jail coiffed: February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Pentagon reviewing Pratt recommendation to resume F-35 flights

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Thursday it was reviewing a recommendation by Pratt & Whitney to resume flights and ground operations of the F-35 fighter jet after a week-long grounding prompted by a cracked engine blade, but no decision has yet been made.

Spokeswoman Kyra Hawn said officials from the U.S. Air Force, Navy and the Pentagon's F-35 program office were reviewing data from a comprehensive engineering investigation conducted by Pratt about the cracked blade discovered on a test plane in Florida on February 19.

Pratt spokesman Matthew Bates confirmed that the F-35 Joint Program Office was assessing the company's recommendation to resume flights but declined to offer further comment.

Pratt, a unit of United Technologies Corp, supplies the engine for the single-engine, single-seat fighter plane, which is built by Lockheed Martin Corp.

The Pentagon announced the grounding of all F-35 warplanes on Friday after an inspection revealed a crack on a turbine blade in the jet engine of an F-35 being tested at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

It was the second engine-related grounding in two months of the $396 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's largest weapons program. The Marines Corps version of the plane was grounded for nearly a month starting in mid-January because of a faulty hose in the engine.

The Pentagon said on Wednesday that no additional cracks have been found on F-35 fighter engines during inspections begun after the February 19 incident.

Pratt began investigating the cracked blade on Sunday evening after the blade assembly arrived at its Middletown, Connecticut, facility, first through nondestructive testing such as X-rays, followed by a procedure that split open the blade for a closer examination.

Those tests have convinced the company's engineers that the problem with the turbine was not caused by high-cycle fatigue, which could force a costly design change, or a design defect, sources familiar with the investigation told Reuters earlier this week.

Instead, engineers now believe the crack is a "creep rupture" caused by the fact that the engine on that particular test plane had been run particularly hard at hot temperatures since it was used for after-burner testing, according to a source briefed on the Pratt recommendation.

The source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said Pratt engineers were continuing to study the crack to better understand the root cause and develop "potential changes needed to mitigate future occurrences," said the source.

But it was clear that normal fleet use would not reach that degree of "hot time" for a period of years, the source added.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal-Esa in Washington; editing by Matthew Lewis)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-reviewing-pratt-recommendation-resume-f-35-flights-212936296--finance.html

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Criminals cash in on Syria's chaos with kidnappings and ransoms

Alaa?s uncle was a prominent figure in his community and although, as a matter of self-preservation, he has not advertised his political beliefs since Syria's uprising began, he was widely known as a friend of the opposition.

So when a group of men claiming to be part of the Free Syrian Army arrived at his house, asking him to come to their headquarters for questioning about his support for the regime, he was immediately suspicious, but went with them anyway, hoping to clear up the matter.

It was the start of a kidnapping that would last three weeks and cost the family roughly $10,000 and three cars before the uncle was released. His abductors had no discernible connection to the FSA unit they claimed to represent and Alaa now assumes they were simply criminals.

?I found out this wasn?t an isolated incident. It?s happening all over Syria,? says Alaa, who asked to use only his first name due to security concerns. ?It?s the lawless Wild West. No one really listens to anyone and everyone has their own way of doing things. A lot of the kidnappings are people who are profiteering. Some of them are ex-cons turned out by the government to prove that without [the government] you won?t have a peaceful place to life, and others are just self-proclaimed military council leaders profiteering from the war.?

RECOMMENDED: Think you know the Middle East? Take our geography quiz.

A kidnapping-and-ransom industry often emerges from unstable situations. Some estimate that thousands of Iraqis were kidnapped and ransomed during the peak of the most recent Iraq war.

Now, throughout much of northwestern Syria, particularly Idlib province, Syrians say they?re dealing with a kidnapping epidemic. In some of the worst affected areas, residents report people going missing daily.

Throughout Idlib province, locals say there has been a dramatic spike in the number of kidnappings in recent months. Many residents say the fear of abduction now keeps them from leaving their neighborhoods. Though most outside attention is focused on the abduction of foreigners like American reporter James Foley, who has been missing since November, the problem is far more common and pervasive for Syrians.

The kidnapping threat has brought daily life to a standstill in many areas.

?The problem is growing daily. People are afraid to leave the city because they?re afraid they?ll get taken hostage,? says Yazan Khader, a media activist from Idlib who spoke from Turkey. ?It?s really affected our daily lives. We don?t get water in my area any more because the water main broke and the people who can fix it don?t want to come here because they?re afraid of getting taken. Truck drivers who deliver goods also no longer want to pass through this area.?

It remains difficult to determine who is behind the kidnappings, but they are driven in large part by criminal opportunism, as people take advantage of the lawlessness now plaguing large swaths of Syria that are neither completely under opposition or government control. In Syria?s northwest Idlib province, rebels have made a number of recent gains, but serious fighting continues and the opposition has not yet established government institutions like police and courts as they have in Aleppo.

?The number of kidnappings in Idlib has grown compared to what it used to be,? says Shadi Zydani, a former member of Idlib?s Revolutionary Security force who says the problem has grown dramatically. He adds, ?When they kidnap activists, they deliver them to the security forces for sure, but there are others who are taking advantage of the situation to make money.?

The Syrian opposition blames those loyal to the government for the majority of kidnappings and say they have released convicts from jail and encouraged pro-government militias to kidnap and terrorize the local population to make it appear that rebels are incapable of providing security and stability.

There remains some hope that the situation will improve in Idlib. Opposition members say that the situation was much the same in Aleppo shortly after they began gaining ground there. It was not uncommon to have multiple kidnappings daily. But now large swaths of Aleppo province are under opposition control, which has allowed rebels to create their own civilian courts, police stations, and other institutions to maintain law and order. Some Revolutionary Security units in Aleppo even operate intelligence gathering programs to monitor the conduct of the Free Syrian Army.

Residents of Aleppo say the efforts have played a crucial role in reducing kidnappings and crime in general.

In the summer, ?isolated incidents of kidnappings started happening and then it increased dramatically because people started doing it as a job to get money,? says Tony al-Taieb, media activist in Aleppo. ?Now that they have liberated Aleppo, they?ve started organizing the city. They?ve separated the military work from the civilian and political issues. They created police stations and courts, and other jobs.?

With these institutions, Mr. Taieb says he believes kidnapping will soon disappear as a problem in Aleppo. Still, Taieb?s optimism is not universally shared. Despite progress reported by activists, the problem is far from gone in Aleppo. There are reports of increased abduction threats to foreigners working in the area and many worry that kidnapping could be a problem that afflicts the region as long as instability persists.

Penn St. upsets No. 4 Michigan 84-78; 1st B10 win

Penn State's Jermaine Marshall (11) is greeted by fans at the end of an NCAA college basketball game against Michigan in State College, Pa., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Penn State won 84-78. (AP Photo/Ralph Wilson)

Penn State's Brandon Taylor (10) looks for a shot past Michigan's Glenn Robinson III (1) during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in State College, Pa., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Ralph Wilson)

Penn State's Jermaine Marshall (11) drives on Michigan's Mitch McGary (4) during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in State College, Pa., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Ralph Wilson)

Penn State's Jermaine Marshall, center, pulls down a rebound between teammate Ross Travis, left, and a Michigan defender during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in State College, Pa., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. (AP Photo/Ralph Wilson)

Michigan's Tim Hardaway (10) looks for a shot over Penn State's Brandon Taylor(10) and as Michigan's Jon Horford (15) watches during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in State College, Pa., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Penn State won 84-78. (AP Photo/Ralph Wilson)

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) ? Jermaine Marshall was trapped, surrounded by giddy fans who rushed the court after witnessing Penn State's unlikely upset of No. 4 Michigan.

It was about the only time that anyone could contain the Nittany Lions' gritty guard down the stretch of the 84-78 win Wednesday night over the Wolverines.

Marshall scored 25 points and hit a key layup with 1:06 left to help Penn State roar back from a 15-point deficit to get its first Big Ten victory in more than a year.

"We have confidence in ourselves," Marshall said. "We believed we were close. It just feels good to earn that win. We definitely earned it."

Penn State (9-18, 1-14) had lost 18 straight regular-season Big Ten games dating to last season. The team's previous conference win came on Feb. 16, 2012, a 69-64 victory over Iowa.

It was Penn State's first win over a top-five team since defeating No. 5 North Carolina 82-74 in the second round of the 2001 NCAA tournament, and the highest-ranked opponent that the Nittany Lions have beaten since moving to the Jordan Center in 1996.

To celebrate, exuberant fans exchanged hugs and high-fives with the Nittany Lions.

Even Michigan coach John Beilein was impressed.

"I think what you saw tonight is why we all love college basketball," he said.

But this loss might hurt Michigan as it jockeys for seeding in the NCAA tournament. Tim Hardaway Jr. scored 19 points for the Wolverines (23-5, 10-5). Trey Burke had 18 points and six assists, but also committed six turnovers.

Michigan was uncharacteristically sloppy with 15 turnovers in the game, six more than its season average.

Penn State pounced on the mistakes.

D.J. Newbill added 17 points for the Nittany Lions, who hit a season-high 10 3-pointers. Marshall scored 19 in the second half, including four 3s that whipped the hometown fans into a frenzy. But it was his twisting drive to the bucket late left that really hurt Michigan.

The ball teetered on the rim before dropping in, causing the Penn State partisans to let out a collective sigh of relief with their team up 81-78.

"It was a chip play that we run. ... Coach put the ball in my hand and he had trust in me," Marshall said. "Fortuantely that layup rode around the rim and went down."

That was not the kind of luck that the Nittany Lions have been used to, ever since leading scorer and point guard Tim Frazier went down with a left Achilles injury four games into the season.

They had to adjust on the fly, with combo guard Newbill sliding over to the point, and Marshall needing to assume more ball-handling duties. Penn State coach Patrick Chambers, a never-say-die cheerleader, convinced his team to keep fighting through the adversity.

"Tonight, it's a relief. All the hard work, practices and shootarounds paid off for us," Newbill said.

Michigan's Glenn Robinson III misfired on a 3 with 17 seconds left. Sasa Borovnjak (nine points) had a memorable Senior Night, hitting two foul shots with 15 seconds left to seal the win.

Ross Travis provided the muscle up front with 15 points and 12 boards as Penn State made the clutch plays down the stretch.

"They beat us fair and square, and the last 10 minutes they really outplayed us," Beilein said.

Just another hard night for the league's top teams in the rough-and-tumble Big Ten.

Top-ranked Indiana lost Tuesday at Minnesota to fall to 12-3 in conference play, so Michigan squandered a chance to move into a three-way tie for second with Michigan State and Wisconsin, a game behind the Hoosiers.

"They really tried to shut down Trey. We had some good shots, but not enough good ones," Beilein said. "They slowed us up with their press a little bit, but we couldn't stop them."

Two foul shots by Marshall gave Penn State its first lead since the first half, 76-74, with 3:55 left. The Jordan Center rocked as if it were a Michigan-Penn State football game across the street at Beaver Stadium.

It was all Penn State from there.

Chambers watched as Michigan fumbled away opportunities, like when Burke had a steal from Newbill but lost control.

"The ball finally bounced our way," Chambers said. "Trey Burke strips D.J. at half court and kicks it out of bounds ... that's usually what we do."

All five of Michigan's losses have come on the road in the Big Ten ? none worse than Wednesday night's defeat. Michigan finished February with a 3-4 record, heading into a showdown Sunday with the ninth-ranked Spartans in Ann Arbor.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-02-28-BKC-T25-Michigan-Penn-St/id-f44bffcf0f4a417ebf917c9c52efa81a

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Friday, February 22, 2013

$100M Calif. mansion has unusual sale requirement

HILLSBOROUGH, Calif. (AP) ? As if the $100 million asking price wasn't deterrent enough, the owner of a mansion for sale in a ritzy San Francisco suburb says the buyer can move in only after his death.

The unusual arrangement is for a 16,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style home on more than 45 acres in Hillsborough.

The San Mateo County Times reports (http://bit.ly/VyKCcz ) the owner, 76-year-old Christian de Guigne (deh GHEEN-yay) IV, was born and raised in the home and doesn't plan to turn it over to the new owner until he dies.

Sotheby's International Realty agent Gregg Lynn says the arrangement was common for property traded up until the 20th century. He called the estate a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Another home nearby recently sold for $117.5 million.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-02-21-US-Mansion-Sale-Unusual-Deal/id-a8302bf1724c41dfa0f5038d19aaf537

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Tiniest planet yet found with sound

20 February 2013 Last updated at 13:03 ET By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Astronomers have smashed the record for the smallest planet beyond our Solar System - finding one only slightly larger than our Moon.

To spot the tiny, probably rocky planet, they first needed to precisely measure the size of its host star.

They did so using "astroseismology" - effectively, turning tiny variations in the star's light into sounds.

A report in Nature describes the blistering, probably rocky planet, which orbits its star in just 13 days.

It is joined in this far-flung solar system by two other planets, one three-quarters Earth's size and one twice as large as Earth - all circling their star too closely to harbour liquid water or life.

Moving target

The record for smallest "exoplanet" is routinely being broken, as astronomers get better and better at finding them.

The best tool in the planet-hunters' toolbox is the Kepler space telescope, which stares at a fixed part of the sky, trying to detect the tiny dips in stars' light that happens when planets pass in front of them: what is called a transit event.

In its earliest days, the Kepler team tended to find large planets - Jupiter- and Neptune-sized behemoths. In more recent years, the catalogue of exoplanet has seen an increasing number of so-called super-Earths, up to about twice the radius of our planet.

Only recently has something definitively Earth-sized been found.

Continue reading the main story

Exoplanets

An exoplanet is a planet that exists outside our Solar System
Many of those found so far are giant planets believed to resemble Jupiter or Neptune
The first exoplanet was discovered in 1992, orbiting a pulsar
A few years later, the planet 51 Pegasi B was found orbiting a star similar to the Sun
Hundreds of extrasolar planets have been confirmed since, and thousands more "candidates" await confirmation

But the new find is a planet just a third the size of that recent record-holder, smaller even than our Solar System's smallest planet, Mercury.

"I think it's an amazing technological achievement to be able to be able to detect small rocks like this," said Francois Fressin, a co-author of the paper based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"It means we're really in the arena where it's possible to detect all the planets of our Solar System, but around other stars," he told BBC News.

The find of Kepler 37b and its two companions can in part be ascribed to a wealth of data from the Kepler telescope; it has been recording data for nearly four years, and signals that would once have been too small to see have been slowly accumulating, with smaller planets becoming more apparent.

But telling just how small a given planet is depends on a relative measurement: how much light there is when the planet is and is not in front of the host star. The degree to which we can know the planet's size depends on how well we can know the host star's size.

That is where the science of astroseismology comes in - and a team of experts in this area of science at the University of Birmingham in the UK took a look at the data.

"Inside stars it's a very noisy environment, and that noise sets up sound waves that travel all the way through the star," said Birmingham astrophysicist Prof Yvonne Elsworth.

"Some of (the waves) will resonate, just like a musical instrument - the turbulence causes them to ring at frequencies that are characteristic of the star," Prof Elsworth told BBC News.

"If we look at the star we can see those oscillations, the amount of light we get from the star varies - slowly and by a very small amount - at frequencies that tell us what's going on inside the star."

And also like a musical instrument, those "resonant" frequencies tell researchers just how big the star actually is.

'Decade of discovery'

Together, the analyses point to the presence of three planets. Kepler 37b and c are about 30% and 74% as large as the Earth, and Kepler 37d is about twice Earth's radius.

The three orbit their star in 13, 21, and 40 days respectively - all within orbits just 20% of the Earth-Sun distance.

It is, in short, another interesting solar system to go in the burgeoning catalogues of exoplanets - and the notion that exoplanet news has been in plentiful supply in recent years is not lost on Dr Fressin.

"I understand that people could get bored by these successive announcements," he said.

"But hundreds or thousands of years from now, this will be remembered as the decade where discovery of other worlds of all kinds has been made possible."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21471908#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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Thursday, February 21, 2013

Client Accounting Assistant (?Accounting Assistant?) located in ...

This is a job announcement that I pulled directly out of RamsRecruiting. ?If you are interested, please go through Rams to apply. ?Use the title to help you identify the company and the steps to apply.

The company is looking for enthusiastic, committed professionals to join our Firm. Presently, we are recruiting a Client Accounting Assistant (?Accounting Assistant?) to provide support in our Richmond-Riverfront Plaza office location.

The Client Accounting Assistant will perform daily cash intake processes and accurately reflect deposits into the operating and trust accounts. Perform accurate data entry and assist with maintenance of the Firm?s timekeeper master file. Provide assistance to the Billing Auditor and members of the Billing Department with timecard revisions related to billing throughout the month. Assist with calendar management for individual, group and department functions. Provide clerical support for Accounting Managers and Department. Assist with special projects on an as needed basis.

Job duties include:

Accounts Receivable
*Perform daily client cash intake processes in accordance with Firm audit standards, to include: depositing (electronically or counter deposits at the bank) cash and checks, reporting totals to management, filing and maintaining accurate records, and researching of unidentifiable checks.
*Provide general assistance to the Client Accounting Department by researching client payments, provide check back-up documentation as requested and assist with the monthly bank reconciliation research.
*Receive and process client payments via credit cards.
*Provide clients with information regarding ACH and W-9 form requests.

Billing

*Provide assistance to the Billing Department and the Billing Audit Division by processing billing modifications for finalized bill preparation.
*Provide general assistance to the Billing Department to include: research of necessary cost documentation, labeling/mailing/distributing of client invoices/statements, research correction of addresses for returned client invoices/statements, and create basic invoices as needed.
*Responsible for all processes related to internal personal charge accounts to include: research, billing, distribution of bills, and collection of same.

Timekeeper

*Assist Management with the maintenance of the Firm?s Timekeeper master files ensuring that all appropriate fields are updated to comply with our business practices and reporting requirements.
*Collaborate with various departments regarding research of missing timekeeper data.
*Coordinate and provide new timekeepers with a personalized Client Accounting welcome letter.
*Coordinate departing timekeeper inventory reports and exiting attorney meetings for management and essential Client Accounting personnel.

Administrative and Reporting

*Perform necessary steps to generate and validate monthly Firm Performance Financials.
*Perform necessary steps to generate and validate weekly performance reports for Management meetings.
*Assist with validation of newly created Accounting reports.
*Maintain accurate calendar events for management. Take initiative in forecasting and preparing all necessary documentation needed for Managers to conduct calendared meetings.
*Coordinate meeting arrangements to include; Outlook scheduling, Sonexis setup, conference room reservation, video conferencing or other required technical equipment.
*Provide administrative and clerical support for Accounting Managers and Department, i.e. scanning, filing, maintaining offsite storage for accounting records, copying, faxing, research, submission of managerial expense reports.

Job Qualifications:

*Must possess strong clerical skills, with experience of 2-4 years.
*Must be comfortable with numbers, prior Accounting experience preferable.
*Must have strong written and verbal communication skills.
*Must be able to work within deadlines and able to prioritize competing requests.
*Must be proficient with Microsoft Office Suite.
*Must possess a proactive nature and take initiative with little guidance from management and peers.
*Must possess a strong work ethic, upholding confidences, be self-motivated and dependable.
*Must be able to work with minimal supervision as well as value a team approach to problem solving.
*Must maintain the ability to remain focused and engaged in a high paced environment.
*Must portray a high level of professionalism, while minimizing personal distractions.
*Must pay close attention to detail and be extremely organized.
*Must be very focused on customer service and willing to give or receive feedback.

Source: http://wp.vcu.edu/dwardcareer/2013/02/21/client-accounting-assistant-accounting-assistant-located-in-richmond/

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President Obama To Give Commencement Address At Morehouse College

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a?White House official says President Barack Obama will deliver the commencement address at all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta this spring.

The White House official declined to speak on the record because the schedule of President Obama?s commencement speeches has not been released.

Morehouse Colleges?s Commencement is scheduled for May 19.

Source: http://magicbaltimore.com/3365279/president-obama-to-give-commencement-address-at-morehouse-college/

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Gun owners get a discount at Va. pizza shop

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) ? A Virginia Beach pizza shop owner is showing his support for firearm rights by giving gun owners a 15 percent discount.

The discount is given to anyone who brings a gun or concealed handgun permit to All Around Pizzas and Deli.

Owner Jay Laze tells news media outlets that he'd planned on offering the discount for a limited time. But he says the response has been overwhelming and he might make it permanent.

Since the discount began last Friday, Laze says 80 percent of his customers have brought guns into the pizza shop. He says one customer came in with an AK-47.

Laze is a gun owner and says he's always been a supporter of the right to carry firearms.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gun-owners-discount-va-pizza-shop-111718083.html

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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Antarctic Penguin Washes Up in New Zealand; May Have Drifted For A Year

The original "Happy Feet" ready for release aboard The New Zealand research vessel Tangaroa in Aug. 2011.

Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

The original "Happy Feet" ready for release aboard The New Zealand research vessel Tangaroa in Aug. 2011.

Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

New Zealand seems to be the destination of choice for wayward Antarctic penguins.

The BBC reports that a Royal penguin was found Sunday washed ashore on a beach in New Zealand, where another penguin, a three-year-old emperor dubbed "Happy Feet," turned up in June 2011. Months later, Happy Feet was released, ostensibly destined for a return to his homeland. Sadly though, he is believed to have been eaten, possibly by a shark, sometime after his release into the Southern Ocean.

Veterinarians say the latest arrival, "Happy Feet, Jr.," is being cared for at a Wellington Zoo. Scientists there believe the "young male" may have departed about a year ago from a breeding colony on Macquarie Island, more than 1,200 miles away, and drifting been around since then.

The BBC quotes Lisa Argilla, a vet at the zoo, as saying the flightless aquatic bird had possibly struggled to find enough food and come ashore to go through his seasonal molting.

"It's very weak, doesn't want to stand. It's making very small progress every day but it's still in critical condition," Ms. Argilla told the TVNZ channel.

Argilla told the French news agency AFP that Happy Feet, Jr. was having some kidney trouble and she said "hopefully we can reverse that, feed him up and bring him back to good health," but she added that it's "touch and go for at the moment."

The penguin was found on Sunday by Jenny Boyne, who was walking along Tora beach on New Zealand's Wairarapa coast, says The New Zealand Herald.

"She saved this bird's life. I don't think he would've survived another night without veterinary attention," Argilla said.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/20/172508036/antarctic-penguin-washes-up-in-new-zealand-may-have-drifted-for-a-year?ft=1&f=1007

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Google's stock price breaks $800 for 1st time

FILE - In this Oct. 17, 2012, file photo, a man raises his hand during at Google offices. Google's stock price topped $800 for the first time Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2013, amid renewed confidence in the company's ability to reap steadily higher profits from its dominance of Internet search and prominence in the increasingly important mobile device market. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Google's stock price topped $800 for the first time Tuesday amid renewed confidence in the company's ability to reap steadily higher profits from its dominance of Internet search and prominence in the increasingly important mobile device market.

The milestone comes more than five years after Google's shares initially hit $700. Not long after breaking that barrier in October 2007, the economy collapsed into the worst recession since World War II and Google's stock tumbled into a prolonged malaise that eventually led to a change in leadership.

Besides enriching Google's employees and other shareholders, the company's resurgent stock is an implicit endorsement of co-founder Larry Page. He replaced his managerial mentor, Eric Schmidt, as CEO in April 2011. Google's stock has risen by about 35 percent since Page took over. By contrast, the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index has climbed by 15 percent over the same stretch. Most of Google's gains have occurred in the past seven months.

In morning trading, Google's stock was at $801.99, up 1.2 percent, or $9.10.

The significance of crossing the $800 threshold is largely symbolic. If Google had its way, the stock wouldn't even be priced near these levels. The company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., had hoped to split its stock last year in a move that would have at least temporarily halved the trading price by doubling the total number of outstanding shares. But the proposed stock split was put on hold until Google resolves a shareholder lawsuit alleging that the stock split unfairly cedes too much power to Page and fellow co-founder Sergey Brin. Page and Brin have been the company's largest shareholders since its inception. A trial on the lawsuit is scheduled to begin June 17 in a Delaware state court.

Assuming more investors wouldn't have bought the stock had it split, the company's market value probably wouldn't have changed from its current level of about $265 billion.

There is little dispute among analysts that Google appears well positioned for many years of prosperity. The reasons: Its Internet search engine remains the hub of the Web's biggest marketing network; its YouTube video site has established itself as an increasingly attractive advertising vehicle; and its free Android software is running on more than 600 million smartphones and tablet computers to create even more opportunities to sell ads.

The lower prices attached to mobiles ads have raised recurring concerns on Wall Street about the decline in the average rate paid for ads that run alongside Google's search results. The company, though, is trying to reverse the trend with upcoming changes to its ad system that will prod more marketers to buy mobile ads when they are creating campaigns for desktop and laptop computers.

Opinions about Google weren't as upbeat a few years ago. Although Google weathered the Great Recession better than most companies, its revenue growth slowed and its stock plummeted to as low as $247.30 near the end of 2008.

Things looked so bleak in 2009 that Google took the rare step of re-pricing stock options that had been doled out to its employees to give them a chance to make more money when the shares rebounded. The program allowed Google workers to swap their old stock options for new ones with an exercise price of about $308.

Even after the economy snapped out of the recession toward the end of 2009, Google's stock began to lag the rest of the market. Investors began to wonder if the company was losing its competitive age as it morphed from a hard-charging startup to giant organization with thousands of employees working in dozens of offices scattered around the world.

At the same time, Facebook was emerging as the Internet's fastest growing company in a meteoric rise. The social networking company had some people convinced it would eventually become a more important advertising vehicle than Google's search engine.

Perceptions have changed since Page became CEO. Under Page's leadership, Google has streamlined its decision-making and operations while closing dozens of services. It established its own toehold in social networking with the 2011 introduction of Google Plus.

Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. has lost much of the luster that made its initial public offering of stock one of the biggest in U.S. history. Since going public at $38, Facebook's stock has sunk 25 percent.

By contrast, Google's stock has never slipped below its August 2004 IPO price of $85.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-02-19-Google%20Stock/id-951b98bbcdbc4a1280be3f51ce2471f8

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Shedding new light on infant brain development

Feb. 18, 2013 ? A new study by Columbia Engineering researchers finds that the infant brain does not control its blood flow in the same way as the adult brain. The paper, which the scientists say could change the way researchers study brain development in infants and children, is published in the February 18 Early Online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The control of blood flow in the brain is very important" says Elizabeth Hillman, associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Radiology, who led the research study in her Laboratory for Functional Optical Imaging at Columbia. "Not only are regionally specific increases in blood flow necessary for normal brain function, but these blood-flow increases form the basis of signals measured in fMRI, a critical imaging tool used widely in adults and children to assess brain function. Many prior fMRI studies have overlooked the possibility that the infant brain controls blood flow differently."

"Our results are fascinating" says Mariel Kozberg, a neurobiology MD-PhD candidate who works under Hillman and is the lead author of the PNAS paper. "We found that the immature brain does not generate localized blood-flow increases in response to stimuli. By tracking changes in blood-flow control with increasing age, we observed the brain gradually developing its ability to increase local blood flow and, by adulthood, generate a large blood-flow response."

The study results suggest that fMRI experiments in infants and children should be carefully designed to ensure that maturation of blood-flow control can be delineated from changes in neuronal development. "On the other hand," says Hillman, "our findings also suggest that vascular development may be an important new factor to consider in normal and abnormal brain development, so our findings could represent new markers of normal and abnormal brain development that could potentially be related to a range of neurological or even psychological conditions."

Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, is one of several brain-imaging methods that measure changes in blood flow to detect the presence and location of neuronal activity. In adults, blood-flow increases occur in specific regions of the brain during a particular task like moving your hand or reacting to a stimulus. FMRI relies upon measuring decreases in deoxygenated hemoglobin resulting from this blood-flow increase to understand which parts of the brain are responsible for different actions and emotions. FMRI and other brain-imaging methods are currently being widely used to explore brain development, and to understand disorders in infants and children including autism and ADHD.

"Until now, we had been studying blood flow in the adult brain," Hillman notes, "but we became interested in several studies that reported odd, sometimes negative, blood-flow responses in newborn and premature infants and decided to carefully explore what was different about the immature brain compared to the adult. Initially, I saw these studies as a way to watch how the adult system assembled itself during development. Then we realized how important our findings were to those using brain imaging to study child development and developmental disorders."

The team used a unique multispectral optical intrinsic signal imaging system (MS-OISI) built in Hillman's lab to perform the research. MS-OISI is a high-speed, high-resolution imaging approach that takes advantage of the different absorption spectra of deoxygenated and oxygenated hemoglobin in order to determine changes in the concentrations of each. The researchers found that, with increasing age, there was a gradual development of a localized increase in blood flow, while a strong, delayed decrease in flow was consistently present. Only by adulthood was the positive increase able to balance the decrease in flow.

"Our results suggest that the infant brain might not be able to generate localized blood- flow increases, even if there is neuronal activity occurring, and that the development of blood- flow control occurs in parallel with early neuronal development," says Kozberg. "This could suggest that fMRI studies of infants and children may be detecting changes in both vascular and neuronal development -- in fact, vascular development may be an important new factor to consider in normal and abnormal brain development."

The team also found that the younger age groups were highly sensitive to blood pressure increases in response to stimulation and that these increases can cause large increases in blood flow across the brain. "This finding indicates that the newborn brain is also unable to regulate its overall blood-flow levels," Kozberg explains. "This could explain earlier fMRI results in infants and children that were sometimes positive and sometimes negative, because it is difficult to tell whether blood pressure increases are occurring in infants and children. This result suggests that great care should be taken in setting stimulus thresholds in young subjects."

The researchers add that, since the newborn brain appears to be able to sustain itself without tightly controlled blood flow, their findings suggest that the infant brain may be intrinsically more resistant to damage due to a lack of oxygen than the adult brain. "This could be an important property to understand, both in terms of understanding how best to treat blood-flow problems in the newborn infant brain, which can cause lifelong problems such as cerebral palsy, and to potentially better understand how to treat the adult brain in conditions such as stroke," Hillman observes.

"Our lab operates at the intersection of neuroscience and engineering," continues Hillman." Not only do we develop the imaging systems that let us investigate the living brain in new ways, but like all engineers, we're fascinated with figuring out 'how things work,' and the brain is no exception."

Next steps for Hillman and her team include further defining the cellular mechanisms underlying the developing hemodynamic response at a cellular and microvascular level, using methods such as high-speed and multi-plane in-vivo two-photon microscopy, another technique developed in the lab. They're particularly interested in tracking changes in neuronal activity, microvascular architecture and connectivity, and the distribution and activity of other cellular populations thought to be associated with neurovascular coupling as a function of development.

"This will help us understand how the neonatal brain is different, and better understand how mature blood-flow control mechanisms in the adult brain work," says Kozberg. Adds Hillman, "We are also keen to take this research into the clinic and explore whether our findings could improve diagnosis and monitoring of newborn infants. Our findings so far feel like just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more for us to do now to understand why the infant brain is so different, and how we can use our findings to improve understanding of a wealth of devastating childhood and developmental conditions."

This research was supported by grants and student fellowships from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Eye Institute, the National Science Foundation, the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the Medical Scientist Training Program, and the Human Frontier Science Program. Hillman is also a member of the Columbia University graduate program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Kavli Institute for Brain Sciences.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. The original article was written by Holly Evarts.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/mind_brain/child_development/~3/B4IRQuFo-wI/130218164126.htm

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Tuesday, February 19, 2013

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Monday, February 18, 2013

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