The "News" thread.

[Geo]

Are those Argentinian fishing boats within the 200 mile economic exclusive zone of the Falklands??? 

[gwillybj]

Falkland Islands's latitude and longitude is about 51.0-52.5° S and 57.5-61.5° W. Add the 200 miles to that for the exclusive zone and it could be that someone has strayed a few miles.

[Buster's Uncle]

Iraq vet's family considering gravestone options
Associated Press
By AMANDA LEE MYERS October 23, 2013 12:09 PM



In this Thursday, Oct. 10, 2013, photo provided by the family of Kimberly Walker, shows Walker's gravestone in the likeness of popular cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. Despite getting prior approval for the gravestone from Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati, the cemetery recently removed it, saying it did not fit in with the character of the historic and picturesque cemetery. (AP Photo/Kara Walker)


     
CINCINNATI (AP) — The family of a slain Iraqi war veteran wants her towering SpongeBob SquarePants headstone returned to her final resting place while the cemetery officials that removed it say that's the only thing they won't do, leaving both sides at an apparent impasse that may have to be decided in court.

Deborah Walker told The Associated Press after Tuesday's meeting with Spring Grove Cemetery officials that she'd consider their various proposals if they would think about hers — simply putting her daughter Kimberly's gravestone back.

But cemetery President Gary Freytag told the AP that isn't an option.

The headstone fashioned in the cartoon character's likeness was erected at Spring Grove Cemetery on Oct. 10, almost eight months after Kimberly Walker, 28, was found slain in a Colorado hotel room.

Despite getting the cemetery's prior approval of the headstone design — a smiling SpongeBob in an Army uniform, with Walker's name and rank — cemetery staff called her family the day after it was installed to say it would have to come down.

Cemetery officials said the employee who approved the design made a mistake. It was taken down along with a near-exact duplicate erected for Walker's living twin sister.

Deborah Walker said she's beyond frustrated with Spring Grove, saying her family had a contract, wants it to be honored as promised and is now considering their legal options.

"You can't keep blaming it on an employee," she said. "That employee represented that whole cemetery and when they do wrong, you've got to make it right. Put SpongeBob back up."

Freytag said he's "willing to do whatever the family thinks is best, other than installing the monuments back as they were."

Other possible solutions, Freytag said, include creating new, more traditional headstones bearing a smaller SpongeBob likeness, or laying the original headstones flat on the ground after redesigning the lot.

Spring Grove would cover all the costs, Freytag said.

Kimberly Walker's twin sister, Kara Walker, said her family went to great lengths for each of the $13,000 headstones, including obtaining copyright approval from Nickelodeon. The family believes the headstone was the only fitting tribute for her sister, a huge SpongeBob fan.

Kimberly Walker was an Army corporal assigned to the 2nd General Support Aviation Battalion and served two yearlong tours Iraq in 2006 and 2010 as a petroleum supply specialist, her family said.

She was found dead in a hotel room in Colorado Springs in February on Valentine's Day, strangled and beaten to death. Her boyfriend, an Army sergeant stationed nearby, was arrested and charged with her killing.

"My sister served our country and most people try to accommodate veterans and try to take care of them," Kara Walker said. "For them not to accommodate and respect what my sister sacrificed, not only for my family, but for everyone else in this country, really bothers me."

Freytag said Spring Grove admires and appreciates Kimberly Walker's military service but that the cemetery has to consider the wishes of other families whose loved ones are interred there and may not feel that gravestones modeled after cartoon characters are appropriate.

The dispute over the headstones has gained nationwide attention. Freytag said the cemetery has received so many calls, both in support of and against its decision, that they had to set up a special extension to field all the comments.

http://news.yahoo.com/iraq-vets-family-considering-gravestone-options-200650071.html

[Geo]

Last month or so, a community council ordered the late wife to change the tombstone of her deceased husband. She had engraved a puzzle and a math formula on it. The council's objection? The tombstone inscriptions was not in line with typical ones.

[Buster's Uncle]

Scientists Are 3D Printing Poop Now–You Know, For Science
BetaBeat
By Molly Mulshine 3 hours ago

     



So lifelike.

We've been wondering what 3D printers can really be used for aside from manufacturing hairless Troll dolls and illegal guns. Lo and behold, the answer is full scale replicas of poop--special eff-excrements, if you will.

In researching this story, Betabeat learned of a whole new world of poop categorization known as the Bristol Stool Form Scale, or BSFS, via Discover Mag. It's a measurement system for figuring out how long your doo doo has been traveling through your intestines. It involves looking at one's waste and describing it with a range of verbal descriptors named after food, like "sausage" and "chicken nuggets." Appetizing.

Scientists have for some reason decided that this means of categorizing butt sludge is not child-friendly, despite the fact that children love nothing more than talking about both poop and food.

So they figured they'd recreate the official seven types of fecal matter (gotta catch 'em all!) using a 3D printer to see if children could better describe their stools with a lifelike visual guide, Discover Magazine reports. To add to the verisimilitude, the models even floated or sank depending on whether their real-life counterparts would.

The scientists' conclusion was that the 3D models weren't any better for helping kids identify dookie than the previous verbal system was. But on the plus side, the scientists now have a bunch of fake turds at their disposal, just in time to scare away trick-or-treaters who try to get greedy with the chocolates.


http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-3d-printing-poop-now-know-science-184603273.html

[gwillybj]

  ookey-dookey, that was a fun Halloween treat 

[gwillybj]

Type in 16°51′53″N, 11°57′13″E on Google Maps, Zoom in and Watch What Happens.
By Liz Klimas
14 hours ago

If you go to Google maps and search 16°51?53?N and 11°57?13?E something pretty cool happens: you're taken to a place in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Zoom in and you would see a compass with the image of an airplane in the middle.

And that's not an icon.

The image is actually a giant tribute to all the passengers and crew who lost their lives in a plane crash more than two decades ago.

google_UTA Flight 772
UTA Flight 772 memorial. (Image source: Google Maps)

Although it's not the anniversary of the UTA Flight 772 explosion that led to a crash that killed about 170 people on board, the aerial image that most will only ever see thanks to Google's satellite images is going viral now none the less.

Flight 772 from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo to Chad to Paris went down in Niger on Sept. 19, 1989, after a briefcase bomb planted by Libyan terrorists was detonated.

NIGER-AIRPLANE ACCIDENT
The cabin of the UTA DC 10 flight 772 lays on the Tenere desert after the passenger plane exploded on September 19, 1989, killing all 171 people aboard. (PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty Images)

The memorial was created in 2007 by an association dedicated to the crash victim's families. It features a DC10 airplane, the model that went down, in black rock inside the compass pointed in the direction of its intended flight path.

UTA Flight 772
A look at UTA Flight 772?s memorial from the ground. (Image source: Imgur)

Check out touching images of the memorial being constructed from stone.

(H/T: Viral Nova)

http://news.yahoo.com/type-16-51-53-n-11-57-13-212013548.html

[gwillybj]

The New York Times - U.S.
Rules to Require Equal Coverage for Mental Ills
By JACKIE CALMES and ROBERT PEAR
Published: November 8, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Friday will complete a generation-long effort to require insurers to cover care for mental health and addiction just like physical illnesses when it issues long-awaited regulations defining parity in benefits and treatment.

The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama’s program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.

In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In planning those actions, the administration anticipated that gun control legislation would fail in Congress as pressure from the gun lobby proved longer-lasting than the national trauma over the killings of first graders and their caretakers last Dec. 14.

“We feel actually like we’ve made a lot of progress on mental health as a result in this year, and this is kind of the big one,” said a senior administration official, one of several who described the outlines of the regulations that Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, will announce at a mental health conference on Friday in Atlanta with the former first lady Rosalynn Carter.

While laws and regulations dating to 1996 took initial steps in requiring insurance parity for medical and mental health, “here we’re doing full parity, and we’ve also taken steps to extend it to the people covered in the Affordable Care Act,” the senior official said. “This is kind of the final word on parity.”

With the announcement, the administration will make some news that is certain to be popular with many Americans at a time when Mr. Obama and Ms. Sebelius have been on the defensive for the bungled introduction of the insurance marketplaces created under the Affordable Care Act.

According to administration officials, the rule would ensure that health plans’ co-payments, deductibles and limits on visits to health care providers are not more restrictive or less generous for mental health benefits than for medical and surgical benefits. Significantly, the regulations would clarify how parity applies to residential treatments and outpatient services, where much of the care for people with addictions or mental illnesses occurs.

Any geographic or facility-type limitations would have to be comparable for medical and mental health benefits. For example, an administration official said, an insurer “can’t say you can only get substance-abuse treatment in state but you can go anywhere for medical/surgical.”

The regulations, which specifically put into effect the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, would affect most Americans with insurance — roughly 85 percent of the population — whether their policies are from employer plans, other group plans, or coverage purchased in the market for individual plans.

The final parity rules do not apply to health plans that manage care for millions of low-income people on Medicaid. However, the administration has previously issued guidance to state health officials saying that such plans should meet the parity requirements of the 2008 law.

The parity law does not apply to Medicare, according to Irvin L. Muszynski, a lawyer at the American Psychiatric Association.

The rules have been awaited since the 2008 law by patient advocate groups. As it happened, the groups’ complaints about regulatory delays were the subject of a Senate hearing on Thursday. Interest picked up further last month as individuals could begin enrolling in the new insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, provided under Mr. Obama’s health care law.

Under that law,treatment for mental health and substance abuse is among 10 categories of benefits considered essential and thus mandatory in plans marketed in the new exchanges to individuals and small groups. Although many insurers already provide extensive mental health coverage, some have found ways to get around existing rules and to deny payment for treatment, or to otherwise limit the benefits.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said the five-year delay in issuing a final rule had real-world consequences. “In mental health, uncertainty kills,” he said. “If an individual poses a threat to himself or others, he cannot be told he will get the care he needs as soon as his insurance company decides what ‘parity’ means.”

Insurance companies have raised concerns about the expense involved in paying for the lengthy and intensive courses of treatment that the final regulations address. But experts have said the rules are not expected to significantly add to the cost of coverage because so few patients require these levels of care. 

Mental health services are scarce in many parts of the country, particularly for children, so experts have questioned whether changes in the law will have much impact in practice.

Former Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, a co-sponsor of the 2008 law, said the rules could particularly help veterans. “No one stands to gain more from true parity than the men and women who have served our country and now need treatment for the invisible wounds they have brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

Administration officials consulted closely with mental health groups. “What we are hearing is very positive,” said Andrew Sperling, a lobbyist at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, based on what he had been told of the final language.

Under the 2008 law, treatment limits — like restrictions on the number of doctor visits or days in a hospital — cannot be more restrictive for mental health benefits than for medical and surgical benefits. But interpretation of the law left much in question.

For example, Mr. Sperling said, policyholders can easily determine whether numerical limits on doctor visits are comparable in their plans for mental and medical health care. But, he said, it is more difficult to challenge “nonquantitative limits” — like some insurers’ requirements that people get their authorization before seeing a psychotherapist.

The provision of the rule that will seek to clarify the amount of transparency required of health plans “is important,” Mr. Sperling said. Patients advocates say they need to be able to see the criteria by which insurers find a particular service to be medically necessary, so policyholders can judge whether standards for mental health treatments are more restrictive.

Carol A. McDaid, the leader of a coalition of patients and providers of mental health and addiction services, said: “This is the beginning, not the end, of our work to make the vision of the law a reality. We have to make sure that the law and the rules are fully enforced.”

Insurers and business trade groups said they did not know enough about the rules to comment.

Dr. Paul Summergrad of Tufts University, president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, said he hoped the final rules would end “the uniquely discriminatory form of prior authorization and utilization review” applied to emergency care for patients with mental illness.

A person who has a heart attack or pneumonia and goes to a hospital will routinely be admitted, with electronic notice sent to the insurer on the next business day, Dr. Summergrad said. By contrast, he said, if a person who is profoundly depressed and tried to commit suicide goes to a hospital, an emergency room doctor must call a toll-free telephone number, “present the case in voluminous detail and get prior authorization.”

State insurance commissioners will apparently have the primary responsibility for seeing that commercial insurers comply with the parity standards. They already have their hands full, however, enforcing new insurance market rules, and in some states insurance regulators are considered close to the industry.

“We need enforcement,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. “The notion of delegating this to the states, which are looking to the federal government for direction, is problematic.”


A version of this article appears in print on November 8, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rules to Require Equal Coverage for Mental Ills.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/us/politics/rules-to-require-equal-coverage-for-mental-ills.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Your Pee Could Power Future Robots
LiveScience.com
By Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer  3 hours ago



Researchers have found a way to turn urine into electric power that could drive a robot.



There's a new use for artificial hearts, and it involves a more taboo bodily fluid than blood.

A device that mimics the squeezing action of the human heart has been used to pump urine into a microbial fuel cell, which could power robots that convert the waste into electricity.

"In the future, we hope the robots might be used in city environments for remote sensing," where they could help to monitor pollution, said study researcher Peter Walters, an industrial designer at the University of the West of England. "It could refuel from public lavatories, or urinals, " Walters said.

Walters and colleagues at the University of Bristol have created four generations of these so-called EcoBots over the past decade. Previous versions of the robots ran off energy from rotten produce, dead flies, wastewater and sludge.

Each is powered by a microbial fuel cell, containing live microorganisms like those found in the human gut or sewage treatment plants. The microbes digest the waste (or urine) and produce electrons, which can be harvested to produce electrical current, Walters said.

The researchers have already proved the microbial fuel cells can use urine power to charge a mobile phone.

Now, the team has developed a device, made of artificial muscles, that delivers real human urine to the robot's microbial power stations. The pump is constructed from smart materials, called shape memory alloys, which remember their shape after being deformed.

Heating the artificial muscles with an electric current causes them to compress the soft center of the pump, forcing urine through an outlet that pumps it up to the height of the robot's fuel cells. Removing the heat allows the muscles to revert to their original shape, allowing more fluid to enter the pump — much as a heart relaxes to suck in more blood.

Twenty-four of these fuel cells stacked together were able to produce enough electricity to charge a capacitor, which was used to trigger contractions of the artificial heart pump, the researchers report today (Nov. in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Whereas conventional motor-powered pumps tend to get clogged, the artificial muscle pump has larger internal orifices, Walters said.

While the new pump does produce more electricity than it consumes (since some of the electricity comes from urine that's converted to electrons), it's still not extremely efficient. The researchers hope to improve the pump's efficiency for use in future generations of the EcoBot.

http://news.yahoo.com/pee-could-power-future-robots-145355520.html

[gwillybj]

Cursive Handwriting Will No Longer Be Taught in Schools Because It's a Big, Old Waste of Time

Also, because computers.

The biggest controversy to take place in the world of penmanship is happening right now: The Common Core education standards dictate that cursive will no longer be taught in elementary schools. And things are getting pretty heated.

Where does your allegiance fall?

Seven states — California, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Utah — are now fighting to keep cursive in the curriculum. Their argument is that "it helped distinguish the literate from the illiterate."

Jokes on them because all kids are illiterate these days. Because again: computers.

"It's much more likely that keyboarding will help students succeed in careers and in school than it is that cursive will," said Morgan Polikoff, assistant professor of K-12 policy and leadership at the University of Southern California. So instead of cursive, kids might learn keyboarding.

Here's our two cents: You spend the entire year in third grade learning how to write in cursive and then will never, ever write in cursive again. Instead, schools should add additional spelling lessons to the curriculum. Kids are more tech savvy these days, but because of Microsoft Spell Check, NOBODY knows how to spell without a computer anymore.

Let's spend that time teaching kids that there is a difference between language used to text and tweet and proper, written English. It's no longer a matter of knowing "your" vs. "you're," it's learning that it's definitely never "ur."

Also, the capital, cursive "Q" looks so stupid.

Advocates for learning cursive (including Idaho representative Linden Bateman, 72) argue that "more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard."

Bateman continues, "The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills."

And if that's the reasons schools taught cursive, sure, fine. That's great. Also, there are plenty of other ways that kids can develop hand-eye coordination that doesn't involve spending a year of their prime development time learning a new alphabet.

But Bateman also argues that forgoing cursive may have much more consequential results: He argues we "will lose the ability to interpret valuable cultural resources—historical documents, ancestors' letters and journals, handwritten scholarship — if they can't read cursive."

"The Constitution of the United States is written in cursive. Think about that," Bateman said.

The Constitution of the United States is also available online, typed out. Not in cursive. Soooooo...We're probably good.

Right now I'm screaming at the top of my voice against the statement that cursive is never used after learning it in third grade! If my cursive is compared to my printing, anyone with half a brain would thank my third grade teacher for that year's education, as my printing is atrocious and my cursive is art. Learning cursive adds a choice for the individual: which way will I write? Which will help me establish a personality in my handwriting?

[Unorthodox]

I use a bizarre mix of print and cursive.  Alec's teachers were told 'don't teach cursive', but they've ignored that. 

Talia, on the other hand, where half her day is learning CHINESE, I don't know that cursive is going to fit in there.  Though, the Chinese teacher is VERY particular about how they write the characters. 

[Geo]

Though, the Chinese teacher is VERY particular about how they write the characters.

They HAVE to be, or they'd be 'writing' down a completely different meaning.

[JarlWolf]

I think cursive is better taught later on in a curriculum, when you need it more official documents, signatures and that sort of thing. It also makes more sense, because when a person is a youth it's when they generally find their first jobs and engage in more official activities, like getting a driver's license, whatever.

If it were me, I'd have cursive removed from earlier grades, and instead focus on spelling and grammar: SO you get a good foundation on the language and how it operates, and proper spelling and such, and then once you reach the age of say 12 or so, the start of a person's time as a youth, learn cursive and other more official/fancy forms of writing to give them more options and help them develop their signature, among other things. Just my opinion of it though.

[gwillybj]

I use a bizarre mix of print and cursive.

That's pretty much how my "style" developed and I never had any complaints from teachers. My mother screamed a couple of times

My stepsons (age 14/grade 8 and age 16/grade 10) and their teachers are very glad there is the computer and printer. The loss, though, is neither has a proper signature; they just print fast and say "good enough."

It's a little bit hard to present this on an international forum, since we have the Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, et al. But I suppose each has its own difficulties where there is "standard" versus "script" handwriting.

[JarlWolf]

I use a bizarre mix of print and cursive.

My stepsons (age 14/grade 8 and age 16/grade 10) and their teachers are very glad there is the computer and printer. The loss, though, is neither has a proper signature; they just print fast and say "good enough."

That's why I think that handwriting/cursive and official signatures should be taught and developed around the time of youth, not as a younger child: Is when you begin to actually use such a thing, and if it's taught early on, and not constantly used, the skill of it wanes and is eventually lost.