Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the markup for the immigration reform bill on Capitol Hill May 9, 2013 in Washington,??
A bipartisan group of senators begin their fifth full day of debating changes to the immigration reform bill Tuesday. So far, the so-called mark up process has left the sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration laws--which would legalize most of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants--largely untouched. On Tuesday, the senators will address some of the final controversial changes to the bill, including increasing the number of visas for the high tech industry and whether to allow people in same-sex marriages to apply for green cards for their spouses.
Republicans are outnumbered on the 18-member Senate Judiciary Committee, and two of them--Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham--helped draft the original bipartisan bill in the first place. Nonetheless, Republican senators have been able to push through a few amendments that they say will strengthen the enforcement portion of the bill. On Monday, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, introduced an amendment that requires officials at 30 major airports to take the fingerprints of departing foreign visitors, as a way to better keep track of which people on temporary visas have left the country when they were supposed to. Graham, meanwhile, passed an amendment that prevents people applying for asylum from returning to their home countries to visit unless they show there is good cause to do so. Grassley also passed an amendment that would bar unauthorized immigrants with three drunken driving convictions from legalizing.
Attempts by Republican senators to levy tougher criminal penalties on people who illegally enter the country or to prevent unauthorized immigrants from ever becoming citizens have failed, to the disappointment of groups that oppose the reform bill.
"We don't think the changes are very meaningful," said Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that promotes lower levels of immigration.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the center, said that the group wanted the greater enforcement of the border and employment verification portions of the bill to take place before any undocumented immigrant is eligible to legalize his or her status. Efforts to change the bill to do so in the committee have failed.
Meanwhile, immigrant rights groups are cautiously optimistic. "So far, so good," said Lynn Tramonte, deputy director of America's Voice, an immigrant advocacy group. "It's clear that the opponents of immigration reform are just trying to find every little way to pick apart the bill in hopes of destabilizing the coalition," but haven't been successful, she added.
Democrats successfully passed amendments that will allow unauthorized immigrants to pay their legalization fees in installments and restricting the circumstances when immigration detainees can put in solitary confinement.
Advocates expect the mark up process to end this week, with the full bill introduced on the Senate floor sometime after the Senate's Memorial day recess in early June. The House, which is working on its own version of a bill, is expected to release their draft version in early June, as well.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) ? Christian music singer Sandi Patty will perform the national anthem at Sunday's Indianapolis 500 for a record sixth time.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway announced Patty's selection Tuesday.
Patty is a five-time Grammy Award winner and longtime resident of Anderson, Ind. She last sang the national anthem at the 500 in 1992. She also performed it in 1987, 1988, 1990 and 1991.
Patty says it's a "thrill" to return to Indiana and participate in the event that "showcases Indianapolis as one of the best cities in the world."
Patty has sold more than 11 million albums and is the most decorated female vocalist in contemporary Christian music.
May 20, 2013 ? Entanglement, by general consensus of physicists, is the weirdest part of quantum science. To say that two particles, A and B, are entangled means that they are actually two parts of an inseparable quantum thing. An important consequence of this inherent kinship is that measuring a property of A (say, the particle's polarization) is necessarily to know the corresponding property of B, even if you're not there with a detector to observe B and even if (as explained below) the existence of that property had no prior fixed value until the moment particle A was detected.
To create such entanglement it is generally necessary to generate particles two at a time and to generate them so that they are born with this connected property. The most basic step in measuring such a system is to measure and detect both particles and to do so efficiently. So it had better be the case that if one detector registers a particle, the other detector should collect and register the other particle. Because we know that if we see one particle, the other must exist, we say that the detection of one particle "heralds" the existence of the other, just as medieval heralds, with their banners and bugles, signified the arrival of a king. Although in this case, because with these particles born in twos, one photon is no more regal than the other, so we can equally well say that one photon heralds the other and vice versa. But as in the case of a king, in real life even though the herald announces the king he may be waylaid and never appear.
An experiment conducted at the Joint Quantum Institute establishes a new record for heralding efficiency for a pair of entangled photons (particles of light). The JQI work is published in the May 15 issue of the journal Optics Letters (see below). What happens is this: about 84% of the time the researchers observe photon A they also observe photon B just where it should be, and vice versa.
The JQI detection scheme will be useful for a number of reasons: it should help experiments to tighten remaining loopholes over the fundamental sway of quantum reality; it shows that sources of single heralded photons can achieve a certain level of reliability; and that might be a critical ingredient in producing a source of random numbers in a way that guarantees that any nefarious attempts to "load the dice" are impossible.
Indeterminacy
The JQI experiment demonstrates a photon source which could allow one to get to the heart of counter-intuitive nature of quantum reality by looking at indeterminacy. In common experience a coin facing up has a definite value: it is a head or a tail. Even if you don't look at the coin you trust that it must be a head or tail. In quantum experience the situation is more unsettling: material properties of things do not exist until they are measured. Until you "look" (measure the particular property) at the coin, as it were, it has no fixed face up.
What this indeterminacy means is that until it is observed an object has no definite value for that property. So the property in question, whether it is position, velocity, charge, polarization, or some other attribute, cannot even be said to exist. Instead the object is said to be in a superposition of states and its physical attributes can potentially take on a variety of values. When describing the existence of this particle, we can do no more than specify a set of probabilities that the object's properties have certain values. At the moment measurement occurs the object undergoes a "collapse of probability." The probability estimates in play just before measurement become superfluous. The property being measured -- the polarization of a photon, say -- has assumed a definite value, horizontal or vertical in this case.
Einstein's Reservations
Describing reality in terms of indeterminacy and probability bothered Albert Einstein. Surely, he said, a particle's property exists before it is measured and a theory more complete than quantum mechanics would include the existence of those properties before they were measured. Those properties before measurement must be contained in some variables hidden from the standard quantum mechanical representation. The search for those "hidden variables" pertaining to the existence of things occupied a lot of Einstein's time in the latter part of his life, and has been a topic of concern with physicists ever since.
In the 1960s John Bell proposed a number of experiments designed to test the validity of things like entanglement and indeterminacy. So far all such tests have supported the validity of quantum indeterminacy and have discouraged the idea of any hidden variables. But for some skeptics, loopholes remain, and they argue that the reality of entanglement has not yet been adequately demonstrated. One reason for this is the difficulty in measuring properties of two or more (supposedly entangled) objects with sufficient efficiency. The relatively poor measurement efficiency, resulting in the failure to detect one or the other of the pair of entangled photons, allowed skeptics to assert that the measured sample of pairs did not constitute a good enough representation of the overall set of objects to be able to say something definitive about entanglement.
JQI Experiment
The experiment effort in Alan Migdall's JQI lab specifically targets the efficiency of the heralding process. To start, the researchers send a beam of ultraviolet photons into a special crystal where, at a rate of about one per billion, a UV photon is turned into a pair of entangled photons. This process is called spontaneous parametric down-conversion (PDC). The laws of physics dictate that the momentum and energy of the incoming photon (from the pump beam) should be split between the daughter photons (one is called the "signal" and the other the "idler"). In this picture omega is the frequency of the respective photon and is proportional to its energy.
The daughters might, for instance, be a green photon plus a near-infrared photon, or two red photons, or any other combination of colors so long as the sum of the energies of the photons adds up the energy of the pump photon.
Each of the two photons makes its way through a lens and into a fiber so narrow that only a single mode can propagate. That is, if we think of the light not as a particle (photon) but as a bundle of electric and magnetic fields, the lateral profile of the ray will have a simple Gaussian shape. This kind of fiber, aligned to exacting standards, ensures that photons of a very specific energy and direction will be channeled into a photodetector where its presence and time of arrival can be determined.
Photon or Vacuum?
"In effect the observation of photon A brings photon B into existence," says Alan Migdall, "at least if these are true entangled photons." This entanglement between the existence of a photon and no photon (or vacuum) is not what is usually considered to be entanglement but it is nonetheless.
The aim of this JQI experiment is not itself to test the Bell criteria for entanglement (as it turns out the polarizations of photons A and B are known be forehand), but rather to optimize the process of heralding -- the ability to say that if A is here then B is there. For some theories a heralding efficiency must at least 82% if entanglement loopholes are to be closed.
New Heralding Record
The JQI physicists have now exceeded this yardstick. They typically observe about 50,000 signal photons (photon A) per second in their detector. And when this happens about 84% of the time a photon is seen in detector B. And simultaneously, when the roles of the two detectors are reversed a comparable percentage is registered. This is the highest symmetric heralding efficiency for a single-mode fiber yet seen in any experiment.
Migdall says that because of the random nature of observing a photon with an appropriately prepared polarization state, the measurement of a heralded photon can be turned into a number that is truly random and guaranteed to be free of tampering. Such random numbers can, in turn, be used in various schemes to encrypt messages that can never be cracked.
The Joint Quantum Institute is operated jointly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD and the University of Maryland in College Park.
Small update with system enhancements, still based on Android 4.1.2
HTC One phones that were sold unlocked via HTC, including the developer editions, in the U.S.A. are getting a small over-the-air update today. As you can see it's a 17MB file containing "important enhancements and bug fixes". Without seeing the actual change log, we're going to guess this is an update you'll probably want to take.
When all said and done, you're at Software Number 1.29.1540.16, Android version 4.1.2 and HTC Sense 5.0. The usual warnings about root and custom recovery apply, so be sure to have that RUU handy, or wait for a flashable version.
(Reuters) - In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's cash-hungry capital city, local political battles are waged much as they are across the United States: with big personalities and bare-knuckled verbal brawls.
But unlike most cities, Harrisburg's financial troubles have thrust it into the national spotlight, most recently with a slap from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud. Financing for a single incinerator has been driving the city toward insolvency since 2009.
The $3.7 trillion U.S. municipal bond market will be watching on Tuesday when Harrisburg, a poster child for mismanaged public finances, holds its Democratic Party primary for mayor. There is no Republican mayoral primary.
Whoever leads the city of nearly 50,000 will play a role in how Harrisburg struggles to shrink a mountain of debt while maintaining basic services and paying - or not paying - bondholders.
The mayor must be "willing to work through the problems and get to the next step. In order to do that, you need a certain amount of charisma, a certain amount of cooperation, and a fair margin of public support," said John Hallacy, head of municipal research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Given the severity of the situation, that's a lot to ask for."
The ghosts of a questionable 2007 bond deal haunt Harrisburg, which is at least $340 million in debt - some reports put the figure at $370 million - thanks largely to the municipal bonds it guaranteed to finance upgrades to its problematic waste-to-energy trash incinerator.
Harrisburg also faces a cumulative deficit of at least $13 million, including more than $9 million of debt service payments that went unpaid in March and September, according to a March 28 status update from William Lynch, the state-appointed receiver.
CONTROVERSIAL MAYOR FACES RIVALS
Two candidates hope to unseat Mayor Linda Thompson, an outspoken and controversial first-term Democrat. The victor in Harrisburg's Democratic primary is also expected to win November's general election, although at least one challenger, Independent Nevin Mindlin, will run in the fall.
Thompson is African-American and has a strong base of support in Harrisburg's black community, which makes up 52 percent of the city's population.
But beyond her base, "she's got very fragile relationships with almost every constituent group you could imagine," said Terry Madonna, director of Franklin & Marshall College's Center for Politics and Public Affairs, who has conducted polls of Pennsylvania politics for more than a decade.
Receiver Lynch, the only person with the power to send Harrisburg into bankruptcy, has so far said he sees that option as a last resort. But even the threat of bankruptcy can be enough to bring different sides to the bargaining table.
Lynch attempted to negotiate borrowing money through a tax anticipation note during late 2012 and early 2013, but financial institutions still "have concerns" about Harrisburg's credit worthiness, he said in his March update.
None of Wall Street's three big credit rating agencies currently rate the city of Harrisburg's debt.
The mayor must work with Harrisburg's state-appointed overseer, the City Council and a host of other players to push ahead a court-approved recovery plan. The plan includes the sale and lease of city assets, but so far no deals have been finalized.
The mayor also helps negotiate with police, fire and public employee unions on labor contracts that, if altered, could save the city money on health care and other costs.
BOND DEAL HAUNTS POLITICIANS
One of Thompson's two top rivals, independent bookstore owner Eric Papenfuse, hopes that the 2007 bond deal will haunt both Thompson and challenger City Comptroller Dan Miller.
Thompson and Miller were on the City Council when it approved the bond financing, and both got there because of support from former Mayor Steve Reed who had served 28 years.
Miller was the only City Council member to vote against the bond financing.
It was during Reed's administration that the incinerator deals were cut and, later, that some of the more troublesome financial disclosure problems occurred, leading to the SEC's fraud charge earlier this month. The city paid no penalty in the settlement and no individuals were named.
Thompson has made a number of problematic statements since taking office in January 2010. She once referred to Miller - Harrisburg's first openly gay elected official - as a "homosexual, evil little man," according to local media reports. In subsequent stories, she did not deny the comment.
She also lost several close staffers during her first year in office. Five of them told the central Pennsylvania newspaper The Patriot-News that she created a toxic, abusive atmosphere.
Papenfuse is no stranger to local politics. In February 2007, the City Council appointed him to the board of the Harrisburg Authority, which owns the incinerator. Papenfuse opposed additional funding for the incinerator upgrades and later quit the board.
Thompson and Papenfuse have said they do not want the city to file for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy. Miller, however, believes bankruptcy is inevitable, and that it should be done before the city's assets are sold off.
The only poll of the race so far, published on May 13, found Thompson, with 13 percent of the vote, losing to Miller and Papenfuse, who would be tied at 30 percent each. Some 23 percent were undecided. Fifty-seven percent of those polled strongly disapproved of Thompson's performance on the job.
The poll, conducted by Susquehanna Polling and Research for the local ABC News station, surveyed 300 Harrisburg Democrats by telephone and has a margin of error of 5.6 percent.
(Reporting by Hilary Russ; Editing by Tiziana Barghini and Leslie Gevirtz)
Which women should be screened for high cholesterol?Public release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vicki Cohn vcohn@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 ext. 2156 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News
New Rochelle, NY, May 20, 2013National guidelines recommend that at-risk women be screened for elevated cholesterol levels to reduce their chances of developing cardiovascular disease. But who is 'at risk?' The results of a study by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to estimate the proportion of women young and old who have cholesterol levels that meet the definition of being at-risk are reported in an article in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh.
In "Cholesterol Screening for Women: Who is 'At Risk?'" Cheryl Robbins, Patricia Dietz, Shanna Cox, and Elena Kuklina, from the CDC, Atlanta, GA, analyzed data for a representative sample of 1,781 U.S. women not previously diagnosed with elevated cholesterol.
More than half (55%) of younger women (ages 20-44 years) and 74.2% of older women (>45 years) were at-risk for high cholesterol as defined by U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines. Nearly all of the women in both age groups had at least one risk factor that would make them candidates for cholesterol screening according to the American Heart Association risk definition. The authors suggest the need for future research to determine whether screening and treatment of young women with high cholesterol will help to decrease subsequent deaths due to cardiovascular disease.
"The high prevalence of dyslipidemia reported in this study even among younger women is striking and supports the need for increased education about the risks for cardiovascular disease in women," says Susan G. Kornstein, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Women's Health, Executive Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Women's Health, Richmond, VA, and President of the Academy of Women's Health.
###
About the Journal
Journal of Women's Health, published monthly, is a core multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the diseases and conditions that hold greater risk for or are more prevalent among women, as well as diseases that present differently in women. The Journal covers the latest advances and clinical applications of new diagnostic procedures and therapeutic protocols for the prevention and management of women's healthcare issues. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh. Journal of Women's Health is the Official Journal of the Academy of Women's Health and the Society for Women's Health Research.
About the Academy
Academy of Women's Health is an interdisciplinary, international association of physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who work across the broad field of women's health, providing its members with up-to-date advances and options in clinical care that will enable the best outcomes for their women patients. The Academy's focus includes the dissemination of translational research and evidence-based practices for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of women across the lifespan.
About the Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Population Health Management, Thyroid, Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, and Breastfeeding Medicine. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 70 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website at http://www.liebertpub.com.
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 140 Huguenot Street, New Rochelle, NY 10801 http://www.liebertpub.com
Phone: (914) 740-2100 (800) M-LIEBERT Fax (914) 740-2101
[ | 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.
Which women should be screened for high cholesterol?Public release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Vicki Cohn vcohn@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 ext. 2156 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News
New Rochelle, NY, May 20, 2013National guidelines recommend that at-risk women be screened for elevated cholesterol levels to reduce their chances of developing cardiovascular disease. But who is 'at risk?' The results of a study by investigators at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to estimate the proportion of women young and old who have cholesterol levels that meet the definition of being at-risk are reported in an article in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh.
In "Cholesterol Screening for Women: Who is 'At Risk?'" Cheryl Robbins, Patricia Dietz, Shanna Cox, and Elena Kuklina, from the CDC, Atlanta, GA, analyzed data for a representative sample of 1,781 U.S. women not previously diagnosed with elevated cholesterol.
More than half (55%) of younger women (ages 20-44 years) and 74.2% of older women (>45 years) were at-risk for high cholesterol as defined by U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines. Nearly all of the women in both age groups had at least one risk factor that would make them candidates for cholesterol screening according to the American Heart Association risk definition. The authors suggest the need for future research to determine whether screening and treatment of young women with high cholesterol will help to decrease subsequent deaths due to cardiovascular disease.
"The high prevalence of dyslipidemia reported in this study even among younger women is striking and supports the need for increased education about the risks for cardiovascular disease in women," says Susan G. Kornstein, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Women's Health, Executive Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Women's Health, Richmond, VA, and President of the Academy of Women's Health.
###
About the Journal
Journal of Women's Health, published monthly, is a core multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the diseases and conditions that hold greater risk for or are more prevalent among women, as well as diseases that present differently in women. The Journal covers the latest advances and clinical applications of new diagnostic procedures and therapeutic protocols for the prevention and management of women's healthcare issues. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Journal of Women's Health website at http://www.liebertpub.com/jwh. Journal of Women's Health is the Official Journal of the Academy of Women's Health and the Society for Women's Health Research.
About the Academy
Academy of Women's Health is an interdisciplinary, international association of physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who work across the broad field of women's health, providing its members with up-to-date advances and options in clinical care that will enable the best outcomes for their women patients. The Academy's focus includes the dissemination of translational research and evidence-based practices for disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of women across the lifespan.
About the Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Population Health Management, Thyroid, Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, and Breastfeeding Medicine. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry's most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm's 70 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available on the Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers website at http://www.liebertpub.com.
Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 140 Huguenot Street, New Rochelle, NY 10801 http://www.liebertpub.com
Phone: (914) 740-2100 (800) M-LIEBERT Fax (914) 740-2101
[ | 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.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during the markup for the immigration reform bill on Capitol Hill May 9, 2013 in Washington,??
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Public release date: 20-May-2013
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