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How would you build the perfect ski hotel? Start with a slope-side location at a notable mountain, add a world-class spa, and decorate the hotel with native stone and Navajo carpets. Factor in an après-ski sushi bar and ever-smiling ski valets to help you with your boots. You'd end up with the Four Seasons Resort Jackson Hole — one of America's best ski hotels.
Culled from Travel + Leisure's World's Best Hotels — named by T+L readers through our annual survey — the best ski hotels must meet some basic requirements. First, alpine skiing has to be the raison d'être for staying there, not an afterthought. And the ski mountain should be close by. Ideally, that's "close" as in outside the front door, though a few minutes' walk or driving a mile or so is still okay.
Slideshow: America's best ski hotels
At the winning hotels, the ski experience begins at check-in. Cozy lobby fireplace with comfy chairs? Check. A friendly and ski-savvy staff who know every powder stash and are generous enough to divulge a favorite? Check. And dining is as important as the snow conditions — places where the wine cellar rivals those found in any big-city restaurant.
Of course, it's even better if there are ski valets to help with all that equipment. And a ski concierge doesn't hurt, either — after all, you want someone who can nail that impossible dinner reservation in Aspen or direct you to an après-ski bar beloved by locals.
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Hotels that have a European ski tradition at their core tend to rank high in our listings, places like the Sonnenalp Resort of Vail, which has European ownership along with carved wood and antiques. Or the Stein Eriksen Lodge in Deer Valley, which borrows smartly from the Norwegian design of Olympic skier Stein Eriksen's homeland.
And the best ski hotels are true getaways, where a day on the slopes is easily paired with an afternoon of spa relaxation, like the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid or Topnotch at Stowe.
Whether these resorts are in Alaska or New Hampshire, Colorado or the Canadian Rockies, they celebrate the sport of skiing and are in their prime during the winter season.
Copyright © 2012 American Express Publishing Corporation


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The NFL Total Access crew looks back on the Vikings 10-sack day against the Lions.
NFL Network's Daniel Jeremiah, Bucky Brooks list notable replacements for familiar faces.
NFL Network Insider Ian Rapoport reports the salary cap could drop by $40 million per team in 2020.
NFL Network's Daniel Jeremiah and Bucky Brooks break down which teams got better or worse in the NFC North entering 2020.
NFL Network's Michael Robinson explains why he thinks the Vikings have the best running back group in the NFL...
Minnesota Vikings players attend the first memorial service for George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The "Good Morning Football" crew discusses whether the VIkings will miss WR Stefon Diggs during the upcoming season...
Wide receiver Randy Moss | Top 10 Mic'd Up players of All Time
Former NFL wide receiver Cris Carter ranks the five receivers he says had the best hands of all time.
NFL Network's LaDainian Tomlinson explains why he thinks the Green Bay Packers are still the favorites to win the NFC North.
NFL analytics expert Cynthia Frelund reveals the toughest four-game stretches for each NFC North team in 2020.
NFL Network's Steve Mariucci reflects on Hall of Fame defensive end Chris Doleman's legacy on and off the field.
The "Good Morning Football" crew discusses whether the Vikings' 2020 success is completely reliant on QB Kirk Cousins.
NFL Network's Kurt Warner, Steve Smith Sr. and David Carr highlight three teams who could challenge the San Francisco 49ers for NFC supremacy in 2020.
NFL Network's Bucky Brooks reveals two of NFL's most overlooked edge rushers.
Washington Redskins running back Adrian Peterson remembers his first touchdown he scored while a member of the Minnesota Vikings.
NFL Network's Peter Schrager poses a burning question for the Minnesota Vikings ahead of the 2020 season.
Vikings LB Eric Kendricks opens up about losing his grandfather to COVID-19 and discusses the paintings he's doing to help raise money to fight the disease.
NFL Network's Mike Garafolo shares his thoughts on the NFC North picture heading into 2020 and why the Vikings may be considered the favorites.
NFL Network analyst breaks down what he likes about Vikings 2020 draft pick DT James Lynch.
Minnesota Vikings rookie wide receiver Justin Jefferson takes the field with his new team in this Madden simulation.
The "Good Morning Football" crew breaks down Minnesota Vikings QB Kirk Cousins' advice to Dallas Cowboys QB Dak Prescott about a franchise tag.
The '"Around The NFL" crew list their can't-miss games on 2020 schedule.
Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Adam Thielen shares expectations for rookie wide receiver Justin Jefferson in 2020 season.
The "Good Morning Football" crew discusses whether the Green Bay Packers are the most vulnerable reigning division champions heading into the 2020 season.
Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman joined "NFL Now" to discuss his team's 2020 NFL Draft class and the the team's offseason.

subset: commoncrawl


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I have read a text file into BufferedReader
my first line and second has this information:
How can I derive the minutes and seconds and save it to String minutes, seconds. This is an extract of code I have written so far:Date Time Number Duration
01/01/2007 00:01 0202332981 1:04
String strLine; //Read File Line By Line while ((strLine = br.readLine()) != null) { // What do I do with strLine so the minutes and seconds are extracted? }
Thank you


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INFORMATION: TO SEND AND USE IT (Jan, 1958)
This is a chapter about information from a really cool text book called The World of Science, published by Golden Books in 1954.
Also check out another chapter I posted called "COMPUTERS THE ELECTRONIC BRAINS"
In the sound studio a singer is performing a popular number. The microphone suspended from overhead wires picks up the sound. If a whole group of musicians were being used, more microphones would be spaced about. In the control room at the back stands the sound engineer listening through earphones and turning dials on the crowded panels before him.
Soon, as a result of this recording session, tens or hundreds of thousands of people will be able to flick on a phonograph and, wherever they are, hear this same singer with her guitar performing this same popular tune, as often as the hearer chooses to repeat it.
Let us look at the steps between.
The strings of the guitar and the voice of the singer set up sound waves.
These sound waves press against the microphones. They are converted in the microphone At left, equipment for direct long-distance dialing.
to electrical impulses. These electrical impulses are strengthened by amplifiers. And the amplified signal drives an electric head which magnetizes particles in the emulsion on a spool of magnetic tape. The tape is played back and redone until everyone is satisfied. Then it is played off once more. And this time the amplified electrical signal into which its sound is converted drives a hot electric cutting head. This head cuts grooves into a revolving disk of acetate-coated aluminum. This is the master recording disk. It is plated. And from the plate as many similar disks are pressed out as salesmen can sell.
The purchaser lays the disk on the table of his phonograph. As the disk revolves, turned by electric power, he fits a needle point into the outermost spiral of grooves. The slight variations in the grooves wiggle a transducer which changes those small motions into an electrical signal.
This small electrical signal has to be amplified, built up again. Then it is sent on to the loudspeaker, where the electrical energy is transformed again into sound waves, pressure waves which press against the hearer's eardrums.
Even that is not the end of the journey. The pressure against the eardrums is transformed into nerve pulses which run via relay centers to the brain. There the pulses are interpreted. Some hearers will hear the utmost in music. To others it will seem just a lot of meaningless noise.
The basic pattern of steps in many forms of longdistance communication today—television, radio, telephone—is similar to the phonograph. Glancing back, you will see that the signals are being repeatedly changed into other forms.
To engineers, anything which converts energy from one form to another is a transducer. There is a vast variety of them:
Hydroelectric generators convert water energy to electricity.
Steam engines convert thermal (heat) energy to mechanical energy.
Solar batteries convert light to electricity.
Soon a nuclear battery may convert atomic energy directly to electricity.
And in the other direction:
The light bulb converts electricity to light.
The loudspeaker converts electricity to mechanical energy.
Electric coils convert electricity to heat.
There are many other transducers. The human body has a whole set of them. Light seen by the eye, sounds heard by the ear, odors smelled by the nose, touch felt by nerve endings, all are converted (by transducers) into nerve impulses and sent to the brain.
Scientists and engineers have learned a lot about communication from studying the eye and the ear. Light and sound can now be communicated successfully by machines. But the mechanical basis of taste and smell is not yet understood. These have not been successfully imitated mechanically.
And the human brain, with its complex system for storing and processing information, for transmitting that information and checking on whether it has been properly understood—all this remains largely a mystery, even to scientists.
The major steps in modern communication systems, just as in the human body, are the following:
1. obtaining information (through various sensing devices);
2. converting its form (through transducers);
3. storing it (on records, magnetic tape, or punch cards);
4. processing it (through amplifiers);
5. switching, relaying, and transmitting it.
If sending a message is to do any good, the message signal must be strong enough to be understood. This is where amplifiers come in.
The amplifier principally used today is the vacuum tube. It is really a valve, operated by a very small electrical current, which controls the passage of a larger current. The simplest vacuum tube has three principal elements:
1. A hot filament (or a cathode) from which
electrons are boiled off.
2. A wire grid, which receives the tiny electric voltage variations carrying the voices and music.
3. A plate to which the boiled-off electrons from the cathode are attracted.
The number of electrons ( —) which are at-tracted to the plate ( + ) (and go on to the loudspeaker to be converted back into sound) depends on the grid voltage.
The voltage on the grid varies with the sound signal it carries. As this tiny voltage varies it attracts more or fewer electrons through the grid to the plate beyond. So the grid passes on to the plate in the form of electrons all its variations (its voice pattern). This current to the plate is much stronger than the original voice current. So now the voice pattern in a much strengthened (amplified) form is sent along its way.
"One limititation of ordinary vacuum tubes," an engineer tells us, "is that they do not all work equally well at amplifying signals with very high frequencies."
Why are these high frequencies so important? To answer this, we must take a look at waves.
Light and sound both travel in waves. Light, radio, x-ray, and microwaves all belong to the widespread family of electromagnetic waves. Electromagnetic waves can travel through a vacuum like outer space. (See the back endpapers.)
Sound waves on the other hand need some substance to travel through, because they are compression waves. They must have something to compress. Sound waves travel rather slowly, around 1100 feet per second in air, while electromagnetic waves all travel at the familiar speed of light-186,000 miles per second or 30,000,000,000 (3 X 10^10) centimeters per second. This, of course, is why in a thunderstorm we see the lightning sometimes several seconds before the slower thunder beats against our eardrums.
The frequency of a wave is the number of wave peaks that pass a given point per second. Since waves go up and down or back and forth, scientists measure frequency in cycles per second (cps). Naturally the number to pass a given point per second depends both on the length of each wave and on the speed at which they all travel. One equation expresses this for all waves:
velocity = frequency X wavelength Thus if the wavelength of a radio signal is 100 meters (10,000 cm), its frequency will be
30,000,000,000 (cm per sec.) /10,000 (cm) = 3,000,000 cps.
The frequency of a sound wave we hear as pitch. The lower the frequency (the longer the wavelength) the lower the pitch is.
The human ear can hear quite a range of frequencies or variety of pitches, from as low as 20 cycles per second to as high as 20,000. Most people cannot hear this whole range. Men in general hear the lower frequencies better than women; women usually hear high frequencies better than men. This leads to disagreements in many homes over high-fidelity (hi-fi) phonographs. If a set amplifies the high-pitch sounds to suit the men, they are likely to sound screechy to the women.
A good hi-fi system may have a range of 40 to 15,000 cps. Some records have ranges of 30 to 18,000. But these are sound waves. All our longdistance communication systems—telephone, radio, television, telegraph—use electromagnetic waves instead. And, as you can see on the chart, if you go into the microwaves (less than one centimeter in wavelength), frequencies go higher than thirty billion cycles per second.
That is where present-day research is centered —in the high-frequency microwaves.
You have a message for someone who lives many miles away. You want him to have it at once. Chances are you will telephone. So many millions of people use long distance telephone service today that it keeps a large research staff busy working at top speed to keep expanding and improving the service.
The first telephones, much less than a hundred years ago, had a microphone (transducer) which converted sound waves into electricity. This electricity went directly through a wire to the receiver, where another transducer in the receiver converted it back into sound waves. There had to be a pair of wires to close the circuit and keep the electricity flowing.
This kind of system worked for a distance of ten to twenty miles. But beyond that there was loss of power and distortion of sound. You could scarcely hear through the receiver, and what you did hear was hard to understand.
Then in came amplifiers. In a telephone system they are called repeater stations. Every twenty miles or so the current goes through a repeater station which strengthens the signal.
When telephone wires had spanned most countries, demand for trans-oceanic service began to grow. So cables have now been laid along the ocean floor, all across the Atlantic. And repeater stations were built into the cable. Every few miles the cable bulges like a snake that has just swallowed its breakfast. Each bulge marks another repeater station to step up the power of the signal traveling thousands of miles in an instant to come out as a familiar voice.
In early telephone systems each loop of wire carried one message and only one. If modern systems, with their hundreds of thousands of calls per hour, had to have a wire for every call, think how thick those ropes of wires would be!
A way had to be found for sending many messages through a single wire or cable at one time, still keeping them separate so they could all be sorted out again. The method which has been worked out is called carrier modulation.
When the voice signal is converted to electricity, the waves of the electric current have the same frequency as the sound waves—about 200 to 3500 cycles per second. A diagram of a voice signal might look something like this:
A diagram of electric current or sound waves would look the same.
Now in a high-frequency range a carrier wave with a constant height (or amplitude) can be sent running along the wire. Its pattern is something like this:
The carrier wave is put into a modulator. There the voice signal above is made to vary the amplitude (height) of the carrier wave. So the carrier wave takes on the pattern (or amplitude) of the voice signal, like the one in the next column.
The high-frequency wave now carries the voice pattern. At the other end of the line a reverse process separates the two patterns again, and the voice signal comes out through the receiver as sound waves.
The high-frequency range includes a spread of billions of cycles per second. So allowing a band of around 3000 cps to each message, there is still plenty of room for many messages side by side on the same wire at the same time. At the receiver end there is a filter which blocks out all frequencies but one particular band or signal.
(Your radio or television antenna picks up a whole group of messages. It is with just such a filter that you choose one band or another as you tune in on one particular station in radio or channel in TV and block the rest out.)
One telephone wire can now carry about a hundred separate messages at a time. A coaxial cable may carry 1800 or more. As population grows and demands for telephone service increase, engineers are being challenged to increase the carrying power of cables and to make use of higher and higher frequencies.
The chart of wavelengths on the endpapers shows how crowded with messages some frequency bands already are. Radio broadcasts extend from 0.5 megacycle per second to 1.5 megacycles per second. (A megacycle is a million cycles!) Above that lie police and other special radio bands. Between 10 and 30 megacycles are the short-wave frequencies used for trans-oceanic telephone and telegraph. Around 50 megacycles are the TV channels; above 100 megacycles are FM broadcasts; and other TV channels extend up to 200 megacycles. Beyond that there are bands of frequencies vastly wide, waiting to be used.
One problem at high frequencies is that ordinary vacuum tubes do not amplify such signals well. Above 500 megacycles per second, the motion of the electrons cannot be changed fast enough, and electric current is too sluggish for accuracy. Noise gets into the signals then and makes them hard to understand.
Research engineers have made great progress in solving the problem of high-frequency amplifiers. But many men are still at work, because vacuum tubes are so vital in so many fields of modern research—in nuclear physics, microwave spectroscopy, radio astronomy, and many other fields where delicate instruments pick up very faint but extremely important signals.
One way to increase efficiency at high frequency is to cut down the distance the electrons must travel. If the size of the tube is halved each time the frequency is doubled, the tube can be kept very efficient. But as frequencies go up, the size of the tube gets so tiny that it is in danger of disappearing entirely. To operate at a frequency of 4000 megacycles, the tube must have a grid made of wires 1/10 the diameter of a human hair, strung 1000 to the inch. The cathode will be 3/16 inch in diameter, about 1/2000 inch from the grid. These are difficult dimensions to handle in construction, as you may imagine.
The engineers have tried every variation they could think of. They have worked out means of speeding up the electrons so they could travel farther in a fraction of a wave cycle. This gave them the klystron amplifier, used in ultra-high-frequency television transmitters. It can produce enough energy to bounce signals off the moon.
They also produced a kind of tube called a magnetron, which is widely used for generating radar pulses.
Still there were problems. All these amplifiers worked only for a relatively narrow band of frequencies at a time. How could they be made to amplify a wide band of frequencies at once?
The traveling wave tube seems to be the answer to this. In it the electrons are sent a longish distance. But they travel through a coiled wire, a helix, which carries an electromagnetic wave.
This increases the power of the electrons immensely. Traveling-wave tubes have been built which can amplify bands of frequencies several thousand of megacycles wide. A glance at the chart on the front endpapers will show you that this band width could include huge numbers of telephone and television channels as well.
Traveling wave tubes seem to have solved most of the major problems of amplifiers:
1. They introduce very little noise.
2. They can be made to amplify a signal to very great power, so it can be sent a very long distance.
3. They can amplify many signals at a time.
4. And they have opened up a vast new range of frequencies in the microwaves. These waves have such short wavelengths (less than one centimeter ) that their frequencies are correspondingly extremely high. They open up what seems to us now to be an inexhaustible range of newly accessible frequencies.
But there will be new demands too. A television broadcast takes a band 6,000,000 cycles wide, as against about 3000 for a telephone conversation. And person-to-person television seems just around the corner. That may soon fill up a vast range of frequencies.
In vacuum tubes of all types, electrons are made to travel through space. But a few years ago scientists found that electrons travel about, even in solid materials.
In some solid materials, crystals, the atoms are put together in regular patterns. And it was found that in these crystals electrons can travel freely in waves of certain frequencies, without interference from the atoms.
Scientists plotted these wave motions and worked out an amplifier in which there is no heated cathode, no wire grid, no vacuum, no plate. There is just a bit of germanium or silicon the size of a pencil point with three or more tiny electrical connections to it. The signal comes in; an electric current sets electrons in motion, and through their motion the signal is tremendously amplified.
Transistors, as these tiny amplifiers are called, have special value because of their small size and weight and low power consumption. They can be fitted, for example, into very small hearing aids and amplify sound signals there. They can be operated on the power of a tiny battery—as little as 1/100,000 of a watt. Within their range they are very efficient. And they have the promise of long life.
But so far they do not operate well at high frequencies. Research men are busy trying to extend their range in this direction. Also the transistors are not yet very consistent. Manufacturers are trying hard to improve them so that a standard will be reached and each one made will be just like every other one.
You know the particles within atoms are always in motion. These natural internal motions of any one type of atom have a certain frequency. This frequency is so stable that it varies only one part in 100 billion. The property of atoms and molecules to emit and absorb electromagnetic energy at these stable frequencies is the basis of the Maser.
The atoms (of gas or crystal) are first "primed" by one of several methods. Then a small microwave signal is used to trigger the atoms into emitting their natural radiation. When there is no triggering signal, the Maser produces no signal at all. There is no background noise, as with vacuum tubes. This is a great advantage of Masers over other devices.
Let us think of the vast telephone system which forms a spider-web of communication over our whole continent. The system includes millions of individual wire loops connecting telephones with local exchanges. It includes hundreds of thousands of wires carrying a number of messages at a time between exchanges. It includes thousands of cables carrying hundreds of messages at a time over long distances, stepped up in power every twenty miles or so by vacuum tubes in relay stations.
And the system includes at least two transcontinental radio lanes along which signals are beamed through the atmosphere without wire or wave guide. (Some microwaves are transmitted through hollow tubes called wave guides.) An antenna at the sending end shoots out its signals—not broadcast, but carefully narrowed into a directional beam. About a hundred miles away (more or less, depending on the kind of countryside) the antenna of a repeater station picks up this signal. Here it is amplified by a klystron, traveling-wave tube, or vacuum tube and sent on its way.
These radio lanes have the advantage of saving the expense of installing and maintaining an elaborate system of wires. They have the disadvantage of being affected by weather along the route. The systems engineer must balance advantages and limitations of all kinds of equipment in this way. He must be conversant too with all the research projects under way in attempts to solve his problems.
One big problem in every kind of communication is noise or interference. Surely you have been in a group so noisy that you couldn't hear what anyone said. The sounds were loud enough, but they were interfering with each other, and so could not be understood.
Even a smoke signal may be interfered with by "noise." In this case, the noise would be a cloudy sky which would make the signal hard to see. A jungle drum signal might be interfered with by the noise of workmen hammering.
In radio astronomy, as you may recall from page 59, there is always background noise being received. The signal from distant hydrogen clouds is so faint in this background sky "noise" that an observer must have several long signals to compare to make sure he is really catching the hydrogen signal.
Vadium tubes may develop noise ("static") as they build up a signal, so that the message is hard to understand. Or filters may not completely sep-arate two frequencies, so that there is some confusion of messages.
All these are problems of the systems engineer. And they have led to a study of what really makes up a message. This study is called information or communication theory.
Our speech is not a very efficient way of giving messages. In conversation we waste a great many words. This does not matter when we are talk-ing with someone who is in the same room and we both have a lot of time. In fact, we sometimes do this for amusement. But there are times and circumstances when it is important to be efficient in giving a message.
Look at the want ads in your newspaper. The advertiser is paying for his want ad by the line. He really compresses his information to get in as much as he can per dollar. Read an advertisement for a used car, for example, and then think of all the words an eager dealer would use to give you this same information:
Ford '56. CI. dlx 2-dr. auto, trans. w/w tires, rad. htr. Pwr Strg. Xlnt cond, lo mi., orig. own. Tel. Ex 2-1111
Condensing speech is just one step, though.
"We'd like to condense the whole process of running want ads," says a newspaper man. "Look at all the steps: The advertiser telephones in the information. An ad taker puts it into condensed language and types it up. A linotype operator sets the typewritten copy up in metal type. A paper mat is made from the metal type. The mat is plated up into a page. And the newspaper is printed from the plates. Then the business office has to type up a bill for the advertiser and keep a record of the billing.
"We'd like a computer that could take the message over the telephone and type it off so a mat could be made directly from it. At the same time the computer could type off information for the billing department. That would really save us a good slice of work."
The telephone company does have a system for transmitting information directly from a computer's magnetic tape over the telephone.
You will recall (from page 78) that a computer can take instructions only in the form of holes in cards or magnetized spots on tape. There are just two signals in its code—1 and 0. At each point on a punch card either there is a hole or there is none. A spot on tape is magnetized or it is not.
A piece of equipment called a digital sub set accepts this information and converts it into tones. Wherever there is a magnetized spot, an electrical pulse sets up a tone. This code of electrical pulses diagrammed would look something like this:
There could be quite a lot of "noise" or interference with this signal and it would still be clear that this meant 1 0 1 0 1. In the computer code described on page 77, this pattern would give you the number 21.
This method can transmit 600 "bits" per second, the equivalent of 800 words per minute. This is about ten times as fast as the teletype-writer or telegraph.
Another method already in operation for send-ing computer information by telephone uses equipment called the recorded carrier.
Before putting in your telephone call, you feed your information onto a magnetic tape recorder. Then you put through a regular long distance call; and when the other party is ready to receive, you turn on your tape recorder. Of course the message is transmitted backwards, but who cares? When it is wound up on the tape recorder at the receiving end, it will be all set to play off in the right order. Then the information can be converted from tones back to magnetized spots on computer tape.
The input by this method is slower—75 "bits" per second. But it can be transmitted at eight times this speed, which brings it up to the digital sub set in efficiency.
Engineers have worked out an alphabetic code, too, using just 1 and 0. Using this code, you could send words and sentences with the simple pattern of a pulse or no pulse. It counts from 1 to 26 on the kind of basis many computers use:
In this code, our signal 10 101 would stand for U, the twenty-first letter of the alphabet.
"But we want to talk into the telephone," you may say. "We don't want to send a beep-blank-beep code. If we did, we would send a telegram."
Researchers are at work on a code for voices too. They take the pattern of a spoken message, as the pitch of the voice rises and falls, like this:
They divide up the range of the voice into just six or seven numbered bands. They sample the pattern, let's say a thousand times a second, and note in which band the voice is pitched each time. Then they send out just the list of band numbers. At the receiving end, these numbers are converted back into the sound ranges they stand for. And out comes a sound pattern enough like the original speech to be understood.
Simplified ways to send messages by machine are becoming very important. For the big movement in modern business is toward systems in which machines do all the routine jobs now done by human workers. This means that a great deal of information must be communicated from one machine to another. This development is called automation. Some people speak of it as a Second Industrial Revolution.
Little more than a hundred years ago, the steam engine was put to work to provide man for the first time with practically unlimited amounts of energy. Man put the steam engine on wheels and travel began to speed up. He attached the steam engine to looms for weaving cloth and to spinning wheels, and work began to speed up. Because these machines were too large for homes, factories began to be built. And on came the Industrial Revolution.
Soon man's arms and legs and back no longer had to provide the power for much of the work of the world. But man's brain still had to control the machines doing the work. He had to start them and guide them and stop them. He had to judge their work and correct errors. His eyes, ears, and sense of touch did the observing. His brain interpreted their information. And his muscles made the machines respond.
Now in automation, machines replace man's eyes and ears and sense of touch. Machines replace man's brain in judging the quality of the work, keeping track of the marketing, even in planning how much work should be done. And machines replace all but a little of man's muscular control of the machines.
Sometimes it is at a routine task that a machine replaces a man. Much of the steering of big ships and planes is now done automatically, with controls set to respond to any change in direction.
In other situations a machine replaces a man because the machine can do extremely complicated tasks at speeds the human eye and hand could not approach. A jet fighter plane in combat moves much faster than a pilot could possibly respond to changes in the situation. So a computer takes over and controls both flight and
firing. Engineers who have developed these computers feel that by 1965 there will probably be few fighter pilots left.
Perhaps it will not be much longer before some of the super highways being planned will have automatic control lanes. On these, drivers of properly equipped cars will be able to switch their cars to automatic pilots. And radar and sonar will keep the cars from bumping other vehicles or from going too close to the edges of the lane.
As in every communication problem, the elements would be the familiar ones. There would have to be a sensing device (possibly a compass needle) to check the car's direction. When an error in course occured an electrical signal would be set up (the familiar transducer). This tiny pulse would have to be amplified as usual. And the more powerful signal could be used to turn the wheels of the car. Also strong guiding signals might come from equipment along the road or from buried guide cables or magnetic "tapes" painted on the highway.
Here is a huge, light, busy factory. Machines whir and hum. But there are no voices to be heard. No workers move about among the machines. Up in a small control room two men are on duty, keeping watch. But in the main the lonely factory runs itself.
It is fashioning machine tools from raw steel ingots. Huge rollers set to exact thickness flatten the ingots into sheets. Three dimensional sensing devices "read" patterns for parts. Transducers convert this information into electrical energy. Amplifiers build up that energy so that it can run machines to shape, drill, and fasten together the parts.
As many as a thousand different individual machining operations may all be done mechanically. And they are all supervised by machines. Amplifiers can sense and correct tiny changes in speed or voltage which could cause errors. Photo tubes can convert light into signals which count, sort, check defects, and judge quality. All the things human operators would have done, machines do now.
Parts are swung or slid or rolled into place for the next step automatically. But, you may say, this has been done for a long time on assembly lines in many factories. That is true. In fact, in most factory automation most of the individual steps are familiar. The new thing is the size and completeness of the system.
These systems are described by the term "a closed loop." This means that instead of feeding raw parts into one end of the factory and carting away finished products from the other end (an open loop) you have machines (computers) which also keep track of supplies on hand, of use of parts, of incoming purchases, and sales of finished products. This information closes the loop of automation. For it tells the machines how much to produce and checks the output. This kind of control is called feedback.
The challenge for engineers in automation today is putting existing devices together into these systems which can largely run themselves, and controlling that running so that they operate at a profit. There is even talk of machines which will be able to repair and reproduce themselves.
What will become of the men and women whose life work has been the supervision and operation of machines? Will they and their families starve?
No, say the engineers. In the first place, automation will be practical only for large-scale manufacturing plants, offices, and stores where the same sort of routine operation is done over and over again. For many, many smaller businesses, especially where planning, imagination, and ingenuity are needed, the human touch will still be in control.
Also, engineers point out that the more we have, the more we want. As basic necessities are produced and distributed increasingly by automation, new needs and desires will develop. People working fewer hours and having more leisure will want more equipment for their hobbies and sports, all their recreational interests. And these new wants will help make new jobs for many people.
Most working people today are employed at jobs which had never been heard of before the first Industrial Revolution. It seems reasonable to suppose that you and many of your friends will find yourselves as grownups working at jobs which have not been dreamed of today.
But will people have too much leisure? Will they know what to do with all their free time?
That is a real challenge. The answer lies in human beings themselves.
We humans are more than just machines which must be fed and kept in condition so we can turn out work. We are individuals, each one different, with minds of such wondrous complexity that not even scientists who have spent a lifetime in study can begin to understand their workings.
These minds of ours have capacities few of us ever begin to explore, for enjoying truth and beauty in countless forms.
They have sensitivities of feeling so mysterious and marvelous that in awe and wonder we give them a special name, the soul.
Men of science and engineers have learned to use the earth's varied resources. They harness the rivers to give us light and power, tame the waves of the air to carry our messages, turn the trees of the forests into papers and books. The vast resource we still let go to waste is the power of human minds to think keenly and to feel deeply, to dream and to plan and to work together for the enriching of all human life.
If you as a scientist or engineer of tomorrow can lead men in that direction, your name will go down in history as a great benefactor of mankind.


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Professor of Law
John and Frances Angelos Law Center, AL 1009
Administrative Assistant:
Laurie Schnitzer
J.D., Yale Law School
M.P.P., John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard
B.A., Swarthmore College
Areas of Expertise
Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure
Family Law
Professor Jaros joined the law school after three years as an assistant professor in New York University School of Law's Lawyering Program. His teaching interests include Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Criminal Law, Law and Economics, and Family Law. In 2012, Professor Jaros was awarded the James A. May Award, by vote of the Student Bar Association, for excellence in teaching and mentoring.
Professor Jaros' scholarship addresses the growing use of criminal law to police and regulate various aspects of our daily lives. His articles have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, University Pennsylvania Law Review, Indiana Law Journal, and the American Criminal Law Review. His most recent article, Flawed Coalitions and the Politics of Crime, will appear in the Iowa Law Review.
Professor Jaros received his law degree from Yale Law School and his masters degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. After graduating from Yale, he clerked for the Honorable Allyne Ross, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York. He then worked for five years as a public defender at the Bronx Defenders in New York City, first as a staff attorney and later as the legal director.
Selected Publications
Articles and Essays
Judging Aggregate Settlement, 94 Wash. U. L. Rev. 545 (2017) (w/ Adam Zimmerman)
Preempting the Police , 55 B.C. L. Rev. 1149 (2014)
Flawed Coalitions and the Politics of Crime, 99 Iowa L. Rev. 1473 (2014)
Perfecting Criminal Markets,112 Colum. L. Rev. 1947 (2012)
The Criminal Class Action , 159 U. PA. L. Rev. 1385 (2011) (w/ Adam Zimmerman)
Unfettered Discretion: Criminal Orders of Protection and Their Impact on Parent Defendants, 85 Ind. L.J. 1445 (2010)
The Lessons of People v. Moscat: Confronting Judicial Bias in Domestic Violence Cases Interpreting Crawford v. Washington, 42 Am. Crim. L. Rev. 995 (2005)
Articles on Social Science Research Network
Talks and Presentations
Speaker, Preempting the Police, Junior Faculty Scholars Works-in-Progress Conference, Marquette Law School (Oct. 2013).
Speaker, Preempting the Police, Junior Scholars Colloquium, University of Maryland Law School (Feb. 2014).
Speaker, Preempting the Police, Criminal Justice Scholarship Conference at American University Washington College of Law, (Mar. 2014).


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Worldly women say the best lovers are from Spain, the worst are from Germany and guys from the U.S. aren't much to write home about.
The poll of 15,000 women determined that German men stink in bed -- literally. The Brits make the gals do all the work and Americans are too rough, according to the survey, by onepoll.com. As for the best lovers in the world, the Brazilians, Italians, French and Irish stack up just below the Spanish.
The poll asked women from 20 countries to rate nations on the men's abilities in the sack and to give reasons for their answers. But if American men who were rated fifth-worst, want to move up the list by displayng some tenderness, they shouldn't overdo it. Ranked sixth from the bottom were Greek men, who were faulted for being too "lovey-dovey."
U.S. & World
Get more: Telegraph


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Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Risk Factors
- Teens and Sex
- Minorities and Young Women in the U.S.
- Alcohol and Drug Use
- Talking to Your Teen About HIV
The average teenager feels as if she or he could not possibly get HIV. Most believe that HIV only happens to other people. However, many teens are getting infected and are now living with HIV (HIV+). All teens need to take HIV seriously, get educated, and be tested if they have sex or use drugs.
Risk Factors
Teens and young adults make up the largest number of HIV cases reported in recent years. Globally, UNAIDS estimates that a young woman is newly infected with HIV every minute. Young women account for more than six in ten young people living with HIV worldwide. In many countries, girls and young women have few or no privileges in the economic and social structures of their communities. As a result, they often have less access to HIV testing and treatment as well as to prevention measures, such as condoms and negotiating for safer sex. Moreover, less than a third of young women worldwide have correct and thorough knowledge about HIV.
Violence against girls and women also contributes to the number of young women who are living with HIV. UNAIDS reports that between 11 and 48 percent of the first sexual experiences of adolescent girls (less than 15 years old) were forced. In addition, early marriage is still common in many parts of the world. Adolescent girls who marry and become sexually active are more likely to drop out of school, have less ability to get and understand important health information, and have greater chances of becoming infected with HIV. Adolescent girls who get married often marry against their will and marry older men; these older men are more likely to have been exposed to HIV through sexual activity or injection drug use and therefore expose their young brides to HIV as a result.
In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that, although young people ages 13 to 24 number fewer than one in five people generally, they account for more than one in every four new HIV infections. It is estimated that more than half of all youth living with HIV do not know they are infected.
One of the groups most at risk for HIV in the US is young men who have sex with men (MSM). In 2010, over seven in ten new HIV infections in young people ages 13 to 24 occurred as the result of male-to-male sexual contact. MSM who become infected may spread the virus to women as well as to men.
MSM are particularly at risk for several reasons:
- There are high numbers of MSM living with HIV; therefore, they face a greater risk of being exposed to HIV each time they have sex
- Many MSM do not know their HIV status
- Many MSM have unprotected sex, especially unprotected anal intercourse
- Many MSM use alcohol and street drugs, which increases their likelihood of risky sexual behaviors
- Young MSM may incorrectly believe that HIV is no longer a serious health problem because of advances in treatment
- Social stigma and fear of homosexuality have deep and direct negative effects on the health of MSM. Negative cultural messages about MSM can lead MSM to think poorly about themselves and make unhealthy decisions, including those about sex and substance use. Stigma and discrimination may also make MSM less willing to access HIV prevention and care, or may isolate them from family, friends, and other community support networks.
Teens and Sex
Let's face it -- teens are having sex. In the US, nearly one-half of high school girls say they have had sexual intercourse, yet only slightly more than one in ten (13 percent) of them have ever been tested for HIV. One of the most common ways HIV is passed among teens is through unprotected sex. Teens are less likely to use a condom during vaginal or anal intercourse than sexually active adults. Among sexually active US high school students, only about two out of every five used a condom the last time they had sex. This is a key factor in why so many new HIV infections occur among youth and young adults.
Not using condoms also puts teens at risk for other sexually transmitted diseases or infections (STDs or STIs). In fact, one in every four STDs each year occurs among teens. This is especially concerning because the presence of an STD greatly increases a person's chances of getting or passing on HIV. People who have an STD such as syphilis, genital herpes, chlamydia, or gonorrhea are at greater risk for getting HIV during sex with partners living with HIV. Regularly using condoms significantly reduces the chances of getting STDs.
Minorities and Young Women in the U.S.
Teens living with HIV come from all different backgrounds; however recent studies show that over half of all newly infected American youths are African-American, even though only 17 percent of all US teens are African-American.
Unlike young men, the vast majority of young women get HIV through heterosexual sex (sex between a male and female). Young black women ages 13 to 24 accounted for almost six in ten new HIV infections among US teens and young adults in 2010.
Certain factors may put young women at higher risk for sexually transmitted HIV:
- Not being aware of their partners' risk factors
- Lack of power in relationships
- Having sex with older men who are more likely to be living with HIV
- HIV is transmitted from men to women much more easily than from women to men
- Younger women have a less mature genital tract that may be more likely to get tears or abrasions during vaginal intercourse
- A younger woman's cervix (entrance to the womb) is still developing until age 18. A young woman's "immature cervix" is one with thinner cells that provides less of a barrier to HIV than the cervix of an older, mature woman.
Alcohol and Drug Use
Young people in some countries, including the US, use alcohol and drugs at high rates. Many teens are curious about drugs and feel pressure from peers to try them. Teens are more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors, such as unprotected sex, when they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
In 2011, almost one in four sexually active American high school students drank alcohol or used drugs before the last time they had sex. Runaways and other homeless young people are at high risk for HIV infection if they trade sex for drugs or money.
Drug use can also increase the risk of HIV infection if needles are shared. This includes using needles for injecting drugs, injecting steroids, piercing the ears and body, and tattooing.
Talking to Your Teen About HIV
Teens hear about HIV at school, from friends, and on the TV, radio, and Internet. They generally know some basic information. However, what they know may be incorrect and many teens would like to know more. Teens need accurate, age-appropriate information that includes the following:
- What HIV is and how it is spread
- How to protect themselves
- Where to get tested for HIV
- How AIDS differs from HIV
- How to talk with their parents and partners about HIV/AIDS
- How to use a condom correctly
- How to make healthy choices about abstinence or sexual activity
Parents can make a difference. CDC research has shown that it is important for parents to talk early and clearly to their children about sex and values. Ongoing conversations about sex, HIV, STDs, and pregnancy prevention can help teens wait until they are older to have sex and make responsible decisions about sexual behaviors when they do start having sex. Awareness, education, and communication can reduce the risk of teens becoming infected with HIV.
So let's start talking! (See The Well Project's "Talking with Your Children about HIV")


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I know there's a SW 30th Anniv, I think there was a ST Anniv too. The last 2 on TV I did get a friend to Tivo/DVD for me. The quality was not bad, but the damn Tivo play bar is at the opening ... ;(
I did edit the 2 into 1 DVD w/o commercials ...
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Four Tet: Jazz is a Feeling
Part 1 of 2: An in-depth conversation with Kieran Hebden
Dimitri Nasrallah - 24 mai 2011
One of the most eclectic minds in electronic music today, Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) is one of those rare artists whose records and outlook grows more interesting with age. The core of his ever-expanding horizons, one could argue, is two-fold. On the one hand, a deep appreciation for the obscure ends of free jazz and early electronic outposts has led to a musicologist's purview of how musical styles evolve. On the other hand, Hebden keeps a very close ear to the ground with what's going on right now, highlighting and promoting numerous younger acts through his remix work and journeylike DJ sets.
Getting his start in the mid-90s as part of post-rock trio Fridge, Hebden released a flurry of albums with the band before releasing his solo debut as Four Tet in 1999. Since then, his work has grown increasingly more surprising and unpredictable. His first major critical success came with 2003's Rounds, and after 2005's Everything Ecstatic, he began to make his free-jazz interests more overt, with a series of collaborative albums with cult-legend drummer Steve Reid. 2010's There Is Love in You proved to be a high watermark for a producer who already had a wealth of accomplishments to his name, firmly establishing Four Tet as creative force in both the indie-rock and electronic realms.
In advance of Four Tet's Nocturne 4 appearance at MUTEK 2011 on Saturday, June 4th, MUTEKMAG caught up with Kieran Hebden for an in-depth and wide-ranging conversation. Today, in Part 1 of our extended talk, we discuss the upcoming show, his roots, and his numerous collaborations with free-jazz legend Steve Reid. Part 2 of the interview runs on Thursday.
For your MUTEK appearance, you are going to be doing a partial collaboration with Rocketnumbernine, from what I understand.
Yeah, the plan is they're going to do a little set on their own, and we're going to do a little set together, and then I'm going to do a set on my own.
Have you guys ever performed together before in that kind of context?
Yeah, just once. Gilles Peterson put on this event called Worldwide Awards earlier this year in London, and it was actually his idea. Would we be interested in doing something together? We actually wrote two pieces for it, and rehearsed and everything, and did that kind of one-off.
Just around the same time, MUTEK got in contact and said they'd really like it if I was up for doing the festival this year, especially if I was interested in doing a unique collaboration with somebody. And I said, oh, it's funny you ask now, I've just been doing this thing with this band called Rocketnumbernine, so how about that? Fortunately, they were up for it. I guess people don't really know Rocketnumbernine hardly at all, so I'm really happy that they were into the idea.
How did that first show go?
It was great, yeah. Really, really good fun. It seemed to go down really well with the crowd and stuff. It was a really amazing night. You know, it was Rocketnumbernine and Flying Lotus and James Blake and Mount Kimbie and Ramadanman, a kind of unbelievable line-up. So, yeah, Jerry Dammers of the Specials doing a tribute to Sun Ra, and loads of good stuff.
How did you guys meet?
Well, I actually know Rocketnumbernine through Steve Reid. The connection goes back a while because their drummer Tom, who is good friends with Steve. Steve used to hire Tom to come on tour with us, to help out with driving and drum tech and stuff like that. Him and I became good friends as well. Another member of Rocketnumbernine is his brother, Ben, and when they first started out they were kind of more improvised music and sort of more abstract stuff. Then a couple of years ago they changed direction a bit and started working on these more composed sort of tracks that were much more dance-music influenced in lots of ways.
And then James Holden got them to play. I'd seen them a few times and I saw them again at that, and it had turned into this whole new thing. Since then I've seen them live loads, and we talk together. I put out a 12-inch of theirs on my label, that I recorded and produced for them. We're definitely kindred spirits and have become connected in lots of ways, through connections from the past and what we're doing currently as well.
You mentioned that part of the thing that made you kindred spirits is the fact that they've evolved so much in such a short periods of time. One could say the same thing of your career, if you follow it from the beginnings and Fridge, all the way up to where it is now. There are two completely different producers at both ends of that spectrum. How naturally has that evolution come to you? Has it always been a part of your personality to want to push forward and try new things every time out?
Yeah, from the moment I first got involved in music. Especially when I was a teenager, it was all about having the experience of trying different kinds of styles and things. I guess Fridge was just one thing out of my time in high school that evolved into something more serious. And then once I actually thought this could be a full-time thing, I quit college and things got more serious. I got into the mentality of, 'Well, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm using all my time for now. It's not just a hobby anymore, it's a focus in my life.' I think at that moment, I really made a conscious decision. I don't want to waste this time. I want to experience as much of this music as I possibly can.
The whole thing was a bit of a fairy tale. I mean, how could this last longer than a couple of months, being allowed to do music as like a job.
Fridge was right out of high school, and that band made waves internationally in certain circles, so the attention got quite far for how young you were at the time.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Everything fell into place in a really amazing way when I was very young. I don't know if you understand how at that time you made demo cassettes and tried to give them to people. The first one I ever gave anybody got to Trevor Jackson [of Output Recordings] and it got us our first record deal, so we were blessed at that point and things just fell into place in a really natural way.
I was incredibly naïve about the music industry, how everything worked and the whole mentality of how to do things. Looking back on it now, I'm really pleased. We made all sorts of crazy mistakes in that early stage, but it was brilliant as well. The early part of my music making was perfectly documented. It's all there. You never get that kind of naïve moment in your music making back.
That naïveté works to your advantage. There's a certain level of honesty that comes out of that.
Yeah, and you can't recapture that moment. You know, there are so many people I know where you hear their first album, see some of their early shows and there's something really magical there. Then you see them a few years later and it's all slick and brilliant, but there are also certain things that have gone that you never get back no matter how hard you try.
You mentioned an appreciation for jazz even as far back as high school. Jazz sounds like a very pivotal part of what you do, even though it's not necessarily there in every aspect of your music. Are you formally trained in jazz at all, or has it always been a matter of listening?
I'm not trained at all, but my father's a massive music fan and jazz is definitely one of his big things, so I grew up in a household surrounded by that music and played it a lot. It was more bop and straight-ahead stuff. I knew of the mad, squawking free jazz, but I didn't really know about Impulse Records. I had heard Miles Davis, but I hadn't heard Bitches Brew and things like that.
I think it was when I was in my late teens and just as I started university, when I was 19-20 years old, I really discovered all of that stuff. It was like this music that I had been dreaming of and wishing had existed. Almost suddenly, I realized this music was a combination of everything I liked most. It had an incredible, heavy kind of rhythmic element. It had very interesting sonic arrangements. I'd listen to Herbie Hancock, and he'd have a record with synths and flutes and two drummers. That was fantastic, very ambitious and open music. It was definitely trying to push boundaries, and that was just so exciting for me.
I love all types of music, but I got so inspired and excited by that heavy sort of spiritual jazz from the late 60s, early 70s. I just keep coming back to it and as a real constant, something that truly inspires me. Getting to work with Steve Reid, someone who very much came out of that music and was truly part of it, was the icing on the cake, really.
I'm glad you brought up the Steve Reid collaboration because it strikes me as one of those eureka moments in you trajectory, one of those doors that open creatively that can never be closed again. Yet at the time, from the outside it seemed like such a "what the fuck?" moment, how are these two coming together? But then you check out the records and you see everything that came after it, and the context that settles in and it makes complete sense. How did you guys meet?
I had the idea that I really wanted to work with a drummer. When [2005's] Everything Ecstatic came out, I did a lot of touring for that record, more than I'd done for previous records, doing a 40-date tour in North America and a long tour in the UK, We did this big show in London with me and Faust, Explosions in the Sky and Kid Koala, that was the line up. It was this huge night. It was the biggest show I'd ever done. It was amazing, a truly fantastic night. It ended and I got home and I remember thinking, I've done it. You know, that's it. I feel completely fulfilled with this right now. I just knew that point that I wanted to do something different. I just needed a completely new experience.
I think it was maybe a week or so later, I was at the Oslo Jazz Festival and I went to this night of duos, of saxophones and drums, with Hamid Drake, Fred Anderson, Mats Gustafsson and others. I saw that, and I just had this moment there, it was like, these jazz duos are often drums and saxophone, imagine if I did drums and samples, or drums and laptop. What if I get my kind of ideas into this?
I mentioned this to this friend of mine in France, and he contacted me a month or so later. He loved the idea. He was a guy I used to buy records off. And he was like, I met Steve Reid, and I told him your idea, and he wants to meet you and he was coming to London, the London Jazz Festival, a few weeks later. I went to meet him, and we discussed the idea and he seemed really up for it and like-minded and enthusiastic about the concept.
We just agreed to do it. My firend in France arranged a concert for us. We never had any rehearsal. We just went into the first concert not knowing how it was going to turn out. It was either going to be a disaster or be okay, or just be a one-off. That was the real life-changing – it changed everything. Just the sound check was like, whoa, a whole other world of possibility with what I'm doing with my music here. There's loads of things I've been interested in doing. but I didn't even realize I had the potential to do, which certainly came alive in that moment.
Steve and I obviously became really great friends and made four albums worth of material together. There's loads and loads of stuff that ended up turning into really, really big projects, and that became the focus of what I was doing for a while. Sometimes I do something like that, and since the Four Tet stuff is much more popular than other things I do all the time, some people think, oh, this is like a side-project. Music's not like that for me. Everything I do is like the next stage, part of musical journey I'm on. There's no sideways. I'm moving along a certain kind of path in everything I do can feed into the next project. Even when I make records now, even it's not completely obvious, it's very inspired by the stuff I do with Steve Reid. It's the education I got from him in rhythm.
From what I can hear, it definitely sounds like you opened up after that and that the range of Four Tet just became so much wider. It's much more unpredictable and surprising. I mean, apart from the fact that you guys did four records together, the generational difference also opened up this amazing jazz drummer to a whole new generation of people very late in his career. He must have been pretty happy to feel vital to a new generation.
Oh yeah. It was such a wonderful time for both of us. Really, it was exciting for me. I felt like I was branching out, creating something that really seemed rhythmically very exciting, and an amazing personal experience. So, for him, I think he felt the same. One of the great things about Steve was that he was never stuck in the past at all. He was like, I never want to be one of those "oldies but goodies" type of guys, who doesn't want to be with the young guys moving on.
We'd go and play clubs, and there'd be like a drum & bass DJ, and then there'd be me and Steve. Things like that. It totally made sense. We weren't just playing seated theatres. We were doing a whole variety of things, even playing alongside rock bands at festivals. I think he was just thriving on that. Absolutely loving it. It was also completely how his ethos had been all along. He wanted to reach everybody and young people especially. Yeah, I think the fact that we got lots of really great bookings and good audiences, that was really exciting for him.
Part 2 of this conversation runs on Thursday, May 26th
Four Tet performs at MUTEK 2011's Nocturne 4: Saturday, June 4th @ Metropolis.


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Cung Le Counter KOs Rich Franklin in UFC on Fuel TV 6 Main Event in China
Cung Le knocked Rich Franklin out cold at UFC on Fuel TV 6. | Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images
Cung Le has his signature victory.
The former Strikeforce champion knocked out Rich Franklin with a clean counter right hook in the first round of the UFC on Fuel TV 6 headliner on Saturday at the Cotai Arena inside the Venetian Macau Resort Hotel in Macau, China. Franklin (29-7, 14-6 UFC) met his end 2:17 into round one.
"That was the biggest fight of my life," Le said. "I couldn't ask for anything more. I'm just grateful. I don't know what to say. It was a lucky punch."
Franklin was active from the outset, as he kicked effectively to Le's legs and body, all while punching in combination to the head. However, he let his guard down on one of those aforementioned kicks and a pawing follow-up jab. Le (9-2, 2-1 UFC) capitalized, unleashing a devastating right hook that sent an unconscious Franklin crashing face first to the canvas.
"He kept on throwing that punch at me," Le said. "I wasn't able to time my kick because he was loading up and looking for me to kick so he could catch me with a punch, so I waited for him to punch and then came with the overhand right, and I caught him."
Franklin had never before been finished so quickly. At 38, his future appears to be very much in doubt.
"I don't know [what happened]," Franklin said. "I'll have to go back and watch the tape. I'm still a little fuzzy right now. I'll have to go home, go back to the drawing board and sit down with my coaches and make an intelligent decision."
Thiago Silva submitted previously unbeaten Bulgarian light heavyweight Stanislav Nedkov with a third-round arm-triangle choke in the co-main event. Nedkov (12-1, 1-1 UFC) conceded defeat 1:45 into round three.
Silva (15-3, 6-3 UFC) -- who had not won since August 2009 -- survived an encounter with an overhand right from the Sengoku veteran, resulting in a knockdown late in the second round. Nedkov's failure to finish cost him dearly. His legs savaged by a series of kicks from the Brazilian, Nedkov broke down quickly in round three. Sensing his opponent was a beaten man, the Blackzilian team member moved in for a takedown, transitioned to mount and cinched the choke without much resistance. The tapout followed soon after.
"[My strategy] was just to work my standup and kick his legs," Silva said. "That's what I did, and I used the right opportunity to take him down."
In a performance that can only be described as utterly dominant, Dong Hyun Kim roared to a one-sided unanimous decision over Paulo Thiago in a welterweight showcase. Kim (16-2-1, 7-2 UFC) swept the scorecards by 30-26, 30-27 and 30-27 counts.
Thiago (14-5, 4-5 UFC) had no answers for his South Korean counterpart. Kim secured takedowns in all three rounds and then proceeded to sap the Brazilian's spirit with a crushing top game. "Stun Gun" threatened Thiago with a barb choke, one of Thiago's own specialties, late in the second round and capped the stirring victory with a relentless barrage of ground-and-pound in the third.
Once considered one of the world's top 10 welterweights, Thiago has lost four of his last five fights.
Former Pride Fighting Championships lightweight titleholder Takanori Gomi put forth what was arguably the best effort of his UFC career, as he captured a split verdict from "The Ultimate Fighter" Season 6 winner Mac Danzig. All three judges scored it 29-28, two of them in favor of Gomi (34-8, 3-3 UFC).
Now 34, Gomi threw punches and kicks with power and conviction, mixing in a first-round takedown and rekindling some of his past magic. Danzig enjoyed success in the clinch and threatened the Japanese star with a guillotine in round two. However, Gomi stayed aggressive, knocked down Danzig with a sneaky right hand inside the first 15 seconds of the third round and did enough to secure his second straight triumph.
A steady diet of takedowns and ground-and-pound drove former WEC title contender Takeya Mizugaki to a lopsided unanimous decision over Jeff Hougland in a bantamweight showcase. All three cageside judges scored it for Mizugaki (16-7-2, 3-2 UFC): 30-25, 30-27 and 30-27.
Mizugaki was efficient and effective on the feet, but he made his real inroads on the ground. The 28-year-old Japanese standout delivered takedowns in all three rounds, and unleashed a barrage of rights and lefts on Hougland (10-6, 1-2 UFC), who'd entered the cage with nine wins in his previous 10 appearances. Mizugaki put the exclamation point on the victory late in the third round, when he opened a nasty horizontal laceration above Hougland's left eyebrow with a short elbow strike.
Undefeated Guamanian import Jon Tuck kept his perfect professional record intact with a unanimous decision over China Top Team representative Tiequan Zhang in a featured lightweight battle. Tuck (7-0, 1-0 UFC) swept the scorecards by 29-28, 30-27 and 29-28 counts.
"The Ultimate Fighter" Season 15 alum set the tone from start, as he freed himself from a first-round takedown and threatened Zhang (15-4, 1-3 UFC) with an armbar. Tuck later settled into top position and transitioned from full mount to side control to back mount. The scene replayed itself in round two, where Tuck again moved to mount and attached himself to his foe's back.
Zhang did his best work in the third round, when he attacked Tuck with heavy punches, including a wicked left hook that wobbled the 28-year-old. Even so, it was not enough to erase the deficit that confronted him when he entered the final five minutes.
More UFC on Fuel TV 6 »
• UFC on Fuel TV 6 Prelims: Lineker Outduels Urushitani; Caceres, Fukuda Notch Wins
• UFC on Fuel TV 6 Play-by-Play


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Events Calendar
Strange & Magical Beasts: Etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick
Tony Fitzpatrick, "Norwhalis," color etching with aquatint and chine collé, 37/40, 1994
Date and TimeTuesday, December 11, 2018
7:00 a.m. - 11:00 p.m.
- Russel H. Kirkhof Center Gallery, Russel H. Kirkhof Center
Tony Fitzpatrick was born in 1958, and raised in and around Chicago as a member of a large middle class Irish Catholic family. His father worked as a burial vault salesman, and often took Tony along to appointments around the city when he was suspended from school. Drawing was a pervasive part of his life, and he'd sketch anything that caught his eye. He graduated from Montini Catholic High School in 1977, untrained in the arts.
Over the years, Fitzpatrick spent time as boxer, bartender, actor, waiter and tattoo artist. These experiences, coupled with an insatiable appetite for drawing, had a profound effect on his work. This exhibition features 21 etchings by the artist. They are drawn out of a recent gift of over 120 works on paper to the GVSU permanent collection. Filled with strange and magical beasts they draw on his childhood imagination, Catholic upbringing and immersive experience in street culture.
Strange & Magical Beasts: Etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick will be on display until March 1, 2019. For more information visit our website!
Art Gallery, 616-331-2563
This event also occurred on 11/2/2018, 11/5/2018, 11/6/2018, 11/7/2018, 11/8/2018, 11/9/2018, 11/12/2018, 11/13/2018, 11/14/2018, 11/15/2018 and 66 others


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In Colorado, 12 volunteers raked and bagged leaves, cut and bundled tree limbs, and planted flower bulbs Saturday.
"The Karlis Family Center in Lakewood was very grateful for our work," said John Panozzo '89, who organized the Wabash Day effort. "They look forward to reading more about Wabash Day on the College website."
Panozzo credited Harry Phillips '65 for helping plan the event. But Panozzo reported, "Harry got caught in Florida due to Hurricane Wilma and was not able to attend on Saturday."
The Karlis Family Center is a domestic violence resource center, which provides programs for families who have experienced high-conflict separation or divorce, domestic violence or other abuse in the home. The center provides a safe, home-like environment and is open seven days a week. They provide several different counseling programs, support groups, supervised parenting and visitation, and safe exchanges. The center was founded over a decade ago by former Denver Bronco kicker Rich Karlis.
The alumni included John and Ebie Panozzo, Gary Johnson '59, Roy Early '98, Al Hart '69 and his wife Sally, Clark Dickerson '67, Masud Bahramand '05, Qadeer Bahramand, Daniel Sweet '04, Meghan McNulty and Louis Skeegan.
In photos:
At top: A group shot of the Colorado and Denver area alums and friends who took part in the first Wabash Day.
At right: Gary Johnson '59 and Roy Early '98 work cleaning up leaves and debris.


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New Avon LLC ("Avon"), with operations in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, has a deep respect for animal welfare and does not conduct animal testing. Avon does not conduct animal testing on its products or ingredients, nor does it ask others to do so on its behalf.
Avon is a strong advocate of both the ethical and humane treatment of animals and the protection of human health and safety. Our products are developed utilizing alternative testing methods such as extrapolations from existing data, computational modeling, in vitro (test tube/cell culture) testing and clinical tests with human volunteers to ensure both their efficacy and safety.
Consumers can be assured that any product carrying the Avon name and sold in the U.S., Canada or Puerto Rico has been developed in a cruelty-free manner (no animal testing), has undergone rigorous and thorough safety evaluation, and can be used with the utmost confidence.


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Chevron Water Guard Mat
Our welcoming mats defend against dirt and water while making a stylish statement with intricate, hand-pressed patterning. Available in multiple sizes, designs, and colors — with the option to add your family initial — these Garnet Hill-exclusives add a pop of personality throughout your home, front door to back door, kitchen island to bathroom vanity. * Resistant to mold, mildew, rot,....
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Shorter are the days that separate us from the IUCN World Conservation Congress. That was the motivation driving the D-100 celebrations held on Saturday 2 June at the International Convention Centre Jeju (ICCJ).
Julia Marton-Lefèvre, IUCN Director General, travelled from the headquarters of IUCN in Switzerland to take part in the ceremony on the prized Korean island.
"In only 100 days from now, we will welcome thousands of conservationists, business leaders, community representatives, philanthropists and government delegates from all corners of the world to this wonderful place," she said to an estimated 3,500 spectators.
"I will be personally speaking about the Jeju Congress in less than two weeks from now at the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil. The Jeju Congress will be the first major international event after Rio, where we will start putting Rio commitments into action."
Ms Marton-Lefèvre was joined by Yoo Young-Sook, Minister of Environment; Woo Keun-min, Governor of Jeju Special Self-governing Province; Lee Hong Koo, Chairman of the Korean Organizing Committee (KOC) and former Prime Minister of Korea; and Kim Chong Chun, KOC secretary general.
In the opening speech, Chairman Lee described the Congress as "the most influential conference in seeking possible solutions to global environmental challenges".
Minister Yoo gave a positive message on the Republic's environmental commitments: "We will try to ensure that the IUCN Congress will serve as an opportunity to broaden the horizon of Korea's conservation policies and move toward an environmentally advanced nation."
The Ministry of Environment, the Jeju Special Self-governing Province and the Korean Organizing Committee, which was set up specifically for the IUCN Congress, are highly engaged in making the next IUCN Congress one of the best and most impactful to date.
In front of the numerous attendees who came to show their support, Governor Woo said: "Great interest and efforts of you all here today are very important to ensure that the 2012 IUCN World Conservation Congress will seed a new era in global environmental history."
People from Jeju and mainland Korea were present at the ICCJ to enjoy the open concert organized to raise awareness of the Congress. One of the highlights that kept the younger crowds on their feet was the live performance by 2am, one of the country's most popular boys band.
2am sing the Congress campaign song, "Let's Go Green Together", which calls on people's willingness to care for the Earth.
D-100 was also an occasion to recognize the contributions by online supporters, with other activities taking place, including an essay competition for Korean students and a photo exhibition.
The high participation rate in this day of festivities is a boost in the right direction for the World Conservation Congress, as the countdown thins down into the two-digits.


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Why We Fight (Over Land) – "In the most recent issue of the journal International Security, Monica Duffy-Toft and Dominic Johnson, political scientists at Oxford, argue that a new theoretical framework is needed to analyze such behavior, one rooted in evolutionary biology…. As Duffy-Toft told me an interview today, 'It comes back to survival and reproduction. There's an instinct that we need land in order to exist. We need to have the capacity to get resources to live our lives….' Duffy-Toft acknowledges that the thesis is controversial. While their piece is currently the lead article in International Security, one of the more prestigious journals in the field, it took almost 10 years to get it published. 'We're pushing up against real biases in our field,' she says. 'Scholars don't want to admit that our behavior can be constrained by the fact that we're animals.'" – *sigh* – original research article here [pdf].
Oldest modern human genome from Siberia ~45 thousand years ago – "The femur belonged to an H. sapiens man who had slightly more Neandertal DNA, distributed in different parts of his genome, than do living Europeans and Asians." – @dienekes'.
Human evolution: The Neanderthal in the family – "Thirty years after the study of ancient DNA began, it promises to upend our view of the past."
The phylogenetic and geographic structure of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a – h/t razib!
Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans' Arrival in the Americas – "[T]he ancient rock art depicts fierce battles among tribesmen…." – h/t steven pinker! who tweeted: "refutes frequent claim of no war before agriculture."
Cochran-Harpending paper on "Amish Quotient" – "'[T]heir social pattern probably drives strong selection for a particular flavor of personality, which is downright fascinating and worthy of further investigation. One could, with difficulty and a lot of investment, identify dimensions of a hypothetical AQ. It would likely include affinity for work, perseverance, low status competition, respect for authority, conscientiousness, community orientation, and so on. We proposed (Cochran, Hardy, & Harpending, 2006) a similar mechanism to account for Ashkenazi Jewish evolution in Medieval times selecting for ability and success in white collar occupations.'" – from steve sailer. previously @west hunter: Inferring an AQ.
The Son Becomes The Father – "The failure of parents to appreciably affect the outcomes of their children affirms Gregory Clark's findings, and indicates that much of the transmission of status from one generation to the next is ultimately genetic in origin…. Almost certainly, throughout history, and across the diverse societies, that has been a huge amount of 'noise' in the transmission of status, especially on the individual level and in the short run. The vagaries of the circumstances no doubt imbued good fortune on some and dashed the success of many others. But through it all, the thing that is at the root of continuity – DNA – remained the active ingredient to propagate lineages in their respective places through out the ages." – from jayman.
First comprehensive atlas of human gene activity released – h/t mike anissimov!
Sperm competition and Heteropaternal Superfecundation – from greg cochran.
The Holocene Lattice – "First, it is now clear that long-range migration, admixture and population replacement have been the rule rather than the exception in human history. Second, the serial founder effect model is no longer a reasonable null hypothesis for modeling the ancient spread of anatomically modern humans around the globe." – from razib. (emphases in original.)
Percentage of DNA shared amongst the various archaics (including our sapiens sapiens lineage), from a review in Cell – from billare.
Neural portraits of perception: Reconstructing face images from evoked brain activity – whoa. h/t mo costandi!
We Are All Mutants – "On the hunt for disease genes, researchers uncover humanity's vast diversity."
Puerto Rico and IQ: Same as it ever was – from steve sailer.
About That Gene-Environment Interaction Study by Turkheimer et al. – "The upshot is that while environmental deprivation may render genetic differences less important in the determination of children's IQ, the typical black child in this large and downscale sample had apparently not been raised in deprived circumstances any more frequently than the typical white child in the sample. The lower IQs of blacks in this sample cannot therefore be put down to them having been exposed to environments less conducive to the expression of genetic variance in IQ than the environments experienced by whites." – @human varieties.
People can predict the IQ of men — but not women — by looking at their face, study finds – see also dr. james thompson: The mind's construction in a face.
Dopamine D4 receptor gene variation influences self-reported altruism – "[T]he DRD4 7-repeat allele is associated with lower scores on the NEO-PI-R Altruism facet scale, accounting for about 2% of the variance. As the DRD4 7-repeat allele has been associated with higher scores in impulsive personality traits and ADHD, our result suggests that individual differences in impulsive behavioral tendencies may play a role in the propensity to behave altruistically." – h/t tom farsides!
How Social Darwinism Made Modern China – "A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom." – from ron unz. h/t eduardo zugasti!
Kinder, gentler speech – "In sum, when the State imposed a monopoly on the use of violence, it set in motion a process of gene-culture co-evolution with many consequences. Among other things, this process may have favored not only learned ways of speaking but also unlearned ways as well." – from peter frost.
Crows Understand a Fundamental Part of Logical Reasoning – "Crows are far more rational than we had realized. New research shows that wild New Caledonian crows can compete with 7-year-old children when it comes to understanding causality, or how one action causes another." see also: Crows understand water displacement at the level of a small child: Show causal understanding of a 5- to 7-year-old child.
Do animals have a sense of humour? – koko the gorilla "once tied her trainer's shoelaces together and signed 'chase'." (^_^) (^_^) (^_^) – h/t steve stewart williams!
On "Male" vs. "Female" Brains – twitter convo on sexual dimorphism in human neuro-whatsits. kevin mitchell ftw!
"Natural Law" and Other Rationalizations of Morality – "People worry about a 'grounding' for morality. There's really no need to. As Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce pointed out in Wild Justice – The Moral Lives of Animals, there are analogs of moral behavior in many species besides our own…. Other animals don't wonder why one thing is good and another evil. They're not intelligent enough to worry about it. Hominids are Mother Nature's first experiment with creatures that are smart enough to worry about it. The result of this cobbling of big brains onto the already existing mental equipment responsible for moral emotions and perceptions hasn't been entirely happy. In fact, it has caused endless confusion through the ages." – from helian.
Inclusive fitness theory for the evolution of religion – "We describe and evaluate an integrative hypothesis for the origin and evolution of human religious cognition and behaviour, based on maximization of inclusive fitness. By this hypothesis, the concept of God is represented by one's circle of kin and social salience, such that serving God and serving this circle become synonymous. The theory is supported by data from anthropology, evolutionary theory, psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, endocrinology and genetics." – h/t claire lehmann!
Are liars ethical? On the tension between benevolence and honesty – "[I]ndividuals who tell prosocial lies are perceived to be *more* moral than individuals who tell the truth." – h/t zhana vrangalova!
Speculations on the Evolution of Awareness – "The 'attention schema' theory provides one possible account of the biological basis of consciousness, tracing the evolution of awareness through steps from the advent of selective signal enhancement about half a billion years ago to the top-down control of attention, to an internal model of attention (which allows a brain, for the first time, to attribute to itself that it has a mind that is aware of something), to the ability to attribute awareness to other beings, and from there to the human attribution of a rich spirit world surrounding us. Humans have been known to attribute awareness to plants, rocks, rivers, empty space, and the universe as a whole. Deities, ghosts, souls-the spirit world swirling around us is arguably the exuberant attribution of awareness." – h/t neuroskeptic!
Mugshots Built from DNA Data – "A computer program crudely predicts facial structure from genetic variations."
The Oldest Living Things On Earth – "Starting in the 1960s, evolutionary biologists have searched for an overarching explanation to account for all the different ways to grow old. The best-supported ones so far are variants on the old truth that a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none. An organism can collect a finite amount of energy, whether it's a lion killing gazelles, a tulip capturing sunlight, or a microbe breathing iron at the bottom of the sea. It can use that energy to grow, to produce offspring, to defend itself against pathogens, to repair damaged its damaged molecules. But it has a limited budget. The energy spent on one task is energy that can't be spent on others. Molecular repair and pathogen defense are both good ways to live longer. But a long-lived organism that produces few offspring will not pass on many copies of its genes to future generations. The organisms that will succeed are the ones that do a mediocre job of keeping their bodies in order, leaving more energy for making babies." – h/t billare!
Mutation, Not Natural Selection, Drives Evolution – according to masatoshi nei: "Every part of our body is controlled by molecules, so you have to explain on a molecular level. That is the real mechanism of evolution, how molecules change. They change through mutation. Mutation means a change in DNA through, for example, substitution or insertion [of nucleotides]. First you have to have change, and then natural selection may operate or may not operate. I say mutation is the most important, driving force of evolution. Natural selection occurs sometimes, of course, because some types of variations are better than others, but mutation created the different types. Natural selection is secondary."
End the Hype over Epigenetics & Lamarckian Evolution – "They insist that characteristics many researchers assume to be the result of epigenetic inheritance are actually caused by something else. The authors list four possibilities: Undetected mutations in the letters of the DNA sequence, behavioral changes (which themselves can trigger epigenetic tags), alterations in the microbiome, or transmission of metabolites from one generation to the next. The authors claim that most epigenetic research, particularly when it involves human health, fails to eliminate these possibilities." – h/t jayman!
New warning about 'Celtic Curse' blood iron disease – "Hemochromatosis is a hereditary disease, linked particularly to Irish and those of Irish origin. It causes your body to absorb too much iron from the food you consume. The excess iron becomes stored in your organs, especially your liver, heart and pancreas. It can lead to life-threatening conditions such as cancer, heart problems and liver disease. Those with Irish heritage have a significantly greater chance of carrying the gene mutation that can contribute to the deadly disorder. Some experts believe that hemochromatosis originated more than 40,000 years ago in Ireland when genes mutated allowing the population to over-absorb iron, to compensate for a poor iron diet." – h/t 23andMe!
The state is the worst wicked stepmother of all – "[T]he number of children raised without one of their parents has increased sharply in recent years, partly due to changing sexual mores but also the involvement of the state itself; the largest increase in non-marital births came after the 1977 Homeless Persons Act gave lone mothers priority on housing lists. The Tory MP behind this proposal wrote, 'The sad truth is that, until now, the Wicked Stepmother would have got away scot-free.' Possibly, but there would not have been so many wicked stepmothers, or stepfathers, or mother's current boyfriends, without the state in the first place." – from ed west.
Pseudoescepticismo y biodiversidad humana – "Desde hace años, sin embargo, existe una tendencia ideológica inflacionaria en el movimiento escéptico que tiende a alejarse del 'núcleo' original, cuyos contornos de todos modos son imprecisos (¿es la parapsicología una ciencia?). El inconveniente es que este alejamiento del núcleo, yo lo llamaría 'escepticismo inflacionario' o simplemente pseudoescepticismo, desdibuja los criterios de demarcación y hace que los nuevos temas sean más y más propensos a la contaminación moral e ideológica…. Un caso bastante claro es la campaña 'escéptica' de descrédito contra la psicología evolucionista, que sólo ha convencido a un pequeño grupo. ¿Pudiera ser que el empeño de grupos 'escépticos' de asimilar el movimiento de biodiversidad humana con el 'racismo científico' y con la 'pseudociencia' (la falacia moralista siempre merodeando) corriera una suerte parecida?" – @la revolución naturalista.
Response to 'Fists of furry: at what point did human fists part company with the rest of the hominid lineage?' – "A Swedish study on interpersonal violence reported 63 facial fractures and 57 concussions inflicted by fists, but only eight fractures of the metacarpal or phalangeal bones (Boström, 1997). Thus, human fists are effective weapons and, when humans fight, faces break more frequently than fists." – h/t john hawks!
Sexually Transmitted Virus Sterilises Insects, Turns Them On – "[O]ne particular insect virus can sterilise crickets, but also change their behaviour so they continue to mate with each other. By doing so, they pass the virus on to uninfected hosts."
Ancient African cattle first domesticated in Middle East, study reveals – "The genetic history of 134 cattle breeds from around the world has been completed by a group of researchers. In the process of completing this history, they found that ancient domesticated African cattle originated in the 'Fertile Crescent,' a region that covered modern day Iraq, Jordan, Syria and Israel." – h/t anthropology tip!
Autism characteristics differ by gender, studies find – h/t hbd bibliography! also: Autism begins in pregnancy, according to study: Cortical layers disrupted during brain development in autism – h/t mr. robert ford!
Men 'size-up' male competition by watching dance moves – " The results revealed that handgrip strength and arm movements of the dancers were predictors of dance quality ratings. Both men and women rated stronger males with larger, more variable and faster arm movements as better dancers. However, men picked up clues of upper-body strength from male dancing more accurately than women." – previously: "you should be dancin' yeah!"
A Study of Twins, Separated by Orbit – "While circling the earth aboard the International Space Station for a full year — the longest single space adventure for any American astronaut — and after his return, scientists will closely monitor Commander Kelly to see what changes space has wrought. NASA has been studying the effects of long stays in space on astronauts for years, but this set of 10 investigations will be different: The scientists will be doing the same poking, prodding and analyzing on Commander Kelly's identical twin brother, Mark, a retired astronaut."
A simple but elegant method to detect election fraud and irregularities. – from randy olson.
bonus: Game of Thrones tells the story of Britain better than most histories – "The popular TV drama gives a vivid idea of how people might have behaved in the Middle Ages – which is brutally" – from ed west. and coming out on thursday!: Ebook on the history behind 'Game of Thrones' – by ed west. what does he mean, "there aren't really dragons"??!?
bonus bonus: L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. A bird in a gilded cage. – new ebook from peter frost!
bonus bonus bonus: Advice for a Happy Life – "Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch 'Groundhog Day' (again)." – from charles murray.
bonus bonus bonus bonus: The War Nerd: Who exactly are the Jihadis (and why aren't there more of them)? – "There's one simple generalization you can make from these stats: Jihadis from Muslim-majority countries are generally higher-status than those from countries where Muslims are a minority." – h/t michael "the sailor" story!
bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Neurosurgeons successfully implant 3D printed skull – whoa.
bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Woolly Mammoths Suffered Major Birth Defects Before Extinction – "According to the researchers, this influx of birth defects could have come about in two different ways. The genetic mutations could have arisen from inbreeding depression. As mammoths were reduced in number, genetic diversity would have plummeted and the number of mutations would have risen sharply. The other explanation offered states that expecting mothers would have been under considerable stress as the population dwindled. This prenatal stress could have had negative consequences for fetal development." – h/t avi tuschman!
bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: A Day in the Life of an Ancient Athenian Citizen – from blowhard, esq. h/t ray sawhill! (for some reason, i always crave a cocktail after visiting uncouth reflections…. (^_^) *hic*)
bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Greatest Invention in Human History Helps You Avoid Certain People – "The era of antisocial networking has begun with the development of apps such as Cloak, which identifies locations of your contacts so you don't have to see them." – FIIIInally!
bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus bonus: Absurd Creature of the Week: The 6-Foot Earthworm That Sounds Like a Draining Bathtub – h/t charles (aka the doctor! (^_^) )!
(note: comments do not require an email. gippsland earthworm!)


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IT Leadership Council board chair and members elected
IT Leadership Council board chair and members elected
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Penn State's Information Technology Leadership Council (ITLC) has recently elected a new chair and three new board members as part of its annual election process.
Joanne Peca, chief information officer at Penn State Altoona, will serve as the new ITLC chair, and will preside over the organization from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2014. Mairead Martin, senior director in Information Technology Services; Adam Caimi, IT manager in Penn State Outreach; and John Domico, assistant director of management systems in computer, science and engineering; will serve as the ITLC's new board members from Jan. 1, 2014, to Dec. 31, 2016.
ITLC is a University-wide organization that facilitates IT planning efforts and guides the many technology services that support Penn State's mission. Comprised of more than 80 IT managers and directors throughout Penn State, the ITLC was established in 2011 to oversee Penn State's strategic IT goals and foster collaboration among IT and University units.
Under the leadership of last year's chair, Neal Vines (director of IT in the College of Agricultural Sciences), the council has helped to guide a number of initiatives at Penn State, including a new distribution and cost-sharing model for Adobe software; an upcoming cost-free wireless service for individuals visiting Penn State's campuses; a wireless service that provides greater coverage and a more consistent experience for its users; and a Shared Service Management initiative that will make it possible for students, faculty and staff to have improved access to IT support and services.
"The structure of ITLC allows for unprecedented communication and collaboration among the IT leaders from across the entire University," said Peca, who served on the board previously as a member from 2012 to 2014. "The full council meets once each month, and the meetings are designed to allow for discussion and collaboration among all of the attendees."
Membership in the council is open to all individuals with primary leadership responsibility for information technology in a college, campus or other major University unit at Penn State. In the coming year, Peca said the ITLC will strengthen its focus on enabling IT to facilitate learning and support research and innovation — while modernizing Penn State's enterprise systems and sustaining IT effectiveness.
"The unique thing about ITLC is that it is an action-oriented community: a forum where new ideas can be brought forth and considered by the senior-most IT leaders from each unit," she added.
The ITLC has eight elected board positions and two standing board positions held by Kevin Morooney, vice provost for information technology, and John Harwood, associate vice provost for information technology, respectively. Elections take place on an annual basis in December for the three new members on a rotating basis. Nominations are made in November and December, and are voted upon by the overall ITLC membership.
To learn more about Penn State's Information Technology Leadership Council, go to https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/itcouncil/IT+Leadership+Council.
For more stories about IT at Penn State, visit Current at http://current.it.psu.edu/.