More on Libya

Rania el-Gamal and Tim Gaynor have a Reuters article about Libya:

Snipers loyal to Muammar Qaddafi held back government forces trying to capture his hometown of Sirte, and the deposed leader warned the heads of the developing world who have recognized Libya's new rulers that they would face a similar fate to his own.
Hiding in a mosque and a building that was once Qaddafi's favorite venue for international summits, loyalists blocked the advance of government forces, making forecasts of a quick end to the battle for Sirte look premature. Thousands of civilians in the town are caught up in the fighting. Red Cross workers who were able to reach the town's hospital described patients sheltering from the gunfire in the corridors and a lack of staff to treat them. Taking Sirte is of huge symbolic importance to Libya's new rulers and, until it is captured, they are putting on hold plans to start rebuilding the oil-producing North African state.
Once a sleepy fishing town and Qaddafi's birthplace, Sirte was transformed by the former Libyan leader into the country's second capital. Parliament often sat in Sirte and summit meetings were staged in a marble-clad conference center in the south of the Mediterranean coastal city, from where fighters loyal to him fired on the attacking forces.
Commanders with the National Transitional Council (NTC) have predicted they will have Sirte, which has a population of 75,000, under their full control by the weekend. They pledged that units on Sirte's outskirts would be brought into the fight in a coordinated offensive.
An audio recording of Qaddafi obtained by Reuters from Syrian Arrai television was the first sign of life from him since 20 September, when the same station last aired a speech by him. "If the power of (international) fleets give legitimacy, then let the rulers in the Third World be ready," Qaddafi said in an apparent reference to NATO's support for NTC forces. "To those who recognize this council, be ready for the creation of transitional councils imposed by the power of fleets to replace you one by one from now on," said Qaddafi, who was in power for over forty years.
Qaddafi loyalists who pulled back to Sirte when they lost control of other cities are putting up fierce resistance. They have nowhere else to go."A lot of them are veterans, the hard-core fanatics. There's also mercenaries (and) people fiercely loyal to Qaddafi," said Matthew Van Dyke, an American who is fighting with the anti-Qaddafi forces. "They are not going to give up," said Van Dyke, who said he came to Libya seven months ago to visit friends, was arrested by Qaddafi forces, and joined the fighting on his release. "It's going to take a while. Because of the snipers, we are going to take a lot of casualties."Anti-Qaddafi fighters had advanced just over one kilometer into Sirte from the luxury hotel on the Mediterranean shore that had earlier marked the front line. They were hunkered down in a neighborhood of villas and five-storey residential blocks from where they were using machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades to try to take out loyalist sniper positions. They set up firing positions, fortified with sandbags, next to the apartment block windows. But they were drawing heavy fire: buildings were riddled with bullets and their balconies had been partially demolished by heavy-caliber rounds.
A Reuters reporter saw a rocket-propelled grenade crash into one of the apartment buildings with NTC fighters inside. It caused little damage because, by a fluke, it passed through a hole made earlier by another projectile.
Anti-Qaddafi fighters used binoculars to watch for muzzle flashes from loyalist sniper rifles. They said the snipers were positioned in the minaret of a nearby mosque and in the Ouagadougou conference hall. That is the building where Qaddafi, often decked out in elaborate traditional dress, would host summits of African and Arab heads of state.
An NTC defense spokesman quoted by al-Jazeera television said one of Muammar Qaddafi's sons, Mo'attassem, had left Sirte and fled south. NTC official have said Qaddafi is most likely deep in the south of Libya, in the Sahara desert.
The street-by-street fighting was taking place on the northeastern corner of Sirte while anti-Qaddafi forces on the western side of the city held back. Commanders there were bringing up tanks in preparation for what they said would be a coordinated assault on both fronts.
"There is high morale among our boys," Ali Abdullah Ismail, commander of the Zawiyat Al-Mahjoub brigade, told Reuters. "Today there will be no ground assault. It's tomorrow."
With the NTC focus on Sirte, Libya has been left in a political limbo. It has only a makeshift government and, in Tripoli, rival armed militias are jockeying for power.
An NTC spokesman said council chairman Mustafa Abdel Jalil would travel to Tripoli to handle the "delicate situation" in the capital.
The battle for Sirte has exacted a high cost for civilians. They have been trapped, with dwindling supplies of food and water and no proper medical facilities to treat the wounded.
Many of Sirte's residents are members of Qaddafi's own tribe. The NTC says there will be a place for them in the new Libya, but the fighting has caused hostility that it likely to hamper the new government's efforts to unite the country once the violence is over.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said its team evacuated three wounded from Sirte's Ibn Sina hospital, including a seriously injured nine-year-old girl. "Today there were only a few doctors left to treat war-wounded people in the Sirte hospital," Cordula Wolfisberg, a Red Cross doctor who visited the hospital, said in a statement. "The hospital is packed with civilians from the neighborhood, including many women and small children."
Hajj Abdullah, in his late fifties, was at a Red Cross post on the edge of Sirte where food was being handed out. "My eleven-year-old died from the NATO rockets and I buried him where he died" because it was too dangerous to go to the cemetery, he said. "There are random strikes in the city. People are dying in their houses." He said many civilians were unable to leave. "The ones who stayed behind are the poor and the weak."

Rico says it's always the poor and the weak who get the worst of any war...

Another bad one gone

The Los Angeles Times has an article about a righteous shooting in Sunnyvale, California:

Three Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies on routine patrol shot and killed the gunman alleged to have committed the Cupertino workplace shootings after spotting the armed suspect in a Sunnyvale neighborhood and attempting to make contact with him, authorities said.
"The three deputies on routine patrol are the ones who found him despite all of our efforts," said Sheriff Laurie Smith, referring to the massive manhunt launched for Shareef Allman, 47, after he allegedly fatally shot three co-workers and wounded several others at the Lehigh Permanente plant where they all were employed. The suspect was armed with a handgun, Smith said. “All three deputies fired at the suspect,” she said. “He did display, in a threatening manner, a firearm.”
The identity of the victim must still be confirmed by coroner's investigators, but the body matched the description of Allman, she said.
The deputies, two men and a woman whose identities were not revealed, were patrolling the area when one of them noticed some suspicious movement in the neighborhood and they got out of their vehicles, Smith said. "The subject crouched down behind a vehicle," she said. "Deputies attempted to make contact with the suspect. The suspect was armed. All three deputies fired shots. The subject was pronounced dead at scene."
It is unclear how the suspect managed to elude officers or where he had been hiding since the shootings at the plant, Smith said. The motive for the shootings is still unknown, she said.

Rico says he doubts Miranda was mentioned...

Not here, not yet

Rico says some people just say it better than he can, and Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch is one of them:

Consider this: Muslims have no qualms proudly declaring the particulars of their religion for all and sundry to hear, no matter how absurd it may sound, or how it reflects on them or Islam. Thus talk about the legitimacy of adult “breast feeding,” paedophilia as marriage, insistence that the Earth is flat, commands not to yawn (lest Satan should fly down one’s throat), the salutary effects of drinking urine, the need to execute the “infidel” Mickey Mouse, and any number of other oddities and perversities are regularly evoked by Islam’s sheikhs and clerics throughout the Muslim world.
There is, of course, one caveat: whenever Islam is vulnerable vis-à-vis the international infidel, as it is today, caution is called for regarding the declaration of those things that might backfire, things that might make Islam look like a threat— things that might incline other civilizations to go on a preemptive offensive, while they have the advantage.
Jihad is a perfect example. Despite the fact that “holy war” to conquer infidel territories and spread Islamic hegemony is an ironclad aspect of the religion— an integral part of its history, its doctrines, its very being— Muslims are careful not to evoke it around infidels.
Even Islamist organizations, including al-Qaeda, while regularly pontificating to fellow Muslims about how Islam demands the subjugation of non-Muslims— simply because they are infidels— always back-peddle when communicating with the West, opting instead to use language and paradigms that comport with Western sensibilities. It is in this manner that many in the West have come to believe Islam’s nonstop aggression around the globe is a byproduct of “grievances”, of “Zionism”, of U.S. “foreign policy”, of anything and everything that is not Islam.

The Alaskan broad is out, too

Rico says that Sarah Palin has announced that she, like Chris Christie, is not running for president this time around; she did, however, take a lucrative position on Fox News... (Nice tits, though.)

History for the day

On 6 October 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was shot to death by Islamic militants while reviewing a military parade.


Rico says that, unfortunately never able to resist a good pun, he's always been compelled to say: Yasser, Sadat's my baby...

Great name, but a little far

Rico says that even he is surprised sometimes by the reach of the Internet, but he's even more surprised by the location of Restaurante Dos Lobos (the Two-Wolf Restaurant) after he got this grand-opening invitation:

I would like to invite you to the opening of my new restaurant, Restaurante Dos Lobos.
Location: 7128 Rosson Lane, Suite 12B (Behind the Palenque Grill and La Quinta).
Hours of Operation: Monday-Wednesday: 11:00am-3:00pm (lunch) & 5:00pm-10:00pm (dinner)
Thursday-Saturday: 11:00am-3:00pm (lunch) & 5:00pm-11:00pm (dinner)
Sunday Brunch: 10:00am - 3:00pm (beginning October 16, 2011)
Phone: 956.729.1982
Email: doslobosrestaurante@yahoo.com
Come and experience Border Fusion in an atmosphere unlike any other in Laredo, that will take you on a journey to Old Mexico.
If you have any questions, you can contact me personally at 956.220.7879.
Eat, Drink, and Live Life to its Fullest!
Peace to all,
Chano

Rico says that would be Laredo in Texas (a mere 1,800 miles away)... Next time you're in town, drop in, say hi to Señor Aldrete, the owner, and send Rico a review.

If Romney's a liberal, what's Obama?

Rico says his somewhat (understatement of the year) conservative friend Mild Bill sends along this: 

Shocker of the year

Rico says that The New York Times has the story, but the headline is hard enough to read: Steven P. Jobs, Co-Founder of Apple, Dies. Here's the rest:

Steven P. Jobs (at left in photo), the visionary co-founder and former chief executive of Apple, has died at 56.
Apple said in a press release that it was “deeply saddened” to announce that Jobs had passed away. “Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” the company said. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.
Jobs stepped down from the chief executive role in late August, saying he could no longer fulfill his duties, and became chairman. He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, and received a liver transplant in 2009.
Rarely has a major company and industry been so dominated by a single individual, and so successful. His influence went far beyond the iconic personal computers that were Apple’s principal product for its first twenty years. In the last decade, Apple has redefined the music business through the iPod, the cellphone business through the iPhone, and the entertainment and media world through the iPad. Again and again, Jobs gambled that he knew what the customer would want, and again and again he was right.
The early years of Apple long ago passed into legend: the two young hippie-ish founders, Jobs and Steve Wozniak (at right in photo); the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in 1984, which stretched the boundaries of what these devices could do; Jobs’s abrupt exit the next year in a power struggle. But it was his return to Apple in 1996 that started a winning streak that raised the company from the near dead to its current position. This summer, Apple briefly exceeded Exxon Mobil as the most valuable United States company.
Bill Gates, the former chief executive of Microsoft, said in a statement that he was “truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death.” He added: “The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.”

Rico says he knew it would happen eventually, but it's still a shock... (That asshole in the middle of the photo? John Sculley, who was Steve's worst-ever acquisition.)

Lording it over the rest of us

Rico says that sometimes, when you least expect it, you stumble across a website you'd never have imagined:

Launched in early 2008, Lords of the Blog encourages dialogue between the public and Members of the House of Lords. This is where Members of the Lords write blogs on their specialist areas, and talk about life and work in the House of Lords. We have a growing number of regular contributors as well as guest appearances from other Peers.
All the authors welcome your comments and will try and respond, please remember to keep comments on topic (read our terms and conditions if you are unsure).
Opinions expressed by the authors/bloggers are their own and don't represent those of the House of Lords, its administration, or other Members (including parties and other groups of Members).
This site is managed by the Hansard Society, the UK's leading political education and research charity, as part of its commitment to Parliamentary democracy.

Joke for the day

Rico says his father sends along this one:

A blonde is on board a small two-seater airplane, when suddenly the pilot has a heart attack. Not knowing how to fly a plane, she grabs the radio: Mayday, mayday! My pilot just died!
Having received her call for help, Ground Control answered: Don't worry, madam. I'll talk you down, just do as I say. First, I need you to give me your height and position.
The blonde keys the mike and says: I'm 5"2' and sitting in the right front seat.
After a pause, Ground Control responded: Repeat after me: Our Father, who art in Heaven...

Begorrah

Suzanne Daley has an article in The New York Times about discrimination in an unlikely place:

When Britain decided last December to impose a steep increase in university tuition, Scotland, proud and independent as usual, flatly rejected the idea. Instead, it held firm to its long tradition of virtually free university education.
For Scots, that is.
Government officials here soon decided that they were at liberty to charge more to students from the rest of Britain; quite a bit more. Starting next September, those students are to pay the same tuition as the new rates going into effect in England, up to $14,000 a year.
The move has incited outrage south of the border, where heading to the blustery campuses of Edinburgh and St. Andrews has been an appealing option for generations of English students, including Prince William and his wife.
“If it is not illegal, then it is immoral,” Baroness Ruth Deech, a lawyer and academic, fumed on Lords of the Blog, a website for members of the House of Lords.
An editorial in The Daily Telegraph complained that the Scottish treatment of other British students was an “injustice” and “especially galling” since all British taxpayers contribute to Scotland’s treasury. “After all,” it asked, “if Scotland was independent, and relied solely on its own taxes, would it be able to continue a policy that is no longer affordable south of the border?”
The sting was sharpened by the fact that, under European Union law, Scotland cannot charge students from other European Union countries more than it charges its own.
So, next year, students from France, Denmark, and Greece will be offered a free education in Scotland, even as those from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland will have to pay as much as $56,000 for a four-year degree.
The plan is likely to be challenged in both British and European courts, where the cases will be closely watched both for what they say about the relationship between the parts of the United Kingdom and for the measures that European countries can take in these lean times.
Generally, the European courts try to stay out of nations’ internal matters, and they may see this case in that light. But some experts say they may be willing to recognize students from England, Wales, and Northern Ireland as European Union students, entitled to the same benefits as Bulgarian or Finnish ones when it comes to tuition.
“It’s a genuinely intriguing question,” said Niamh Nic Shuibhne, a professor of European Union law at the University of Edinburgh.
One prominent human rights lawyer in England, Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers, has promised to challenge the Scottish policy in court. In Northern Ireland, Jim Duffy, also with Public Interest Lawyers, is preparing a similar case. “This cannot be right,” Duffy said. “If you are from Bucharest, it’s free. But if you live just over the border in Carlisle, it could cost 36,000 pounds. That cannot be right.”
The decision to raise tuition in Britain, from about $5,600 a year, was greeted in December with a wave of violent protests in which demonstrators attacked government buildings and battled the police on the streets of London for days, at one point surrounding Prince Charles and his wife as they headed to the theater in their Rolls-Royce limousine.
Education experts say the increase in Britain pushed its university system much closer to the American model, where education is seen as an individual benefit that should be paid for.
But Scotland is trying to adhere to a different principle, more aligned with the rest of Europe: that education is a public good, like highways or bridges, and is worthy of public investment. Still, virtually free education may be hard to sustain in the coming years, experts say, in part because more and more European students are seeking university degrees.
“In Europe, a university education is broadly seen as part of the social contract,” said Ellen Hazelkorn, an expert on higher education in Europe at the Dublin Institute of Technology. “But when you start approaching fifty percent participation, how do you fund that from the public purse?”
Scottish officials say the decision to raise rates for non-Scots was borne of necessity, not spite. Officials feared a flood of bargain-seeking English students pushing Scots out of their own universities. Admissions are blind to country of origin. The fee increase will also help offset the expense of educating non-Scots, now that Westminster has cut back its financing for higher education.
For now, Scottish officials are brushing off threats of lawsuits, saying they believe they are on solid legal ground. “They won’t happen,” said Michael Russell, Scotland’s education minister. In fact, Russell said he was looking into ways to charge higher fees to the eleven thousand European students who study in Scotland, though he has had little success so far in his discussions with European Union officials.
There have been skirmishes over the European Union education regulations before. When Belgium found its medical schools overwhelmed by French students looking for a bargain, it fought back in court, arguing that it was not able to train enough Belgian doctors. It won the right to limit the number of foreign students.
Whatever the eventual outcome here, officials at Scottish universities say the new tuition structure has turned this admission season into an uncomfortable guessing game. Stephen Magee, a vice principal at the University of St. Andrews, where about one-third of the students are from England, said he found the situation “utterly bizarre". He wondered whether more English students would decide to stay home, where a three-year degree, the norm in England, would end up costing less than a four-year Scottish degree. Will only the wealthy come north, tipping the balance of student life here? “It is almost impossible to model this thing,” Magee said.
St. Andrews has come up with a complicated system of financial support to mitigate the cost for English students who cannot afford the new tuition. Students who are already enrolled in Scottish universities this year will not have to pay the higher fees as long as they remain enrolled. Non-European students will continue to pay the highest fees of all, about $20,000 a year.
But even Scottish students, many of whom rode buses to England last December to protest the tuition increase there, are unhappy with Scotland’s two-tier solution. “It may be understandable,” said Matt McPherson, 23, the student body president at the University of Edinburgh. “But it is unfair.”

Rico says fuck the Brits, let 'em pay; they've been screwing the Scots for centuries...

Banning it doesn't help

Emily Owens, an assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell, has a column in The New York Times about Prohibition, then and now:

Proponents of legalizing drugs offer many arguments in their favor, but perhaps the most ubiquitous, and most readily accepted, is that illegal markets drive up the murder rate. For proof, they say, just look at the 1920s: as television shows like HBO’s Boardwalk Empire and Ken Burns’ new documentary on Prohibition seem to attest, the nationwide ban on liquor sales led to an explosion of criminal violence. Surely the same is true today regarding illegal drugs.
The legendary lawlessness of Prohibition makes for great entertainment. And it may be true that some specific crimes, like gang violence, did increase. But the conclusion that it caused a huge increase in the homicide rate is almost certainly wrong. At first glance, the numbers do seem to support the conventional wisdom. According to Census mortality statistics, the national homicide rate jumped forty percent under Prohibition; after it was repealed in 1933, murder rates plummeted. It’s only natural to conclude that criminalizing the market for alcohol caused a huge increase in crime. But there are three major holes in this conclusion. For one thing, the Census data on homicides is not actually from a complete census. In 1900, the Census counted deaths only in New England, Indiana, and Michigan. New states were added almost every year until 1931. The states that were added later, like Nevada and Texas, tended to have higher homicide rates than states added earlier. In other words, part of that forty percent increase in the “national” rate is due to the inclusion of more violent states in the statistics, not an actual increase in murders.
Furthermore, Prohibition wasn’t a sudden thing. The 1919 passage of the Eighteenth Amendment culminated a seventy-year movement that had gradually shut down liquor sales nationwide. By the time the federal government got involved, it was already illegal to sell alcohol in 32 states, home to roughly a quarter of the population covered by the Census. Nor did repeal make all states go “wet”: it remained illegal to buy or sell alcohol in some states for years and Mississippi did not legalize it until 1966.
This sets up a convenient comparison: if illegal markets really do drive crime, we would expect homicide rates to increase earlier in states with early dry laws, and decrease later in states that stayed “wet”. And yet when we compare state homicide rates in “dry” and “wet” years, the forty percent jump in homicide rates drops to 26 percent.
Even that 26 percent is suspect. Perhaps the most important hole in the conventional wisdom is that it overlooks the social context of Prohibition. The early twentieth century was a time of unprecedented urbanization. Americans, especially black Southerners, were moving into cities at the same time as immigrants from Europe and China. Then, less than a decade into Prohibition, the Great Depression plunged us into poverty. Such upheaval alone could have turned city streets into war zones.
Standard statistical analysis allows us to disentangle the impact of dry laws from changes in urbanization, immigration, race, and age distribution, and even the ameliorating effect of the New Deal. The hard data do not show a strong relationship between criminalizing the market for alcohol and homicide rates once these other factors are taken into account. In fact, depending on the model, the actual effect of going dry ranges from a five percent increase to a thirteen percent decrease in state homicide rates, with margins of error of four percentage points.
How could dry laws have reduced crime? By making alcohol harder to come by, dry laws most likely reduced drinking. And researchers almost all agree that alcohol is associated with high levels of psychopharmacological violence; that is, conflicts that escalate because one or more parties are intoxicated.
Of course, the news media presented a drastically different picture. Gang shootouts made for compelling headlines, and these might have increased when states went dry. But this wasn’t enough to outweigh a reduction in more mundane, alcohol-fueled violence.
The best policies seemed to be lenient dry laws, which, before federal Prohibition, allowed very limited access to legal alcohol markets by, for example, letting consumers import alcohol from a wet state. That reduced psychopharmacological violence, but it also reduced the need for illegal markets. In such states, homicide rates were about ten percent lower than one would expect, based on the other social changes taking place.
There may be other reasons to legalize drugs. But when put to the test of modern policy analysis, the American experience of alcohol prohibition provides no compelling evidence that legalizing modern drug markets would reduce violent crime.

Rico says the violence in the drug trade has more to do with money than drugs...

As if...

Nick Wingfield and Jenna Wortham have an article in The New York Times about the competition, such as it is, for the iPhone:

As soon as Apple unveiled its highly anticipated new version of the iPhone, millions of people started plotting how to be among the first to buy it. But millions more may be considering a competitor: an Android phone.
Despite all the hoopla surrounding the Apple announcement, more people buy smartphones running Google’s Android operating system than buy Apple phones. Android’s share of new smartphone sales is now more than double Apple’s share, a striking change from a year ago, when the two were roughly even, and a reflection of how Android phones have improved and become more broadly available.
In this altered competitive landscape, any new phone from Apple will have to stack up favorably against the most popular Android phones. Even app developers, many of whom once devoted all their energy to building for the iPhone, now have more divided loyalties.
“The more the Android platform matures, the more it becomes a real competitor,” said Mike Novak, an Android engineer at GroupMe, a group messaging service that has over a million users. “It’d be foolish not to support both Apple and Android.”
Yet Apple, by many measures, still remains the smartphone player to beat, with better profits from the business, huge influence among mobile app makers, and innovations that rivals scramble to copy.
Apple is expected to introduce a new iPhone with a variety of slick new features, but the product could also get a lift from an old-fashioned distribution deal: Apple has struck a deal with Sprint Nextel to offer the new iPhone to its customers. The agreement could help blunt some of the distribution advantages that have helped propel Google’s Android into more and more smartphones. Until now, Apple phones have been available in the United States only via AT&T and Verizon.
Apple also faces another big challenge in releasing a new iPhone: it has to top itself. It must show it can still deliver enough of the cutting-edge features that have made the company a trend-setter.
“They set the bar,” said Phil Libin, the chief executive of Evernote, a start-up that makes a mobile note-taking app, who said he had no knowledge of Apple’s new phone. “Android and other devices have had to catch up.”
Analysts widely expect the new iPhone to include a faster microprocessor for running applications at a greater speed, along with a more powerful camera. Some have speculated that Apple might finally include big improvements in the voice recognition capabilities of the new phone using technology the company acquired when it bought Siri, a start-up, last year. Some have also speculated that Apple might introduce more than one phone, including one with fewer new features that could sell for $99 with a carrier contract. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment before the event, which took place at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.
In the second quarter, handsets running the Android system accounted for 43.4 percent of worldwide smartphone sales, compared with 18.2 percent for Apple, according to the research firm Gartner. During the same period last year, the two companies were roughly neck-in-neck, with Android and Apple holding 17.2 percent and 14.1 percent of the market, respectively. For both companies, growth in market share has come at the expense of technology laggards like Symbian, the mobile software backed by Nokia, and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, rather than each other.
Despite its smaller share of the market, Apple earns outsize profits. Thanks to its comparatively healthy profit margins, Apple had about half of the operating profits in the mobile handset business in the first quarter of the year, even though its sales accounted for only five percent of the phones sold, according to a recent report by the analyst Michael Walkley of Canaccord Genuity.
Apple could get a boost from its new relationship with Sprint, which may have a card up its sleeve to lure customers: its unlimited mobile data plan. That plan allows cellphone users to gorge themselves on streaming media services like Spotify and Netflix, without worrying about accidentally going over their monthly allotment. AT&T and Verizon both have monthly limits on the data its iPhone customers can consume. A Sprint spokesperson declined to comment.
Android’s surge in the market means app developers are splitting more of their time between the competing phone systems. Novak, the engineer at GroupMe, who also helps organize a monthly gathering in New York City for Android developers, said Apple would need to impress developers, as it did with the iPhone 4, if the company hoped to persuade them to stay committed to the iPhone. “It really comes down to the wow factor,” Novak said. “Without that, it leaves the door wide open for whatever announcements Google plans to make.”
Adam Goldstein, a founder of a flight search engine called Hipmunk, said the company decided to release a version of its mobile application for Android earlier this month, after watching the popularity of the platform grow. “We definitely did the iPhone first,” he said. “But requests kept coming in from the Android side.” Goldstein said the company was dividing its programming resources equally between Android and Apple phones.

Rico says that 'innovations that rivals scramble to copy' sums up the whole Apple experience; smart people in Cupertino invent it, and everybody else copies it... (And, no, he's not buying an Android POS, either.)

Lower life forms, like people you know

Carl Zimmer has an article in The New York Times about slime molds:

Most of the aliens that come out of Hollywood don’t really look alien at all. They may have pizza-size eyes or roachlike antennae, but their oddities are draped on a familiar humanoid frame. If you want to find life forms that truly seem otherworldly, however, your local forest is a much better place than your local cineplex. It is home to creatures that are immensely old, fundamentally bizarre, and capable of startlingly sophisticated behavior. They are the slime molds.
Slime molds are a remarkable lineage of amoebas that live in soil. While they spend part of their life as ordinary single-celled creatures, they sometimes grow into truly alien forms. Some species gather by the thousands to form multicellular bodies that can crawl. Others develop into gigantic, pulsating networks of protoplasm.
While naturalists have known of slime molds for centuries, only now are scientists really starting to understand them. Lab experiments are revealing the complex choreography of signals in some species that allows twenty thousand individuals to form a single sluglike body.
The pulsating networks that some slime molds form are giving other scientists clues to solving difficult mathematical problems. In 2000, Japanese researchers placed Physarum polycephalum (the name means “many-headed slime mold”) in a maze, along with two blocks of food. It extended its tendrils down the corridors of the maze, bending around curves, reaching dead ends and then backing out of them. After four hours, the slime mold was feasting on both blocks of food.
Andrew Adamatzky, a researcher at the University of West England, has been watching slime molds since 2006, finding inspirations in their growth for designing computer software. He has made electronic music using molds, and a favorite hobby is challenging them to build highway systems. In 2010 he and his colleagues placed a slime mold in the middle of a map of Spain and Portugal, with pieces of food on the largest cities. The slime mold grew a network of tentacles that was nearly identical to the actual highway system on the Iberian Peninsula. “If some countries started to build highways from scratch, I would recommend to them to follow the slime mold routes,” Dr. Adamatzky said.
Despite their name, slime molds are not related to bread mold or the black mold that grows in damp houses. They belong to a separate lineage that evolved from ordinary soil amoebas. By analyzing the DNA of different slime mold species, researchers are reconstructing their evolutionary history, which turns out to reach back about a billion years. Since all known slime molds live on land, that suggests that they were early pioneers, arriving hundreds of millions of years before animals or plants.
“They may be as old as the terrestrial ecosystem,” said Sandra Baldauf, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden.
Slime molds first came to scientific fame in the mid-twentieth century, with the work of the Princeton biologist John Tyler Bonner, who learned of a North American species of slug-forming slime mold called Dictyostelium discoides and began to raise them in his lab, studying them as a simple analog of animal embryos.
Today, biologists no longer think of Dictyostelium as an embryo: it is more like a society of amoebas that come together for a common cause, for which some will sacrifice themselves. The organisms respond to starvation by rushing together by the thousands into a single blob. The blob stretches out into a slug-shaped mass about one millimeter long (one twenty-fifth of an inch), which then crawls like a worm toward light. Once it reaches the surface of the soil, the slug undergoes another transformation: Some of the cells turn into a stiff stalk, while the others crawl to the top and form a sticky ball of spores. They stick to the foot of an animal and travel to a hospitable place.
Inside the slug, about one percent of the amoebas turn into police. They crawl through the slug in search of infectious bacteria. When the amoebas find a pathogen, they devour it. These sentinels then drop away from the slug, taking the pathogen with it. They then die of the infection, while the slug remains healthy. When the slug is ready to make a stalk, more amoebas must die so that others can live. They climb on top of one another and transform their insides into bundles of cellulose. Twenty percent of Dictyostelium cells die this way, allowing the survivors to climb up their lifeless bodies and become spores.
David Queller and Joan Strassmann, a husband-and-wife team of Dictyostelium experts at Washington University in St. Louis, have found that some strains of the slime mold are natural-born cheats. If they are mixed with other strains, they are more likely to end up as spores than as dead stalk cells. “Clearly this is not just a weird thing,” Dr. Queller said. “Those mutations happen all the time.”
Research by Dr. Queller and Dr. Strassmann has revealed some reasons the slime-mold world has not been overwhelmed by these cheats. For one thing, most of the amoebas that form a slug are closely related to one another. “They’re helping relatives,” Dr. Strassmann said. Even if the slime molds die to form a stalk, many of their genes are passed on to the next generation through their kin.
To help relatives, Dictyostelium needs a way to recognize them. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston recently figured out part of the way the slime molds tell kin from strangers. The amoebas make a pair of proteins on the surface of their cells, which fit snugly together like “patches of Velcro,” as one researcher, Gad Shaulsky, put it. Dr. Shaulsky and his colleagues reported that, if these proteins cannot link to each other, amoebas cannot fuse. “They completely ignore each other,” said Adam Kuspa, another Baylor biologist.
Dictyostelium belongs to one of the two great branches of slime molds. Its branch is known as the cellular slime molds, because its spore and stalk are made out of many cells. By contrast, the so-called acellular slime molds do not form slugs. Instead, two cells merge, combining their DNA into a new single-celled organism that just keeps growing, extending tentacles that can extend as far as several yards. It pulsates to pump food from its extremities to its core, and it can even crawl to search for food. “You see one on a log, and then you come back a few hours later and it’s gone,” said Steven L. Stephenson, a slime mold expert at the University of Arkansas.
Eventually, acellular slime molds also make spores. They produce tens of thousands of stalks, and the spores that cap them blow away in the wind. Dr. Adamatzky, the researcher who watched acellular molds form highwaylike patterns, has also used them to simulate a nuclear disaster. He and his colleagues grew a slime mold network of highways for Canada, then placed a crystal of sea salt— which repels slime molds— on the map where the Bruce nuclear power plant is located, on Lake Huron in Ontario. The slime mold abandoned its tendrils near the salt and then grew a new highway pattern that efficiently rerouted food across Canada. “Reactions to spreading contamination may shed some light what would happen if real disasters occur,” Dr. Adamatzky said.
Building networks sometimes requires tough decisions from slime molds. At the University of New South Wales in Australia, Madeleine Beekman and her colleagues recently documented the decision-making of slime molds by presenting Physarum with two different kinds of food: either rich in protein, or rich in carbohydrates. The slime molds grew tendrils to both foods, but adjusted their sizes to get the best balance of protein and carbohydrates that allowed them to grow fastest. In another experiment, Dr. Beekman and her colleagues made the choice harder by putting food under bright lights, which Physarum tries to avoid. In the first trial, the scientists offered the slime mold food chunks that contained three percent oat flakes in the dark, and five percent oat flakes in bright light. The mold was just as likely to ooze toward either kind of food. But when the scientists added a one percent chunk to the dark area, that was enough to tip the balance: Even though there was still not as much oat in the dark, eighty percent of the mold now oozed in that direction.
This might seem an irrational switch, but it is one that humans make as well. Psychologists have found that the value we put on things depends greatly on the other things we can choose from. Humans and slime molds alike choose according to relative values, rather than trying to calculate absolute ones. Scientists know a lot about the two lab-friendly species Physarum and Dictyostelium, but they still know very little about the many other slime molds on earth. In 2003, Dr. Stephenson and other slime mold experts embarked on a worldwide expedition to get a better understanding of the global diversity of these creatures.
The Global Eumycetozoan Project, based at the University of Arkansas, has doubled the known species of slime molds. Biologists have found slime molds in Antarctica, in barren deserts, high in the canopies of jungles, and even on the leaves of household plants. “Every place people have looked for them, they’re there,” Dr. Stephenson said.
Slime molds are also present in huge numbers: There may be thousands of individual slime molds in a pinch of soil. Their collective hunger makes them a powerful ecological player. When plants and animals die, microbes break them down; slime molds then devour many of the bacteria, releasing their nutrients for other organisms to grow on. “If you removed those slime molds, the earth’s ecosystems would be very different,” Dr. Stephenson said.
As scientists sequence the DNA of new species, they can finally start to figure out how slime molds evolved; genetic studies have confirmed, for example, that the two main groups of slime molds are each other’s closest relatives.
Other studies have shown that the slime mold lineage is immensely old. In a paper to be published in the journal Genome Research, British and German scientists estimate that the cellular slime molds evolved six hundred million years ago. Preliminary studies suggest that the common ancestor of all living slime molds is much older than that. If slime molds arrived on land close to a billion years ago, they may well have colonized continents that were home only to films of bacteria. “They might be tightly linked to the development of soil on land,” said Dr. Baldauf, the Swedish biologist, who is analyzing the DNA of species discovered in the Eumycetozoan Project.
The traits that slime molds share in common, like making spores, may have first evolved as they came ashore. The ancestors of Dictyostelium may have evolved the ability to form slugs and stalks to get those spores out of the ground, so that they’d have a better chance to spread. The giant acellular slime molds chose a different strategy, spreading their bodies across huge areas, and making spores across their entire surface.
Finding new species of slime molds will let scientists test these possibilities, Dr. Baldauf said. While she is impressed with all the species Dr. Stephenson and his colleagues have found, she is sure there are many more waiting to be discovered. “I think it’s the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “They go to some incredible place like a mountain in Patagonia, and they take a tiny soil sample and bring it back. But who knows what’s a foot away?”

Rico says he knows people who haven't evolved much farther...

The Italian quake aftermath

Henry Fountain has an article in The New York Times about the recent quake in Italy:

The manslaughter trial of six seismologists and a government official in the central Italian city of L’Aquila, stemming from what the authorities say was a failure to warn the population before a deadly 2009 earthquake, has outraged many scientists. Thousands have signed petitions protesting the prosecution as anti-science. But the trial, which resumed recently, has also focused attention on a vexing problem in earthquake-prone regions around the world: how to effectively communicate the risk of potential disaster. Whatever the merits of the L’Aquila case, scientists and government officials have difficulty conveying what they know about the risk of earthquakes in ways that help prepare the public without sowing panic. “People are expecting much more information, in particular quantitative information,” said Thomas H. Jordan, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. “Coming clean with what you know is being demanded by the public.”
Earthquakes differ from other types of natural disasters. Meteorologists can track a hurricane with precision, but seismologists cannot predict exactly when and where an earthquake will occur. Scientists have condemned the Italian prosecution for this reason, saying the defendants are on trial for failing to do something that is impossible.
What seismologists are increasingly able to do, however, is forecast the likelihood that a quake will occur in a certain area over a certain time. Statistical analysis shows, for example, that some seismic activity— a minor quake or a swarm of very small ones— increases the probability of a larger, destructive earthquake in the same area. But the probabilities are still very small, and they become even smaller with time. Given a low-probability forecast of an event that has potentially high consequences, the problem, Dr. Jordan said, becomes “what the heck do you do with that kind of information?”
That was a question that the Italian defendants faced. In the months before a magnitude 6.3 quake hit L’Aquila on 6 April 2009, killing more than three hundred, the area had experienced an earthquake swarm. That probably increased the likelihood of a major earthquake in the near future by a factor of one hundred or a thousand, Dr. Jordan said, but the probability still remained very low, perhaps one in a thousand.
But there was a wild card in L’Aquila that complicated the situation. As the earthquake swarm continued over several months, a local man, who is not a scientist, issued several predictions of a large earthquake— specific as to date and location— based on measurements of radon, a radioactive gas that is released as rocks fracture.
The predictions, none of which proved accurate, increased public anxiety in the city— so much so that the Italian government convened a meeting of a national risk-forecasting commission, including the seismologists and the government official, in L’Aquila on 30 March.
At the meeting, the seismologists noted that it was possible, though unlikely, that the seismic activity could be a sign that a larger quake was imminent. They also noted that there was always some risk in L’Aquila, which has a history of earthquakes. But, in a news conference afterward, the message to the public became garbled, with the government official assuring that there was no danger.
“The government ended up looking like it was saying, ‘No, there’s not going to be a big earthquake,’” when the scientists had not precluded the possibility, said Dr. Jordan, who was the chairman of a commission established by the Italian government after the quake to look at the forecasting issue.
The statement by the official, who is not a seismologist, violated a cardinal rule of risk communication, which is that those involved should speak only to their expertise, said Dennis Mileti, an emeritus professor of behavioral science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “This person should not have been speaking,” said Dr. Mileti, who has studied risk communication.
In general, said Michael Lindell, a professor at Texas A&M, scientists should advise emergency managers about the likelihood of events, and then the managers should make the yes-or-no decisions about whether to order an evacuation or urge the public to make other, simpler preparations. But often the roles become confused. “When you step over the boundary outside your area of expertise, then there aren’t necessarily any warning signs,” Dr. Lindell said.
The L’Aquila news conference did not fill what was essentially an information vacuum, Dr. Jordan said. “One of the principles that social science has shown is that the public wants to hear things from people they trust,” he said. “They want to hear things repeated. “You don’t want to put out information just when there’s a seismic crisis, because people then don’t have the context for this kind of information,” he added. “You want people to get used to how these things ebb and flow.” California, with its active seismic zones, has a system for communicating risks to the public on a regular basis, though it, too, has flaws, Dr. Jordan said.
Just a few weeks before the L’Aquila quake, an analysis of an earthquake swarm in Southern California showed an increased likelihood of a major earthquake near the southern end of the San Andreas fault. While the probability was small, it was high enough that a scientific group decided to advise the state’s emergency management agency. (In the end, no quake occurred.)
Even if the information at the L’Aquila news conference had been correct and the public had been warned there was a slightly higher risk, Dr. Mileti said, it would probably have made little difference. “One person saying once ‘You don’t have to worry’ is probably not why they didn’t do what they might have done to protect themselves,” he said. “Humans are hard-wired to deny low-probability, high-impact events.” The only way to overcome that, he continued, is through constant communication. Once-a-year earthquake drills, like those in California, are not enough. The messages have to be everywhere, repeated ad nauseam. “If you want to sell earthquake preparation in a way that it affects human behavior,” he said, “you have to sell it like Coca-Cola.”

Rico says the teeny quake in Philly of late was nothing compared to a real one like this...

Not the 5, not yet

Slate has a column by Farhad Manjoo (now there's a name to conjure with) about the latest iPhone:

And the news about Apple’s long-awaited iPhone 5 is: there is no news about the iPhone 5!
Instead, Apple announced the release of the iPhone 4S, touting it as a significant upgrade over the iPhone 4, which came on the market sixteen months ago. The new smartphone will come with all-new hardware, including a dual-core processor, and an improved eight-megapixel camera, among a slew of other new features. Oh, and it can listen to you and talk back. The company announced that the new phone will run from $199 to $399 when it goes on sale in the U.S. on 14 October. The original iPhone 4, meanwhile, will be knocked down to $99, and the the 3GS will be free with a two-year contract.
Apple will also add a third carrier to its roster of those available on the new iPhone, with Sprint joining AT&T and Verizon. The Wall Street Journal reported that Sprint agreed to buy more than thirty million phones over the next four years in exchange for access to the device.
Tim Cook (photo), who succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO in August, took the stage for the announcement, his first as Apple’s chief. Much of the specific phone news was delivered by Apple executive Phil Schiller, however.
Aside from the new processor and camera, highlights of the iPhone announcement included faster 4G download speeds, improved battery life, and news that the 4S will be a “world phone”, allowing users to roam between GSM and CDMA networks.
Among the new software features, the headliner is a digital voice assistant called Siri.Demonstrating its ability to interpret voice input and discern meaning, Apple executive Scott Forstall asked Siri the current time in Paris, where to find Greek food in Palo Alto, and how the NASDAQ was doing; according to TechCrunch, the phone answered each question.
Anticipation ran high ahead of the event, with scraps of information and speculation dominating Twitter. With no live broadcast of the event, people flocked to tech blogs for live updates. Several went down during the announcement, presumably overwhelmed by all the traffic. No wonder: The potential market is huge. In a recent survey, the ad network InMobi found that forty percent of all mobile phone owners on the continent planned to purchase the new iPhone, depending on the features, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
As far as the stock market was concerned, however, no iPhone 5 news was bad news. Apple’s shares dipped more than three percent immediately after the announcement, though it figures to continue bouncing up and down as the market reacts.

Rico says his budget will require waiting for the iPhone 5...

New toy for filmmakers

From the Studio Daily blog:

Apple’s iPhone has impressive imaging capabilities, for a phone. But now that the specs are out for the new iPhone 4S, what does it mean for filmmakers? At first glance, the answer might seem to be: “Not much.” But, based on Apple’s widely live-blogged presentation, the company really has gone all out to improve the capabilities of the on-board camera. It now boasts eight megapixels of still-photo resolution. Apple was quick to point out that pixels aren’t everything, noting that a new “backside illuminated” CMOS will actually capture 73 percent more light, which should make a real difference in image quality. Capture speed has also been boosted, as has accuracy and uniformity of color. Even the tiny lens has outsized capabilities. Apple has packed five separate elements into the lens assembly, as part of a design that, it claims, increases sharpness by thirty percent (hopefully that means real, optical sharpness and not some digital-processing voodoo) and yields an aperture of f/2.4. White balance is also “26 percent better”, Apple says, although it’s not clear exactly what they’re measuring there. Video recordings can now be made at 1080p, and the iPhone 4S will have image stabilization and temporal noise reduction built in. That sounds good, assuming the algorithms being used don’t give the pictures too much of a plastic, highly processed look. It’s a real boon for consumers but, beyond some novelty projects, it’s doubtful that filmmakers will want to use the iPhone as a primary capture device. However, as a documentary tool, it could be invaluable. If creative people can carry around a quality still and video camera during every waking moment, a trip to the corner store can become a location scout and a Sunday afternoon snapshot can become part of a mood board. Not even the vaunted iPad, becoming one of the platforms of choice for on-location dailies playback and other creative tasks, is as handy for capturing the spirit of a moment as the iPhone. Or any camera phone, really. But, as Apple lavishes attention on the quality of iPhone images, here’s hoping it encourages more filmmakers to document their own creative processes. Just imagine the footage we might be rediscovering if Orson Welles had an iPhone in his pocket.

Rico says his current budget won't support a new iPhone, but he can't wait until the iPhone 5...

809 area code scam

From the AT&T site:

The latest long distance phone scam causes consumers to inadvertently incur high charges on their phone bills. Consumers usually receive a message telling them to call a phone number with an 809, 284, 649, or 876 area code in order to collect a prize, find out information about a sick relative, etc. The caller assumes the number is a typical three-digit U.S. area code; however, the caller is actually connected to a phone number outside the United States, often in Canada or the Caribbean, and charged international call rates. Unfortunately, consumers don't find out that they have been charged higher international call rates until they receive their bill.
AT&T recommends the following tips to help avoid this area code scam:
• Return calls to familiar numbers only. As a general rule, return calls from numbers that contain familiar or recognizable area codes. You may call your directory assistance or long distance operator to check the area code location.
• Carefully read your telephone bill. Make sure that you only receive charges from your provider of choice. Ensure you thoroughly understand charges listed on your phone bill, have chosen to do business with all of the listed providers billing for those charges and have authorized additional fees invoiced. If your local service provider has changed, you will receive a final bill from the former provider and a notice of service disconnection. 

If you believe that you have been scammed:
• Contact the carrier with whom the charge originated, whose name and toll-free telephone number should be printed on the same bill page as the charge in question. Often, the problem can be resolved with a single phone call.
• If the carrier with whom the charge originated does not agree to resolve the problem, contact AT&T. AT&T will work with you and the carrier to help remove fraudulent charges from the phone bill.

Rico says the alert he got (via his mother, not normally a techie) said people were getting charged thousands of dollars, and couldn't get it removed...

Justice

The New York Times has an editorial about Pakistan:

There is a rare glimmer of hope from Pakistan. A court on Saturday found Malik Mumtaz Qadri guilty of the assassination of Salman Taseer, the courageous and outspoken governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, who was gunned down in January.
Taseer defended the rights of women and minorities. He pressed hard to repeal the country’s outrageous blasphemy law that imposes a mandatory death sentence on anyone convicted of “insulting” Islam. Qadri, who was one of the governor’s bodyguards, admitted to the killing, and said it was justified because of what he called Taseer’s “blasphemous” statements.
Qadri’s sentence of death, like all such rulings, is barbaric. There is little doubt that Taseer’s close ties to President Asif Ali Zardari and the ruling party gave the government extra incentive to bring the killer to trial.
But the fact that Judge Syed Pervez Ali Shah and the special prosecutor were willing to bring the case to a conclusion is a reminder that there are still people of courage in Pakistan. The government must protect them from retribution.
The reaction in Pakistan to the January killing was repugnant. Many people, including lawyers, cheered Qadri and showered him with rose petals at a court appearance while most of the country’s political leaders remained silent. After the ruling, some of Qadri’s supporters burned tires and denounced the sentence. Qadri is expected to appeal his conviction, so the test for Pakistan’s judicial system is far from over.
Pakistan’s leaders, and all of its people, are facing an even more profound choice: Do they want a country in which zealots like Qadri can intimidate and murder anyone who dares to disagree with them? Or do they want a country in which tolerance and justice can prevail? That was Salman Taseer’s vision for Pakistan. It must not be forgotten.

Rico says that the death sentence may be hard on the convicted, surely, but it's no more 'barbaric' than his killing of Taseer...

Not a surprise

Campbell Robertson has an article in The New York Times about Alabama:

The vanishing began early, the most frightened families packing up their cars as soon as they heard the news. They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for a thousand dollars or even less. Or they just closed up and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a neighbor. Dogs were fed one last time; if no home could be found, they were simply unleashed.
Two, five, ten years of living here, and then gone in a matter of days, to Tennessee, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arkansas, Mexico, or who knows; anywhere but Alabama.
The exodus of Hispanic immigrants began just hours after a federal judge in Birmingham upheld most provisions of the state’s far-reaching immigration enforcement law. The judge, Sharon Lovelace Blackburn, upheld the parts of the law allowing police to ask for immigration papers during routine traffic stops, rendering most contracts with illegal immigrants unenforceable, and requiring schools to ascertain the immigration status of children at registration time.
When Judge Blackburn was finished, Alabama was left with what the governor called “the strongest immigration law in this country”. It went into effect immediately, though her ruling is being appealed by the Justice Department and a coalition of civil rights groups.
In the days since, school superintendents have reassured parents— one even did so on television in Spanish— that nothing had changed for children who were already enrolled. Wary police departments around the state said they were, for now, awaiting instructions on how to carry out the law.
For many immigrants, however, waiting seemed just too dangerous. By the next afternoon, 123 students had withdrawn from the schools in this small town in the northern hills, leaving behind teary and confused classmates. Scores more were absent. Statewide, 1,988 Hispanic students were absent on Friday, about five percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system.
John Weathers, an Albertville businessman who rents and has sold houses to many Hispanic residents, said his occupancy had suddenly dropped by a quarter and might drop further, depending on what happens in the next week. Two people who had paid off their mortgages called him asking if they could sell back their homes, Weathers said.
Grocery stores and restaurants were noticeably less busy, which in some cases may be just as well, because some employees stopped showing up. In certain neighborhoods the streets are uncommonly quiet, like the aftermath of some sort of rapture.
Drawn by work in the numerous poultry processing plants, Hispanic immigrants have been coming to Albertville for years, long enough ago that some of the older ones gained amnesty under the immigration law of 1986. But the influx picked up over the last decade, and the signs on Main Street are now mostly bilingual, when they include English at all.
What the new immigration law means on a large scale will become clearest in a place like Albertville, whether it will deliver jobs to citizens and protect taxpayers as promised or whether it will spell economic disaster as opponents fear.
Critics of the law, particularly farmers, contractors, and home builders, say the measure has already been devastating, leaving rotting crops in fields and critical shortages of labor. They say that even fully documented Hispanic workers are leaving, an assessment that seems to be borne out in interviews here. The legal status of family members is often mixed, but the decision whether to stay rests on the weakest link.
Backers of the law acknowledge that it might be disruptive in the short term, but say it will prove effective over time. “It’s going to take some time for the local labor pool to develop again,” said State Senator Arthur Orr, a Republican from Decatur, “but outside labor shouldn’t come in and just beat them every time on cost and put them out of business.” Orr said there were already signs that the law was working, pointing out that the work-release center in Decatur, about fifty miles to the northwest, was not long ago unable to find jobs for inmates with poultry processors or home manufacturers. Since the law was enacted in June, he said, the center has been placing more and more inmates in these jobs, now more than 150 a day. One of the poultry processing plants in Albertville had a job fair, attracting an enormous crowd, a mix of Hispanic, black, and white job-seekers, lining up outside the plant and down the street.
“This needed to be done years ago,” Shannon Lolling, 36, who has been unemployed for over a year, said of the law. Lolling’s problem seemed to be with the system that had brought the illegal-immigrant workers here, not with the workers themselves. “That’s why our jobs went south to Mexico,” he said. “They pay them less wages and pocket the money, keep us from having jobs.”
Not far from the plant, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment or the silence of paralyzing fear.
Many Hispanics have chosen to stay for now, saying, with little apparent conviction, that the law will surely be blocked by the president, the judge, “the government”. Until then, they are not leaving their homes unless absolutely necessary. They send others to buy their groceries, and tell their children to quit the soccer team and to come home right after school. Rumors of raids and roadblocks are rampant and, though the new law has nothing to say about such things, distrust is primed by anecdotes, like one told by a local Hispanic pastor who said he was pulled over outside Birmingham on Wednesday, within hours of the ruling. His friend who was driving— and who is in the United States illegally— is now in jail on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, the pastor said, adding that while he was let go, a policeman told him he was no longer welcome in Alabama.
“I am afraid to drive to church.,” a 54-year-old poultry plant worker named Candelaria said, adding: “The lady that gives me a ride to work said she is leaving. She said she felt like a prisoner.”
All summer long, Allen Stoner, a lawyer in Decatur, has been helping his Hispanic clients fill out forms appointing friends or family members as guardians of their children who are, in many cases, American-born citizens. This way, the children would not be transferred to social services if the parents were arrested and deported. Much of this was done by the time the judge’s ruling came down, though last week Stoner’s clients began to contact him immediately to ask what they should be doing. Monday was quiet. “We had a lot of phone calls Thursday and Friday,” Stoner said, “but it has plummeted.” He did not know for sure, but he figured his clients were gone.

Rico says it'll be hard on everybody for awhile, but that's what it's gonna take...

More history for the day

The History Channel sends a "what happened this week" email:

4 October 1970: Janis Joplin dies at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood, California of a heroin overdose. The death of the troubled 27-year-old singer, who had played at Woodstock the previous year after rising to fame as a lead singer for blues and psychedelic bands, came just sixteen days after the death of rock icon Jimi Hendrix. The posthumous release of Pearl, which included the single Me and Bobby McGee, would become the largest selling record of her career.

 

6 October 1781: Continental troops and their French allies, led by General George Washington and the Comte de Rochambeau, begin to dig a two-thousand-yard trench around Yorktown, Virginia, as some eighteen thousand men prepare to lay siege to the British-occupied city. English general Charles Cornwallis would surrender the city two weeks later, effectively ending the American Revolutionary War. 

7 October 1913: Henry Ford's automobile factory introduces a moving assembly line, which includes subassemblies for transmissions, engines, and magnetos. Soon a system for assembling an entire car is established, vastly increasing productivity and reducing the cost of a Model T by about one-third. The system, which would be mirrored by other manufacturers, would mark a new dawn in the American automobile industry.

Carrots? Not a big seller

Winnie Hu has an article in The New York Times about changes in school lunches:

The new vending machine sat unnoticed as students rushed past its baby carrots, yogurt smoothies, and hummus to neighbors dispensing Snapple, Doritos, Goldfish, and Cheez-Its. The lunch period was nearly over before a potential customer stopped to check out its offerings, but no sale.
“This is way too healthy for a snack,” said John Achnitz, 15, a tenth grader. “Kids want healthy stuff like baked Doritos, but not an apple that they can get at home free.”
Like many schools across the nation, Commack High School on Long Island is stepping up its war on junk food this year. Its new cafeteria vending machine— a lighted panel on the front shows sliced apples and oranges against a backdrop of lettuce— is part of a pilot program intended to encourage students who skip lunch or stay late for sports to make better choices.
“By fostering healthy snack vending options, we support the lessons that are taught in the classroom and at home,” said Donald A. James, the superintendent of schools. But, so far, potato chips are winning.
Commack’s healthy machine sold 296 items totaling $388.75 from 1 September to 19 September, less than one-third of the sales made by a nearby machine that offers less nutritious fare. Moreover, the top-selling item from the new machine was baked potato chips— less fat than fried chips, but less than ideal— with almost no takers for peach smoothies, roasted edamame, or fresh pineapple chunks.
Around the country, schools that have banned candy and soda and trimmed trans fats from their lunch menus are now restocking their vending machines with whole-grain, reduced-fat snacks or fresh fruits and vegetables. These efforts have been fueled by renewed concerns about childhood obesity, as well as growing state and federal legislation regulating the content of food and beverages sold in school.
Fourteen New York City high schools are testing vending machines that offer fresh mango, watermelon and pineapple chunks or raw carrots and celery. Last month, Jon Corto of the Buffalo Bills recruited four of his teammates to promote six healthy vending machines in the district in Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb, where he attended school. “I’ve always been health-conscious,” he said. “You eat Doritos and it’s not going to help your performance.”
Philadelphia schools, which were among the first to embrace healthful vending, with five machines selling organic tea, flavored water, and Clif bars in 2009, will soon expand to twenty machines. And in Florence, Arizona, high school administrators have seen a spillover effect from two healthful vending machines installed last year, with lower-calorie options like Popchips and Pirate’s Booty being added to other machines.
These efforts have drawn praise from many parents and nutrition experts, who say putting healthier food in front of children makes them more likely to eat it. And they have helped prompt a niche industry: one company designed a machine with a digital LCD screen streaming video messages like: Hey, looking for a sustained energy snack to get you through practice? Try this, alongside a picture of a Kashi granola bar and its nutrition facts.
“Having these healthy snacks is a far cry better than what the schools were selling before,” said Kelly D. Brownell, a Yale psychology professor and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, also praised healthful vending machines. “Dietary change happens over time,” she said. “I worked ten years to get schools to go from candy bars to granola bars and baked chips. But when you look at the whole mix, it really does help to reduce calories, saturated fats and sugar.”
While 27 states have adopted policies regulating nutritional content in elementary schools’ vending machines— typically limiting fat, sugar, calories, and portion size— some of those policies have lacked teeth, said Elizabeth Walker, a project director for the National Association of State Boards of Education. Under a 2010 law, however, the federal Agriculture Department must set national nutrition standards for school vending machine foods and drinks by the end of next year. Of the nation’s nearly six million vending machines, seven percent were in elementary, middle, and high schools in 2010, up from six percent the year before, according to a survey by Automatic Merchandiser Magazine. Another six percent were at colleges.
Jackie Clark, a spokeswoman for the National Automatic Merchandising Association, which represents the vending industry, said it had embraced healthier options in recent years with the Fit-Pick program, in which orange stickers can be affixed to trays holding one of four hundred products meeting the industry’s nutritional guidelines.
Revolution Foods, a company that creates healthy-meal programs for schools, is expanding its operations to vending machines in response to requests from principals; its first ten machines were to go into Denver area schools in October, with dozens more coming to Colorado and Northern California in the next six months, according to Kirsten Tobey, a founder of the company.
Fresh Healthy Vending, whose chief executive likes to describe its machine as a “mini version of Whole Foods,” introduced eight hundred of them to schools and colleges in the past year and adds 150 new machines a month. Another company, Vend Natural, has installed four hundred school machines since 2007, most recently in Montclair, New Jersey.
Sean Kelly, chief executive officer of Human Healthy Vending, which designed the machine with the digital message screen, said that promotions like digital messages, free samples, and contests helped to increase monthly sales to an average of about $1,500 per machine, up from $1,000 last year. “You cannot just take a standard vending machine, throw graphics on it, put some healthier options in there, and expect everything to work out perfectly,” he said.
In Commack, some students complained that items in the new machine were either unappealing or expensive: hummus is $3; yogurt smoothies, $2; and a pair of hard-boiled eggs, $1.50, compared with the more typical $1 for a bag of chips. John, the tenth grader who walked away, said he mistakenly bought a grape-raspberry twist for a dollar last week— he was aiming for the baked barbecue chips— and “it just tasted really bad.”
But ten minutes later, the new vending machine finally had a customer. Zach Auster-Mehr, a junior, dropped in $1.25 for the baby carrots with ranch dressing. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “I usually buy potato chips.”
Marissa Gibaldi, 17, a senior, said she had become a regular on days when she did not bring lunch from home. “My mom will ask: ‘What did you have for a snack?’ ” she said. “And I can actually tell her, instead of saying: ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Rico says that he should as hell would never have eaten carrots for lunch back in high school. (He'll only occasionally eat them now.) But he'd have bought a peach smoothie or fresh pineapple chunks...

Oops is now a Swedish term

Lawrence Altman and Nicholas Wade have an article in The New York Times about a glitch in the Nobel Prize process:

When a representative of the Nobel Foundation could not reach Dr. Ralph M. Steinman by telephone to deliver the thrilling news that he had been awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his breakthrough work in immunology, he sent Steinman an email about the honor. But Dr. Steinman would never see the message nor learn of the prize. He died of pancreatic cancer three days before the phone call from the Nobel committee. He had been battling the highly deadly disease for four years, using a treatment he devised to try to prolong his life, essentially turning his body into an extension of his research.
However, Nobel Prizes cannot be awarded posthumously. And so the Nobel committee, which had believed Dr. Steinman to be alive, faced a quandary.
One of Dr. Steinman’s daughters, Alexis (in photo), saw the email from the Nobel Foundation and contacted Rockefeller University in New York, where her father had worked. The president of the university, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, immediately called the chairman of the Nobel Prize committee to inform him. Then the committee, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, scrambled to figure out what to do. As heartless as it might seem, would the prize for Dr. Steinman have to be revoked?
“This is a unique situation. Steinman died hours before the decision was made,” Goran Hansson, secretary of the Nobel committee for physiology and medicine, told Swedish Radio News after the situation came to light. “News of his death was not made public. We had no idea, nor did they know at his place of work.”
The foundation’s nine-member board of directors met and consulted lawyers concerning the interpretation of the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, issued in 1974. The statutes hold that the Nobel Prize is not to be given posthumously. But, if a person who is announced as a prize winner dies before receiving it at the Nobel ceremonies on 10 December— the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who endowed the prizes— the award remains valid.
Because Dr. Steinman’s award was made in good faith on the assumption that he was alive at the time of his election, he should receive it, the directors decided.
The drama seemed to overshadow the fact that Dr. Steinman was awarded only one-half of the prize, and that two other immunologists shared the other half. They were Dr. Bruce A. Beutler of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, and Dr. Jules A. Hoffmann of France. All three scientists were honored for discoveries of essential steps in the immune system’s response to infection.
But it was Dr. Steinman who actually used his discoveries in the laboratory to try to save his own life. His career-long quest had been to develop a vaccine against cancer for humans, having shown twenty years ago that such a treatment could be effective in mice. Four and a half years ago, after he was found to be jaundiced from a spreading pancreatic cancer, he began tailoring an experimental vaccine against his own tumor. The idea was to use the principles learned in the experiments on mice and in the laboratory to produce immune cells derived from his dendritic cells, a class of cells that he discovered in 1973.
After a piece of Dr. Steinman’s cancer was removed, a colleague, Dr. Michel Nussenzweig, grew it in the laboratory to produce enough material to send to at least twenty researchers at Rockefeller University and at least five other laboratories around the world. Dr. Steinman organized the work among the researchers who developed the experimental vaccine.
Dr. Steinman received standard chemotherapy for his cancer, as well as the experimental vaccine, which other doctors at Rockefeller University injected under his skin, Dr. Nussenzweig said in a telephone interview. Rockefeller University’s institutional review board approved the experiment.
“Ralph believed strongly that it would work,” Dr. Nussenzweig said. “Obviously, it did not work or he would be here now, but possibly it prolonged his life.” The research, he added, will continue.
Pancreatic cancer is among the most aggressive malignancies, in part because it arises in a gland deep in the abdomen that is hard for doctors to feel with their hands and because usually it produces symptoms only after it has become advanced. About twenty percent of patients with pancreatic cancer survive one year after detection and four percent after five years, according to the American Cancer Society.
Dr. Nussenzweig and other doctors said it was impossible to determine whether Dr. Steinman would have survived as long without his self-tailored experimental treatment. At the time of his death, Dr. Steinman was working to develop a general method for making a vaccine that would not need to be tailored to each patient and that could be used against cancer and certain infections. Other vaccines based on dendritic cells are being tested in patients, researchers said.
Provenge, a vaccine against advanced prostate cancer, was based on Dr. Steinman’s work with dendritic cells. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year and is sold by the Dendreon Corporation of Seattle. (Dr. Nussenzweig said that neither he nor Dr. Steinman had any connection to Dendreon, financial or otherwise.)
Scientists who knew Dr. Steinman and his work said the Nobel committee had made the right decision. “All I can say is that the work deserved the prize,” said Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who himself won the prize in 1987 for his work in immunology.
Honored along with Dr. Steinman were Dr. Hoffmann, who was born in Luxembourg, and Dr. Beutler, an American. In 1996, Dr. Hoffmann discovered the cell receptors in laboratory fruit flies that are activated by pathogenic bacteria or fungi. Two years later, Dr. Beutler identified the cell receptors in mice that respond to a substance in the coat of bacteria and that can set off septic shock if overstimulated. These receptors turned to be made by the same family of genes as those in the fruit fly, known as Toll-like receptor genes.
Hansson, of the Nobel committee, said Nobel Prizes had been awarded posthumously twice before: in 1931, for literature, to the poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt, and, thirty years later, to Dag Hammarskjold, for peace. “The situation was different then because the committee was aware that the recipients were dead,” Hansson told Swedish radio. “The practice now is not to award the prize to someone who is deceased.”
The Nobel committee was not able to make contact with any of the three winners before the announcement was made, Hansson said, adding that the committee normally makes personal contact with the winners before going public with the news. Annika Pontikis, a spokeswoman for the Nobel Foundation, said she did not know whether the board had discussed how to check whether future recipients were alive at the time of their election.

Rico says that, forty-one years ago, he got a tetanus shot at the Karolinska Institute, but there was no prize involved, just his qualifying for re-entry to the United States after a summer spent working in Stockholm...

The fat boy is out

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has decided not to seek the presidency. Christie is scheduled to announce his decision at a news conference in the state capital, but two sources said that the governor will not pursue the Republican nomination.
The decision ends a late flurry of indecision on the part of Christie, who had been encouraged by a growing number of Republican donors and activists who had hoped he would add his name to the field of candidates vying to challenge President Obama.

Gone but not forgotten

Charles O. Hegarty, late of the Starboard List, who provides some of the songs in Rico's head, especially when Rico wants to drown out the damned jingles (Rico hates jingles) that the television puts in there...

History for the day

On 4 October 1957, the Space Age began as the then-Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit.