When it comes to gigabit internet, the headline buzz usually involves Google and some mid or south western American locale. But not today. No, today, the ridiculously high-speed internet spotlight falls on Omaha, Nebraska where local provider CenturyLink is poised to launch a pilot service. Starting Monday, the telco's Lightspeed Broadband package ($150 a month for standalone service or $80 a month as a bundle) will go live for nearly 10,000 subscribers and continue to rollout to a footprint just shy of 50,000 residential and enterprise subs by October. Further expansion plans for the greater metro area all hinge upon whether CenturyLink can turn a profit on the service, but the company will continue to sign-up enterprise subs outside of this pilot zone for the next two years. The path forward -- at least, to us -- is pretty clear, Omahans: vote with your wallet if you want to preserve the gigabit bragging rights.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nevada health officials acknowledged on Thursday that a state-run hospital improperly bused 10 newly discharged psychiatric patients out of the state with deficient plans for their care, while Los Angeles launched a criminal probe into the alleged "patient dumping."
Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital has been under fire since last month, after a Sacramento Bee investigative series reported that hospital staff gave as many as 1,500 patients one-way Greyhound bus tickets from Las Vegas to California and 46 other states over the past five years.
"If the conduct is true as alleged, it's no less than human trafficking," Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich told Reuters, adding he was working with San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who last month opened an investigation into the practice.
"We have to find the individuals who were dumped. We're working on it. It's like finding a needle in a haystack," Trutanich said.
Nevada health and human services spokeswoman Mary Woods said an internal investigation showed this week that 10 of the patients were put on buses with inadequate plans for housing and continued medical treatment.
Woods said Nevada health officials had fired two Rawson-Neal employees and would discipline three others following an internal investigation. She blamed nine medical staff members for the 10 improper discharges, and said four had stopped working at the facility before the investigation.
The hospital has also come under federal scrutiny. Federal authorities warned Rawson-Neal last week it was in violation of Medicare rules governing the discharge of patients and could lose critical funding under the federal program, which provides healthcare for the elderly and disabled.
The hospital has referred comment on the matter to state health officials
TEN PATIENTS LACKED ADEQUATE SUPPORT
Twenty-one members of Congress in a letter dated on Tuesday, urged U.S. Attorney Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to investigate "allegations that mental health providers in Nevada are transporting vulnerable individuals with serious mental illnesses across state lines."
Over the past five years, Woods said Rawson-Neal purchased 1,473 one-way bus tickets for newly discharged psychiatric patients. Of those, she said, 10 lacked documentation outlining they had adequate care plans in place. There was no immediate word on the whereabouts of all the patients involved.
Nine of the 10 had previously been admitted to the psychiatric facility's observation unit because of problems stemming from substance abuse, she said.
Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval issued a statement saying he had received proposals from mental health experts "to provide an objective and comprehensive analysis of our state facilities to ensure that best practices are being implemented and followed."
"As I have stated before, improperly discharging one patient is one patient too many," he said. "It is important to me and all Nevadans that we treat our most vulnerable members of society with dignity and care."
Rawson-Neal last month began sending chaperones on out-of-state bus rides with psychiatric patients, Woods said. The hospital also tightened its oversight of discharge plans.
U.S. Representative Ami Bera of California drafted the letter to Holder and Sebelius.
"If this practice of shipping patients with a history of mental illness to other states, known colloquially as ?Greyhound Therapy,' is occurring," the Democrat wrote, "it would not only be unethical and disgraceful, but would also be an illegal attempt by Nevada to evict members of the state's most vulnerable population to benefit its bottom line."
Bizarre binary star system pushes study of relativity to new limitsPublic release date: 25-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sean Bettam s.bettam@utoronto.ca 416-946-7950 University of Toronto
Provides evidence that Einstein's predictions still hold true a century later
TORONTO, ON An international team of astronomers and an exotic pair of binary stars have proved that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is still right, even in the most extreme conditions tested yet. The results of their research are described in the April 26 issue of Science.
"The unusual pair of stars is quite interesting in its own right but we've learned it is also a unique laboratory for testing the limits of one of our most fundamental physical theories, general relativity" says University of Toronto astronomy professor Marten van Kerkwijk, a member of the research team.
What makes the pair of stars exceptional are the unique characteristics of each and their close proximity to each other. One is a tiny but unusually heavy neutron star one of the most massive confirmed to date. Named PSR J0348+0432, it is the remnant of a supernova explosion, and is twice as heavy as the Sun yet is only 20 kilometres across. The neutron star is a pulsar that gives off radio waves that can be picked up on Earth by radio telescopes. The gravity at its surface is more than 300 billion times stronger than that on Earth and at its centre every sugarcube-sized volume has more than one billion tonnes of matter squeezed into it, roughly the mass of every human past and present.
The massive star spins 25 times each second and is orbited by a rather lightweight dwarf star every two and a half hours, an unusually short period. Only slightly less exotic, the white dwarf is the glowing remains of a much lighter star that has lost its envelope and is slowly cooling. It can be observed in visible light, though only with large telescopes it is about a million times too faint to be visible with the naked eye.
In the new work, led by Bonn PhD student John Antoniadis, very precise timing of the pulsar's spin-modulated emission with radio telescopes was used to discover a tiny but significant change in the orbital period of the binary, of eight-millionths of a second per year. Given the masses of the pulsar and the white dwarf, inferred with the help of observations of the light emitted by the white dwarf using techniques perfected by Antoniadis and van Kerkwijk this turns out to match exactly what Einstein's theory predicts.
Einstein's general theory of relativity explains gravity as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime created by the presence of mass and energy. As two stars orbit each other, gravitational waves are emitted wrinkles moving out in spacetime. As a result, the binary slowly loses energy, the stars move closer, and the orbital period shortens.
The test posed by PSR J0348+0432 is particularly interesting because the massive star is a truly extreme object in terms of gravity, even compared to other pulsars that have been used to test general relativity. As a result, it causes exceptionally strong distortion of spacetime. In many alternatives to Einstein's theory, this would cause the orbit to lose energy much faster than is observed.
"The observations disprove these alternatives," says van Kerkwijk, "and thus give further confidence that Einstein's theory is a good description of nature even though we know it is not a complete one, given the unresolved inconsistencies with quantum mechanics."
"We really are just at the beginning of our studies of this massive and bizarre stellar object," says Antoniadis. "It may become the new standard for testing general relativity as time goes on."
###
Note to media: Contact Sean Bettam for illustrations and an animation of the research described here.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Marten van Kerkwijk
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Toronto
mhvk@astro.utoronto.ca
Sean Bettam
Communications, Faculty of Arts & Science
University of Toronto
[ | 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.
Bizarre binary star system pushes study of relativity to new limitsPublic release date: 25-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sean Bettam s.bettam@utoronto.ca 416-946-7950 University of Toronto
Provides evidence that Einstein's predictions still hold true a century later
TORONTO, ON An international team of astronomers and an exotic pair of binary stars have proved that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is still right, even in the most extreme conditions tested yet. The results of their research are described in the April 26 issue of Science.
"The unusual pair of stars is quite interesting in its own right but we've learned it is also a unique laboratory for testing the limits of one of our most fundamental physical theories, general relativity" says University of Toronto astronomy professor Marten van Kerkwijk, a member of the research team.
What makes the pair of stars exceptional are the unique characteristics of each and their close proximity to each other. One is a tiny but unusually heavy neutron star one of the most massive confirmed to date. Named PSR J0348+0432, it is the remnant of a supernova explosion, and is twice as heavy as the Sun yet is only 20 kilometres across. The neutron star is a pulsar that gives off radio waves that can be picked up on Earth by radio telescopes. The gravity at its surface is more than 300 billion times stronger than that on Earth and at its centre every sugarcube-sized volume has more than one billion tonnes of matter squeezed into it, roughly the mass of every human past and present.
The massive star spins 25 times each second and is orbited by a rather lightweight dwarf star every two and a half hours, an unusually short period. Only slightly less exotic, the white dwarf is the glowing remains of a much lighter star that has lost its envelope and is slowly cooling. It can be observed in visible light, though only with large telescopes it is about a million times too faint to be visible with the naked eye.
In the new work, led by Bonn PhD student John Antoniadis, very precise timing of the pulsar's spin-modulated emission with radio telescopes was used to discover a tiny but significant change in the orbital period of the binary, of eight-millionths of a second per year. Given the masses of the pulsar and the white dwarf, inferred with the help of observations of the light emitted by the white dwarf using techniques perfected by Antoniadis and van Kerkwijk this turns out to match exactly what Einstein's theory predicts.
Einstein's general theory of relativity explains gravity as a consequence of the curvature of spacetime created by the presence of mass and energy. As two stars orbit each other, gravitational waves are emitted wrinkles moving out in spacetime. As a result, the binary slowly loses energy, the stars move closer, and the orbital period shortens.
The test posed by PSR J0348+0432 is particularly interesting because the massive star is a truly extreme object in terms of gravity, even compared to other pulsars that have been used to test general relativity. As a result, it causes exceptionally strong distortion of spacetime. In many alternatives to Einstein's theory, this would cause the orbit to lose energy much faster than is observed.
"The observations disprove these alternatives," says van Kerkwijk, "and thus give further confidence that Einstein's theory is a good description of nature even though we know it is not a complete one, given the unresolved inconsistencies with quantum mechanics."
"We really are just at the beginning of our studies of this massive and bizarre stellar object," says Antoniadis. "It may become the new standard for testing general relativity as time goes on."
###
Note to media: Contact Sean Bettam for illustrations and an animation of the research described here.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Marten van Kerkwijk
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Toronto
mhvk@astro.utoronto.ca
Sean Bettam
Communications, Faculty of Arts & Science
University of Toronto
[ | 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.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? South Korea's economy expanded at the fastest level in two years in the first quarter as capital expenditure and exports turned higher.
Bank of Korea said Thursday South Korea's economy grew 0.9 percent in the January-March period from three months prior, accelerating from 0.3 percent growth in the fourth quarter.
Over a year earlier, Asia's fourth-largest economy expanded 1.5 percent, the same level as the previous quarter.
The bank said capital expenditure increased after declining for the previous three quarters. Exports also turned higher after the fourth quarter's drop.
Bank of Korea held its key rate steady for a sixth month in April after two rate cuts last year saying South Korea is on track to slow recovery while South Korea's government proposed $15 billion extra budget to boost economy.
Leap Motion has just announced that its 3D gesture controller hardware ship date will be delayed, from May 13 for pre-orders and May 19 for general retail availability to July 27. The delay was caused by a need for more testing from the Leap Motion beta testing community, and an expansion of that group with additional members, according to Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald, who held a press conference today to discuss the missed dates. This is not good new for a company that has spent a lot of time promoting its product and securing high-level partnerships (with Asus, HP and Best Buy) up until now. The hype that Leap Motion has been able to build only means that users will be more disappointed by any delays in its launch window, and the effect on public perception is certainly one the hardware startup would like to have avoided. Still, some 12,000 developers have received units and already used them to do impressive things, so Leap Motion is hardly in danger of being branded ‘vaporware’ as of yet. Leap Motion says it wants to make sure that the product they deliver is the best they can offer, and says that there is “nothing catastrophically wrong” with the hardware as of yet. The company?believes?that it could have shipped by the original date if it had really pushed things, but wanted to make sure that things were ready for prime time. The new July 22 ship date is firmly set, according to Buckwald, and this is “the first and only delay there will be.” When asked if there was a specific cause, Buckwald said it’s more about beta testing everything in general, but that there will definitely be a focus on getting more input on how customers interact with the product. In general, it sounds like there’s some concern about making sure that user experience is pleasant among not only Leap Motion’s more technical users, but also the general public, too. Buckwald says it has addressed most of the technical issues around gesture tracking, and now the emphasis is squarely on usability testing, and those who are already seeded with early hardware will essentially act more as consumer testers. “If you’d asked me a year ago what was the biggest challenge, I’d have said it would be the hardware side,” Buckwald said, but went on to explain that the software aspect is now
Many of the BlackBerry faithful might not have got around to upgrading to version 10 just yet (perhaps they're waiting on that keyboard model), but they haven't been completely forgotten. A refreshed version of its Facebook app is now available on BlackBerry OS 5 and above, bringing it at least a little more in line with other moderniterations. Expect your pictures to gain more importance in your newsfeeds and timelines, both which finally get pull-to-refresh controls. The new version is currently being rolled out to BlackBerry's app stores globally -- see if your version is ready at the source.
Apr. 25, 2013 ? Researchers previously have shown that a depth camera system, such as Kinect, can be combined with a projector to turn almost any surface into a touchscreen. But now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated how these touch-based interfaces can be created almost at will, with the wave of a hand.
CMU's WorldKit system enables someone to rub the arm of a sofa to "paint" a remote control for her TV or swipe a hand across an office door to post his calendar from which subsequent users can "pull down" an extended version. These ad hoc interfaces can be moved, modified or deleted with similar gestures, making them highly personalized.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) used a ceiling-mounted camera and projector to record room geometries, sense hand gestures and project images on desired surfaces.
But Robert Xiao, an HCII doctoral student, said WorldKit does not require such an elaborate installation. "Depth sensors are getting better and projectors just keep getting smaller," he said. "We envision an interactive 'light bulb' -- a miniaturized device that could be screwed into an ordinary light fixture and pointed or moved to wherever an interface is needed."
The system does not require prior calibration, automatically adjusting its sensing and image projection to the orientation of the chosen surface. Users can summon switches, message boards, indicator lights and a variety of other interface designs from a menu. Ultimately, the WorldKit team anticipates that users will be able to custom design interfaces with gestures.
Xiao developed WorldKit with Scott Hudson, an HCII professor, and Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. student. They will present their findings April 30 at CHI 2013, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Paris.
"People have talked about creating smart environments, where sensors, displays and computers are interwoven," said Harrison, who will join the HCII faculty this summer. "But usually, that doesn't amount to much besides mounting a camera up on the ceiling. The room may be smart, but it has no outlet for that smartness. With WorldKit, we say forget touchscreens and go straight to projectors, which can make the room truly interactive."
Though WorldKit now focuses on interacting with surfaces, the researchers anticipate future work may enable users to interact with the system in free space. Likewise, higher resolution depth cameras may someday enable the system to sense detailed finger gestures. In addition to gestures, the system also could be designed to respond to voice commands.
"We're only just getting to the point where we're considering the larger questions," Harrison said, noting a multitude of applications in the home, office, hospitals, nursing homes and schools have yet to be explored.
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Public release date: 25-Apr-2013
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Leap Motion has just announced that its 3D gesture controller hardware ship date will be delayed, from May 13 for pre-orders and May 19 for general retail availability to July 27. The delay was caused by a need for more testing from the Leap Motion beta testing community, and an expansion of that group with additional members, according to Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald, who held a press conference today to discuss the missed dates. This is not good new for a company that has spent a lot of time promoting its product and securing high-level partnerships (with Asus, HP and Best Buy) up until now. The hype that Leap Motion has been able to build only means that users will be more disappointed by any delays in its launch window, and the effect on public perception is certainly one the hardware startup would like to have avoided. Still, some 12,000 developers have received units and already used them to do impressive things, so Leap Motion is hardly in danger of being branded ‘vaporware’ as of yet. Leap Motion says it wants to make sure that the product they deliver is the best they can offer, and says that there is “nothing catastrophically wrong” with the hardware as of yet. The company?believes?that it could have shipped by the original date if it had really pushed things, but wanted to make sure that things were ready for prime time. The new July 22 ship date is firmly set, according to Buckwald, and this is “the first and only delay there will be.” When asked if there was a specific cause, Buckwald said it’s more about beta testing everything in general, but that there will definitely be a focus on getting more input on how customers interact with the product. In general, it sounds like there’s some concern about making sure that user experience is pleasant among not only Leap Motion’s more technical users, but also the general public, too. Buckwald says it has addressed most of the technical issues around gesture tracking, and now the emphasis is squarely on usability testing, and those who are already seeded with early hardware will essentially act more as consumer testers. “If you’d asked me a year ago what was the biggest challenge, I’d have said it would be the hardware side,” Buckwald said, but went on to explain that the software aspect is now