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The
Federal Communications Commission should require sponsors of political advertising to disclose their biggest financial backers to the public, according to a petition filed
Tuesday by a public-interest law firm. A new view of the sky above, created by an artist for whom photographs are just the starting point. Here’s
a rarity for fans of the Smiths former drummer Mike Joyce has tweeted a link to a very e[...] Each team is allowed three assistant coaches, but when support staffers are added in, there seem
to be more. Way more.
The mission of the Vet Hunters Project is to track down homeless veterans and offer aid.
Marking a major milestone for both companies, Herman Miller has agreed to take ownership of Maharam for approximately $156 million in a transaction that is slated to close April 29. How can universities manage facilities and services while balancing the books? Join our #HElivechat 22 Mar 12pm GMTAs Northampton vice-chancellor Nick Petford says, university procurement is not a sexy subject, but an important one.The
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has predicted it will face £150m limit on
how much it can spend in 2013-14, reductions increasing further to £280 in 2014-15.And with the sector spending in the region of £10bn every year on buying goods and services, universities are looking to reorganise – through outsourcing or collaborative procurement –
to reduce costs.But as higher education institutions increasingly look to outsource campus services including catering and facilities management, staff and students are responding
in their numbers against these acts of privatisation which they feel will affect their university experience.Staff
and students currently in their fifth week of occupation against the outsourcing of key services at the University of Sussex are not the only ones expressing concern over a lack of clarity and communication behind university decision-making, arguing the move will jeopardise employment terms and conditions.London
Metropolitan University is using a private firm to reshape its non-teaching services.
Falmouth University plans to move academic support staff to a private company, FX Plus.
And in November, the University of Central Lancashire became the first public university to apply to become a private company.Some of the key issues at hand:• Fear that universities are becoming more like businesses• The growing view of
students as ‘consumers’• Impact of privatisation on the
NUS vice-president for higher education, in response to the Sussex occupation, “and it means students will not have the opportunity to shape what that looks like.”Amid
widespread opposition to outsourcing, what are its benefits – and alternatives? In 2012, the University of Northampton launched the 1 Billion Pound Challenge, a
scheme that aims to support local economies and bring wider community benefits, while at the same time helping universities and colleges develop efficient, sustainable procurement practices. “Building relationships initially through procurement could prove a route in for academic activities including research, consultancy and student placements,” said Petford of the move.Meanwhile,
research by Sheffield Hallam University in 2012 found facilities management service delivery at a turning point across the board with traditional models failing to meet customer needs.
The study found what was driving companies in a range of sectors was the chance to gain innovation in service delivery within tight budgetary restraints.Does the same apply to universities? Higher education budgets are tight, but is the answer to balancing the books in outsourcing services, or rather, making use of a university’s resources and expertise on campus? Is tinnitus miracle review simple case of homegrown verses
GMT to discuss the best
models
for universities and how they can be implemented. Is the view that private providers are just out to make money from universities fair, or are there other factors to consider?If you would like to be on the panel, please email [email protected] can also follow the debate live on Twitter using the hashtag #HElivechatPanel to be confirmed This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, become a member of the Higher Education Network.Live Q&AManagement, admin and servicesFundingFinanceInnovationCommunications and marketingInfrastructureStudent experiencePartnershipsEngaging businessEmployabilityPrivate providersHigher educationClaire Shawguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.,
Oct. 17 - Former Purdue quarterback Drew Brees had a simple message for current Boilermakers signal caller Joey Elliott. with a new processor and some much-improved battery
In College Park today, there are two ways to look at this uneven Maryland men’s basketball season: Glass half-empty, the Terrapins have an NBA lottery pick at center and some nice young pieces that, after starting an admittedly inflated 14-1, still should have been better than an outside-the-bubble team. Glass half-full, they’ve already managed 20 wins and remain on the periphery of the NCAA tournament just two years after Mark Turgeon inherited a fairly bare cupboard.
Read full article >> Scheduling summer childcare can be stressful and expensive. Marcus Thornton had 25 points, Toney Douglas scored 17 of his 19 in the fourth quarter and the Sacramento Kings rallied from eight down in the final 11 minutes to stun the Los Angeles Clippers 116-101 on Tuesday night.
Haruhiko Kuroda, a Finance Ministry veteran and lover of Greek philosophy, has been charged with turning around an institution reviled for its monetary policy.
Since the 1970s, when early autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) were developed at MIT, Institute scientists have tackled various barriers to robots that can travel autonomously in the deep
ocean.
This four-part series examines current MIT efforts to refine AUVs’ artificial intelligence, navigation, stability and tenacity.Anyone
who has steered a boat knows how much effort is needed to keep the boat on course when currents are pushing it in different directions. Now, MIT researchers have developed sensors that can measure the pressure of flows around an oceangoing vessel so that it can utilize rather than fight those flows, saving energy
and improving maneuverability. Other work aims to go a step further: to change flows from patterns that impede progress to patterns that will help.Flows around autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and other vessels  from ships to submarines  can significantly affect their performance. For example, when a vessel going 20 miles per hour turns sharply, it pushes into the current on one side and creates swirling eddies on the other; as a result, its speed can drop suddenly to seven miles per hour. The behavior of control surfaces such as rudders and propellers can also be affected. A
propeller operating in waves, for instance, can experience cavitation, a phenomenon in which vapor layers form around the blades, impeding performance. Preventing such phenomena could mean smoother, more energy-efficient operation.
Indeed, oceangoing vessels are now responsible for 8.6 percent of the world’s total annual oil consumption, so even a small increase in
efficiency could mean significant
energy savings.Natural sea creatures do not experience such problems because they trademiner review organs that enable them to sense their environment. In many fish, dark-colored “lateral lines†running down their sides and around their heads contain hundreds of tiny pressure and velocity sensors that perceive every minute change in the water flowing by, enabling
the fish to turn or take other appropriate action. The effect can be astonishing.
The Mexican cavefish, for example, lives in absolute darkness.
As a result, it has no eyes and must navigate using only its lateral lines. In an experimental setting, a cavefish can dart among obstacles, moving quickly along their edges and ducking through openings between them.“We
want to design sensors for our vessels that can do exactly what the lateral lines do for fish,†says Michael Triantafyllou, the William I. Koch Professor of Marine Technology and professor of mechanical and ocean engineering. “But while we get ideas from fish, we needn’t use exactly the same design that they do.â€Â
In fish, the lateral lines are made up of systems of fluid-filled canals containing tiny hairs that monitor flows and send messages directly to the fish’s brain.“This is an organ we don’t have, so we have no idea of how it really works, but it’s good because it’s simple and doesn’t require the intense computation that vision requires, for example,†Triantafyllou says.
The engineered version, he adds, should likewise generate “simple signals so that  without using a huge computer  we know immediately what’s going on and can take action.â€ÂTo design and fabricate his pressure sensors, Triantafyllou turned to the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL).
There, experts make various types of inexpensive, high-performance sensors based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)  the technology of small mechanical
devices driven by electricity.
Led
by Jeffrey Lang, a professor of electrical engineering, an MTL team designed arrays of pressure sensors, each of which is a two-millimeter-wide cavity covered by a 20-micron-thick silicon membrane that bends in response to pressure. A metal strain gauge on the surface of each membrane senses that deflection and generates a signal that indicates pressure. Electronic systems amplify and integrate the signals from all the sensors, producing pressure information that can be displayed continuously online.In
tests on small vessels and propellers, the sensor arrays proved robust and even more sensitive than expected. In one set of experiments, Triantafyllou and his colleagues in the Center for Ocean Engineering equipped a small vessel with sensors in locations that mimic where they are on fish. They also installed commercially available sensors that would generate reliable measurements for comparison and guidance.
Then they performed experiments in the 108-foot-long MIT Towing Tank, a test facility equipped with a wave generator.In
those experiments, they simulated a common situation: A
vessel is traveling straight ahead, but the oncoming current is approaching at an angle, so the vessel must exert energy to offset that force.
A more energy-efficient approach would
be to head straight into the current as long as possible and then turn, much as a sailboat tacks in the wind. Pressure measurements could guide the execution of such an energy-saving maneuver.To replicate that situation, the researchers propel their vessel directly
into oncoming flows from the wave generator and then at a gradually increasing angle. As the angle increases, pressure asymmetries increase dramatically.
The combination of low pressure on one side and high pressure on the other creates a drag force that must be overcome  a significant waste of energy. “The effect is very detectable,†Triantafyllou says. “These sharp pressure signals can guide us as we develop techniques to navigate and maneuver more efficiently.â€ÂOther work aims to detect eddies, swirling fluid natural vitiligo treatment can also profoundly affect navigation.
Again, fish use their lateral lines to identify eddies  and then take advantage of them. In one video, a trout swims in a tank as eddies come toward it, first from one side and then from the other. The trout senses the eddies and uses their suction force to stay in one place without swimming, thereby expending little energy.To
test their ability to identify eddies, the researchers again used the MIT Towing Tank.
For these tests, they seeded the water with small particles and shone a laser beam from below so as to observe the patterns of flow without disturbing them. Four sensors measured pressure as hand-generated eddies
swirled through the tank. Based on the pressure signals, a flow model estimated the position and strength of
the eddies. The model accurately tracked the behavior of the eddies within the tank.Triantafyllou
and his team are now developing methods of controlling flows that interfere with propulsion and maneuverability. In one project, they designed a torpedo-shaped submersible vehicle that has pressure sensors plus two small rotating cylinders running down its sides.
When the submersible heads at an angle into the oncoming flow, the pressure sensors detect the formation of eddies and start the small cylinders spinning. The cylinders spin in opposite directions, creating suction that immediately prevents eddies from forming.The team is also looking at another possible animal model: the whisker of a seal. This organ has a remarkable ability to sense the velocities of flows. In experiments, a blindfolded harbor seal can detect the passage of a fish by using its whiskers to sense changes in flow velocity  even 30 seconds after its prey has passed by.The researchers recently acquired whiskers shed by seals at the New England Aquarium in Boston.
They have now developed large-scale models of these elaborate, undulating structures and are developing computer simulations of how they behave. “We’re trying to understand why these whiskers work so well,†Triantafyllou says. “Once again, we hope to emulate the ability of seagoing creatures to sense flows around them â€â€
a prerequisite to developing ways to make our vessels more energy efficient and maneuverable.â€ÂNext:
MIT researchers design a “controllable adhesion system†for underwater robots.
A market consensus has emerged: After a long price climb, the immediate prospects for many commodities have grown appreciably bleaker. A day after Bayern routed Barcelona, Robert Lewandowski scored all four of Borussia Dortmund’s goals in a Champions League semifinal win over Real Madrid. “The sounds uttered by birds offer in several respects the nearest analogy to language,†Charles Darwin wrote in “The Descent of Man†(1871), while contemplating how humans learned to speak. Language, he speculated, might have had its origins in singing, which “might have given rise to words expressive of various complex emotions.†Now researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo, say that Darwin was on the right path.
The balance of evidence, they believe, suggests that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of
birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals.“It’s this adventitious combination that triggered human language,†says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and co-author of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The idea builds upon Miyagawa’s conclusion, detailed in his previous work, that there are two “layers†in all human languages: an “expression†layer, which involves the changeable organization of sentences, and a “lexical†layer, aquaponics 4 you to the core content of a sentence. His conclusion is based on earlier work by linguists including Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser.Based
on an analysis of animal communication, and using Miyagawa’s framework, the authors say that birdsong closely resembles the expression layer of human sentences  whereas the communicative waggles of bees, or the short, audible messages of primates, are more like the lexical layer.
At some point, between 50,000 and 80,000 years ago, humans may have merged these two types of expression into a uniquely sophisticated form of language.“There were these two
pre-existing systems,†Miyagawa says, “like apples and oranges that just happened to be put together.†These kinds of adaptations of existing structures are common in natural history, notes Robert Berwick, a co-author of the paper, who is a professor of computational linguistics in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and
Decision Systems, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.“When
something new evolves, it is often built out of old parts,†Berwick says. “We see this over and over again in evolution.
Old structures can change just a little bit, and acquire radically new functions.â€ÂA
new chapter in the songbookThe new paper, “The Emergence of Hierarchical Structure in Human Language,†was
co-written by Miyagawa, Berwick and Kazuo Okanoya, a biopsychologist at the University of Tokyo who is an expert on animal communication.To consider the difference between the expression layer and the lexical layer, take a simple sentence: “Todd saw a condor.†We can easily create variations of this, such as, “When did Todd see a condor?†This rearranging of elements takes place in the expression layer and allows us to add complexity and ask questions. But the lexical layer remains the same, since it involves the same core elements: the subject, “Todd,†the verb, “to see,†and the
object, “condor.â€Â
Birdsong lacks a lexical structure. Instead, birds sing
learned melodies with what Berwick calls a “holistic†structure; the entire song has one meaning, whether about mating, territory or other things. The Bengalese finch, as the authors note, can loop back to parts of previous melodies, allowing for greater variation and communication of more things; a nightingale may be able to recite from 100 to 200 different melodies.
By contrast, other types of animals have bare-bones modes of expression without the same melodic capacity. Bees communicate visually, using precise waggles to indicate sources of foods to their peers; other primates can make a range of sounds, comprising warnings about predators and other messages.Humans,
according to Miyagawa, Berwick and Okanoya, fruitfully combined these systems. We can communicate essential information, like bees or primates  but like birds, we also have a melodic capacity and an ability to recombine parts of our uttered language.
For this reason, our finite vocabularies can generate a seemingly infinite string of words. Indeed, the researchers suggest that humans first had the ability to sing, as Darwin conjectured, and then managed to integrate specific lexical elements into those songs.“It’s not a very long step to say that what got joined together was the ability to construct these complex patterns, like a song, but with words,†Berwick says. As they note in the paper, some of the “striking parallels†between language acquisition in birds and humans include the phase of life when each is best at picking up
languages, and the part of the brain used for language. Another similarity, Berwick notes, relates to an insight of celebrated MIT professor emeritus of linguistics Morris
Halle, who, as Berwick puts it, observed that “all human languages have a finite number of stress patterns, a forex growth bot of beat patterns.
Well, in birdsong, there is also this limited number of beat patterns.†Birds and beesNorbert Hornstein, a professor of linguistics at the University of Maryland, says
the paper has been “very well received†among linguists, and “perhaps will be the standard go-to paper for language-birdsong comparison for the next five years.â€Â
Hornstein adds that he would like to see further comparison of birdsong and sound production in human language, as well as more neuroscientific research, pertaining to both birds and humans, to see how brains are structured for making sounds.The
researchers acknowledge that further empirical studies on the subject would be desirable.“It’s just a hypothesis,†Berwick says. “But it’s a way to make explicit what Darwin was talking about very vaguely, because we know more about language now.â€ÂMiyagawa, for his part, asserts it is a viable idea in part because it could be subject to more scrutiny, as the communication patterns of other species are examined in further detail. “If this is right, then human language has a precursor in nature, in evolution, that we can actually test today,†he says, adding that bees, birds and other primates could all be sources of further research insight.MIT-based research in linguistics has largely been characterized by the search for universal aspects of all human languages.
With this paper, Miyagawa, Berwick and Okanoya hope to spur others to think of the universality of language in evolutionary terms.
It is not just a random cultural construct, they say, but based in part on capacities humans share with other species. At the same time, Miyagawa notes, human language is unique, in that two independent systems in nature merged, in our species, to allow us to generate unbounded linguistic possibilities, albeit within a constrained system.“Human
language is not just freeform, but it is rule-based,†Miyagawa says. “If we are right, human language has a very heavy constraint on what it can and cannot do, based on its antecedents in nature.â€Â
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who went from a young conspiratorial soldier who dreamed of revolution to the fiery anti-U.S.
leader of one of the world’s great oil powers, died March 5 in Caracas of complications from an unspecified cancer in his pelvic area.
Read full article >> The Yahoo no-work-from-home brouhaha had working moms up in arms last week.
Professional women with children had been dealt a blow, they said.
Oh, and as one writer reminded us, it’s an issue for working dads, too. Read full article >> LONDON – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was released from a British jail cell Thursday after the High Court upheld a decision granting him bail. Assange retreated to a friend’s country estate, where he planned to help mount his legal defense against extradition to Sweden to face sex-crime… Matthias D?rfelt had a bright idea: he’d let a computer do the drawing. But D?rfelt’s flip books aren’t just rendered by
computers.
They’re authored by them, too.
About 50 African Union peacekeepers have died in clashes with militants linked to al-Qaeda over the past two weeks. The French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said that French forces in Mali had found tons of weapons stockpiled by fighters linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Acting IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel is scheduled to deliver a 30-day progress report to the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday, when he testifies before lawmakers about his agency’s efforts to address screening practices that sparked a controversy. Read full article >> The best ultra-portable computer just got better -