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Sunday, February 19, 2012
Suspect arrested in Capitol suicide attack plot (Reuters)
[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - An illegal immigrant from Morocco was arrested near the Capitol on Friday after an undercover investigation into an alleged plot to carry out a suicide attack on the national landmark that houses Congress, U.S. officials said.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Cosmonaut Stylus (for iPad)
Like a grownup crayon, the chunky Cosmonaut ($25) can help the shaky-handed navigate even tiny touch-screen elements on their iPads. While we prefer the Pogo Sketch Pro ($24.95, 4.5 stars) for nimbler fingers and the AppCrayon ($9.99, 4 stars) for little kids, we can see the Cosmonaut fitting firmly into the grasp of older iPad users.
Why use a stylus on your iPad? It gives you more precision when you're drawing or making handwritten notes, and it gets your finger out of the way. A stylus turns your tablet into a true sketchbook or notepad.
The Cosmonaut is the shortest of the four styli we tested at 4.5 inches, made of black rubber wrapped around a stainless-steel or wooden core. It feels very, very solid, and won't slip out of your hand. Studio Neat, the creators, say that it's similar to a dry-erase marker; that's selling the quality of the materials short, but the size comparison is right.?
The Cosmonaut's rubbery tip gripped the screen well, providing solid feedback, and it was especially good for clicking and dragging interface elements on the iPad.
Professional artist (and my wife)?Leontine Greenberg said she found the Cosmonaut's thickness made it a bit hard to hold and clumsy, but she typically paints with very small brushes. It might be a better pick for people with arthritis, carpal tunnel, or other disabilities, she noted. I'd add to the list older children turned off by the AppCrayon's very little-kid look.
If the Cosmonaut's chubby body appeals to you, it'll be a solid companion for your iPad.
More Accessory Reviews:
??? Crayola ColorStudio HD iMarker (for iPad)
??? Nomad Play (for iPad)
??? AppCrayon (for iPad)
??? Pogo Sketch Pro (for iPad)
??? Cosmonaut Stylus (for iPad)
?? more
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/t4rH1lhQDTU/0,2817,2400329,00.asp
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Knicks get lucky after other teams miss on Lin (AP)
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Friday, February 17, 2012
Why retail lease brawls are increasing: the Victorian Small Business ...
Thursday, 16 February 2012
The body charged with mediating disputes on retail leases in Victoria says ?financial tightness? among landlords and tenants is likely driving a surge in conflicts.
The state?s Small Business Commissioner Geoff Browne says the number of complaints about retail leasing conflicts soared to 611 in the six months to December last year, from 501 the previous corresponding period.
The complaints cut both ways: landlords are often chasing rent from tenants, and tenants are seeking the return of security for the lease.
Browne says data from the Office of the Victorian Small Business Commissioner suggests that there?s been growth in the number of landlords chasing tenants who may have closed up shop over the past 18 months or so.
?I?ve seen a number of disputes where tenants have walked away because the business is not generating sufficient revenues,? he says.
Another cause of dispute is appropriate rent increases, with valuers often sought by tenants who insist that the requested rate is too high for market conditions.
Browne says it?s imperative that tenants understand their obligations and?honour their contracts, even in difficult economic conditions.
Conversely, landlords need to ensure they disclose all relevant information to tenants.
?And in this current economic climate, they need to engage with tenants if there are signs of distress.?
?It?s usually better to have a tenant rather than a vacant shop.?
Brown says he?s also hearing a willingness from landlords to look at contractual terms.
The office started life in 2003, and typically sees 10% growth in complaints each year.
Its annual report, released in September last year, showed that retail leasing accounted for about 70% of the 1,553 matters it tackled through 2011.
Browne says the body has a mediation success rate of more than 80%. Under the Retail Leases Act, parties cannot go to VCAT without going to the Small Business Commissioner first.
The comments come as Westfield, Australia?s largest shopping centre, throws down the gauntlet at local retailers complaining about rents, tipping international retail behemoths would replace them.
Speaking after reporting that its Australian and New Zealand portfolio was more than 99.5% leased, Westfield co-CEO Peter Lowy ?stronger retailer internationally [are] coming in to replace? stores that close within its shopping centres.
Co-CEO Steven Lowy added he would be ?staggered? if popular international brands such as Japan?s Uniqlo, Abercrombie & Fitch, and H&M didn?t enter Australia by 2017.
http://www.smartcompany.com.au/retail/048245-why-retail-lease-brawls-are-increasing-the-victorian-small-business-commissioner.html?utm_source=SmartCompany&utm_campaign=54ac1c6b90-Thursday_16_February_201216_02_2012&utm_medium=email
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Natural gas wells leakier than believed
Measurements at Colorado site show methane release higher than previous estimates
Web edition : 11:09 am
Wells that pump natural gas from the ground in Colorado have leaked about twice as much gas into the atmosphere as previously thought, a new study finds.
That could tarnish gas?s image as clean source of energy. Natural gas, made mostly of methane, does give off less carbon dioxide than coal when burned. But methane itself strongly warms the atmosphere, which means even relatively small releases can have a big impact on the climate.
?We?re seeing raw natural gas in the atmosphere,? says Gabrielle P?tron, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado Boulder. Her team reports the new findings, based on data gathered in 2007 and 2008, in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
P?tron and her colleagues monitored air quality near Denver using a 300-meter tower. NOAA maintains a network of such towers across the country. This one lies southwest of the Denver-Julesburg Basin, an area that feeds more than 20,000 natural gas wells.?
When winds blew in from the basin, levels of methane detected by sensors on the tower spiked. Landfills, cattle feedlots and wastewater treatment plants probably belched some of the gas into the sky. But methane from gas wells was accompanied by other components that allowed it to be fingerprinted and separated out in the analysis.
These measurements suggested that about 4 percent of the methane in the gas wells was leaking. Previous studies by the Environmental Protection Agency and by industry groups pegged this loss at between 1 and 2 percent. But the earlier estimates were done by measuring leakages from individual pieces of equipment.
?You tend to underestimate things when you do that kind of bottom-up approach,? says Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist at Cornell University.
Last year, Howarth found higher-than-expected levels of methane being released from wells that extract gas from shale ? a process called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. His estimates, reported in 2011 in Climatic Change, suggested that extracting shale gas is substantially worse for climate change than mining coal.
P?tron hasn?t made this comparison. Her main concern, she says, is to work with the gas industry to keep methane out of the air.
Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance in Denver says gas wells in the area have already made some changes since the data used in the new study were collected that should cut down on leakage.
Found in: Environment
Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338505/title/Natural_gas_wells_leakier_than_believed
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Thursday, February 16, 2012
ITinvolve's New Cloud Service Aims to Transform IT Change ...
ITinvolve, based in Houston, Texas, announced today the introduction of a new cloud service that enables IT managers and staff to visualize, assess and understand the impact of changes made in complex IT environments before they are implemented. Called ITinvolve for Change Management?, this unique service directly addresses the challenges faced by system administrators and IT managers who are responsible for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of changes to complex IT systems every week.
?We developed ITinvolve for Change Management to address the single most consistent complaint we heard from companies---lack of insight into the potential impact of proposed changes across their IT environments, including physical infrastructure, applications, virtual infrastructure, policies, and compliance requirements," according to ITinvolve?s CEO, Logan Wray. ?CIOs to system administrators were concerned that unintended consequences from changes could cause poor performance or even an outage.?
ITinvolve for Change Management helps resolve these challenges by aligning the right information with the right people at the right time through an intuitive interface that gives IT professionals a better way to visualize relationships and quickly access key information when making changes.
?For the first time, IT managers and staff have visibility into the potential impacts of changes to other teams and Business Services during the planning phase knowing that they have the right, up-to-date information at their fingertips,? explained ITinvolve Chief Technology Officer Rob Reiner. ?Our solution proactively notifies and connects the right stakeholders so they can collaborate in a context of identified risks surrounding a proposed change,? he said. ?That means they can make change decisions more efficiently and effectively, and prevent incidents that are frequently associated with changes in today?s very complex IT environments."
The result is a dramatic improvement in the ability of IT staff to understand and assess the impact of changes before they are implemented which can substantially reduce the risks of unintended consequences or downtime. And if an incident does occur, mean time to repair (MTTR) can be significantly reduced as well.
As one of ITinvolve for Change Management?s customers, Jeff Pollard, Senior Business Strategist at software provider Jalasoft (www.jalasoft.com), confirmed its effectiveness for his organization.
?ITinvolve for Change Management makes our IT guys a lot smarter, much more productive and ensures we understand the impact of every change we make,? Pollard said. ?As an affordable online service, ITinvolve for Change Management is truly unique, provides significant value from day one and is a product I?d highly recommend to any IT executive who wants to dramatically improve change management.?
By making the change management process more efficient and productive, Pollard emphasized, ITinvolve for Change Management has helped to reduce the administrative burden on his IT staff by as much as 50 to 75 percent.
Developed and delivered on Force.com, the proven, secure and scalable cloud platform from Salesforce.com, ITinvolve for Change Management can be accessed via the Internet at any time, from any location, and is priced on a monthly fee-per-seat basis. To learn more about ITinvolve for Change Management and try it free, visit ITinvolve?s web site at www.ITinvolve.com.
ITinvolve was established in 2011 as an independent software-as-a-service provider with a veteran leadership team and funding from Austin Ventures.
Supporting Resources
Video - Jeff Pollard of Jalasoft http://itinvolve.com/customers/
Jalasoft customer story http://itinvolve.com/customers/jalasoft-corporation/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/itinvolve
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/itinvolve
ITinvolve Resources http://itinvolve.com/resources-events/
Article source - Business Wire, all right reserved. Copyright 2012
Trademarks, logos, pictures and other items may be copyright of firms mentioned in this article.
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Manufacturers providing outsize boost to economy
In this Feb. 13, 2012 photo, a workman welds a stainless steel tank at JV Northwest, in Camby, Ore. JV Northwest manufactures stainless steel vessels. U.S. factories boosted output last month and December ended up being their best month for growth in five years. Busier factories are helping drive the economy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
In this Feb. 13, 2012 photo, a workman welds a stainless steel tank at JV Northwest, in Camby, Ore. JV Northwest manufactures stainless steel vessels. U.S. factories boosted output last month and December ended up being their best month for growth in five years. Busier factories are helping drive the economy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
In this Feb. 13, 2012 photo, workman welds a tank at JV Northwest Monday, Feb.13, 2012, in Camby, Ore. JV Northwest manufactures stainless steel vessels. U.S. factories boosted output last month and December ended up being their best month for growth in five years. Busier factories are helping drive the economy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
In this Feb. 13, 2012 photo, a workman moves a section of a stainless steel tank at JV Northwest, in Camby, Ore. JV Northwest manufactures stainless steel vessels. U.S. factories boosted output last month and December ended up being their best month for growth in five years. Busier factories are helping drive the economy. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? American factories are humming ? and driving the economy forward.
Manufacturers have been hiring more consistently than other employers, for jobs with better-than-average pay. They just had their best month of growth in five years. And more factory output has raised demand in some other industries, such as shipping, leading to further hiring.
"The manufacturing sector is on a tear," said Paul Ashworth, an economist at Capital Economics.
It's an optimistic theme that serves President Barack Obama's political needs. On Wednesday, Obama traveled to Milwaukee to salute a company that brought jobs back to the United States. The president has promoted the nation's manufacturing base as an engine of growth and as evidence of a recovering economy.
No one thinks manufacturing will return to its 1950s peak. After all, the factory sector now makes up barely one-tenth of the economy.
But since the recession ended more than 2? years ago, factories have been contributing disproportionately to the recovery in hiring and the overall economy.
A big reason, economists say, is that individuals and businesses are making major purchases they delayed during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Consumers are buying more cars and appliances. Companies are investing in industrial machinery and computers.
The release of that pent-up demand gives manufacturing a kick that isn't visible in some other corners of the economy. Manufacturing was hit particularly hard by the recession. Consumers postponed purchases of cars, refrigerators and flat-screen TVs, even as they continued to visit doctors, get haircuts and pay utility bills.
"Manufacturing has punched above its weight, but that's because it was punched in the stomach in the recession," Michael Montgomery, a senior economist at IHS Global Insight, said.
Factory output got off to a robust start this year, and it ended last year with the fastest growth in five years, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday.
Those were the best back-to-back monthly performances since summer 2009, when the recession ended, according to Jonathan Basile, an economist at Credit Suisse.
Manufacturing is delivering an outsize benefit to the economy in key ways:
? JOBS:
About 9 percent of the nation's jobs are in manufacturing. But last year, factories added 13 percent of new jobs. And in January, about one-fifth of the 243,000 net jobs the economy created were in manufacturing.
Factory growth has also helped to increase hiring in other industries such as shipping, warehousing, department store sales and auto sales. Railroad operators such as Union Pacific have stepped up hiring as their shipments of cars, machinery and other equipment have climbed.
The hiring has boosted struggling Midwestern states such as Ohio and Michigan, which will likely be battleground states in the presidential election.
George Mokrzan, an economist at Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank, said those two states have added a greater percentage of jobs since the recession ended than the nation as a whole.
? WAGES:
Average hourly pay for factory workers making durable goods, such as autos, was $20.15 in January, according to the Labor Department. That's above the average of $19.37 for the broad service sector, meaning that each new manufacturing job, on average, fuels more consumer spending than does the equivalent new service-sector jobs.
The service sector, which employs roughly 90 percent of the private-sector workforce, includes everything from restaurants and hotels and retailers to financial service firms and construction companies.
? CONFIDENCE:
As Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl halftime ad for Chrysler ("Our second half is about to begin.") showed, Americans are thought to respond more emotionally to a rebound in manufacturing than in other sectors. The perception that American manufacturing is healthy again could boost confidence in the economy, some analysts say.
Jeffrey Bergstrand, a finance professor at Notre Dame University, calls it "factory nostalgia" but says that it is "economically legitimate."
"It reminds us of the period of the greatest growth we had in the U.S. economy," Bergstrand said. "It's also ... an association with the boom in the middle class, (when) they were all sharing in that economic boom."
Still, economists caution that expanding factories can do only so much to reduce unemployment. That's because factories have increasingly relied on automation and other advances to produce more goods with fewer people.
Many economists expect manufacturing to keep growing faster than the broader economy for the rest of the year. It's not clear how long that will continue.
"This is nothing more than the manufacturing sector recovering faster because it got hammered worse," Montgomery said.
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