NASA Captures Shuttle's Capitol Hill Flyby With—What Else—Instagram (Updated) [Image Cache]
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Head-mounted displays may be all the rage as of late, thanks to Sergey Brin's own recent fashion choices, but the space is hardly new. Brother, for one, has been in the game for a while now, with its AirScouter glasses, and before fellow printer-maker Epson steals all its glory, the company wants you to know that it's got some new wearable augmented reality on the way. The AirScouter WD-100G and WD-100A are being targeted toward business users, allowing workers to get all of the relevant information from their computer, without staring at a proper monitor -- of course, you're going to want to use the included USB cable to tether you to that PC. The glasses do SVGA images in full color over an eye, while the other eye remains unobstructed, keeping you relatively aware of your surroundings -- best of all, you can choose the eye. The new AirScouters will be available in Japan this summer for a pricey ¥199,800. But really, how can you put a price on looking like the business casual version of the Terminator?
Continue reading Brother AirScouter glasses bring augmented reality, unsightly add-ons to your face
Brother AirScouter glasses bring augmented reality, unsightly add-ons to your face originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Two particular repressor genes in a family of regulatory genes are vital for controlling cell proliferation during development of the placenta, according to a new study by researchers with the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center ? Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC ? James).
The two genes are called E2f7 and E2f8. Their absence in stem cells results in a placenta made up of overcrowded and poorly organized cells that cannot properly transport oxygen and nutrients or support normal embryonic development.
When placental stem cells were also missing a third gene, the activating gene called E2f3a, the placental defects were corrected and embryos carried to birth.
The findings, published in the journal Developmental Cell, shows at the molecular level how these E2Fs control cell proliferation in intact animals, the researchers say.
"The findings provide insight into the role of these two repressor genes," says principal investigators Gustavo Leone, associate professor of Medicine and associate director of Basic Research.
The two genes belong to a family of regulatory genes that, in humans, has eight members. They are all believed to activate or suppress other genes to control cell division and proliferation in both normal and cancer cells. But which genes they regulate and how they interact with one another in living animals is poorly understood.
"E2F regulatory genes have been thought to be important for a long time, but with so many of them, it's been hard to tell which one is doing what," Leone says.
"Here, we show that the repressors E2f7 and E2f8 are essential for the development of an intact, functional, placenta, and that they balance out the effects of the activating gene E2f3a," Leone says. "Because these two repressors are important for proliferation, they may also play an important role in suppressing tumor development."
For this study, Leone and his colleagues used animal models that lacked one or more of the three E2F genes in trophoblast stem cells, which give rise to the placenta.
Earlier work led by Leone has shown that in some cases, an E2F gene can be an activator in some tissues and a repressor in others.
###
Ohio State University Medical Center: http://www.osumedcenter.edu
Thanks to Ohio State University Medical Center for this article.
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Canonical's AWSOME API bridges OpenStack and Amazon clouds, Ubuntu has its head in both originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Apr 2012 03:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Amanda Seyfried Dumped Josh Hartnett Already
Actress Amanda Seyfried has reportedly split from “Pearl Harbor” actor Josh Hartnett after a brief romance. A source reveals Amanda and Josh started dating in [...]
Amanda Seyfried Dumped Josh Hartnett Already Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News
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A new study demonstrates a link between social class and genetics in non-human primates.
Stressed-out monkeys tend to have a lower quality of life. But why? It turns out the answer might be in their genes.
Skip to next paragraph Harry Harlow shows what happens when a young rhesus macaque is scared.Rhesus monkeys have a clear social ranking system. Those in the highest ranking group have the best access to food, water, and grooming. The opposite is also true: those in the lowest group have a difficult time when resources are scarce.
Researchers began with 49 captive female rhesus macaques of medium social rank. They sorted the monkeys into ten new groups, so that the monkeys sorted themselves into diverse social classes. Afterward, the scientists collected blood samples from the animals.
Blood samples showed a significant relationship between gene expression and social rank. So much so that, 80 percent of the time, the researchers were able to predict an individual monkey's social status just by looking at its genes.
Notably, it appeared that genes associated with the immune system were more active among low-ranking group members. This immune system activity could be tiring for the animals over time.
On the positive side, immune system activity levels did not seem fixed. As the researchers added new group members, altering the social stratification, gene expression changed. As the monkeys moved up in the world, they became less stressed.
This finding demonstrates an important linkage between the social world and individual physiology.
?If an individual is able to improve their social environment, the genome is pretty plastic, which is kind of optimistic,? Jenny Tung a geneticist at Duke University and the study's lead author told The New York Times.
In future studies, Tung plans to explore the question of the health impacts of social rank-associated gene expression.
This study appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Question by Robby?s Girl : How do I file taxes on my house that I own with my fiance
Whose taxes should go on the mortgage interest? Mine or his?Does it matter? Do we have to file jointly even though we are not married? Best answer:
Answer by OOO
It can go on either both, or on one person?s return but you can not overlap. You can either divide it based on ownership (50/50 75/25, 60/40- be careful the rate sticks around once you mine it deterministic). or one person claims the whole amount. You can not file jointly since you are not married unless you are in a common law and state statues are married by common law.My advise is for whoever it benefits the most should claim it and take the other person to dinner or something nice with the additional benefit gained from the use of the mortgage interest.
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REUTERS - Apple Inc and several major publishers were accused by the U.S. government of conspiring to fix prices of e-books and limit retail price competition, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday.
"Apple facilitated the publisher defendants' collective effort to end retail price competition by coordinating their transition to an agency model across all retailers," according to the complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court by the anti-trust division of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The publishers include Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin Group, Pearson Plc and Simon & Schuster, a unit of CBS Corp.
(Reporting By Grant McCool; editing by John Wallace)
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Guest post by Educators for Shared Accountability.
A new group, Educators for Shared Accountability (ESA), has issued the first-ever Value-Added Measurement (VAM) evaluation of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan was rated "ineffective," based on four indicators.
The United States Department of Education had a?discretionary budget of $68.3 billion in fiscal year 2011. This amount was up from $64.1 billion the year before, and up from $29.4 billion in 2000. When the Department of Education was established in 1979, Congress appropriated an?annual budget of $14.2 billion.
In the past 33 years, the budget for the Department of Education (DoEd) has increased almost fivefold.
Overseeing this massive department is US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Secretary Duncan earns a base salary of?$179,700.
Mr. Duncan's time at the DoEd has coincided with a dramatic emphasis on efficiency and accountability in K-12 education at the local level. Since the dawn of NCLB ten years ago, schools have been rated by the federal government according to their effectiveness on raising student test scores. Most public school districts are also rated by their states. The rating systems vary from state to state, but virtually all of them are based on some combination of student standardized test scores, graduation rates, and other student-level data.
More recently, there has been a concerted effort to move from school-level accountability to government entities (as opposed to local school administrators) holding individual teachers accountable for student performance. Under Arne Duncan, the US Department of Education has offered financial incentives in an effort to coerce states into guaranteeing that a percentage of teachers' evaluations will be based on the performance of their students on standardized tests, using complex formulas known as Value-Added Measures (VAM). VAM formulas are intended to ensure that a teacher isn't rated poorly just because he or she teaches a greater proportion of struggling students. Basically, instead of rating teachers on students' absolute scores, a VAM formula is used to rate teachers by gauging student performance against a performance level anticipated for each student by looking at prior performance and the performance of peers.
VAM is serious business. In the case of New York City and Los Angeles, individual teachers have seen their performance levels published in local newspapers. One poor lady was named by the New York Post as the?"city's worst teacher"?based on her VAM scores. After the release of teacher ratings created by the Los Angeles Times,?one teacher committed suicide.
The validity of VAM ratings is doubted in some quarters. Not only has prominent reform skepticDiane Ravitch questioned VAM's accuracy, but even the?New York Times called the ratings "controversial"?and noted that education officials "cautioned against drawing conclusions" from them. The Times went on to note various data integrity problems reported by teachers, pointing out for example that English teacher Donna Lubniewski was actually rated based on her students' math scores.
Many education officials and pundits appear undeterred by data integrity questions. In the aftermath of the publication of teacher ratings in Los Angeles, Arne Duncan praised the action and said "Silence is not an option." He recently did an about-face, and criticized the posting of VAM scores in New York, but his policies have pushed these systems into schools across the nation. Duncan has long been a proponent of accountability for student outcomes at the local level.
Strangely missing in all of this, of course, is any sort of mechanism for holding people like Arne Duncan publicly accountable for student-level data attributable to their performance in an important position of leadership. With a salary significantly higher than that of the highest-paid teacher in America, and with a budget that dwarfs that of any local school district anywhere on the planet, we are supposed to just take Arne Duncan's word for it that he is doing a good job.
One would think Duncan would lead teachers across the nation by example and submit himself to a system rather similar to the type he advocates for teachers in the trenches.
Apparently, however, at the US Department of Education silence IS an option.
Teachers have been waiting for years for education policymakers and bureaucrats--those who are paid hefty salaries to theoretically improve educational outcomes for American children--to join them on the front lines of punitive data-driven accountability. Last July, one school administrator at the Save Our Schools march in Washington, DC, asked officials this question: "Why don't you...join me in the crucible of accountability?" Many front-line educators find it disconcerting and demoralizing when this nation's educator-in-chief urges the states to pass out labels to teachers but goes out of his way to avoid any label for his own efforts. While teachers are "objectively" rated by independent auditors using "scientific" formulas, personnel at the DoEd are content to have their actions judged subjectively on the basis of?breathless press releases and heavily-massaged conclusions drawn fr...
In the absence of any sort of effort on the part of Duncan or his staff to develop a means of legitimately holding themselves publicly accountable for positive student outcomes, a group calling itself?Educators for Shared Accountability?(ESA) has stepped into the gap. Their "Outcomes-Based, Value-Added Measurement of US Secretaries of Education" weighs every US Secretary of Education in the history of the department by comparing data at the beginning of each of their terms with data from the end of their terms. The data used to measure the effectiveness of each secretary includes two "student quality of life" data points and two data points based on student performance on academic tests. These four data points reflect improvement (or lack thereof) in the following areas during a secretary's term:
1. Student employability
2. Student pregnancy rates
3. Math performance
4. Reading performance
Some may wonder why the first two data points are included. One of the primary goals of K-12 education, of course, is to produce students who are ultimately employable. Furthermore, data suggests that "school achievement...helps reduce the risk of teen pregnancy." If the policies pursued by a US Secretary of Education result in effective schooling for American children, one could fairly assume that more employers would want to hire those students and fewer of those student-aged Americans would get pregnant.
The designers of this system felt it was important to include multiple measures (instead of looking exclusively at test scores) in order to arrive at a fair assessment of which education secretaries most effectively improved life outcomes for American students during their times in office.
ESA acknowledges that questions may arise regarding the validity of these rankings. Nevertheless, in the interest of sunlight, ESA has decided to release their outcomes-based ratings for US secretaries of education as they are. ESA is pleased to share this information and feels that any discussion following the publication of these rankings will be healthy. Like many in the field of education today, ESA is determined not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Students simply can't wait another day for the US Department of Education to develop an objective means for measuring the effectiveness of its highest paid staff member. Citizens, parents, and taxpayers have a right to know this information.
Data Point 1: Teen Employability
One critical aim of the American education system is the holistic development of children. While test scores indicate the content area knowledge and/or the test-taking prowess of students, few dependable measures of a truly well-rounded education exist. How can one measure students' critical thinking skills, communication skills, interpersonal social aptitude, and problem-solving abilities? Fortunately, there is an arena where those precise skills are valued and rewarded--the job market. That being the case, the first data point examined in this study is the employability of the American teen. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ESA's crack research team analyzed the seasonally-adjusted employment population ratio for Americans aged 16-19 years. Each secretary of education was assigned a number of points equal to this ratio for the quarter immediately before he or she took office (which was tallied as the "Beginning" value), and for the quarter immediately after leaving office (tallied as the "Ending" value).?
Note: the latest quarter available for the current secretary of education, Arne Duncan, was the fourth quarter of 2011.
The data used for this portion of the value-added measure was gathered using the search feature found?here?(using these search criteria: both sexes, all races, all origins, 16-19 years, all educational levels, all marital statuses, Employment-population ratio, seasonally adjusted, quarterly).
Data Point 2: Teen Pregnancy
The second data point--also tallied as a "Beginning" and "Ending" value--is the teen birth rate,found here. Each secretary was assigned a "Beginning" teen birth rate and an "Ending" teen birth rate for his or her term in office. Unfortunately, at the time this study was conducted, the latest teen birth rate data available from the CDC was for the year 2008. Since the teen birth rate for 2009 and later was unavailable, Margaret Spellings was assigned the figure from 2008 as her ending figure. For Arne Duncan--who took office in 2009--teen birth rate data was entirely unavailable for his term. That being the case, Duncan was assigned the respective average of all other secretaries' figures for his "Beginning" and "Ending" figures. (This solution was inspired by a similar method used by the state of Tennessee to compensate for a lack of testing data for teachers of non-tested subjects. Such teachers are assigned the average scores of teachers in their school who teach a tested subject, in order to come up with a number for them and determine whether or not they add value to their students.)
Note: unlike the other data points used in this study, teen birth rates improve by dropping. As a result, the teen birth rate immediately preceding a secretary of education's term was listed under the "Ending" category, and the teen birth rate immediately following each secretary's term was listed under the "Beginning" category. Reversing the placement of the two figures enabled an increase in the number to indicate improvement. This was necessitated so that teen birth rate could be combined with the other three data points to generate an overall increase or decrease in the aggregate score of each secretary.
Data Points 3 and 4: Math and Reading Proficiency
Progress in the?mathematics?and?reading?proficiency of students during each secretary of education's time in office was gauged based on overall NAEP scores. The "Beginning" figure was the NAEP score immediately prior to each secretary's taking office. Similarly, the "Ending" score consisted of NAEP results for the test administration immediately following a secretary's departure from office. Specifically, this study looked at the nationwide NAEP scores of 13-year-olds. The scores themselves can be viewed?here.
Unfortunately, NAEP scores were only available through the year 2008 at the time this study was conducted. Because of this, Margaret Spellings was assigned the latest data available for her "Ending" score, and Arne Duncan was assigned the latest data available for both his "Beginning" and "Ending" scores. ESA fully intends to adjust the VAM scores for both Spellings and Duncan when new NAEP scores become available.
Methodology
The "Beginning" and "Ending" data for the four data points described above were summed, and a total "Beginning" and "Ending" figure was determined for each secretary. An increase in the figure from "Beginning" to "Ending" indicated improvement; a decrease indicated a downgrade in student performance.
Absolute improvement in the data was considered an insufficient measure for establishing whether a secretary of education added value to students during his or her term in office. Instead, ESA researchers determined an average rate of improvement in the data across all secretaries of education. That average rate of improvement--2.8763888889, to be exact--became the target for each secretary of education to attain to, the measure by which all were judged. A secretary who exceeded the average rate of improvement in his or her data was considered to have been an effective educational leader, while a secretary whose rate of improvement fell short of that target was judged to be an ineffective leader.
The actual VAM score of a Secretary of Education is the number of points (positive or negative) difference between his or her rate of improvement from the beginning to the end of his or her term and the average rate of improvement for all secretaries of education.
In order to assist the public in interpreting these VAM scores, clear and easy-to-understand labels were applied to a simple distribution of the scores. All VAM scores ranged from -12.9764 on the low end to 20.62361 on the high end. The label "Superior" was assigned to scores between 1.523611 and 20.62361. The label "Average" was assigned to scores between -2.07639 and 1.523610. The label "Inferior" was assigned to scores from -12.9764 to -2.07638. Additionally, any score below 0--i.e., any VAM that fell below the average rate of improvement for all secretaries of education--was assigned the label "Ineffective," a label which trumped all other labels. (This trumping mechanism was inspired by the policy devised in New York State that requires that, while student test scores account for 40% of a teacher's evaluation, a failing mark on that 40% will invalidate the remaining 60% of the evaluation and require the teacher to be found ineffective.)
You can?download the VAM report for all nine secretaries of education here.
For ease of reference, the US secretaries of education were also ranked from first to ninth based on their VAM scores. (click the image for a larger view)?![]()
ESA wishes to congratulate former education secretary Richard Riley for the outstanding performance revealed by his value-added score. During his time in office, student data soared to remarkable heights: Riley's data surpassed the VAM target by over 20 points, or roughly 6 times better than the improvement shown by the second-best secretary of education, Lamar Alexander. Current and future secretaries of education in the United States would do well to examine their practices and policies against those of Mr. Riley, who added far more value to American students than any education secretary before or since. Richard Riley was a Blue Ribbon secretary of education.
On a sad note, the data indicates that five out of the nine secretaries of education we have had actually reduced value for their students, forcing researchers at ESA to conclude that the nation would have been better off with no education secretary at all during their terms.
What do you think of the Value Added Method ratings for Secretary Duncan? Does this indicate he has been ineffective during his term?
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