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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Power plant limits at center of Obama climate plan

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Taking climate change efforts into his own hands, President Barack Obama is proposing sweeping steps to limit heat-trapping pollution from coal-fired power plants and to boost renewable energy production on federal property.

Obama, in a speech Tuesday at Georgetown University, was to announce he's issuing a presidential memorandum to launch the first-ever federal regulations on carbon dioxide emitted by existing power plants, moving to curb the gases blamed for global warming despite adamant opposition from Republicans and some energy producers.

The far-reaching plan marks Obama's most prominent effort yet to deliver on a major priority he laid out in his first presidential campaign and recommitted to at the start of his second term: to fight climate change in the U.S. and abroad and prepare American communities for its effects. Environmental activists have been irked that Obama's high-minded goals never materialized into a comprehensive plan.

By expanding permitting on public lands, Obama hopes to generate enough electricity from renewable energy projects such as wind and solar to power the equivalent of 6 million homes by 2020, effectively doubling the electric capacity federal lands now produce, senior administration officials said. He'll also set a goal to install 100 megawatts of energy-producing capacity at federal housing projects by the end of the decade.

Obama also was to announce $8 billion in federal loan guarantees to spur investment in technologies that can keep carbon dioxide produced by power plants from being released into the atmosphere.

"While no single step can reverse the effects of climate change, we have a moral obligation to act on behalf of future generations," the White House said in a statement, arguing that climate change is no longer a distant threat ? the 12 hottest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years.

The linchpin of Obama's plan involves new and existing power plants. Forty percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and one-third of greenhouse gases overall, come from electric power plants, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. The Obama administration already has proposed controls on new plants, but those controls have been delayed and not yet finalized. Tuesday's announcement would be the first public confirmation that Obama plans to extend carbon controls to existing plants.

"The country is facing a threat; the president is facing facts," said Dan Lashof of the Natural Resources Defense Council, praising Obama for taking aim at power plants. "Reducing that pollution is the most important step we can take as a nation to stand up to climate change."

A spokesman for major power companies said the industry long has understood the importance of addressing climate change and has been working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for two decades. The industry will consider whether new climate change policies and regulations "mesh" with its ongoing transition to a cleaner generating fleet and an enhanced electric grid, said Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, a group that represents power companies.

Even before Obama spoke, reaction from Republicans was swift and dismissive, reflecting the opposition to climate legislation on Capitol Hill that prompted a frustrated Obama to sidestep lawmakers and take action himself. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said imposing carbon rules on power plants amounts to a national energy tax.

"Will the president explain the massive costs to American jobs? Will the president explain how low-income Americans would pay for their new, higher utility bills?" Stewart said.

Senior administration officials, who weren't authorized to comment by name and requested anonymity, said Obama will set a timeline for putting new power plant controls in place. But he won't issue detailed emission targets or specifics. Instead, the president will launch a process in which the Environmental Protection Agency will work with states to develop specific plans to rein in carbon emissions, with flexibility for each state's circumstances.

Obama also will announce more aggressive steps to increase efficiency for appliances such as refrigerators and lamps, the White House said, adding that stricter standards could reduce carbon pollution by more than 3 billion tons between now and 2030 ? the equivalent of a half-year's worth of carbon pollution from power plants. Another component of Obama's proposal will involve ramping up hydropower production from existing dams.

Obama raised climate change as a key second-term issue in his inaugural address in January, but has offered few details since. In his February State of the Union, he issued an ultimatum to lawmakers: "If Congress won't act soon to protect future generations, I will."

"His view reflects reality," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday. "We've seen Congress attempt to deal with this issue, and fail to."

Framing Obama's efforts as part of a broader, global movement, the White House said the U.S. can play a leading role in persuading other nations to join in efforts to slow the warming of the planet.

Obama is calling for an end to U.S. support for public financing for new coal-fired plants overseas, officials said, but will exempt plants in the poorest nations as long as the cleanest technology available in those countries is being used. He's also pledging to work with major polluting countries like China and India to curb emissions, building on an agreement Obama struck recently with China's leader to phase out hydrofluorocarbons, potent greenhouse gases used in air conditions and refrigerators.

Another of Obama's goals ? to prepare communities for the inevitable effects of climate change ? appears to be more aspiration than concrete plan. Community leaders and environmental activists say that what cities and states need to prepare for flooding and higher temperatures is money ? something Obama is hard-pressed to provide without Congress' go-ahead.

Sidestepping Congress by using executive action doesn't guarantee Obama smooth sailing. Lawmakers could introduce legislation to thwart Obama's efforts. And the rules for existing power plants will almost certainly face legal challenges in court.

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Follow Matthew Daly on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewDalyWDC

Follow Josh Lederman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/power-plant-limits-center-obama-climate-plan-100209230.html

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Man who sold the lost iPhone 4 prototype answers... anything

Man who sold the lost iPhone 4 prototype answers anything...

Brian Hogan -- the man who found a prototype iPhone 4 at a bar and ultimately sold it to Gizmodo -- participated in an AMA (ask me anything) on Reddit. Here's how it begins:

When I was 21 I was at a bar pretty late at night with 2 friends. After the last call both of my friends went to the bathroom, as they left a random drunk guy came out, walked up to me, picked up the phone on the bar stool next to me, and said don't forget your phone! I told him it wasn't mine and I didn't know who it belonged to. Random drunk guy hands me the phone and tasks me with finding its owner. I ask around and cant figure out who it belongs to, and after my friends returned we left and walked home having intentions of figuring out who the phone belonged to and giving it back.

And how does it end? Now well, not for anybody. But if you're curious to find out more on Hogan's perspective, check it out the AMA.

Source: Reddit via The Next Web

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/u5DFJ_3U_GU/story01.htm

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Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Skywire Pictures Nik Wallenda Crosses Grand Canyon - Business ...

UPDATE: He made it! After nearly 23 minutes, Nik Wallenda is the first human to ever cross the Little Colorado River Gorge on a wire.

Daredevil Nik Wallenda has a wife, three children, and he's been training for one moment his entire life:

To tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon without any safety net or harness. Making it across means life, falling means death.

The National Park Service would never allow a stunt like this over the Grand Canyon ? so Wallenda had to settle for the "little Grand Canyon" over the gorge of the Colorado River near Cameron, Arizona, on tribal lands of the Navajo Nation.

Wallenda's grandfather died before viewers' eyes on live television trying to do a similar, harness-free walk.

"Thank you Jesus," Wallenda kept repeating with each step. "You're my king, you're my protector, you're my shield, you're my strength, you're my lord." He battled high winds and balanced with a 45 pound bar on the 2-inch wire. He reached the half-way point on the wire at the 11:30 minute mark.

The quarter-mile walk at 1,500 feet in the air took more than 20 minutes ? in winds ranging from a safe 18 mph to a more treacherous 30 mph. Wallenda knelt twice to wait out the stronger wind.

Here's his bio on Discovery's website:

Nik Wallenda is known as 'The King of the High Wire.' He is the seventh generation of the legendary Great Wallendas and began walking the wire at age 4. He and his family have performed some of the most famous stunts in the world, but no one else has ever dared to take on the Grand Canyon.

His incredible walk was aired on the Discovery Channel Sunday evening on a live feed.

This isn't the first feat on the tightrope for Wallenda. Last year, he successfully?walked across Niagara Falls, according to NPR.

Here are some shots of him crossing the Grand Canyon.

Discovery Channel

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-man-is-about-to-tight-rope-walk-across-the-grand-canyon-without-any-wires-2013-6

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Giving children non-verbal clues boosts vocabularies

June 24, 2013 ? The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

By using words to reference objects in the visual environment, parents can help young children learn new words, according to the research. It also explores the difficult-to-measure quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak. For example, saying, "There goes the zebra" while visiting the zoo helps a child learn the word "zebra" faster than saying, "Let's go to see the zebra."

Differences in the quality of parents' non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about a quarter (22 percent) of the differences in those same children's vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found. The results are reported in the paper, "Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary three years later," published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Children's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school," said lead author Erica Cartmill, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago. "Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success, this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood."

Scholars have found that the number of words youngsters hear greatly influences their vocabularies. Parents with higher socioeconomic status -- those with higher income and more education -- typically talk more to their children and accordingly boost their vocabularies, research has shown.

That advantage for higher-income families doesn't show up in the quality research, however.

"What was surprising in this study was that social economic status did not have an impact on quality. Parents of lower social economic status were just as likely to provide high-quality experiences for their children as were parents of higher status," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at UChicago.

Although scholars have amassed impressive evidence that the number of words children hear -- the quantity of their linguistic input -- has an impact on vocabulary development, measuring the quality of the verbal environment -- including non-verbal clues to word meaning -- has proved much more difficult.

To measure quality, the research team reviewed videotapes of everyday interactions between 50 primary caregivers, almost all mothers, and their children (14 to 18 months old). The mothers and children, from a range of social and economic backgrounds, were taped for 90-minute periods as they went about their days, playing and engaging in other activities.

The team then showed 40-second vignettes from these videotapes to 218 adults with the sound track muted. Based on the interaction between the child and parent, the adults were asked to guess what word the parent in each vignette used when a beep was sounded on the tape.

A beep might occur, for instance, in a parent's silenced speech for the word "book" as a child approaches a bookshelf or brings a book to the mother to start storytime. In this scenario, the word was easy to guess because the mother labeled objects as the child saw and experienced them. In other tapes, viewers were unable to guess the word that was beeped during the conversation, as there were few immediate clues to the meaning of the parent's words. Vignettes containing words that were easy to guess provided high-quality clues to word meaning.

Although there were no differences in the quality of the interactions based on parents' backgrounds, the team did find significant individual differences among the parents studied. Some parents provided non-verbal clues about words only 5 percent of the time, while others provided clues 38 percent of the time, the study found.

The study also found that the number of words parents used was not related to the quality of the verbal exchanges. "Early quantity and quality accounted for different aspects of the variance found in the later vocabulary outcome measure," the authors wrote. In other words, how much parents talk to their children (quantity), and how parents use words in relation to the non-verbal environment (quality) provided different kinds of input into early language development.

"However, parents who talk more are, by definition, offering their children more words, and the more words a child hears, the more likely it will be for that child to hear a particular word in a high-quality learning situation," they added. This suggests that higher-income families' vocabulary advantage comes from a greater quantity of input, which leads to a greater number of high-quality word-learning opportunities. DMaking effective use of non-verbal cues may be a good way for parents to get their children started on the road to language.

Joining Cartmill and Goldin-Meadow as authors were University of Pennsylvania scholars Lila Gleitman, professor emerita of psychology; John Trueswell, professor of psychology; Benjamin Armstrong, a research assistant; and Tamara Medina, assistant professor of psychology at Drexel University.

The work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/U2KmlDslfMQ/130624152529.htm

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Monday, June 24, 2013

Fatal accidents by wing walkers said to be rare

A stunt plane loses control as a wing walker performs at the Vectren Air Show just before crashing, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

Flames erupt from a plane after a stunt plane crashed while performing with a wing walker at the Vectren Air Show, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the wing walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

A wing walker performs at the Vectren Air Show just before crashing, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and the stunt walker instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Thanh V Tran)

Flames erupt from a plane after it crashed at the Vectren Air Show at the airport in Dayton, Ohio. The crash killed the pilot and stunt walker on the plane instantly, authorities said. (AP Photo/Dayton Daily News, Ty Greenlees)

This photo provided provided WHIO TV shows a plane after it crashed Saturday, June 22, 2013, at the Vectren Air Show near Dayton, Ohio. There was no immediate word on the fate of the pilot, wing walker or anyone else aboard the plane. No one on the ground was hurt. (AP Photo/WHIO-TV)

CINCINNATI (AP) ? Although a Virginia woman became the third wing walker to die in two years when a fiery crash killed her and a pilot at an Ohio air show this weekend, those in the business insisted such fatal accidents are rare and that its practitioners are meticulously careful.

Wing walker Jane Wicker, 44, and pilot Charlie Schwenker, 64, were killed Saturday in a crash that was captured on video and witnessed by thousands of horrified spectators at the Vectren Air Show near Dayton. The show closed shortly afterward but reopened Sunday with a moment of silence for the victims.

The cause of the crash not yet known.

From 1975 to 2010, just two wing walkers were killed in the U.S., one in 1975 and another in 1993, said John Cudahy, president of the Leesburg, Va.-based International Council of Air Shows. But since 2011, three wing walkers have died, including Wicker.

In 2011, wing walker Todd Green fell 200 feet to his death at an air show in Michigan while performing a stunt in which he grabbed the skid of a helicopter. That same year, wing walker Amanda Franklin died two months after being badly burned in a plane crash during a performance in South Texas after the engine lost power. The pilot, her husband, Kyle, survived.

"It's not entirely an anomaly but not quite as dangerous as it would appear to be," Cudahy said, adding that the recent spike appears to be a coincidence.

He said it was too early to say whether Saturday's crash would lead to any changes in safety standards among wing walkers and their pilots and that those standards already are high.

Jason Aguilera, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator leading the probe into the crash, said Sunday that it was too early to rule anything out and that the agency would issue its findings in six months to a year.

Wing walker Teresa Stokes, of Houston, and her pilot and boyfriend, Gene Soucy, said their hearts were heavy after hearing of Saturday's crash and watching video footage of it, but that it doesn't give them any second thoughts about what they do.

"It is the craziest fun ride you've ever been on," Stokes said. "You're like Superman flying around, going upside-down doing rolls and loops, and I'm just screaming and laughing."

Soucy said he never worries because he's "really good at flying upside-down and doing rolls."

"This is just what we do," he said. "Some people sit at a typewriter looking out a window all day. We're flying with the wind."

Stokes, who said she has been wing walking for 25 years and does a couple dozen shows every year, said the job mostly requires being in shape to climb around the plane while battling strong winds.

"It's like running a marathon in a hurricane," she said.

Wing walking began in the 1920s in the barnstorming era of air shows following World War I.

The practice fell off the middle of the 20th century but picked back up again in the 1970s. Still, there are only about a dozen wing walkers in the U.S., Cudahy said.

John King, pilot and president of the Flying Circus Airshow, where Wicker trained, said the trend among some in the air show industry is to try ever more exciting, but riskier stunts ? just like many other sports.

"They're doing something just a little more exciting to give the crowd their money's worth," he said, adding that he was not referring specifically to the Ohio crash. "So sometimes they step out of the safety box that we should stay in."

He said that such edgy shows are called "ultimate" performances.

"They're going to push the boundaries to see how much more they can do, to see if they can they come up with something new and unique," he said. "Our technique is to stay minimalist ? as safe as you could possibly get it."

The maneuver that ended in death in Ohio is a popular trick that has been performed many times, King said, describing how the wing walker starts on the bottom of an airplane flying upside-down. The plane then rolls back to its normal position, and the wing walker ends up on top, sitting.

That's the position Wicker was in at the time of the crash.

"Everything has to be just right when you're doing an act like that, to the extreme," King said. "There's not a whole lot of room for anything going wrong."

He described Wicker, of Bristow, Va., and Schwenker, of Oakton, Va., as "ultimate professionals."

"I don't know of anyone who could have done any better than what they were doing," he said.

On Saturday, Wicker, a mother of two teenage boys and recently engaged, sat helplessly on the plane's wing after she had just finished a stunt as the aircraft suddenly turned and slammed into the ground, exploding on impact and stunning the crowd.

In one post on Wicker's website, the stuntwoman explains what she loved most about her job.

"There is nothing that feels more exhilarating or freer to me than the wind and sky rushing by me as the earth rolls around my head," says the post. "I'm alive up there. To soar like a bird and touch the sky puts me in a place where I feel I totally belong."

She also answered a question she said she got frequently: What about the risk?

"I feel safer on the wing of my airplane than I do driving to the airport," she wrote. "Why? Because I'm in control of those risks and not at the mercy of those other drivers."

FAA spokeswoman Lynn Lunsford said the agency is often asked why wing walking is allowed.

"The people who do these acts spend hours and hours and hours performing and practicing away from the crowd, and even though it may look inherently dangerous, they're practiced in such a way that they maintain as much safety as possible," he said. "The vast majority of these things occur without a hitch, so you know whenever one of them goes wrong and there's a crash, it's an unusual event."

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Associated Press writer Verena Dobnik in New York contributed to this report.

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Follow Amanda Lee Myers on Twitter at https://twitter.com/AmandaLeeAP

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-06-24-Air%20Show%20Crash/id-9a629a5d502a4543a314cd56777ba0e3

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Custom-built Katamari controller is made from yoga ball, DualShock 2 pad, power of the cosmos (video)

Conventional wisdom would suggest that making a for-real Katamari Damacy ball would be tricky, but that didn't stop Chris McInnis, Ron LeBlanc and Tom Gwozdz from taking up the challenge. As part of the Nuit Blanche festival in London, Canada (which also included some building-projected gaming), they were able to fashion their very own Katamari ball from a yoga ball, some stickers, wood, an Arduino microcontroller, several optical mice and a dissected DualShock 2 controller. See how it steers after the break.

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Science, Alt