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Williams Hybrid Power established a partnership with Go-Ahead Group in March 2012

Williams Hybrid Power is today celebrating success following yesterday?s Low Carbon Champion Awards where it was honoured in the category of Innovation by an SME for its ground breaking partnership with Go-Ahead Group, one of the UK?s leading public transport operators.

The awards are an initiative of the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP) which celebrate outstanding and innovative practice in reducing road transport emissions. Williams Hybrid Power established a partnership with Go-Ahead Group in March 2012 and it was this partnership that was submitted as a case study for the category of Low Carbon Innovation by an SME.

This collaboration has seen the two companies work together to develop a number of hybrid buses that utilise Williams Hybrid Power?s electromechanical flywheel energy storage technology. Initially developed for the 2009 Williams Formula One car, this technology has since been adapted for a range of public transport applications and other motorsport series such as endurance racing. The technology appealed to the judging panel because of the 20% fuel efficiency savings on offer and attractive installation costs, a combination which has the potential to see mass market hybridisation of public transport become a tangible reality.

Jonathan Murray, Deputy Director of the LowCVP and one of the awards category judges said; ?Williams Hybrid Power have shown true leadership by taking Formula One technology and, working with Go-Ahead Group, applying it successfully to deliver emissions and efficiency savings in buses.?

Speaking about the award Frank Thorpe, Head of Bus Systems for Williams Hybrid Power, commented; ??Our partnership with Go-Ahead is truly unique and is seeing two leading British companies come together and share their resources in a bid to reduce carbon emissions on Britain?s roads. This award is a great honour and validates the hard work of both companies to produce a number of hybrid buses. Energy efficiency is an important issue for Williams and initiatives such as this demonstrate how Formula One based technology can play a key role in helping to tackle an important global issue.??

source: williamsf1.com

Tags: Bus Systems, Frank Thorpe, Go-Ahead Group, Innovation Award, Jonathan Murray, Low Carbon Vehicle Awards, LowCVP, Williams Hybrid Power, williamsf1.com
Category: Formula One??|? January 30, 2013, 7:14 am

Source: http://www.flagworld.com/news/2013/01/30/williams-hybrid-power-wins-innovation-award-at-the-low-carbon-vehicle-awards/

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Cops: 'Yukuza' gangster cashes in on Fukushima

By Arata Yamamoto, Producer, NBC News

TOKYO -- A member of one of Japan's infamous "yakuza" organized crime syndicates has been arrested for illegally sending men to work at a construction company helping to clean-up the area around the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear power plant, police said Thursday.

Yoshinori Arai, 40, who allegedly belongs to the?Sumiyoshikai crime group,?was detained after he sent three workers to do decontamination work without proper permits in November, according to?Yamagata police.

The?Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper?reported?the three men aged in their 50s were paid about $164 to $186 a day, mainly for cutting grass and other decontamination work. ?A third of the pay went to Arai, according to the report.

Police said they were also investigating a similar case involving 10 other workers allegedly sent to the area in December.

Related:

Worker at Japan's tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant: Firm sent crews into danger

Slideshow: Devastation in Japan after quake

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Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/31/16788905-police-yukuza-gangster-tries-to-cash-in-on-fukushima-disaster?lite

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Selling health insurance could generate revenue for county health ...

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Your journal for Chicago area real estate business news, trends, events and public records data.

Source: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130129/NEWS03/130129765/selling-health-insurance-could-generate-revenue-for-county-health

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Frank Ocean: Chris Brown Threw the First Punch!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/01/frank-ocean-chris-brown-threw-the-first-punch/

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Eleven Keys to a Successful HTML Email | Business 2 Community

Email is one of the most effective tools in our modern marketing arsenal. It allows us to reach an enormous number of people with at a low cost and with minimal effort, especially when you consider the historical alternative.

Since the word ?e-mail? was first used in 1982, the medium has undergone significant evolution. The first email, sent by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971, contained ?something like QWERTYUIOP,? although he?s not at all sure, commenting that ?It is equally likely to have been ?TESTING 1 2 3 4? or any other equally insignificant message.? Either way, it was a simple text string, a far cry from the colorful and interactive emails that will arrive in our inboxes in 2013.

Email technology is improving, and as marketers we would be amiss to not take advantage of it. However, HTML emails aren?t always easy; there are significant differences between how various email clients render your code, there are government regulations and images are often hidden by default.

Here are 11 applicable tips to ensure that your emails engage your subscribers and stand out from the crowd.

1. Use tables.
Responsive design evangelist Ethan Marcotte won?t be happy about this, but facts are facts: there?s simply not enough support for CSS to make the leap from table-based structures yet. While the rest of the Internet moves on, HTML emails are stuck with nested tables to ensure the highest degree of design integrity.

As of now, the best way to set up a centered, fixed-width HTML email involves creating a first table with a width of 100% and adding another table inside of it:

<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">  <tbody>?  <tr>?  <td valign="top" align="center">?  <table width="600" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="center">?  <!-- Your content here! -->  </table>  </td>?  </tr>?  </tbody>? </table>

Dust off your <br /> and <p> tags and get coding!

2. Know your restrictions.
While most email services have good support for the majority of HTML and CSS markup, there is a fair amount of scattering across the board on even fairly general issues. Which clients support CSS3?s text-shadow property? How about spacing using margin and its related shorthand?

Funny you should ask! Text-shadow is supported by all clients except for Outlook (all versions, from ?00 to ?13) and margin is supported by most ? except for recent versions of Outlook and Outlook.com, which ignore margin-top/margin-bottom and margin/margin-top, respectively.

What about CSS?s background attribute? Well, it has no support on recent Outlook, Outlook.com or Gmail on Android 2.3.

Long story short: Use Campaign Monitor?s The Ultimate Guide to CSS Support, which is a comprehensive and well-designed list of CSS support in various browsers and email clients.

3. Use inline CSS.
While some clients support CSS in the tag, many (including Gmail) don?t. Make sure you?re coding CSS inline:

This is a styled paragraph that works in all clients!

I agree that it can be a hassle to code an email and then manually make a last-second change to each and every element, so I recommend the HTML email pre-mailer. Write the code between style tags in your header and then run it through this tool, which translates it across all of your various email elements.

Share this: Don?t communicate crucial information with images. Strengthen your email with their presence but don?t rely on it.

4. Assume viewers can?t see images.
Images are disabled by default for most of your subscribers, so you?ll have to cater your designs to them in a few different ways:

• - Don?t communicate crucial information with images. Strengthen your email with their presence but don?t rely on it.
• - Add ALT tags to everything. Even if the image isn?t displayed, the ALT tag almost always is.
• - Be sure to scale images appropriate and specify their width and height. If you don?t, some clients may display the images at their actual dimensions.
• - Leave images to the right-hand side of the email. This way, the content flow remains intact and unharmed even if the images don?t display as they should.

5. Maximum width of 600 pixels
Designers frequently contest that many email recipients now have larger displays and, as such, emails should be wider to take advantage of the increased space. This isn?t necessarily the case.

First, many people still use email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird to access their email. For us at BrightTALK, testing has revealed that well over 40% of our emails are opened on some flavor of Outlook, which has quite a bit of chrome in its interface that minimizes the usable space for email preview.

Second, the growing trend of checking email on mobile means that wider emails will be more difficult to read on mobile devices, and therefore quickly redirected to the trash.

Finally, for web-based clients, larger resolutions don?t necessarily mean wider browser windows. Google?s BrowserLabs site shows the percentage of browsers that can see content at various height/width positionings. Only 80% of viewers have a window wider than 1000 pixels, and that drops to 60% at only 1050 pixels.

In short, if you want recipients to see your email as you designed it, cap the width at 600 pixels.

6. Design with the reader in mind

This is a general design axiom, but is very much applicable to HTML emails as well. Examine your audience for various characteristics, including email client, profession, social media activity and any other distinguishing factors that you might be able to think of.

As you create your list of characteristics, examine the tools at your disposal and make notes on how best to cater your mailings. For example, if you frequently send to new subscribers who use Outlook or Gmail, two clients that don?t show images by default, you might think about minimizing the number of images in your emails in order to make them appear more correctly to new recipients.?To examine if it?s worth including a Twitter link, you might check a portion of your email list against the Twitter email address tool? to determine if there is a high enough percentage of users.

7. CAN-SPAM compliance
The CAN-SPAM Act, which was passed in 2003 by the 108th US Congress, is a law that defines rules for commercial email in order to protect our poor inboxes. There are seven primary rules, and all are entirely reasonable, if not totally intuitive. The following is excerpted from the CAN-SPAM page at the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission:

1. Don?t use false or misleading header information. Your ?From,? ?To,? ?Reply-To? and routing information ? including the originating domain name and email address ? must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
2. Don?t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you?re located. Your message must include your valid, physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you?ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service or a private mailbox you?ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that is easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read and understand. Creative use of type size, color and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn?t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient?s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can?t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don?t want to receive more messages from you, you can?t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you?ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can?t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

8. Test compatibility
The first thing to do is determine what type of clients, web-based or otherwise, your recipients use to view your email. As you set up templates, test and refine them constantly, even if it means setting up a PC and a Mac next to each other to check emails with different versions of software.
9. Optimize, optimize, optimize
Your first email isn?t going to be perfect, and neither is your second. Be sure to implement analytics on your emails and examine open rates, click-through rates and ?goal conversion? rates for each email.

Industry standards dictate that you implement A/B or multivariate testing on your emails. For each send, create two emails with slight differences and segment your email list into three sections. Send one version of the email to a quarter of the list and the other email to another quarter; the email with the higher conversion rate should then be sent to the remaining 50% of the list.

Make a note of best practices for subject line composition, send time and day, calls to action and email layout to continually improve the performance of your email.

President Barack Obama?s campaign team did an exceptional job of A/B testing, which resulted in an inspiring story on BusinessWeek.

10. Include a text-only version
Although this may seem outdated, there are a few very valid reasons for which to send a text-only email alongside the full HTML version.

First, some email clients and mobile devices still can?t handle HTML email. Even if it?s just 1% of your send list, you don?t want to miss out an opportunity to connect with your messaging.

Second, SPAM filters still like seeing that there?s a plain text option. If it?s missing, or if the content differs significantly from that of the HTML email, a red flag will be thrown up and might negatively impact the deliverability.

11. Keep it small
Just as with web design, be sure to optimize all of your images before including them in a custom email. It?s bad practice to resize images with HTML for a variety of reasons:

• - It forces your recipients to download unnecessarily kilobytes.
• - Dynamic resizing depends on browsers, email clients, and phones, which almost guarantees that some recipients will receive images that are both bloated and pixelated.
• - Some clients don?t respect HTML width and height tags, meaning that the image will appear at its original size regardless, breaking up your beautifully crafted layout.

Mobile phone email clients will download images automatically, but don?t have the kind of speed (even with 4G LTE) that you would expect from a desktop computer. The smaller you can make your images, the more seamlessly they?ll display on all clients, browsers and device types and the better your recipients? experience will be.

HTML emails are a complex, though useful, method of communication. Done correctly, they give you the ability to reach into thousands of inboxes with elegant and colorful messaging; done incorrectly, they can drive away potential customers. Track your results, optimize your emails accordingly and pay attention to these eleven keys to a successful HTML email.

Interested in more email marketings tips and strategies? Head over to our marketing community and check out our email marketing webinars.

Source: http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/eleven-keys-to-a-successful-html-email-0390629

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The Sieve Hypothesis: Clever Study Suggests an Alternate Explanation for the Function of the Human Stomach

You have a stomach. I have a stomach. It is one of our few universals. Humans, mate, sing, talk, and raise their children in many different ways, but we?ve all got stomachs. The question is why.

Stomachs help to digest food; they get the process rolling, boiling and grinding by coating our food in slime, enzymes and acid. This is the textbook explanation and no one is saying it is wrong, but in one of my treasured meanders through the library, I recently stumbled upon a paper suggesting this explanation is incomplete, perhaps woefully so. Just as important to our survival may be the stomach?s role in separating, sieving one might say, bacteria that are good for our guts from those that are bad. The study I found was led by Dr. Orla-Jensen, a retired professor from the Royal Danish Technical College. Orla-Jensen tested this new idea about the stomach by comparing the gut bacteria of young people, healthy older people and older people suffering from dementia. What Orla-Jensen found is potentially a major piece in the puzzle of the ecology of our bodies.

Image 1. A diagram of the human stomach. The stomach may act as a sieve, allowing only some kinds of microbes through to the small intestines.

Orla-Jensen and colleagues began by positing, or perhaps assuming is the better word, that a key function of the stomach is to kill bad bacteria with acid. The acid, they argue, serves as a sieve. It stops bad bacteria, particularly the most opportunistic of pathogens, but it does not stop all bacteria. It lets those beneficial bacteria that have adaptations for dealing with stomach acid?adaptations honed over many thousands of generations?on down the gastrointestinal road. In their model, if the stomach fails to kill bad bacteria, pathogens dominate the intestines. They do so in place of the beneficial microbes that help our bodies to digest food and produce nutrients. And when they do? death or at least the failure to thrive is nearly inevitable.

Orla-Jensen and colleagues knew from earlier work that the pH of the human stomach increases with age; the stomach becomes less acidic. This effect is most acute in individuals over seventy years of age. In these individuals Orla-Jensen predicted that the stomach?s effectiveness as a killer of bad microbes might be compromised. In turn, the intestines, recipients of everything that leaves the stomach, living or dead, might become dominated by pathogenic species such as the weedy and deadly Clostridium dificile or by oral species, that while beneficial in the mouth can become a pathogen in the gut. It was a simple enough prediction, but perhaps too simple. The biota of the gut is complex. It can contain thousands of species and is influenced by many, many factors which have proven in many ways intractable. Could the stomach?s pH really matter enough to make a measurable difference? As I read Orla-Jensen?s paper, I was skeptical, but I was curious enough to read through to the results. I sat down on the floor in the library and prepared to stay a while.

Image 2. Micrograph of Clostridium dificile. Image courtesy of CDC/ Lois S. Wiggs (PHIL #6260), 2004.

To test their hypothesis, Orla-Jensen and colleagues cultured bacteria they had collected from fecal samples of ninety human participants, one third of whom were between 30 and 40 years old and two thirds of whom were over seventy. They then compared the microbes found in the samples from these different age groups. Again, they would expect that in the older individuals that the bad bacteria and oral bacteria should be more common and, in their abundance, displace the good necessary bacteria, such as Bifidobacterium.

Remarkably, the authors? predictions from the sieve hypotheses held up. I have reproduced and slightly modified their main table below. Nine percent of the individuals over seventy had more than a million cells of the bad news?Clostridum bacteria per gram of feces; none of the thirty to forty-year-olds did. What was more, a third of the individuals over seventy had more than a billion cells per gram of feces of the oral bacteria, Streptococcus salivarius. Again, none of the thirty to forty-year-olds did. But were these pathogenic and oral bacteria doing well enough to actually compromise the success of good bacteria in the gut? Yes. While all of the thirty to forty year olds had at least a million cells of the good gut bacteria Bifidobacterium per gram of sample, less than half of the individuals over seventy did.

Interestingly, the guts of those individuals over seventy years of age who had dementia were in the worst shape, by far. Nearly each and every one of their guts was dominated by Clostridium and oral bacteria. Other studies seem to lend support to these general findings, albeit from different angles. A study comparing healthy individuals and individuals with low stomach acidity found that those with low stomach acidity were less likely to have Bifidobacterium even though their total density of intestinal bacteria, particularly the pathogens, increased. Another study found that individuals with low stomach acidity tend to be more likely to suffer from diarrhea, as would be expected if their guts were being taken over by pathogens.

The ?differences seen here as a function of age are much more pronounced than those seen in another study, recently published in the journal Nature. The Nature article compares the gut microbes of more than ?five hundred individuals of different ages and ethnicities. In the Nature study the authors found little effect of age on gut microbes after the first few years of life (during which there was a large effect as newborns slowly acquired adult microbes). However, the Nature study only considered four individuals over seventy years of age (they also did not specifically look for shifts in beneficial versus problematic species, perhaps they will in the future). Orla-Jensen?s work suggests that it is precisely the very old individuals in whom the differences begin to be pronounced. ?Sometimes it takes the perspective of many studies and time to see the full picture.?This is probably where I should point out that the Orla-Jensen study I?m discussing was published in 1948. Interesting ideas can get lost in unread scientific articles; many, perhaps most, are. Orla-Jensen?s paper has only rarely been cited and never in the context of the discussion of the function of the stomach or even in the context of aging and the microbial wilderness of our bodies.

Table 1. Reproduced (with updates) from Orla-Jensen et al., 1948. Sample size for each group = 30 individuals. The author of this paper, Prof. Orla-Jensen was 77 at the time of the publication of this paper in 1948 and so had a personal interest in these results. One wonders if he sampled himself.

	Percent of individuals with > than 1 billion cells of each bacteria per gram of feces, or, in parentheses, percent of individuals with > 1 million cells per gram.
Volunteers	Mutualist Bifidobacterium	Pathogen Clostridium	Oral bacteria, Streptococcus salivarius
Aged 30-40 (Healthy)	57? (100)	0	0
> 70 years (Healthy)	25 (44)	9	31
> 70 years (w/ Dementia)	7 (9)	48	35

More than sixty-five years later it is now up to us to figure out what other predictions the sieve hypothesis might make <sup>2/<sup>. Perhaps the most obvious prediction is that as one travels the body, from the skin to the mouth to the stomach and on into the intestines, that one should encounter, at each step, diminishing subsets of microbial lineages. Is this true? It seems hard to believe. After all, a huge number of studies have proudly announced the great diversity of microbes in the gut, a terrible diversity. Let?s look.

The best study I know of included samples from skin, mouth and gut, and considered which taxa of microbes were found in the different habitats. The diversity of major lineages drops by half as you go from the mouth to the stomach AND the lineages present in the gut, particularly the colon, are a subset of those in the stomach which are a subset of those in the mouth (see Figure 2). This matches what the sieve hypothesis would predict, but it is not enough.

If the sieve hypothesis holds, there must be additional predictions. I have not thought this through terribly well, but I think I would probably expect differences in the stomachs of animals eating different foods. Animals that eat foods that are more likely to include pathogens ought to have filters that are more finely tuned to weeding out bad microbes; they ought, I think, to err on the side of killing too many. This does appear to be the case for some vultures. The stomach of the white-backed vulture has a pH of 1! Conversely it seems plausible to predict that animals that eat diets less likely to lead them to pathogens, fruit eaters for example, should be expected to relax the sieve, open it up a little to make sure that many good microbes make it through. ?I don?t know that it has been tested. There must be more predictions for the differences one expects among species. A broad survey of the evolution of the stomach seems in order.

Image 3. White backed vultures feeding on a wildebeest. These vultures need to very actively fight the pathogens in the dead meat on which they indulge. One way they do so is by having very, very, acidic stomachs. Photo by?Magnus Kjaergaard.

Modern living also presents us with another testable prediction about the stomach and its effects on microbes. Bariatric surgery is an ever more common medical intervention in which the size of a patient?s stomach is reduced so as to reduce the amount of food he or she can eat in one sitting. The surgery also has the consequence, however, of increasing the pH in the stomachs of those who have the surgery, making their stomachs less acidic. If the sieve hypothesis is right these individuals ought to have gut bacteria that look more like those of seventy years old than those of thirty year olds. They do. Recently a study has found that good Bifidobacterium species become more rare after bariatric surgery while oral bacteria (in this case Prevotella) and? E. coli, which can be a pathogen, become more common. These results seem to be what the sieve hypothesis would predict.

I am sure there are more predictions. I?ll leave you to them. The good news is that if there are more predictions now is a great time to look, to test them. The study of the microbes of our body is now hip, as sexy as a field of study that often involves the word fecal can be (see Image 4 or check out your own sexy fecal bugs at American Gut). New data are published every day. If we can develop good predictions they can be tested. We might finally figure out what the stomach does, or rather the complex mix of its roles, its churning melange of duties. No one denies that the stomach helps to break down proteins, it just might not be its most important job.

Image 4. Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen wearing his microbiome. Image courtesy of Jonathan Eisen.

Meanwhile, there is an interesting coda to this story. In addition to considering the difference between old and young individuals, Orla-Jensen, as you might remember, considered the difference between healthy individuals over seventy and individuals over seventy with dementia. The individuals with dementia had even more pathogens and oral microbes in their guts than did the healthy seventy-year-olds. This is interesting, but what is the cause and what is the effect here? Could a poorly functioning stomach lead to a pathogen heavy microbe community in the gut and could that gut community in turn lead to dementia??Could our minds really fail because our stomachs do? A few recent studies have begun to explore the possibility that dementia might result from infection, but it is WAY too soon to say anything conclusive. One is left to imagine the mechanism behind such a decline. I have some ideas, but I?ll need to think them over some more. Meanwhile, you can offer your hypotheses too, and I?ll go back to the library and see what other gems I can find, old studies that are as revolutionary as the new ones you read about in the press, studies that whether right or wrong confirm just how little we know and how slow and circular progress can be.

Footnotes (more to be added)

1- They did not sequence the genes of these microbes?now a common technique?and so their results represent just part of what was going on in the sampled guts, a few kinds of common trees in a diverse forest, and yet it was probably a reasonable measure of those trees.

2- Which, I will confess, I?ve named here. Orla-Jensen and colleagues thought the idea so obvious as to not even deserve a name.

?

?

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=3ed07578c573a96e6eed86c777d90172

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Researchers break million-core supercomputer barrier

Jan. 28, 2013 ? Stanford Engineering's Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) has set a new record in computational science by successfully using a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to solve a complex fluid dynamics problem -- the prediction of noise generated by a supersonic jet engine.

Joseph Nichols, a research associate in the center, worked on the newly installed Sequoia IBM Bluegene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) funded by the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Program of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Sequoia once topped list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, boasting 1,572,864 compute cores (processors) and 1.6 petabytes of memory connected by a high-speed five-dimensional torus interconnect.

Because of Sequoia's impressive numbers of cores, Nichols was able to show for the first time that million-core fluid dynamics simulations are possible -- and also to contribute to research aimed at designing quieter aircraft engines.

The physics of noise

The exhausts of high-performance aircraft at takeoff and landing are among the most powerful human-made sources of noise. For ground crews, even for those wearing the most advanced hearing protection available, this creates an acoustically hazardous environment. To the communities surrounding airports, such noise is a major annoyance and a drag on property values.

Understandably, engineers are keen to design new and better aircraft engines that are quieter than their predecessors. New nozzle shapes, for instance, can reduce jet noise at its source, resulting in quieter aircraft.

Predictive simulations -- advanced computer models -- aid in such designs. These complex simulations allow scientists to peer inside and measure processes occurring within the harsh exhaust environment that is otherwise inaccessible to experimental equipment. The data gleaned from these simulations are driving computation-based scientific discovery as researchers uncover the physics of noise.

More cores, more challenges

"Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, like the one Nichols solved, are incredibly complex. Only recently, with the advent of massive supercomputers boasting hundreds of thousands of computing cores, have engineers been able to model jet engines and the noise they produce with accuracy and speed," said Parviz Moin, the Franklin M. and Caroline P. Johnson Professor in the School of Engineering and Director of CTR.

CFD simulations test all aspects of a supercomputer. The waves propagating throughout the simulation require a carefully orchestrated balance between computation, memory and communication. Supercomputers like Sequoia divvy up the complex math into smaller parts so they can be computed simultaneously. The more cores you have, the faster and more complex the calculations can be.

And yet, despite the additional computing horsepower, the difficulty of the calculations only becomes more challenging with more cores. At the one-million-core level, previously innocuous parts of the computer code can suddenly become bottlenecks.

Ironing out the wrinkles

Over the past few weeks, Stanford researchers and LLNL computing staff have been working closely to iron out these last few wrinkles. This week, they were glued to their terminals during the first "full-system scaling" to see whether initial runs would achieve stable run-time performance. They watched eagerly as the first CFD simulation passed through initialization then thrilled as the code performance continued to scale up to and beyond the all-important one-million-core threshold, and as the time-to-solution declined dramatically.

"These runs represent at least an order-of-magnitude increase in computational power over the largest simulations performed at the Center for Turbulence Research previously," said Nichols "The implications for predictive science are mind-boggling."

A homecoming

The current simulations were a homecoming of sorts for Nichols. He was inspired to pursue a career in supercomputing as a high-school student when he attended a two-week summer program at Lawrence Livermore computing facility in 1994 sponsored by the Department of Energy. Back then he worked on the Cray Y-MP, one of the fastest supercomputers of its time.

"Sequoia is approximately 10 million times more powerful than that machine," Nichols noted.

The Stanford ties go deeper still. The computer code used in this study is named CharLES and was developed by former Stanford senior research associate, Frank Ham. This code utilizes unstructured meshes to simulate turbulent flow in the presence of complicated geometry.

In addition to jet noise simulations, Stanford researchers in the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP), sponsored by the Department of Energy, are using the CharLES code to investigate advanced-concept scramjet propulsion systems used in hypersonic flight (with video) -- flight at many times the speed of sound -- and to simulate the turbulent flow over an entire airplane wing.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford School of Engineering. The original article was written by Andrew Myers.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/information_technology/~3/ms7cX5a1IAs/130128104628.htm

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New health insurance market opens in WA in October - seattlepi.com

SEATTLE (AP) ? Another aspect of President Barack Obama's health care law will go from concept to reality this fall as Washington residents who don't have health insurance will become eligible for Medicaid or gain access to a new insurance exchange.

Some questions and answers on where the health care law stands in Washington state:

?How many people are uninsured in Washington and how many of them are projected to get insurance under the Washington Health Benefit Exchange?

About 1 million Washington residents are uninsured, or about one in seven people who live in the state. Officials do not know the total number who will benefit from an expansion in Medicaid coverage or will buy health insurance through the state's new exchange, which opens in October. State officials estimate that by 2017, insurance coverage obtained through Medicaid and the exchange is expected to reduce Washington's uninsured rate to less than 5 percent.

?How many people are served by Medicaid in Washington state and how many more will be served by a proposed expansion?

About 1.2 million Washington residents are currently served by Medicaid. Another 75,000 are eligible for the free health insurance for low-income people but do not participate, said state Health Care Authority spokesman Jim Stevenson. About 250,000 will be newly eligible on Jan. 1, 2014, under new rules that set the bar at 138 percent of the federal poverty level. If everyone who is eligible signs up for Medicaid, state officials expect to add about 325,000 over the new few years.

?How is the exchange being set up in Washington?

A new public-private partnership called the Washington Health Benefit Exchange is setting up an online marketplace called the health plan finder. It will allow people to compare plan and enroll as individuals, families or small businesses. It was created by the Legislature in 2011. Rules were refined by another bill in 2012. It is governed by a board of volunteers with experience in health care, economics or actuarial science.

?How is it being paid for?

Federal dollars are paying for setting up the exchange. Washington has received grants totaling more than $150 million so far. About 50 people currently work at the exchange and that number is expected to reach 100. Nearly $10 million has been set aside for marketing and outreach, including paid advertising starting in late summer.

Beginning in 2015, the exchange will be required to be self-sustaining, with estimated expenses totaling about $50 million in 2015. How that will happen will be a topic of discussion during this year's Legislature. A monthly fee of nearly $13.69 per participant per month, which would add up to the costs of running the exchange, is being discussed along with other approaches.

?How will people access the exchange?

Although its main interface will be online, people will also be able to access the exchange by fax, mail, telephone and in person.

The Affordable Care Act requires that the exchange build relationships with local groups to help them with outreach and to also assist people who need help signing up for insurance, said Michael Marchand, spokesman for Washington health plan finder. These groups, called navigators, will likely be local nonprofits that help people in a certain community. The Health Benefit Exchange will be asking groups to apply for navigator grants soon. They'll be trained and certified to help people navigate the exchange but they will be prohibited from giving advice about which plan to join. Insurance agents and brokers will also have access to the exchange and people who want more advice can turn to them, but they will also have to pay these private companies a fee for their advice.

?How will the online site work?

People will be able to search by cost, of course, but the interface will be much more sophisticated and potentially more confusing for people who would prefer not to have so many choices. They will be able to narrow their search to see what plans their own doctor will accept. They could search by name brand or type of plan and by what services are covered such as mental health and physical therapy.

Online they'll find links to places where they can get extra help, on the telephone or in person and eventually the site will include a live chat feature for immediate help. People who enter their information into the system may also get a few nice surprises, such as a determination that they are eligible for Medicaid or for help paying their premiums.

?Will the exchange be ready to start enrolling people by the Oct. 1 deadline?

Absolutely, says Marchand. But the program will continue evolve in the future, as will its online presence.

Source: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/New-health-insurance-market-opens-in-WA-in-October-4229288.php

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Content management systems - UK Business Forums

I'm really getting into this forum. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Manchester Posts: 260 Thanked 4 Times in 4 Posts

Content management systems What is the best content management system out there? I have used wordpress since the launch of my site 18 months ago, and although I really like the ease of wordpress I have never been 100% happy with the functionality of my website as a whole. I have tried for ages to bridge the site with all the different forum software's & shopping carts & never found anything I am truly happy with. All 3 components work brilliantly individually but what I really want is 1 website that offers everything under 1 login. Our website is now becoming really popular, so want to invest in a long term website option. My requirements are... 1, blogging system 2, chat forum 3, shopping cart 4, Facebook connect (1 of my main traffic sources) 5, WHMCS / membership module - we run a magazine so something that could handle magazine subscriptions as well as website membership. Anyone have any experience or advice to offer on upgrading from wordpress ?? __________________ UK's biggest Manchester United magazine

I am part of the furniture here. ...UK Business Forums Full Member... ? Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: Woking Posts: 874 Thanked 213 Times in 184 Posts

I think that you are really talking about a custom build. You will find similar 'components' in Joomla & Drupal, but you probably will have the same concerns as you do today in Wordpress. However the custom build costs could be frighteningly large for everything you need compared to the free opensource / low cost components you get with Wordpress etc. Another approach is to identify the specific concerns you have and get a developer to fix them.

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I'm really getting into this forum. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Manchester Posts: 260 Thanked 4 Times in 4 Posts

Thanks roibot, Out of interest, what ball park figure do you estimate for a custom build? Instead of having the whole site custom built would it be better to take existing software which matches most my requirements then custom build the rest? Has anyone used expression engine? http://ellislab.com/expressionengine would this have all the functionality I require? __________________ UK's biggest Manchester United magazine

I say quite a bit around here. ...UK Business Forums Full Member... ? Join Date: Apr 2011 Location: Belfast Posts: 586 Thanked 70 Times in 70 Posts

Wordpress/Buddypress/Zencart would sort this out. Quite a lot of recoding needed but can be done and should be a lot cheaper than a custom build.

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Super Moderator UKBF Voluntary Moderator ? Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Gloucestershire Posts: 4,097 Thanked 1,491 Times in 1,250 Posts

I have used EE and it's blooming brilliant but like Joomla and Drupal, it has a large learning curve as it's ultimately a custom built system. It can also get very expensive as modules are chargeable and can be upto $500 for the forum module. A lot of large websites use EE including Vidahost, but they don't use the EE forum module, instead running on Xenforo (which is built by the guys who built Vbulletin) You're never going to find a 100% fit without a custom build, as every websites needs are different and what works for one website, won't work for another. Custom build, estimate would be ?15k + but will depend on so many variables including features, coding language used etc.

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I'm just testing the water here. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Jan 2013 Posts: 5 Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post

Quote: Out of interest, what ball park figure do you estimate for a custom build? Instead of having the whole site custom built would it be better to take existing software which matches most my requirements then custom build the rest? For your requirements a custom build would be really quite expensive, it's a lot of work. Hiring someone to link pieces together would be a bit cheaper but it's not going to be without it's issues. With each part being separate and developed elsewhere the updates might be pulling in different directions and you might have to do a lot to keep it maintained. Consider that it's not a completely terrible crime to have separate unlinked systems though. It's not at-all outside the realm of a users typical experience to have to sign up to a website and then separately to it's forum. __________________ That's Brill - Fantastic products curated. For retail therapy or gift ideas. thatsbrill.co.uk

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I'm really getting into this forum. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Manchester Posts: 260 Thanked 4 Times in 4 Posts

Cheers Faevilangel, Why don't vidahost use the EE forum? is it not that good? does the Xenforo forum integrate fully? I'm aware that I still won't get 100% of my requirements but if I could get 90% + I would be really happy. as my site continues to grow I think wordpress is going to be less suitable, so would like to design for the future now. I have my own graphic designer so would only really need to pay for the modules and then maybe someone experienced to do little bits of coding I reckon I could pick up a lot myself. I have a decent sized budget but not enough for a custom build. As a rough guess what would it cost to set up a site with my requirements with EE? and would this meet most of my requirements? Also anyone recommend any other CMS's not yet mentioned? __________________ UK's biggest Manchester United magazine

Super Moderator UKBF Voluntary Moderator ? Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: Gloucestershire Posts: 4,097 Thanked 1,491 Times in 1,250 Posts

The EE forum module is kind of limited, it's not developed very much while Xenforo is and is just a better forum out of the box. It's the same for all forum packages, using modules for existing systems, normally means a more limited system while an external script gives you a better system. I haven't used EE in at least 2 years so wouldn't be able to quote as not looked at it for ages, but can put you in touch with someone I know who develops with EE. Cost wise, including buying the system, ?1500-?4k depending again on how many features you want (EE has a lot out of the box).

The Following User Says Thank You to Faevilangel For This Useful Post:

I'm really getting into this forum. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Manchester Posts: 260 Thanked 4 Times in 4 Posts

Quote: For your requirements a custom build would be really quite expensive, it's a lot of work. Hiring someone to link pieces together would be a bit cheaper but it's not going to be without it's issues. With each part being separate and developed elsewhere the updates might be pulling in different directions and you might have to do a lot to keep it maintained. Consider that it's not a completely terrible crime to have separate unlinked systems though. It's not at-all outside the realm of a users typical experience to have to sign up to a website and then separately to it's forum. Cheers that's brill, yeah I have seen a lot of decent websites that run a different forum. As I would eventually like to make my website a membership service, I would prefer to have it all the same if poss? that way I can restrict parts of the site & forum for paid members. __________________ UK's biggest Manchester United magazine

I'm really getting into this forum. UK Business Forums Free Member ? Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Manchester Posts: 260 Thanked 4 Times in 4 Posts

Quote: The EE forum module is kind of limited, it's not developed very much while Xenforo is and is just a better forum out of the box. It's the same for all forum packages, using modules for existing systems, normally means a more limited system while an external script gives you a better system. I haven't used EE in at least 2 years so wouldn't be able to quote as not looked at it for ages, but can put you in touch with someone I know who develops with EE. Cost wise, including buying the system, ?1500-?4k depending again on how many features you want (EE has a lot out of the box). This sounds more in the ballpark I was looking at, yeah would be great if you could put me in touch. __________________ UK's biggest Manchester United magazine

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Anthony's 9 3s, 42 points lead Knicks over Hawks

NEW YORK (AP) ? Carmelo Anthony was so locked in, he didn't even realize how far he was shooting from.

Those 3-pointers put him in the record book. A drive to the basket put the Knicks back in the win column.

Anthony tied a franchise record with nine 3-pointers, then converted a go-ahead, three-point play with 12.5 seconds left to cap a 42-point night and lead New York to a 106-104 victory over the Atlanta Hawks on Sunday.

The Hawks shot a season-high 60 percent from the field but had their three-game winning streak snapped when Josh Smith, burned on Anthony's basket, missed a 3-pointer on Atlanta's final possession.

Anthony wasn't aware of the record, but he clearly knew his shot was on. So did the Hawks, and Smith may have been expecting a jumper on the last possession and was caught flat-footed when Anthony went right by him.

"It was just a matter of me just taking them shots and making them," Anthony said. "I know I'm capable of making them, but when I'm making them from the outside, from the perimeter, it opens up the game that much more, for myself, for my teammates, and that's what happened tonight."

Amare Stoudemire and J.R. Smith each had 18 points for the Knicks, who were 16 of 27 (59 percent) from 3-point range. Raymond Felton had 12 points and 10 assists in his second game back after a 10-game absence with a broken right pinky.

Jeff Teague scored 27 points for the Hawks. Smith added 20 and Al Horford had 16.

Anthony matched the Knicks' record for 3-pointers held by John Starks, Latrell Sprewell (twice) and Toney Douglas. He also tied Richie Guerin's franchise record with his 29th straight 20-point game. He pulled up for the final one during a streak of three in a row in the first half from the 'G' in the wording "Madison Square Garden" ? a good 4 feet behind the line.

"One of them heat check shots at that time," he said, claiming he was unaware where he was standing and using the term for a player launching from extremely deep or extremely quickly to test how hot he really is.

Asked if he'd ever made 10 3s in a game, Anthony responded by asking how many he made last summer in the Olympics.

Indeed, he was 10 of 12 in a 37-game point game against Nigeria ? not exactly a quality team such as the Hawks.

His biggest basket came nowhere near the arc.

The Knicks came out of a timeout down by one and Anthony found Smith on him after he was played much of the final period by DeShawn Stevenson, a rugged defender who had frustrated him into a potentially costly technical foul.

Anthony blew by Smith to the left, getting fouled as he laid the ball in.

"He took what the defense gave him," Felton said. "Josh Smith kind of lifted his leg a little bit and then he attacked the back leg, got to the basket and got the and-one. He's been doing a great job of finishing games for us and closing out and hitting big shots."

The ensuing free throw made it 106-104 and Anthony nearly came up with a steal on Atlanta's final possession, but the ball deflected out to Smith, who had a good look that was long.

"It was a good look. It just didn't go down," Smith said. "It was really a back-and-forth game. For us to be able to have a chance at making a game-winning shot or a tying field goal towards the end of that game (with) how well they shot the 3, lets us know that we had a pretty good basketball game ourselves. We just fell a little short."

A night after an ugly 97-80 loss, the Knicks had no problems on offense, though could never get much cushion against the speedy Hawks.

Anthony was poked in the eye by Stevenson with 1:51 left, and responded by angrily slamming the ball to the court, leaving the officials with no choice but to call the technical foul. Kyle Korver made the free throw to give Atlanta a 102-101 lead.

Anthony then missed a jumper, but Stoudemire was fouled and made two free throws. Horford scored on an alley-oop eight seconds later, setting the stage for Anthony's final basket.

The All-Star forward finished 15 of 28 from the field and was 9 of 12 behind the arc in his fourth 40-point game this season.

"It's difficult, because he can make the 3-pointer and he's also fast," Horford said. "He has a first step, like we say in the league, it's a quick first step and explosive. He's a good player."

Leading 27-25 after one, the Knicks ran off the first nine points of the second quarter, getting a pair of 3-pointers from Pablo Prigioni to open a 36-25 advantage. The Hawks wiped all of that away in about six minutes, but Anthony steadied the Knicks with three 3-pointers in the final 2:50. It was 52-all at halftime.

Anthony then hit five 3s in a 17-point third quarter, his final one making it 82-74. The Knicks needed all his offense to build a lead, with the Hawks making 9 of 13 shots (69 percent) in the period.

NOTES: Knicks guard Jason Kidd sat out the second half. The Knicks said the 39-year-old was just being rested. ... Because of Rajon Rondo's torn ACL, he will need to be replaced on the Eastern Conference All-Star team, and Hawks coach Larry Drew hopes Commissioner David Stern looks at Smith or Horford. "No doubt about it. I think both of my guys have been overlooked," Drew said. "It's unfortunate what happened to Rondo, but certainly my guys should be in consideration. Strong consideration." ... The Knicks acknowledged Tyson Chandler's All-Star selection during a first-half timeout. With Anthony voted to start, it's the first time the Knicks have had two players picked since Allan Houston and Sprewell in 2001.

___

Follow Brian Mahoney on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Briancmahoney

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/anthonys-9-3s-42-points-lead-knicks-over-035436773--spt.html

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NYC mayor tops $1B in gifts to Johns Hopkins Univ.

BALTIMORE (AP) ? New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg donating $350 million to Johns Hopkins University, the bulk of it to help expand its research on such cross-discipline issues as global health and urban revitalization as his lifetime giving to his alma mater soars past $1 billion, the university said.

University officials announced the commitment late Saturday and said they believe Bloomberg, who amassed his fortune creating the global financial services firm Bloomberg LP, is now the first person to give more than $1 billion to a single American university.

Most of the latest gift, $250 million, will be part of a larger effort to raise $1 billion to foster cross-disciplinary work on global issues at Johns Hopkins, the university said. Funds initially will be used toward the appointment of faculty for interdisciplinary work on a series of issues that also will include individualized health care delivery, sustainability of water resources and the science of learning.

The remaining $100 million is to be devoted to need-based financial aid for undergraduate students, awarding 2,600 Bloomberg scholarships in the next 10 years, it said.

It added that the latest gift brings Bloomberg's giving to the institution just more than $1.11 billion in the 49 years since he graduated ? including his first gift of $5 in 1965 only a year after he received his bachelor's degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins.

"Johns Hopkins University has been an important part of my life since I first set foot on campus more than five decades ago," Bloomberg said in the statement issued by the university. "Each dollar I have given has been well-spent improving the institution and, just as importantly, making its education available to students who might otherwise not be able to afford it."

Bloomberg added that his giving was intended to make a difference in people's lives. "I know of no other institution that can make a bigger difference in lives around the world through its groundbreaking research ? especially in the field of public health," he said in the statement.

University president Ronald J. Daniels praised Bloomberg for being a "visionary philanthropist" for social good on the order of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and the school's founder, Johns Hopkins. Daniels said the chief impact of Bloomberg's gift would be to strengthen the university's multi-disciplinary approach to solving key societal problems.

"This latest initiative allows us to greatly accelerate our investment in talented people and bring them together in a highly creative and dynamic atmosphere," Daniels added. "It illustrates Mike's passion for fixing big problems quickly and efficiently."

Money from the gift is expected to endow 50 distinguished professors to be recruited worldwide with expertise spanning traditional academic disciplines. The school said the work of those recruited would bridge disciplines and schools such as medicine, the humanities, public health and education, social science and engineering.

The New York mayor has remained closely involved with the university where he graduated in 1964, including stints on its board of trustees from 1996 to 2002 and as chairman of Johns Hopkins Initiative fundraising campaign.

The university said Bloomberg made his first $1 million commitment to the university in 1984, 20 years after his graduation. Later gifts included $120 million toward the construction of a children's section at The John Hopkins Hospital in honor of his late mother. All told, the university said, Bloomberg's philanthropy has benefited Johns Hopkins in many ways including improvements to facilities, research and the quality of its student body.

The latest gift touched off praise and excited reactions on the university website after the announcement.

___

Online:

NYC Mayor's website: http://www.nyc.gov/mayor

John Hopkins University: http://www.jhu.edu/

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nyc-mayor-tops-1b-gifts-johns-hopkins-univ-233046365.html

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Humane society kicks off new program | Local & Regional | KIMA ...

By Natalie Eucce Published: Jan 26, 2013 at 6:54 PM PST Last Updated: Jan 26, 2013 at 6:54 PM PST

YAKIMA, Wash.-- The Central Washington Humane Society has kicked off a new monthly event: spay and neuter clinics. Once a month, every month in 2013, the Humane Society will hold a spay and neuter clinic open to the public. This is in response to strays in the community.

Last year in 2012, they took in more than 7,000 pets. The clinics hope to provide a service that bring those numbers down. If you see a stray and can't bring it in, you can call Animal Control or the Sheriff's Department.

Source: http://www.kimatv.com/news/local/Humane-society-kicks-off-new-program-188514831.html

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