Stewart: FOX Failed To Mention Co-Owner Is One They Accuse Of 'Terror Funding' (VIDEO)

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Stewart: FOX Failed To Mention Co-Owner Is One They Accuse Of 'Terror Funding' (VIDEO)

U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients - NYTimes.com

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August 20, 2010

U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients

By GARDINER HARRIS

Thirty-five weeks pregnant, Robin Rodgers was vomiting and losing weight, so her doctor hospitalized her and ordered that she be fed through a tube until the birth of her daughter.

But in a mistake that stemmed from years of lax federal oversight of medical devices, the hospital mixed up the tubes. Instead of snaking a tube through Ms. Rodgers’s nose and into her stomach, the nurse instead coupled the liquid-food bag to a tube that entered a vein. ....

U.S. Inaction Lets Look-Alike Tubes Kill Patients - NYTimes.com

I have read and agree to whatever Adobe says

This is rich. Adobe Flash wants to install an update, but I need to acknowledge that I have read and agree to be bound here and hereafter by the terms of the EULA. 99% of the time people don't actually click the link and read the web page, but this time I did, and instead of one EULA, I got over 100 of them.

Adobe - Adobe product license agreements

Ground Zero Mosque: Digging a Hole in the Soul of America

They should build a mosque at World Financial Center, so that when they face Mecca they have to face the World Trade Center.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Wealthy Americans sign The Giving Pledge

For Release 9:30 a.m. EDT
August 4, 2010
Forty U.S. Families Take Giving Pledge
Billionaires Pledge Majority of Wealth to Philanthropy

SEATTLE – Aug. 4, 2010 – Forty of the wealthiest families and individuals in the United States have committed to returning the majority of their wealth to charitable causes by taking the Giving Pledge. The announcement of this first group was made by Warren Buffett approximately six weeks after kicking off the long-term charitable project with Bill and Melinda Gates.

“We’ve really just started, but already we’ve had a terrific response,” said Warren Buffett, pledge co-founder and chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. “At its core, the Giving Pledge is about asking wealthy families to have important conversations about their wealth and how it will be used. We’re delighted that so many people are doing just that – and that so many have decided to not only take this pledge but also to commit to sums far greater than the 50% minimum level.”

Wealthy supporters from throughout the country have come forward to join the pledge, including the following 40 families and individuals. A full list of those taking the pledge and personal pledge letters by many of these supporters outlining their commitment to give is available online at www.givingpledge.org. Buffett will be joined in commenting on the announcement by three other individuals who have likewise taken the pledge: Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with husband and

wife Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor. A media call and Q&A will take place at 12:15 p.m., EDT on Wednesday, August 4, 2010. Dial-in information for the call is (866) 901-4714 (toll-free) or (702) 599-4277 (int’l.), with conference ID # 92438683. The call is open to all accredited media and will focus uniquely on philanthropy and the Giving Pledge initiative. The Giving Pledge is an effort to help address society’s most pressing problems by inviting the wealthiest American families and individuals to commit to giving more than half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes. The pledge is a moral commitment to give, not a legal contract, and it does not involve pooling money or supporting a particular set of causes or organizations. While it is specifically focused on billionaires, the idea takes its inspiration from other efforts that encourage and recognize givers of all financial means and backgrounds.

Select Pledge Letter Excerpts

The following excerpts have been taken from letters written by pledge signatories on their personal motivation to give. Please visit www.givingpledge.org to view these letters and others in their entirety.
• Laura and John Arnold: “We view our wealth in this light – not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to effect positive and transformative change.”
• Michael R. Bloomberg: “If you want to do something for your children and show how much you love them, the single best thing – by far – is to support organizations that will create a better world for them and their children. And by giving, we inspire others to give of themselves, whether their money or their time.”
• Eli and Edythe Broad: “Those who have been blessed with extraordinary wealth have an opportunity, some would say a responsibility – we consider it a privilege – to give back to their communities, be they local, national or global.”
• Warren Buffett: “Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks (Berkshire Hathaway stock certificates) on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.”
• Bill and Melinda Gates: “We have been blessed with good fortune beyond our wildest expectations, and we are profoundly grateful. But just as these gifts are great, so we feel a great responsibility to use them well. That is why we are so pleased to join in making an explicit commitment to the Giving Pledge.”
• Barron Hilton: “It is my hope that others are inspired by my father’s story, and by our family’s steadfast adherence to his charitable philosophy.”
• Jon and Karen Huntsman: “It has been clear to me since my earliest childhood memories that my reason for being was to help others.”
• George B. Kaiser: “I had the advantage of both genetics (winning the “ovarian lottery”) and upbringing. As I looked around at those who did not have these advantages, it became clear to me that I had a moral obligation to direct my resources to help right that balance.”
• Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest: “The ultimate achievement in life is how you feel about yourself. And giving your wealth away to have an impact for good does help with that feeling."
• Lorry I. Lokey: “There’s an old saying about farmers putting back in to the ground via fertilizer what they take out. So it is with money. The larger the estate, the more important it is to revitalize the soil.”
• George Lucas: “My pledge is to the process; as long as I have the resources at my disposal, I will seek to raise the bar for future generations of students of all ages. I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education.”
• Tashia and John Morgridge: “The more personally involved we have become with the causes we support the more effective we seem to be.”
• Peter G. Peterson: “As I watched and learned from my father’s example, I noticed how much pleasure his giving to others gave him. Indeed, today, I get much more pleasure giving money to what I consider worthwhile causes than making the money in the first place.”
• David Rockefeller: “Our family continues to be united in the belief that those who have benefitted the most from our nation’s economic system have a special responsibility to give back to our society in meaningful ways.”
• Jeff Skoll: “The world is a vast and complicated place and it needs each of us doing all we can to ensure a brighter tomorrow for future generations.”
• Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor: “Surely the pleasure we derive from St. Francis’ active verbs of consoling, understanding, loving, giving and pardoning far outweigh any selfish and passive pleasures of owning, having, or possessing.”
• Ted Turner: “I’m particularly thankful for my father’s advice to set goals so high that they can’t possibly be achieved during a lifetime and to give help where help is needed most. That inspiration keeps me energized and eager to keep working hard every day on giving back and making the world a better place for generations to come.”
• Sanford and Joan Weill: “Our Pledge is this: We will continue to give away all of the wealth we have been so fortunate to make except for a very small percentage allocated to our children and grandchildren between now and the time we pass because we are firm believers that shrouds don’t have pockets.”

###
Media InquiriesFor inquiries regarding specific pledge signatories, please contact the individual’s respective
office directly. For all general inquiries regarding the Giving Pledge, please contact
media@givingpledge.org or 206-268-2207.

The Giving Pledge is an effort to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.

Habitat for Humanity, Ghana stops building houses

August 4, 2010
BiG - Business In Ghana
Habitat For Humanity Throws in The Towel After 21 Years of Building Houses in Ghana - 8/3/2010 -

By Sydney Casely-Hayford and Carly Ahiable, www.bizghana.com

After 21 years, home builder for the under-privileged in Ghana, Habitat for Humanity, Ghana (HFHG) a non-governmental, ecumenical Christian housing ministry has given up its goal of building affordable homes for families in need.

Speaking in an exclusive interview with BUSINESS IN GHANA on Tuesday, a source from HFHG in Accra said the Christian housing ministry’s home building programme is no longer sustainable because many beneficiaries of its programme have failed to pay their mortgages on schedule thus drying up the resources of the organization.

As a result, HFHG has put a hold on its programme for the next three years during which its core business would be to collect all outstanding debts from defaulters.

HFHG could not divulge information on the magnitude of the debt but said only few beneficiaries were honouring their obligations. “The problem is partly due to poverty and attitudinal norms as many of our beneficiaries think everything is free if it comes from the “white man”. Others think they were simply being cheated because NGOs give out freely and why should HFHG make them pay for the houses?

“Although we educate the beneficiaries before they sign their mortgages it seems they do not fully accept the concept.”

The most recalcitrant defaulters are in the Volta Region where HFHG built houses in the Ho and Keta districts between 1990 and 2000. Others are in the Western and Brong Ahafo areas.

Since its inception in 1989, HFHG has built over 7,000 housing units in Ghana, employing local labour and using local materials as much as possible. It instituted a flexible monthly mortgage repayment of an equivalent of two bags of cement per month at current market price spread over 20 years.

With the motto: ‘A world where everyone has a decent place to live’ HFHG’s single-bedroom housing unit costs about Ghc1,500 and a two-bedroom unit costs about Ghc4,000.

It has affiliates in all the regions in Ghana and collaborates with its mother organization, Habitat for Humanity International whose affiliates operate in many parts of Africa and the Middle East.

It is funded through the generosity of individuals, companies, churches, and other corporate bodies, board members, staff, volunteers and affiliate members of Habitat for Humanity Ghana. Donations received from those sources are directly applied to the programme. Funds from the Revolving Fund for Humanity are also used specifically for house construction.

After 21 years of working a well tried and tested international formula for providing affordable housing, HFHG’s withdrawal from the under-privileged housing market, is a lesson in sustainability of this market. The two-pronged malady of poverty; hindering repayment and the welfare mentality; government benevolence, have conspired against the International organization, one of the best not for profit agencies in the USA and Europe.

Considering that there is no one success story of low-cost housing in Ghana, this upheaval bodes lessons for the current STX deal before Parliament and the business model intended to provide 110,000 “affordable” homes to the under-privileged across Ghana.

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Habitat for Humanity, Ghana stops building houses

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Wants Pentagon to Help - The Daily Beast

WikiLeaks' Cry for Help

by Philip Shenon

Julian Assange’s team wants the Pentagon’s aid in reviewing a new batch of U.S. military secrets it plans to publish soon—and the Pentagon is reviewing WikiLeaks’ request. Philip Shenon reports.

Julian Assange wants the Pentagon’s help.

His secretive WikiLeaks website tells The Daily Beast it is making an urgent request to the Defense Department for help reviewing 15,000 still-secret American military reports to remove the names of Afghan civilians and others who might be endangered when the website makes the reports public.

The request follows statements of regret from Assange and others at WikiLeaks that the site may have unintentionally endangered Afghan civilians with its first massive document dump—72,000 leaked classified American military reports from Afghanistan that revealed the names and home villages of hundreds of local informants who cooperated with American forces there.

The Taliban has suggested it will now hunt down the informants named in the leaked documents.

“I would certainly say that the invitation to talk to the Obama administration is open,” said Daniel Schmitt, a WikiLeaks spokesman in Germany. “It has been open before.”

In a phone interview Tuesday with The Daily Beast, Schmitt said the site wanted to open a line of communication with the Defense Department in order to review an additional 15,000 classified reports in an effort to “make redactions so they can be safely published.” Schmitt said that these reports also relate to American military operations in Afghanistan. ....

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Wants Pentagon to Help - The Daily Beast

uwnews.org | Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding | University of Washington News and Information

Aug. 4, 2010 | Science | Technology | Health and Medicine Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding Hannah Hickey hickeyh@u.washington.edu Foldit players can use different tools to interactively twist, jiggle and reshape proteins. In this picture, a player uses rubber bands (purple) to pull together two sheets, or long flat regions of the protein. University of Washington Foldit players have control over which parts of the protein they want to move. In this picture, a player has frozen some curly helices, which keeps them in place while they adjust the rest of the protein. Biochemists and computer scientists at the University of Washington two years ago launched an ambitious project harnessing the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems. The game, Foldit, turns one of the hardest problems in molecular biology into a game a bit reminiscent of Tetris. Thousands of people have now played a game that asks them to fold a protein rather than stack colored blocks or rescue a princess. Results published Thursday (Aug. 5) in the journal Nature show that Foldit is a success. It turns out that people can, indeed, compete with supercomputers in this arena. Analysis shows that players bested the computers on problems that required radical moves, risks and long-term vision -- the kinds of qualities that computers do not possess. "People in the scientific community have known about Foldit for a while, and everybody thought it was a great idea, but the really fundamental question in most scientists' minds was 'What can it produce in terms of results? Is there any evidence that it's doing something useful?'"said principal investigator Zoran Popović, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. "I hope this paper will convince a lot of those people who were sitting on the sidelines, and the whole genre of scientific discovery games will really take off,"he said. Scientists know the pieces that make up a protein but cannot predict how those parts fit together into a 3-D structure. And since proteins act like locks and keys, the structure is crucial. At any moment, thousands of computers are working away at calculating how physical forces would cause a protein to fold. But no computer in the world is big enough, and computers may not take the smartest approach. So the UW team tried to make it into a game that people could play and compete. Foldit turns protein-folding into a game and awards points based on the internal energy of the 3-D protein structure, dictated by the laws of physics. Tens of thousands of players have taken the challenge. The author list for the paper includes an acknowledgment of more than 57,000 Foldit players, which may be unprecedented on a scientific publication. "We had to talk to the editors a bit about getting that in there,"said first author Seth Cooper, a UW doctoral student in computer science. "I think it's not the standard style of doing things.” The author list is a first step toward the original goal of having many people contribute to scientific research. Players come from all over the world, and are of all ages and educational backgrounds. "I don't think that there's any sort of real demographic profile that would be a typical Foldit player,"Cooper said. A major challenge in developing the game was to make it fun while still producing valid scientific results, Cooper said. There was a constant back-and-forth between scientists, game developers and players to achieve the best balance. The class of problems in which humans were able to do better than computers required intuitive leaps or major shifts in strategy. Future work will aim to better combine the strengths of experts, computers and thousands of game players. "It's a new kind of collective intelligence, as opposed to individual intelligence, that we want to study,"Popović said. "We're opening eyes in terms of how people think about human intelligence and group intelligence, and what the possibilities are when you get huge numbers of people together to solve a very hard problem.” The Foldit blog lets players know about updates to the game, upcoming competitions, and special events like online chats with the scientists or game developers. The Foldit energy calculations are carried out by Rosetta, the procedure for computing protein structures developed by co-author David Baker, a UW biochemistry professor. Baker's group has previously used donated computer cycles through Rosetta@home to help crunch through the trillions of possible orientations for the chains of amino acid molecules that make up proteins. The human thinking patterns may now help bolster Rosetta's skills. Researchers in Baker's group are analyzing the most successful Foldit strategies and trying to replicate them in the computer-powered version. This summer the Foldit community has been focused on problems in the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction competition, the world's largest comparison of protein-folding computation strategies. Last year Foldit competed as part of the Baker lab team. This year for the first time Foldit players have their own team, taking on the most sophisticated supercomputers in the world. Contest results will be announced in December. Now, Foldit players will focus on designing novel proteins. Last year a Texas player who goes by the name "BootsMcGraw"was the first Foldit player to have his new protein design synthesized in the Baker lab. Although this particular structure did not work, the researchers plan to try again and are optimistic about the possibilities. "I think that design problems are an area where human computing has huge potential,"Baker said. "People are good at building things, so I'm expecting that people will be very good at building proteins for different purposes. That's where I'm expecting really great things from Foldit.” Players may someday design proteins to disable the flu virus or tackle HIV, or perform tasks outside the body such as cleaning up waste or generating energy. Cooper has years of experience with computer games and says he "might be classified as a gamer."Now he's found a way to turn this global pastime to the benefit of science. "We're taking the effort that people put into games and channeling that into something productive and useful for humanity,"he said. "We're combining computational power and human brainpower to tackle important problems that neither one of them can do alone.” Other co-authors are Firas Khatib, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Baker's group; Adrien Treuille, a former UW computer science doctoral student now on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University; former UW undergraduate computer science students Janos Barbero and Michael Beenen; Jeehyung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University; and Andrew Leaver-Fay at the University of North Carolina, a former postdoctoral researcher in Baker's lab. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. ### For more information, Popović is in Norway until Aug. 11 and is best reached at zoran@cs.washington.edu. Cooper is in Japan and can be reached at scooper@cs.washington.edu. Baker is out of the office this week and best reached at dabaker@uw.edu. The Foldit website is http://fold.it. The site is currently down while data is being moved to a new server. Foldit videos are on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/uwfoldit. ©2010 University of Washington News and Information | uwnews.org | uweek.org uwnews@u.washington.edu phone: 206-543-2580 fax: 206-685-0658 @uwnews Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/uwnews B-54 Gerberding Hall, MS 351207, Seattle, WA, USA 98195 Contact UW News editorial team

uwnews.org | Gaming for a cure: Computer gamers tackle protein folding | University of Washington News and Information

Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure | Media Maverick - CNET News

July 19, 2010 10:28 AM PDT

Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure

by Greg Sandoval

More details are surfacing about why Blogetery.com, a blogging platform that claimed to service more than 70,000 blogs, was mysteriously booted from the Internet by its Web-hosting company.

The site was shut down after FBI agents informed executives of Burst.net, Blogetery's Web host, late on July 9 that links to al-Qaeda materials were found on Blogetery's servers, Joe Marr, chief technology officer for Burst.net, told CNET. Sources close to the investigation say that included in those materials were the names of American citizens targeted for assassination by al-Qaeda. Messages from Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization, as well as bomb-making tips, were also allegedly found on the server.

But Marr said a Burst.net employee erred in telling Blogetery's operator and members of the media that the FBI had ordered it to terminate Blogetery's service. He said Burst.net did that on its own.

This past weekend, reports surfaced that Blogetery was shut down by the federal government and suggested that it was likely due to copyright violations. On Sunday, CNET reported that the shutdown had nothing to do with copyright violations and that a similar service, Ipbfree.com, a platform for message boards, was shuttered within days of Blogetery. It is still unclear why Ipbfree was cut off.

The disappearance of the sites has prompted users of each service to complain about the closures and speculate about possible reasons. Some guesses were more wild than others.

Bomb-making tips, hit list behind Blogetery closure | Media Maverick - CNET News