Alan Alda's Challenge to Scientists: What is Time?

Copyright ? 2012 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. Of course we'll be keeping you up to date this hour on the shooting spree that's been going on in Newtown, Connecticut. But first something different. When Alan Alda was 11, he asked one of his teachers: What is a flame? The answer he got back was oxidation. Accurate, yeah, but not very helpful.

To promote better science communication, he started the Flame Challenge last year, and the contest was simple. Scientists around the world were invited to submit their best kid-friendly explanations of a flame. How do you explain a flame simply to a kid? A panel of 11-year-olds judged 800 - 800 entries - and chose a winner.

Well, when - Alan Alda is back with round two now. Here he is with the Flame Challenge, round two. It's not a flame this time. This time the kids have a more timely question in mind.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY again, Alan.

ALAN ALDA: Hi, thank you, Ira.

FLATOW: What is the - what was the winner, and how was it chosen?

ALDA: Well, the kids sent in suggestions for what this year's question should be, the 11-year-olds themselves, and a lot of them came in, hundreds came in. And they were narrowed down and sent back to the kids to vote on, and the one that we're using that came out on top with a tremendous number of votes is this very difficult question: What is time?

And this - in fact, what was amazing about this was last June, when we announced the winner of the first flame challenge, we said we're starting to ask kids for what they want to know about, so what questions should be in next year's contest. The first one that came in was from a nine-year-old boy who said what is time.

And he said: Is it OK? I'm only nine. I'm not 11.

(LAUGHTER)

ALDA: He's asking such a deep question.

FLATOW: And it's an age-old question, right?

ALDA: Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting because my question that I asked when I was 11, what is a flame, turned out to my surprise to be an extremely difficult question to answer. One or two scientists said this - the answer to this encompasses all the known structures in the universe. I don't know if it's that extreme, but that's what I heard.

So that turned out to be a very difficult question. But it was about a simple thing. This is a thing you can see, you can get burnt by it and that kind of thing. But what is time? That seems to be a much more abstract, a much more deep question. And it interests me. I wonder if 11-year-olds have become much more sophisticated since I was 11. It sounds like they have.

FLATOW: Well, you've been interviewing scientists for a long time. You know, certainly your "Scientific American Frontiers" series, you've come up against that question, or being asked all the time what is time.

ALDA: Well, I don't know. Usually it's always thought of - I mean it's usually thought of, at least in our daily lives, as something, a way to keep track of our events and a way to sort of be browbeaten by the succession of events. And then there's that great joke. I like it anyway.

FLATOW: Let's hear it.

ALDA: That time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: Very pithy, right to the point, time is what happens when nothing else is happening.

ALDA: But then you get into these very complex notions that time is - goes faster under certain conditions, or it slows down or comes to a stop. And this is really weird. And then there are the speculative ideas about can time go backwards.

FLATOW: Right. Why does it have to go forward?

ALDA: Yeah. Well...

FLATOW: Yeah.

ALDA: Well, it goes forward for me, that's all I know. But, you know, I love that - it's a positron, right, that's the opposite of the electron. So there's a wonderful passage in one of Richard Feynman's books, the great physicist Richard Feynman, and he has a diagram, and under the diagram he says this is a positron, which of course is an electron going backward in time.

See, now, I love - the part I love is of course...

FLATOW: Of course.

ALDA: Of course.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: That's how Feynman used to speak.

ALDA: Now, I guess if you write it out in a formula, you can make it go backward in time, but I don't see how you can make it go backward in time in real life. I guess maybe it can at that scale. But all of these questions - somebody who tries to the answer the question, what is time, has to make a decision about how deep to go. And that's going to be interesting to see how they solve that problem.

FLATOW: 1-800-989-8255, talking with Alan Alda and his new challenge, which is come up with a kid-friendly - who's eligible to win? What are the rules, and how do you win?

ALDA: You have to be a scientist, which is defined sort of broadly. You have to look at the rules to make sure. But it's roughly somebody studying to be a scientist or presently working as a scientist or teaching science. I don't want to get quoted on that too precisely. But it's roughly that on the website.

And kids are going to be judging, 11-year-olds, roughly 11-year-olds, are going to be judging all the entries. So they'll decide if they've really learned from this and if they feel it's sufficient enough, if the answer gives them enough to hang onto, because if it's just something short like time is what happens when things happen, forget it, you know.

But so now the kids are entered as judges in the contest by their teachers. So classes will be entered. And you know, we have already 7,300 kids signed up to judge.

FLATOW: Wow.

ALDA: Last - and this is - the contest just opened a couple of days ago. Last year we had 6,000 altogether for the whole span of time. So I think this is going to really be a much bigger event.

FLATOW: And its deadline, when is it over? When does your last entry come? In the spring...

ALDA: In the spring sometime. Check the website, flamechallenge.org. And the winner will be announced June 1 at the World Science Festival.

FLATOW: Do you expect - now, an animation, a really cool animation, won the Flame Challenge.

ALDA: It was wonderful. Ben Ames won the Flame Challenge last year, and it was a great story. He was studying for his doctorate at Innsbruck in - what's the name of that country?

FLATOW: Austria.

ALDA: Austria, thank you.

(LAUGHTER)

FLATOW: You're getting as old as I am, Alan.

ALDA: No, I wasn't good at geography. So he said to his boss, I can't get this equipment to work, I'm going to take two weeks off because I heard Ira Flatow talking about this on a podcast, and I'm going to go home and I'm going to work on this. And he told his wife and daughter you won't see me for two weeks, I'll be in the basement building this animated cartoon.

And he wrote a song, and he performed on it. It was unbelievable, so good. And now look what's happened. He's gone on to create a startup company to do animated videos about science for kids on television. So it's spawning a whole other effort.

FLATOW: Yeah, all kinds of interest. Alan, we've run out of time. I want to thank you very much.

ALDA: Thank you.

FLATOW: Hopefully our podcast will do wonders for you again.

ALDA: Oh, thank you, and thanks for helping with the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook.

FLATOW: It's going well?

ALDA: Oh, it's going so well.

FLATOW: All right. Well, we'll talk about that next time you're here. We'll have to spend more time with you.

ALDA: Thanks so much.

FLATOW: Alan Alda is a founding member and visiting professor at the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York .

Copyright ? 2012 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

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Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/12/14/167255699/alan-aldas-challenge-to-scientists-what-is-time?ft=1&f=1007

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Venus transit and lunar mirror could help astronomers find worlds around other stars

Dec. 13, 2012 ? On June 6, 2012, Venus passed directly between Earth and the Sun, in a so-called transit where the planet appears as a silhouette against the solar disk, something that will not happen again until Dec. 5, 2117. A team of Italian astronomers led by Paolo Molaro of the Instituto Nazionale di Astrofisica at the University of Trieste used the opportunity to perform an unusual and challenging experiment, looking at the sunlight reflected off the Moon ('moonlight') to see how it changed during the transit. This technique could help scientists to find planets in orbit around other stars.

The team publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters published by Oxford University Press.

When Venus passes in front of the Sun it hides a part of our star's rotating surface. Because of rotation, the spectrum of the Sun (created splitting the different colours of light using a spectrograph) is slightly different on each side. On one side, the solar surface is rotating towards the observer and so its light will be 'blueshifted', meaning the lines seen in a spectrum move towards shorter wavelengths. On the other, the surface is rotating away from the observer, so its light is 'redshifted', meaning that the lines move towards longer wavelengths.

By looking at the reflected light from the lunar surface, this is averaged out as a broadening of the various lines. When Venus moves in front of the Sun from east to west, it first blocks out the surface moving towards us and then the surface moving away from us. This causes a distortion in the spectral lines known as the "Rossiter-McLaughlin effect."

The astronomers realised that the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph installed on a 3.6m telescope at La Silla in Chile, part of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), would be sensitive enough to detect the effect and that the Moon would be in the right place too. The Moon was slightly ahead of Earth in its orbit, so 'saw' the transit a couple of hours later than terrestrial observers. This also meant that the Moon was in the night time sky in Chile, making it possible for the La Silla telescope to operate safely and observe the change in the solar spectrum.

Distortions in the spectral lines resulting from the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect are extremely small and are equivalent to a 3km / hour shift in the observed motion of the Sun. It has been seen before, in binary systems where the two stars eclipse each other. But it becomes more and more difficult to observe when the celestial body is a planet and rather than being the size of Jupiter is similar in size to Earth, as Venus is. Scientists should nonetheless be able to measure the extent of this weak effect on the light from other planetary systems using telescopes such as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) now under development. With the technique it should be possible to characterise important features of these systems and thus improve our understanding of the formation of planets in general.

Team member Lorenzo Monaco from ESO describes how important HARPS was in their work. "The measured magnitude of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect is comparable to being able to track the speed of a person walking at a slow pace at a distance of 150 million kilometres, the space that separates us from the Sun. Nowadays there are very few instruments capable of recording such tiny changes, especially if you only have a few hours to measure them."

"There is close agreement between our work and the theoretical models," says Mauro Barbieri, from University of Padua, who is also a member of the team. "Among other things, this change in velocity is comparable with that due to the natural expansion and contraction of our star. Our observations however have allowed us to clearly see the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect during the transit."

"This measurement," says Paolo Molaro "shows the sensational results that spectrographs on telescopes like E-ELT will be able to deliver. We will open a new horizon in the study of the other Earth-like planets that are almost certainly waiting to be found around other stars in our galaxy."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).

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


Journal Reference:

  1. P. Molaro, L. Monaco, M. Barbieri, S. Zaggia. Detection of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect in the 2012 June 6 Venus transit. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 2012; DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sls027

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://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/space_time/nasa/~3/fa3D42rpIjo/121213111734.htm

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Mobile Devices Are the Future of eCommerce ... - Yahoo! Finance

The Commerce Department reported Thursday that retail sales rose 0.3% in November after falling 0.3% in October. Retail spending over the past 12 months has grown 3.7%, in line with modest economic growth. Even as many Americans struggle to find jobs and pay bills, one sector of the economy has been resilient in this weak economic environment. Wealthy Americans are continuing to spend their money and Web sites like Gilt ? a flash sales site that offers discounts on designer apparel and jewelry as well as deals on exotic vacations, restaurants, Broadway shows and gym memberships ? has experienced a surge in sales as high-end consumers chose online shopping over brick-and-mortar stores.

Even the prospect of higher taxes next year has had little effect on the shopping habits of these individuals. Kevin Ryan, CEO and founder of Gilt, estimates that sales for the current quarter will increase 30% from the same period a year ago. The site saw a 60% year-over-year gain during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. According to Ryan, online shoppers tend to be wealthy consumers and he expects all online players will "do very well" this holiday season.

Online commerce has exploded largely due to the shift in consumer preferences for mobile devices. According to Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst at Forrester Research, eCommerce sales touched $200 billion in 2011. Online sales are projected to grow to 9% of total retail sales by 2016 from the current 7%. Nearly 167 million consumers, or 53% of the U.S. population, shopped online last year.

Ryan says Gilt customers are consciously reducing their time spent shopping the racks in physical stores, and he refers to mobile as the "dominant player" in the online world. Mobile devices accounted for 60% of the site's traffic last week alone, Ryan notes, with Apple's iPhones and iPads as the main source of page views. Sales via mobile devices could even comprise 50% of Gilt's revenue by next year. The expensive items for sale on Gilt are more likely to be sold on tablets than smartphones, Ryan says, a trend Forrester confirms.

"Given the smartphone's considerable screen size limitations and consumers' preponderance to use smartphones for research and social shopping activities, it is hardly surprising that just 2% of all U.S. eCommerce is actually transacted on smartphones. By contrast, the mobile sales growth opportunity appears to lie squarely with tablets," writes Mulpuru in a recent report.

Ryan sees a future for daily deals sites but believes there will be considerable consolidation in the industry. Groupon, despite its recent trouble, will likely hold onto its top spot but competitor LivingSocial may ultimately fold, Ryan predicts. Overall, mobile has been changing how consumers shop and traditional retailers are going to have to adapt to stay in the game.

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Congressional Gift Giving: No to Caviar But Yes to Campaign Contributions

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Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/mobile-devices-future-ecommerce-gilt-kevin-ryan-183228497.html

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Choosing To Retire To A Tucson Arizona ... - Home and Family

Selecting Tucson

If you have recently retired or taken a pension lump sum, deciding on an Arizona retirement community is easy. Arizona is pretty terrain with mountains, desert, and cityscapes to please anyone?s taste. Tucson is about 100 miles north of the Mexican border to the United States; it is just about encased by mountains and has warm mild winters. Many trees and cacti grow well in the Tucson Arizona area; the mountains give many hiking possibilities. There additionally are many cultural attractions including museums, theaters, and fine dining areas. Tucson also has a wide range of medical facilities and specialists in nearly every field.

Apartment Living

Some Arizona retirement communities are apartments. These apartments are especially designed with active people in mind. The clubhouses will probably have planned social events and hobby meet-ups. Most Arizona retirement communities are near golf, tennis, and other sporting locations so their residents can pursue their preferred sports. The residences are likely to have massive fully kitted out kitchens, spacious terraces and balconies, and vast floor plans. Many apartment communities for Arizona retirees have both one and two bedroom plans, average costs are between 1500 and 3000 dollars each month. Most Arizona retirement communities which are apartments will have parking for big automobiles such as recreational automobiles, boats, and camping trailers. Apartments are the best living situation for folk who have no need for a lot of room or that travel often and just need a place to call home for some time.

Living In A Retirement Housing Development

Some housing developments in Tucson are Arizona retirement communities. These communities will generally have a number of housing with a few central facilities like community centres, pools, golfing courses, and tennis courts for the residents to enjoy. The housing change in price and size but approximately start around 250,000 dollars. Living in a home rather than a loft is excellent for folks who are interested in living in Arizona all year. Furthermore selecting to get a home in an Arizona retirement community gives the owner freedom to enjoy hobbies like gardening, woodworking, or other garage and lawn friendly art forms which are easier to pursue in a home than a residence. Choosing to live in an Arizona retirement community is a good choice for people who like a lot of sun with out the risk of devastating typhoons, volcanic eruptions or tremors. A place with hot summer temperatures and mild short winters is ideal for most retirees to enjoy their silver and golden years.

This article is courtesy of adviser hub. We stress that prior to taking any early pension release or pension lump sum you need to undertake a full pension plan review with a professional pension adviser who can explain the potential effect on your revenue in retirement.


Related:

Spend It or Save It?Explores the policy question of whether allowing people access to their pension money when they change jobs enhances or diminishes their eventual reti... Read More >

Tags: pension lump sum, Pension plan, pension release

Source: http://homeandfamily.emilie.org/uncategorized/choosing-to-retire-to-a-tucson-arizona-retirement-community/

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Kenner Housing Authority, Jefferson Parish planning, more in ...

  • The Kenner Housing Authority missed its deadline to submit a recovery plan to the federal government, and Mayor Mike Yenni is exasperated. WVUE posted reports on the former and the latter.
  • Jefferson Parish's emergency management department is linking with a private analytics firm to assess the parish's vulnerability to natural disasters and minimize that risk. The Advocate has this story.
  • Convinced that the impending widening of the Huey P. Long Bridge will spark a residential and commercial boom in West Jefferson, parish officials are trying to guide that development. The Advocate takes a look.
  • Parish officials are begging the state highway department to fix the Harvey Tunnel. A story from WWL television is here.
  • Kenner's economic development committee meets Friday. See the agenda.
  • Two years later, the blog slabbed.org revisits the subject of mysterious text messages from Mike Yenni's phone. See this post.

Source: http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/12/jefferson_parish_politics_link_2.html

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Joe Allbritton, 87, DC media, banking giant, dies

(AP) ? Joe L. Allbritton, who became one of Washington's most influential men by building media and banking empires, has died at the age of 87.

Allbritton Communications president Frederick Ryan said Allbritton died Wednesday of heart ailments at a hospital in Houston, where he lived.

Allbritton's fortune was self-made, beginning with real estate trades and banking investments. By age 33, he was a millionaire.

His holdings include eight television stations, including WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington whose call letters bear his initials. He owned the Washington Star for several years and his son founded Politico.

He also owned Riggs Bank for more than 20 years, including its final years, which were mired in scandal.

He was a fixture on the D.C. social circuit and good friends with Prince Charles.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-12-12-Obit-Allbritton/id-247417f8f39f42d88d48cac08191a07d

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Peppermint pigs a smashing tradition in NY

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) ? A holiday tradition in this upstate New York resort town has a peppermint twist: pig-shaped hard candies are sold with little metal hammers to smash them at Christmas.

The peppermint pigs, which can weigh up to a pound, are considered good luck charms by some. Family members will take turns whacking the piggy tokens of holiday cheer into little candy shards.

"We do find that some people are a little taken aback: 'What's the whole idea of the pig and the hammer? What are you doing? And is someone insulting me by giving me a pig?'" said Mike Fitzgerald, owner of Saratoga Sweets, which makes the pigs that can be the size of a big bar of bath soap.

Fitzgerald has pigs on his brain this time of year. A small crew at his shop south of Saratoga Springs in Halfmoon makes the hard candy from dawn to dark in a shop distinguished by boiling red pots of candy and an overwhelming scent of peppermint. Fitzgerald is hurrying to fill thousands of pig orders around the country.

Why pigs?

It could be related to the marzipan pigs northern European confectioners make at holiday time as good luck symbols. Fitzgerald said it's possible chefs at the old hotels in Saratoga Springs in the late 19th century couldn't easily make marzipan, so they improvised with peppermint hard candy.

In the old days, the pig was placed on the Christmas dinner table. Father would wrap it in a napkin and crack it with the steel rod used to sharpen knives so the family could share the sweet-tasting bits, Fitzgerald said. But by the mid-20th century, the area holiday tradition went the way of lit candles on Christmas trees.

In 1988, Fitzgerald made a first run of 60 peppermint pigs at the request of the local historical society. He was surprised to see people lining up to buy them, many of them older people who fondly recalled smashing pigs when they were young. He sold out his run and never looked back.

"It's been a pig race ever since. This year we'll make about 130,000 pigs," he said.

As Fitzgerald spoke, workers stirred bubbling tea pots filled with a Pepto-pink mix of sugar and corn syrup. The candy mix is hand-poured into cast aluminum molds to make one of three pigs: Holly (3 ounces and 3 1/2-inches long), Noel (a half pound and 5 1/2 inches) or the big man, Clarence (1 pound and 6 inches).

The hardened pigs have a shiny, glassy quality other hard candies with a higher corn syrup content lack. A quick strike by Fitzgerald's hammer shattered a pig.

"It has to break like glass," Fitzgerald said with satisfaction.

It's not as though sales of candy canes ? more than 1.8 billion are made a year ? are being threatened. But the pigs are a popular item in gift stores in Saratoga Springs and other retailers, dressed in red velvet bags with a shiny, silver hammer. (Once you get the hammer, you can order a refill without one.)

"Thanksgiving sort of kicks it off and from here on in, it gets crazy," said Marianne Barker of Impressions of Saratoga.

And the pigs have extended beyond their upstate New York habitat through online sales and catalogs. In Georgia, Lynn Barlow bought a pig on a lark in 1997 and shared it with her family on Christmas. A good luck streak followed that included a raise for her husband, one son bagging the biggest buck of his life and another son's team winning a basketball tournament.

The White, Ga., resident said pigs have been passed around at the holiday table ever since, now with grandchildren taking a turn with the hammer.

"My husband hits it first," Barlow said, "and then the peppermint is hard, so we usually go around the table twice just because the kids enjoy doing it so much."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/peppermint-pigs-smashing-tradition-ny-073143226.html

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Apple television still in the labs, still not going to market any time soon

For a long time now we've heard Apple has television prototypes in the lab, but nothing even approaching a final design or go-to-market plan for the product. According to the Wall Street Journal, nothing has changed in that regard.

Two people said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., 2317.TW +0.63% which assembles the iPhone and iPad, has been collaborating with Japan's Sharp Corp. 6753.TO +7.80% on the design of the new television. "It isn't a formal project yet. It is still in the early stage of testing," said one of the people.

Jony Ive is almost certainly doing the design, though Hon Hai and Sharp are just as likely collaborating on the prototypes.

The late Steve Jobs famously said the go-to-market strategy for a television was even more difficult than a phone, with entrenched, regionalized monopoly cable companies and future-adverse content providers. The Apple TV set top box has often been called a "hobby" compared to the serious business of Apple's iPhone, iPod, iPad, and Mac product lines.

In a recent interview, Apple's CEO, Tim Cook escalated Apple's living room plans from hobby to "area of intense interest".

Making a television, or even a decoupled panel to along with a more easily upgradable brain box, would give Apple control of "input zero", or the initial startup and default user experience, and relegate everything from cable and satellite boxes to game consoles like the Xbox, to other media streamers like Roku to inputs further down the chain.

Yet panels remain a limited, low-margin business, and no matter how smart the brain or brain-box, and how good the user experience, it would be tough for Apple to disrupt even the current, pathetic status quo without compelling content offerings, including live events, news, sports, and the other living room staples.

My guess remains that we'll keep seeing the slow, steady evolution of the current Apple TV product for now, with more and more channel partners like Netflix and Hulu coming on line. Apple can be remarkably patient. If the goal is a unified interface to search across all content, find the program you want, and watch it when you want, that can be broken down into manageable steps. If they can't overcome the myopia of cable and content companies, they can outmaneuver it or simply outlast it.

Apple shareholders are anxious about the timing and nature of the company's plans. While iPhones and iPads are selling briskly, they believe television could be one of the next big catalysts for Apple's business as those products eventually peter out. Apple shares fell to $541.39 on Tuesday from all-time high of $702.10 in September amid concerns about the company's future profits and growth.

Apple has had 3 big products. It was decades between the Mac and iPod, and over a half a decade between the iPod and iPhone (and its iPad offshoot). Treating Apple like Hollywood or the video game industry, and expecting them to deliver blockbusters on a year basis is folly and will likely be rewarded as such.

It's normal for people to want the "next big thing" -- if and when Apple ships a television, Apple iCar rumors will probably spring up within weeks if not seconds -- but it's just as normal for Apple to follow a far saner, and more measured product strategy.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/2QnYVaV_HNY/story01.htm

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Mali prime minister resigns after arrest by soldiers

BAMAKO (Reuters) - Malian Prime Minister Cheick Modibo Diarra resigned on Tuesday, hours after he was arrested by soldiers while trying to leave the West African nation.

Diarra's arrest and subsequent resignation will complicate efforts to stabilise Mali, where soldiers and politicians remain divided since a coup in March and where the north of the country is occupied by al Qaeda-linked Islamist fighters.

"I, Cheick Modibo Diarra, hereby resign with my entire government on Tuesday, December 11, 2012," a nervous-looking Diarra said in a statement broadcast on state television early on Tuesday morning.

News of Diarra's resignation came hours after he was arrested as he tried to leave the country for France.

Bakary Mariko, a spokesman for the group of soldiers that seized power in a March coup and remains powerful despite officially handing power back to civilians in April, said Diarra had been arrested for not working fully to address the nation's problems.

"The country is in crisis but he was blocking the institutions," Mariko said. "This is not a coup. The president is still in place but the prime minister was no longer working in the interests of the country."

Mariko said Diarra had been taken to the ex-junta's headquarters in Kati, a military barracks town just outside Bamako, after his arrest.

Coup leader Captain Amadou Sanogo has been repeatedly accused of meddling in politics since he stepped down and was officially tasked with overseeing reforms of Mali's army.

Residents in Bamako said the town was quiet in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

There have been divisions for months between the former junta, interim President Diouncounda Traore and Diarra, a former NASA scientist and Microsoft chief for Africa.

Diarra was made prime minister in April after the military officially handed power back to civilians. As the son-in-law of Moussa Traore, a former Malian coup leader and president, he appeared to have good ties with the military.

However, tensions became particularly acute in recent weeks, with analysts saying Diarra, a relative newcomer to Malian politics after years abroad, seemed keen to establish a political base of his own ahead of any future elections.

West African leaders and Western nations have warned that Mali's north has become a safe haven for terrorism and organised crime, but they have struggled to draw up plans to help the country because of the deep divisions in the capital.

Some of Mali's politicians support the idea of a foreign-backed military operation to retake control of the north. Others, including much of the military, say they need only financial and logistical support and insist that Mali can carry out the operation itself.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mali-prime-minister-resigns-arrest-soldiers-062429465.html

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Aurora Movie Theater Shooting: Suspect's Lawyers To Subpoena Fox News Reporter Jana Winter

CENTENNIAL, Colo. -- Attorneys for the Colorado movie theater shooting suspect plan to subpoena a Fox News journalist who was the first to report that James Holmes sent his psychiatrist a notebook full of violent descriptions.

The attorneys made the statement toward the end of a court hearing Monday after nine different law enforcement officials denied being the ones to tell reporter Jana Winter about the notebook. The defense argues the disclosure was a violation of a gag order in the case and is seeking sanctions against the leaker.

After authorities seized a package from Holmes in the mailroom of the University of Colorado, Denver four days after the shooting, Winter reported that it contained a notebook with violent descriptions of a possible attack. Defense attorneys quickly complained that the leak must have come from law enforcement and demanded sanctions, though prosecutors said the report was inaccurate and there was no indication it came from anyone with knowledge of the case.

The defense's plans to subpoena Winter could set up a courtroom clash over reporters' ability to protect their sources from disclosure.

In a statement, Fox said the network had not received a subpoena and would evaluate it if one does arrive.

Holmes sent a package containing the notebook and burnt paper money to his psychiatrist shortly before allegedly opening fire on a midnight screening of the new Batman movie in July. Authorities haven't described the notebook's contents.

Aurora Police Det. Alton Reed testified Monday he thumbed through the notebook to see if any burnt currency remained inside but didn't stop to look at any of the pages and wasn't able to make out any writing.

"I just kind of fanned through it with my thumb," Reed said.

In court on Monday, they said they became aware of it only after Holmes' attorneys contacted his psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, and asked for it back. The package was then found, undelivered, in the university mail room.

Aurora Police Sgt. Matt Fyles testified Monday that his department and university police disagreed over which department had jurisdiction over the notebook.

Aurora police obtained a warrant hours after the notebook was found and took custody, but Fyles did not describe how the disagreement was settled. The notebook was later turned over to the court.

Holmes is charged with killing 12 people and wounding 70. A preliminary hearing to determine if there's enough evidence for Holmes to stand trial is scheduled for Jan. 7.

Earlier on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/aurora-movie-theater-shooting-reporter-subpoena_n_2274280.html

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