Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/311427689?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Sunday, June 9, 2013
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Saturday, June 8, 2013
Obama: Gov't records sweep not targeting Americans
President Barack Obama pauses while speaking in San Jose, Calif. , Friday, June 7, 2013. The president defended his government's secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorized the collection of America's phone records and U.S. internet use. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
President Barack Obama pauses while speaking in San Jose, Calif. , Friday, June 7, 2013. The president defended his government's secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorized the collection of America's phone records and U.S. internet use. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
This undated photo made available by Google shows the campus-network room at a data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Routers and switches allow Google's data centers to talk to each other. The fiber cables run along the yellow cable trays near the ceiling. (AP Photo/Google, Connie Zhou)
An aerial view of the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, Thursday, June 6, 2013. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The Obama administration is defending the National Security Agency's need to collect such records, but critics are calling it a huge over-reach. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
FILE -- In this file photo taken Wednesday, April 21, 2010, shows Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper. Clapper called the disclosure of an Internet surveillance program "reprehensible" Thursday June 6, 2013 and said it risks Americans' security. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
President Barack Obama gestures while speaking in San Jose, Calif. , Friday, June 7, 2013. The president defended his government's secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorized the collection of America's phone records and U.S. internet use. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama declared Friday that America is "going to have to make some choices" balancing privacy and security, launching a vigorous defense of formerly secret programs that sweep up an estimated 3 billion phone calls a day and amass Internet data from U.S. providers in an attempt to thwart terror attacks.
He warned that it will be harder to detect threats against the U.S. now that the two top-secret tools to target terrorists have been so thoroughly publicized.
At turns defensive and defiant, Obama stood by the spy programs revealed this week.
The National Security Agency has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans each day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the U.S. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage ? audio, video, photographs, emails and searches ? from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Obama assured the nation after two days of reports that many found unsettling. What the government is doing, he said, is digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might "identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism." If there's a hit, he said, "if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they've got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."
While Obama said the aim of the programs is to make America safe, he offered no specifics about how the surveillance programs have done this. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., on Thursday said the phone records sweeps had thwarted a domestic terror attack, but he also didn't offer specifics.
Obama asserted his administration had tightened the phone records collection program since it started in the George W. Bush administration and is auditing the programs to ensure that measures to protect Americans' privacy are heeded ? part of what he called efforts to resist a mindset of "you know, 'Trust me, we're doing the right thing. We know who the bad guys are.'"
But again, he provided no details on how the program was tightened or what the audit is looking at.
The furor this week has divided Congress, and led civil liberties advocates and some constitutional scholars to accuse Obama of crossing a line in the name of rooting out terror threats.
Obama, himself a constitutional lawyer, strove to calm Americans' fears ? but also remind them that Congress and the courts had signed off on the surveillance.
"I think the American people understand that there are some trade-offs involved," Obama said when questioned by reporters at a health care event in San Jose, Calif.
"It's important to recognize that you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," he said. "We're going to have to make some choices as a society. And what I can say is that in evaluating these programs, they make a difference in our capacity to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity."
Obama said U.S. intelligence officials are looking at phone numbers and lengths of calls ? not at people's names ? and not listening in.
The two classified surveillance programs were revealed this week in newspaper reports that showed, for the first time, how deeply the National Security Agency dives into telephone and Internet data to look for security threats. The new details were first reported by The Guardian and The Washington Post, and prompted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to take the unusual and reluctant step of acknowledging the programs' existence.
Obama echoed intelligence experts ? both inside and outside the government ? who predicted that potential attackers will find other, secretive ways to communicate now that they know that their phone and Internet records may be targeted.
"The bad folks' antennas go back up and they become more cautious for a period of time," said former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, a Republican who sat on the House Intelligence Committee for a decade, including as chairman for nearly three years. He said he approved the phone surveillance program but did not know about the online spying.
"So right now, with these organizations and individuals we're trying to track, we'll see a drop-off in the ability of these tools to get beneficial or meaningful intelligence," Hoekstra said Friday. "People will start putting in protocols to protect themselves from intelligence gathering. It will have a negative effect. But we'll just keep coming up with more sophisticated ways to dig into these data. It becomes a techies game, and we will try to come up with new tools to cut through the clutter."
For example, extremists could start using online providers that do not have servers based in the U.S. and therefore do not have to comply with American court orders.
In the immediate years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government began collecting data from U.S. telephone companies, looking at whether overseas terror suspects were calling phone numbers in the U.S. The program does not allow the government to listen in on calls, but it can track where a call was placed and how long it lasted. If intelligence officials single out phone numbers that they want to target for eavesdropping, they must return to court to get approval.
In 2006, after the telephone surveillance was first revealed and amid a public outcry, a secret court was tasked with approving all of the government requests for the records ? amounting to as many as 3 billion phone calls daily. But until this week, it was not widely known how many phone records were noted, or how often.
The NSA seizure of website and Internet provider records was even more secretive, and began only in the past few years. Clapper said those records, too, are released only with secret court orders, and monitors look only for documents that appear to have come from overseas. The data are not to be used to target U.S. citizens, and the government must try to minimize any information that was mistakenly taken from Americans.
It was not immediately clear how intelligence analysts weed out Americans' online documents from those sent by a citizen of another country. And it's unknown if Internet communications from citizens of the closest U.S. allies ? like Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ? are examined.
The new details of the broad surveillance have brought criticism from civil liberties and privacy advocates, as well as re-igniting a long-simmering debate in Congress over government power in security issues.
"Tell our nation's leaders to stop spying on calls, email," the Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to its followers on Friday. The American Civil Liberties Union demanded a congressional investigation.
In his comments Friday, Obama said that "every member of Congress" had been briefed on the spy programs. However, only members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the leadership, who have high security clearances, are routinely briefed and oversee the surveillance.
Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona called the programs "a serious breach of faith between the federal government and the American people." He demanded the Obama administration limit the surveillance. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said the telephone data collection is "an astounding assault on the Constitution," and he introduced legislation to require a warrant before any government agency could search Americans' phone records.
But a number of other lawmakers, including Democrats and Republicans who sit on the Intelligence committees, vociferously defended the programs as necessary safeguards against terror threats that the public never knows about.
Obama said he would be happy to join a new debate in Congress over whether the surveillance programs are appropriate, noting that lawmakers continually authorize the measures that some now are criticizing.
But he, too, warned that making the programs public now risks security: "It's very hard for us to be as effective in protecting the American people," Obama said.
___
Superville reported from San Jose, Calif. Associated Press writer Donna Cassata contributed to this report.
Follow Lara Jakes and Darlene Superville on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP and https://twitter.com/dsupervilleap
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Taking A Different Tack With In-Store Offers, Trialpay Grows Its Mobile Revenue By 85% Quarter-Over-Quarter
The same week as its old rival Tapjoy restructured with layoffs, Trialpay says it has quietly grown mobile revenue 85 percent over the last quarter by giving gamers offers they can redeem offline in stores. The company, which helped social game developers monetize through subscription and other product offers, has shifted toward the Android and iOS platforms over the last year. They add that May mobile revenues should be double April’s in-take. Angelos didn’t say what base mobile revenues were growing from, but he did say that the company’s overall revenue is up from where it was two years ago. Instead of veering toward incentivized installs or rich video ads in games like many other competitors, Trialpay instead went for a product that tracks in-store promotions via credit and debit cards. A gamer can earn extra premium virtual currency by buying everyday items like coffee or clothing. “You can walk into a store, buy a burger and all you have to do is swipe your credit card while we track that purchase via a payment network,” said co-founder Terry Angelos. Trialpay has picked up about half of the top 10 game developers, according to PocketGamer’s annual list, and on the marketing side, they’ve picked up local food chains like Buca di Beppo. “Our business is following a similar trajectory as Facebook and Kabam,” Angelos said. “We were originally 100% web-based like Facebook and now we’re seeing our business gravitate toward mobile platforms.” Facebook said about 30 percent of its revenues came from mobile advertising, up from virtually nothing a year earlier. Like on the Facebook platform, Angelos said the company avoided a lot of the riskier strategies. They were originally picked up as Facebook’s official partner for offers after rivals aggressively pushed lower-quality lead generation offers. Then when other players shifted to mobile platform, Trialpay migrated a lot more slowly — for better and worse. For one, it meant that their mobile traction has only really picked up in the last quarter, while others have grabbed market share over the last two years. But on the other hand, moving later helped the company avoid some of the early missteps around incentivized downloads. In 2011, the practice of giving gamers virtual currency in exchange for downloading other apps was banned on iOS because Apple felt it was too manipulative of chart rankings. “We’ve avoided the whole incentivized category on iOS. That’sSource: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/sB6k-wMeotk/
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Sunday, June 2, 2013
Planning Your Dream Home On A Budget | Useful Home Improvement
Posted on 01 June 2013.
Building a new home is a dream of many, most of us would choose to build houses dedicated to our requirements through the purchase of existing on the main page, but the reality is that most end up buying an existing property to one of several reasons ? it?s the moment, it is a cost-known, land is not available in the region and we would like to buy, or to rest. However, this does not stop many more to take the plunge of the building, being more than happy with the final product. Cost One of the critical factors in choosing whether you want to buy an existing property and the new building yet. If you do not have a big budget you may feel that you are not able to build, but there are ways to build your dream home on a budget.
Select the forum will play a big part in the cost of construction. Ideally you want to clip easy access and flat, close to services, and requires little preparation before building. Site selection is high, and one is a bit out of town, or requires the services to be connected will be more expensive. Ensure that you can familiarize yourself with the restrictions on the section before you offer to buy. If they will need a water tank or a long distance to connect sewage electrical current that could see the cost of construction increased by several thousand dollars, while choosing the branch closest to the local town or city and connect the power supply within a few meters will not affect the budget as much as .
Determine your priorities during the planning of your dream home. Is having a smaller home end is more important than a bigger house, which may take several years to complete? You future proof the house prior to the completion of two-thirds of it, and has plans to add an extension in five or ten years when the money is better.
Spend as much time as you can seek professional advice free, and tough decisions before your subscription architect, workers, and other relevant professionals. Make changes in your plans during the building process can easily watch blow your budget, and therefore the time spent in advance with the architect planning your home will save you time and money on the track. Most architects will be able to provide you with a digital three-dimensional model of the house you can ?walk through? to make sure it reflects your vision. They will be able to include the upgrading of the department, and perspectives, and other aspects help you in your home.
Source: http://www.ecmi2012.org/planning-your-dream-home-on-a-budget.html
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Power grid getting smarter with big battery
June 1, 2013 ? Research conducted with a large new battery unveiled today in Oregon will help make the Northwest's and the nation's electric system smarter and more efficient, officials said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Portland General Electric's 5-megawatt, lithium-ion energy storage system was shared with the public today at the utility's Salem Smart Power Center in South Salem, Ore. The energy storage facility is part of PGE's contribution to the Battelle-led Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project. Half of PGE's $23-million portion of the regional project was paid for with U.S. Department of Energy funds. The regional demonstration is a five-year, $178-million project that launched in 2010.
"The Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project is a successful public-private partnership involving 17 organizations across five Northwest states," said Patricia Hoffman, assistant secretary for DOE's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, which oversees regional smart grid demonstration projects. "It is a highly innovative project demonstrating transactive energy management, which is a promising, cost-effective way to integrate variable renewable energy, energy storage and demand response at scale. The celebration of the Salem Smart Power Center makes it clear that Oregon is helping to lead the way on energy storage commercialization and grid modernization."
Hoffman was a featured speaker at today's ceremony, as was Ron Melton, who directs the regional demonstration project for Battelle.
The battery is part of a highly reliable, localized power zone called a microgrid that will enable about 500 southeast Salem customers to tap into a power reserve during electricity disruptions such as blackouts. The battery and microgrid are examples of the innovative technologies and methods being tested through the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project.
The energy storage system will respond to regional grid conditions with the help of a key aspect of the demonstration called transactive control. Transactive control is based on technology from DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is managed by Battelle. The technology helps power producers and users decide how much of the area's power will be consumed, when and where. This is done when producers and users automatically respond to signals representing future power costs and planned energy consumption. The cost signals originate at Battelle's Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center in Richland, Wash. They are updated every five minutes and sent to the project's participating utilities, including PGE.
The automated signals allow project participants to make local decisions on how their piece of the smart grid project can support local and regional grid needs. Participants are now gathering data to measure how the signal can help deliver electricity more effectively, help better integrate wind power onto the power grid and more. The Salem battery will use the signal to coordinate its charge and discharge cycles with the power grid's supply and demand.
"Two-way information exchange in the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project allows grid operators to make the existing electric grid more efficient, while also exploring how using other technologies such as PGE's energy storage system, smart appliances and wind power can bolster the reliability of our system," said Carl Imhoff, who manages Battelle's Electricity Infrastructure Market Sector in Richland.
PGE's role As an investor-owned utility that serves about 830,000 customers in 52 Oregon cities, PGE is testing several smart-grid technologies in the Salem area for the demonstration project. Beyond the energy storage system unveiled today, PGE is working to integrate renewable power sources to the power grid. It is also implementing a demand-response program with residential and commercial customers to help meet peak demand. All these resources will be optimized with the automated transactive control signal.
"Together with our project partners and customers, we are demonstrating smart grid technologies to help Oregon and the nation learn how to build intelligent energy resources for the future while continuing to deliver long-term value for customers," said Jim Piro, PGE president and CEO. "We are proud of the collaboration, hard work and ingenuity that went into this project, and thank our Salem customers who volunteered to participate in this important study."
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New drug improves progression-free survival, shrinks tumors in rare cancer for first time
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_smyfCaE01WVa2FZYbcgv-oObHkfazxRw3hQpYyAs-l8ZLI-DD5HtBJ8s23fWGT_qLvVf1WBbqIsxLorCjkl7PYAqIsyqzZx7_7VayixVk=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 1-Jun-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Caitlin Hool
hoolc@mskcc.org
646-227-3956
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
CHICAGO, JUNE 1, 2013 The experimental drug selumetinib is the first targeted therapy to demonstrate significant clinical benefit for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma, according to new Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center research presented on Saturday, June 1, at the 49th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
The findings are potentially practice-changing for a historically "untreatable disease." Though uveal melanoma is rare there are only 2,500 cases diagnosed in the United States each year about half of patients will develop metastatic disease, and survival for patients with advanced disease has held steady at nine months to a year for decades.
Researchers found that progression-free survival (PFS) in patients receiving selumetinib was nearly 16 weeks and 50 percent of these patients experienced tumor shrinkage, with 15 percent achieving major shrinkage. Patients receiving temozolomide, the current standard chemotherapy, had seven weeks of PFS and no tumor shrinkage. Selumetinib also lengthened overall survival to 10.8 months versus 9.4 months with temozolomide, and side effects were manageable.
"This is the first study to show that a systemic therapy provides significant clinical benefit in a randomized fashion to advanced uveal melanoma patients, who have very limited treatment options," said Richard D. Carvajal, MD, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and lead author on the study. "This clinical benefit has never been demonstrated with other conventional or investigational agents, which is all we have been able to offer patients for decades."
Dr. Carvajal and his team decided to test selumetinib because it blocks the MEK protein, a key component of the tumor-driving MAPK pathway. This pathway is activated by mutations in the Gnaq and Gna11 genes, which occur in more than 85 percent of uveal melanoma patients; 84 percent of patients in this trial had one of the mutations.
Uveal melanoma does not respond to the drugs given to patients with melanoma on the skin; and, in fact, there is no drug approved specifically for treatment of the disease. Patients with uveal melanoma receive surgery to remove the tumor and in some advanced cases, the entire eye as well as radiation therapy or chemotherapy.
In the trial, researchers randomized 98 patients with metastatic uveal melanoma and administered selumetinib to 47, of which 81 percent had a Gnaq or Gna11 mutation. Of the 49 patients who received temozolomide, 86 percent had a mutation. Two patients were not treated. Despite the study's cross-over design meaning patients whose tumors progressed on temozolomide could begin taking selumetinib there was a trend towards improved survival with selumetinib. Selumetinib was generally tolerable, with most side effects manageable with conservative management or dose modification.
Dr. Carvajal is currently planning a confirmatory multi-center, randomized trial that will enroll approximately 100 patients and be led by Memorial Sloan-Kettering. "If we can confirm selumetinib's effectiveness in treating advanced uveal melanoma in this follow-up trial, it will become the standard therapy for this disease, forming a foundation for new drug combinations that could maximize selumetinib's MEK-inhibitor effect," he said. "It could offer a whole new way to treat this historically untreatable disease."
###
The current research was supported by a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Career Development Award, the National Institutes of Health, Cycle for Survival, and the Fund for Ophthalmic Knowledge.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is the world's oldest and largest private institution devoted to prevention, patient care, research, and education in cancer. Our scientists and clinicians generate innovative approaches to better understand, diagnose, and treat cancer. Memorial Sloan-Kettering specialists are leaders in biomedical research and in translating the latest research to advance the standard of cancer care worldwide. For more information, go to http://www.mskcc.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 1-Jun-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Caitlin Hool
hoolc@mskcc.org
646-227-3956
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
CHICAGO, JUNE 1, 2013 The experimental drug selumetinib is the first targeted therapy to demonstrate significant clinical benefit for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma, according to new Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center research presented on Saturday, June 1, at the 49th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).
The findings are potentially practice-changing for a historically "untreatable disease." Though uveal melanoma is rare there are only 2,500 cases diagnosed in the United States each year about half of patients will develop metastatic disease, and survival for patients with advanced disease has held steady at nine months to a year for decades.
Researchers found that progression-free survival (PFS) in patients receiving selumetinib was nearly 16 weeks and 50 percent of these patients experienced tumor shrinkage, with 15 percent achieving major shrinkage. Patients receiving temozolomide, the current standard chemotherapy, had seven weeks of PFS and no tumor shrinkage. Selumetinib also lengthened overall survival to 10.8 months versus 9.4 months with temozolomide, and side effects were manageable.
"This is the first study to show that a systemic therapy provides significant clinical benefit in a randomized fashion to advanced uveal melanoma patients, who have very limited treatment options," said Richard D. Carvajal, MD, a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and lead author on the study. "This clinical benefit has never been demonstrated with other conventional or investigational agents, which is all we have been able to offer patients for decades."
Dr. Carvajal and his team decided to test selumetinib because it blocks the MEK protein, a key component of the tumor-driving MAPK pathway. This pathway is activated by mutations in the Gnaq and Gna11 genes, which occur in more than 85 percent of uveal melanoma patients; 84 percent of patients in this trial had one of the mutations.
Uveal melanoma does not respond to the drugs given to patients with melanoma on the skin; and, in fact, there is no drug approved specifically for treatment of the disease. Patients with uveal melanoma receive surgery to remove the tumor and in some advanced cases, the entire eye as well as radiation therapy or chemotherapy.
In the trial, researchers randomized 98 patients with metastatic uveal melanoma and administered selumetinib to 47, of which 81 percent had a Gnaq or Gna11 mutation. Of the 49 patients who received temozolomide, 86 percent had a mutation. Two patients were not treated. Despite the study's cross-over design meaning patients whose tumors progressed on temozolomide could begin taking selumetinib there was a trend towards improved survival with selumetinib. Selumetinib was generally tolerable, with most side effects manageable with conservative management or dose modification.
Dr. Carvajal is currently planning a confirmatory multi-center, randomized trial that will enroll approximately 100 patients and be led by Memorial Sloan-Kettering. "If we can confirm selumetinib's effectiveness in treating advanced uveal melanoma in this follow-up trial, it will become the standard therapy for this disease, forming a foundation for new drug combinations that could maximize selumetinib's MEK-inhibitor effect," he said. "It could offer a whole new way to treat this historically untreatable disease."
###
The current research was supported by a Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Career Development Award, the National Institutes of Health, Cycle for Survival, and the Fund for Ophthalmic Knowledge.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center is the world's oldest and largest private institution devoted to prevention, patient care, research, and education in cancer. Our scientists and clinicians generate innovative approaches to better understand, diagnose, and treat cancer. Memorial Sloan-Kettering specialists are leaders in biomedical research and in translating the latest research to advance the standard of cancer care worldwide. For more information, go to http://www.mskcc.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/mscc-ndi053113.php
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