Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/274904282?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Saturday, January 5, 2013
Friday, January 4, 2013
ASUS partners up with Leap Motion, PCs with 3D motion control to ...
ASUS Embraces Revolutionary New Interface, Partners to Bundle Leap Motion with
Select Computers
World's Most Accurate 3-D Motion-Control Technology to Bundle with New Premium All-in-One Computers and High-End Notebooks using Intel's Haswell Platform
SAN FRANCISCO ? January 3, 2013 ? Leap Motion, the motion-control software and hardware company changing the future of human/computer interaction, today announced one of its first global OEM partnerships. ASUS, a leading innovator in personal computing products, will bundle the revolutionary Leap Motion controller with select new computers. In an industry first, ASUS will also bundle the world's most accurate 3-D motion-control technology into new high-end notebooks and premium All-in-One (AiO) PCs later this year.
ASUS is one of the world's largest consumer notebook vendors and the maker of the world's best-selling and most award-winning motherboards. The ground-breaking partnership brings the future of computer interaction-Leap Motion's incredibly fast and accurate natural user interface-to millions of potential consumers around the world.
Leap Motion's incredible speed and precision are helping fuel its momentum and leadership in the industry. Leap Motion's technology can track movements to 1/100th millimeter-smaller than the tip of a pin-with no visible lag time. The Leap Motion controller has a 150-degree field of view, and tracks individual hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second.
ASUS plans to bundle the Leap Motion controller with its upcoming premium All-In-One (AiO) PCs and high-end notebooks for global distribution.
"Our commitment to innovation and exceptional quality drive us to provide the best technology to our consumers," said Alber Wu, Desktop Division Senior Director at ASUSTek. "Leap Motion has developed an exciting technology that will truly enhance the experience our customers have with their ASUS devices, opening a world of opportunity for personal use and business, from entertainment to architecture to education. We're proud to be one of the first companies to partner with Leap Motion."
"As OEMs adopt 3-D motion control technology, they're spurring a rapid evolution in computer interface innovations and helping free the full power and potential of computing for consumers," said Leap Motion co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald. "This historic partnership with ASUS is an important step in building global adoption of the new computing paradigm Leap Motion's technology offers. We're delighted that ASUS shares our outlook on the future of human/computer interaction."
In May 2012, Leap Motion revealed its technology and controller to huge global excitement, with its introduction video garnering more than 7 million views. More than 40,000 developers worldwide have requested to work with Leap Motion, and the company has sent out 12,000 free units to developers to foster the creation of new applications.
Leap Motion has won innovation awards from Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Fast Company, and will present a featured session at the 2013 SXSW conference. The Leap Motion device will ship to consumers early this year, and can be pre-ordered for $70 at www.leapmotion.com.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/03/asus-leap-motion-partnership/
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Report: Israeli ex-spy chief criticizes PM on Iran
JERUSALEM (AP) ? A recently retired Israeli spy chief says Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acted irresponsibly regarding Iran's nuclear program and accuses him of prioritizing personal concerns over national interests.
Yuval Diskin, chief of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency from 2005 to 2011, has voiced similar criticisms before.
Diskin says Netanyahu tried to convince him and his colleagues to approve what he called an "illegal" decision to attack Iran. He describes attending a "bizarre" meeting with Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and then-foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, in which they discussed the Iranian nuclear threat over cigars and liquor.
Diskin spoke in an interview to a filmmaker who made a documentary about Israeli spymasters. The interview appeared Friday in Israel's daily Yediot Ahronot.
Netanyahu's office in a text-messaged statement called Diskin's comments "baseless."
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Health News - Virtual patient may help future doctors prevent suicide
A virtual patient named Denise may help future physicians feel more comfortable and capable assessing suicide risk.
Denise, a mother and wife, is seeking psychiatric care for insomnia and a mood disorder.
?Primary care doctors tend to be the frontline providers for people with mental illness so we need to put the same kind of educational effort into suicide risk assessment that we put into recognizing a heart attack,? said Dr. Adriana Foster, psychiatrist at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Health Sciences University. ?Suicide risk assessment should be one of the ?must haves.??
Suicide is occurring earlier and more often in the United States than ever before. Rates are up 25 percent in the last decade to 12.4 per 100,000 individuals annually. It?s the second-leading cause of death for college students and third for all 15-24 year olds, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Twenty percent of high school students report having seriously considered suicide during the previous 12 months.
The MCG study of second-year medical students is helping determine if the opportunity to ask tough questions about suicide risk to a virtual (computer-simulated) patient can help real families avoid this tragedy.
?We hope this approach will help future practitioners deal with really difficult issues such as suicide, psychosis, anxiety and depression,? Foster said. Mood disorders, such as depression, are the most common mental health disorders coming to physician attention that carry a high risk of disability and suicide, she said.
Foster is principal investigator on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention-funded study in which 40 sophomore medical students watch a video of a physician interviewing a patient with a mood disorder. The interview includes a suicide risk assessment. Another 40 students will electronically interview Denise, who was designed by the University of Florida Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering.
Later, all the students go to MCG?s Clinical Skills Center to interview an actor portraying a patient with a mood disorder. A subgroup will also interact with a second actor with a different mental health problem. These actors, called standardized patients, are trained to portray and report symptoms associated with a certain condition. Before all MCG students enter their clinically intensive third and fourth years of medical school, they spend time with these patients, honing communication and patient-examination skills.
The researchers hypothesize that students who interact with Denise will be better able to assess suicide risk in the standardized patients.? If they are right, researchers want to share Denise with other medical students through the Association of American Medical Colleges MedEdPORTAL (see https://www.mededportal.org/), an online medical education tool collection. They also want to study Denise?s long-term impact on students as they take clinical rotations in psychiatry and graduate from medical school.
While students type their questions and mostly get a typed response from Denise, the virtual interaction helps them think through what to ask and the best way to ask it. In fact, Denise tells them when she doesn?t understand. To enhance Denise?s inter-actability, MCG is sharing unanswered questions with collaborators at the University of Florida, to see if maybe she should respond. As in life, sometimes the problem is just a matter of phrasing.
Studies show that front-line providers, such as family medicine physicians, don?t feel comfortable assessing suicide risk. In countries with some of the highest suicide rate, such as Japan and Hungary, targeted provider education has helped decrease rates.
MCG already uses a virtual patient with depression in the first-year curriculum to help students learn the basics of asking about a depressed mood. First- and second-year students also get several lectures and team-based learning sessions focused on mental health, Foster said. ?While there has been tremendous progress in the last few years introducing mental health topics to first- and second-year students, they tend to remain somewhat textbook- and other reading material-bound. We are trying to introduce more interactive methods.?
Warning signs of suicide include unrelenting low mood, hopelessness, desperation, anxiety, withdrawal, sleep problems, increased alcohol and/or other drug use, impulsiveness, taking unnecessary risks and threatening suicide or expressing a strong wish to die, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
?Most suicides don?t occur out of the blue,? Foster said, and most suicidal individuals are open to intervention. ?Most people are actually ambivalent about it and seeking help,? making provider assessment and family/friend awareness even more important, she said. ?There is a lot of stigma, a lot of things friends and family feel they should never talk about. But when you are a doctor, a lot of your patients are going to have these types of disorders in addition to physical disorders. We want our students to be prepared and not afraid to ask questions.?
For more information about the Virtual People Factory and Virtual Experiences Research Group at the University of Florida visit http://verg.cise.ufl.edu/
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Quick detection of periodontitis pathogens
Jan. 3, 2013 ? Twelve million Germans suffer from periodontitis, an inflammation that can lead to the loss of teeth if left untreated. A new diagnostic platform enables the pathogens to be detected quickly, enabling dentists to act swiftly to initiate the right treatment.
Bleeding gums during tooth brushing or when biting into an apple could be an indication of periodontitis, an inflammatory disease of the tissues that surround and support the teeth. Bacterial plaque attacks the bone, meaning teeth can loosen over time and in the worst case even fall out, as they are left without a solid foundation to hold them in place. Furthermore, periodontitis also acts as a focal point from which disease can spread throughout the entire body: If the bacteria, which can be very aggressive, enter the bloodstream, they can cause further damage elsewhere. Physicians suspect there is a connection between periodontitis pathogens and the sort of cardiovascular damage that can cause heart attacks or strokes. In order to stop the source of inflammation, dentists remove dental calculus and deposits from the surface of teeth, but this is often not enough; particularly aggressive bacteria can only be eliminated with antibiotics.
Of the estimated 700 species of bacteria found in the mouth cavity, there are only eleven that are known to cause periodontal disease in particular; of these, some are deemed to be severely pathogenic. If these biomarkers are present in the gingival sulcus -- the small gap around the base of the tooth -- then the patient is at high risk of a severe form of periodontitis. But the only way to find out is by conducting a bacteria test. The problem is that current methods for identifying pathogens are time-consuming and must be carried out in an external contract laboratory. Conventional bacterial analysis using microbial culture carries the risk of bacteria being killed as soon as they come into contact with oxygen.
Bacterial analysis in less than 30 minutes
A new mobile diagnostic platform is designed to speed up identification of the eleven most relevant periodontitis pathogens considerably. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology IZI in Leipzig have collaborated with two companies, BECIT GmbH and ERT-Optik, to develop a lab-on-a-chip module called ParoChip. In future this will allow dentists and medical labs to prepare samples quickly and then analyze the bacteria. All the steps in the process -- the duplication of DNA sequences and their detection -- take place directly on the platform, which consists of a disk-shaped microfluidic card that is around six centimeters in diameter. "Until now, analysis took around four to six hours. With ParoChip it takes less than 30 minutes. This means it's possible to analyze a large number of samples in a short amount of time," says Dr. Dirk Kuhlmeier, a scientist at the IZI.
The analysis is conducted in a contactless and fully automated manner. Samples are taken using sterile, toothpick-shaped paper points, after which the bacteria are removed from the point and their isolated DNA injected into reaction chambers containing dried reagents. There are eleven such chambers on each card, each featuring the reagent for one of the eleven periodontal pathogens. The total number of bacteria is determined in an additional chamber, via polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This method allows millions of copies of even tiny numbers of pathogen DNA sequences to be made. In order to generate the extremely quick changes in temperature that are required for PCR, the disk-shaped plastic chip is attached to a metal heating block with three temperature zones and mechanically turned so it passes over these zones. This causes a fluorescent signal to be generated that is measured by a connected optical measuring device featuring a fluorescence probe, a photo detector and a laser diode. The key benefit is that the signal makes it possible not only to quantify each type of bacterium and thus determine the severity of the inflammation, but also to establish the total number of all the bacteria combined. This enables doctors to fine-tune an antibiotic treatment accordingly.
"As the connected optical measuring system allows us to quantify bacteria, ParoChip is also suited to the identification of other bacterial causes of infection, such as food-borne pathogens or those that lead to sepsis ," says Kuhlmeier, who goes on to emphasize further advantages of the compact diagnostic platform: "Using ParoChip does away with many of the manual steps that are a necessary part of current bacteria tests. The synthetic disks can be produced cheaply and disposed of after use in the same way as disposable gloves." Already available as a prototype, ParoChip is initially intended for use in clinical laboratories; however it could also be used by dentists to carry out inhouse analysis of patient samples in their own practice.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/health_medicine/genes/~3/Ms4eYAs76xM/130103114130.htm
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Court overturns ruling on editing Yelp criticism
By Bob Sullivan
Free speech advocates have won the latest battle in the legal fight between critical web commenters and the businesses they target.
In a Dec. 28 decision that is only now being widely circulated, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a dissatisfied consumer's Yelp comments shouldn?t have been ordered removed from the web by a lower court.
The decision is the latest in a steady stream of court rulings that impact consumers who criticize businesses online; in this case, an appeal to First Amendment rights was successful.
Jane Perez was sued by contractor Christopher Dietz in Fairfax County, Va., after she wrote on Yelp that Dietz failed to deliver promised services and implied he might be responsible for jewelry missing from her house. In early December, a trial court ordered Perez to remove portions of her negative review, including references to the missing jewelry and to an earlier court ruling surrounding their dispute. That ruling gained national attention.
But the Virginia Supreme Court overruled the lower court, finding that "the preliminary injunction was not justified," removing restrictions on her original review and siding with Perez? argument that the lower court?s decision represented unreasonable ?prior restraint? of her right to free speech.
?The decision confirms the importance of not shutting down public discussion on the Internet just because someone doesn?t like what?s being talked about,? said Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for advocacy group Public Citizen, which filed Perez?s appeal to the supreme court. ?Review sites like Yelp are vehicles for the free flow of ideas by helping consumers make informed decisions on how to spend their hard-earned dollars.?
The ruling does not mean that Perez has no legal responsibility for her comments, however ?- the underlying case continues, and she could be liable for damages if Dietz proves in court that he was libeled. The court's ruling merely invalidates what Perez's trial attorney had earlier called judicial "copy-editing" of her Internet comments.
In its appeal to the injunction, Public Citizen argued that a court cannot forbid speech with an injunction simply to protect a business from bad publicity.
?Settled law ? forbids preliminary injunctions to protect the reputation of a business as impermissible prior restraints,? the advocacy group wrote.
?Prior restraints on speech and publication are the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights,? it continued, citing a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
That hasn?t stopped companies from trying, however. Weary of reputation-killing criticism on review sites like Yelp, some businesses have taken to suing consumers for libel, claiming damages through lost future customers. Such lawsuits are meeting with mixed results: An Oregon judge dismissed one lawsuit filed by a dentist earlier this year. Months earlier, a similar lawsuit filed by a church pastor was also dismissed. On the other hand, a case filed by a neurologist in Minnesota after negative comments was initially dismissed, but reinstated by a state appeals court earlier this year. And there are dozens of other ongoing cases -- many involving health care -- including one involving a ?Chicago plastic surgeon suing former patients for $100,000 after they criticized his work online.
Still, the threat of a libel lawsuit has become a more common tactic by businesses trying to dissuade consumers from making critical comments in public forums. A Red Tape reader in Ohio complained last month that she was threatened with such a lawsuit after she placed a sign on her front lawn criticizing a home alarm company.
Levy, a lawyer with Public Citizen, said it?s important the discussion and criticism not be chilled by legal threats and that he was pleased with the Virginia Supreme Court?s ruling.
?This ruling means if you have a sound case for defamation, by all means, you can bring it, but you shouldn't expect to have (comments) taken off-line at first blush,? Levy said. ?You have to show to the satisfaction of a jury that false statements have been made about you with malice or negligence.?
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CSN: Reid pleased with Chiefs interview
January 3, 2013, 12:55 am
E-mail Reuben Frank at rfrank@comcastsportsnet.com.
Tags: eagles, Atlanta Falcons, Dirk Koetter
Andy Reid interviewed for the Kansas City Chiefs? head coaching vacancy for nearly nine hours in Philadelphia on Wednesday.
Reid said via text the meeting ?went very well.?
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Reid also said via text that his interview with the Cards, originally scheduled to begin later Wednesday, has been pushed back, either to Thursday or Friday.
Reid met Wednesday with Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, team president Mark Donovan and general manager Scott Pioli. Donovan spent the 2003 through 2008 seasons with the Eagles, serving as senior vice president of business operations.?
Reid, fired Monday after 14 years as head coach of the Eagles, immediately surfaced as a candidate with the Cards, who fired head coach Ken Whisenhunt after six years, and the Chiefs, who fired head coach Romeo Crennel after one full season and three games of 2011.
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Reid had arrived in Phoenix by late Wednesday, but it wasn?t clear exactly when his meeting with the Cards would begin.
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The Cards have already interviewed their own defensive coordinator, Ray Horton, for their head coach vacancy, and are also reportedly planning to meet with Broncos offensive coordinator Mike McCoy. Lovie Smith, fired after a 10-win season with the Bears, has also been mentioned in conjunction with the opening.
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No other candidates have been reported to have interviewed with the Chiefs so far. The length of the Chiefs? interview with Reid is certainly a strong indication he could be at the top of their wish list.
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Reid won more playoff games during the nine-year stretch from 2000 through 2008 (10) than the Chiefs have won in their 53-year history (eight). The Chiefs haven?t won a postseason game since 1993, when Joe Montana took them to the AFC Championship Game.
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Reid also won more postseason games with the Eagles than the Cards have won in their 93-year history (six), although the Cards did beat Reid?s Eagles in the 2008 NFC Championship Game.
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Chiefs vice president of media and marketing Rob Alberino spent the 1997 through 2009 seasons with the Eagles, where he started the Eagles Television Network and won 39 Emmys in his 13 years.
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Alberino, one of the Chiefs? top front-office executives, tweeted about Reid early Thursday morning: ?No scoop. Just reminded of some awesome years. Whatever direction we go, I'm on board. Whole town just wants to win. Loving that.?
E-mail Reuben Frank at rfrank@comcastsportsnet.com.
Tags: eagles, Atlanta Falcons, Dirk Koetter
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