Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Insight: From darkest India, an enlightened leader (Reuters)

PATNA, India (Reuters) ? There's an apocryphal story about Bihar, a sprawling state on the Gangetic plains of eastern India that for decades held the dubious honor of being the most violent, poverty-stricken and corrupt in the land.

A Japanese minister visiting in the 1990s, shocked at the decrepit buildings, the darkness at night even in the centre of town and the crumbling roads, declared that it was all solvable.

"Give me three years," he told a state leader, "and I can turn Bihar into Japan."

"That's nothing," came the laconic reply from his host. "Give me three days and I will turn Japan into Bihar."

Bihar is no longer the butt of jokes, however, not since Nitish Kumar took charge of the ruined state in 2005 and began to turn it around -- winning such respect that he stands a decent chance of one day becoming prime minister of India.

"My first priority was governance, my second priority was governance and my third priority was governance," Chief Minister Kumar told Reuters at his office in the state capital, Patna, a dusty city where property prices have soared to levels paid in far away New Delhi, even as its streets teem with the desperately poor.

"Bihar suffered not because of bad governance but because of a lack of governance."

When India launched reforms to open up its state-stifled economy 20 years ago, many states surged ahead, leaving behind the 3.5 percent "Hindu rate of growth" that had plagued the decades after the country's independence from Britain in 1947, and with it Bihar.

Bihar is still India's most impoverished state: landlocked, not blessed with resources and prone to catastrophic flooding, its annual per-capita income of about $400 is just a third of the national average. Its 104 million overwhelmingly farm-dependent people have India's worst literacy rate and the lowest proportion of households with electricity, and the state scores miserably on the U.N.'s Human Development Index.

It's hard to imagine that in ancient times Bihar was the centre of the flourishing Magadha empires and the region where the Buddha lived and attained enlightenment.

And yet the state's dismally low income level has grown 250 percent since Kumar took the helm, more than double the national average. The growth of its economy has surged into double figures to become India's second-fastest growing state, driven by hefty public spending on roads and buildings and rapid expansion in services such as hotels and restaurants.

RESTORING FAITH

Kumar has done much more than bring growth. Working until midnight most days for the past six years, he has declared war on crime and corruption, introduced an act that gives citizens the right to efficient public services, launched a frenzy of road-building, empowered women and promoted education, offering a free bicycle to every girl that registers in a Grade 9 class.

"Everything had gone to the dogs," said Prakash Jha, one of Bihar's favorite sons, a Bollywood film-maker who has chronicled many of the state's ills, including the once-thriving industry of kidnapping businessmen.

"What Nitish Kumar has been able to do is restore faith in the society of Bihar. We had almost given up, but now you feel you can do things in Bihar," said Jha, who has put his money where his mouth is, spending $12 million on a shopping mall and cinema multiplex in Patna, the state's first.

Kumar is not without detractors: critics say he is poor at delegating, causes bottlenecks by amassing all decision-making in his office and accomplishes far less than he claims.

"This is a government of denting, painting and decorating," said state opposition leader Abdul Bari Siddiqui. "It's all on the surface. Nitish Kumar will hold a ceremony to inaugurate the ditch and then another for the bridge built over it."

Still, the contrast between the hyper-active chief minister of Bihar and the central government in New Delhi could hardly be more stark after months of drift and policy paralysis under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that have contributed to a slowdown in the country's stellar economic growth.

AN IDEOLOGY OF HUMANISM

A vegetable garden borders the path that leads to the simple Patna bungalow where the chief minister has his office. On a shelf inside his sparsely furnished room, there are several trophies awarded by media groups for "Indian of the Year." There is just one picture on the wall, an image of Mahatma Gandhi, father of independent India.

Kumar's father was a freedom-fighter during British rule, but the son has always been implacably opposed to the Congress party that led the struggle for independence and its Nehru-Gandhi dynasty of leaders, defining himself more by his vision of social justice than any political group.

"His is not an ideology of a political party, it's an ideology of humanism," said M.J. Akbar, one of India's best-known newspaper editors and a former member of parliament for a Bihar constituency.

Meticulously turned out in a creaseless cream tunic, sleeveless Nehru jacket and a grey scarf, 60-year-old Kumar smiles gently as he explains his style of governance: "pro-poor and pro-people."

An engineering graduate, Kumar first got a toehold in state politics and then in New Delhi, where he was a member of parliament and the country's railways minister in a coalition led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

He won elections in Bihar for his Janata Dal (United) party six years ago and, in a ringing endorsement of his policies, he was voted back to power in 2010.

Kumar's party is still aligned with the BJP, and popular wisdom has is that if their coalition wins the general election in 2014 he could be a strong contender to become prime minister.

Does he dream of leading the country one day?

"Not really," he says diffidently. "Serving my own people gives me satisfaction. I don't have any ambition. I don't have that kind of desire."

Not content to sit in Patna for long, Kumar gets around Bihar's 38 districts, talking to people on streets and in village squares to find out what they want fixed. These audiences are followed by meetings with district officials at which he prods the state's bureaucracy to respond.

"Why is there darkness around the lamp?" he asked at one such meeting in Patna recently, when he was informed that a scheme to provide free meals for schoolchildren was least effective in and around the city. "This is the capital, you all live here, we have to improve this."

Later, when told of plans to hire more land records staff, he instructed officials to make sure there were desks and offices ready for them. "We don't want them loitering in the corridors," he said, his voice restrained but still dominating the room filled with more than 100 bureaucrats.

This direct and no-nonsense delivery belies his apparent bonhomie.

"He is a very confident person who disguises his confidence with a great amount of modesty," said Akbar.

VOTES ARE 'CASTE'

It is sometimes said that in Bihar people "don't cast their votes, they vote for their caste."

That is because, besides being blighted by poverty, its people have long been sharply divided by Hinduism's social hierarchy. In the fairly recent past, upper and lower caste groups kept private armies, and pitched battles between them or massacres by one side or another were common.

Fanning the caste-based politics of Bihar in the 1990s was Lalu Prasad Yadav, now a lawmaker in New Delhi. A charismatic leader from a "backward" caste whose trademark humor can make a budget speech sound like a stand-up routine, Yadav's reign was dubbed the "Jungle Raj" as the rule of law broke down.

Kumar also belongs to a minority "backward" caste and was aligned with Yadav for years before they parted ways. One factor behind his rise has been his resolve to woo voters not by social blocs but on the basis of his government's performance.

"Caste is the reality in the Indian system, but I have proved that caste does not decide the outcome of an election," he said.

Corruption is still endemic despite Kumar's crackdown. He has confiscated the houses of two corrupt officials to turn them into schools, and many others face the same fate, but critics say he is actually too tolerant of the graft around him.

Law and order remains a serious problem, too. In 2010, Bihar ranked second among the country's states for the number of people killed in violent crimes, and police seize tens of thousands of illegal firearms every year.

Still, many feel that Bihar is a safer place since Kumar launched an anti-crime drive. Residents now feel less frightened to drive at night in rural areas, where roadside hold-ups and kidnappings were once routine.

"Five years ago, if we had to travel from Gaya to Patna, we would leave by 3 in the afternoon so we could get to the city before dark," said Navendu Kumar Thakur, who runs a construction company in the state. Gaya is about 100 km (60 miles) south of the state capital. "Now, it doesn't matter if we leave at 9 at night, there's no problem on the road."

Kumar says restoring faith in the police and judiciary was a top priority.

"A reign of terror used to prevail in the society, Bihar used to be in the news for all the wrong reasons," he said. "My first task was to ensure rule of law and trust in the system."

WEAK ECONOMIC BASE

With the improvement in law and order, there has been tentative interest in setting up industries in Bihar, which is 90 percent dependent on agriculture after the mineral-rich region of Jharkhand was hived off into a separate state in 2000.

New industries in Bihar can receive up to 300 percent of capital invested in VAT refunds over 10 years, in addition to a host of other incentives.

"He (Kumar) has shown that grass can grow in a desert," said Prem Kumar Agrawal, part-owner of a biscuit-making plant in the Hajipur industrial park near Patna, where half a dozen factories have opened in the past six months. With 300 workers, his enterprise produces 70-75 tonnes of biscuits per day.

"I give Nitish 9 out of 10 in terms of industrial policy," Agrawal said. "Bihar is now on the map."

But the new factories are only part of the story: abandoned buildings litter the rest of the industrial park, the metal fences on road dividers are rusty and the link to the nearby highway is a potholed and narrow road.

Manufacturing has in fact contributed very little to the surge in the economy's growth: with power cuts common, highways often jammed and graft still thriving, few investors are willing to brave Bihar yet. No surprise, then, that Bihar was ranked bottom last year in a state-by-state survey of economic freedom.

Official figures show that even agriculture, the mainstay of the economy, has contracted for the past six years, suggesting that the Bihar boom has been far from inclusive. Much of the growth has instead been generated by hefty public spending on construction, which means the Bihar boom may not have a solid enough base to be sustainable.

Indeed, Bihar is Exhibit A for the case that India is a two-track economy, with industry-friendly seaboard states rushing ahead as others grow from extremely low bases.

Shaibal Gupta, secretary of the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna, reckons that even if Bihar's growth continues at its current double-digit clip it would take 18 years to catch up with the present-day wealth of Maharashtra, home to the financial capital, Mumbai.

"We can't call it a miracle," Gupta said. "It's some change at an initial level that should have happened 60 years ago."

(Editing by Alex Richardson)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120131/wl_nm/us_india_bihar

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Sunday, January 29, 2012

Microbubbles Cut Cost of Algae-Derived Biofuel

60-Second Science60-Second Science | Energy & Sustainability

Tiny bubbles float algae to the water's surface for harvest and processing. Sophie Bushwick reports.

More 60-Second Science

Algae naturally produce oil. When it?s processed, that oil can be turned into biofuel, an alternative energy source. There?s just one snag?harvesting the oil from algae-filled water is prohibitively expensive. But researchers have come up with an effervescent solution: bubbles smaller than the width of a human hair can help reduce the costs of collecting algae oil.

So-called microbubbles are already used for water purification?they surround contaminants and float them out of the liquid. Similarly, in water containing algae, bubbles can float the algae to the surface for easy collection and processing.

The research builds on previous work that used microbubbles to grow algae more densely and thus increase production. This time, however, the researchers produced the fizziness with a new method that uses far less energy, and is cheaper to install. The study is in the journal Biotechnology and Bioengineering. [James Hanotu, HC Hemaka Bandulasena and William B Zimmerman, Microflotation performance for algal separation]

Although microbubbles improve algae harvesting in the lab, they still have to work at larger scales. The researchers are planning a pilot program for an algae biofuel plant, in the hope of making really green energy.

?Sophie Bushwick

[The above text is a transcript of this podcast]???
?


Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=8fc974c36c3cec2f6239f2d1857d8a07

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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Unsold goods weigh on future economic growth

By John W. Schoen, Senior Producer

?

The U.S. economy perked up late last year as hiring accelerated?and factories ramped up production.?Unfortunately, a lot of what those factories made is still sitting in warehouses and on store shelves.

That doesn?t bode well for growth in the coming months. ?

At first blush, the numbers posted by the Commerce Department for gross domestic product in the last three months of 2011 looked strong. Overall growth advanced by 2.8 percent on an annual basis, a little weaker than economists had expected based on a series of other positive economic reports. That was much better than the 1.8 percent pace in the third quarter and the best showing since the second quarter of 2010.

But much of the fourth quarter growth came from businesses restocking inventories, which swelled by $56.0 billion, adding nearly 2 percentage points to GDP growth. The so-called ?final sales? number, which tracks how much was actually sold, rose a meager 0.8 percent.

?The pickup in GDP growth doesn't look half as good when you realize that most of it was due to inventory accumulation," said Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics. ?Despite the apparent improvement in some of the incoming economic data, it still looks like ... another disappointing year."

Ashworth is among a number of private economists who see the fourth quarter growth spurt easing this year. He expects to see U.S. GDP advance by just 1.5 percent in 2012.

Federal Reserve officials echoed that prediction this week, though they?re?a bit more optimistic. The central bank is looking for growth of 2.7 percent in 2012, but the latest forecast was trimmed by two-tenths of a percentage point. The Fed expects unemployment to drop as low as 8.2 percent by the end of the year.

Vote: Will the economy continue to accelerate?

The lowered growth forecast prompted central bankers to extend their pledge to keep interest rates at or near zero for another year; they now expect to hold rates at rock bottom until at least 2014 to try to encourage businesses and consumers to borrow and spend more money.

Business investment slowed sharply in the fourth quarter after heavy spending earlier last year.

Consumers continued to do their part; consumer spending grew at a 2 percent annual rate, up a bit from the third quarter. Car sales zoomed ahead as the average age of the cars and light trucks on the road hit record levels. The replacement of those worn-out vehicles helped boost car sales by 14.8 percent.

Consumers are feeling a bit better about the outlook for the economy. A separate report Friday showed the University of Michigan consumer sentiment index edging up for the fourth straight month. But the level of confidence remains weak.

?Despite the rise, this and other confidence measures remain in recession territory due to global sovereign debt fear, Congressional dysfunction, and high food and energy prices,? said economist Mike Englund at Action Economics

Consumers have also fallen back on car loans and credit cards to maintain their spending.?Consumer borrowing jumped by $20.4 billion in November, the Federal Reserve said Monday. That was the third straight increase and the largest monthly gain in a decade. Consumers have boosted borrowing in 13 of the past 14 months.

The gradual improvement in the job market may explain some of the rise in borrowing. But many households are also leaning harder on debt because their wages are rising as fast as the price of the goods and services they need to buy.

A breakdown of the fourth quarter GDP numbers, with Mark Olson, Treliant Risk Advisors co-chairman/former Fed governor; CNBC's Steve Liesman & Rick Santelli

Personal incomes rose at an 0.8 percent annual rate, according to Friday?s GDP report, after falling for the last two quarters. Consumer prices are climbing at an annual rate of 3 percent, according to the latest government data.

Much of that spending appears to represent people buying goods, not services. That's a sign that households are sticking to necessities, according to Joel Naroff, chief economist at Naroff Economic Advisors.

?The clearest sign that households remain cautious was in services spending,? he said. ?This is the largest component of consumer demand and it fairly budged.? People are not yet comfortable buying the little luxuries in life.?

With consumers tapped out and cautious, the economy faces other headwinds in the coming year. The housing industry remains stuck in the worst recession since the 1930s. A separate report Friday showed that the pace of new home sales fell in December, making 2011 the worst sales year since the Commerce Department first began collecting the data in 1963. Sales in December fell to a seasonally adjusted annual pace of 307,000 ? less than half the 700,000 that economists say represents a healthy pace.

Slack sales have forced builders to slash prices, which has kept many would-be buyers on the fence until they see signs that the market has bottomed. The median sales prices for new homes dropped in December by 2.5 percent to $210,300.

Though ultra-low mortgage rates have made home buying more affordable than it has been in decades, mortgage bankers remain very choosy about to whom they?ll lend. Some 12 million potential ?move-up? buyers are stuck with mortgages that are bigger than their homes are worth.

Growth in the fourth quarter was also held back by big cuts in government spending, which lopped 0.9 percent from fourth-quarter GDP.? That belt-tightening will likely continue.

What are your thoughts on the short term economic future? Share your thougts on Facebook.

Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/27/10251908-unsold-goods-weigh-on-future-economic-growth

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Friday, January 27, 2012

Anomaly Warzone Earth HD finally brings "tower offense" to Android

 

Wildly popular "tower offense" game Anomaly Warzone Earth HD is now available for a cool $4 in the Android Market. A long-time iOS staple, the title picked up quite a bit of industry buzz, including a nomination for best Mobile Strategy Game from IGN and a Platinum Award from PocketGamer, among other accolades. Unlike other tower defense games, Anomaly Warzone Earth HD takes a different approach: you are on the offense rather than the defense, and it's up to you to break down what other similar titles would have you build-- tower defense. If you're the type to balk at a $4 pricetag, the immersive Story Campaign mode along with the top-notch graphics and sound will likely be enough of a justification. You'll need to be running at least Android 2.2 to play, and you'll likely be better off with a higher-spec'd phone that can handle the game's rather intensive graphics (the title can also be found on Xbox Live and PCs, an indication for just how rich the gameplay can get). As it just hit the Android Market yesterday we'll take a few more days to see what's what and get a proper review posted. Until then, you can hit the link below to grab a copy for yourself. 

Source: Anomalythegame.com

read more



Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/zlFelg6MCnw/story01.htm

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Thursday, January 26, 2012

Legal exemplars cited in Michael Mann's UVA email case | Watts Up ...

Mann alludes to his ?dirty laundry? which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (PE-22).

The Environmental Law Center of the American Tradition Institute

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Release

Washington, D.C.

January 25, 2012

On Tuesday the American Tradition Institute?s Environmental Law Center sent the University of Virginia and Michael Mann copies of 40 emails selected as examples of the 27 categories identified as benefitting from the Court?s review of UVA and Mann?s claims that emails in the taxpayer-funded school?s possession are properly subject to the specific exemptions under Virginia?s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). These categories range from discussions of professional retaliation against other scientists who challenged Mann?s work, to those sent to or from Mann from or copying an email account covered by other FOI laws, such as the federal Freedom of Information Act.

This was part of a process agreed to by ATI, the University and Mann?s attorneys as ATI continues to seek Thomas Jefferson?s university to release a cache of 12,000 emails covered under VFOIA that tell an important part of the history of climate alarmism and the often unsettling ways taxpayer money was spent in promoting it.

?The UVA emails are a key part of a history that taxpayers are trying to piece together to place the early climate alarmism, and taxpayer financing of it, in context,? said Dr. David Schnare, Director of the ATI Environmental Law Center. ?The alarmist professors who in some of these emails speak about ?the cause? have complained that their emails have been taken out of context. Release of the full UVA email collection, all sent or received by Mann after expressly agreeing he had no ownership of or expectation of privacy about them, will provide that context. Considering the behavior of this former UVA professor as documented in many emails already available to the public, these emails are the only means he has to claim exoneration without being accused of a whitewash.?

The selected emails include graphic descriptions of the contempt a small circle of largely taxpayer-funded alarmists held for anyone who followed scientific principles and ended up disagreeing with them. For example, in the fifteenth Petitioners? Exemplar (PE-15), Mann encourages a boycott of one climate journal and a direct appeal to his friends on the editorial board to have one of the journal?s editors fired for accepting papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and recommended for publication on the basis that the papers dispute Mann?s own work. In PE-38, he states that another well respected journal is ?being run by the baddies,? calling them ?shills for industry.? In PE-39 Mann calls U.S. Congressmen concerned about how he spent taxpayer money ?thugs?.

PE-18, 20 & 27 illustrate the typical fashion with which Mann used a UVa email account to accuse co-authors and other respected scientists of incompetence, berating them in emails copied to colleagues living throughout the world. UVA claims this is somehow exempt from VFOIA as scientific research.

In PE-22, Mann alludes to his ?dirty laundry? which cannot come out, requesting his correspondent to not pass the email or the data attached to it to anyone else (UVa has claimed no attachments to any emails were preserved on their system). In this email, Mann admits he has failed to follow the most basic tenet of science, to keep a record of exactly what he did in his research, and thus himself could not reproduce his own results.

PE-24 & 25 characterize the efforts of this small group of academics to hide what they are doing and to avoid their work being held up to inspection under the Freedom of Information Act. In PE-26, Mann goes so far as to ask a federal employee ? impossibly, as he send it to an email account subject to the federal FOIA ? to ?treat this email as confidential? though all the email does is complain about a Wall Street Journal author?s efforts to report the science impeaching Mann?s early work. PE-26, like many other emails UVA wishes to keep secret, is subject to release under the federal FOIA.

These emails, if honestly representative of the entire collection, do not make Virginians proud of having paid Mann?s salary.

?ATI, like Greenpeace and its peers, as well as the media, is committed to using transparency laws to make science and government policy open to the citizens who underwrite it, to the exclusion of properly exempt information such as proprietary material,? said Chris Horner, ATI?s Director of Litigation. ?Universities are routinely asked to produce emails under FOIA, and most do so quickly. This has recently been proved true at another Virginia university when the media sought emails of a Mann critic. Why UVA wishes to boast of such outlier status within the academic community makes one ask, ?what is it they are trying to hide???

The Petitioners? Exemplars are available at ATI?s site.

If you wish an interview with Dr. Schnare or Mr. Horner, please contact ATI at info@atinstitute.org.

- 30 ?

h/t to reader Peter Bromberg

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Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/first-look-at-michael-manns-uva-emails/

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Modern Man Starts Fires With an App, Not Flint [Video]

You already have a remote for controlling your TV, one of the focal points in your living room, so why not your fireplace as well? Escea asked the same question, but then went ahead and answered it with their new DX5100 model. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/rT2f6lykujk/starting-a-fire-theres-an-app-and-fireplace-for-that-now-too

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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

New material to remove radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) ? Research by a team of Sandia chemists could impact worldwide efforts to produce clean, safe nuclear energy and reduce radioactive waste.

The Sandia researchers have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel. "This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture," said chemist Tina Nenoff of Sandia's Surface and Interface Sciences Department.

The discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents. A characteristic of nuclear energy is that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants. Countries such as France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel.

The process also reduces the volume of high-level wastes, a key concern of the Sandia researchers. "The goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations that result in less waste being interred," Nenoff said.

Part of the challenge of reprocessing is to separate and isolate radioactive components that can't be burned as fuel. The Sandia team focused on removing iodine, whose isotopes have a half-life of 16 million years, from spent fuel.

They studied known materials, including silver-loaded zeolite, a crystalline, porous mineral with regular pore openings, high surface area and high mechanical, thermal and chemical stability. Various zeolite frameworks can trap and remove iodine from a stream of spent nuclear fuel, but need added silver to work well.

"Silver attracts iodine to form silver iodide," Nenoff said. "The zeolite holds the silver in its pores and then reacts with iodine to trap silver iodide."

But silver is expensive and poses environmental problems, so the team set out to engineer materials without silver that would work like zeolites but have higher capacity for the gas molecules. They explored why and how zeolite absorbs iodine, and used the critical components discovered to find the best MOF, named ZIF-8.

"We investigated the structural properties on how they work and translated that into new and improved materials," Nenoff said.

MOFs are crystalline, porous materials in which a metal center is bound to organic molecules by mild self-assembly chemical synthesis. The choice of metal and organic result in a very specific final framework.

The trick was to find a MOF highly selective for iodine. The Sandia researchers took the best elements of the zeolite Mordenite -- its pores, high surface area, stability and chemical absorption -- and identified a MOF that can separate one molecule, in this case iodine, from a stream of molecules. The MOF and pore-trapped iodine gas can then be incorporated into glass waste for long-term storage.

The Sandia team also fabricated MOFs, made of commercially available products, into durable pellets. The as-made MOF is a white powder with a tendency to blow around. The pellets provide a stable form to use without loss of surface area, Nenoff said.

Sandia has applied for a patent on the pellet technology, which could have commercial applications.

The Sandia researchers are part of the Off-Gas Sigma Team, which is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory and studies waste-form capture of volatile gasses associated with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Other team members -- Pacific Northwest, Argonne and Idaho national laboratories -- are studying other volatile gases such as krypton, tritium and carbon.

The project began six years ago and the Sigma Team was formalized in 2009. It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy.

Sandia's iodine and MOFs research was featured in two recent articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society authored by Nenoff and team members Dorina Sava, Mark Rodriguez, Jeffery Greathouse, Paul Crozier, Terry Garino, David Rademacher, Ben Cipiti, Haiqing Liu, Greg Halder, Peter Chupas, and Karena Chapman. Chupas, Halder and Chapman are from Argonne.

"The most important thing we did was introduce a new class of materials to nuclear waste remediation," said Sava, postdoctoral appointee on the project.

Nenoff said another recent paper in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research shows a one-step process that incorporates MOFs with iodine in a low-temperature, glass waste form. "We have a volatile off-gas capture using a MOF and we have a durable waste form," Nenoff said.

Nenoff and her colleagues are continuing their research into new and optimized MOFs for enhanced volatile gas separation and capture.

"We've shown that MOFs have the capacity to capture and, more importantly, retain many times more iodine than current materials technologies," said Argonne's Chapman.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by DOE/Sandia National Laboratories.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal References:

  1. Karena W. Chapman, Dorina F. Sava, Gregory J. Halder, Peter J. Chupas, Tina M. Nenoff. Trapping Guests within a Nanoporous Metal?Organic Framework through Pressure-Induced Amorphization. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2011; 133 (46): 18583 DOI: 10.1021/ja2085096
  2. Dorina F. Sava, Mark A. Rodriguez, Karena W. Chapman, Peter J. Chupas, Jeffery A. Greathouse, Paul S. Crozier, Tina M. Nenoff. Capture of Volatile Iodine, a Gaseous Fission Product, by Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework-8. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2011; 133 (32): 12398 DOI: 10.1021/ja204757x

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124140319.htm

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Google's 4Q lobbying bill triples to $3.76 million (AP)

SAN FRANCISCO ? Google's U.S. lobbying bill more than tripled to $3.76 million in the fourth quarter as the Internet search leader fought proposed changes to online piracy laws and sought to influence a wide range of other issues that could affect its fortunes.

The amount that Google Inc. spent making its political points from October through December is by far the company's highest lobbying tab for any three-month period since Google's Washington office opened in 2005. The total compared with a lobbying budget of $1.24 million during the final three months of 2010 and $2.38 million in the third quarter of 2011.

For all of 2011, Google spent $9.7 million on political persuasion, nearly doubling from $5.2 million in 2010.

The company disclosed its fourth-quarter lobbying figures in documents filed late Friday with the U.S. House clerk's office.

Google's lobbying expenses have been rising steadily against a backdrop of intensified U.S. government scrutiny of the company's acquisitions and business practices. The focus has been prompted by complaints alleging that Google is abusing its dominance of the lucrative Internet search market to stifle competition and muscle its way into other markets.

As a foil, Google last summer hired a dozen lobbing firms to supplement the team that it already employed in its Washington office. The bills coming in from those firms contributed to the sharp rise in Google's fourth-quarter lobbying expenses, according to the company.

Google's emphasis on lobbying mirrors what Microsoft Corp. did during the late 1990s while the U.S. Justice Department pursued an antitrust case asserting the software marker had unfairly bundled its dominant Windows operating system with key personal-computer applications. Microsoft eventually thwarted the government's attempt to break up the company, but not before years of legal wrangling that included a high-profile trial.

With that case behind it, Microsoft now spends far less on lobbying than Google. In the fourth quarter, Google's lobbying expenses doubled Microsoft's $1.88 million bill. For all of 2011, Microsoft's lobbying tab totaled $7.3 million.

Google's fourth-quarter lobbying agenda included a proposed antipiracy law, which inspired an Internet protest last week. While some popular websites such as Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours, Google stamped out its colorful logo to signal its objection to proposed changes to online piracy laws. The company says the changes would result in censorship and discourage Internet innovation. More than 7 million people signed a protest petition posted by Google.

Movie and music studio backed the changes ? dubbed the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA ? as a more effective way to prevent rampant theft of their copyrighted material. Lawmakers postponed the legislation following the online protests.

Google's fourth-quarter lobbying push addressed online advertising, which accounts for most of the company's $38 billion in annual revenue.

Other topics covered by Google's lobbyists included: online security; personal privacy on the Internet; renewable energy; international tax reform; the treatment of corporate earnings outside the U.S.; the availability of wireless Internet access; free speech; and free-trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama.

Besides Congress, agencies that Google lobbied in the fourth quarter included: the Federal Trade Commission, the White House; the Federal Communications Commission, the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative.

The outside firms working for Google are: Akin, Gump; Bingham; Capitol Legislative Strategies; Chesapeake Group; Crossroads Strategies; Gephardt Group; Holland & Knight; Normandy Group; Prime Policy; The First Group; The Madison Group; and the Raben Group.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120124/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_google_lobbying

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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Thunderstorms, tornadoes possible in southern U.S.

Severe storms were expected to spread across several southeastern U.S. states on Sunday into Monday with tornadoes, highwinds and large hail possible, weather forecasters said.

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A second stormfront expected to hit California late Sunday night will bring significant snowfall to the mountain regions, according to the National Weather Service, before rolling into the southern United States later in the week.

The potential for severe storms stretched from the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi to southern Indiana and Ohio, according to AccuWeather.com meteorologist Bill Deger.

"Some of the thunderstorms are even expected to spawn tornadoes, making for an especially dangerous situation given the veil of night," Deger said.

In Alabama, residents were bracing for storms that could hit after dark on Sunday or overnight with a strong cold front from the west combining with warm moist air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico, said Mary Keiser, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Birmingham, Alabama.

"The best dynamics for this are going to be across the northwest part of the state and lesser so as you move to the southeast part of the state," Keiser said of the forecast for severe weather to strike in Alabama.

The weather service said thunderstorms could bring wind gusts up to 80 mph, tornadoes or gulf ball-sized hail in Mississippi. Farther west, the weather service warned of a high fire danger in Texas with wind gusts of up to 50 mph.

Weather.com said the greatest tornado threat appeared to be in eastern Arkansas, western Tennessee, northern Louisiana and northern Mississippi.

Parts of central and southern California were under a winter weather warning as a storm system was expected to sweep into the area late Sunday into Monday morning, with the weather service predicting 6 to 12 inches of snow.

The Sierras and the Rockies may accumulate as much as 3 feet of snow, the weather service said, and driving in mountain passes will be "very hazardous" due to low visibility, gusting winds and heavy snowfall.

In Reno, Nevada, meanwhile, snowfall provided welcome relief to firefighters who were monitoring remaining hotspots from a blaze that raged near the outskirts of the city beginning Thursday, destroying 30 houses and prompting thousands of people to flee their homes.

"As long as we keep on getting snow instead of rain, it looks like we'll be okay, at least for the next couple of days," said Mark Regan, spokesman for the Sierra Fire Protection District.

Rain had threatened the area with flash flooding on Friday night. Emergency responders had the blaze 100 percent contained as of Saturday, and all residents have been allowed to return to their homes, Regan said.

In the upper Midwest, freezing drizzle was expected to make roads and sidewalks slippery from southeastern Minnesota into Wisconsin, changing to snow later Sunday, the weather service said. Up to 4 inches of snow was expected farther north in southeast North Dakota and west central Minnesota.

In the northeast United States, a fast-moving storm from central Pennsylvania eastward dropped up to a foot of snow in parts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts on Saturday.

Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40493174/ns/travel-news/

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Monday, January 23, 2012

iBooks Author Gives You the Power to Design Your Own Book, Here's What You Should Know [Mac Downloads]

iBooks Author Gives You the Power to Design Your Own Book, Here's What You Should KnowApple announced its new education-focused apps last week and with a new version of iBooks they've also released a free tool for making ebooks, iBooks Author. Is this just a niche tool for creating textbooks or is there something useful you can do with it?

The niche factor is going to depend on what type of creative person you are. iBooks Author is geared toward making interactive textbooks for iPads, but it's also a simple tool to create any type of digital book you can imagine. Think of it like Adobe InDesign for iBooks and you're on the right track. So, what can you do with iBooks Author? Let's take a look at some of the ways you might get use out of it.

What You Can Do with iBooks Author

iBooks Author Gives You the Power to Design Your Own Book, Here's What You Should KnowApple bills iBooks Author as a way to easily create textbooks, but you can hack your way through it to create any type of book you want. If you're a photographer, it's simple to make and distribute a collection of your photographs. You can also use it as a digital scrapbook and collect together all your family footage into a package that can be easily shared with family. The interactive elements also make it easy way to create and release your own interactive children's books, comics, cookbooks, novels, or anything else you can imagine.

Stuff Interactive Elements Anywhere Your Like

If you use iWeb or Keynote you already have a grasp on the core concepts behind iBooks Author. The big difference between simply exporting a piece of text as an EPUB file and creating a book is the interactive elements. Let's take a look at the three main features you're likely to use.

  • Photos, Audio, and Video: For the most casual users, these three multimedia elements are the bread and butter of a personal iBook. Each has drag-and-drop functionality and all you have to do is drag the multimedia of your choosing onto the page you want and you're done.
  • HTML Snippets: The purpose of the HTML inclusion is to pull live content from the web. You might find use in this for your own book in a few ways. For instance, you can pull content from Twitter, display a Flickr slideshow, or include your blog's RSS feed.
  • Keynote Presentations: If you created a slideshow of your last vacation to show to friends you can automatically import it into iBook Author and give everyone something to take home. When you import a presentation, it retains all the animations, formatting and everything else.

You Can Create Your Own Templates but You Have to Edit Apple's First

Since Apple only includes a few templates to choose from, you want to make your own design to set the book apart. To create you own templates, you need to open a preexisting template and edit it. It's not difficult to do:

  • Step 1:Pick a template that's close to what you want. You'll notice the backgrounds and other elements are locked in place and seem like they can't be deleted. To edit the lines and background, select the element and click Arrange > Unlock. Now you can edit or delete the previously locked elements.
  • Step 2: Add background images or shapes you like. Get the page to look exactly how you like it. For backgrounds, right-click "Send to Back" so it doesn't move text out of the way.
  • Step 3: Once your chapter pages are set how you like. Right-click "duplicate chapter" and iBooks Author creates chapters identical to the one you made.

Editing this way isn't perfect, but following the above steps makes it so you can create and customize iBooks Author to your liking. Your own design also helps your book stand out so it doesn't look like it was created from a template.

What You Can't Do with iBooks Author

iBooks Author Gives You the Power to Design Your Own Book, Here's What You Should KnowAt its core, iBooks Author is built to make textbooks. You can hack your way through it easy enough, but it could be made a bit easier. It can't do everything. In fact, as a standard ebook creator it stinks because you can't export it in the industry standard EPUB format. It's good at creating books specifically for iBooks and that's it.

iBooks Author is Picky About its Formatting

iBooks Author doesn't support a few really common file types, including MP3. You can import audio files, but it only accepts AAC formats. You can import video, but only if its a Quicktime format. While iBooks Author accepts most word processor files, it doesn't always retain formatting. This means you'll lose your bolds, italics, and anything else you add. Basically, you have to tweak your content before you drop it into iBooks Author by formatting everything into the accepted file types, but don't bother with text because it often won't retain the formatting.

The iBooks Author User Agreement Can Be a Sticking Point

According to Apple's end user licensing agreement, you cannot sell your book through other outlets, so if you make a book with iBooks Author, you have to sell it exclusively through the iBooks app. This does not mean Apple owns the text, video, or photos, but rather the iBook package they're in. You can skirt around this issue by "self-publishing" your book and distributing the iBook file for free on your personal website (or share it directly with friends). However, in order to retain the multimedia facets of your book, you have to export it as an iBooks file and it can only be read in iBooks on an iPad. You can also export it as a PDF, but you lose all your multimedia content and still end up with an Apple watermark.

It's Free, but You Still Have to Pay to Sell Your Book

Finally, unlike publishing to Amazon's Kindle Marketplace, you have to purchase an ISBN (a book's barcode) if you want to sell your book in iBooks for a profit. Apple doesn't offer these through its store or its app, so you have to go through a third party like Bowker and pay around $100-$150 to purchase an ISBN number. You can still put your book up for free or share it privately with friends without the ISBN.

We're excited to see what people come up with and how they use it. It's not exactly made for designing your own books, but it's simple enough to hack together a means to do so. Do you plan on using iBooks Author to design your own book? Share it in the comments.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/pT0xB6ET6Os/ibooks-author-gives-you-the-power-to-design-your-own-book-heres-what-you-should-know

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Iran tensions slow, but don't stop, Gulf smugglers

By dawn, the unmarked speedboats from Iran pull into port. By dusk, they are racing back across the Strait of Hormuz loaded with smuggled consumer goods ranging from Chinese-made shoes to cut flowers from Holland.

Even as sanctions squeeze Iran ever tighter, there's one clandestine route that remains open for business: A short sea corridor across the Persian Gulf connecting a rocky nub of Oman and the Iranian coast about 35 miles away.

Yet even this established smugglers' path is now feeling the bite from the pressures on Iran over its nuclear program.

Business is sharply down, the middlemen and boat crews say, as the slumping Iranian currency leaves fewer customers for the smuggled wares. At the same time, the risks of interception are higher as Iranian authorities step up patrols near the strategic oil tanker lanes at the mouth of the Gulf.

The strait, which is the only access in and out of the Gulf, has been the scene of Cold War-style brinksmanship between Iran and the West after Tehran last month threatened to block the passageway for about one-sixth of the world's oil in retaliation for new U.S. sanctions.

"We used to make two or three trips across every day. Now, it's maybe one," said an Iranian middleman, who gave only his first name Agheel to protect his identity from authorities in his homeland.

He watched crews load up a pickup truck with bolts of fabric from Pakistan and table-size boxes of cut flowers from the Netherlands, before the trucks headed off through the treeless mountains to Khasab port.

The operation smuggles in merchandise to avoid Iranian tariffs and to bring in American and European products that have disappeared from Iranian markets because of international sanctions. Experts note that the consumer items post no real challenge to efforts to block material with military or nuclear uses.

"Still, it shows you can't close off all channels into Iran no matter how hard you try," said Paul Rogers, who follows security affairs at Bradford University in Britain. "People will find a way."

On this side of the Gulf, the smugglers operate under a tacit tolerance from authorities, even though Oman and the United Arab Emirates are close U.S. allies and have pledged to enforce sanctions. The port lies in a sparsely populated peninsula enclave belonging to Oman but encircled on land by the UAE, a legacy of how the area was carved up in the final days of British rule here in the last century that resulted in Oman holding joint control with Iran over the strait.

The goods are legally imported into the UAE and truck drivers take them across the border, paying the customary 50 dirham ($13.50) entry fee, according to the smugglers interviewed by The Associated Press. In Khasab, the merchandise is taken to warehouses and then piled on the docks less than 100 yards (100 meters) from the port police headquarters.

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Omani authorities did not respond to requests for comment on the traffic.

The Khasab speedboats are far from the only back channel into Iran. Drug traffickers easily cross the hinterland borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and black market networks stretch across the frontiers with Iraq and Turkey. Authorities in Iraq's Kurdish region have been under pressure for years to crack down on fuel trucks heading into Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions.

But Khasab stands out for its openness and for lying on the highly sensitive Strait.

A shipment arranged by the Iranian smuggler Agheel this week was done with practiced efficiency.

A pickup truck backed into a wood-floored warehouse with hundreds of cases of cigarettes bundled three together and wrapped tightly in gray plastic weave ? in total 3,000 cigarettes under south Asian brands such as Ruby Menthol. The truck was soon sagging under the weight of boxes piled five high.

Agheel did some quick calculations: Each three-case load cost him about $1,200 and he could sell them to merchants in Iran for the equivalent of about $1,350 under current exchange rates. The truck pulling out of the warehouse represented a potential return of about $4,500.

"If we don't get caught," he added.

The smugglers have their ways of avoiding Iranian authorities.

Spotters off the coast ? on the island of Qeshm and near the port of Bandar Abbas ? call in coast guard movements to Khasab. The speedboat drivers keep close attention to the water conditions on the Strait and try to approach the Iranian coast just after sunset. The trip can take as little as 90 minutes in calm seas and up to four hours in rough water in the stripped down stripped-down 16-foot (five-meter) fiberglass boats.

Agheel's truck passed through the Khasab customs station at midday and then down a strip of hardscrabble road.

At the port ? almost in the shadow of a Costa cruise ship making a day stop ? dozens of boats were being packed and secured for the trip. There were no names or markings on the speedboats. But the items loaded on carried familiar logos: LG 42-inch flatscreen TVs, Discovery Channel DVDs, Panasonic microwaves, Yamaha motorcycle parts. Also in the stacks were textiles, satellite dishes and Chinese-made clothes and shoes.

One boat driver, who gave his name only as Aziz, had a breakfast of eggs, beans and Mountain Dew as he waited for the day's shipment to be loaded for the return run to Qeshm, a long arrow-shaped island near the Iranian coast and a main waystation for the smugglers.

Months ago, he could make as many trips as possible because the merchants in Iran were demanding goods.

But now the struggling Iranian rial ? dragged down partly by U.S.-led sanctions that could target Iran's Central Bank ? has put many things out of reach for Iranians, he said.

"No one wants to buy because the (rial) rate is not stable," he said.

He also said the Iranian coastal patrols have been boosted amid the escalating tensions over the Strait.

On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the American military is "fully prepared" to deal with any Iranian effort to close the waterway. Next month, Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard plans naval exercises in the area.

If spotted by patrols, Aziz said the two-man boat crews try to heave the goods overboard. They then must pay back the smuggling network, which can amount to thousands of dollars.

But it's worth the risk, he said.

"The situation is getting worse now," he said. "All the prices are up and Qeshm has nothing else" except smuggling.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46091504/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/

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Friday, January 20, 2012

Hey, Did You Hear? ?Why We Don?t Listen

Why do we sometimes not register sounds and voices around us? A wife asks her husband for the third time, ?did you take the garbage out yet?? He is so glued to the big game and he still hasn?t issued a response. A kid doesn?t hear her mother tell her dinner is ready because she is fully immersed in her favorite video game. You miss part of the conversation you were having with your friends at a coffee shop because you were too busy checking for new email, comments and tweets on your smart phone for the millionth time today (that one I can relate to). What do these three scenarios have in common? Our bodies trying to balance our sensory perceptual load between vision and hearing and one of these senses ultimately falls short.

Researchers in the United Kingdom have demonstrated for the first time a phenomenon known as inattentional deafness. It seems when we are concentrated on a highly involved visual task, we block out auditory information around us that is unrelated to the task at hand. In other words, we may be involuntarily putting sounds ?on mute? while we concentrate on activities that take a great deal of our attention visually and and this can turn us into poor listeners.

Inattentional Blindness:

Now we have all probably heard of something called ?inattentional blindness? and the infamous visual awareness test that Chabris and Simons conducted back in 1999 in which one is asked to watch a video and count the number of times a basketball is passed by one of two teams. If you haven?t seen it, it was similar to the following video. Check it out!

Visual Awareness Test (by dothetest.co.uk):

In the original version of this test, also known as the ?invisible gorilla? experiment by Chabris and Simons, the mental task of counting passes had about 50% of viewers so distracted that they were visually unaware of the gorilla walking (or in this case, the bear moonwalking) right into the middle of the screen. A moonwalking bear, hello? A gorilla beating on his chest? Come on! (For the record, I missed both!)

Perhaps you have also heard about the study that came out in 2009 in which distracted cell phone users were visually unaware of a clown on a unicycle passing them as they were walking and chatting away on their phone. I mean, really. How could you not notice a clown pedaling right passed you on a unicycle!

Visual awareness has been well researched and there are many interesting studies out there on how distractions can take away from your vision. If you?d like to have a little more fun with it, I will list a couple of other videos at the end of this post. But for now let?s turn our attention towards hearing and distractions causing a decrease in our auditory awareness. What is this newly named phenomenon of inattentional deafness?

Inattentional Deafness:

In May 2011, Macdonald and Lavie set up a series of experiments putting the theory of inattentional deafness to the test. They found subjects were able to hear a beeping sound being played through headphones while they performed a visual task on the computer if the task was relatively easy but as the level of difficulty of the visual task increased, they became unaware that a sound was even there.

The setup of the experiment went like this. On the computer screen, a series of crosses were presented to participants, one by one, each for a short interval. The cross had one green arm and one blue arm and the lengths of the arms on the cross varied slightly. Each person was asked to either indicate which arm was blue or judge which arm was longer. Determining color was thought to be a very easy visual task with a low amount of perceptual load. Conversely, participants who were asked to detect the subtle difference in length of the two arms were said to have a more challenging task, requiring more visual attention and therefore having to endure a higher perceptual load.

The experiment had three parts. In the first part, experiment 1, white noise was played through the headphones and participants were told that they were to wear the headphones throughout the experiment. Researchers said the white noise would ?aid concentration by blocking out noise from people passing the testing room?[according to researchers] participants seemed to take this instruction at face value and did not seem suspicious [of the need to] block out the sound of people passing by.?

During the last cross presentation, the white noise was accompanied by a beeping sound. Participants were then stopped and asked at the end if they had heard ?anything different about the sound coming through the headphones during the last trial?? Their response was noted. Then they were asked to perform one more trial in which they were told to ignore the cross and just listen to the sound coming through the headphones to make sure each person had good enough hearing to detect the sound. If they didn?t hear it when they were actively listening for it, then they were excluded from the study and replaced.

From the results in Experiment 1, Macdonald and Lavie concluded that their hypothesis was in fact correct. At times when a higher visual load was presented (determining length of the arms of the cross), the participants were less likely to hear the task-unrelated tone sounding through their headphones.

However, they wanted to prove their point further so they did a second experiment without the white noise. They thought that maybe the presence of white noise could possibly cause subjects to actively ignore all noise during the entire experiment. By taking away the white noise from the headphones, the presence of sound (versus natural silence) should be easier to detect and therefore be more noticeable. They found that, again, when the participants had the more dauntingly visual task of detecting the subtle difference in the length of the arms on the cross, they were a lot less likely to notice the beeping sound being played through the headphones, even in the absence of all other sound. So again, if a task takes a lot of visual concentration and attention, it can cause a decrease in auditory awareness. Now you think they would stop there, but Macdonald and Lavie took it to the next level once more.

In experiment 3, they sought to eliminate the possibility that those who were on the low perceptual load team were a little aloof during the experiment and those who were on the high perceptual load team maybe were a little more motivated, engaged and attentive because of the nature of their work being a little harder. So they made it a length only discrimination task where each person was asked nothing about color, only which arm of the cross was longer. Sometimes the difference in lengths between the arms of the cross was grossly obvious, other times it was subtle. They also increased the number of trials presented. Macdonald and Lavie found that still, those with a higher perceptual load (distracted with determining a more subtle difference in arm length) heard the sound less often than those who had the easier visual task of the more grossly obvious difference in cross arm length. Their results were ?not as robust? but they were still there.

More studies need to be conducted on inattentional deafness to truly see how it affects our everyday lives. Macdonald and Lavie have concerns about inattentional deafness and driving a motor vehicle stating that if people were ?less likely to notice an auditory alarm while engaged in a high-visual-load computer task, [then] the sound of a car horn while attending to a visually loaded billboard? also might pose a problem. Safety out on the roadways is definitely a concern.

Perhaps another interesting modification to the study would be to replace the tone sounding through the headphones with a person?s voice saying a word. Maybe a bizarre word that you wouldn?t just happen to overhear in the laboratory like zebra or halloween. Would the participant be completely unaware of human speech like it was of the tone when engaged in a highly visual task?

After researching this topic, I know I will be practicing more patience when I catch someone not listening to me. It may not have been intentional. And also I pledge to put down the smartphone and have some real ?face-time? with the person sitting right across the table from me the next time I?m out for coffee. After all, they are deserving of my undivided attention. My emails, texts and tweets can wait. Unless of course I see a moon-walking bear, then all bets are off, sorry guys, I have to tweet pic that.

Additional tests of your visual awareness:

The Colour Changing Card Trick (by Richard Wiseman/Quirkology):

Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit? (by dothetest.co.uk ):

Also, check out the fun book by Chabris and Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How our Intuitions deceive us.

Photo Credits: Man with glasses (Matt Jeacock /istockphoto), i-distractions and Author pic (Erica Angiolillo/Gotcha! by Erica), Bear (Trine de Florie /stockxchg photo).

References:

Boss, M. Caggiano, J. Hyman, I. McKenzie, K. Wise, B. (2010) Do You See the Unicycling Clown? Inattentional Blindness While Walking and Talking on a Cell Phone. Applied Cognitive Psychology. 24:597-607.

Chabris C. and Simons, D. (2011) The Invisible Gorilla: How our Intuitions deceive us. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Macdonald JS and Lavie N. Visual perceptual load induces inattentional deafness. Atten Percept Psychophys. 2011 Aug; 73(6):1780-9. doi: 10.3758/s13414-011-0144-4

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=1091f7de6766aeb6b4f2f11e5c4a3188

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Monday, January 16, 2012

Trade Commodity Finance | Selby Jennings : Recruitment for the ...

Any Spanish or Portuguese speaking candidate with experience in Trade Finance or Commodity Finance please get in touch. My client a leading Managing Director in field of Trade commodity finance is hiring immediately for one Associate of Trade Finance to join their New York team.

The Role

  • Successful candidate will join the trade finance commodities team in New York and be responsible for all commodities- energy/ softs/ metals/ agriculture to clients in Latin America particularly Brazil and Mexico
  • Role involves structuring and negotiating trade agreements/ credit approvals/ financings and originating, structuring and executing trade commodity finance transactions for US clients and borrowers in developing countries, particularly Latin America.
  • You will learn and develop massively from working with successful senior members of the team and having a broad remit of responsibilities
  • Role will involve identifying and mitigating risk associated with transactions/ working on collateral and trade receivables/ commodity pricing and hedging and also pre payment financing and warehouse financing

The Candidate

  • My client has the headcount now to hire and wants the candidate on board by February/ March 2012
  • Essential to speak fluent English and Spanish and or Portuguese
  • Successful candidate will need experience/ exposure to the commodity sectors in Latam, and know the players and market well
  • Successful candidate must be skilled in credit application and negotiation of documentation and structuring of transactions related to commodity trade transactions, ideally in the soft, metal & mining and energy sectors
  • My client would consider Spanish speaking candidates with experience of trade finance/ export finance or commodity finance

Great opportunity to join a stable team with significant commitment to the trade/ commodity finance world.
If you feel you are suitable please send your CV to structuring@selbyjennings.com or call +442070194139.
http://www.selbyjennings.com

Type: Full-time

Location: New York

Category: Structuring Jobs

Apply Email: structuring@selbyjennings.com

Source: http://www.selbyjennings.com/current-vancancies/structuring-jobs/trade-commodity-finance-3/30937/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trade-commodity-finance-3

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