Treasury Secretary Timothy Geither told CNBC Wednesday that Republicans are "making a little bit of progress" in?"fiscal cliff"?talks but said the Obama administration was "absolutely" ready to go over the cliff if the GOP doesn't agree to raise tax rates on the wealthy.
"I think they're making a little bit of progress," Geithner said of the Republican proposal released on Monday calling for $800 billion in new tax revenue. "They're clearly moving and figuring out how to try to move further."
But Geithner said the White House would "absolutely" go over the fiscal cliff ? triggering over $600 billion in automatic spending cuts and tax increases ? unless tax rates increase on the top 2 percent of wage earners.
"What we're trying to do is put in place a comprehensive, balanced set of fiscal reforms that put us back on the path of living within our means," Geithner told "Closing Bell."
Geithner, who is the Obama administration's lead negotiator in the cliff talks, added that if Republicans are willing to accept higher rates, "we think we can do something really good for the economy. We can make the government use the taxpayers money much more efficiently, lock in some spending savings and do some long-term reforms to entitlements."
President Barack Obama told business leaders earlier in the day that a deal could be reached in a week if Republicans would accept higher tax rates on the wealthiest Americans.
"We're not insisting on rates out of spite, but rather we need to raise a certain amount of revenue," Obama told the Business Roundtable, an association representing chief executives of large U.S. firms.
The Republicans have proposed $800 billion in additional tax revenues over 10 years as part any solution to the country's fiscal problems. Geithner said that Republicans haven't told us how they would raise the $800 billion dollars and what the mix of rates and limitations on deductions they would support, he said.
The President has proposed raising taxes by $1.6 trillion over the coming decade, cuts to Medicare and another $50 billion in stimulus spending, but has largely exempted Social Security from budget cuts.?
ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2012) ? Astronomers at the University of Utah and elsewhere are seeking volunteers to explore the galaxy next door, Andromeda. The newly launched Andromeda Project will use people power to examine thousands of Hubble Space Telescope images of the galaxy to identify star clusters that hold clues to the evolution of galaxies.
Anyone can take part by going to www.andromedaproject.org.
"We want to get people excited about participating. We're hoping for thousands of volunteers," says Anil Seth, an organizer of the Andromeda Project and an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah.
"I love looking through these amazing Hubble Space Telescope images of Andromeda, the closest big spiral galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy," he adds. "The Andromeda Project will give lots of people the opportunity to share in that amazement."
"Star clusters are groups of hundreds to millions of stars that formed from gas at the same time so all the stars have the same age," Seth says. A goal of the Andromeda Project "is to study the history of the galaxy, and these clusters play an important role."
Finding star clusters is difficult work. Eight scientists spent more than a month each searching through 20 percent of the available Hubble images just to find 600 star clusters. This is less than a quarter of the 2,500 star clusters they believe exist in the full set of Hubble images of Andromeda, also known as galaxy M31.
It would take too long for the astronomers to continue looking for star clusters on their own, and pattern-recognition software isn't good at picking out star clusters.
To obtain faster results, Seth and colleagues want to "crowdsource" the problem and enlist volunteers from all walks of life to identify the star clusters. Registration isn't required and a simple online tutorial helps volunteers quickly learn how to recognize and mark star clusters on www.andromedaproject.org.
"You don't need to know anything about astronomy to participate, and it's actually pretty fun, like playing an online game," says Cliff Johnson, a University of Washington graduate student working on the project.
The Andromeda Project is a collaboration that includes scientists and website developers at the University of Utah, University of Washington, Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Oxford University, University of Minnesota, University of Alabama and the European Space Agency.
About 400 volunteers participated in a recent test of the new website.
All about Andromeda
Pioneer astronomer Edwin Hubble observed Andromeda in the 1920s, confirming galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way and contain billions of stars.
"Everyone wants to know where they came from, and part of that question involves understanding how galaxies like our own Milky Way form," says Seth. "Andromeda is actually the best place to study that process. In the Milky Way, our position within the galaxy makes it hard to study our history."
"We have a good sense of how stars, once born, evolve," he adds. "But we don't really know the details of how galaxies form and how stars form within those galaxies. This project will help address both of those questions."
Star clusters are important for understanding Andromeda's history because their ages are easy to measure. Astronomers determine a star cluster's age by the mass of its brightest, most massive stars. Massive stars mean a cluster is young, because "massive stars are like rock stars: they live fast and die young," says Seth.
Andromeda is about 2.4 million lights years away from Earth, or 14 billion billion miles (billion billion twice is correct). "There are other, closer galaxies, but Andromeda is the closest big spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way," Seth says. "It's almost a million times more distant than the nearest star to our sun, Alpha Centauri."
Andromeda contains hundreds of billions of stars, and has a diameter of about 160,000 light years, or about 940 million billion miles. The star clusters in Andromeda are typically about 20 light years across, which equals 118 trillion miles, tiny compared with the diameter of the galaxy.
The Hubble images used in the Andromeda Project are part of a larger effort involving about 20 institutions and known as PHAT, the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury survey.
The Hubble Space Telescope began collecting the PHAT images in 2010. Since then, it has spent nearly two months of time making hundreds of orbits of Earth while taking pictures of the least dusty third of Andromeda. If all goes well, the Hubble will send the last batch of images back to Earth next summer.
By then, the survey will have imaged one-third of Andromeda's spiral disk at six wavelengths of light: two ultraviolet, two visible and two infrared. The complete PHAT survey is expected to reveal 100 million individual stars.
"We're already starting to discover some amazing things about Andromeda from the PHAT data, but we expect people to be combing through this data for decades," says University of Washington Professor Julianne Dalcanton, principal investigator of PHAT.
Citizen Scientists: Eyes on Andromeda
Seth expects children, retirees, and workers on their lunch breaks to volunteer for the Andromeda Project.
"We'll definitely have some astronomy buffs, but hopefully there are a lot of people who, rather than looking at Facebook, will do this in their down time," he says, adding that the Andromeda project wants "people who are interested in looking at a lot of pretty pictures and wondering about what's out there."
"There are lots of images, so we're going to need a lot of volunteers," says Seth. Some high school and college students will participate for class assignments. Among them: students in Seth's observational astronomy class.
"We have about 10,000 images we are feeding to the users through the site," he says. "We want them each to be viewed as many as 20 times."
Each image is 725 pixels by 500 pixels. Images are both in color and black-and-white. Young star clusters have bright blue stars. Older clusters have more red stars.
"A lot of images won't have any clusters on them, or will have one," Seth says. "You might think it's really difficult to pick out clusters, but after looking at a few images, you really learn to see the patterns the clusters make."
A trained volunteer will take about 20 seconds per image, he adds.
What if some of the volunteers are bad at identifying star clusters?
"We have our original sample of 600 star clusters as a test case, and we'll use that to see how well they do," ranking individuals, Seth says.
As another double-check, some images will contain completely fabricated images of "synthetic" star clusters with a wide range of sizes and masses. That will help the astronomers determine how small a cluster can be detected.
Once the clusters all are identified, "it will be the largest sample of clusters known in any spiral galaxy, including our own Milky Way galaxy," Seth says.
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Utah.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
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.
FILE - In this April 26, 2010 file photo, Hugh Hefner, left, and Crystal Harris arrive at the premiere of "Iron Man 2" at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. Hefner and Harris obtained a marriage license in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Tuesday Dec. 4, 2012, roughly a year-and-a-half after the centerfold called off the couple's previous engagement. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)
FILE - In this April 26, 2010 file photo, Hugh Hefner, left, and Crystal Harris arrive at the premiere of "Iron Man 2" at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles. Hefner and Harris obtained a marriage license in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Tuesday Dec. 4, 2012, roughly a year-and-a-half after the centerfold called off the couple's previous engagement. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles, File)
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris are again taking steps toward the altar, more than a year after the centerfold canceled their previous engagement and was branded a "runaway bride" in Playboy.
The couple obtained a marriage license Tuesday at a courthouse in Beverly Hills.
Harris called off the couple's previous engagement in June 2011, prompting Playboy to affix "runaway bride" stickers to an issue introducing her as Mrs. Hefner.
Celebrity website TMZ first reported the couple's license. It says they reunited earlier this year and plan to wed on New Year's Eve.
LA County Recorder Public Information Officer Elizabeth Knox says the license is valid for 90 days.
The Playboy founder has been married twice before. His spokeswoman Teri Thomerson didn't immediately return a message Tuesday.
Working towards happinessPublic release date: 4-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Joan Robinson joan.robinson@springer.com 49-622-148-78130 Springer
Retiring later is unlikely to affect men's quality of life
Raising the retirement age to increase financial stability does not make men worse off psychologically in the long-run, according to a new study by Dr. Elizabeth Mokyr Horner, from the University of California, Berkeley in the US. Her work shows that individuals go through the same psychological stages as they adjust to retirement, with life satisfaction stabilizing after 70, irrespective of how old they are when they retire. The study is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.
As we live longer, the size of the retired population relative to that of tax payers is growing, creating mounting costs with dwindling resources. Despite country variation in public pension programs and retirement age regimes, the vast majority of current social security programs are financially unstable. As a result, several countries have been steadily raising their retirement age.
Dr. Mokyr Horner's work investigates the relationship between retirement and happiness in individuals near retirement and afterwards. She analyzed international data from the 2006 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for 14 EU countries, the 2006 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing in the UK and the 2004 Health and Retirement Study for the US. The data covered a total of 18,345 fully retired men aged between 50-70 years. The researcher was particularly interested in how satisfied they were with their lives at different time points after retirement.
In the time surrounding retirement, the men experienced a large improvement in well-being and life satisfaction. A few years after retirement, however, levels of happiness fell rapidly. This happened irrespective of how old men were when they retired. In the long-run i.e. post 70 years, happiness levels stabilized for all.
Dr. Mokyr Horner concludes: "A later formal retirement simply delays the well-being benefits of retirement in men, and age of formal retirement is relatively neutral with regard to overall happiness. Given the growing fiscal pressures to adjust the age of retirement upwards, it can be inferred from my studies that well-being may be, on balance, affected only marginally - if at all - by such changes."
###
Reference
Horner EM (2012). Subjective well-being and retirement: analysis and policy recommendations. Journal of Happiness Studies; DOI 10.1007/s10902-012-9399-2
The full-text article is available to journalists on request.
[ | 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.
Working towards happinessPublic release date: 4-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Joan Robinson joan.robinson@springer.com 49-622-148-78130 Springer
Retiring later is unlikely to affect men's quality of life
Raising the retirement age to increase financial stability does not make men worse off psychologically in the long-run, according to a new study by Dr. Elizabeth Mokyr Horner, from the University of California, Berkeley in the US. Her work shows that individuals go through the same psychological stages as they adjust to retirement, with life satisfaction stabilizing after 70, irrespective of how old they are when they retire. The study is published online in Springer's Journal of Happiness Studies.
As we live longer, the size of the retired population relative to that of tax payers is growing, creating mounting costs with dwindling resources. Despite country variation in public pension programs and retirement age regimes, the vast majority of current social security programs are financially unstable. As a result, several countries have been steadily raising their retirement age.
Dr. Mokyr Horner's work investigates the relationship between retirement and happiness in individuals near retirement and afterwards. She analyzed international data from the 2006 Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe for 14 EU countries, the 2006 English Longitudinal Study of Ageing in the UK and the 2004 Health and Retirement Study for the US. The data covered a total of 18,345 fully retired men aged between 50-70 years. The researcher was particularly interested in how satisfied they were with their lives at different time points after retirement.
In the time surrounding retirement, the men experienced a large improvement in well-being and life satisfaction. A few years after retirement, however, levels of happiness fell rapidly. This happened irrespective of how old men were when they retired. In the long-run i.e. post 70 years, happiness levels stabilized for all.
Dr. Mokyr Horner concludes: "A later formal retirement simply delays the well-being benefits of retirement in men, and age of formal retirement is relatively neutral with regard to overall happiness. Given the growing fiscal pressures to adjust the age of retirement upwards, it can be inferred from my studies that well-being may be, on balance, affected only marginally - if at all - by such changes."
###
Reference
Horner EM (2012). Subjective well-being and retirement: analysis and policy recommendations. Journal of Happiness Studies; DOI 10.1007/s10902-012-9399-2
The full-text article is available to journalists on request.
[ | 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.
Hogging the spotlight: South Farms pig gets international attentionPublic release date: 4-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Jongeneel sjongene@illinois.edu 217-333-3291 University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
URBANA A detailed annotation of the genome of T.J. Tabasco, a pig from the University of Illinois South Farms, is the outcome of over 10 years of work by an international consortium. It is expected to speed progress in both biomedical and agricultural research. U of I Vice President for Research Lawrence Schook said that the College of ACES played a crucial role in getting the work started.
Funding that came through ACES allowed Schook and others to put together the Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium, an alliance of university, industry, and government laboratories in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The USDA committed 10 million dollars to the project. Today the project includes scientists from more than 50 research groups.
Schook said that the project has three main objectives: (1) to serve as a blueprint for understanding evolution and domestication, (2) to advance research on animal production and health, and (3) to explore ways to use the pig in biomedical applications.
The first publication, which just appeared in Nature, focuses on the pig's evolution. Researchers compared the reference genome from T.J. Tabasco with genomes of wild and domestic pigs from Europe and Asia (including archaeological and museum samples), and to human, mouse, dog, horse, and cow genomes.
"The pig is interesting because the wild boar still exists," Schook explained. "We could look at domestication, and we also looked at speciation. From an evolutionary perspective, these Sus species diverge in a very short time."
The researchers traced the domestic pig back to Southeast Asia. From there, it spread across Eurasia. The glaciation period separated the pigs into two groups about one million years ago. Today they are almost sub-species. "However, their chromosome structures have stayed very similar," Schook noted.
Pigs were independently domesticated in western Eurasia and East Asia 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is evidence that as the early European settlers moved around, they bred the domesticated females with wild boars.
Pigs in Central and South America are thought to have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. In a paper soon to be published in Heredity, the researchers tracked how these pigs adapted to different climates, altitudes, and diets.
As well as providing insights into how the pig evolved, the genome sequencing provides valuable new tools for animal breeding. One is a DNA test that can identify individual pigs that are less susceptible to certain diseases or have a genetic predisposition to fattening rapidly, eating less, and bearing many offspring.
On the biomedical side, researchers will build on ongoing efforts to use the pig to model human diseases, including lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The sequencing identified 112 genes in pigs that are also responsible for diseases in people, suggesting that pigs could be used for drug testing.
Another direction is to use pigs as a source of organs for humans. Schook mentioned islet cells for diabetics as an example.
"Human transplant of eyelets doesn't work because there's not enough cells in a single pancreas," he explained. "If you could have an animal source, even if they get rejected, they're plentiful."
Clearly, there are a plenitude of exciting possibilities for future research. "For me, the next phase is looking at this concept of epigenomicsof how the environment affects gene expression," Schook said.
###
Other U of I researchers involved in the project are: Jon Beever, Laurie Rund, Sandra Rodriguez-Zas, Bruce Southy, and Jonathan Sweedler. Harris Lewin and Denis Larkin, who have left the U of I, are also part of the project.
The research was recently published in Nature and is available at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11622.html.
[ | 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.
Hogging the spotlight: South Farms pig gets international attentionPublic release date: 4-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Susan Jongeneel sjongene@illinois.edu 217-333-3291 University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
URBANA A detailed annotation of the genome of T.J. Tabasco, a pig from the University of Illinois South Farms, is the outcome of over 10 years of work by an international consortium. It is expected to speed progress in both biomedical and agricultural research. U of I Vice President for Research Lawrence Schook said that the College of ACES played a crucial role in getting the work started.
Funding that came through ACES allowed Schook and others to put together the Swine Genome Sequencing Consortium, an alliance of university, industry, and government laboratories in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. The USDA committed 10 million dollars to the project. Today the project includes scientists from more than 50 research groups.
Schook said that the project has three main objectives: (1) to serve as a blueprint for understanding evolution and domestication, (2) to advance research on animal production and health, and (3) to explore ways to use the pig in biomedical applications.
The first publication, which just appeared in Nature, focuses on the pig's evolution. Researchers compared the reference genome from T.J. Tabasco with genomes of wild and domestic pigs from Europe and Asia (including archaeological and museum samples), and to human, mouse, dog, horse, and cow genomes.
"The pig is interesting because the wild boar still exists," Schook explained. "We could look at domestication, and we also looked at speciation. From an evolutionary perspective, these Sus species diverge in a very short time."
The researchers traced the domestic pig back to Southeast Asia. From there, it spread across Eurasia. The glaciation period separated the pigs into two groups about one million years ago. Today they are almost sub-species. "However, their chromosome structures have stayed very similar," Schook noted.
Pigs were independently domesticated in western Eurasia and East Asia 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. There is evidence that as the early European settlers moved around, they bred the domesticated females with wild boars.
Pigs in Central and South America are thought to have originated on the Iberian Peninsula. In a paper soon to be published in Heredity, the researchers tracked how these pigs adapted to different climates, altitudes, and diets.
As well as providing insights into how the pig evolved, the genome sequencing provides valuable new tools for animal breeding. One is a DNA test that can identify individual pigs that are less susceptible to certain diseases or have a genetic predisposition to fattening rapidly, eating less, and bearing many offspring.
On the biomedical side, researchers will build on ongoing efforts to use the pig to model human diseases, including lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The sequencing identified 112 genes in pigs that are also responsible for diseases in people, suggesting that pigs could be used for drug testing.
Another direction is to use pigs as a source of organs for humans. Schook mentioned islet cells for diabetics as an example.
"Human transplant of eyelets doesn't work because there's not enough cells in a single pancreas," he explained. "If you could have an animal source, even if they get rejected, they're plentiful."
Clearly, there are a plenitude of exciting possibilities for future research. "For me, the next phase is looking at this concept of epigenomicsof how the environment affects gene expression," Schook said.
###
Other U of I researchers involved in the project are: Jon Beever, Laurie Rund, Sandra Rodriguez-Zas, Bruce Southy, and Jonathan Sweedler. Harris Lewin and Denis Larkin, who have left the U of I, are also part of the project.
The research was recently published in Nature and is available at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7424/full/nature11622.html.
[ | 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.
Drawing, painting, playing, and writing! All your creative instincts can be satiated here - feedback, commissions, contests, and even requests!
Moderators: Scholars, Designers
Post a reply
RolePlayGateway is a site built by a couple roleplayers who wanted to give a little something back to the roleplay community. The site has no intention of earning any profit, and is paid for out of their own pockets.
If you appreciate what they do, feel free to donate your spare change to help feed them on the weekends. After selecting the amount you want to donate from the menu, you can continue by clicking on PayPal logo.
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
Rockstar Games has released a short teaser trailer for its soon to be released remake of the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto: Vice City game which will be available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The game will be released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the games original release on the Sony Playstation 2 back in 2002. It will feature native high resolution graphics including Retina enhancements, lighting effects, new firing and targeting options and much more.
To commemorate the anniversary of Vice City and its mobile release on December 6th for select iOS and Android devices, please enjoy this new nostalgia-filled Anniversary Video celebrating a decade since the original game's launch.
The trailer should whet your appetite, if it actually needs whetting for a big release like this one. Personally I can't wait to get my hands on this and if it is done as well as the previous version of GTA on iPad it will be another special game. Thankfully we won't have to wait much longer for its release. The magic date is December 6th, that's right, just four more days to go. The pricing has already been set at $4.99; so it's going to be well worth that price. Who else is excited about this one?
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uyzUsesbzQG6B1A7xQNdSDTJ6S-CA5cOwF8D0BrQWpSy2ZKiaD6B3YKXu90o0_eO0_5Wndl-2kabm01pI3ujDjkA0D-DXWX2Ok0B7SUk8=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 4-Dec-2012
Share ] 
