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Monday, January 9, 2012
An Emergency Phone With a 15-Year Standby Time Is Definitely Going In My Car's Trunk [Phones]
Honor Our Troops All American Breakfast Fund Raiser
El Dorado County Association of Realtors Honor Our Troops Committee Presents an?All American Breakfast fund raiser is coming up on Saturday, January 28th from 7am to 11am at the Placerville Veteran's Hall, 130 Placerville Drive, Placerville.? Complete with eggs, toast, sausage, ham, hash browns, hot cakes, biscuits & gravy, juice, milk & coffee!? All proceeds are used to send care packages to the military personnel serving in the war zones who are from El Dorado County or have family members in El Dorado County.? Adults $5, kids $2.? Come support your local heroes!
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Sunday, January 8, 2012
Swiss right presses central bank chief to resign (AP)
GENEVA ? Switzerland's biggest political party called Friday for the country's central bank chief to resign, saying Philipp Hildebrand broke the law by conducting private currency deals while he was leading efforts to soften the Swiss franc.
The nationalist Swiss People's Party, which won more than a quarter of the vote in last year's election, said Hildebrand was "no longer tenable" as president of the central bank. The demands came a day after the 48-year-old banker broke his silence to deny wrongdoing and dismiss calls for his resignation.
"The best thing would be if he himself took the consequences," the party's deputy general-secretary, Silvia Baer, told The Associated Press on Friday. "Otherwise it's up to the appropriate oversight authorities to recall him."
The Swiss National Bank acts independently of the government, but its president is elected by the government's seven-member Cabinet, which can also remove him or her following a request by the central bank's supervisory council.
Hildebrand, whose six-year term began Jan 1., 2010, is considered a pillar of the central bank's success in steering Switzerland through the worst of the global credit crunch. But his decision to buy and sell large amounts of U.S. dollars at a time when his own central bank was making major monetary decisions about the Swiss franc has led to accusations of naivety and possibly insider trading.
The former swimming champion and hedge fund manager on Thursday denied breaking the bank's internal rules, saying his only mistake was not to reverse a particularly sensitive transaction conducted by his American wife from their joint account.
Still, Hildebrand acknowledged the public had raised "moral questions" about his behavior and pledged to review the bank's rules on personal transactions.
A senior figure in the People's Party said that isn't enough. Lawmaker Christoph Blocher has demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the whole affair.
The billionaire businessman, who first brought leaked statements of Hildebrand's dollar deals to the attention of the government, said he expected further questionable transactions to surface in a probe.
A parliamentary inquiry would prolong the focus on Hildebrand's personal finances at a time when he is trying to keep Switzerland from being drawn into the European debt crisis that is crippling its neighbors.
Under Hildebrand's leadership, the Swiss central bank last year took several steps to halt the rise of the franc against the euro, including setting a minimum exchange rate for the euro of 1.20 Swiss francs. That also pushed up the dollar just weeks after Hildebrand's wife Kashya had bought some $504,000.
In early October, the couple sold a similar amount of dollars for what appeared to be a profit of tens of thousands of francs (dollars). Hildebrand said he has since donated those profit to a Swiss charitable organization.
Without naming Blocher, Hildebrand told reporters Thursday that those now engaged in "attacks on me as an individual" were harming the interests of Switzerland. Hildebrand said he would talk with his lawyer on whether to take legal steps against those involved in leaking details of his personal account at the exclusive Basel-based bank Sarasin.
Zurich prosecutors said Friday they have opened an investigation into a possible breach of banking secrecy by a former Sarasin employee.
The bank said Friday it was also seeking a criminal probe against those who encouraged the unnamed employee and received copies of Hildebrand's confidential documents.
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Saturday, January 7, 2012
Santorum shrugs off report of Iowa vote errors (AP)
DES MOINES, Iowa ? Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum shrugged off reports late Thursday that the vote count from Iowa's caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied.
Santorum told Fox News that Iowa's Republican Party chairman, Matt Strawn, informed him of two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night. Taken together, Santorum said, the changes would almost cancel out each other and that Romney would win by nine votes instead of eight.
"That doesn't really matter to me," he said. "This was a tie."
Strawn said in a statement that party officials would not respond to "every rumor, innuendo or allegation" as it certifies results during a two-week certification process. Romney and Santorum each had just over 30,000 votes out of more than 122,000 votes cast.
Strawn said state party officials had been in contact with GOP officials in Appanoose County but that officials "do not have any reason to believe the final, certified results of Appanoose County will change the outcome of Tuesday's vote."
Des Moines TV station KCCI reported that a Ron Paul backer attending his first precinct caucuses in Appanoose County, in southern Iowa, said the vote from his precinct was inaccurately reported and gave Romney 20 more votes than he actually received.
The Paul supporter, Edward True of Moulton, told The Associated Press that he helped count the ballots cast at his precinct caucuses and that Romney received two votes. True said he was shocked to see the official results on the Republican Party website showed Romney with 22 votes in the precinct.
"I assume somebody made a typographical error," he said in a telephone interview.
True said that when he contacted local Republican officials, "They said they would sort it out in the next couple of weeks, but how many primaries will have happened by that time?"
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Scientists, Fight For Access!
Scientists? idealism is honorable, and genuinely heartfelt. Few other groups of people really do want the change the world in such a positive, progressive manner. Yet, in a twist of irony, few other groups who prize evidence and free thought systematically follow dogmatic traditions that are directly in conflict with their idealistic world view. Why are some of the smartest people in the country allowing publishing companies to fleece them, their institutions and libraries, the federal government and the american taxpayers of their money?
Sadly, what is occurring is not illegal, but to the average person it might sound like a fine line between fee-for-service and embezzlement of taxpayer money. Scientists, at least those receiving federal and state grants, are awarded taxpayer?s money based on merit of proposals by a groups of their peers. This money is managed through academic institutions and when it comes time to publish these results in the peer-reviewed literature, fees are paid out to private, profit-driven publishing companies. The publishing companies provide editorial assistance and the peer review process and once accepted, print it out or make the works available online and ship copies to subscribers. There is nothing wrong about providing fees for service, but these publishing companies then charge the same academic and federal institutions and the taxpayers who provided the initial funds for the research to access the information that they paid for.
Herein lies the paradox.?Consider an investment broker who takes clients? money offshore evading the United States tax system and then charges their clients fees to access their own money and to merely look at their portfolio or balance. Not a perfect analogy, and not entirely illegal perhaps, but it smells just as funny. This is why there are groups of people, not only scientists, that insist on open access of publication results and data for taxpayer-funded research. Who else wants access to research besides scientists? Non-profit groups with strapped budgets, advocacy groups for patient rights, teachers and students at grade schools or even non-research universities, journalists and writers working on news stories or books, etc. ? all are participants of the knowledge ecosystem along with the researchers. Many are indeed taxpaying United States citizens who have actually helped to fund the research they desperately need access to.
In 2008, the National Institutes of Health recognized the irony and proclaimed that all federally-funded research publications be made openly accessible. The even provide a repository (PubMedCentral) and a gave researchers (and publishing companies) a generous leeway up to 12 months post-publication to accomplish this. The publishing companies still had a year to make money off the research and taxpayers would eventually get to read relevant research results after an arguably reasonable period.
Not satisfied with this compromise, though, the American Association of Publisher?s, has been fighting back and curiously appear to have secured a few members of Congress in their back pocket. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) introduce HR3699, the ?Research Works Act?, into Congress just before Christmas. And it not a tenuous link that Maloney and Issa both ?received donations from major publishing companies in 2011 and ended year introducing this short, and potentially misleading, bit of text intended ?to ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.? It reads as follows:
No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that?
(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.
As with any legislation, language is always very important. As Dr. Michael Eisen pointed out on his personal blog, ?this bill would not only end the NIH?s Public Access Policy, but it would forbid any effort on the part of any agency to ensure taxpayer access to work funded by the federal government.? Additionally, the part about the ?private-sector??refers to any non-governmental research. In this manner, universities would be regarded more as independent contractor and their research works would thus be non-governmental and part of the ?private sector?.
Speaking of language, the text of the AAP?s press release commending the legislation is mind-bogglingly superfluous! Is there really rogue peer review out there that needs protecting against? Where Tom Allen, president and CEO and AAP notes,??The professional and scholarly publishing community thanks Representatives Issa and Maloney for supporting their significant investments that fund innovations and enable the essential peer-review process maintaining the high standards of U.S. scientific research.? It is?disingenuous?at best to connect the free, open dissemination of publicly-funded research works with standards of peer review and innovation. If anything, the taint of profit-driven shenanigans causes a detriment to the credibility of research and peer review.
The AAP even goes so far as to boldly state ?Journal articles are widely available in major academic centers, public libraries, universities, interlibrary loan programs and online databases. Many academic, professional and business organizations provide staffs and members with access to such content.? Being widely available is not the same thing as being widely accessible! If you offer something on the internet, by definition it is widely available. This blog is widely available since internet connections exist in most countries around the world. But locking research works behind paywalls makes them widely inaccessible and not just geographically either as anyone without the means (poor people -which are historically minorities; cash-strapped nonprofits, teachers and students; etc.) is effectively barred from knowledge that they financially contributed to, in a collective sense, through tax payments.
So, we are where I started this conversation, why do the some of the smartest people in country allowing this to happen? I think Danah Boyd put it best in a pointed rant on saving ideas, not the publishing industry
But what pisses me off to no end is that the same Marxist academics who pooh-pooh corporations justify their own commitment to this blood-sucking process with one word: tenure. Not like that is the end of the self-justifications. Even once scholars get tenure, they continue down the same path ? even when not publishing with students ? by telling themselves it?s for promotion or because grants require it or because of any other status-seeking process.
With the rise of at least two prominent open access publishing companies, Public Library of Science and BioMedCentral, with an assortment of general and niche topic science publications, there is little excuse to support this institutionalized fleecing. In fact, as the blog for the Association of College and Research Libraries notes, there are several ways we can be break out of the?vicious cycle, produce noteworthy publications in popular, highly-accessed and openly available journals.?The fact of the matter remains that the large, profit-driven scientific publishing companies are touting an unsustainable and outdated model and failing to innovate their own industry. Instead, they are pumping thousands of dollars into politicians to enact legislation making it more difficult for individuals and institutions to access research works. In fact, we?ve seen the initial dying throws of the industry as it spews out dozens of new, highly-specialized journals to target ever more niche audiences.
There is one thing that we all need to do, though. If you have ever supported science, if you rely on research works for your advocacy group or non-profit (medical, environmental, etc.), if you are scientist who understands how precious every research dollar is, or even if you are a taxpayer concerned about publishing companies double-dipping (remember, many public universities? libraries are publicly-funded to some extent!) you need to get off you ass and get involved right now! The Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP) puts out calls for comments on science and technology related legislation. Guess who answered the call? Private publishing companies. Guess who did not answer the call? Scientists.
In fact, since?no scientists commented on 2 recent calls and the deadlines were extended. One, Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research, unfortunately just passed (was extended to January 12!).?I do not think that should stop you from making a comment though, perhaps to your elected representatives. The other, Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research, is still accepting comments through January 12. If you are unhappy with something, it is?incumbent?upon you to do your part to change things. I hope readers will join me in contacting?representatives?Maloney and Issa and sharing why we think limiting access to taxpayer-funded research is a bad idea for our nation.
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UPDATE: Jonathan Eisen just published a post about a highly disturbing letter from the Ecological Society of America to the?White House OSTP in regard to Open Access publishing. He lays it out thoroughly so I won?t rehash it here, but definitely worth a read!
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=3cef37ded6b85db093cff8f19170ca98
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Friday, January 6, 2012
Blackwood Brothers at Lawrence Springs Baptist Church
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Source: http://lindale.kltv.com/news/events/76147-blackwood-brothers-lawrence-springs-baptist-church
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Thursday, January 5, 2012
Does Your Startup Need Beta Testers? BetaBait Will Hook You Up (Now On Email & The Web)
You could just launch your app without testing it first, but the reality is that more times than not this could have disastrous consequences. So, being the savvy people they are, when entrepreneurs want to test something that they're about to bring to market, they go out and find beta testers to give their ideas thorough vetting. Obviously, this is essential to the process of building a successful business, but finding these worthy beta testers? Not as easy as it may sound. This is where BetaBait comes into the picture. BetaBait, which launched last month, wants to provide startups with an alternative solution to hiring a PR rep, spamming email databases, or bugging friends to test their fledgling app ideas. In short, the startup wants to play matchmaker, as it has built a service that connects startups who have new web, mobile and social apps with eager consumer and professional early adopters -- in one place. Once connected, startups have access to the beta users they need to be their guinea pigs, while consumers or professionals get early access to the latest apps on the market.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/aRa8NG1xlAE/
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