Japanese reporter shot dead in Syria: colleague

A veteran Japanese war reporter died after she was shot in the neck when coming under fire from up to 15 apparently pro-government troops in Syria's second city, a colleague said on Tuesday.

Mika Yamamoto was covering the anti-regime movement in Aleppo, which has borne the brunt of the conflict since fighting erupted there last month, her long-time colleague Kazutaka Sato told Japanese broadcasters.

The death of the 45-year-old takes to four the number of foreign journalists who have lost their lives in the country since the uprising began against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.

Yamamoto is the first of them to die in Aleppo, with the other three -- two French men and an American woman -- killed in Homs. Her death was confirmed by Japan's foreign ministry.

Three other journalists were also reportedly missing on Tuesday, two of them from a US-funded Arabic language broadcaster. It was not clear if the incidents were connected.

Sato, a colleague from the small but respected Japan Press, said he and Yamamoto had been with anti-regime forces when they were shot at on Monday by what appeared to be government soldiers.

"We saw a group of 10 to 15 troops ahead on the right, who were walking in double file," he told national broadcaster NHK.

"When they started shooting, I dashed towards my left, where I saw a Free Syrian Army soldier."

Sato, who also worked with Yamamoto in Iraq, told NTV: "The one at the front (of the group of troops) was wearing a helmet and I immediately thought they were government troops.

"I think I told her to run. At that moment, they started shooting.

"We all ran and scattered. After that, I couldn't see Yamamoto and was told to go to hospital. I found Yamamoto's body there."

Sato was told by a hospital official that Yamamoto was already dead when she arrived, NHK said. The TBS network cited Sato as saying she had been shot in the neck.

Yamamoto was a known face on Japanese television, who came to prominence after surviving air raids on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in 2003, in which two journalists from Reuters and a Spanish broadcaster were killed.

The dead woman's father, retired journalist Koji Yamamoto, said reports of her death were "too much to bear".

"She was always talking about tragic people who were caught in conflicts, human lives and world peace. She was more than I was... she is a wonderful reporter and daughter," he told Jiji Press.

Abu Raashid, commander of the Liwa Asifat al Shamal, one of the groups that make up the opposition Free Syrian Army, told an AFP reporter near Aleppo the dead journalist had been "targeted by regime forces".

He said his men had transported the body to nearby Turkey through the Bab al-Salam crossing.

"If the international community doesn't move to help the Syrian people, they have to react to the spilling of their citizens' blood on Syrian territory," he said.

"We want a sincere position from the international community, a real position, not just words."

A total of 23,000 people have been killed in Syria since March last year, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation.

The UN puts the death toll at around 17,000.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/japanese-reporter-killed-syrias-aleppo-3-missing-ngo-205940574.html

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Halo of neutrinos alters physics of exploding stars

ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2012) ? Sparse halos of neutrinos within the hearts of exploding stars exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events.

John Cherry, a graduate student at UC San Diego, models stellar explosions, including a type called a core-collapse supernova. As these stars run out of fuel, their cores suddenly collapse to form a neutron star, which quickly rebounds sending seas of neutrinos through the surrounding stellar envelope and out into space.

Even as the collapsed core is rebounding, the rest of the star is still falling inward. Plumes of matter sink, accreting onto the core. "This matter is actually causing some small fraction of neutrinos to bounce at wide angles and cross the trajectories of neutrinos coming from the core," Cherry said.

Astrophysicists knew that the heart of that envelope contained these scattered neutrinos, but because they are relatively few compared with the numbers streaming from the core, they thought their influence on the physics of these explosions would be so minor it could be ignored. Not so, Cherry and colleagues demonstrated in a paper they published in Physics Review Letters. They showed that neutrinos streaming from the core interacted with halo neutrinos far more often than anticipated.

Cherry calculated how often that might occur and how large a difference it would make to their models of neutrinos within supernovae. "What was so startling about this is that nowhere was the correction less than 14 percent. That's enough that you need to worry about it," he said. Indeed, the some places in the outer regions of the envelope require as much as a 10 fold correction.

Neutrinos are famously aloof particles that seldom interact with other matter. "The way neutrinos interact in matter depends on what we call 'flavor'," said George Fuller, professor of physics at UC San Diego who leads the neutrino-modeling research group and is a co-author of the paper.

When neutrinos meet, they "scatter" off one another and in the process can change their flavor. The influence is much greater than physicists thought in the outer halo of neutrinos. "Even though few neutrinos are scattered in funny directions, they can completely dominate how the neutrinos change their favors," Fuller said.

And the balance of neutrino flavors determines many important things."The neutrinos are the engine that drives the exploding star," Cherry said. "What's going on with neutrinos sets the entire stage for what's happening in the explosion."

These stars also forge new elements, and neutrino flavor influences this process as well.

"Those neutrino flavor states allow the neutrinos to change protons to neutrons or neutrons to protons." Cherry said. "What matter is produced, what kinds of atoms, elements are produced by these supernovas are changed dramatically if you change the flavor content of neutrinos."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. John Cherry, J. Carlson, Alexander Friedland, George Fuller, Alexey Vlasenko. Neutrino Scattering and Flavor Transformation in Supernovae. Physical Review Letters, 2012; 108 (26) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.261104

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/strange_science/~3/JL_9ZCM1to0/120821094458.htm

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Everything changing for convention coverage

NEW YORK (AP) ? On the surface, television networks will cover the upcoming Republican and Democratic national conventions much like they have the past few election cycles ? generally an hour each night on the big broadcasters, more or less full time with the cable news networks.

Below the surface, things are dramatically different.

The Internet will give people more access to convention halls and a greater opportunity to become part of the political conversation. The popularity of social media and people experiencing big events on TV with tablets and smartphones has driven up TV ratings, most dramatically and recently for the Olympics, and television executives are curious to see if the trend continues in Tampa, Fla., and Charlotte, N.C.

"It is possible that social media and the discourse we can see there can help transform the conventions into something more dynamic again, something that involves the public," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News Channel, PBS and C-SPAN are live streaming the convention online pretty much from start to finish, besides what is being offered on television. ABC News' online feed will mimic a television newscast for three hours prior to the network coming on the air. Bloomberg will stream economy-focused panel discussions that it holds with convention figures. PBS is stationing live webcams at the convention halls and surrounding areas. NBC News will host "hangouts" with some of its correspondents on Google Plus. C-SPAN's TV and online coverage is commentary-free.

The activity reverses a decades-long trend of television networks compressing coverage on the theory that the conventions have become stage-managed events largely free of news.

Yet they are important to candidates, offering the best filter-free way to reach the public along with the presidential debates. For three nights over two weeks in 2008, more than 40 million people watched convention speeches by candidates Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin on television.

Twitter and Facebook were barely a speck on the horizon in 2008. Their growing influence speaks directly to the reasons people follow big events: Asked by Pew two years ago why they keep up with the news, the largest percentage of Americans ? 72 percent ? said it was because they enjoy talking with friends and family about what is going on.

"Social media adds a new layer to this gigantic nonevent," said Jeff Jarvis, a media critic who writes the Buzzmachine.com blog. "It's becoming fascinating. We could all be there. We don't all want to be there but we can talk about it, and that can be more newsworthy than the actual event."

The Olympics were NBC's eye-opener to the power of social media. Others have their own stories. When Mitt Romney proposed a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry in a December debate, it was barely noticed at the debate hall, but exploded on Twitter and influenced ABC's decision to emphasize it in debate sum-up, said Marc Burstein, senior executive producer at ABC News in charge of convention coverage.

The challenge for networks comes in harnessing social media for effective use in their coverage.

"I can't say anybody has found the secret sauce yet but there's a lot of great experimenting going on," said Mark Lukasiewicz, producer in charge of NBC's convention coverage. "One of the fantastic things about this is you do get real-time feedback about what you do on the air."

NBC is trying several different approaches, including flashing Twitter messages at the bottom of its TV screen, setting up several hashtags to gather tweets and give both viewers and correspondents a destination to share thoughts, streaming speeches on Facebook and hiring a company to measure the sentiment of online commentary.

ABC, by contrast, is keeping its social media plans quiet in advance.

"You'd be a fool to ignore social media," Burstein said, "and we don't plan to do so."

Current TV is trying a bold new approach, devoting half of its screen to a real-time Twitter feed divided into dozens of categories. Viewers can see what mainstream media figures are tweeting, what politicos attached to Obama or Romney are saying, and even voters in key swing states. The tweets will take up more screen space than pictures from the convention or commentators like Al Gore.

On TV, Current producers choose the Twitter feeds that run on the air. Online, viewers can choose what feeds to follow.

"There's a swirl of conversation going on right now in the country, and TV has never found a way to tap into it," said David Bohrman, who runs Current.

The different online approaches also speak to the spirit of experimentation. NBC is offering an unadorned gavel-to-gavel feed because it is also providing a network summary (except for Wednesday, Sept. 5, when it is pre-empted by a football game) and full nights of coverage anchored by the left-leaning anchor team on MSNBC. CBS is preparing online specials for both directly before and after its television coverage, the latter anchored by Scott Pelley. PBS will have presidential historians on hand for analysis of convention speeches.

The online specials allow CBS a chance to reach an audience that doesn't normally follow the network regularly, said Susan Zirinsky, who is producing the network's coverage.

"It affords us an opportunity on exciting new platforms to spread our original reporting, our seasoned veterans and coverage that can give you a wide perspective," she said. "I think that's way cool."

Lead anchors on the network coverage include Pelley on CBS, Brian Williams on NBC, and Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos on ABC. The Republicans meet next week in Tampa, with the Democrats meeting the following week in Charlotte.

With the dynamic media landscape, the media's long-held role as agenda-setters is changing, too. The convention coverage will be much watched to see who can best take advantage of them and rule a world where tablets, smartphones and laptops are as much a part of many people's big-event experience as flat-screen TVs.

"I have five screens at my desk right now," Lukasiewicz said. "That's kind of where I max out."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/everything-changing-convention-coverage-125440214.html

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Jamaican woman faces marriage fraud trial in Kan.

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) ? A Jamaican woman accused of entering into a "sham marriage" with a Kansas soldier faces a federal trial Tuesday during which jurors must decide whether she wed for love or for immigration purposes in a criminal prosecution.

Prosecutors say Shannakay Hunter was an a illegal immigrant who conspired with Joshua Priest, then a private in the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Riley, to enter into marriage so she could get a "green card" and regain her legal status, as well as receive military benefits such as health care for herself and her two children. Priest, 23, in turn received Army housing and subsistence benefits provided to married soldiers. The government contends their May 2010 marriage in Junction City was never consummated and the couple never lived together.

But the defense in its court filings has portrayed the 28-year-old Jamaican immigrant, who lives in Bronx, New York, as a hardworking mother who admittedly overstayed her visa but married for love ? and that her husband only made the allegations of fraud out of anger. The defense plans to call as a witness the victim advocate who took care of Hunter after an alleged domestic abuse incident in Junction City involving Priest.

Which portrayal of Hunter prevails ? fraud or loving wife ? will be determined during a three-day trial that begins Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Wichita. Hunter faces charges of conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, marriage fraud and making a false statement to the government. If convicted she faces up to five years in prison on each count, although she would likely get far less, if any, prison time under federal sentencing guidelines. But she would likely be deported.

"I am absolutely mystified by this prosecution," defense attorney Molly McMurray said in a phone interview. "You know, there are hordes of people coming into this country every day, and for some reason the government is picking on a woman who came here legally who has no criminal record. Now, she did overstay her visa, but she works and she takes care of her two children, who are United States citizens."

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brent Anderson, who is prosecuting the case, in an email said, "We disagree with the lawyer's statement but we cannot respond to it as to this specific case until after the case has been concluded."

Priest is expected to be the government's star witness. He pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to commit marriage fraud and wire fraud in a deal with prosecutors for leniency in exchange for his testimony against his wife. He will be sentenced in October after admitting he got $26,000 in military benefits for married soldiers that he was not entitled to receive.

The marriage came to the government's attention in February 2011 when Hunter returned to Fort Riley from New York to make sure Priest would attend an upcoming immigration hearing in which her change of status was going to be heard. She told Priest's superiors that he failed to provide support to her since their marriage, as required by Army regulations, and that he needed to be ordered to attend her impending immigration hearing, given his "moral obligation" to do so, according to a court filing.

After his superiors confronted him, Priest told them the marriage was arranged so Hunter could get legal immigration status. His superiors ordered him to attend the immigration hearing but also reported the suspected marriage fraud to an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement fraud hotline and the Army's Central Investigations Divisions, court documents show.

Hunter's defense attorney acknowledged that while the couple has always lived apart, she would often come to visit her husband in Kansas.

"She is adamant ? and has been the entire time ? that she is innocent," McMurray said. "It is weighing heavily on her."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/jamaican-woman-faces-marriage-fraud-trial-kan-084232370.html

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BlackBerry Music Gateway review

 

Here's a little gem that's been hiding in the back of ShopAndroid.com. Ignore, for the moment, that the BlackBerry Music Gateway is, well, from BlackBerry. And that it's got a BlackBerry logo on it. Instead, let's focus on what it does: It's an extremely simple way to wirelessly stream music from your phone to any device that accepts a 3.5mm headphone jack.

That's streaming music in your car. To your entertainment center. To computer speakers. Anything, really. And it does so with a little trick up its sleeve that makes getting started as easy as possible -- and a price that doesn't break the bank.

read more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/Xl1PPrYA2wU/story01.htm

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Researchers demonstrate that 15=3x5 about half of the time

Monday, August 20, 2012

Computing prime factors may sound like an elementary math problem, but try it with a large number, say one that contains more than 600 digits, and the task becomes enormously challenging and impossibly time-consuming. Now, a group of researchers at UC Santa Barbara has designed and fabricated a quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number ? in this case the number 15 ? into its constituent prime factors, 3 and 5.

Although modest compared to a 600-digit number, the achievement represents a milestone on the road map to building a quantum computer capable of factoring much larger numbers, with significant implications for cryptography and cybersecurity. The results are published in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Physics.

"Fifteen is a small number, but what's important is we've shown that we can run a version of Peter Shor's prime factoring algorithm on a solid state quantum processor. This is really exciting and has never been done before," said Erik Lucero, the paper's lead author. Now a postdoctoral researcher in experimental quantum computing at IBM, Lucero was a doctoral student in physics at UCSB when the research was conducted and the paper was written.

"What is important is that the concepts used in factoring this small number remain the same when factoring much larger numbers," said Andrew Cleland, a professor of physics at UCSB and a collaborator on the experiment. "We just need to scale up the size of this processor to something much larger. This won't be easy, but the path forward is clear."

Practical applications motivated the research, according to Lucero, who explained that factoring very large numbers is at the heart of cybersecurity protocols, such as the most common form of encoding, known as RSA encryption. "Anytime you send a secure transmission ? like your credit card information ? you are relying on security that is based on the fact that it's really hard to find the prime factors of large numbers," he said. Using a classical computer and the best-known classical algorithm, factoring something like RSA Laboratory's largest published number ? which contains over 600 decimal digits ? would take longer than the age of the universe, he continued.

A quantum computer could reduce this wait time to a few tens of minutes. "A quantum computer can solve this problem faster than a classical computer by about 15 orders of magnitude," said Lucero. "This has widespread effect. A quantum computer will be a game changer in a lot of ways, and certainly with respect to computer security."

So, if quantum computing makes RSA encryption no longer secure, what will replace it? The answer, Lucero said, is quantum cryptography. "It's not only harder to break, but it allows you to know if someone has been eavesdropping, or listening in on your transmission. Imagine someone wiretapping your phone, but now, every time that person tries to listen in on your conversation, the audio gets jumbled. With quantum cryptography, if someone tries to extract information, it changes the system, and both the transmitter and the receiver are aware of it."

To conduct the research, Lucero and his colleagues designed and fabricated a quantum processor to map the problem of factoring the number 15 onto a purpose-built superconducting quantum circuit. "We chose the number 15 because it is the smallest composite number that satisfies the conditions appropriate to test Shor's algorithm ? it is a product of two prime numbers, and it's not even," he explained.

The quantum processor was implemented using a quantum circuit composed of four superconducting phase qubits ? the quantum equivalents of transistors ? and five microwave resonators. The complexity of operating these nine quantum elements required building a control system that allows for precise operation and a significant degree of automation ? a prototype that will facilitate scaling up to larger and more complex circuits. The research represents a significant step toward a scalable quantum architecture while meeting a benchmark for quantum computation, as well as having historical relevance for quantum information and cryptography.

"After repeating the experiment 150,000 times, we showed that our quantum processor got the right answer just under half the time" Lucero said. "The best we can expect from Shor's algorithm is to get the right answer exactly 50 percent of the time, so our results were essentially what we'd expect theoretically."

The next step, according to Lucero, is to increase the quantum coherence times and go from nine quantum elements to hundreds, then thousands, and on to millions. "Now that we know 15=3x5, we can start thinking about how to factor larger ? dare I say ? more practical numbers," he said.

###

University of California - Santa Barbara: http://www.ucsb.edu

Thanks to University of California - Santa Barbara for this article.

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Executives Discover Modern Leadership Answers Via Business ...

When planning their new company, service or product methods professionals who have to develop progressive leadership solutions must study innovative money options. Entrepreneurs don?t have to travel any more than their pc for information about elevating venture capital funds.Venture capital is one business that has been around for yesteryear 60 years or so. But, just like every other business, it continues to change and change. Much of the VC industry?s success is due to the explosive growth of the Internet. The Internet has created several information-gathering tasks quicker and easier. Upgrades on venture capitalists and several types of venture capital news are readily accessible to the world?s people through on line media.Aside from the World Wide Web, there are other sourced elements of venture capital news. Old, standard sources such as for example papers and magazines continue to provide the required candidate requirements or details and data that entrepreneurs and vcs need. These are also good sourced elements of appropriate revisions in the area of endeavor capital.Information contributions by VC companions or research associates are printed in report publications, magazines or newspapers and could also be on the Internet. Besides the published products in circulation, some partners operate their own websites, also create websites and contact and share their expertise in web-posted posts or ezines.Newsletters and emails will also be resources of news. People to a VC-specific site will most likely find presents for subscribers with their daily or weekly newsletters. Inside these publications, recruiting companies empower entrepreneurs by giving them with practical data and useful articles. Extra benefits from capitalists and business specialists can also be within these media organs.Discussion groups and boards are also good sites for placing changes. On line groups, message planks, chatrooms and membership sites give you the capability to exchange ideas and talk with your fellow entrepreneurial colleagues.Based on the standard and quantity of players, you could assemble assistance or ideas and discover modern leadership solutions concerning the challenging facets of funding your venture, from elevating venture capital to the drafting of recommendations to the style of one?s exit strategies.Articles on venture capital aren?t limited to business pages or textbooks. There are internet sites which are exclusively specialized in investment capital ? these sites might post news reports or give movie loading as well. News articles may be categorized into more specific subjects such as sector news, buyout news, finance news and change news.When a niche site is categorized into clearly defined areas, it makes it easier for the audience to select which articles to read. So if you are thinking about buyouts only, for instance, then you don?t need to plow through all articles to find the information that you need. Additionally, it helps to have the articles arranged by date, to allow the reader the methods to designate currency or importance to the piece.With the Internet being worldwide in scope, articles, papers and perhaps application forms may be seen by nearly anyone anywhere, in the exact same way that people read information, visit practices and updates inside our own countries. Everybody with internet access can find ways to utilize the revolutionary leadership solutions being provided by venture capitalist firms.This visits show that the availability of venture capital is just a worldwide phenomenon. But, in the US alone, near to $29.9 Billion was used for capital raising investment in 2007.Today?s capitalists are no more restricted to the US markets only but may now consider funding organizations and firms in China, India and other developing countries in Asia, the Pacific Rim or Middle East and Africa. This is good news for places in these areas with vast manpower resources but limited use of equity funding.Entrepreneurial professionals could be better informed concerning the newest styles in VC. Last year, the development was towards early phase committing. It was believed that 35% of VC opportunities should go to seed-stage and early phase deals. On the other hand, expansion-stage financing showed signs of being decreased.There are some really good sites which provide more and capital raising media. Irrespective of news, they offer listings of the businesses and venture capital firms that they served fund.Find these sites and bookmark them. For entrepreneurs, these websites provide the beneficial, revolutionary leadership solutions they should find out about the venture capitalist arena.Copyright 2008, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved.

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Source: http://www.searchipnews.com/2012/08/20/executives-discover-modern-leadership-answers-via-business-capital-news/

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