malagao: জুন 2013

রবিবার, ২৩ জুন, ২০১৩

Beaming Internet to the Boondocks, Via Balloon

Rather than relying on cell towers, phone lines, or fiber optics, Google plans to beam 3G-speed Internet to the world's most inaccessible corners using helium balloons. The experiment is called "Project Loon." Leader Mike Cassidy talks about the project's first step: providing balloon Internet to New Zealand and the 40th parallel south.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/06/21/194230814/beaming-internet-to-the-boondocks-via-balloon?ft=1&f=1007

the killing grant hill turkey Houston fire oklahoma titanic After Earth

Obamacare: Will it worsen Missouri's doctor shortage?

Obamacare: Missouri already has a shortage of primary care doctors. When Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) goes into effect on Jan.1, some say the ratio of patients to doctors will get even worse.

By Chris Blank,?Associated Press / June 22, 2013

Senate clerks arrange 95 proposed amendments to the health insurance exchange bill at the statehouse in St. Paul, Minn., earlier this year. Minnesota will set up its own health insurance exchange to comply with Obamacare, but the federal government will do it on behalf of 34 other states.

Glen Stubbe/The Star Tribune/AP/File

Enlarge

Missouri is facing a shortage of the primary care doctors. The strain could grow as more Missourians soon gain health insurance under the federal health care law.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; // google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

"A lot of folks say that politics is the biggest threat to Obamacare or the Affordable Care Act. I think the second biggest threat is the lack of primary care providers to serve the folks who are going to gain access to coverage," said Joe Pierle, CEO of the Missouri Primary Care Association that represents community health centers. "We can give everybody health insurance, but if they can't get in to a doctor, especially in rural Missouri, then we're really not making much progress."

Nationwide, the shortage of family doctors stems from a populace that is getting older and a desire by doctors to seek out specialties with better pay and hours. A shortfall of primary care doctors can mean more difficulty scheduling appointments and longer waits while reduced preventive care can push patients' health problems into chronic conditions. Clinics more frequently are using search firms to find practitioners.

Missouri had a little less than 74 active patient care primary care doctors per 100,000 residents in 2010 according to figures from the Association of American Medical Colleges. That ranked 35th and put it behind the national per capita average of more than 79 active primary care doctors. Among its neighbors, Missouri had fewer doctors per 100,000 residents than Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Tennessee.

Access to a primary care doctor seems a particular issue in Missouri's rural areas. The medical school at the University of Missouri-Columbia has a pipeline program aimed at increasing supply and retention of rural doctors that includes but is not limited to family medicine.

Some also are suggesting consideration of changes to types of care health professionals are authorized to offer.

The challenge of access to primary care doctors could grow as the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), the new federal health care law, is fully implemented Jan. 1. The law will require most Americans to obtain health insurance. People with lower incomes will be eligible for subsidies and can obtain coverage through online marketplaces called health insurance exchanges. Insurers also will be barred from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition.

The Missouri Foundation for Health estimated there currently are 877,000 people in Missouri without health insurance. The foundation said about 300,000 people will be eligible for the subsidies. Another roughly 50,000 people likely have been priced out of the insurance market because of significant pre-existing conditions but could pay for affordable insurance coverage. That means about 350,000 more people could gain insurance, and they are expected to seek health care. However, it's unclear how many doctors Missouri will need to meet the demand.

Ryan Barker, vice president of health policy for the Missouri Foundation of Health, said better data could track where doctors practice and how frequently. Furthermore, some of the people who will gain health insurance already could be seeing a primary care doctor.

"We do not have a good sense of how many of the individuals who are going to gain insurance currently do not have a primary care doc and are going to put this additional pressure," Barker said. "Honestly, we just don't have a good sense of how much pressure is this adding to the system."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/NaOR7NmHCTM/Obamacare-Will-it-worsen-Missouri-s-doctor-shortage

winning numbers mega millions megamillions drawing olbermann mega millions march 30 lucky numbers odds of winning mega millions mary mary

Grandson: Mandela hopefully coming home soon

JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? A grandson of Nelson Mandela says hopefully he'll be headed home soon, as the 94-year-old beloved former president marked two weeks in the hospital Friday.

Ndaba Mandela addressed concerns about his grandfather's health at a Thursday media briefing about a football invitational that will be part of celebrations surrounding Mandela's 95th birthday on July 18.

"Positively we can say that he has been getting better and better each day and hopefully he'll be coming home soon," Ndaba Mandela was quoted as saying by The Star, a South African newspaper.

"For us, as family, as long as he can still hear and understand what is said to him, and talk to us, we'll continue to celebrate him," he said.

Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison during white racist rule, was taken to a Pretoria hospital on June 8 to be treated for a recurring lung infection. It marked the fourth time he has been hospitalized since December.

Meanwhile, former President Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as president in 1999, said he also has remained in close contact with doctors about Mandela's condition.

"Nelson Mandela is in fact improving, in terms of his health," Mbeki said Thursday night in an interview with Power FM, a South African radio station. "I think we really need to feel comforted that we still have him with us now."

The government had described Mandela's condition as serious but stable, but later said he was improving.

Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and became South Africa's first black president in all-race elections in 1994.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/grandson-mandela-hopefully-coming-home-soon-142635755.html

keystone pipeline purim acc tournament big ten tournament big east tournament 2012 solar storm spanx

শনিবার, ২২ জুন, ২০১৩

Beyond silicon: Transistors without semiconductors

June 21, 2013 ? For decades, electronic devices have been getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. It's now possible -- even routine -- to place millions of transistors on a single silicon chip.

But transistors based on semiconductors can only get so small. "At the rate the current technology is progressing, in 10 or 20 years, they won't be able to get any smaller," said physicist Yoke Khin Yap of Michigan Technological University. "Also, semiconductors have another disadvantage: they waste a lot of energy in the form of heat."

Scientists have experimented with different materials and designs for transistors to address these issues, always using semiconductors like silicon. Back in 2007, Yap wanted to try something different that might open the door to a new age of electronics.

"The idea was to make a transistor using a nanoscale insulator with nanoscale metals on top," he said. "In principle, you could get a piece of plastic and spread a handful of metal powders on top to make the devices, if you do it right. But we were trying to create it in nanoscale, so we chose a nanoscale insulator, boron nitride nanotubes, or BNNTs for the substrate."

Yap's team had figured out how to make virtual carpets of BNNTs,which happen to be insulators and thus highly resistant to electrical charge. Using lasers, the team then placed quantum dots (QDs) of gold as small as three nanometers across on the tops of the BNNTs, forming QDs-BNNTs. BNNTs are the perfect substrates for these quantum dots due to their small, controllable, and uniform diameters, as well as their insulating nature. BNNTs confine the size of the dots that can be deposited.

In collaboration with scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), they fired up electrodes on both ends of the QDs-BNNTs at room temperature, and something interesting happened. Electrons jumped very precisely from gold dot to gold dot, a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling.

"Imagine that the nanotubes are a river, with an electrode on each bank. Now imagine some very tiny stepping stones across the river," said Yap. "The electrons hopped between the gold stepping stones. The stones are so small, you can only get one electron on the stone at a time. Every electron is passing the same way, so the device is always stable."

Yap's team had made a transistor without a semiconductor. When sufficient voltage was applied, it switched to a conducting state. When the voltage was low or turned off, it reverted to its natural state as an insulator.

Furthermore, there was no "leakage": no electrons from the gold dots escaped into the insulating BNNTs, thus keeping the tunneling channel cool. In contrast, silicon is subject to leakage, which wastes energy in electronic devices and generates a lot of heat.

Other people have made transistors that exploit quantum tunneling, says Michigan Tech physicist John Jaszczak, who has developed the theoretical framework for Yap's experimental research. However, those tunneling devices have only worked in conditions that would discourage the typical cellphone user.

"They only operate at liquid-helium temperatures," said Jaszczak.

The secret to Yap's gold-and-nanotube device is its submicroscopic size: one micron long and about 20 nanometers wide. "The gold islands have to be on the order of nanometers across to control the electrons at room temperature," Jaszczak said. "If they are too big, too many electrons can flow." In this case, smaller is truly better: "Working with nanotubes and quantum dots gets you to the scale you want for electronic devices."

"Theoretically, these tunneling channels can be miniaturized into virtually zero dimension when the distance between electrodes is reduced to a small fraction of a micron," said Yap.

Yap has filed for a full international patent on the technology.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/JY7mkn1cLuE/130621121015.htm

Amanda Bynes Topless reese witherspoon joakim noah Of Monsters and Men boxing news mint julep silk

Twitter Said To Be Preparing Location-Based Ads For Clicks And Bricks

Twitter is reportedly working on geolocated promoted tweets to help retailers target specifically consumers within spitting distance of their stores, according to AdAge. The location-based ads might be ready to launch as soon as later this year, the report claims, and would be the perfect means of delivery for spot deals designed to drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar retailers and other businesses to nearby shoppers.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/eGtnzrfFMjk/

daytona 500 winner cleveland plain dealer john scott barry sanders barry sanders jimmie johnson juan pablo montoya crash

one year ago / canon rebel & expired Kodak Gold ? Orange County ...

El Capitan Canyon | Santa Barbara, CA
June 2012

One year ago I made the decision to use film for my personal work and family photos. I picked up the only film camera I had on hand (a 90?s Canon Rebel) and in the same bag found ten rolls of Kodak Gold 400. So that?s what I used on my first foray back to the medium from whence I came. And this is the first time I used it. Getting these scans back was like getting an email from your best friend from sixth grade, the one you haven?t talked to in fifteen years, but who stills feels like the peanut butter to your jelly, the sun to your sky. Like, ?WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?!? And, ?WHY DID WE EVER FALL OUT OF TOUCH?!?

I didn?t know this at the time, but with expired film you actually need to overexpose, and I didn?t. So a lot of these are underexposed and grainy, but I?m okay with that. Because that?s the deal with film, you get what you get. You get what you get.

I have an elderly Aunt and Uncle who are in the process of cleaning out their home and giving things away. Things they have had tucked away in their cupboards and garage for thirty or forty years. Last Thanksgiving, Uncle Leonard brought a Nikon One-Touch to my mom?s house, thinking ?one of us kids? might like it. It was perfectly timed, because after six months of use, my Canon Rebel had begun breaking down. I was having trouble locking focus and the battery door insisted on popping open, batteries falling out and camera rendered useless at the most inopportune moments, so I was ecstatic to have another option fall into my lap. One with sentiment attached, even better. It?s entirely possible that the camera had recorded me, as a child, and I like the notion of that.

So, for the first half of this year, I have used the Nikon One-Touch as my main form of documenting my children and my life. This point and shoot camera (like all point and shoot cameras) has given me freedom from technical thought, which is what the iPhone camera also brings to the table, and what I mean is ? I don?t have to think about exposure. I only have to look, see, and then push a button. In certain aspects of my personal and family work, I appreciate the speed and ease this camera offers me. The images themselves feel so cut directly from the moment, like there?s nothing in between you when you see them in front of you. It?s exactly what was in front of me, nothing more and nothing less. No shallow depth of field to manipulate the viewer?s eye into being drawn to a certain place, no fancy bells and whistles.

I recently picked up a Canon EOS 3, a film SLR. Which I wanted for the entirely opposite reason that I have come to appreciate in the Nikon One-Touch. I want to have some control. I want some depth of field. I want a little more quality and depth to the images. I haven?t run any film through it yet, but I?m getting ready to.

Here?s a link to the ?film? blog category I created to keep everything organized in one place.

Happy Friday.

Source: http://tarawhitney.com/justbeblogged/2013/06/one-year-ago-canon-rebel-expired-kodak-gold/

wilt chamberlain joe arpaio cat in the hat green eggs and ham wiz khalifa and amber rose oh the places you ll go blunt amendment