The woman who took on DOMA

Edith Windsor (in purple) reacts to cheers in New York (REUTERS/Mike Sega)

The Supreme Court's landmark decision to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is much more than a symbolic victory for 84-year-old Edith Windsor, the original plaintiff in the suit.

In 2009, Windsor's partner of 40 years, Thea Spyer, died after a battle with multiple sclerosis. Spyer left her estate to Windsor, but because their marriage was not legally recognized, Windsor was charged $363,053 in estate taxes.

Windsor first sued the United States in November, 2010, arguing that DOMA was unconstitutional. In June, 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of Windsor. The case then went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel ruled 2-1 in favor of Windsor.

With the Supreme Court's decision to strike down DOMA with a 5-4 vote, Windsor will finally be eligible for a tax refund, plus interest.

Windsor heard the news of the Court's decision while at her lawyer's home, according to the New Yorker. The room, which was filled with family and friends, erupted in cheers once the news of the ruling came down.

President Obama called Windsor to congratulate her on the victory.

"Hello, who am I talking to?" Windsor said, according to the New Yorker. "Oh, Barack Obama? I wanted to thank you. I think your coming out for us made such a difference throughout the country."

The president also spoke with the plaintiffs in the case against the legality of California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in the state.

Former President Bill Clinton, who originally signed DOMA into law in 1996, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released a joint statement applauding the Supreme Court's decision.

"By overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, the Court recognized that discrimination towards any group holds us all back in our efforts to form a more perfect union," the statement reads.

"We are also encouraged that marriage equality may soon return to California. We applaud the hard work of the advocates who have fought so relentlessly for this day, and congratulate Edie Windsor on her historic victory."

At a New York City press conference following the ruling, Winsdor was modest about her role in history and status as an icon in the gay rights movement.

"It's an accident of history that put me here," said Windsor. "If Thea had been Theo," things would have been different, she said.

"What a way to celebrate the life of my beloved Thea," she said.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/edith-windsor-woman-took-doma-201619670.html

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This Climate Fix Might Be Decades Ahead Of Its Time

Global Thermostat's pilot plant in Menlo Park, Calif., pulls carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. The next challenge is to find uses for the captured gas.

Courtesy of Global Thermostat

Global Thermostat's pilot plant in Menlo Park, Calif., pulls carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. The next challenge is to find uses for the captured gas.

Courtesy of Global Thermostat

Every year, people add 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, mostly by burning fossil fuels. That's contributing to climate change. A few scientists have been dreaming about ways to pull some of that CO₂ out of the air, but face stiff skepticism and major hurdles. This is the story of one scientist who's pressing ahead.

Peter Eisenberger is a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Earlier in his career, he ran the university's famed Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and founded Columbia's Earth Institute. He was never one of those scientists who tinkered into the night on inventions. But he realized he didn't need to be.

"If you looked at knowledge as a commodity, we had generated this enormous amount of knowledge and we hadn't even begun to think of the many ways we could apply it," Eisenberger says. He decided he'd settle on a problem he wanted to solve and then dive into the pool of knowledge for existing technologies that could help him.

He started looking for a way to pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. "And it turned out the best device already exists," he says. "It's called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that's in the catalytic converter in your car. It cleans up your exhaust."

Eisenberger's monoliths grab carbon dioxide from the air and release it again when you heat them up.

He teamed up with a colleague at Columbia, Graciela Chichilnisky, and formed a company to develop the idea. Global Thermostat got seed money from Edgar Bronfman, Jr. ? CEO of Warner Music Group and the former CEO of Seagram's, his family's business.

The company has built two pilot plants at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif. But of course there are big issues to solve: What do you do with the carbon dioxide once you've captured it, and how do you make money?

"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," says Peter Eisenberger, co-founder of Global Thermostat, a firm that's building a device to pull carbon dioxide from the air.

Chris Schmauch/Global Thermostat

"So we then we looked for ways to monetize CO₂ and found that lots of people wanted to use CO₂ as a feedstock to make a valuable product," Eisenberger says.

Growers pipe carbon dioxide into greenhouses. Oil companies pump it underground to help them squeeze out more oil. Soda companies use it to put bubbles in their drinks. These are mostly small-scale applications.

Maybe someday Eisenberger could get paid to clean up the atmosphere by sucking out the CO₂ and burying it underground, though there's no market for that now.

But using carbon dioxide to make fuel could someday be big. So Eisenberger's first project involves using CO₂ to feed algae that churn out biofuel.

"Our first demonstration plant is being erected right now down in Daphne, Alabama, with an algae company called Algae Systems, which sits on Mobile Bay," Eisenberger says. "They'll be floating their algae in plastic bags on the top of the water. We'll be piping in CO₂ that we pull out of the air, and the sun will do the rest."

Of course, this one project will have zero effect on how much carbon dioxide is in the earth's atmosphere. But Eisenberger has much grander ambitions.

"I believe we have something that's economically viable, so our company will be successful," he says. "But I'm really in this because I want to contribute to a long term solution that the world needs."

Eisenberger says if he can open the door to capturing carbon dioxide from the air ? and make the process cheap enough ? someday we could actually slow down, or possibly even reverse, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Robert Socolow at Princeton University started hearing a buzz about this technology a few years back.

"It's catchy," Socolow admits. "It's attractive conceptually that one could basically pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for the next several decades and pull it out later and everything would be fine." But the appeal of the idea also worried him ? people might use the mere prospect of this technology as an excuse not to act.

So Socolow spearheaded a critique of the technique, on behalf of the American Physical Society.

Socolow's panel concluded that the technology would be hopelessly expensive, costing $600 for every ton of carbon dioxide it drew out of the air. And the scale would also be huge. In order to capture the emissions would waft into the air from a single coal-fired power plant, you'd need to build a structure 20 miles long and 30 feet high. "It's like the Great Wall of China," Socolow says.

The committee concluded that it would make a lot more sense to cut down on emissions first ? make our cars, homes and factories more efficient. Panel members also said it makes much more sense to capture carbon dioxide directly from smokestacks, where it's concentrated, instead of from the air.

Socolow says, maybe someday we'll have our emissions under control, and then we might need to remove some of the carbon dioxide that's already in the air with a capture technology. But, in his view, that's a long way away. "I locate it in the 22nd century," he says. In other words, this might be a good project for Eisenberger's great-great-great grandchildren.

Researchers currently working on carbon dioxide capture technologies say the American Physical Society critique has made it much harder for them to raise money. Klaus Lackner at Columbia University says he was turned down for a government grant. David Keith at Harvard and the University of Calgary says he struggled to get funding for his small company.

"It's a very powerful report from a very credible group of people, and it may well help to kill us and other efforts," Keith says.

Proponents of air-capture technologies say some of the panel's conclusions are just plain wrong ? especially the estimated cost of $600 per ton.

"We have had third party reports, independent people, evaluating our technology, and it's under $50 a ton," Eisenberger says. He hasn't actually demonstrated that cost yet, and he agrees that nobody should take his word for it. But he's stopped arguing with his critics.

"I'm just going to go do it," he says. "And doing it or not ? that's the answer."

Pursuing a big idea takes some hard-headedness and thick skin.

"If they don't tell you you're crazy, you're not doing something worthwhile," Eisenberger says. "Because what you do when you innovate is you disturb the existing order."

Fortunately, this won't be an academic argument forever. "That's the beauty of science. The people that take the time to come into the lab and see it working and do their own evaluation of the cost and the performance, they know it's not crazy."

If the researchers pursuing this technology can really make it inexpensive to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Eisenberger says it could be a game-changer.

We could start producing fuels with the carbon dioxide that's already in the air, instead of unearthing more fossil fuels. This won't happen quickly, though.

"The energy infrastructure of the world is $55 trillion," Eisenberger says. So a technology to replace that is "not like a new Google app."

Still, human societies have made such transitions before. "They just don't happen in a day," Eisenberger says. "But they happen."

There's certainly no guarantee that capturing carbon dioxide from the air would ever become a big enough enterprise to make a difference to Earth's climate. But it won't even be put to the test unless people like Eisenberger give it a try.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/27/189522647/this-climate-fix-might-be-decades-ahead-of-its-time?ft=1&f=1007

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Paid sick time law passes in NYC, veto overridden

NEW YORK (AP) ? New York City is becoming the most populous place in the United States to make businesses provide workers with paid sick time, after lawmakers overrode a mayoral veto early Thursday to pass a law expected to affect more than 1 million workers.

With the vote, the city joined Portland, Ore.; San Francisco; Seattle; Washington, D.C.; and the state of Connecticut in requiring the benefit for at least some workers. Similar measures have failed in some other places, including Milwaukee, Denver and Philadelphia.

Supporters see the New York measure as a pace-setter, although it has some significant limits and conditions, and they envision such laws becoming a national norm in coming years.

"The catalyst will have been the successful struggle we waged here in New York City," said Dan Cantor, the national executive director of the Working Families Party, which is among groups pushing the cause in Maryland, Oregon, Vermont and Washington states, among others.

Advocates say workers shouldn't have to choose between their physical and financial health. And customers and colleagues shouldn't have to be exposed to employees who come to work sick, supporters add.

Camilo Montes is diabetic and has felt ill at times during his six years working at a Queens car wash, but he has stuck it out instead of going home because he doesn't get paid sick days, he said.

Because he's supporting himself and his mother in Veracruz, Mexico, "I can't afford to lose a day's salary," Montes, 46, said through a Spanish interpreter after paid sick leave supporters rallied outside City Hall Wednesday.

But critics say that the government should leave sick day arrangements to workers and bosses and that the requirement will burden small businesses.

"Faced with this increase in costs, employers will seek to offset them in any number of ways, including reducing other benefits employees receive," entrepreneur-turned-politician Mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote in vetoing the measure earlier this month. "... It will harm the very people it seeks to help."

The huge financial information firm he founded, Bloomberg LP, does offer paid sick time, he has noted. But small companies can't afford it, he says.

Under the new law steered by Councilwoman Gale Brewer, employees of businesses with 20 or more workers would get up to five paid sick days a year beginning in April 2014; the benefit would kick in by October 2015 at enterprises with 15 to 19 workers. All others would have to provide five unpaid sick days per year, meaning that workers couldn't get fired for using those days.

The requirements could be postponed if the city's economy takes a major dive.

Employees could choose to work extra hours instead of taking sick time, a provision aimed at those who would rather swap shifts than stay home sick. That provision could be attractive to restaurant servers, for example, since the paid sick time wouldn't include tips.

Manufacturing companies would be exempt from the paid sick time requirement ? the rationale is that they're struggling, Council Speaker Christine Quinn has said ? though workers would still be protected from firing for taking unpaid sick days.

Besides paid sick leave, city council Thursday voted to create an outside watchdog and make it easier to bring racial profiling claims against the New York Police Department, the nation's largest police force. Both measures passed with enough votes to override expected mayoral vetoes.

___

Follow Jennifer Peltz at http://twitter.com/jennpeltz

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/paid-sick-time-law-passes-nyc-veto-overridden-064416923.html

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His name is Mr. Jingles ...

Google+ gets a new notifications mascot, 'mark all read' button

Normally we wouldn't make a big deal about such a small change to Google+, but this one's kind of fun. Stick with us here.

A couple days ago the little notification identifier switched from a number (which Facebook appears to have adopted for unread posts, by the way) to a bell with a rather cute smiley face. We'll call him Mr. Jingles, because that's what Google's calling him. Blaze through all of your notifications and click on Jingles, and he does a fun little dance. Yes, we're easily amused. 

Jingles has just hit the Android app for Google+ as well. And along with it comes a new button to mark all of your notifications as read. It looks like a little bar graph, and it's now on the web version of Google+, too. Tap it or click it, and your notifications shall bother you no more. Or, in my case, for the next three seconds. Jingles then appears, applauding your notification-marking ability, and does his little dance.

And, yes, Mr. Jingles is on Google+.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/9WzEVEF0YNw/story01.htm

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Greece: TV screens still blank amid dispute

ATHENS, Greece (AP) ? State TV channels in Greece remained off-air Tuesday as the political storm over the future of public broadcaster ERT rages on.

Conservative Prime Minister Antonis Samaras averted the threat of a snap general election late Monday at a meeting with center-left coalition partners who strongly oppose his June 11 decision to close ERT and fire all its staff of nearly 2,700.

Also late Monday night, Greece's high court ruled that while the government was entitled to replace ERT with a more efficient broadcaster, it should not have shut off the public TV signal.

Samaras and his partners agreed to continue negotiations and will meet again Wednesday to discuss the transition to a new state broadcaster.

The prime minister is under pressure from Greece's international bailout lenders who seeking faster spending cuts as a condition for continued payouts from their 240 billion euro ($320 billion) rescue program.

Samaras is due to meet Tuesday with bailout inspectors from the "troika" of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Shares on the Athens Stock Exchange were up nearly 3 percent Tuesday, as markets in Europe were mixed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/greece-tv-screens-still-blank-amid-dispute-102251097.html

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The Xbox One Just Got Way Worse, And It's Our Fault

Microsoft just announced that its much-maligned DRM policies won't look at all like they originally had originally been described. They're going to more relaxed, sort of like the PS3's. Good news, you say? No. Bad news. The Xbox One just got worse.

But what? Isn't all DRM bad and anti-consumer? No. Often it is, sure. If applied in the ways that gaming culture has been anxious about for the past few weeks, it would be disastrous. But that's not what was really at stake. This was:

These changes will impact some of the scenarios we previously announced for Xbox One. The sharing of games will work as it does today, you will simply share the disc. Downloaded titles cannot be shared or resold. Also, similar to today, playing disc based games will require that the disc be in the tray.

That SUCKS.

The Vision

Here was the simple vision of the Xbox One, selling and reselling games:

• Every game you bought, physical or digital, would be tied to your account. This would eliminate current-gen problems like buying a disc, and then being unable to store it or download it from the cloud.
• Because every single game, physical or digital, would be tied to an account, publishers could create a hub to sell and resell the games digitally. Let's refer to these as "licenses" from here, even though it's a loaded term.
• Because reselling games would now work through a hub, publishers could make money on resold games.
• Here is how this makes sense for YOU: New games could then be cheaper. Why? Publishers KNOW that they will not make money on resold games, so they charge more to you, the first buyer. You are paying for others' rights to use your game in the future. If the old system had gone into place, you would likely have seen game prices drop. Or, at the very least, it could have staved off price increases.
• You also would have started getting a better return on your "used" games?because a license does not have to be resold at a diminished rate.
• How do you know that this would have been the case? Because that's exactly what happens on Steam. But wait!, you shout. Steam is CHEAP cheap, and it has crazy sales. We love Steam! Micro$oft is nothing like that. Well, no, it isn't now, but Steam was once $team, too. It was not always popular, and its licensing model was once heavily maligned. Given time, though, it's now the only way almost every PC gamer wants to play games.
• Sharing games would have worked either by activating your Live account on someone else's Xbox One, or by including them in your 10-person share plan, which would not have been limited to "family.". Details on that had been scarse, but even the strictest limitations (one other person playing any of the shared games from your account) would have been a HUGE improvement over the none that we have now. We don't get that now.
• The 24-hour check-in would have been necessary for the X1's store, which it is not for Steam, because the physical product (game discs) would still be available. This check-in, literally bytes of data exchanged, would confirm that the games installed were not gaming the system in a convoluted install-here-and-then-go-offline-and-I'll-go-home-and-check-in-and-go-offline-too-and-we'll-both-use-the-game methods.

You would also, as it happens, have been able to share your digitally purchased games. That's a REALLY BIG DEAL. We won't be able to do that now, though. We still have to use the disc for games we buy physically. This is the loss of some of the most future-facing features of the system, things that changed and challenged the traditional limitations of console gaming. We are literally standing in stasis, refusing to move forward, at the behest of those who are loudest and not ready for the future.

The DRM Boogey Man Is So Last Decade

More than anything, the outcry over the Xbox One was a reaction to buzzwords that are easy to distance ourselves from. "Censorship," "retcon," "person who disagrees with Joss Whedon." DRM is right there with any of those for Microsoft's core gaming audience.

The real fear behind DRM on games is the idea that at some point in the future, you'll be told that you are no longer allowed to use the content you'e paid for. It's that you're "allowed" to use anything at all, instead of outright "owning" it. And in the past, shitty DRM has absolutely worked like that. Walmart MP3s and the like have taken their servers offline, stranding file formats and leaving them to die, forgotten.

That is not how DRM, by and large, works today. There is very little risk of any particular format dying off. The dangers, as such, lie in a dropoff of support, or at worst, confiscation. That for whatever reason, Microsoft would tell us to screw ourselves and stop supporting Xbox One games, or kick you, specifically, out.

Fair enough. But compare that to the benefits of DRM. It helps build an ecosystem that is easy and convenient and, most of all, affordable enough to draw customers. That's what Apple did with iTunes and music, and it's what Amazon did with books. The content was just too easy to get and too cheap to bother with pirating it. We could have had that with the Xbox One and games.

Here's a video game example of effective DRM in practice: World of Warcraft, more or less the most popular game of the past decade. WoW, a Massively Multiplayer RPG by Blizzard, is played entirely online?always online, even. Your account is not your property, Blizzard can ban it, or remove items from it at its pleasure. Everything is within its right.

And yet, all Blizzard does is run customer support to users who have been hacked (oh, so many are hacked) or who accidentally deleted something or any number of other problems for their accounts. They were even years ahead of the two-factor authentication push, basically giving away authenticators at a loss, with in-game bonuses, just to keep customers from being hacked. Because Blizzard knows that its whole job is keeping its customers coming back for more. And it works. And no one complains.

Our Capacity

Today's news proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the internet has a voice. You're heard, and you can affect change in the things that you care about deeply. It's oddly fitting that the news comes as fan-saved Futurama gets ready to go off the air again. But today also proves how widely that nerd-influence can swing an entire generation of hardware, based solely on the whims of internet jokes based on information that isn't even accurate, and tinfoil fears about worst-case scenarios.

Cheaper games. Easier sharing. The end of discs. The Xbox One would have been just fine despite the chorus of haters, would have been a better system for ignoring them. Microsoft losing its nerve on this isn't just disappointing for the features we lose. It's unfortunate because it shows just how heavy an anchor we can be.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-xbox-one-just-got-way-worse-and-its-our-fault-514411905

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How the Hell Does a Quantum Computer Work?

You've probably heard people?including us?banging on about quantum computers for a long ol' time. But that doesn't necessarily mean you know exactly how they work. Fortunately this video is here to help.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/bwb3grRdeG0/-513986146

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Bomb in Syrian capital kills 10 soldiers

BEIRUT (AP) ? A car bomb targeting a checkpoint near a military airport in an upscale neighborhood of the Syrian capital has killed 10 soldiers, activists said Monday as President Bashar Assad's troops pressed ahead with an offensive to regain territory they lost to rebels trying to topple his regime.

The army has scored major victories in key battlefields in western and central Syria in the past weeks, and is now setting its sights on the country's largest city, Aleppo, in the north, parts of which have been opposition strongholds.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday that 10 soldiers died in the Sunday night attack in Mazzeh and 10 were wounded. The neighborhood houses several embassies and a military airport.

Syrian state media confirmed there was a blast near the military airport late Sunday but did not release any casualty figures.

At least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria's conflict since it erupted in March 2011, according to a recent U.N. estimate.

Millions have been displaced and the civil war is increasingly being fought along sectarian lines, pitting Sunni Muslims against Shiites. It is also threatening the stability of Syria's neighbors, including Lebanon and Iraq.

Sunnis dominate the rebel ranks while the Assad regime is mostly made up of Alawites, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam.

Sectarian divisions deepened in the conflict a few weeks ago, when Lebanon's Iran-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah joined the fight inside Syria on the regime's side.

Earlier this month, Assad's troops dealt a major blow to the opposition forces after they pushed the rebels out of the strategic town of Qusair near the Lebanese border, largely with Hezbollah's help.

The fall of Qusair shifted the balance of power on the battlefield in favor of the Damascus regime, which is now looking to keep the momentum and aims to take back control of Aleppo, the country's commercial hub. The rebels captured parts of the city last summer during an offensive in the north along the border with Turkey.

While the rebels had been able to capture territory from the government in the past month, they have been unable to hold on and govern it effectively because of the regime's superior firepower.

Lack of services and aid flow into the rebel-held areas in the north have caused problems for the opposition and resulted in infighting between ethnic Kurdish and Arab groups fighting against Assad's regime in the predominantly Kurdish northern region of Afrin.

Arab rebels imposed a siege in late May on the area that resulted in a humanitarian crisis, according to the Observatory, which relies on a network of informants on the ground.

The region has a population of more than half a million, along with more than 200,000 internally displaced people, the Observatory said. Clashes between Kurdish gunmen and other rebel groups have been ongoing in the town of Afrin and surrounding villages for months, leading to a lack of food and medicine, and spikes in prices of basic goods.

The opposition has appealed to Western backers for weapons to be sent to them as soon as possible if they are to keep control of parts of Aleppo.

Troops clashed with rebels inside Aleppo and in the city's outskirts on Monday, the Observatory said. It also reported an airstrike on a village of Douweirina, a stronghold of an al-Qaida affiliated group fighting on the opposition's side.

President Barack Obama authorized lethal aid to the rebels for the first time last Friday, after Washington said it had conclusive evidence that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons. Syria accused Obama of lying about the evidence, and says he resorted to fabrications to justify his decision to arm the rebels.

Russia, one of Assad's main allies, also criticized Obama decision.

Syria and especially the increasingly opposed positions of the U.S. and Russia over the civil war are expected to be high on the agenda of G-8 leaders meeting in Northern Ireland on Monday. Obama is expected to hold a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The host, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday conceded there is a chasm on Syria, but said Russia, like all G-8 governments, has a responsibility to push opposing factions in the civil war to the negotiating table as rapidly as possible and not to back a government that "butchers" its citizens.

Russia supplies Assad's army with weapons and has its only Mediterranean port in Syria.

Cameron, who on Sunday met separately with Putin in London, said Russia and the West need to unite behind a diplomatic push that transitions Assad from power. Both leaders said they're hopeful Syria's warring factions can hammer out their differences at upcoming peace talks tentatively planned for next month in Switzerland.

In Geneva, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations said he was not optimistic about the prospects of holding a conference this summer.

Faysal Khabbaz Hamoui blamed the impasse on the armed opposition and told The Associated Press that the two sides remain too far apart to make it to the negotiating table in July.

However, there could still be some movement toward that goal depending on the outcome of talks among "major powers" at the G-8 summit, Hamoui said.

___

Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue in Beirut and John Heilprin in Geneva contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bomb-syrian-capital-kills-10-soldiers-091618639.html

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Syrian rebels cling to enclave in eastern Lebanon

The wounded Syrian, his bloodcrusted face swathed in bandages, is gently lifted from the back of a pickup truck that had just made the perilous journey across Lebanon?s remote northeastern border with Syria.

?Slowly, slowly,? says Ahmad Hujairy, a Lebanese medic, as the stretcher is eased into the back of an ambulance.

The man was wounded two weeks ago by an exploding mortar round as the strategic rebel-held town of Qusayr fell back into the hands of the Syrian Army and Lebanese Shiite militant group, Hezbollah.

The survivors, civilians and rebel fighters alike, have since trekked across a desolate mountainous landscape, where missile-firing Syrian helicopters often prowl, to reach Arsal, a Sunni-populated Lebanese town near the border with Syria.

RECOMMENDED: Sunni and Shiite Islam: Do you know the difference? Take our quiz.

Arsal has been a bastion for the rebels since early in the uprising. The dirt tracks that cut across the rugged landscape to the north and east were used by rebels to ferry weapons and ammunition into Syria and by refugees headed the other direction, fleeing the violence.

But now that the Syrian regime has taken Qusayr, just five miles north of the border, the northern route into Syria is blocked. And the Syrian Army, backed by Hezbollah fighters, appears poised to seal the border east of Arsal as well, potentially bottling up several thousand Lebanese and Sunni rebels in this remote area. Last week, a Syrian helicopter fired missiles into the centre of Arsal for the first time, wounding one man. The attack drew a rare complaint from the Lebanon, which has long lived in the shadow of its larger neighbor.

"Arsal will meet the same fate as Qusayr because there's nothing but rebels here," says Samar Attar, a Syrian fighter from Qusayr.

'PRESSURE COOKER'

The concerns felt by Arsal's residents are compounded by the town's isolation. There is only one asphalt road linking it to the rest of Lebanon. The road crosses a barren mountainous ridge west of Arsal before dropping into the flat plain of the Bekaa Valley, a mainly Shiite-populated area and stronghold of Hezbollah.

The fall of Qusayr has cut the logistical supply chain that previously extended north from Arsal, over the border to Qusayr, and on to Homs, Syria's third largest city. But the tracks heading east from Arsal that connect to the rebel-held areas around the Syrian towns of Yabroud and Nabk remain open for now. This allows rebels to slip into Syria and head south toward the frontlines around Damascus.

The sources close to Hezbollah have indicated that the Syrian army and Hezbollah will focus efforts on restoring the area between Damascus and Homs fully to regime control. Seizing Yabroud and Nabk will be key to this strategy as it will allow the regime to control the border east of Arsal.

If Arsal is neutralized, it will greatly diminish the ability of Lebanese rebel sympathizers to provide any significant logistical support to the rebel forces in terms of weapons and volunteers.

It will also turn Arsal into a dangerous pressure cooker with thousands of frustrated fighters unable to reach the frontlines in Syria. Tensions are already running high between Arsal and its Lebanese Shiite neighbors to the west, not just because they back opposing sides in Syria, but because of a spate of tit-for-tat kidnappings and killings.

The northern Bekaa is a tribal area where notions of clan loyalty and revenge run deep. Last week, the brother of a sheikh in Arsal was killed while driving through a Shiite area near Hermel. On Sunday, four Shiites were ambushed and gunned down while driving along a track near Arsal. Three of them were from the powerful Jaafar clan and dead men's relatives have sworn revenge.

FURY TOWARD HEZBOLLAH

The conflict in Syria has been seeping into the northern Bekaa for months. Syrian rebels have fired Katyusha rockets across the border, striking a swathe of Shiite towns and villages and killing and wounding several people. Sources close to Hezbollah say fighters have deployed into the barren mountain chain along Lebanon's eastern border to intercept Syrian rebel rocket-firing groups.

The Syrian rebels from Qusayr who are now recovering from wounds, hunger, and exhaustion in Arsal relate harrowing tales of their 17-day ordeal when the town was subjected to heavy artillery shelling and air strikes. Hezollah led the assault on Qusayr, deploying some 1,200 of its battle-hardened special forces fighters.

?They were very fierce fighters. You would shoot at them but they kept on coming. They wore headbands with 'O Hussein? written on them,? says Mr. Attar, referring to the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and a revered figure in Shiite Islam.

Khaled, a slim fighter from Qusayr with a spade-like beard and cropped hair, says he captured a 15-year-old Lebanese Shiite.

?He wore a headband inscribed with 'martyrdom is the key to heaven.' I asked him why he has fighting in Qusayr. He said that he was waging jihad,? Khaled says.

What did he do with the boy?

?I killed him, of course,? Khaled says with a chuckle.

It was impossible to verify his story, although Hezbollah does not permit men below the age of 18 to serve in a combat role.

The battle for Qusayr and Hezbollah's intervention in the Syria war has left upon the rebel fighters an indelible imprint of fury and bitterness toward the Lebanese group and a burning desire for revenge that even dwarfs their hostility toward the Assad regime, which is dominated by members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The rebels refer to Hezbollah as the "Party of the Devil," a play on the group's name which means "Party of God" in Arabic.

?We will never make peace with Hezbollah,? says Abu Mohammed. ?We will never forgive nor forget. They have killed our people. Even after Assad is gone, we will continue to go after the Party of the Devil. I would release four Alawite prisoners for the pleasure of killing one Shiite. They will remain our enemy forever.?

RECOMMENDED: Sunni and Shiite Islam: Do you know the difference? Take our quiz.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-rebels-cling-enclave-eastern-lebanon-160400969.html

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China launches fifth manned space mission, set to be its longest ever

A Chinese rocket carrying three taikonauts lifted off Tuesday to begin a 15-day mission. The mission is China's next step toward building a space station.

By Pete Spotts,?Staff writer / June 11, 2013

The Long March 2-F rocket loaded with the Shenzhou 10 manned spacecraft carrying three Chinese astronauts lifts off from the launch pad in the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province Tuesday.

China Daily/Reuters

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Three Chinese taikonauts lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province for a 15-day mission that will take them to China's experimental lab module Tiangong 1, which orbits some 210 miles above Earth.

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The mission is the longest yet for the Chinese human spaceflight program and the first truly operational ? and final ? mission for Tiangong 1. The crew will test new docking maneuvers as they arrive, then perform experiments and hold a live lecture from space for students in China.

The launch, which took place at 5:38 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, went flawlessly, with the crew reaching orbit about nine minutes later. If all goes well, the crew aboard the Shenzhou 10 spacecraft should reach the lab module on Thursday.

Shenzhou 10 represents China's fifth human-spaceflight mission in 10 years ? a more methodical pace than the US and the former Soviet Union pursued during the Cold War.

During the past decade, China has sent 10 different taikonauts into space, including two women. Each mission has represented a progressive step over the previous one ? first, with a John Glenn-like orbital mission that lasted nearly 21 hours and 23 minutes in 2003. Two years later, two taikonauts spent 5 days on orbit. In 2008, China launched its first three-person crew for a three-day mission that included the program's first spacewalk. Last year, Shenzhou 9 carried three crew members on a 13-day mission to Tiangong 1.

The program's near-term goal is to orbit a space station comparable to Russia's Mir space station, which over 10 years grew from a single module into a seven-module station. The Russians abandoned and deorbited Mir in 2001 in favor of its participation in the International Space Station project.

Tiangong 1 is the first step toward China's space-station goal. China's human-spaceflight plans call for launching a second, larger module later this year. Dubbed Tiangong 2, it is designed to host a crew of three for up to 20 days and has a second docking port to accept resupply missions. Tiangong 3 is slated for launch in 2015 as the core for the new station. A modified Tiangong 1 is expected to serve as an unmanned cargo carrier to support an eventual space station.

The launch comes as the US has embarked on yet another study aimed at recommending future directions for NASA's human spaceflight program. Last August, at the behest of Congress, the National Academies' Human Spaceflight Committee began holding a series of meetings to gather ideas from the public, aerospace specialists, and other stakeholders. The panel expects to present its final report next May.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/0sBdjefNskA/China-launches-fifth-manned-space-mission-set-to-be-its-longest-ever

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Apple Is Making Badass New Mac Pros

Today during the WWDC keynote, we got our first look at what Apple is thinking in terms of the future of Mac Pros. Everyone who said the Mac Pro is dead can just shut up. Here comes a new freaking generation of high-performance computing from Apple, and we couldn't be more excited.

Read more...

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/-a0VultGjFI/apple-is-making-badass-new-mac-pros-512324822

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Watch Nintendo's E3 2013 presentation here! (updated)

Nintendo's making its E3 announcements digitally this year, so if you're looking to hear more on the Wii U, 3DS and all those presumably incoming games, we'd advise you gaze into the embedded video stream right after the break. We'll be reporting all the notable news as it develops and it all kicks off in a few minutes now!

Update: And here's what Nintendo had to show. We've embedded the full presentation after the break.

Super Mario 3D World announced for Wii U, coming this December

The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker HD launches in October, boasts faster sailing

Mario Kart 8 launching on Wii U in spring 2014

Super Smash Bros for Wii U and 3DS coming in 2014, brings Megaman along for the ride

Nintendo says Wii Fit U now delayed until December

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/Sxd4X-OYltw/

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China inflation, lending falls point to economy weakness

By Langi Chiang and Jonathan Standing

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's annual consumer inflation slowed in May while growth in bank lending fell below expectations, data showed on Sunday, piling up more evidence that the world's second-largest economy could slow further in the current quarter.

The National Bureau of Statistics said China's consumer inflation slowed to 2.1 percent, the lowest in three months, while producer prices fell 2.9 percent from a year earlier, the lowest since September.

Economists polled by Reuters had expected annual consumer inflation of 2.5 percent and factory-gate prices to fall 2.5 percent in May.

"The inflation data showed China's economic growth continued to slow down. Q2 growth is probably even slower than Q1. In particular, the PPI data showed very weak demand," said Jianguang Shen, chief China economist at Mizuho Securities Asia in Hong Kong.

Adding to the evidence of a slowdown was separate central bank data showing that Chinese banks lent 667.4 billion yuan ($109 billion) in new local currency loans in May, missing market expectations of 850 billion yuan and lower than April's 792.9 billion yuan.

The broad M2 money supply rose 15.8 percent in May from a year earlier, slightly below a median forecast of 15.9 percent in a Reuters poll, while China's total social financing aggregate, a broad measure of liquidity in the economy, was 1.19 trillion yuan in May versus 1.75 trillion yuan in April.

The subdued inflation will enable China to keep an easy monetary stance and some see the possibility that the People's Bank of China could cut rates later this year to reduce financing costs for struggling Chinese firms, provided that housing inflation does not flare up.

"China has rising room and the possibility to cut interest rates in the second half of this year," Shen added.

"The financing cost for companies is very high now and the central bank should further pursue interest rate liberalization. China's fiscal policy in the second half needs to protect consumption growth and support investment."

China's economy grew at its slowest pace for 13 years in 2012, and it has so far surprised on the downside, bringing warnings from some economists that the country would even miss its annual growth target of 7.5 percent.

On Saturday, data showed that China's exports posted their lowest growth rate in almost a year in May while imports unexpectedly fell, underlining concerns that growth in the world's second-largest economy could slow anew in the second quarter.

Government economists from top think-tanks in Beijing told Reuters this week that the new leadership of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang will tolerate quarterly growth to slip as far as 7 percent before hitting the stimulus button.

Li had struck a more upbeat note on Saturday, being quoted by state television as saying that China's economy was generally stable, growth was within a "relatively high and reasonable range" and the employment situation was stable.

Month-on-month, consumer prices fell 0.6 percent in May versus a forecast for a drop of 0.2 percent.

Over 80 percent of the monthly fall in the CPI was accounted for by a fall in vegetable prices as supply increased due to warm weather. Vegetable prices fell 13.8 percent in May from April, dragging down the month-on-month headline CPI by 0.5 percentage points.

(Reporting by Langi Chiang and Jonathan Standing; Editing by Ron Popeski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-may-cpi-slows-gives-room-easy-monetary-021821183.html

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Clapper: Leaks are 'literally gut-wrenching,' leaker being sought (Washington Post)

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When will my computer understand me?

June 10, 2013 ? It's not hard to tell the difference between the "charge" of a battery and criminal "charges." But for computers, distinguishing between the various meanings of a word is difficult.

For more than 50 years, linguists and computer scientists have tried to get computers to understand human language by programming semantics as software. Driven initially by efforts to translate Russian scientific texts during the Cold War (and more recently by the value of information retrieval and data analysis tools), these efforts have met with mixed success. IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system and Google Translate are high profile, successful applications of language technologies, but the humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of the continuing difficulty of the problem.

Our ability to easily distinguish between multiple word meanings is rooted in a lifetime of experience. Using the context in which a word is used, an intrinsic understanding of syntax and logic, and a sense of the speaker's intention, we intuit what another person is telling us.

"In the past, people have tried to hand-code all of this knowledge," explained Katrin Erk, a professor of linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin focusing on lexical semantics. "I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been successful. There are just too many little things that humans know."

Other efforts have tried to use dictionary meanings to train computers to better understand language, but these attempts have also faced obstacles. Dictionaries have their own sense distinctions, which are crystal clear to the dictionary-maker but murky to the dictionary reader. Moreover, no two dictionaries provide the same set of meanings -- frustrating, right?

Watching annotators struggle to make sense of conflicting definitions led Erk to try a different tactic. Instead of hard-coding human logic or deciphering dictionaries, why not mine a vast body of texts (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and use the implicit connections between the words to create a weighted map of relationships -- a dictionary without a dictionary?

"An intuition for me was that you could visualize the different meanings of a word as points in space," she said. "You could think of them as sometimes far apart, like a battery charge and criminal charges, and sometimes close together, like criminal charges and accusations ("the newspaper published charges..."). The meaning of a word in a particular context is a point in this space. Then we don't have to say how many senses a word has. Instead we say: 'This use of the word is close to this usage in another sentence, but far away from the third use.'"

To create a model that can accurately recreate the intuitive ability to distinguish word meaning requires a lot of text and a lot of analytical horsepower.

"The lower end for this kind of a research is a text collection of 100 million words," she explained. "If you can give me a few billion words, I'd be much happier. But how can we process all of that information? That's where supercomputers and Hadoop come in."

Applying Computational Horsepower

Erk initially conducted her research on desktop computers, but around 2009, she began using the parallel computing systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Access to a special Hadoop-optimized subsystem on TACC's Longhorn supercomputer allowed Erk and her collaborators to expand the scope of their research. Hadoop is a software architecture well suited to text analysis and the data mining of unstructured data that can also take advantage of large computer clusters. Computational models that take weeks to run on a desktop computer can run in hours on Longhorn. This opened up new possibilities.

"In a simple case we count how often a word occurs in close proximity to other words. If you're doing this with one billion words, do you have a couple of days to wait to do the computation? It's no fun," Erk said. "With Hadoop on Longhorn, we could get the kind of data that we need to do language processing much faster. That enabled us to use larger amounts of data and develop better models."

Treating words in a relational, non-fixed way corresponds to emerging psychological notions of how the mind deals with language and concepts in general, according to Erk. Instead of rigid definitions, concepts have "fuzzy boundaries" where the meaning, value and limits of the idea can vary considerably according to the context or conditions. Erk takes this idea of language and recreates a model of it from hundreds of thousands of documents.

Say That Another Way

So how can we describe word meanings without a dictionary? One way is to use paraphrases. A good paraphrase is one that is "close to" the word meaning in that high-dimensional space that Erk described.

"We use a gigantic 10,000-dimentional space with all these different points for each word to predict paraphrases," Erk explained. "If I give you a sentence such as, 'This is a bright child,' the model can tell you automatically what are good paraphrases ('an intelligent child') and what are bad paraphrases ('a glaring child'). This is quite useful in language technology."

Language technology already helps millions of people perform practical and valuable tasks every day via web searches and question-answer systems, but it is poised for even more widespread applications.

Automatic information extraction is an application where Erk's paraphrasing research may be critical. Say, for instance, you want to extract a list of diseases, their causes, symptoms and cures from millions of pages of medical information on the web.

"Researchers use slightly different formulations when they talk about diseases, so knowing good paraphrases would help," Erk said.

In a paper to appear in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Erk and her collaborators illustrated they could achieve state-of-the-art results with their automatic paraphrasing approach.

Recently, Erk and Ray Mooney, a computer science professor also at The University of Texas at Austin, were awarded a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to combine Erk's distributional, high dimensional space representation of word meanings with a method of determining the structure of sentences based on Markov logic networks.

"Language is messy," said Mooney. "There is almost nothing that is true all the time. "When we ask, 'How similar is this sentence to another sentence?' our system turns that question into a probabilistic theorem-proving task and that task can be very computationally complex."

In their paper, "Montague Meets Markov: Deep Semantics with Probabilistic Logical Form," presented at the Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (STARSEM2013) in June, Erk, Mooney and colleagues announced their results on a number of challenge problems from the field of artificial intelligence.

In one problem, Longhorn was given a sentence and had to infer whether another sentence was true based on the first. Using an ensemble of different sentence parsers, word meaning models and Markov logic implementations, Mooney and Erk's system predicted the correct answer with 85% accuracy. This is near the top results in this challenge. They continue to work to improve the system.

There is a common saying in the machine-learning world that goes: "There's no data like more data." While more data helps, taking advantage of that data is key.

"We want to get to a point where we don't have to learn a computer language to communicate with a computer. We'll just tell it what to do in natural language," Mooney said. "We're still a long way from having a computer that can understand language as well as a human being does, but we've made definite progress toward that goal."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/information_technology/~3/7QeHx5EQCWQ/130610113051.htm

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