PFT: Browns won't release McCoy, may trade him

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Former NFL quarterback Jeff Garcia working with Jets starter-for-now Mark Sanchez seems like a legitimate opportunity for a man well-versed in the West Coast Offense to share his wisdom.

Throw in JaMarcus Russell, and it sounds like a punch line that?s looking for a joke.

But Garcia said he was impressed with the work Sanchez was doing, as he gets used to the changes new offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg is bringing to the Jets.

?He?s doing an excellent job ? the progress Mark has made over the past three weeks is definitely very positive,? Garcia told Jim Corbett of USA Today. ?It shows Mark is committed to bettering himself and getting himself more mentally prepared.

?

?The most important thing for Mark is to take that tough season last year as a learning experience from the standpoint of how he can get better and give his team the best chance to win. That has to be done in terms of being confident in his ability to run this system and speak the language correctly. So now when he takes the field in OTAs, he?ll be in that much more comfortable of a place.?

Garcia?s a good tutor for the system, and he threw for career-best numbers under Mornhinweg?s tutelage in San Francisco in 2000.

?Marty and I communicated a few weeks ago [about] what he?d like to introduce to Mark,? Garcia said. ?Mark is definitely getting more comfortable speaking the West Coast terminology. He had a brief glimpse of the West Coast system at USC.

?The toughest thing is this will be Mark?s third offensive coordinator in six seasons. The guy has had to learn a new system just about every other year. From a consistency standpoint, that just doesn?t translate to success in the NFL. You really need to be secure in what you?re doing mentally in order to compete at the highest level.?

Speaking of which, Garcia said Russell?s trying to get in shape for a pro day in a month or so, hoping to get another chance.

?Granted his back is against the wall,? Garcia said of the former first-overall pick. ?This is a situation where if he doesn?t do it now, it may never happen. But if you look at where he was two months ago to where he is today, he?s come a long way in demanding more out of himself than he ever did.?

If he had done that the first time through, he might not be a reclamation case.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/03/28/banner-says-mccoy-wont-be-released-could-be-traded/related/

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Obama must support global Arms Trade Treaty

The global arms trade is out of control. In armed conflicts from Syria to Sudan, Mali to Myanmar, and Congo to Columbia, thousands of people are slaughtered by weapons of war that are transferred by governments into the hands of unscrupulous regimes, criminals, illegal militias, and terrorist groups.

The unregulated global arms trade, which increases the availability of small arms and ammunition in conflict zones, is fueling wars and human rights abuses against civilians. More than 740,000 men, women and children die each year as a result of armed violence.

The deaths caused each year are at the center of a larger tragedy. The poorly regulated arms trade makes development in war-torn countries more difficult. For example, the prevalence of AK-47?s and ammunition in the rural areas of South Sudan, a country plagued by five decades of war, is having devastating effects on peace-building and poverty-eradication efforts.

OPINION: 5 ways US must promote nuclear nonproliferation

The time for action to reduce the illicit, unregulated flow of weapons and ammunition is now.

Rather than watching this destruction from afar, the international community has an opportunity to offer a solution. Diplomats from the United States and more than 150 other countries are at the United Nations in New York for the ?final? round of negotiations (set to conclude tomorrow) for a legally binding Arms Trade Treaty. The treaty would restrict the flow of weapons across borders and close the loopholes unscrupulous traders now navigate with impunity.

Last July, the US was among a handful of states that failed to join a consensus on the treaty during the last hour of negotiations, saying "more time was needed" to complete the process. Now, the Obama administration has had that time.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry must now work with other countries at the United Nations to close the deal on a robust, effective Arms Trade Treaty with the highest possible standards. The Arms Trade Treaty will not, by itself, prevent all illicit and irresponsible arms trafficking, but it will help reduce the enormous toll of armed conflict around the globe.

Mr. Obama should join other leaders to finalize a treaty that outlaws arms deals where the exporter knows or should know that the weapons will be used to commit the world?s worst crimes. No country should be able to hide behind ambiguous international law to aid and abet genocide, crimes against humanity, serious war crimes, or a consistent pattern of serious human rights abuses.

The treaty should also require each country to assess the risks associated with an arms deal prior to transfer and be required to not transfer the weapons if there is a substantial risk that the arms will be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights, the laws of war, or acts of terrorism.

The implementation of an Arms Trade Treaty based on this standard would prevent, or at least make it more difficult to justify, the ongoing supply of weapons to the Assad regime in Syria, for example.

While the US has some of the strictest regulations governing the export and import of weapons, less than half of the countries in the world have any basic laws governing arms trade. That?s why the treaty must mandate that countries adopt and enforce comprehensive legal regime to regulate the import and export of all conventional weapons and ammunition. Arms dealers have no problem finding countries to base their operations and escape law enforcement. The treaty must close this lethal loophole.

The treaty must also avoid other loopholes ? like the one sought by India and opposed by the US ? that would exempt arms deals made under previous defense cooperation agreements from the treaty. And finally, the treaty should ensure that states make their reports on arms transfers available to the public to improve accountability.

THE MONITOR'S VIEW: For Obama's second term, a call to arms control

The Arms Trade Treaty is about making it harder for irresponsible states and arms dealers to put profits ahead of people. It is a vital tool to help protect civilians, aid workers, and missionaries from the violence fueled by the illicit arms trade. Its time is now.

Daryl G. Kimball is the executive director of the Arms Control Association.

Raymond C. Offenheiser is president of Oxfam America.

ALSO BY DARYL KIMBALL: Time to curb the illicit global arms trade

ALSO BY RAYMOND OFFENHEISER: How to make US foreign aid work

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-must-support-global-arms-trade-treaty-140817424--politics.html

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TV writing remains a white man's world, WGA study finds

By Todd Cunningham

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - Women and minorities have made some gains over the past decade, but the overall picture on the TV writing front remains bleak, according to a study released Tuesday by the Writers Guild of America West.

The WGAW's latest analysis of the state of diversity, the 2013 TV Staffing Brief, finds that while there have been some recent job gains for minority and women writers, the employment playing field in Hollywood is far from level

The research shows minority and women writers have made incremental gains in employment over the past decade-plus period, but current TV staffing levels still continue to be widely disproportionate to actual minority demographics of the U.S. population.

Diverse writers remain substantially underrepresented on TV writing staffs, the study found.

The study analyzes employment patterns for 1,722 writers working on 190 broadcast and cable TV shows during the 2011-2012 season, highlighting three specific groups who have traditionally been underemployed in the TV industry: women, minority, and older writers.

Between the 1999-2000 and 2011-12 TV seasons, women writers' share of TV staff employment increased approximately 5 percentage points, from 25 percent to 30.5 percent.

To put that in perspective, at that rate of increase it will be another 42 years before women reach proportionate representation.

Minority writers nearly doubled their share of staffing positions since the millennium but remain severely underrepresented. Between the 1999-2000 and 2011-12 seasons, minority writers' share of TV employment increased from 7.5 percent to 15.6 percent. Despite this increase, minorities as a combined group remain underrepresented by a factor of more than two-to-one in television staff employment in the 2011-12 season.

A number of writing staff remain dominated by white males. Roughly 10% of TV shows in the 2011-12 season had no female writers on staff; and nearly a third had no minority writers on staff. In the 2010-2011 television season, only 9% of pilots had at least one minority writer attached, while just 24% of pilots had at least one woman writer attached.

"It all begins with the writing," said Dr. Darnell Hunt, author of the report and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA and professor of sociology. "From concept to characters, from plot to narrative, writers play a fundamental role in the fashioning of stories a society circulates about itself. But in the Hollywood entertainment industry, unfortunately, there has all too often existed a disconnect between the writers hired to tell the stories and an America that's increasingly diverse with each passing day."

There was some good news in terms of older writers. For the first time in 2011-12, writers over 40 claimed a majority share of TV staff positions: between 1999-00 and 2010-11 seasons, the over-40 share of TV staff employment increased nearly 16 percentage points, from 39.9% to 55.6%.

The bad news was that nearly a third of the shows in the 2011-12 season had no writers over 50 on staff.

"Despite a few pockets of promise, much more work must be done on the television diversity front before the corps of writers telling our stories look significantly more like us as a nation," said Hunt.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tv-writing-remains-white-mans-world-wga-study-215129270.html

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Simulations uncover obstacle to harnessing laser-driven fusion: Under realistic conditions, hollow cones fail to guide energetic electrons to fuel

Mar. 26, 2013 ? A once-promising approach for using next-generation, ultra-intense lasers to help deliver commercially viable fusion energy has been brought into serious question by new experimental results and first-of-a-kind simulations of laser-plasma interaction.

Researchers at The Ohio State University are evaluating a two-stage process in which a pellet of fusion fuel is first crushed by lasers on all sides, shrinking the pellet to dozens of times its original size, followed by an ultra-intense burst of laser light to ignite a chain reaction. This two-stage approach is called Fast Ignition, and there are a few variants on the theme.

In a recent paper, the Ohio State research group considered the long-discussed possibility of using a hollow cone to maintain a channel for the ultra-intense "ignitor pulse" to focus laser energy on the compressed pellet core. Drawing on both experimental results from studies at the Titan Laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and massively-parallel computer simulations of the laser-target interaction performed at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus, Ohio, the research team found compelling evidence that the cone-guided approach to Fast Ignition has a serious flaw.

"In the history of fusion research, two-steps-forward and one-step-back stories are a common theme," said Chris Orban, Ph.D., a researcher of the High Energy Density Physics research group at Ohio State and the lead theorist on the project. "But sometimes progress is about seeing what's not going to work, just as much as it is looking forward to the next big idea."

Since the ultra-intense pulse delivers energy to the fuel through relativistic electrons accelerated by the laser interaction, the Ohio State study focused on the coupling of the laser light to electrons and the propagation of those electrons through the cone target. Rather than investigating how the interaction would work on a high-demand, high-cost facility like the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which is also based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the largest scientific operations in the world, the researchers considered experiments just across from NIF at the Titan laser, which is much smaller and easily accessible.

These images from their simulations highlight the trajectories of randomly-selected electrons for a thin cone (left) and thick cone (right), each attached to a copper wire. Background colors show the strength of the electric fields pointing away from the cone and wire. For thin cones, the electric fields act to guide energetic electrons forward into the wire while for thick cones -- a more realistic case -- these fields are too distant to be effective. An animation of the simulation is available online at: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~orban/cone_wire_final5mJ_4_5ps.avi.

Despite its size and despite having lower total energy, for a brief moment the Titan laser is many thousands of times more intense than NIF, which makes it a decent stand-in as a second-stage ignitor pulse. The OSU-led experimental team focused the Titan pulse on hollow cone targets attached at the tip to copper wires and observed the burst of X-ray photons coming from the copper as a measure of the laser energy to relativistic electron conversion efficiency.

The X-ray signal was much lower from the hollow cones with thicker cone walls. "This was strong evidence to the experimental team that the typical approach to cone-guided Fast Ignition wouldn't work, since thicker cones should be more realistic than thin cones," said Orban. "This is because electrons are free to move around in a dense plasma, much like they do in a normal metal, so the thicker cone target is like a thin cone embedded in a dense plasma."

These intuitions were tested in simulations performed at OSC. Whereas earlier efforts to simulate the laser-target interaction were forced to simplify or shrink the target size in order to make the calculations more feasible, Orban used the LSP code to perform the first-ever, full-scale 2D Particle-In-Cell simulations of the entire laser-target interaction using fully realistic laser fields.

These simulations also included a sophisticated model for the pre-heating of the target from stray laser light ahead of the ultra-intense pulse developed by collaborators at the Flash Center for Computational Science at the University of Chicago.

"We were delighted to help Chris use the FLASH code to provide realistic initial conditions for his Particle-In-Cell simulations," said Don Lamb, director of the Flash Center. "This is an outstanding example of how two groups can collaborate to achieve a scientific result that neither could have achieved alone."

To conduct the simulations, the Ohio State researchers accessed OSC's flagship Oakley Cluster supercomputer system. The HP-built system features 8,300+ Intel Xeon cores and 128 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Oakley can achieve 88 teraflops, tech-speak for performing 88 trillion calculations per second, or, with acceleration from the NVIDIA GPUs, a total peak performance of 154 teraflops.

"The simulations pointed to the electric fields building up on the edge of the cone as the key to everything," said Orban. "The thicker the cone is, the further away the cone edge is from the laser, and as a result fewer energetic electrons are deflected forward, which is the crucial issue in making cone-guided Fast Ignition a viable approach."

With both the experiment and the simulations telling the same story, the evidence is compelling that the cone-guided route to Fast Ignition is an unlikely one. While other studies have come to similar conclusions, the group was the first to identify the plasma surrounding the cone as a severe hindrance. Thankfully, there are still many other ideas for successfully igniting the fusion pellet with current or soon-to-be-constructed laser facilities. Any future efforts to spark fusion reactions with these lasers using a two-stage fast-ignition approach must be mindful to consider the neutralizing effect of the free electrons in the dense plasma.

"We could not have completed this project without the Oakley Cluster," Orban noted. "It was the perfect combination of speed and RAM and availability for us. And thanks to the profiling I was able to do, the compute time for our production runs went from two weeks in November 2011 to three or four days as of February 2012."

"Energy and the environment is one of the primary focus areas of the center, and this research fits perfectly into that domain," said Brian Guilfoos, the client and technology support manager for OSC. "Many of our systems were designed and software packages selected to best support the type of computing required by investigators working in fields related to our focus areas."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Ohio Supercomputer Center.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. K. U. Akli, C. Orban, D. Schumacher, M. Storm, M. Fatenejad, D. Lamb, R. R. Freeman. Coupling of high-intensity laser light to fast electrons in cone-guided fast ignition. Physical Review E, 2012; 86 (6) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.86.065402

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

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

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/electricity/~3/2LmJkrdgNbo/130326162340.htm

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Language Startup Babbel Closes $10M Series B Funding To Expand Globally, Build Team

Things are moving fast in the world of Babbel, the language learning startup out of Germany which has been scaling its international presence since we first started covering them back in 2009. Today Babbel is announcing a $10 million Series B funding round led by Reed Elsevier Ventures. Other investors include Nokia Growth Partners as well as existing investors, IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft via its VC Fonds Technologie Berlin, and Kizoo Technology Capital.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/DTEO5-l-has/

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Pentagon urged to stop stalling, start planning defense cuts

By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon needs to stop stalling and start figuring out how to cut its budget by $50 billion annually for the foreseeable future in a way that preserves national security, defense analysts from across the political spectrum said on Thursday.

Warning that the department appeared to be clinging to the hope that Congress and the White House would eventually reverse the cuts, the analysts said the Pentagon needed to focus on factors that drive long-term cost growth, including overhead, compensation and acquisition.

"We are not getting the bang for the buck for the dollars we should in the Pentagon," said retired Marine Corps Major General Arnold Punaro, who led a task force that reviewed Pentagon overhead costs for then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2010.

"If we don't make some fundamental changes ... in about 15 years, we will not have the strongest military ... because these three ticking time bombs are eating away at the core of our defense capability," he told a round-table at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

The Pentagon is scrambling to reduce spending by $46 billion this fiscal year after a law requiring $500 billion in defense spending cuts over the next decade took effect on March 1. The cuts came as the department was implementing a $487 billion cut over the same period that went into force last year.

The Pentagon's 2013 budget has also been under stress because of Congress' failure to appropriate funds for the government this year.

Congress alleviated some of those issues on Thursday when it approved funding for the government for the rest of the year. But it left in place the budget cuts required under the automatic reductions, known as sequestration.

The Pentagon welcomed the measure and postponed for two weeks a decision on how many of the nearly 800,000 civilian defense employees would have to be placed on unpaid leave for as many as 22 days during the rest of the fiscal year.

'DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE'

The 2014 budget proposal the Pentagon sent to the White House last month did not include the $50 billion in automatic cuts scheduled for that year and the Defense Department has not been asked for revised figures, officials said.

The White House posted a plan on its website this week that seeks to avert the automatic cuts through budget cuts and revenue increases. The White House plan would replace the $500 billion of defense cuts over the next decade with a $100 billion cut, to be implemented over five years beginning in 2019.

The defense analysts expressed skepticism about the plan, which likely faces stiff resistance from Republicans who have vowed to oppose more tax increases.

"That's a scenario that doesn't make any sense at all except in la-la land because those aren't real cuts," said Gordon Adams, an analyst with the Stimson Center who worked on defense budgets while at the White House during the Clinton presidency.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the White House and Defense Department approach to the budget cut was to "deny it, put it off, assume it's going to go away at some point."

"The reality is they need to start planning for this staying in effect, and even if they start right now it's a little too late," he said, noting the department would have to begin laying off personnel next year when more cuts go into effect.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, urged the Pentagon to tackle the tough issues of compensation, overhead and base closures, some of the thorniest issues politically but factors that have been driving up defense costs for years.

Punaro said the cost of the Defense Department's "massive and inefficient overhead," at $218 billion a year, was greater than the economy of the entire state of Israel.

"If you just look at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the combatant commands and the defense agencies ... there's over 250,000 people, $116 billion a year," he said.

"There's not a trigger-puller in that lot. There's nobody with a sharp bayonet in that group," said Punaro, adding that of the top 12 defense contractors, half were agencies of the Pentagon.

(Editing by Peter Cooney)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pentagon-urged-stop-stalling-start-planning-defense-cuts-005419299--business.html

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Jack Swagger breaks Ricardo Rodriguez's ankle

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Source: http://www.wwe.com/shows/raw/2013-03-18/jack-swagger-breaks-ricardo-rodriguez-ankle

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