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LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron rejected the idea of a law to regulate the British press on Thursday, risking a split in his government after an inquiry advised legal backing for a watchdog to police the sometimes outrageous conduct of newspapers.

Opposing an independent regulator enshrined in law will delight the British press ahead of the 2015 election but may raise concern inside the coalition government that Cameron lacks the mettle to stand up to media barons such as Rupert Murdoch.

Cameron said he was wary of writing press regulation into law, a snub to the inquiry he ordered in July last year after public outrage at revelations that one of Murdoch's tabloids hacked the phone messages of a 13-year-old murder victim.

"The issue of principle is that for the first time we would have crossed the rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into the law of the land," Cameron told parliament, watched from the gallery by victims of phone-hacking who have campaigned for tougher rules to police Britain's recalcitrant media.

"I'm not convinced at this stage that statute is necessary," Cameron said, just hours after Lord Justice Brian Leveson reported on his inquiry which laid bare the cozy ties between British leaders, police chiefs and press barons.

Presenting his 1,987-page report opposite the House of Commons, Leveson said he had no intention of undermining three centuries of press freedom but that the press had at times "wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people" and was sometimes guilty of "outrageous" behavior.

Leveson said it was essential that there should be legislation to underpin a new independent, self-regulatory body for the press that would be scrutinized by the broadcast regulator Ofcom and have the power to impose fines of up to 1 percent of turnover up to a maximum of 1 million pounds ($1.6 million).

"The ball moves back into the politicians' court: they must now decide who guards the guardians," Leveson said.

The behavior of Britain's tabloid press has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. While British newspapers were unwilling to report on King Edward VIII's affair with American divorcee Wallis Simpson in the 1930s, their conduct has since become much less restrained in the battle for readers.

As competition intensified, the tabloids turned on the private lives of the royal family, culminating in feverish coverage of Princess Diana, hounded by paparazzi as her marriage to Prince Charles collapsed.

At one point in the early 1990s, a government minister warned the tabloid press that they were "drinking in the last chance saloon". A subsequent inquiry led to the setting up the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulating watchdog now deemed to have failed.

"I know of no organized profession, industry or trade in which the serious failings of the few are overlooked or ignored because of the good done by the many," Leveson said.

'LAST CHANCE SALOON'

While Cameron rejected immediate legislation, the leader of the opposition Labour Party said he supported Leveson's proposals as did Cameron's coalition partner, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.

"There can be no more last chance saloons," said Labour leader Ed Miliband, opening up the prospect of possible defeat in parliament for Cameron if Labour joined forces with supporters of tougher rules inside the coalition parties.

In a sign of a split at the very heart of government, Clegg said legislation was the only real way to establish a new self-regulatory body for the press.

"Changing the law is the only way to give us all the assurance that the new regulator isn't just independent for a few months or years, but is independent for good," Clegg said.

Victims of phone hacking say the raucous media has been given no less than seven chances to reform in the last 70 years but Leveson said the British press had at times displayed a "reckless disregard for accuracy".

Leveson heard evidence from a host of celebrities including Harry Potter author JK Rowling, singer Charlotte Church and ordinary people who told the inquiry how they had been harassed, bullied, and traumatized by the press.

Hacked Off, an organization set up to represent victims of press abuse, said it welcomed the Leveson report but warned Cameron's opposition risked neutering the recommendations.

"The prime minister has not done his job. His failure to accept the full recommendations of the report is unfortunate and regrettable," said Brian Cathcart, a former Reuters journalist and founder of the Hacked Off campaign.

"In tearing out from this report the element of scrutiny on the self-regulator, he (Cameron) has left us with only a self-regulator. That is where we were before. That is where we have been for 60 or 70 years."

Ultimately, Cameron took a political decision: powerful ministers in Cameron's party and the majority of the press have said they were adamantly opposed to any form of legislation as they see it as an erosion of press freedom.

Lord Guy Black, currently the head of the body which funds the current discredited, self-regulatory system, said there was no need to subject the new body to a statutory regime.

"Any form of statutory press control in a free society is fraught with danger, totally impractical and would take far too long to implement," he said.

'TOO CLOSE'

Leveson said the relationship between the cream of Britain's political elite and the press was too close and said he was concerned by lobbying.

The 63-year-old judge warned that the close ties formed between the government and Murdoch's News Corp over the aborted takeover of BSkyB was concerning and had the potential to jeopardize the $12 billion bid.

"We are keen to play our full part, with others in our industry, in creating a new body that commands the confidence of the public," said Tom Mockridge, chief executive of Murdoch's British newspaper arm, News International,

"We believe that this can be achieved without statutory regulation - and welcome the prime minister's rejection of that proposal," Mockridge said in a statement.

Leveson offered little in the way of direct criticism of individuals, ammunition for those who hoped it would condemn Cameron for his links to Murdoch's media empire. Nor did he say there had been any deal between the two.

He said there was no credible evidence of bias on the part of senior minister and Cameron ally Jeremy Hunt in his handling of the BSkyB takeover, but said the close ties allowed a perception of favoritism.

Inquiry hearings embarrassed Cameron by exposing his close ties to executives at Murdoch's British newspaper empire, notably former top lieutenant Rebekah Brooks, who is facing criminal action over phone-hacking and other alleged illegal actions.

Brooks appeared in court earlier on Thursday accused of making illegal payments to public officials.

Four prime ministers including Cameron were quizzed in great detail about their links to newspaper owners, especially Murdoch, who himself endured two days of grilling, during which he denied playing puppet-master to those running the country.

(Additional reporting by Tim Castle, Matt Falloon, Estelle Shirbon and Mohammed Abbas; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/british-inquiry-calls-law-underpin-press-body-134857637--finance.html

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ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2012) ? A new paradigm for understanding the earliest eras in the history of the universe has been developed by scientists at Penn State University. Using techniques from an area of modern physics called loop quantum cosmology, developed at Penn State, the scientists now have extended analyses that include quantum physics farther back in time than ever before -- all the way to the beginning. The new paradigm of loop quantum origins shows, for the first time, that the large-scale structures we now see in the universe evolved from fundamental fluctuations in the essential quantum nature of "space-time," which existed even at the very beginning of the universe over 14 billion years ago. The achievement also provides new opportunities for testing competing theories of modern cosmology against breakthrough observations expected from next-generation telescopes.

The research will be published on 11 December 2012 as an "Editor's Suggestion" paper in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

"We humans always have yearned to understand more about the origin and evolution of our universe," said Abhay Ashtekar, the senior author of the paper. "So it is an exciting time in our group right now, as we begin using our new paradigm to understand, in more detail, the dynamics that matter and geometry experienced during the earliest eras of the universe, including at the very beginning." Ashtekar is the Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics at Penn State and the director of the university's Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos. Coauthors of the paper, along with Ashtekar, are postdoctoral fellows Ivan Agullo and William Nelson.

The new paradigm provides a conceptual and mathematical framework for describing the exotic "quantum-mechanical geometry of space-time" in the very early universe. The paradigm shows that, during this early era, the universe was compressed to such unimaginable densities that its behavior was ruled not by the classical physics of Einstein's general theory of relativity, but by an even more fundamental theory that also incorporates the strange dynamics of quantum mechanics. The density of matter was huge then -- 10⁹⁴ grams per cubic centimeter, as compared with the density of an atomic nucleus today, which is only 10¹⁴ grams.

In this bizarre quantum-mechanical environment -- where one can speak only of probabilities of events rather than certainties -- physical properties naturally would be vastly different from the way we experience them today. Among these differences, Ashtekar said, are the concept of "time," as well as the changing dynamics of various systems over time as they experience the fabric of quantum geometry itself.

No space observatories have been able to detect anything as long ago and far away as the very early eras of the universe described by the new paradigm. But a few observatories have come close. Cosmic background radiation has been detected in an era when the universe was only 380-thousand years old. By that time, after a period of rapid expansion called "inflation," the universe had burst out into a much-diluted version of its earlier super-compressed self. At the beginning of inflation, the density of the universe was a trillion times less than during its infancy, so quantum factors now are much less important in ruling the large-scale dynamics of matter and geometry.

Observations of the cosmic background radiation show that the universe had a predominantly uniform consistency after inflation, except for a light sprinkling of some regions that were more dense and others that were less dense. The standard inflationary paradigm for describing the early universe, which uses the classical-physics equations of Einstein, treats space-time as a smooth continuum. "The inflationary paradigm enjoys remarkable success in explaining the observed features of the cosmic background radiation. Yet this model is incomplete. It retains the idea that the universe burst forth from nothing in a Big Bang, which naturally results from the inability of the paradigm's general-relativity physics to describe extreme quantum-mechanical situations," Agullo said. "One needs a quantum theory of gravity, like loop quantum cosmology, to go beyond Einstein in order to capture the true physics near the origin of the universe."

Earlier work with loop quantum cosmology in Ashtekar's group had updated the concept of the Big Bang with the intriguing concept of a Big Bounce, which allows the possibility that our universe emerged not from nothing but from a super-compressed mass of matter that previously may have had a history of its own.

Even though the quantum-mechanical conditions at the beginning of the universe were vastly different from the classical-physics conditions after inflation, the new achievement by the Penn State physicists reveals a surprising connection between the two different paradigms that describe these eras. When scientists use the inflation paradigm together with Einstein's equations to model the evolution of the seed-like areas sprinkled throughout the cosmic background radiation, they find that the irregularities serve as seeds that evolve over time into the galaxy clusters and other large-scale structures that we see in the universe today. Amazingly, when the Penn State scientists used their new loop-quantum-origins paradigm with its quantum-cosmology equations, they found that fundamental fluctuations in the very nature of space at the moment of the Big Bounce evolve to become the seed-like structures seen in the cosmic microwave background.

"Our new work shows that the initial conditions at the very beginning of the universe naturally lead to the large-scale structure of the universe that we observe today," Ashtekar said. "In human terms, it is like taking a snapshot of a baby right at birth and then being able to project from it an accurate profile of how that person will be at age 100."

"This paper pushes back the genesis of the cosmic structure of our universe from the inflationary epoch all the way to the Big Bounce, covering some 11 orders of magnitude in the density of matter and the curvature of space-time," Nelson said. "We now have narrowed down the initial conditions that could exist at the Big Bounce, plus we find that the evolution of those initial conditions agrees with observations of the cosmic background radiation."

The team's results also identify a narrower range of parameters for which the new paradigm predicts novel effects, distinguishing it from standard inflation. Ashtekar said, "It is exciting that we soon may be able to test different predictions from these two theories against future discoveries with next-generation observational missions. Such experiments will help us to continue gaining a deeper understanding of the very, very early universe."

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Penn State. The original article was written by Barbara K. Kennedy.

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

Journal Reference:

Ivan Agullo, Abhay Ashtekar, and William Nelson. Quantum gravity extension of the inflationary scenario. Physical Review Letters, December 11, 2012

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/top_news/~3/KJ2HhYd9VXM/121129143452.htm

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JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - South African President Jacob Zuma looks set for re-election as head of the ruling ANC in December but the battle for the post of his deputy could thrust millionaire businessman and former unionist Cyril Ramaphosa back into political prominence.

Despite sluggish growth in Africa's biggest economy, bloody labour strife that dented South Africa's image this year and a slew of scandals during Zuma's three years in power, five of the country's nine provinces are backing the president to stay on as leader of the African National Congress.

This line-up suggests Zuma has seen off a campaign to replace him with Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, whose own silence on whether he is in the running has opened up the chance of a political comeback by business tycoon Ramaphosa.

Leadership of Nelson Mandela's 100-year-old liberation movement would virtually guarantee Zuma another five years as state president in a 2014 election, given the support the ANC can still count on from South Africa's black majority.

Nominations for top ANC leadership positions for the December 16-20 party conference close on Friday.

Zuma, who ousted former President Thabo Mbeki in a fight to head the party in 2007, has obtained wide endorsement from ANC branches across five provinces, including his home KwaZulu-Natal, which will have the largest number of voting delegates at the conference in the central city of Mangaung.

The expectation that Zuma will carry the ANC leadership race has taken some steam out of the contest and provides an element of political continuity, even though many have been critical of his lacklustre performance in office.

Zuma's reputation as president was tarnished by criticism that his government mishandled a wave of violent mining strikes in recent months that saw at least 50 people killed, 34 of them striking miners shot by police in a single day in August. It was the deadliest labour violence since apartheid ended in 1994.

Critics on the left within his own party accused the 70-year-old president, who is proud of his Zulu origins and likes to present himself as a genial 'man of the people', of abandoning poor and working class South Africans.

Business leaders said Zuma's government did not move quickly enough to halt the labour troubles that led to downgrades from two credit ratings agencies for South Africa, whose deep social and economic inequalities are seen as an Achilles Heel.

DAILY PROTESTS

"His leadership has led to a myriad of conundrums around policies, and investors expect more inaction from him," Peter Attard-Montalto, emerging market economist at Nomura International, told Reuters.

Since Zuma took office in 2009, protests about basic services have become an almost daily occurrence in urban areas across South Africa as the ANC struggles to fix a broken education system and address chronic unemployment and poverty.

This has generated opposition to Zuma from elements within the party who demand radical economic and social reforms to achieve a fairer sharing out of the national wealth.

Two provinces have come out in favour of Motlanthe to be party leader.

But sources in the camp of the bearded and bespectacled deputy president, who is 63, said he was reluctant to challenge his boss in next month's internal ANC election.

Motlanthe's silence on whether he will stand has also forced Zuma's supporters to look elsewhere for a deputy president.

"Zuma's emissaries initially approached Motlanthe to stay on as deputy president on condition that he will get their support for president in the next ANC election (in 2017)," said one Zuma campaigner. "But his silence, and subsequent support from some provinces to go it alone, has made us decide to look elsewhere."

This has opened the door for Ramaphosa, a respected and influential member of the ANC's National Executive Committee, who has been backed as candidate to be Zuma's deputy in the party by at least four of the provinces.

Reuters spoke to official sources and lobbyists in all nine provinces and although Ramaphosa, 60, appeared to have strong grassroots support from local branches, it was not clear if he would in the end accept the nomination.

"Cyril is the best man for the job, he brings integrity but we can only hope that he accepts the nomination. He expects guarantees that this will line him up to become the automatic choice for president next time around," said one ANC official from KwaZulu-Natal.

BUSINESS OR POLITICS

Ramaphosa is hailed along with Mandela as a hero of the anti-apartheid struggle. As a founder leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, he led a three-week strike against South Africa's white mining bosses in 1987 that gained him international renown.

But he left politics for business in 1997 three years after the end of apartheid, and is now South Africa's second richest black entrepreneur.

But his shareholding in Lonmin, the company at the centre of the August 16 Marikana mine killings in which 34 strikers were shot by police, has laid him open to accusations that he has betrayed his original working class allegiances.

An ANC member from the Free State province, who asked not to be named, said: "We really don't know if he will leave his high life in business to come back to a position in the ANC."

Ramaphosa's extensive business empire includes ownership of the MacDonald's South Africa franchise, he is the chairman of telecoms giant MTN, and also sits on the board of Standard Bank, Africa's largest bank by assets, and of brewer SABMiller.

In the ANC's closed political culture, open ambition is frowned upon, so Ramaphosa, Mothlanthe, or any other candidates are unlikely to go public with their intentions before the nomination process closes on Friday.

The contest will be fought behind closed doors in a five-day conference in Mangaung next month with 91 percent of voters being ordinary rank and file members. The balance will come from national and provincial leaders, the women's league, youth league and veterans league.

Although Ramaphosa's nomination may go down well with the business sector, insiders said he would not have carte blanche over economic policy.

"Whatever his success in business was does not matter," said a senior ANC official from Mpumalanga province.

"The ANC discusses policies as a collective, it's not up to individuals," the official added.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/africas-zuma-set-anc-election-ramaphosa-may-come-054803876--sector.html

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Automotive Art Discuss Classic Automobile Dealer Service Signs #2 in the AACA GENERAL DISCUSSION forums; I'm not sure how many signs I can post here for you but I'll keep posting until they tell me to stop. Think I'll try them alphabetically. Fred Melbourne FL...

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SEO (search engine optimization) and social media marketing have become synonymous with one another. Search engine optimization is the act of helping a given company and/or website to achieve a high ranking within the search algorithms. Of all, the most popular search engines available on the web the higher the rank a given company and/or website achieves the easier it is for that website and/or company to be found when any given user performs a search for information, and/or products, the mosque on the type of search performed is an organic search. This is when a user types in a specific set of words or phrases to find either a specific product or information.

Social media marketing is now directly tied into the rank of a given website and/or company is going to achieve within a given search and the more positive feedback. A company receives from the various social media outlets, the higher their rank is going to be, which again will increase the number of visitors to a given website and therefore hopefully increase the revenue that a company receives, because the new visitors will become customers, and hopefully repeat customers, which is the ultimate goal of search engine optimization work other than achieving a number one ranking of course, search engine optimization is designed to ensure that customers have a positive experience when visiting a website and become repeat customers, because they feel as though they have established a connection with the company. Occasionally, however it may be necessary to redesign a website for search engine optimization purposes.

As the search engine optimization technology available on the web is constantly changing and updating so frequent redesigns may be necessary to ensure that a given website is running at its most optimum level and attracting as much of a given market demographic as possible redesigns may be necessary as a product increases in popularity.

The ?captain marketing scam? is a good example of what happens when customers do not fully understand the purpose of search engine optimization and take the negative aspects of a company way out of proportion captain is a reliable company and the vast majority of their customers are completely satisfied with their services. However, there is always a list of customers that for one reason or another are unsatisfied with ?captain marketing,? but does not mean the service or product is completely bad.

This entry was posted on November 29, 2012, 2:00 pm and is filed under Internet Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Source: http://www.a-hum.org/search-engine-optimization-and-web-redesign-vital-components-of-internet-business.html

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Portland poet B.T. Shaw, about to move to Vietnam with her husband, received a surprise parting gift from the National Endowment for the Arts -- a $25,000 creative writing fellowship. Shaw was a leader in the local poetry scene for the last decade and was a longtime contributor to The Oregonian. Her previous book is "This Dirty Little Heart."

Numerous other arts organizations in Portland and around the state received grants from the NEA, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ($100,000 for the world premiere of a play) to the Portland Playhouse ($10,000 for a new adaptation of "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin).

-- Jeff Baker, on Twitter

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/portland_poet_bt_shaw_wins_250.html

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Liverpool scientists decipher genetic code of wheat

Public release date: 28-Nov-2012
[ | E-mail |

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Contact: Samantha Martin
samantha.martin@liv.ac.uk
44-015-179-42248
University of Liverpool

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have deciphered the genetic code of wheat to help crop breeders increase yield and produce varieties that are better suited to a changing environment.

Wheat is one of the world's most important food crops, accounting for 20% of the world's calorific intake. Global wheat production, however, is under threat from climate change and an increase in demand from a growing human population.

The Liverpool team, at the University's Centre for Genomic Research, used new methods of sequencing DNA to decode the large wheat genome, which meant that scientists could achieve in one year what would have taken decades to do with previous methods. With a team of UK and international collaborators, they developed a novel way of analysing wheat's genetic information to provide breeders with the tools they need to apply the research to breeding programmes.

Funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and published in the journal, Nature, the analysis of more than 90,000 genes, will help wheat breeders produce crop that are better able to cope with disease, drought and other stresses that cause crop losses.

Professor Neil Hall, from the University's Institute of Integrative Biology and lead author of the research, said: "Wheat is a large and complex genome; arguably the most complex genome to be sequenced to date. Although the genome has not been fully decoded, we now have instrumentation that can read DNA hundreds of times faster than the systems that were used to sequence the human genome.

"This technology can now be applied to other genomes previously considered to be too difficult for detailed genetic study, such as sugar cane, an important biofuel crop."

In order to understand the variations of wheat genes and their relationship to each other, scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology in Germany, compared the genetic sequence to known grass genes, such as rice and barley. Partners at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the University of California in the US, also compared the sequences to simpler genomes of wheat's ancestors.

This allowed the team to assemble the data in a way that scientists and plant breeders can use effectively to produce new wheat varieties that display specific traits suitable for surviving in different environments. The team worked with the John Innes Centre in identifying genetic differences between varieties, which have now been developed by scientists at the University of Bristol as landmarks in the genome to help crop breeders improve wheat grown in the UK.

Dr Anthony Hall, from the University Institute of Integrative Biology and co-author of the research, said: "Understanding wheat's genetic information and lining up its data into a form that crop breeders can use, will help develop wheat that has particular agricultural traits, such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.

"The identification of genetic markers in the genome will help breeders accelerate the wheat breeding process and integrate multiple traits in a single breeding programme. This research is contributing to ongoing work to tackle the problem of global food shortage."

Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive, said: "In the face of this year's wheat crop losses, and worries over the impact on prices for consumers, this breakthrough in our understanding of the bread wheat genome could not have come at a better time. This modern strategy is a key component to supporting food security and gives breeders the tools to produce more robust varieties with higher yields."

###

Notes to editors:
1. The University is home to the Centre for Genomic Research which is a leading facility for genome sequencing, with client researchers from major companies and research institutions world-wide. The state-of-the-art new generation genome sequencing instruments is available as a service for the scientific user community. The facility is home to two Roche 454 FLX instruments and three SOLiD next generation genome analysers, which can read 10,000 million separate letters of DNA in a single day.
2. The University has established an inter-disciplinary Food Security Network to address concerns over increasing food shortages worldwide. Global food security is now an international concern with the converging impacts on human welfare of increasing population size, shortages of natural resources and climate change. The Food Security Network will investigate many of these challenges, which span all aspects of animal and crop production, disease control, nutrition and food quality, as well as land use and biofuels, and food processing.
3. The University of Liverpool is one of the UK's leading research institutions with an annual turnover of 410 million, including 150 million for research. Liverpool is ranked in the top 1% of higher education institutions worldwide and is a member of the Russell Group. Visit www.liv.ac.uk.

[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.

Liverpool scientists decipher genetic code of wheat Public release date: 28-Nov-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Samantha Martin
samantha.martin@liv.ac.uk
44-015-179-42248
University of Liverpool

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have deciphered the genetic code of wheat to help crop breeders increase yield and produce varieties that are better suited to a changing environment.

Wheat is one of the world's most important food crops, accounting for 20% of the world's calorific intake. Global wheat production, however, is under threat from climate change and an increase in demand from a growing human population.

The Liverpool team, at the University's Centre for Genomic Research, used new methods of sequencing DNA to decode the large wheat genome, which meant that scientists could achieve in one year what would have taken decades to do with previous methods. With a team of UK and international collaborators, they developed a novel way of analysing wheat's genetic information to provide breeders with the tools they need to apply the research to breeding programmes.

Funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and published in the journal, Nature, the analysis of more than 90,000 genes, will help wheat breeders produce crop that are better able to cope with disease, drought and other stresses that cause crop losses.

Professor Neil Hall, from the University's Institute of Integrative Biology and lead author of the research, said: "Wheat is a large and complex genome; arguably the most complex genome to be sequenced to date. Although the genome has not been fully decoded, we now have instrumentation that can read DNA hundreds of times faster than the systems that were used to sequence the human genome.

"This technology can now be applied to other genomes previously considered to be too difficult for detailed genetic study, such as sugar cane, an important biofuel crop."

In order to understand the variations of wheat genes and their relationship to each other, scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology in Germany, compared the genetic sequence to known grass genes, such as rice and barley. Partners at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the University of California in the US, also compared the sequences to simpler genomes of wheat's ancestors.

This allowed the team to assemble the data in a way that scientists and plant breeders can use effectively to produce new wheat varieties that display specific traits suitable for surviving in different environments. The team worked with the John Innes Centre in identifying genetic differences between varieties, which have now been developed by scientists at the University of Bristol as landmarks in the genome to help crop breeders improve wheat grown in the UK.

Dr Anthony Hall, from the University Institute of Integrative Biology and co-author of the research, said: "Understanding wheat's genetic information and lining up its data into a form that crop breeders can use, will help develop wheat that has particular agricultural traits, such as disease resistance and drought tolerance.

"The identification of genetic markers in the genome will help breeders accelerate the wheat breeding process and integrate multiple traits in a single breeding programme. This research is contributing to ongoing work to tackle the problem of global food shortage."

Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive, said: "In the face of this year's wheat crop losses, and worries over the impact on prices for consumers, this breakthrough in our understanding of the bread wheat genome could not have come at a better time. This modern strategy is a key component to supporting food security and gives breeders the tools to produce more robust varieties with higher yields."

###

Notes to editors:
1. The University is home to the Centre for Genomic Research which is a leading facility for genome sequencing, with client researchers from major companies and research institutions world-wide. The state-of-the-art new generation genome sequencing instruments is available as a service for the scientific user community. The facility is home to two Roche 454 FLX instruments and three SOLiD next generation genome analysers, which can read 10,000 million separate letters of DNA in a single day.
2. The University has established an inter-disciplinary Food Security Network to address concerns over increasing food shortages worldwide. Global food security is now an international concern with the converging impacts on human welfare of increasing population size, shortages of natural resources and climate change. The Food Security Network will investigate many of these challenges, which span all aspects of animal and crop production, disease control, nutrition and food quality, as well as land use and biofuels, and food processing.
3. The University of Liverpool is one of the UK's leading research institutions with an annual turnover of 410 million, including 150 million for research. Liverpool is ranked in the top 1% of higher education institutions worldwide and is a member of the Russell Group. Visit www.liv.ac.uk.

[ | 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.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-11/uol-lsd112712.php
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Creativity and Affect

The authors of this volume attempt to cohere the field of creativity and affect in a scholarly fashion by categorizing and characterizing some of its major features, including environmental influences; underlying processes; specific affective states; the role of atypical or pathological personalities; unconscious processes; physiological components; proactive and reactive stimuli; intrinsic motivation; eminence versus everyday creativity; and testing of assessing the affective component of creativity. The authors also examine and discuss the role that emotions, feelings and moods play in the creative process. This volume also provides a vehicle for students and psychotherapists, with which they can fully appreciate the feelings generated by the creative process and the various stages of it. How does a creator feel during its more mundane phases? Can he or she tolerate the frustration of failing and being unsuccessful most of the time? What is the real joy of achievement, success, and ultimate acceptance by ones peers in a given field? Do we have to exhibit major psychopathological features in order to achieve eminence in specific fields? What is the role of mind altering substances, mood disorders, and the like? This volume answers these questions and more. Author: Shaw, Melvin P./ Runco, Mark A./ Shaw, Melvin P. Series Title: Creativity Research Binding Type: Hardcover Number of Pages: 296 Publication Date: 1994/01/01 Language: English Dimensions: 9.21 x 6.14 x 0.69 inches
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Source: http://self-improvement.roxy-publishing.com/blog/news-self-growth/creativity-and-affect

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Source: http://lkathleen87.posterous.com/creativity-and-affect-self-improvement-person

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Source: http://pugh387.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/creativity-and-affect-self-improvement-personal-growth.html

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Source: http://carrenolaurene.typepad.com/blog/2012/11/creativity-and-affect-self-improvement-personal-growth.html

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Republicans are grappling with growing rifts in their ranks over a no-new-tax pledge that has been rock solid for more than 20 years. That quiet debate within the GOP could determine how Congress deals with its looming 'fiscal cliff.'

By Gail Russell Chaddock,?Staff writer / November 24, 2012

President Obama, accompanied by House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio, speaks to reporters in the Roosevelt Room of the White House as he hosted a meeting of the bipartisan, bicameral leadership of Congress to discuss the deficit and economy in Washington at a Nov. 16 meeting.

Carolyn Kaster/AP/File

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The sharpest struggle in the lame-duck session of Congress, which picks up again on Monday, may well be within GOP ranks, as Republicans grapple with whether to relax a no-new-tax pledge that has been fixed party orthodoxy for nearly a generation.

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Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) of Georgia is the latest lawmaker to formally renege on the pledge. In a television interview on Wednesday, he said that he's no longer supporting the pledge because "times have changed significantly, and I care more about my country than I do about a 20-year-old pledge."

Such breaks in GOP ranks could become decisive as GOP leaders negotiate with Democrats and the White House over how to resolve the "fiscal cliff," or some $600 billion in mandatory spending cuts and tax increases set to take effect in 2013.

Breaking a no-new-tax pledge can be toxic at the polls. President George H. W. Bush lost his bid for a second term after bypassing his 1988 "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge in his budget agreement with a Democrat-controlled Congress in 1990. Since then, most GOP members of Congress and even a few Democrats have signed the Taxpayer Protection Pledge by Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax group.

After Senator Chambliss's announcement, ATR President Grover Norquist shot back in a statement on Friday: "Raising taxes on the people of Georgia to pay for Obama's reckless spending is not the right thing to do for America or Georgia."

"We have a problem because Washington spends too much, not because Sen. Chambliss has failed so far to raise taxes on the hard-working men and women of Georgia," he added.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D) of Nebraska broke his no-new-tax pledge and soon after announced his retirement from the Senate in 2012. "[Senator Nelson] withdrew because polling showed he could not win a general election having both lied to his state and raised their taxes," Mr. Norquist said in Friday's statement.

Heading into the 2012 elections, 279 incumbent lawmakers in Congress had signed the pledge, up from 208 in 2010, according to the ATR website.? In addition, 286 challengers had taken the pledge, up from 241 in 2010. (The ATR site does not expunge the names of those who have since repudiated the pledge.)

But critics say that the pledge's influence is waning. Freshman Rep. Scott Rigell (R) of Virginia, who signed the pledge when he first ran for office in 2010, campaigned against the pledge in 2012 in a state with a strong tea party presence, yet won back? his seat with 54 percent of the vote.

Nine-term Rep. Steven LaTourette (R) of Ohio, one of the first House Republicans to publicly repudiate the pledge, notes that when he first signed on in May 1994, the national debt was nearing $4.7 trillion. Now, the nation is on track to owe $20 trillion. "To be beholden to some pledge when the future of the country is at stake is kind of silly," told the Monitor in November 2011. (Mr. LaTourette also declined to run for reelection in 2012, but appeared to be in no danger of losing his seat.)

In addition to Senator Chambliss, Sens. Tom Coburn (R) of Oklahoma, John McCain (R) of Arizona, Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, Mike Crapo (R) of Idaho, and Lamar Alexander (R) of Tennessee have publicly repudiated elements of the pledge, especially its call to oppose eliminating tax breaks, unless offset by tax cuts elsewhere. Those six dissenters may mean that Republicans no longer have the votes to sustain a filibuster of any deal that includes tax hikes.

After a White House meeting on Nov. 16, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky said: "We're prepared to put revenue on the table, provided we fix the real problem," that is: a $16 trillion national debt and unsustainable entitlement spending. House Speaker John Boehner says that he is open to revenue as part of a solution to the fiscal cliff, but not to raising tax rates on "job creators."

President Obama, claiming a mandate on tax hikes for the wealthiest Americans in the 2012 vote, says he won't budge on the need to raise taxes on the richest Americans, that is individuals with incomes over $200,000 or? families with incomes over $250,000.

Norquist says that, in the end, Republicans won't blink either. "No one is caving," he said told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published on Saturday. "For 20 years Democrats have tried over and over to trick Republicans into breaking the pledge," he added. "It hasn't happened."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/jBc2yscYWu4/Saxby-Chambliss-One-more-Republican-breaks-ranks-over-anti-tax-pledge

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Office feng shui has a major aspect of office politics and colleagues back stabbing. Your work life is totally dependent upon how supportive your colleagues are and how the work office environment is. It has been proved that having unsupportive office colleagues and friends and an irritable argumentative boss will drain you energy and affect adversely on your work performance. Feng shui simple cures can help you to diffuse this negative energy and make it useful for your work progress and better office relationships.

The work environment with unsupportive colleagues and arguments will often bring about a loss of energy in you and you will as a result feel loss of confidence and avoid taking any challenging tasks at work. Your ideas will be objected by your boss and often colleagues may be back stabbing by petty office politics and hinder in your work progress and promotion leading to low self esteem and loss of confidence. Such environments are not only harmful for your financial and work professional life but this will also affect your family and home life. It is better to leave such a work place and choose some other job where colleagues are supportive and you share a good rapport with your boss. In case you wish to improve your office relationships and protect your self from office politics and gain confidence then you may use simple feng shui cures to improve confidence. You may hang a mountain painting behind your back of the office chair where you sit in the office, this will provide support to you and improve your confidence. Hanging a Feng shui painting of mountains in shape of turtle is the best cure to improve confidence and create positive energy.? There are many feng shui cures available in form of artefacts that can be placed near your office table for improving confidence at work place. ?You may also hang a painting of Chinese? dragon to improve you personal energy and get strength of the dragon as support from office work load and politics. The feng shui turtle the most humble yet powerful tool used as feng shui cure for wealth, support and good relations with colleagues and boss. By placing a turtle shaped mountain feng shui painting behind your back you will invite luck in form of good mentors and boss who will support you and also help in getting good rise and promotion in work. You will get support from the mountain and this will improve your confidence and morale at your office.

Source: http://fengshui-simplecures.blogspot.com/2012/11/improve-office-confidence-and-office.html

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Since 1999, Carolyn Skibba has served as the technology coordinator at Burley School, a public elementary school in Chicago?s Lakeview community. At Burley, she has taught technology classes for grades K-8, developed technology curricula and integration strategies, led professional development for the school and district, and implemented a 1:1 laptop program. She currently supports the school?s iPad initiative in grades 1-6 and presents frequently on iPad curricular integration and program implementation. Before joining Burley, she was a third grade teacher, an Upward Bound instructor, and received her master?s degree in Technology in Education from Harvard University. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator and a recipient of the 2012 Chicago Public Schools ?Ones to Watch? award. Learn more about Carolyn and Burley?s iPad program at?ipadsatburley.blogspot.com, or by following Carolyn on Twitter, @skibtech.

Educators often describe the iPad as transformative ? a claim I believe to be true. But in order to realize that claim, we need to look for ways to use apps to make new and powerful things possible in the classroom. Now in our third year of an elementary school iPad implementation, my colleagues and I have found that the best apps are those that are versatile, creative, easy to use, and promote sharing. It is those apps that have the capacity to transform instruction and assessment and meaningfully amplify the student voice.

SonicPics is a perfect example of such an app, and it?s one that should be in every elementary iPad classroom. The power of SonicPics is in its simplicity: essentially, it is an app where you can narrate a collection of photos. However, within that simple concept lie multiple transformative strategies for student content creation, assessment of student learning, and differentiation. SonicPics is one of those apps that just works, and once you use it with your students, it will become an app that you turn to again and again.

What it does

SonicPics enables users to generate simple narrated slideshows of photos, screenshots, or other images. In SonicPics, you select photos from your camera roll and then flip through them in sequence while explaining, describing, or otherwise narrating. That?s it. The finished product is a video file. Because the transitions are generated through an intuitive swiping motion, there is no tricky timing to manage for students, and no additional effort is required to synchronize the voice with the images. When a student is ready to talk about the next image, he or she flips to it. This is a process that can be managed independently by students in Kindergarten or even younger. What SonicPics does is beautifully simple and effective, and it unlocks a world of possibilities in the elementary classroom.

Classroom use

SonicPics is one of our go-to apps any time we need to hear from our students about their thinking and learning. This has been especially transformative in three key areas: 1) creating and sharing student work, 2) assessing student skill, knowledge, and understanding, and 3) differentiation.

From the Appolicious Community: Ten Giggly Gorillas from Wasabi Productions offers a complete sensory reading experience and with text highlighting, positive social / moral lessons and 100% family-friendly features, it?s an excellent choice. It?s also on SALE this week for $0.99 (usually $2.99) so why not?download today to enjoy with your 2-6 year old!

1) Creating and sharing student work

SonicPics is one of the simplest multimedia creation tools available, which makes it infinitely usable for content creation by students of all ages and abilities. Students are able to talk and swipe as they move through a set of photographs, drawings, screenshots of text, original artwork, maps, or graphs ? any of the infinite collection of visuals that can appear on the iPad screen or be captured with the camera. The completed video file can easily be exported and shared, giving students a creative and authentic way to publish their thinking for others.

Here are just a small sample of the many ways in which students can use SonicPics to share their knowledge and ideas. As you read these examples, add the words ?to teach others? or ?for a global audience? to each one, and you will begin to sense how this app could make a real difference in the type of work students can create.

Create book reviews or book trailers using a combination of photos of the book itself and student drawings of characters, settings or scenes
Create ?wonder videos? with drawings and verbal questioning about topics of curiosity inspired by non-fiction reading
Publish audiobooks of original student writing with illustrations
Record and share student poetry, with original student artwork and recitation
Create illustrated audio-visual vocabulary guides
Draw and record math challenges for other classmates to solve
Use images and narration to explain and describe mathematical concepts
Create mini-documentaries about science or social studies topics
Create how-to videos or multimedia ?expert books? to share student knowledge
Generate narrated photo-essays about community issues to share as public service announcements
Design narrated virtual tours of locations around the community or the world
Create a classroom news podcast to document and share learning from the day or week

2) Assessing student skill, knowledge, and understanding

Traditional assessments tend to be product-based and can?t fully capture the thinking, wondering, discovery, and analysis that goes on within a student?s mind. When you can hear a student talk about his or her learning, you gain a much richer picture of individual progress, knowledge, and instructional needs. While one on one conversations and conferences are a critical practice, it?s not possible to speak to each student individually about each learning experience. With SonicPics, each student can record his or her thinking process and share it with the teacher, creating an invaluable record of student thinking and reflection over time and documenting student growth in a meaningful way.

Here are some examples of assessment practices with SonicPics:

Capture beginning, middle, and end photos from a picture book and retell the story
Capture fluency snapshots of self-selected text, where students photograph a passage and then record their reading in SonicPics
Flip through images of new vocabulary, explaining and utilizing words correctly
Take photos of other work or projects, explaining and describing choices made during the creation process
Draw and speak about visualizing, connections, or questioning during reading
Draw and speak about new facts and information obtained during a non-fiction read-aloud, independent reading, or research
Select comparable or contrasting images and narrate an explanation
Sequence and narrate photos from a book, an historical time period, a scientific process, etc.
Narrate photos of a science experiment to retell the process and highlight key questions or discoveries
Take photos of a mathematical problem solving process and narrate each step, thereby revealing strategies used and any misconceptions held
Analyze and explain relationships between images connected to themes in science and social studies

3) Differentiation

Not all students express themselves best in writing. While this is most obvious in the early childhood or special education classroom, we know that students of all ages benefit from varied, multimodal opportunities to express their knowledge and ideas. Because of the built-in camera, anything that can be seen, created, or experienced can be saved as images. Once you pull up those images in SonicPics, whatever a student can express, explain, or ask about those images can be saved and shared. This is a transformative opportunity for any teacher who wants their students to have choice and variety in how they express themselves ? or for any teacher who wants peek ?under the hood? and really understand the complexity of student thought.

Tech tips

SonicPics provides you with various options for collecting and sharing finished student videos. There is direct upload to YouTube, which may be an option for some teachers. A more controlled option is Send to Computer, in which SonicPics displays an IP address (a sequence of numbers) that you can type into the address bar of any browser, essentially giving you a direct, temporary wifi link between the iPad and a computer for quick access to SonicPics videos. SonicPics will also allow you to email videos, but that option is best for short projects. Finally, Save to Library will put the finished video into the iPad Photo Library for additional editing or embellishment in iMovie, use in other apps, or upload to other sharing sites.

Download the Appolicious Android app

Source: http://www.appolicious.com/education/articles/12989-appealing-apps-for-educators-how-sonicpics-amplifies-a-students-voice

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This artist's rendering provided by DLANDSTUDIO and Architecture Research Office shows a proposed perimeter wetlands and an archipelago of man-made barrier islets on New York's Manhattan island, designed to absorb the brunt of a huge storm surge. The concept was worked up by DLANDSTUDIO and Architecture Research Office, two city architectural firms, for a museum project. (AP Photo/DLANDSTUDIO and Architecture Research Office)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2012 file photo, Joseph Leader, Metropolitan Transportation Authority vice president and chief maintenance officer, shines a flashlight on standing water inside the South Ferry 1 train station in New York in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. A map of the original topography of Manhattan is seen on the wall behind Leader. By century's end, researchers forecast up to four feet higher seas, producing storm flooding akin to Sandy's as often as several times each decade. Even at current sea levels, Sandy's floodwaters filled subways, other tunnels and streets in parts of Manhattan. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle, File)

This 1939 photo made available by the Library of Congress shows New York City Park Commissioner Robert Moses with a model of the proposed, but never built Brooklyn Battery Bridge in New York. Retired geologist Jim Mellet of New Fairfield, Conn., recalls hearing a story told to him by the late Bill A. O'Leary, a retired city engineer at the time: He and other engineers, concerned about battering floods, had approached Moses more than 70 years ago to ask him to consider constructing a gigantic barrier to hold back storm tides at the entrance to the city's Upper Bay. Moses supposedly squashed the idea like an annoying bug. "According to Bill, he stood there uninterested, with his arms folded on his chest, and when they finished the presentation, he just said, 'No, it will destroy the view.'" Or perhaps he was already mulling other plans for the same site, where he would build the Verrazano Narrows Bridge years later. (AP Photo/Library of Congress, C.M. Spieglitz)

FILE - This February 1953 file photo shows an aerial view of a windmill pump elevated above the floodwaters in the coastal village of Oude Tonge in The Netherlands. It took the collapse of dikes, drowning deaths of more than 1,800 people, and evacuation of another 100,000 in 1953 for the Dutch to say "Never again!" They have since constructed the world's sturdiest battery of dikes, dams and barriers. No disaster on that scale has happened since. (AP Photo/File)

FILE - This Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005 file photo shows apartment buildings built just behind a small dike which separates them from the Maas River in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It took the collapse of dikes, drowning deaths of more than 1,800 people, and evacuation of another 100,000 in 1953 for the Dutch to say "Never again!" They have since constructed the world's sturdiest battery of dikes, dams and barriers. No disaster on that scale has happened since. (AP Photo/Fred Ernst, File)

Think Sandy was just a 100-year storm that devastated New York City? Imagine one just as bad, or worse, every three years.

Prominent planners and builders say now is the time to think big to shield the city's core: a 5-mile barrier blocking the entryway to New York Harbor, an archipelago of man-made islets guarding the tip of Manhattan, or something like CDM Smith engineer Larry Murphy's 1,700-foot barrier ? complete with locks for passing boats and a walkway for pedestrians ? at the mouth of the Arthur Kill waterway between the borough of Staten Island and New Jersey.

Act now, before the next deluge, and they say it could even save money in the long run.

These strategies aren't just pipe dreams. Not only do these technologies already exist, some of the concepts have been around for decades and have been deployed successfully in other countries and U.S. cities.

So if the science and engineering are sound, the long-term cost would actually be a savings, and the frequency and severity of more killer floods is inevitable, what's the holdup?

Political will.

Like the argument in towns across America when citizens want a traffic signal installed at a dangerous intersection, Sandy's 43 deaths and estimated $26 billion in damages citywide might not be enough to galvanize the public and the politicians into action.

"Unfortunately, they probably won't do anything until something bad happens," said CDM Smith's Murphy. "And I don't know if this will be considered bad enough."

Sandy and her 14-foot surge not bad enough? By century's end, researchers forecast up to four feet higher seas, producing storm flooding akin to Sandy's as often as several times each decade. Even at current sea levels, Sandy's floodwaters filled subways, other tunnels and streets in parts of Manhattan.

Without other measures, rebuilding will simply augment the future destruction. Yet that's what political leaders are emphasizing. President Barack Obama himself has promised to stand with the city "until the rebuilding is complete."

So it might take a worse superstorm or two to really get the problem fixed.

The focus on rebuilding irks people like Robert Trentlyon, a retired weekly newspaper publisher in lower Manhattan who is campaigning for sea barriers to protect the city: "The public is at the woe-is-me stage, rather than how-do-we-prevent-this-in-the-future stage."

He belongs to a coterie of professionals and ordinary New Yorkers who want to take stronger action. Though pushing for a regional plan, they are especially intent on keeping Manhattan dry.

The 13-mile-long island serves as the country's financial and entertainment nerve center. Within a 3-mile-long horseshoe-shaped flood zone around its southernmost quadrant are almost 500,000 residents and 300,000 jobs. Major storms swamp places like Wall Street and the site of the World Trade Center.

Proven technology already exists to blunt or virtually block wind-whipped seas from overtaking lower Manhattan and much of the rest of New York City, according to a series of Associated Press interviews with engineers, architects and scientists and a review of research on flooding issues in the New York metropolitan area and around the globe.

These strategies range from hard structures like mammoth barriers equipped with ship gates and embedded at entrances to the harbor, to softer and greener shoreline restraints like man-made marshes and barrier islands.

Additional landfill, the old standby once used to extend Manhattan into the harbor, could further lift vulnerable highways and other sites beyond the reach of the seas.

Even more simply, the rock and concrete seawalls and bulkheads that already ring lower Manhattan could be built up, but now perhaps with high-tech wave-absorbing or wave-reflecting materials.

Seizing the initiative from government, business and academic circles have fleshed out several dramatic concepts to hold back water before it tops the shoreline. Two of the most elaborate proposals are:

? A rock causeway, with 80-foot-high swinging ship gates, would sweep five miles across the entryway to inner New York Harbor from Sandy Hook, N.J., to Breezy Point, N.Y. To protect Manhattan, another shorter barrier is needed to the north, where the East River meets Long Island Sound, and another small blockage would go up near Sandy Hook. This New Jersey-side barrier and a network of levees on both ends of the causeway could help protect picturesque beach communities like Atlantic Highlands, in New Jersey to the west, and the Rockaways, in New York City to the east. This so-called outer barrier option was conceived for a professional symposium by the engineering firm CH2M HILL, which last year finished building a supersized 15-mile barrier guarding St. Petersburg, Russia, from Baltic Sea storms.

? An extensive green makeover of lower Manhattan would install an elaborate drainage system beneath the streets, build up the very tip by 6 feet, pile 30-foot earthen mounds along the eastern edge, and create perimeter wetlands and a phalanx of artificial barrier islets ? all to absorb the brunt of a huge storm surge. Plantings along the streets would help soak up runoff that floods the city sewers during heavy rains. This concept was worked up by DLANDSTUDIO and Architecture Research Office, two city architectural firms, for a museum project.

What's missing is not viable ideas or proposals, but determination. Massive projects protecting other cities from the periodic ravages of stormy seas usually happened after catastrophes on a scale eclipsing even Sandy.

It took the collapse of dikes, drowning deaths of more than 1,800 people, and evacuation of another 100,000 in 1953 for the Dutch to say "Never again!" They have since constructed the world's sturdiest battery of dikes, dams and barriers. No disaster on that scale has happened since.

It took the breach of levees, a similar death toll, and flooding of 80 percent of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to marshal the momentum finally to build a two-mile barricade against the Gulf of Mexico.

A handful of seaside New England cities ? Stamford, Conn.; Providence, R.I.; and New Bedford, Mass. ? have built smaller barriers after their own disasters.

However, New York City, which mostly lies just several feet above sea level, has so far escaped the horrors visited elsewhere. Its leaders have been brushing off warnings of disaster for years.

Retired geologist Jim Mellet of New Fairfield, Conn., recalls hearing a story told to him by the late Bill A. O'Leary, a retired city engineer at the time: He and other engineers, concerned about battering floods, had approached power broker Robert Moses more than 80 years ago to ask him to consider constructing a gigantic barrier to hold back storm tides at the entrance to the city's Upper Bay.

Moses supposedly squashed the idea like an annoying bug. "According to Bill, he stood there uninterested, with his arms folded on his chest, and when they finished the presentation, he just said, 'No, it will destroy the view.'" Or perhaps he was already mulling other plans for the same site, where he would build the Verrazano Narrows Bridge years later.

Many city projects, like the Westway highway plan of the 1970s and 1980s, died partly because of the impact they would have on the cherished view of water from the congested cityscape. Imagine, then, the political viability of a project that might further block access to the harbor or the view of the Statue of Liberty from the tip of Manhattan.

"I can assure that many New Yorkers would have strong opinions about high seawalls," said an email from a retired New York commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Bud Griffis, who was involved in the permitting process for the failed Westway.

However, global warming and its rising sea levels now make it harder simply to shrug off measures to shield the city from storms. Sandy drove 14-foot higher-than-normal seas ? breaking a nearly 200-year-old record ? into car and subway tunnels, streets of trendy neighborhoods, commuter highways and an electrical substation that shorted out nearly all of lower Manhattan.

The late October storm left 43 dead in the city, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn estimated at least $26 billion in damages and economic losses. The regional cost has been estimated at $50 billion, making Sandy the second most destructive storm in U.S. history after Katrina.

Yet heavier storms are forecast. A 1995 study involving the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers envisioned a worst-case storm scenario for New York: High winds rip windows and masonry from skyscrapers, forcing pedestrians to flee to subway tunnels to avoid the falling debris. The tunnels soon flood.

With its dense population and distinctive coastline, New York is especially vulnerable, with Manhattan at the center.

The famous island can be pounded by storm surges from three sides: from the west via the Arthur Kill, from the south through the Upper Bay, and from the Long Island Sound through the East River. Relatively shallow depth offshore allows storm waters to pile up; the north-south shoreline of New Jersey and the east-west orientation of Long Island further channel gushing seas right at Manhattan.

Some believe that Sandy was bad enough at least to advance more serious study of stronger protections. "I think the superstorm we had really put the fear of God into people, because no one really believed it would happen," said urban planner Juliana Maantay at Lehman College-City University of New York.

But nearly all flood researchers interviewed by the AP voiced considerable skepticism about action in the foreseeable future. "In a half year's time, there will be other problems again, I can tell you," said Dutch urban planner Jeroen Aerts, who has studied storm protections around the world.

William Solecki, a Manhattan-based Hunter College planner who has been at the center of city and state task forces on climate change, guessed that little more will be done to prevent future flooding beyond "nibbling at the edges" of the threat.

In recent years, the city has been enforcing codes that require flood-zone builders to keep electrical and other critical systems above predicted high water from what was until recently thought to be a once-in-a-century storm. Sealing other key equipment against water has been encouraged. The city has tried to keep storm grates free of debris and has elevated subway entrances. The buzz word has been making things more "resilient."

But this approach does little to stop swollen waters of a gigantic storm from pouring over lower Manhattan. "Resiliency means if you get knocked down, this is how you get back up again," huffs activist Trentlyon. "They just were talking about what you do afterward." He said Sandy's flood water rose to 5 feet at street level in Chelsea, where he lives on the western side of lower Manhattan.

The city has at least toyed with the idea of barriers and even considered various locations in a 2008 study. "I have always considered that flood gates are something we should consider, but are not necessarily the immediate answer to rush toward," said Rohit Aggarwala, a Stanford University teacher who is former director of the New York mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability.

Unswayed by Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his assistants have been blunter. Bloomberg said barriers might not be worthwhile "even if you spent a fortune."

Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said no specific measures ? whether more wetlands, higher seawalls or harbor barriers ? have been ruled out because "there's no one-size-fits-all solution." But he compared sea barriers to the Maginot Line, the fortified line of defenses that Germany quickly sidestepped to conquer France at the beginning of World War II.

"The city is not going to be totally stormproof, but I think it can be very adaptable," he added. He said that new flood maps informed by Sandy are being drawn up, and he suspects they will extend the zones where new developments must install critical equipment above flood level.

Computer simulations indicate that hard barriers, which have worked elsewhere around the world, would do a good job of shielding New York neighborhoods behind them. But they'd actually make flooding worse just outside the barriers, where surging waters would pile up with nowhere to go.

The patriarch of this research is Malcolm Bowman, a native New Zealander who leads a passionate cadre of barrier researchers at Stony Brook University on the northern shore of Long Island. His warnings have mostly gone unheeded. "I feel like a biblical prophet crying in the wilderness: 'The end is near!'" Bowman said.

Unbowed, he continues to preach against incremental measures. "If you get a storm and a big oak tree falls on your house, then whether you fix your gutter doesn't matter," he said.

In recent years, his logic has finally begun to resonate a bit more. Nicholas Kim, an oceanographer with engineering firm HDR HydroQual who studied with Bowman in the 1980s, said his mentor has been thinking about barriers since then: "Everybody said, 'You're crazy!' But now it's becoming clear that we need protection."

Even massive structures don't shield everyone, though. A 2009 four-barrier study co-authored by Kim found that in a simulated storm, barriers still failed to protect large swaths of Queens and sections of other outlying boroughs with a total of more than 100,000 people.

Researchers also have predicted at least a modest additional one-foot rise of stormy seas as water piles up outside the barriers. "If you're the guy just outside the barrier, and you're paying taxes and you're not included, you're not going to be very happy," said oceanographer Larry Swanson at Stony Brook University.

How such barriers would affect water movement, silt and marine life also remains an open question requiring further study for each case.

The scale and costs of hard barrier schemes have further put off many critics. After flooding from Hurricane Irene last year, city representatives asked Aerts, the Dutch planner, to compare the cost and benefits of barriers to existing approaches. His initial analysis will not be finished until February, but his early cost estimate for barriers and associated dikes for New York City is $15 billion to $27 billion ? comparable to that of the record-setting $24 billion Big Dig that reshaped Boston's waterfront ? not to block storms, but to unblock traffic and views of the waterfront.

Barrier defenders counter by pointing to the cost of storm damages. Stony Brook meteorologist Brian Colle said: "When you think of the cost of a Sandy, which is running in the billions, these barriers are basically going to pay for themselves in one or two storms." Advocates say tolls on trains or cars riding atop a barrier could help finance the project.

While appealing for rebuilding, Council Speaker Quinn also has said that "the time for casual debate is over" and called for a bold mix of resiliency with grander protective structures. She has estimated the cost of her plan at $20 billion.

Other massive protection schemes, like the green makeover of lower Manhattan, also would probably run into the billions. And soft protections are meant only to defuse, not stop, rising waters. Sandy battered parts of Long Island behind barrier islands and wetlands.

Nor is it clear that Manhattan has enough space to fashion more extensive wetlands of the sort that help protect the Gulf Coast, however imperfectly. "New York is too far gone for wetlands," said Griffis, the retired Army Corps commander for New York.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has announced he will spearhead efforts to request a corps study of whether barriers or other options would work better. However, it remains unclear if Congress would be willing to fund such a study, which would undoubtedly take several years and cost millions of dollars.

And even before a dime has been appropriated, the corps is lowering expectations. Says spokesman Chris Gardner: "You can't protect everywhere completely at all times."

___

Associated Press National Writer Adam Geller and AP researcher Julie Reed contributed to this report.

___

The AP National Investigative Team can be reached at investigate(at)ap.org

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-11-25-Superstorm-Blocking%20the%20Sea/id-7673cc1940be446892755e614988accc

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