strive for. The way to keep your optimism high and give you renewed motivation is to maintain a constantly evolving list of things you want to accomplish. Add new goals as you think of them or as opportunities present themselves. Keep in mind that not every opportunity is clear. You may need to scrutinize it to find the gem hidden within. An added benefit of replenishing your goals list is that it boosts enthusiasm for goals you're currently working on.
Stay positive.
Saving the best for last, above all, stay positive. If you envision a successful outcome, you're already making progress toward that eventuality. Plus, a positive attitude can help you weather interim roadblocks, overcome disappointments, and give you the breathing room to be able to discern potential solutions when you're locked up.
* * *
Related Posts:
How to Tap into Your Capabilities
You Won or Lost: Here's How to Get Over It and Move On
Success Means You Make Things Happen
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Senor: Al Qaeda gaining strength
Ahead of Mitt Romney's major foreign policy speech slated for Monday, a top foreign policy hand on the Republican's presidential campaign insisted Al Qaeda was on the rise in the Middle East despite the death of Osama bin Laden
"Just because bin Laden is dead doesn't mean Al Qaeda's not on the rise," Dan Senor said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "If you look throughout the Middle East today and throughout North Africa, Al Qaeda's on the rise."
In a speech Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, Romney will try to deliver a more detailed foreign policy critique of the president, linking the assault in Libya to the civil war in Syria and Iranian progress toward a nuclear weapon. All, Romney will argue, are the result of Obama administration weakness.
Senor wasn't able to identify specific actions Romney would have taken differently than Obama, other than implementing a tough round of sanctions on Iran earlier. Those sanctions have caused major inflation in Iran, putting pressure on the country's political leadership.
He did link the unrest in the Middle East to Obama administration's much-hyped "pivot to Asia."
"Look at events in recent years," Senor said. "Iran closer to a nuclear bomb than ever before, Syria in chaos, you know, lots of tumult throughout the Middle East, the Arab Spring turning into some sort of dark winter, [Romney]'s taking a step back and looking at the world we live in. The president likes to talk about a pivot to Asia. The Middle East is really unsettling, unraveling."
Besides the death of bin Laden, Obama is responsible for the expansion of U.S. drone war against Al Qaeda, resulting in the deaths of key leaders in both Yemen and Pakistan. The group's branch in Libya has been linked to the assault on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya that resulted in the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and four others.


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Roy Moore posts video following Alabama Senate race defeat: 'The battle rages on'
Following a surprising defeat Tuesday night, GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore has still not officially conceded to Doug Jones, who was declared the winner of the race.
Moore claims he is concerned about the state of our country "both financially and morally."
Roy Moore begins the statement thanking his supporters and his family. He then mentions that his team has "not received a final count" of the votes.
"In this race we have not received the final count to include military and provisional ballots. This has been a very close race and we are awaiting certification by the secretary of state."
Democrat Doug Jones won the election by more than 20,000 votes over Republican Roy Moore, reported CNN.
But Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said that an automatic recount won't take place based on the numbers counted on Tuesday night alone.
- Jones receiving 671,151 votes (50 percent)
- Moore's 650,436 votes (48 percent)
- Write-ins 22,819 (2 percent)
The certification process is scheduled to start around Dec 26. Provisional and military ballots will be included in those numbers. The certification team the governor of Alabama, the attorney general and the secretary of state.
CNN has contributed to this report


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Volkswagen is going to pull the cloth off a sporty-looking R-Line package of its Arteon four-door sedan; we could observe it in its full glory at the New... read more
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Volkswagen Parati
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Claimed to be even cheaper than the current model, the 2019 Volkswagen Jetta will hit U.S. markets with the starting price of $18,545. While saving costs and... read more
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For the current Los Angeles Auto Show, the Wolfsburg-headquartered automaker rolls out the new R-Line appearance package for two trims, SEL and SEL Premium.... read more
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As first images of the new VW's compact SUV, the T-Roc, leaked on the internet, Volkswagen had to show off its official teaser video revealing the... read more
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Is it an ugly duckling or a smart concept vehicle for future? Volkswagen revealed its fully-autonomous concept at the latest Shanghai Motor Show claiming it... read more
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Truth to be told, Volkswagen needs a branded-new, affordable prize winner to be offered at the sales market after all the sadly remembered "Dieselgates". And... read more
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It would be as leading-edge vehicle as the Beetle model was several decades ago, Volkswagen announced. The one-off latter-day electric pioneer based on the... read more
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Can it be both? Local Food Initiatives for Social and Environmental Change in Communities
This presentation was part of a panel session on "Planning for Growth or Planning for Equity: Potential and Challenges of Sustainable Community Development" at the Planners Network conference on Towards a Just Metropolis: ...
Bridging the Social Economy and Sustainability Through Food: Exploring the potential for community transformation
This presentation was part of a panel session on "Community Organizing and Community Economic Development" at the 2010 annual conference of the Association for Nonprofit and Social Economy Research (ANSER). Drawing on ...


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This new Lexmark multifunction device (MFD) is full of fresh ideas. A printer, scanner and photocopier with USB or Wi-Fi 'n' connectivity and colour fax support.
The Genesis' optical image capture is based on Lexmark's new Flash Scan technology, replacing the usual reflective scanner with a 10MP digital camera. This makes it incredibly fast, capturing the entire scannable area in just three seconds, with no warm-up time needed.
Genesis abandons the traditional form factor in favour of a much more upright design. The 'scanner' is positioned in a near-vertical orientation, allowing for a smaller, space-saving footprint. A clip at the top of the scannable area and a shelf at its foot stop your documents from sliding down the glass.
Its 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen does more than control the device's functions too. After connecting the Genesis to your wireless network, you can download and install Lexmark's SmartSolutions mini-apps. These include a basic calculator, clock display, Facebook and Twitter integration, apps to view, scan to and print from MobileMe, Flickr and Picasa, print your own graph or music paper and even display news and sports feeds from Apple, ESPN and the BBC. Over 60 apps are already available, and more are in the works.
But for all its innovation, the Genesis also makes compromises. The camera-based image capture function has a maximum resolution of 300dpi. While this is good enough for most home users, if you need a high-resolution scanner, this isn't the printer for you.
Also, its three-second image capture speed is rendered almost moot by the lack of an automatic document feeder. If you've a handful of pages to scan one after another, you have to open the lid and change them by hand after each scan.
There's only one paper tray too, an open feeder at the back of the device – inconvenient if you like a second tray for letterheads or photo paper.
Thankfully, there's no compromise in print quality. Text output is dark and crisp, remaining readable even at very low point sizes. Our 20-page text document printed in six minutes, five seconds, which is pedestrian but not problematic. A top-quality A4 photo print took two minutes, 32 seconds, which is perfectly acceptable.
Default-setting plain-paper photo prints are natural and complete, and when you switch to photo paper and max out the quality settings, the results are commendable, but maybe not quite as good as a recent Canon.
Lexmark's Genesis S815 is innovative and ideal for most home users. Versatile and user-friendly, it offers great integration with online services, but it's not the best for high-resolution scanning, fast document printing or stellar photo printing.
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'Signal' And 'Noise': Prediction As Art And Science
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Our guest, Nate Silver, is a statistical analyst who's become something of a celebrity for his ability to decipher the meaning of opinion polls and other political data. He writes a blog called FiveThirtyEight, named for the number of votes in the Electoral College. In 2008, he correctly called all 35 Senate races and the winners of presidential contests in 49 of 50 states.
Two years ago, his blog moved to the New York Times website, where it's closely followed by political junkies. Before he focused on elections, Silver developed a sophisticated system for analyzing baseball players' potential and became a skilled poker player, making his living from the game for a while.
Nate Silver has written a new book about the explosion of data available to us in the Internet age and the challenge of sorting through it and making wise decisions. Silver looks at analysts in many fields, from economics to weather to national security, and concludes those who succeed at spotting new trends and understanding the future are careful to acknowledge what they don't know and examine the assumptions that underlie their thinking. Humility, he says, is critical.
Silver's new book is called "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don't." He spoke yesterday with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies.
Well, Nate Silver, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's talk about where the polls are now. We all - it's widely viewed that Mitt Romney had a great performance in his first debate against President Obama. How has his performance been reflected in polls as you see them?
NATE SILVER: So we've seen a significant reversal in the polls since the Denver debate, where you went from Obama having maybe about a four-point lead, four or five points, to a case now where it's hard to tell who's ahead, and it's probably for the first time in many months that it wasn't clear who had the lead.
We think Obama most likely still has a narrow advantage. There's some evidence that Romney's best polling nights came immediately after the debate and that Obama has since regained some ground. But look, before Denver it looked as though this campaign would be close but where you had a very clear frontrunner and where every day that kind of came off the calendar was an opportunity lost for Mitt Romney.
He did himself an awful lot of good just in that one evening in Denver.
DAVIES: OK, there was a Pew research poll that showed him leading by four percent among likely voters, but when looked in the full context, it's awfully close, right?
SILVER: It's awfully close, and as I said, our - we put a betting line on this each day and give the probability of each candidate winning, and that's still - that calculation still has Obama as a modest favorite. But it's important to - kind of on the one hand you want to look at all the data. On the other hand, sometimes there's a tendency to take the result, the poll that is most out of line with the consensus, because it tells the most dramatic headline and make a big deal about that.
So I do urge some caution about becoming overly attached or overly despondent if you're a Democrat, I suppose, about any one polling result.
DAVIES: Right, and you have a, you know, a full discourse on your blog about how you want to look at all of the current polls. Now, of course forecasting the outcome of the popular vote is one thing. That shows it's very close. You also on your blog do a regular forecast of the likely winners of the Electoral College.
And if I read that right, as of the day we're speaking, Tuesday, it shows about a 75-percent chance that the president will win the Electoral College. Is that right?
SILVER: That's right, although I should stipulate that number has been going down every day since the debate. And so by the time this airs, it might be a bit lower. But one thing we don't know yet, we've seen national polls showing everything from a modest bounce for Romney to a pretty clear bounce in the Pew poll.
We don't have a sense yet for how that will work out in the Electoral College. It would be naive to assume that Obama won't be hurt in some of these states. People in Ohio, for example, aren't all that different than people elsewhere in the country. But there were points when it seemed like he was actually polling better, for example, in Ohio than in the national average.
So if he were able to maintain a lead there and in other key swing states like, say, Virginia and Iowa, then Romney would still have some work left to do.
DAVIES: Now, it's clear that your forecast isn't simply an averaging of polls, that you look at a lot of things, including historical trends. What else do you take into account - economic data, what else?
SILVER: Yeah, so we do look at a number of economic data series. For example, we look at the monthly jobs numbers - not the unemployment rate, technically, but what's called the non-farm payrolls number. And so on that basis, interestingly enough, we think Obama ought to be a slight favorite, where the jobs growth numbers - about 150,000 per month so far this year - look a lot like George W. Bush's in 2004, where he added 160,000 jobs per month.
So that's why we think the natural gravity of this race is a narrow Obama lead, by about two points. So the forecast was adjusting his numbers downward after his convention bounce, where to be ahead by five or six points with this economy seemed unlikely.
At the same time, he is a president who has an approval rating of about 50 percent. There are some brighter signs in the economy lately. And so we think he's a slight favorite on that basis, without looking at any polls.
DAVIES: You carefully analyze every poll. You look at economic data. Anything else, the weather?
SILVER: Not the weather, no. I mean, with any model you have to decide, well, how much can I add to it, where I add value and insight versus just kind of starting to plug in too much detail, where you kind of lose track of the big picture and lose the forest for the trees.
So we look at - the polls and economic data are two variables, and they explain an awful lot of what's going on, but yeah, there are always intangible factors that can matter. Foreign policy developments can matter. At the same time, I think that the news media probably gives more attention to some of those factors and this idea of momentum, for example, than might be really warranted based on the empirical evidence.
DAVIES: Now, you did forecasting in the 2008 national elections and were known for calling all 35 Senate races correctly and the outcome in the presidential contest in 49 out of 50 states. Can you give us an example of something you got right in 2008 that other people missed and tell us why?
SILVER: Well, I think the best thing that our model did in 2008 was that it detected very quickly after the financial crisis became manifest, meaning after Lehman Brothers went belly-up, that McCain's goose was cooked. He had been a little bit behind before, and there was such a clear trend toward him - or against McCain, rather, that McCain had very little chance in the race from that point onward.
Interestingly enough, Obama had about the same lead pre-Lehman Brothers over McCain than he did before the debate against Romney. So you see in 2008 you had a narrow Obama advantage that broke and opened up toward him, whereas this cycle you had a narrow advantage that collapsed to close to a tie based on a news event going the other way.
DAVIES: Now, you tell an interesting story in this book about the relationship between all of the information we're getting nowadays and our inability to use it effectively.
SILVER: Sure.
DAVIES: How much more data do we generate today than we used to?
SILVER: So according to IBM, 90 percent of the data in the world was created within the last two years. Now, not all that data is very useful, though. It might include YouTube videos of people's cats and text messages sent between teenage girls. So the question is - well, two questions, really. Number one...
DAVIES: You're saying that's not important?
SILVER: Well, it might be, but if you have a very literal-minded way of looking at what is data, what is information, that stuff's encoded and beamed into outer space and will survive forever, but there's not a lot of knowledge in there. So one problem is that what we would call the signal-to-noise ratio, the amount of meaningful information relative to the overall amount of information is declining.
We're not that much smarter than we used to be, even though we have much more information, and that means the real skill now is learning how to pick out the useful information from all this noise, as we call it. The second thing people can do, though, when they have so much choice of what to read or which news outlets to learn about the election from, for example, is that people are often very selective about the information that they choose to emphasize.
If you have three polls coming out every day, you can kind of handle those mentally and look at all of them. If you have 20, what happens is that people tend to pick three that they like, depending if they're a Romney or an Obama supporter, and ignore the others.
And so there are actually cases where for some types of people, more information can make their analysis worse.
DAVIES: You have an interesting story. I mean, you worked for several years at an economic consulting firm. And you've developed a great statistical model for predicting the performance of baseball players. Was baseball a love of yours? Is that why you got into this?
SILVER: You know, so I've always been a person who's been interested in data and statistics but always in a hands-on way rather than an abstract way. And so kind of being a little bit of a math nerd growing up and also having been six in 1984, when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series - I grew up in Michigan - I always found that connection very compelling in baseball, and it was kind of - it's always been a lifelong love of mine.
And baseball is such a great way to test out statistical ideas because you have so much information and so much data. So I created a statistical system called Pecota. Pecota is named after Bill Pecota, who is a Kansas City Royals infielder who was always a thorn in the side of the Tigers.
And what it does is it looks at history to guide it. So it can find a player from the past, where if you have, say, Robinson Cano of the Yankees, second baseman, it can find other players who are similar to him throughout history based on their physical characteristics, based on their statistics as well. So it's taking advantage of baseball's very rich history, where we have tens of thousands of players who have played in the major leagues.
So we can say and be more exacting and say let's look at different precedents for how players like this guy did in the past. That was the idea behind the system. We found that this did pretty well. It gave you a slightly better prediction than other systems did and it also gave you the fact that there were different possibilities for how a player might develop, where you might have a player who has the same statistics as, say, Mike Schmidt up through a certain point in his career but then developed a drug problem or something else and tailed off afterwards.
So instead of just saying, oh, we know exactly how many home runs this guy's going to hit next year, it would give you a range of different outcomes, best case and worst case and median case scenarios, so to speak.
DAVIES: You know, it's interesting. I mean one of the main points of the book is that you need the right mix of data analysis and insight. And you write that, you know, there was, you know, years past when the old curmudgeons of baseball, the scouts and coaches, sort of didn't realize what statistics might tell them about real performance, but that now that they've embraced that, they're actually better because they see things and know things that statisticians don't.
SILVER: Yeah, so once you know what you - once you know what you don't know, then you can kind of take more advantage of what you do know, potentially. So the scouts 10 years ago or so, when Michael Lewis wrote "Moneyball," this is about when I was kind of breaking in to the baseball industry, although I was an outsider, I should say, myself. And there really was a lot of tension. Everyone was afraid that the other person would steal their jobs, potentially, that a bunch of stat geeks were going to take down the scouts. And what teams realized is that, number one, in baseball we have a concrete way to measure success, which is how many games do you win or lose, and that reduces some of the poor incentives, where if you're making stupid decisions to be politically correct, then your team will lose and you'll get fired.
So we have natural ways of weeding that out of the system. But the best way you can actually make money, make a good investment in baseball, is by knowing how young players will perform. Based on the major league's contract rules, you don't have to pay a guy his full market value for the first six years of his career.
So if you get a guy who can perform like a superstar, like a Mike Trout or a Bryce Harper, that's worth millions and millions of dollars, given - compared to how much he would cost on the free market. So both stat heads and scouts provide that kind of data.
And the scouts now are sophisticated enough where they understand what the statistics say, that they can concentrate on areas where they add value. A lot of it is actually looking at the kids - because they are kids, they are 18 and 19-year-olds that are just drafted out of high school a lot of the time, looking at what they're like as human beings.
Do they have the willpower and the drive to succeed? How will they handle success and failure? It's a big adjustment when you've gone from being kind of king of your high school to riding a bus in Kannapolis or Boise or something from minor league game to minor league game. And so that stuff is almost where they add more of their value.
DAVIES: You spend a lot more time doing political analysis these days, but I'm sure you follow baseball. Do you have a probability of - can you predict the winner of the World Series?
SILVER: Well, in baseball, because the game does involve, over the near term, so much luck, you would never at this point in the playoffs want to say, oh, any one team is the odds-on favorite necessarily. You'd always want to put things in terms of probabilities.
But, you know, I mean the Yankees and Tigers look fairly decent so far. We'll see how the Nationals do. But no, I don't have as much time to enjoy baseball during election years as I do otherwise. It's one of my - the great pleasures of life denied. So although it would be good for FiveThirtyEight to have an election every year, I appreciate the fact that we have some odd-numbered years instead of even-numbered ones where I can kind of be a little bit more relaxed.
GROSS: We're listening to FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies' interview with Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight political blog for the New York Times and is the author of a new book, "The Signal and the Noise." As you can tell, Silver follows political polls almost around the clock, and since this interview was recorded yesterday, some new data favorable to Mitt Romney has come in. Silver's forecast now gives President Obama a 70 percent chance of winning the Electoral College and Romney a 30 percent chance. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies recorded yesterday with Nate Silver. On Silver's New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight, he analyzes political polls and forecasts election outcomes. He's the author of the new book "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, And Some Don't."
DAVIES: Now, we're in a situation today where we have not only far more data generated than ever before, but we also share it more easily because of the Internet. You compare this to the invention of the printing press. How are they similar?
SILVER: Well, so the printing press - basically books were a luxury item before the printing press, where they cost the equivalent in today's dollars of about $25,000 to produce a manuscript. So unless you were a king or a bishop or something, you probably had never really read a book.
And then all of a sudden, the printing press reduced the cost of publishing a book by about 500 times. And so everyone who was literate at least could read. But what happened is that people used those books as a way to proselytize and to spread heretical ideas, some of which are popular now but at the time caused a lot of conflict.
The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's Theses were reproduced about 250,000 times. And so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before. And look, when something's on the page or on the Internet, people tend to believe it a lot more.
And so you had disagreements that wound up playing into greater sectarianism and even warfare. The first 200 years or so after the printing press was invented were maybe the bloodiest epoch in the history of Western Europe.
DAVIES: And so are we in for a period of intensified conflict because we are sharing all this information?
SILVER: You know, I don't think we'll have another repeat of the Crusades, but we have seen, for example, in Congress that the amount of partisanship has increased quite a bit, and you can time that back kind of to the dawn of the computer age and frankly also the growth in cable news. Right about when cable news comes online you see this uptick in the graph, where fewer and fewer times are Democrats and Republicans voting together, and they're becoming more entrenched in their conservative or liberal views.
So we are moving toward a time where there's greater disagreement, instead of greater consensus, and that could have consequences. It could mean that we cycle back and forth between some very liberal presidents, some very conservative ones. Potentially there's a lot of turnover.
We've had periods like this in the country before, but it can be somewhat damaging. It can be damaging economically, frankly, as well, where you saw the debt ceiling debate really did have economic consequences. It kind of left that Washington bubble in ways that wound up hurting ordinary people.
DAVIES: Now, you write in the book that our challenge is to make sense of all this data, to put it in context. And if there's a glaring example of people having a lot of data and reading it wrong, it's - you know, Wall Street analysts and government regulators who failed to recognize the risks of what was going on in, you know, mortgage-backed securities and all of the derivatives that flowed from them before the economic crash. What was wrong with their approach?
SILVER: So this is an example - it's a two-part problem. Number one is that you have these financial instruments called mortgage-backed securities that were new and complicated and that people didn't have good models for how to handle. They were unprecedented in many respects.
The other problem is that the group that was charged with rating these, the rating agencies, were basically corrupt. They had a lot of skin in the game, where every time a new mortgage-backed security was created, they would get profits by rating it. That's how their business model works. And so they had an incentive to give favorable ratings so that they could rate more of these and make more of a commission.
So those two things, when the person who was supposed to be kind of the lifeguard wound up being in on the scheme, created a disaster for the global economy.
DAVIES: So their analysis of data was tainted by bias?
SILVER: Yeah, I think - look, one thing we talked about in the book is that you can build a statistical model and it's all well and good, but if you're dealing with a new type of financial instrument, for example, or a new type of situation, then the choices you're making are pretty arbitrary in a lot of respects. You have a lot of choices when you're designing the model about what assumptions to make.
For example, the rating agencies assumed, basically, that housing prices would behave as they had over the previous two decades, during which time there had always been steady or rising housing prices. They could have looked, for example, at what happened during the Japanese real estate bubble, where you had a big crash, and having diversified apartments all over Tokyo would not have helped you with that, when everything was sinking.
So they made some very optimistic assumptions that, not coincidently, happened to help them give these securities better ratings and make more money. But so I do throw up my hands some when people say, oh, you know, this is just what the data says, this is what the model says, when it's some human being or some set of human beings who designed the model, and if they make bad assumptions, they'll be reflected in the model.
The term in computer science is garbage in, garbage out.
GROSS: Nate Silver will continue his conversation with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies in the second half of the show. Silver writes the New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight, analyzing political polls and forecasting election outcomes. His new book is called "The Signal and the Noise." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies recorded yesterday with Nate Silver, who writes the 538 blog for The New York Times, which analyzes polling trends in the elections and forecasts outcomes. Silver is a statistician and has written a new book about the challenges of predicting trends and making wise decisions in an age in which more data is available than ever before in so many fields. His new book is called "The Signal and the Noise."
DAVIES: Right. Now in this book, about eight chapters in, you introduce us to an 18th-century minister named Thomas Bayes, who gave us, who had a real insight into how you look at data, statistical probability, all those years ago. What was his insight?
SILVER: So it's called Bayes' Theorem, and what Bayes' Theorem is is just a mathematical rule, a simple rule based on some addition and subtraction, multiplication of how to weigh new evidence given what you already know. And probably the mathematical abstraction of it is less important than just the practical application, which means that you shouldn't take each piece of evidence in isolate. You should say here's what I know, and how much should this change what I know? And ideally, in fact, you create a set of rules where, before you encounter new evidence, you have an idea of how you would weigh it, conditional upon different things being true.
One example we give in the book is - by the way, a lot of this Bayes' Theorem stuff is actually very intuitive; it's kind of how we think naturally a lot of the time. If you're in a relationship and you encounter, say, a strange pair of underwear in your dresser drawer, which could potentially be a sign of infidelity, the right way to look at that information is to consider it in context of the relationship you have already. It might be very damning if you've already had reasons to suspect that your partner is cheating. But if you've been in a relationship for 20 years or something, and this person is as honest as can be, then you wouldn't weigh it very heavily. And that's all it is. It's just saying take this information given the context that you already know, and it also encourages us to be explicit about what our state of knowledge is and what our biases might be, instead of pretending that we can just kind of look at everything like we are performing a perfect experiment on it but be sealed off from the real world implication.
DAVIES: All right. So before you draw a conclusion from somebody's economic model of a financial product, or a poll or a player's, you know, ball-to-strike ratio, you have to think carefully about what you think you know, and ask, does this make sense?
SILVER: And this is especially true in cases where we have limited information. So for example, in baseball you have so much data, where you have 750 players every year, and we've played Major League Baseball for about 150 years now. Where - in baseball, you almost can just run up your statistical model and take the results out and be satisfied that it's a pretty good representation of the truth. But in other fields, like presidential elections, for example, we've only had 16 elections since World War II - this is the 17th, I believe. And so, we don't really know all that much based on why people vote the way they do or exactly which economic indicators are most important. And so we have to make some educated guesses and those guesses are based on the historical evidence that we do have, but also based on theory, and what might even be called common sense, for example on having good structural - good structural variables in the model.
For example saying yeah, we probably should weigh the economy some, but we're going to look at a number of different economic data series, because we're not sure exactly what's most important to people. So I think people who are working, both in a casual way and in a technical way, in these fields don't always respect how important it is for how much quality information do you have. Whereas, baseball is at one end of the spectrum - where you have so much data you can be really data-driven - and something like politics or maybe a new type of financial instrument is at the other end, where we've never seen how mortgage-backed securities performed in the long term. So you can't be guided that much by the history alone, and you have to think sensibly about these things and be more of a Bayesian - as it would be called.
DAVIES: And you write there are some people that do this. And you cite the chief economist at Goldman Sachs...
SILVER: Mm-hmm.
DAVIES: ...a guy named Jan Hatzius? Am I pronouncing that right?
SILVER: Yeah. I think it's Jan Hatzius, but I...
SILVER: Yeah.
DAVIES: ...who wrote a paper in November, 2007 that was strikingly accurate, predicting not just what would happen with mortgage-backed securities but their broader effect on the economy. What did he get that others didn't?
SILVER: So what he understood is he put two different puzzle pieces together. Number one, he realized that these instruments were very risky because the potential for housing price collapse, they weren't robust to the possibility of a housing price decline. But number two, he realized how large a fraction of the economy this had become. So for every actual dollar that Americans spent on a new home during the bubble, there were about $50 of side bets. These derivatives and securities were being traded very, very rapidly and represented an extremely large chunk of the financial sector.
And then when all of a sudden, trillions of dollars - what people think are profits - turn out to be a mirage, that creates a gigantic hole in the economy. And that takes a long time to repair, where you're not quite sure who owes what to whom and you have to untangle and unwind everything. And very often when you have recessions that are triggered by financial crises, they do perpetuate for years and years and years. And in some ways the American experience since 2007 is quite typical, where finally in 2012 you maybe see more resilient signs of a recovery in the job market, but still not great and it's taken an awful long time to get here.
DAVIES: You write that there are some fields that have managed to make better use of all this explosion of data than others. Weather forecasters, for example, is it that they understand this Bayesian principle, that you have to think carefully about what it all means?
SILVER: So the weather forecasters, I think, are Bayesian in the sense that they're frequently updating their forecasts. Another big Bayesian idea is that you always want to make the best forecast that you can at the time you're making the forecast. There's no glory in sticking to a forecast you made three days ago when the facts change. But the weather forecasters also do a couple of other things. One of the most important ones is thinking probabilistically. By the way, this is another component of Bayes' Theorem is that the number - you think of everything in terms of a probability. So there's a, you know, a sixty percent chance that Obama will be reelected. There's a two percent chance that we'll find life on Mars, and so forth. It is framed in terms of a probability, rather than a certainty, either way.
But weather forecasters really realized very early on, because of something called chaos theory, that they could never make perfect predictions. That as smart as they are, and as good as our computing power is, it's still very small as compared to all of the complexities of Mother Nature - how a cloud forms, or something like that, or a rainstorm develops. So they can get to better and better approximations, but when they tell you that there's a 30 percent chance of rain, people think oh, that's being wishy-washy. Will it rain or not? I want to know. That just reflects a more honest view of mankind's predictive powers. That we can get close to the truth and, kind of, give you the odds almost as a gambler might but we'll never know for sure. None of us are possessed of true clairvoyance. And, lo and behold, in having for many many years given those probabilistic estimates and thought about the weather that way, they've gotten a lot better.
They aren't perfect by any means, but now when you have a hurricane, for example, sitting in the Gulf of Mexico, they can predict the landfall position of that hurricane within about 100 miles, on average, three days in advance. Which means if you need to evacuate some key counties in Louisiana or Mississippi, you could do so. Twenty-five years ago they could only get within about 250 miles on average, which if you draw a radius, would take you everywhere from about Tallahassee, Florida to Houston, Texas. Not a very useful prediction at all.
DAVIES: And are we talking about the National Weather Service or commercial forecasters, everybody?
SILVER: So here is a slightly important distinction to make, where the data we've seen the most impressive gains is from the National Weather Service itself. And they're scientists, they're very rigorous about what they do. They should maybe be distinguished from the local TV meteorologist who succumbs to various types of news media biases. Where it's been shown, for example, that local meteorologists have what's called a wet bias, which means they put more rain in the forecast than there really is.
SILVER: So the idea that, oh, this guy is always talking about the next Snowpocalypse or the next storm of the century and it doesn't always seem to pan out, if you're watching the Weather Channel it's not a fair complaint. But if you're watching the goofball on Channel 7, then that's actually true. They deliberately make the forecast worse, because it gets better ratings and seems more dramatic to people.
DAVIES: Right. Now one crew that you think does a particularly poor job of using data and forecasting are political pundits.
SILVER: Yes.
DAVIES: And I love this. You did a study of nearly a thousand predictions by panelists on The McLaughlin Group. You found a quarter of the predictions were too vague to analyze really. But among those that you could test, what did you find?
SILVER: So the predictions - and these were made over a four-year interval, so it's a big enough chunk of data to make some fair conclusions. We found that almost exactly half of the predictions were right, and almost exactly half were wrong. Meaning if you'd just flipped a coin instead of listening to these guys and girls, you would have done just as well. And it wasn't really even the case that the easier predictions turned out to be right more. So, for example, on the eve of the 2008 election - you can go to Vegas, you would have seen Obama with a 95 percent chance of winning. Our forecast model had him with a 98 percent chance.
Three of the four panelists said it was too close to call, despite Obama being ahead in every single poll for months and months, and the economy having collapsed. One of them, actually, Monica Crowley of Fox News, said she thought McCain would win by half a point. Of course, what happened the next week, where she came back on the air and said, oh, Obama's win had been inevitable, how could he lose, with this economy and so forth. And so there's not really a lot of accountability for these predictions. They're mostly meant as entertainment and it's hoped that the viewer will forget about them just moments later.
DAVIES: If you're just joining us, we're speaking with Nate Silver. He analyzes statistics - particularly political polls, and he writes the 538 blog for The New York Times. He also has a new book about how we predict and use data. It's called "The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't."
There was a stretch in the early 2000s, I think, or mid-2000s, where you made your living playing poker?
SILVER: Yes.
DAVIES: I guess not surprising for a guy who understands probability like you do. Was it fun?
SILVER: It's fun when you win. It's not so fun when you lose.
SILVER: I'm not a world-class player but I was pretty good, if you understand probability and statistics and know something about game theory. And so for a couple of years, during the bubble, I made a lot of profits from the game. And it was fun until the end, where we saw the ecology of the game changing and those players began to either get better or bust out. And all of a sudden if you're - if you were the second best player at the table before and one of the fish, they're called in poker, busts out of the game, you might go from being a winning player to a losing one. Most poker players are losing players over the long run, because the house takes a share of the profits; the rest is redistributed around. So unless you're really at the top or you find a very weak game, then it's a hard way to make a living.
DAVIES: What interests me here, I mean, is that the book argues that, you know, we need not just to look hard at data, but we also need to bring our own kind of human understanding of events to it, and look at our assumptions and figure that into how we calculate probabilities. How does that work at a poker table?
SILVER: So in poker, this is a very good example of this Bayes' Theorem concept that I talked about, where you're always refining your estimate of what cards your opponent might have as you pick up more and more data. So at first, maybe even based on a person's physical characteristics, poker players, it's unpleasant, but they engage in a fair amount of what might be called stereotyping. So, for example, women are reputed to be less aggressive players than men. Older players are assumed to be more conservative than younger ones. Of course, some players can exploit that. It's a matter of logical deduction, but also one because in Texas Hold'em - the most popular form of the game - you never know exactly what your opponent holds until the cards are turned face up, or the cards stay facedown throughout the hand, that you're refining your estimate of does he have a good hand or a bad hand, and how should it change my actions accordingly?
DAVIES: But - being a careful observer of human behavior helps.
SILVER: Yeah, it helps a little bit. Although, there's much less of these, you know, people watch, say, the movie "Rounders," which is a great poker movie, but where John Malkovich manipulates an Oreo cookie whenever he's about to bluff in a certain way. Real poker is not like that as much.
It's more very mathematical, and there are a certain number of different combinations that a person can have of different hands, and that number gets reduced as they bet or fold or raise with their hand at different points in the betting hand. So it's more - poker is probably about 90 percent a mathematical game and 10 percent a psychological one.
And the psychology stuff is important, but remember, the good players can manipulate your expectations about how they might be behaving, where they might act weak if they have a strong hand, meaning look like they're very scared and tentative, or the reverse. Or if they're really smart, they'll know that you know that and so they'll go one level deeper and act strong when they have a strong hand because they think, they'll expect you to have them acting the opposite way.
DAVIES: You make the point in the book that you have to be aware of what your own bias is, how you look at data before you look at it, what assumptions you're bringing to your analysis.
SILVER: Yeah.
DAVIES: And there are those who would say, well, you know, Nate Silver is pro-Democrat. He's pro-Obama. Do you have to look at your own kind of biases and do you think there's anything to that?
SILVER: Well, look. I think news coverage in general is affected by different types of biases, but you can go both ways. On the one hand you can give a result that reflects your biases, but there are also people who live in perpetual fear of being labeled as being biased and so maybe overcompensate as a result.
You know, technically speaking, I'm a political independent but I think it would be insane not to have any political views at all. But I do think that if you acknowledge those and say, look, here's where I'm coming from when I view the data, then that makes you less susceptible to actually manifesting that bias than if you pretend that you're this neutral arbiter who has no preferences whatsoever.
But what I do try and do during an election - we do this with the different models we have - is we designed a set of rules in the spring for analyzing the data. And really, the rules were designed in 2008, for the most part. So whatever the polls say, according to that program that we designed, is where the forecast will move. I'm not arbitrarily tweaking it upward and downward.
Sometimes I'll say, oh, I think maybe this model is missing something, but I don't have to make a lot of judgment calls on a day-to-day basis. We decide ahead of time how to weigh the evidence. And that, I think, makes me more on the prism of objectivity toward being objective than maybe someone else who is picking and choosing one poll out of a day when there were 20 to tell a preferred narrative.
So I think there are ways to protect yourself against being infected by bias, which you're always going to have some of, by number one, being fairly explicit with yourself about acknowledging it, maybe also with other people. And number two, setting up rules so that you won't have to make calls in difficult gray areas where your bias might influence your conclusion.
DAVIES: Right. So you call them like you see them. But just so we get this on the table, kind of what is your political perspective?
SILVER: I would describe myself as being somewhere between a liberal and a Libertarian. A fancy way of saying I'm probably fairly centrist on economic policy, but liberal or Libertarian on social policy.
DAVIES: Now, when you got into political forecasting, were you interested in policy and politics or was it more the challenge of prediction?
SILVER: Probably more the challenge of prediction. Although one reason why I did get more interested in politics was because at the time poker was my livelihood and Congress passed a law in 2006 that essentially banned Internet poker. So I wanted to see if those rascals would get voted out of office and that increased my interest in politics.
SILVER: But I more like the - I don't want to call it the game of the election but I like elections a lot more than I like politics themselves, where elections are an interesting thing to look at and look at the data. It's very much like a baseball season where it develops slowly, a little bit at a time, and then you have kind of a climactic ending. But I'm not a fan of the political culture per se. I'm happy that I live in New York in its own kind of bubble and not in D.C., which is a wonderful place but where you can't turn down the street without someone having some kind of tie to Congress or the White House or something else.
DAVIES: Well, Nate Silver, thanks so much for speaking with us.
SILVER: Thank you.
GROSS: Nate Silver spoke yesterday with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies. Silver analyses political polls and forecasts election outcomes on his New York Times blog FiveThirtyEight. His new book is called "The Signal and the Noise." You can read an excerpt on our website, freshair.npr.org.
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Angela Simmons is in the midst of a makeup meltdown. She's seated at a vanity station in the makeshift greenroom of a lofty Hell's Kitchen event space giving her own reflection the screw face. She tosses her newly blond blowout over her shoulder with the panache of a Pantene model and inches toward to the dimly lit mirror to examine herself more closely. Something about the flawless foundation job isn't sitting well with her. 'It looks muddy,' she complains..
It's minutes before her AngelaIAM "Electric Daze" NYFW presentation and anxieties are running higher than Kid Cudi at 4:20. The cramped room is cluttered with clothes, compacts, and a handful of handlers; Angela is still rocking the Timbs and sweats she wore to the venue and her face is naked except for the light layer of bronzer in question. Her makeup artist Angel, who regularly beautifies the 26-year-old sartorial star, patiently continues to work on her pretty palette. Fortunately, tonight Angela has more on her mind than cosmetics and catwalks—debates over lip lacquer will have to wait.. Read more in the link below.. great article.
Angela Simmons by David Joseph Perez for VIBE Vixen February 2014.
Words: Shanel Odum | Photos: David Joseph Perez
Source VIBE Vixen


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Posted by Editoress on 06/12/03
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Amy Winehouse's parents launch foundation for late singer
NEW YORK – The parents of late singer Amy Winehouse officially launched the U.S. branch of a foundation named for their daughter at New York's Joe's Pub, where the embattled pop star made her American debut five years ago.
The Amy Winehouse Foundation -- aimed at assisting disadvantaged youth -- raised $1 million dollars in the United Kingdom, Mitch Winehouse said at Wednesday night's event.
He says in the United States the organization will focus on children "without access to music education and music therapy." The family announced a donation of $10,000 to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.
Mitch Winehouse said he spoke to his daughter through a physic Tuesday, saying that she "is fully behind everything that we're doing and she's up in heaven waving her magic wand."
Mitch Winehouse was joined by Amy's mother, Janis, and her younger brother, Alex. He performed four songs with a jazz band, at one point kissing his mobile phone which had a photo of his daughter on it.
He'll release a book about his relationship with his daughter, who died of accidental alcohol poisoning on July 23 at her London home. It's titled "Amy, My Daughter" and will be released on June 26. All proceeds will benefit the foundation, he said.
The organization also announced the Amy Winehouse Inspiration Awards and Gala, to be held on Sept. 10 in New York.


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Kenya: Jubilation for Kenyatta with slim majority
- Result is likely to bring controversy to Kenya as well as a legal challenge
- Monday%27s vote was the first since Kenya%27s 2007 election sparked two months of violence
- A win by Kenyatta could greatly affect Kenya%27s relations with the West
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta appears to have won the presidential election in the first round with the slimmest of majorities, as Kenya's electoral commission prepared Saturday to announce the final results of the nation's presidential election.
Final numbers showed Kenyatta with 50.03 % of the vote. He needs more than 50 % to win outright and avoid a runoff with Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who had 43.3%.
Kenyatta, the son of Kenya's founding president, is indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and if he becomes president, problems with Western allies are expected.
This did not worry Kenyatta's supporters who are jubilant, though there appeared to be at least an outside possibility that the election commission could announce revised figures that would put Kenyatta back under 50%.
Kelvin Mwangi, a taxi conductor, was one of several Kenyatta supporters who huddled around a taxi in discussion of their candidate's win. There were many more similar groups in the distance, and around Nairobi, and they were more likely to be Kikuyus jubilating — as well as Luos coming to terms with Odinga's loss.
"I feel great because we have won this election," said Mwangi, who like Kenyatta is an ethnic Kikuyu. "Uhuru sold his policies to young people while Raila was busy criticizing him."
The election commission said it would make a formal announcement of the winner. The scheduled announcement was more than an hour late as of midday Saturday in Kenya.
Eliud Owalo, Odinga's chief campaign manager, said the prime minister would not concede defeat "because the process was fraudulent." He did not elaborate.
Isaac Khayiya, another Odinga supporter, said: "This time we want post-election peace, not war. We will be the ones to suffer if there is violence. For them — Uhuru, Ruto, Odinga — they have security and they are rich."
The United States has warned of "consequences" if Kenyatta wins, as have several European countries. Britain, which ruled Kenya until the early 1960s, has said they would have only essential contact with the Kenyan government if Kenyatta is president.
Odinga's camp has indicated legal challenges could be filed. Monday's presidential vote proceeded mostly peacefully, but the counting process has been stymied by a myriad of break-downs and errors.
That the winner was quietly revealed overnight — at about 2:35 a.m. local time — came as somewhat of a surprise. At about midnight the electoral commission said it would give a formal announcement of the winner at 11 a.m. Kenya time (3 a.m. ET) Saturday. Observers believed that the decision was made in part not reveal a winner overnight, something that could stir suspicions and put security forces at a disadvantage if rioting broke out.
In order to win outright, Kenyatta must not only get more than 50% of the vote but also must garner at least 25% of the vote in 24 out of Kenya's 47 provinces. Because of the way the election commission announced results, it was difficult to immediately determine if Kenyatta passed that bar.
Diplomats said they believed Odinga was not likely to protest the vote in a manner that would increase the chances of violence, but rather honor his pledge to respect the result and petition the courts with any grievances. Odinga scheduled a news conference for later Saturday morning.
Though Kenyatta appears to have just barely squeaked by the 50% hurdle, he solidly beat Odinga, one of eight candidates. That fact may help prevent the violence that exploded in Kenya after its last presidential vote, in 2007, when more than 1,000 people were killed.
The final provisional figures showed Kenyatta finishing with 6,173,433 votes out of 12,338,667 cast. Odinga had 5,340,546 votes.
A win by Kenyatta could greatly affect Kenya's relations with the West. Kenyatta faces charges at the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in directing some of Kenya's 2007 post-election violence. His running mate, William Ruto, faces similar charges.
Francis Eshitemi, an Odinga supporter Nairobi's largest slum, Kibera, said it was clear his candidate had lost in a free and fair election and that he expected him to concede.
"The problem is that Raila doesn't have the numbers. There were a few irregularities, but the gap between Raila and Uhuru is big," he said.


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SEOUL (CNN) — A helicopter carrying emergency workers involved in the Sewol ferry disaster operations crashed Thursday in a South Korean city, fire officials said, leaving five dead and one injured.
The helicopter came down in an urban area in the southwestern city of Gwangju, according to Gwangju and Gangwon Fire Headquarters.
Video footage from the scene showed what appeared to be the aircraft's wreckage blazing on a city sidewalk near a stop light, with high-rise buildings only yards away.
The firefighters and rescue personnel on board were on their way home after spending the past four days supporting the search of the ferry, an official with Gangwon Fire Headquarters said.
At least 292 people, including more than 200 high school students, died after the ferry sank in April. Eleven people remain missing.
The dead included two pilots, two rescue workers, and one mechanic, the official said. The helicopter crashed after taking off from a refueling stop at a Gwangju airport.
The cause of the incident is not yet known.
The Sewol ferry was headed from Incheon to Jeju island on April 16 when it capsized. Most of the passengers were high school students on a field trip.


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Washington (CNN) – As the U.S. military campaign in Libya approaches the 60-day mark this Friday, six Republican senators wrote President Obama asking if he will comply with the War Powers Act, which says Congress must authorize action that lasts more than 60 days.
"Friday is the final day of the statutory sixty-day period for you to terminate the use of the United States Armed Forces in Libya under the War Powers Resolution. Last week some in your Administration indicated use of the United States Armed Forces will continue indefinitely, while others said you would act in a manner consistent with the War Powers Resolution. Therefore, we are writing to ask whether you intend to comply with the requirements of the War Powers Resolution. We await your response," wrote the GOP senators Wednesday.
The letter was signed by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
The GOP senators said they believe the president already violated part of the War Powers Act – which says the president's constitutional powers allow him to only deploy troops into "hostilities" with a declaration of war, specific authorization from Congress or a national emergency caused by an attack on the U.S.
But the president did follow the provision in the 1973 law requiring him to provide information to Congress about committing U.S. forces. Now the question is whether he will abide by the part of the War Powers Act which says he must get Congressional permission within 60 days.
Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Tuesday that he is "talking to the administration" about what exactly Congress and the White House might do to abide by that looming 60-day deadline Friday with regard to Libya.
"We want to make sure we're not stretching anything inappropriate. So we're looking at some language," Kerry said as he entered a weekly policy lunch in the Capitol with Democratic senators. "We're really looking at it very seriously to keep everyone on the same page."
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, a vocal advocate of U.S. military support for the Libyan rebels, has been in talks for weeks with Democrats and Republicans about a resolution backing the Libya mission – but perhaps something short of voting on a War Powers resolution. He said Tuesday that congressional leadership has not shown an "inclination" to vote on something.
McCain said he doesn't believe the War Powers Act is constitutional and therefore he doesn't believe the president needs congressional authorization to continue the mission.
"I've never recognized the constitutionality of the War Powers Act, nor has any president, either Republican or Democrat," McCain said.
But Sen. Rand Paul told CNN congress should not let any president get away with launching military action without congressional approval, and that he and his colleagues may go to the Supreme Court and ask for a ruling on whether the president is in violation of the law.
"There is a law. It's on the books, and in plain reading of the War Powers Act, he appears to be in violation of the War Powers Act," said Paul.
Paul said they will also attempt to push "legislative remedies" on the Senate floor, but acknowledges that may be hard to accomplish since Democrats control the schedule.
"To me it's the most important debate we'll ever have up here. If we're going to send someone, your son or my son to war, its important that it be done properly, and its important that if there are constitutional restraints, we obey them," said Paul.
CNN's Ted Barrett contributed to this report.
Put it to a vote. What's the problem? If the Congress votes to stay out of Libya then we will be inviolation of treaties and commitments that we have with NATO and other countries. Put it to a vote, now. Why wait?
Notice how the Congress has the ball, not the President. The Congress must approve the action, and if Congress does not act who is in violation of the law; certainly not the President. He fulfilled his end. The point of the letter, was what?
" Therefore, we are writing to ask whether you intend to comply with the requirements of the War Powers Resolution. "
Fascinating that Republicans are now concerned about the human cost of "war" - and please, let's acknowledge that we are not involved in a "war" with Libya. A "war" requires LOTS of ground troops and support vehicles. The US has NO ground forces or support in Libya; we're simply flying a few airplanes over the country, at times dropping bombs or firing missiles.
Contrast the GOP's current response - no doubt ENTIRELY the result of having a Democratic President - with their "bring it on" attitude in Iraq 8 years ago.
Pathetic Republicans, as always.
Where were these people when Bush LIED about the reason to attack Iraq and BORROW TRILLIONS from China to do it????
Oh – they've met a deadline they can nag on, while they postpone every other decision they're supposed to make.
Get rid of this idiot. In fact, Kentucky needs TWO new senators.
If this is the face of the tea party, we've nothing to fear except those who chose not to vote next election.
I am a Democrat, and I absolutely agree that this needs to go before Congress. This is not a case of Republicans trying to hamstring Obama. I am REALLY, REALLY tired of Presidents sending troops to fight on foreign soil, just because it seems like a good idea to them. The War Powers Act was a created mostly as a reaction to Viet Nam, but also other long-term but undeclared wars such as in Korea.
Oh, so after two failed wars in the Middle East, NOW the Republicans want to complain about the use of military force by the President? SERIOUSLY? Does the GOP hypocrisy know no bounds?
More politics. These 6 senators are sworn obstructionists to anything the president does. They have zero credibility and are an embarrassment to the U.S. Senate. Rand Paul wouldn't know a war if it jumped up and slapped him in the face. What a joke!
Yet another double standard by Democrats. Democrats would be all over a Republican president calling Republicans warmongers and worse. However, once again they show their true colors and overwhelmingly ignore their own record on the issues.


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Washington (CNN) -- The U.S. House on Monday passed the debt-ceiling deal worked out by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders, sending it to the Senate for consideration a day before the deadline for the government to face possible default.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced his chamber will take up the measure at noon on Tuesday. No amendments will be allowed, and approval will require a super-majority of 60 votes in the 100-member Senate, Reid said.
On Monday, the House overcame opposition from liberal Democrats and tea party conservatives for ideologically different reasons to pass the measure by a 269-161 vote.
One of those supporting the plan was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona, who cast her first House vote since being shot in the head in an assassination attempt in January.
Giffords returns to emotional applause
In an emotional moment, Giffords entered the chamber during the vote and received a prolonged standing ovation from her colleagues. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hugged Giffords as other House members mobbed her, and the commotion diverted attention from the ongoing vote total showing the measure would pass.
The agreement reached Sunday by President Barack Obama and congressional leaders from both parties calls for up to $2.4 trillion in savings over the next decade, raises the debt ceiling through the end of 2012 and establishes a special congressional committee to recommend long-term fiscal reforms.
The legislation needs to reach Obama's desk by Tuesday at the latest. If the current $14.3 trillion debt limit is not increased by that point, Americans could face rapidly rising interest rates, a falling dollar and shakier financial markets, among other problems.
Debt ceiling: Where things now stand
A number of Republicans worried about cuts in defense spending and the lack of a required balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. Progressive Democrats were livid over the extent of the deal's domestic spending cuts, as well as the absence of any immediate tax hikes on wealthier Americans.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, was able to round up the support of most of his GOP caucus, while the chamber's two top Democrats -- Pelosi of California and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland -- voted for the plan along with more than 90 of their caucus members.
Still, emotions ran high after months of grueling negotiations that pitted the small-government, anti-tax ideology of conservative Republicans against Obama's call for balancing spending cuts and entitlement reforms with increased tax revenue to spread the pain of necessary deficit reduction steps.
This "may be the single worst piece of public policy to ever come out of this institution," declared liberal Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, while Pelosi noted the measure "makes these big cuts and has ... not one red cent from the wealthiest people in our country -- no revenue."
At one point, more than a dozen protesters caused a disturbance in the House gallery by chanting against Speaker John Boehner until Capitol Police officers removed them.
Folks in the middle feel squeezed
Vice President Joe Biden spent much of Monday on Capitol Hill, trying to persuade unhappy Democrats to back the proposal.
"I am confident that this will pass," Biden asserted. "We have to get this out of the way" in order to turn Washington's focus to job growth, he said.
Boehner and other House leaders said the deal would start reshaping how Washington spends taxpayer money, which was the goal of conservatives who elected Republicans to a majority in the House last November.
"The bill is not perfect ... but changing the way that Washington spends tax payers dollars is often a lot like redirecting or turning an aircraft carrier." said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia. "It's a monumental task."
Boehner acknowledged that Republicans on the Armed Services Committee were concerned about cuts to military spending in the agreement, but he told reporters he believed they would support the proposal.
What exactly did House just vote on?
"As I told them, this is the best defense number we're going to get, and frankly if we don't pass the bill, it's pretty clear to me what'll happen ... the defense number will go down," Boehner said.
The agreement revolves around a two-stage process.
The first stage includes $917 billion in savings, including a roughly $420 billion reduction in the national security budget. The cuts would be accompanied by a $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling.
Because of the pending Tuesday deadline, Obama would have immediate authority to raise the debt ceiling by $400 billion, which will last through September, according to the White House.
The other $500 billion increase in the debt limit would be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
In the second stage, a special joint committee of Congress would recommend further deficit reduction steps totaling $1.5 trillion or more, with Congress obligated to vote on the panel's proposals by the end of the year.
The committee would comprise 12 members: Six from each chamber, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans. The panel's recommendations would be due by November 23 and guaranteed an up-or-down vote without amendments by December 23.
The committee is expected to consider politically sensitive reforms to the tax code and entitlement programs, though Democrats and Republicans disagree on the likelihood of any eventual revenue increases.
If the committee's recommendations are enacted, Obama would be authorized to increase the debt ceiling by up to $1.5 trillion. If the recommendations are not enacted, Obama can still raise the debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion. At that point, however, a budget "trigger" would kick in, imposing mandatory across-the-board spending cuts matching the size of the debt ceiling increase.
The cuts would be split between defense spending and non-defense programs, an unpopular formula intended to motivate legislators to approve the committee's recommendations.
"You want to make it hard for (lawmakers) just to walk away and wash their hands," Gene Sperling, the director of Obama's National Economic Council, said Sunday. "You want them to say, if nothing happens, there will be a very tough degree of pain that will take place."
Stocks: Manufacturing data erases rally
The final debt ceiling increase in the agreement would also be subject to a congressional vote of disapproval that can be vetoed by Obama.
The agreement calls for both houses of Congress to vote on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, though it does not make a further increase in the debt limit subject to congressional passage of such an amendment -- something tea party conservatives were initially demanding.
In a key concession to Democrats, benefits from entitlements including Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare -- as well as veteran's benefits -- will be exempt from any immediate cuts.
Leaders on both sides of the aisle have conceded that the deal is far from perfect.
Reid emphasized that "no one got what they want" and "everyone had to give something up."
But this "is a great stride forward" that shows "we can succeed not in spite of our divided government but because of it," he said.
A recent CNN/ORC International Poll reveals a growing public exasperation and demand for compromise. Sixty-four percent of respondents to a July 18-20 survey preferred a deal with a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Only 34% preferred a debt reduction plan based solely on spending reductions.
iReport: Share your message with Congress
According to the poll, the public is sharply divided along partisan lines; Democrats and independents are open to a number of different approaches because they think a failure to raise the debt ceiling would cause a major crisis for the country. Republicans, however, draw the line at tax increases, and a narrow majority of them oppose raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances.
CNN's Ted Barrett, Kate Bolduan, Gloria Borger, Keating Holland, Brianna Keilar, Jeanne Sahadi, Xuan Thai, Jessica Yellin, Athena Jones, Lisa Desjardins, Dan Lothian and Deirdre Walsh contributed to this report.


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I truly believe that it takes a village to raise a family and it takes a tribe of girlfriends to keep a mama sane and thriving. Over time I have come to realize that it is impossible to be everything to someone and as such I have been able to find over time that all of the different qualities my girlfriends have make for some diverse, sound, and priceless advice. I have never been a one-best-friend type of girl even though I wanted to be and instead do much better with a cadre of lady friends.
As our lives have ebbed and flowed, sometimes the calls are more frequent, sometimes months or even years go by without communication. But the love is always there. After months of not speaking I have done consults on sick kiddos, talked to family members who had medical questions, done an emergency contraception consult for an adolescent volunteer visiting the United Arab Emirates (it is dangerous in many countries to have unmarried sex). I have walked with friends through infertility, infant loss, miscarriages, marriage challenges, spousal communication issues, school issues, health issues, you name it.
As my life has become busier I have been doing more lately to immediately send a text when one of them crosses my mind. Just a quick "you ran across my mind, it's been so long, sending you a big ole hug. How are you and the family?!?". Which leads to a flurry of updates before we have to run. And if I really feel compelled and have some alone time in the car, I pick up the phone and call. Some of those impromptu catch up calls have been life changing for me and for the other ladies.
I have incorporated a saying recently when the inevitable "I am so sorry it's been so long" is uttered. I quickly say something like "Girl!!! Our lives are so busy ain't nobody got time for mama guilt! Call or text me when I run across your mind and I'll do the same for you!" and then we laugh and continue to catch up in the few minutes we have.
So to all of the mamas out there. Call or text your friends when they run across your mind. When you talk, carry on where you need to. If you feel the need to apologize for it being so long, be gentle and forgiving with yourself and stop yourself! Let's minimize the guilt we have in our lives and do what we can when we can unapologetically. If your friend apologizes, tell her you refuse to have any guilt in your relationship when life is already so complicated and you promise to do what you can when you can to stay in touch. Here's to keeping your mama friendships guilt free and full of love!
How do you keep in touch with your friends? How do you minimize guilt in your relationships? Please comment below!