May 20, 2013 ? A new report suggests that improved health care and significant reductions in drug costs might be attained by breaking up the age-old relationship between physicians and drug company representatives who promote the newest, more costly and often unnecessary prescription drugs.
This system, which has been in place for decades, at one time benefited doctors by keeping them up to date on new medications, and always provided generous amounts of "free" samples to get patients started on the newest drugs, as well as other supplies and gifts.
But it's actually a powerful marketing process into which the pharmaceutical industry pours tens of billions of dollars a year, with more than 90,000 drug representatives providing gifts and advice. There is one drug representative for every eight doctors in the United States. This doesn't necessarily serve the best interests of the patient in terms of economy, efficacy, safety or accuracy of information, experts say.
In one of the first reports of its type -- titled "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" -- researchers from Oregon State University, Oregon Health & Science University and the University of Washington outlined the deliberate process that one central Oregon medical clinic went through to remove drug company representatives from their practice. It explored the obstacles they faced and the ultimate, successful result. The findings were just published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine.
The study found that avoiding conflicts of interest and becoming "pharma-free" is possible, but not easy.
"This is a culture change, one that's already happening but still has a ways to go, especially in smaller private practices," said Dr. David Evans, now with the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Washington, and previously a physician at the Madras, Ore., clinic featured in the article.
"The relationship between physicians and drug company representatives goes back generations, and it took a methodical, deliberate campaign to change it," Evans said. "We ultimately decided something had to be done when our medical clinic was visited by drug reps 199 times in six months. That number was just staggering."
Part of what allows the change, the researchers said, is that information on new medications is now available in many other forums. These may have less bias and be more evidence-based than the material traditionally provided by the pharmaceutical industry, which wanted to sell the latest product. In the Madras clinic, the physicians replaced information previously supplied by drug reps with monthly meetings to stay current on new medications, based on peer-reviewed, rather than promotional literature.
"In the past 5-10 years there's been more of a move toward what we call 'academic detailing,' in which universities and other impartial sources of information can provide accurate information without bias," said Daniel Hartung, assistant professor in the OSU College of Pharmacy. "This is being supported by some states and the federal government, and it's a move in the right direction."
Moves to separate the drug industry from the practice of medicine have been more aggressive in large medical teaching hospitals, Hartung said, but much less so in smaller private practice. Of the 800,000 physicians in the U.S., only 22 percent practice in academic settings, the study noted, and 84 percent of primary care physicians still have close relationships with the pharmaceutical industry.
The stakes can be high, the researchers said. In the study example, the "sample cabinet" of medications at the Madras clinic, provided for free by the pharmaceutical representatives, had an average price of $90 for a month's supply of the medications. Less expensive, generic medications were identified for 38 of the 46 sample drugs, which would have cost $22 a month.
The new analysis explored the necessary steps that a private clinic can take to help address this concern, including quantifying the clinic-industry relationship, anticipating clinician and staff concerns, finding new ways to provide up-to-date information, and educating patients and the public.
Crazy ants are taking over areas once occupied by fire ants in the South. The sting of Crazy ants isn't as painful and migrate slowly. But Crazy ants multiply faster.
By Douglas Main,?LiveScience / May 18, 2013
Invasive fire ants have been a thorn in the sides of Southerners for years. But another invasive species, the so-called "crazy" ant ? that many describe as being worse ? has arrived and is displacing fire ants in several places.
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"When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back," said Edward LeBrun, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, in a statement from the school. "Fire ants are in many ways very polite. They live in your yard. They form mounds and stay there, and they only interact with you if you step on their mound."
Crazy ants, on the other hand, "go everywhere," invading homes and nesting in walls and crawlspaces, even damaging electrical equipment by swarming inside appliances. [Image Gallery: Ants of the World]
A study published in the April issue of the journal Biological Invasions found that in areas infested with crazy ants, few to no fire ants were present. Exactly how they are able to outcompete fire ants is so far unknown. In areas with crazy ants, the researchers also found greatly diminished numbers of native ant species, according to the study.
Fire ants are known for their painful stings and have spread through the Southeast since arriving from South America in the 1930s. Crazy ants were first discovered in Houston in 2002, and they have already spread to coastal areas from Texas to Florida, according to the researchers. Although the "crazies" don't have as painful a sting as fire ants, they multiply in even greater numbers. They are also difficult to control since they don't eat the same poison baits as fire ants do, the statement noted.
Last year, the crazy ant species was identified as Nylanderia fulva, which hails from northern Argentina and southern Brazil, according to a 2012 study in PLOS ONE. It's also known as the tawny crazy ant and was previously named the Rasberry crazy ant after the exterminator Tom Rasberry, who first discovered it. The "crazy" moniker comes from the ant's quick, seemingly random movements.
Luckily, the crazy ant doesn't spread as quickly as the fire ant, advancing only 650 feet (200 meters) per year on its own, the release noted. Therefore, it's vital that people don't accidentally transport the ant, the prime method by which it has spread, according to the release.
Email?Douglas Main?or follow him on?Twitter?or?Google+. Follow us @livescience, ?Facebook?or ?Google+. Article originally on LiveScience.com.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Computational tool translates complex data into simplified 2-dimensional imagesPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karin Eskenazi ket2116@columbia.edu 212-342-0508 Columbia University Medical Center
May allow doctors to track progression of cancer, response to treatment, and risk of relapse
NEW YORK, NY (May 19, 2013) In their quest to learn more about the variability of cells between and within tissues, biomedical scientists have devised tools capable of simultaneously measuring dozens of characteristics of individual cells. These technologies have led to new challenges, however, as scientists now struggle with how to make sense of the resulting trove of data. Now a solution may be at hand. Researchers at Columbia University and Stanford University have developed a computational method that enables scientists to visualize and interpret "high-dimensional" data produced by single-cell measurement technologies such as mass cytometry. The method, published today in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology, has particular relevance to cancer research and therapeutics.
Researchers now understand that cancer within an individual can harbor subpopulations of cells with different molecular characteristics. Groups of cells may behave differently from one another, including in how they respond to treatment. The ability to study single cells, as well as to identify and characterize subpopulations of cancerous cells within an individual, could lead to more precise methods of diagnosis and treatment.
"Our method not only will allow scientists to explore the heterogeneity of cancer cells and to characterize drug-resistant cancer cells, but also will allow physicians to track tumor progression, identify drug-resistant cancer cells, and detect minute quantities of cancer cells that increase the risk of relapse," said co-senior author Dana Pe'er, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences and systems biology at Columbia. The other co-senior author is Garry P. Nolan, PhD, professor of microbiology & immunology at Stanford.
The method, called viSNE (visual interactive Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), is based on a sophisticated algorithm that translates high-dimensional data (e.g., a dataset that includes many different simultaneous measurements from single cells) into visual representations similar to two-dimensional "scatter plots"the simple graphs with X and Y axes that many people first encounter in high school math and biology. "Basically, viSNE provides a way to visualize very high-dimensional data in two dimensions, while maintaining the most important organization and structure of the data," said Dr. Pe'er. "Color is used as a third dimension to enable users to interactively visualize various features of the cells."
The viSNE software can analyze measurements of dozens of molecular markers. In the two-dimensional maps that result, the distance between points represents the degree of similarity between single cells. The maps can reveal clearly defined groups of cells with distinct behaviors (e.g., drug resistance) even if they are only a tiny fraction of the total population. This should enable the design of ways to physically isolate and study these cell subpopulations in the laboratory.
Although the algorithm underlying the method is complex, Dr. Pe'er expects that all researchers, no matter their level of mathematical expertise, will be able to use viSNE.
To demonstrate the software's utility, Dr. Pe'er and her colleagues used mass cytometry and viSNE to study bone marrow cells from patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Currently, clinicians can incorporate at most 4 to 8 markers to assess the cells. Because mass cytometry and viSNE can incorporate many more markers, viSNE is able to identify more subtle differences between cells. Using the algorithm, Dr. Pe'er and her colleagues were able to reveal previously unrecognized heterogeneity in the bone marrow cells they studied.
The researchers also showed that viSNE could detect minimal residual disease (MRD) extremely small quantities of cancer cells that persist after chemotherapy and raise the risk of recurrence. "In blinded tests, we were able to find as few as 20 cancer cells out of tens of thousands of healthy cells," said Dr. Pe'er. Such a small quantity of cells is extremely difficult to detect, even by the most experienced pathologist.
"The ability to detect MRD is critical for curing cancer," added Dr. Pe'er. "Eliminating even 99.9 percent of a tumor doesn't bring about a cure. You have to be able to find, and then eliminate, the tiny populations of cells that can survive therapy and lead to disease relapse."
###
The paper is titled, "viSNE enables visualization of high dimensional single-cell data and reveals phenotypic heterogeneity of leukemia." The other authors are: El-ad David Amir (Columbia), Kara L. Davis (Stanford University), Michelle D. Tadmor (Columbia), Erin F. Simonds (Stanford), Jacob H. Levine (Columbia), Sean C. Bendall (Stanford), Daniel K. Shenfeld (Columbia), and Smita Krishnaswamy (Columbia).
The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (MCB-1149728), National Institutes of Health Roadmap Initiative, the NIH Director's New Innovator Award Program (1-DP2-OD002414-01), and the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (1U54CA121852-01A1).
The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.
Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cumc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org.
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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.
Computational tool translates complex data into simplified 2-dimensional imagesPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Karin Eskenazi ket2116@columbia.edu 212-342-0508 Columbia University Medical Center
May allow doctors to track progression of cancer, response to treatment, and risk of relapse
NEW YORK, NY (May 19, 2013) In their quest to learn more about the variability of cells between and within tissues, biomedical scientists have devised tools capable of simultaneously measuring dozens of characteristics of individual cells. These technologies have led to new challenges, however, as scientists now struggle with how to make sense of the resulting trove of data. Now a solution may be at hand. Researchers at Columbia University and Stanford University have developed a computational method that enables scientists to visualize and interpret "high-dimensional" data produced by single-cell measurement technologies such as mass cytometry. The method, published today in the online edition of Nature Biotechnology, has particular relevance to cancer research and therapeutics.
Researchers now understand that cancer within an individual can harbor subpopulations of cells with different molecular characteristics. Groups of cells may behave differently from one another, including in how they respond to treatment. The ability to study single cells, as well as to identify and characterize subpopulations of cancerous cells within an individual, could lead to more precise methods of diagnosis and treatment.
"Our method not only will allow scientists to explore the heterogeneity of cancer cells and to characterize drug-resistant cancer cells, but also will allow physicians to track tumor progression, identify drug-resistant cancer cells, and detect minute quantities of cancer cells that increase the risk of relapse," said co-senior author Dana Pe'er, PhD, associate professor of biological sciences and systems biology at Columbia. The other co-senior author is Garry P. Nolan, PhD, professor of microbiology & immunology at Stanford.
The method, called viSNE (visual interactive Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), is based on a sophisticated algorithm that translates high-dimensional data (e.g., a dataset that includes many different simultaneous measurements from single cells) into visual representations similar to two-dimensional "scatter plots"the simple graphs with X and Y axes that many people first encounter in high school math and biology. "Basically, viSNE provides a way to visualize very high-dimensional data in two dimensions, while maintaining the most important organization and structure of the data," said Dr. Pe'er. "Color is used as a third dimension to enable users to interactively visualize various features of the cells."
The viSNE software can analyze measurements of dozens of molecular markers. In the two-dimensional maps that result, the distance between points represents the degree of similarity between single cells. The maps can reveal clearly defined groups of cells with distinct behaviors (e.g., drug resistance) even if they are only a tiny fraction of the total population. This should enable the design of ways to physically isolate and study these cell subpopulations in the laboratory.
Although the algorithm underlying the method is complex, Dr. Pe'er expects that all researchers, no matter their level of mathematical expertise, will be able to use viSNE.
To demonstrate the software's utility, Dr. Pe'er and her colleagues used mass cytometry and viSNE to study bone marrow cells from patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Currently, clinicians can incorporate at most 4 to 8 markers to assess the cells. Because mass cytometry and viSNE can incorporate many more markers, viSNE is able to identify more subtle differences between cells. Using the algorithm, Dr. Pe'er and her colleagues were able to reveal previously unrecognized heterogeneity in the bone marrow cells they studied.
The researchers also showed that viSNE could detect minimal residual disease (MRD) extremely small quantities of cancer cells that persist after chemotherapy and raise the risk of recurrence. "In blinded tests, we were able to find as few as 20 cancer cells out of tens of thousands of healthy cells," said Dr. Pe'er. Such a small quantity of cells is extremely difficult to detect, even by the most experienced pathologist.
"The ability to detect MRD is critical for curing cancer," added Dr. Pe'er. "Eliminating even 99.9 percent of a tumor doesn't bring about a cure. You have to be able to find, and then eliminate, the tiny populations of cells that can survive therapy and lead to disease relapse."
###
The paper is titled, "viSNE enables visualization of high dimensional single-cell data and reveals phenotypic heterogeneity of leukemia." The other authors are: El-ad David Amir (Columbia), Kara L. Davis (Stanford University), Michelle D. Tadmor (Columbia), Erin F. Simonds (Stanford), Jacob H. Levine (Columbia), Sean C. Bendall (Stanford), Daniel K. Shenfeld (Columbia), and Smita Krishnaswamy (Columbia).
The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (MCB-1149728), National Institutes of Health Roadmap Initiative, the NIH Director's New Innovator Award Program (1-DP2-OD002414-01), and the National Centers for Biomedical Computing (1U54CA121852-01A1).
The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.
Columbia University Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cumc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org.
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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.
CANNES, France (AP) ? The magic and glamour of Cannes can be hard to spot on a day when rain is lashing the palm trees, roiling the gray Mediterranean and pooling in puddles along the Croisette.
But the world's leading film festival can transform careers ? something no one knows that better than actors Berenice Bejo and Tahir Rahim, stars of director Asghar Farhadi's festival entry "The Past."
Bejo shimmered on-screen in Cannes two years ago in "The Artist," her director husband Michel Hazanavicius' vivacious silent homage to Hollywood's Golden Age. It went on to win five Academy Awards, including best picture.
Rahim was the breakout star of the 2009 festival in Jacques Audiard's poetic and brutal prison drama "A Prophet," as a youth growing to manhood behind bars.
Cannes exposure helped boost both performers onto the international stage. While once most European actors could choose between stay at home and playing Hollywood villains, their paths suggest a more globalized movie world.
"It was quite a miracle for me," Bejo said Saturday, as rain drummed remorselessly on a Cannes rooftop lounge. "Two years ago my life changed a little bit in Cannes.
"I don't think Asghar Farhadi would have cast me in this movie if I hadn't done 'The Artist.'"
It's hard to think of two movie styles further apart than the flamboyant artifice of "The Artist" and the anatomically detailed domestic drama of "The Past"
Bejo plays Marie, a harried Frenchwoman with two children, a new boyfriend with a young son, and an Iranian ex who has returned after four years to finalize their divorce. Rahim is her boyfriend Samir, a man with complex family ties of his own.
All the characters are trying to move on ? but the past keeps dragging them back.
Bejo said she did a screen test for Farhadi, then didn't hear from him for a month, so initially thought she hadn't got the part.
"He said to me, I was looking into your face if I could see the doubt," she said. "I guess because he saw me in movies where I was quite positive, quite sunny, quite glamorous. He needed to see if I could show another part of myself ? and I guess he found it."
For Bejo, as for Rahim, working with the Iran director was a dream come true. "The Past" is the first film Farhadi has shot outside his homeland, and the actors say they loved his working methods ? two months of rehearsal to delve into character, break down barriers and forge bonds, followed by a four-month shoot.
With its Iranian director and largely French cast, it's one of several border-hopping movies at Cannes this year. French director Arnaud Desplechin's made-in-America "Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian" stars France's Mathieu Amalric and Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro. Another French filmmaker, Guillaume Canet, has a multinational cast including Clive Owen, Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard in his New York crime drama "Blood Ties."
It's a trend Bejo is happy to embrace.
"In America you have Christoph Waltz, you have Marion Cotillard," she said. "In France we have Italian and Spanish actors. ... I think it's great. We are used to strangers and foreign accents, and it's great that we can see that in our movies now."
Both she and Rahim have been busy since their Cannes breakthroughs. Bejo recently made French heist movie "The Last Diamond" and soon starts filming Hazanavicius' next project, a war movie set in Chechnya.
Rahim's projects include the English-language Roman-era adventure "The Eagle" and another movie appearing at Cannes this year, the nuclear power plant romance "Grand Central."
Coming up, he plays a cop in the French movie "The Informant," and is currently shooting a globe-spanning 1920s-set drama with Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, another pillar of culture-crossing cinema.
Despite the busy international career ? and post-"Prophet" expressions of interest from the United States ? Rahim says Hollywood remains a hard nut to crack for non-Anglophone actors.
"It's not what you expect at first," Rahim said. "You'd like to be with Michael Mann or (directors) like this, but you don't have those parts that easily. Because first you have to speak English, you have to erase your accent."
For now, he's just happy to be back in Cannes, an experience that is easier the second time around.
"The difference is that now I'm not afraid when I come here," he said. "I'm (saying) 'OK I'm going to take every good vibe and keep it.'"
___
Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless
Bob Woodward compared Benghazi to Watergate during a Friday morning appearance on MSNBC?s ?Morning Joe.?
The famous Washington Post reporter and former antagonist of President Richard Nixon said the US government?s editing of talking points used by public officials in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, is ?a very serious issue.?
?I would not dismiss Benghazi,? Mr. Woodward said.
Woodward?s own main talking point was that he believed there are similarities between the process used to produce the Benghazi talking points and Nixon?s release of edited transcripts of the White House tapes.
RECOMMENDED: War with Iran? 5 ways events overseas could shape Obama's second term.
Citing the lengthy e-mail chain detailing the production of the talking points, released by the Obama administration earlier this week, the Watergate press hero said that in the wake of the Libyan tragedy ?everyone in the government is saying, ?Oh, let?s not tell the public that terrorists were involved, people connected to Al Qaeda. Let?s not tell the public that there were warnings.? ?
Forty years ago, Nixon went line by line through his tape transcripts and made his own edits.
?He personally went through them and said, ?Let?s not tell this, let?s not show this,? ? said Woodward on ?Morning Joe."
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Nixon, of course, was trying to deflate the increasing public and congressional pressure for him to release the tapes themselves. He wasn?t successful. The tapes revealed the extent of his involvement with the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover up.
As to Benghazi, Woodward concluded that the edits ?show the hydraulic pressure that was in the system not to tell the truth.?
Is Woodward right to make this comparison? After all, he is the media?s official arbiter of all things Watergate, and his words here carry special weight.
Well, it?s certainly possible that he?s hit upon the reason the talking points got changed around. But having read the 100 pages of e-mails on the editing process ourselves, we?d say it?s also possible that he?s jumping to conclusions. For at least some of the officials involved in the process, the reason to take out references to terrorists and Al Qaeda was not to hide the truth, but because they did not know what the truth was.
For instance, early in the editing process Stephen Preston, the CIA?s general counsel, e-mailed talking-point participants that ?in light of the criminal investigation, we are not to generate statements with statements as to who did this, etc. ? even internally, not to mention for public release.?
And the scrubbed ?warnings? Woodward referred to were fairly vague references to past CIA internal statements. The Post journalist may be right that the public should have heard about them. State Department officials, though, were transparently annoyed that the spy agency was trying to cover its rear end at their expense.
Look, things don?t have to be as bad as Watergate to be important malfeasance. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein made that point earlier this week on his A Plain Blog About Politics.
But loosely comparing current scandals with Watergate is to forget the full extent of the Nixon-era scandal, wrote Mr. Bernstein in a post titled, ?You Call That a Cover-Up??
In Watergate the cover-up was essentially personally directed by the president, overseen by the White House chief of staff, and run by the White House counsel, Bernstein writes. They concocted a false story, destroyed important evidence, and raised hush money used to attempt to buy the silence of underlings who were facing jail time.
Oh, and the president of the United States ordered the CIA to falsely tell the FBI that national security was involved in the Watergate mess, so the FBI needed to pull back its investigation.
By the way, the Watergate hearings began 40 years ago on this date. Bernstein has been writing a fascinating series of pieces outlining the unfolding of the Watergate scandal day by day, as if it were occurring in real time. You can read that to catch up on the bad old days and decide if today compares.
RECOMMENDED: War with Iran? 5 ways events overseas could shape Obama's second term.
Visiting a gynecologist for the first time can be awkward and embarrassing for some teens. But the visit is crucial to help them understand their bodies and lay the groundwork for future health and wellness.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends the first visit should be between the ages of 13 to 15. The exam should be an opportunity to educate teens about their bodies and help them establish a relationship with a gynecologist at an early age.
What to Expect
The first visit is an opportunity for teens to get accurate information about the changes in their bodies. A gynecologist will discuss acne, painful or irregular periods, breast changes, pelvic pain, body hair, nutrition, sexual behavior, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases. It is also an opportunity to talk about preexisting conditions and any family history of cancer.
Beyond talking, the visit might also include a breast exam, pelvic exam and a pap test, which screens for cervical cancer. The gynecologist might ask for a relative or nurse to be present during these exams.
While the first visit might be awkward, it?s an important step in the transition from teenage girl to healthy woman. Starting a conversation with a doctor helps you lay the foundation for health and wellness.
A woman watches an electronic stock board of a securities firm in Tokyo, Thursday, May 16, 2013. Asian stock markets were mixed Thursday following dour European economic data that dampened hopes of a recovery there anytime soon. However, losses were limited by another record session on Wall Street. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
A woman watches an electronic stock board of a securities firm in Tokyo, Thursday, May 16, 2013. Asian stock markets were mixed Thursday following dour European economic data that dampened hopes of a recovery there anytime soon. However, losses were limited by another record session on Wall Street. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
A woman walks by an electronic stock board of a securities firm in Tokyo, Thursday, May 16, 2013. Asian stock markets were mixed Thursday following dour European economic data that dampened hopes of a recovery there anytime soon. However, losses were limited by another record session on Wall Street. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
BANGKOK (AP) ? Asian stock markets were mixed in holiday-thinned trading Friday as investors digested a slew of disappointing economic data and corporate results from the U.S.
Applications for unemployment benefits jumped to their highest level in six weeks, the U.S. Labor Department reported Thursday, while manufacturing slowed in the mid-Atlantic region.
The bright spot was applications for new construction, which reached a five-year peak, reinforcing "the patchy nature of the US economic recovery," Michael Hewson of CMC Markets said in a commentary.
Japan's Nikkei 225 index rose 0.6 percent to 15,119.53, reversing a lower opening. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.5 percent to 5,189.70, pushed up by gains in BHP Billiton, the world's largest mining company. The stock rose 2.4 percent on bargain-hunting. Australia & New Zealand Banking Group rose 1.5 percent.
Benchmark in mainland China and Indonesia also rose while those in Taiwan, India, Singapore, New Zealand and the Philippines fell. Markets in Hong Kong and South Korea were closed for public holidays.
Evan Lucas of IG Markets in Melbourne said market declines could be explained by investors cashing in their gains following strong rallies. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 index has returned 45 percent so far this year. The Standard & Poor's 500 has delivered a terrific first four months. It's up 16 percent.
"There is always an uneasy feeling underlying the markets when they start making all-time highs," Lucas said.
Shares linked to gold, which has suddenly fallen afoul of investors like George Soros, dropped. Australia's Newcrest Mining was down 2.2 percent. Lao Feng Xiang, a Shanghai-listed major gold retailer, fell 0.9 percent.
Corporate earnings, which have been helping to power Wall Street to all-time highs, took a step back on Thursday after Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, reported a disappointing first-quarter profit and acknowledged a sales slump. Personal computer maker Dell posted dismal first quarter earnings.
Markets were also reacting to comments by John Williams, head of the Federal Reserve's San Francisco branch, who told an audience that the Fed could end its bond-buying program this year. But Williams' comments made clear that the Fed would only curtail its stimulus effort when the economy looked strong enough.
The Dow Jones industrial average fell to 15,233.22, a loss of 0.3 percent. The Standard & Poor's 500 dropped 0.5 percent to 1,650.47. Both indexes closed at record highs the day before. The Nasdaq composite index fell 0.2 percent to 3,465.24.
Benchmark oil for June delivery was down 30 cents to $94.87 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract rose 86 cents to $95.16 per barrel on the Nymex on Thursday.
In currencies, the euro fell to $1.2864 from $1.2907 late Thursday in New York. The dollar rose to 102.30 yen from 102.06 yen.
___
Follow Pamela Sampson on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pamelasampson
NEW YORK (AP) ? In one photo, a woman is on all fours, presumably picking something up, her posterior pressed against a glass window. Another photo shows a couple in bathrobes, their feet touching beneath a table. And there is one of a man, in jeans and a T-shirt, lying on his side as he takes a nap.
In all the photos, taken by New York City artist Arne Svenson from his second-floor apartment, the faces are obscured or not shown. The people are unidentifiable.
But the residents of a glass-walled luxury residential building across the street had no idea they were being photographed and they never consented to being subjects for the works of art that are now on display ? and for sale ? in a Manhattan gallery.
"I don't feel it's a violation in a legal sense but in a New York, personal sense there was a line crossed," said Michelle Sylvester, who lives in the residential building called the Zinc Building, which stands out with its floor-to-ceiling windows in a neighborhood of cobblestone streets and old, brick warehouse buildings.
Svenson's apartment is directly across the street, just to the south, giving him a clear view of his neighbors by simply looking out his window.
"I think there's an understanding that when you live here with glass windows, there will be straying eyes but it feels different with someone who has a camera," Sylvester said.
Svenson's show, "The Neighbors," opened last Saturday at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea, where about a dozen large prints are on sale for up to $7,500. His exhibit is drawing a lot of attention, not for the quality of the work, but for the manner in which it was made.
Svenson did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press, but says in material accompanying the exhibit that the idea for it came when he inherited a telephoto lens from a friend, a birdwatcher who recently died.
"For my subjects there is no question of privacy; they are performing behind a transparent scrim on a stage of their own creation with the curtain raised high," Svenson says in the gallery notes. "The Neighbors don't know they are being photographed; I carefully shoot from the shadows of my home into theirs."
That explanation has done little to satisfy some residents of the Zinc Building, where a penthouse was once listed at nearly $6 million. In an email circulating among the building's owners and renters this week, a resident whose apartment was depicted in Svenson's photographs suggested legal recourse against the artist.
"I am not an expert in this area of the law, but I do think we may have some rights and the ability to stop this," the email reads. "I love art, but find this to be an outrageous invasion of privacy."
Civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel said that according to New York civil rights law, there may be a way for Svenson's subjects to challenge him in court but the case will depend entirely on context.
"The question for the person who's suing is, if you're not identifiable, then where's the loss of privacy?" he said. "These issues are a sign of the times. How do you balance the right of privacy vis-?-vis the right of artistic expression?"
Linda Darcia, an exchange student from Colombia living with a family on the sixth floor facing Svenson's studio, said she had no idea whether or not she was depicted in any of the pieces but she was anxious to go to the gallery and find out.
"I'm not really upset about it because that's his job," she said. "But maybe he should have asked before the gallery opens. Everybody's talking about it."
An authentic gyro is roasted in a vertical spit, but this crockpot version is a great homemade alternative to the real thing. I discovered this recipe through Pinterest at Rainy Day Gal. Her recipe is an adaptation of one by A Year of Slow Cooking. I couldn't find ground lamb, so I used beef instead. I'm not sure what lamb would have been like, but it tasted great with the beef and turkey combination.
I? used a Middle Eastern herb blend called Za-atar that my brother and his fiancee had given me for Christmas. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. For those of you on Vancouver Island, you can find it at Hazelwood Herb Farm in Ladysmith BC. It's a blend of sumac, thyme, sesame seeds, oregano, basil, summer savory, sweet marjoram, salt and lemon peel. It worked really well in the gyros, and it's delicious in hummus too. If you can't find Za'atar anywhere near you, here's a link to make your own homemade Za-atar. Or you could just use oregano, as the original recipe calls for.
I have to admit that blending the meat in a food processor was sort of gross, but once it was in the crockpot, the aroma that wafted through our house as it cooked was incredible. I couldn't wait to try it. You could eat it just like a meatloaf if you wanted. I decided to serve it in warm pita bread with greek salad and tzatziki sauce. The boys found them a little hard to eat so they ended up pulling them apart and using a fork. They still really enjoyed the gyros, and so did Tony and I. We didn't use all the meat, so I chopped it up and used it in Greek pizza the next next. I don't have a photo of that because we ate it up so quickly!
Crockpot Gyros
Adapted from Rainy Day Gal 1/2 lb ground beef 1/2 lb ground turkey 2 tsp Za-atar Middle Eastern herb blend 1 tsp smoked paprika 1 tsp kosher salt 1 small onion, chopped 2 cloves garlic, crushed Juice from 1 lemon
Place ground beef and turkey, spices and salt in a food processor and blend well. Form it into a loaf with your hands. Place onion and garlic into the bottom of your crockpot. Lay the meat loaf on top. Squeeze lemon juice over top. Cover and cook for 4 hours on low (or 2 hours on high). Slice the meat and serve in warmed pita with Greek salad and tzatziki sauce. Wrap them in foil to hold them together.
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May 16, 2013 ? The answer is yes, according to a paper in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.
In a paper published in the journal last month, authors Anthony Bonato, Dieter Mitsche, and Pawel Pralat describe a mathematical model to disrupt flow of information in a complex real-world network, such as a terrorist organization, using minimal resources.
Terror networks are comparable in their structure to hierarchical organization in companies and certain online social networks, where information flows in one direction from a source, which produces the information or data, downwards to sinks, which consume it. Such networks are called hierarchical social networks.
"In such networks, the flow of information is often one way," explains author Pawel Pralat. "For example, a celebrity such as Justin Bieber sends out a tweet, which is sent to millions of his followers. These followers send out their own retweets, and so on. We may therefore view hierarchical social networks as directed networks without cycles, or directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)."
Here, there is no requirement for reciprocity (the celebrity does not necessarily follow his or her followers). Similarly, in a terrorist network, the leaders pass plans down to the foot soldiers, and usually only one messenger needs to receive the message for the plan to be executed.
Disruption of the flow of information would correspond to halting the spread of news in an online social network or intercepting messages in a terror network.
The authors propose a generalized stochastic model for the flow and disruption of information based on a two-player outdoor game called "Seepage," where players who depict agents attempt to block the movement of another player, an intruder, from a source node to a sink. "The game -- motivated by the 1973 eruption of the Eldfell volcano in Iceland -- displays some similarities to an approach used in mathematical counterterrorism, where special kinds of DAGs are used to model the disruption of terrorist cells," says Pralat.
The motivating eruption caused a major crisis at the time, as lava flow threatened to close off the harbor, the island's main source of income. In the game, inhabitants attempt to protect the harbor by pouring water on the volcanic lava to halt its progress. A mathematical model of the game pits two opponents against each other -- the sludge, or intruder, against the greens, or agents -- forming a directed acyclic graph, with one source (the top of the volcano) and many sinks representing the lake. The parameter, "seepage," represents the amount of contamination, and the "green number" corresponds to the number of agents required to halt it.
A previous study modeled terrorist cells as partially ordered sets (a special kind of DAG), which are often used in mathematics to analyze an ordering, sequencing, or arrangement of distinct objects. In such a system, terrorist plans are formulated by nodes at the top of the hierarchy, which represent the leaders or maximal nodes of the set. The plans are transmitted down to the nodes at the bottom: these represent foot soldiers in a terror network or minimal nodes in the set who would be presumed to carry out these plans. The assumption is that one messenger is sufficient for reception and execution of the plan. Thus, if the partially ordered set represents a courier network for a terrorist organization, the intention would be to block all routes from the maximal node to the minimal nodes by capturing or killing a subset of agents.
In this paper, the authors utilize the similarities in the previous terrorist cell model to Seepage, where greens try to prevent the sludge from moving to the sinks by blocking nodes. A number of different winning strategies employed by both players are explored when played on a DAG. The seepage and green number for disrupting a given hierarchical social network are analyzed.
The primary difference from the previous study's model is that the Seepage model is dynamic: greens can move and choose new sets of nodes over time. The authors determine that Seepage is a more realistic model of counterterrorism, as the agents do not necessarily act all at once, but over time.
The analysis is made in two types of terrorist network structures, as Pralat explains, "We consider two extreme profiles: one where the network is regular, where every agent has about the same number of connections. The second profile is power law, where some agents have many connections, but most have very few." This is analyzed by considering the total degree distribution of nodes in the DAG. In regular DAGs, each level of the DAG would have nodes with about the same out-degree (number of outgoing edges emanating from a node), while power law DAGs would have many more low-degree nodes and a few with high degrees.
Mathematical analysis allows the authors to determine what point in a network would be most effective for disrupting messages. "Our mathematical results reinforce the view that intercepting the information or message in a hierarchical social network following a power law is more difficult close to levels near the source. For regular networks, it does not matter as much where the message is disrupted," says Pralat. "Future work could look at more complex profiles of networks, along with developing effective algorithms for disrupting the flow of information in a DAG using our game-theoretic approach."
For more than a year, media outlets have posted stories on various major venture capital firms throwing their arms up in frustration and feeling woe over their cleantech investment portfolios. These down-and-out VC stories have been coupled with broader reporting on the drop in the total VC funds issued for cleantech after two years of growth in 2010 and 2011.
Indeed, Q4 2012 experienced a particularly low VC investment period for the alternative energy and fuels subset of cleantech, with just about?$70 million in investment, the lowest quarterly mark in at least four years.?Total cleantech investments in Q1 2013 were at an even more dramatic seven-year low.
This negative has have left many pundits with a dour attitude and confused understanding of the viability of investments in clean energy and related technologies.
Clean energy investment way up in the U.S., just not from VCs
VCs invest when the both the risks and potential rewards are high. Inspiring stories of VC investments in two folks toiling away in a garage on a clever idea is a bit at the far end of risk for VCs, but certainly they do usually make bets on companies that are pre-positive cash flow, and not infrequently, pre-revenue. Once a market begins to reach a level of early maturity, risks and rewards come down, and VCs exit all but the leading edge of the space.
This transition mostly occurred many years ago in the utility-scale wind and solar project finance market, including the backing of development companies, and is in mid-transition for distributed solar PV projects. A good example of this transition is distributed solar PV developer SolarCity, previously backed primarily by VCs but then floating a portion of its common equity to retail investors in an IPO in December.
Today?s situation, with the vast majority of clean energy investment not coming from VCs, is actually a positive indicator for the maturation of clean energy markets. PricewaterhouseCoopers tracked VC investments at $3.3 billion in U.S.-based cleantech companies in 2012. Yet U.S. project investments in wind and solar ? both experiencing record totals in 2012 ? exceeded $25 billionand $11 billion,?respectively. The combined $36 billion is more than 11 times cleantech VC investments in 2012. Yet wind and solar are only a subset of alternative energy.
Furthermore, alternative energy is just a subset of cleantech, generally inclusive of environmental advances in other markets including smart grid, energy storage, energy efficiency, waste management, transportation, water provision, wastewater management and pollution abatement. Combining the project, corporate and other non-VC investments in newer technologies in these markets likely produces a ratio in the vicinity of 100 times.
Granted, some consider the word ?cleantech? to explicitly describe only the VC stage (possibly coupled with the private equity stage) of environmentally beneficial tech-based investments, but this characterization isn?t fully appreciated outside of the financial community and certainly not sufficiently comprehended by the general public.
Photo of solar cells provided by?JNT Visual/Shutterstock
Next page: The valley of death can be real and large, but so is the prize
People often say that information is power, that happens to be true in today?s world. If you want to learn what type of information will skyrocket your business then you are in the right article.
One of the things you should do first if you want to succeed is have an action plan or a business plan that is long term and detailed. This plan will basically have your goals for each month and what actions you will take to get there. You must be aware that you will find many obstacles in the way to success with your home based business, having an action plan will ensure you stay focus and determined to make it work.
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Make sure you have all the tools and resources you need to have a great website. A website that looks cheap and unprofessional may drive customers away and that is a big mistake. Use professional websites as an example of what you?re aiming for and remember your site will be your image on the internet.
There are hundreds of online businesses, each one is different and you must keep that in mind when you encounter issues you are not familiar with. Be open minded to learning new things and applying what you learn along the way. Don?t get frustrated with things you don?t understand and remember chances are someone already encountered your problem so do some research until you find a solution.
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Learn more about starting a business with my empower network review, then see what it takes to get started with these empower network that will help you.
Almost two decades ago, scientists succeeded in cloning Dolly the sheep. Now, the same process has been allowed scientists to clone embryonic stem cells from fetal human skin cells for the very first time. There are no more barriers between us and creating human clones.
Cloning in and of itself has been within our reach for a while. Cloning non-human animals has been on the table for nearly two decades, dating back to Dolly the sheep way back in 1996. Cloning human cells has always been a bit rougher of a prospect, partly because it's just hard, and partly because experimenting with it is ground that needs to be tread very very carefully.
This breakthrough accomplishment, performed by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and his colleagues, makes use of a technique called nuclear transfer. In its most basic sense, nuclear transfer is the process of taking one cell?in this case a skin cell?and inserting it into an egg cell that's had its DNA removed, which is then coaxed into dividing. Or in other words, it's sort of like fertilizing an egg cell with a fully formed cell of another sort, instead of a sperm.
This process results in a ball of stem cells that can be grown into a full-fledged clone if it's allowed to keep developing. That's how we've gotten every successful clone to date, including Dolly back in 1996. But until now, that had never worked with human cells. As documented in the journal Cell, Mitalipov and company have managed to pull off the process using skin cells of a human fetus as fertilizer, creating a whole bunch of embryonic stem cells that could go on to grow into a cloned human being. Not that anyone's planning to actually do that. Ever. These cells are for medical treatment. Stuff like treating nerve and heart damage.
Mitalipov attributes the recent success mainly to two things. First, there's the use of healthy, donated eggs?previously eggs used for experiments like this were leftovers from IVF clinics. Second, there's the slightly new approach to nuclear transfer, with several special tweaks and modifications including the infusion of caffeine at one point. The result is a reliable, high-yeild process that can create, on average, four embryonic stem cell lines from every eight eggs. Mitalipov put it this way:
We knew the history of failure, that several legitimate labs had tried but couldn't make it work. I thought we would need about 500 to 1,000 eggs to optimize the process and anticipated it would be a long study that would take several years. But in the first experiment we got a blastocyst and within a couple of months we already had an (embryonic) stem cell line. We couldn't believe it.
The implications here are huge, from both a medicinal and ethical standpoint. In the past, other scientists experimented with cloning processes that avoided ethical quandaries like extracting fetal cells, but none of those were nearly as reliable as this one. And this approach might be able to work with adult skin cells?removing fetuses from the equation?but it's still too early to tell.
And while the stem cells generated here definitely aren't intended to be used to produce actual, living, human clones, there's no reason to believe they couldn't be. And life potential like that is bound to raise all sorts of questions.
But aside from all that, this cloning process holds promise for the treatment of all kinds of degenerative diseases, though you can bet it will be a long, hard road to any sort of standardization for a whole wide variety of medical and legal reasons. Still, it's a huge step forward for science, and for young megalomaniacs who aspire to live forever through clones someday.. [Time via CNN]
Nokia?s just unveiled the Lumia 925?and it's the Windows phone that you'll want. Gone is the all-plastic traditional Lumia, subsumed by a much more refined feeling metal-polycarbonate mix. This thing looks and feels great.
So, what?s it like? Well, if you take the Lumia 920, remove about 20 to 30 per cent of the weight, slap brushed metal sides on it and make it only marginally thicker than a svelte HTC One, you?ve just about got it.
The metal band antenna round the outside is punctuated with small black bars at the top and bottom corners, which will hopefully prevent any death grip issues, like the iPhone 4 suffered back in the day. The back is made of your now-standard quality-feeling polycarbonate that you know and love from Nokia, curved to fit the profile of a palm providing some great ergonomics. This thing feels great in the hand, just like the HTC One does with its curved backing.
Speaking of the back, turn the thing over and you?ve got the camera module and flash, which are just the same as the Lumia 920 before it, without the extra bulk that its predecessor came packing. On to the front, the screen itself is as vivid as previous Nokia efforts, with colours popping nicely and edges and text as sharp as ever.
Windows Phone is, well, Windows Phone, which means it?s about the same as any other high-end WP8 phone. No real lag to speak of, and entering apps was pretty rapid as you?d expect. Nokia?s bigging up the camera stuff, which we?ll go into more detail about later, but for what it?s worth, Nokia?s Smart Cameradoes what it says on the tin. Operating just like HTC?s Zoe, except with a way better name, it?s essentially burst fire with the ability to meld images into the perfect snapshot. Each frame is captured at 5MP, apparently ?something others can?t do? according to Nokia. That means you can eliminate people from the picture, or do the fancy thing and have action shots with multiple images of your target of choice flying through the air or something, all combined into an awesome composite image.
We?ll be giving the camera a good test, seeing as Nokia?s so proud of the thing, and update with sample shots as and when we can get them.
Cockroaches are gross, but not all need to be squished I detest household bugs. Abhor them. There isn?t a word strong enough to describe how I feel about bugs in my home. That hatred provokes guilt, because I fancy myself an environmentalist. As such, I?m supposed to feel a kinship with all creatures. We?re connected in a circle of life, a colorful tapestry, a delicate web of interdependence.
Source: Washington Post Posted on:
Tuesday, May 14, 2013, 9:00am Views: 0
Hospitals promote screenings that experts say many people do not need Hospitals hoping to attract patients and build goodwill are teaming up with medical-screening companies to promote tests they say might prevent deadly strokes or heart disease. What their promotions don?t say is that an influential government panel recommends against many of the tests for people without symptoms or risk factors.
Source: Washington Post Posted on:
Tuesday, May 14, 2013, 9:00am Views: 39
LONDON/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron faced questions about his leadership on Tuesday after he bowed to pressure from within the Conservative Party to bring forward draft legislation enforcing a referendum on Britain's European Union membership.
Just hours after U.S. President Barack Obama cautioned against rushing towards the EU exit, Cameron was forced by a rebellion in his party into promising a bill that would pave the way for an in-out vote on Europe.
Cameron denied the move was a desperate measure to placate his increasingly restive and eurosceptic party, where many see the EU as an oppressive and wasteful "superstate" that threatens Britain's sovereignty.
"I think when all the dust has settled people will be able to see the substance of the issue," he said.
"That is that one party, the Conservatives, has a clear agenda: renegotiate, change Europe, have a referendum on it - the others parties don't take that approach," he told Sky news.
But the more Cameron concedes to his eurosceptic lawmakers, the more they want, deepening the 25-year battle in his party over Europe and undermining his own chances of leading it to victory in a general election set for 2015.
Divisions over Europe helped bring down the last two Conservative prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and many politicians compared Cameron's position to that of Major whose premiership was riven by rows over Europe.
"There is no way that he (Cameron) can give in any further because he's undermining his own position," said Sheila Gunn, who served as spokeswoman to Major.
"Every time he gives in, the so-called rebels who want Britain to get out of the EU very quickly will just ask for something more."
CAMERON STRENGTHENED?
Conservative lawmakers who back the new bill deny the move undermines Cameron, and instead see it as a way to show a sceptical public that the Conservatives want a referendum on EU membership, but are being held back.
The party's Liberal Democrat partners in coalition government are pro-Europe, while the opposition Labour party says it does not support a referendum on the EU in 2017, the date proposed by Cameron earlier this year.
"We've set out our position and published this bill to give the British people an in-out referendum on Europe ... Now it's vital to hear whether Labour and the other parties are actually prepared to trust the British public," Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said in a statement.
Cameron's advisers hope the draft bill on an EU vote will end the bickering, and a Downing Street spokesman insisted Cameron was still in charge.
Liam Fox, a standard bearer for anti-EU Conservatives and a former party leadership contender, denied the party was in disarray.
"It strengthens the party, because it is able to get onto the issue that we need to be on," Fox told Reuters, referring to a referendum on EU membership, adding that Cameron was stronger because "the party's all pulling in the same direction".
Anti-EU Conservative lawmaker Bill Cash told Reuters Cameron could become a "national hero" if he focused more of his campaign for the 2015 national election on an EU referendum.
However, the three eurosceptic Conservative Party leaders who followed Major failed to get into power, and Cameron's capitulation over the new EU referendum bill has given the impression he is not in control of his party.
"David Cameron's weakness has turned a European issue into a leadership issue," Labour foreign affairs spokesman Douglas Alexander said.
Cameron's offer of draft legislation marked a climbdown from his promise in January to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership and then hold a referendum by the end of 2017.
But some lawmakers had called for further concessions and media reports said Cameron's leadership could be challenged.
Cameron's potential rivals include London Mayor Boris Johnson and Education Secretary Michael Gove.
Up to 100 eurosceptic Conservative members of parliament are still expected to criticise the government's legislative plans this week because they did not include a bill promising a vote on EU membership.
CONSERVATIVES RATTLED
Since coming to power in a coalition government three years ago, the Conservatives have been rattled by the popularity of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), which campaigns for Britain's withdrawal from the EU and tighter immigration laws.
A Guardian/ICM poll showed that UKIP's support had surged to a record high of 18 percent, while support for Britain's traditional parties had fallen by 4 percentage points each.
UKIP took a quarter of the vote in local elections this month. Unless Cameron can convince his party he can win the next election he is likely to face more challenges to his leadership.
"With the story changing every day, it's very reminiscent of the old John Major days where, really, the government appears to be being blown around by events," said UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
The Guardian poll put Labour on 34 percent, the Conservatives on 28 percent and the Liberal Democrats on 11 percent.
UKIP's poll rating has climbed steadily since Cameron's pledge in January to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership and hold a referendum by the end of 2017.
Cameron's bid to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership has concerned the United States, which has warned London that it would lose influence in the world if it did leave the world's biggest economic bloc.
Obama told Cameron in Washington on Monday that EU membership was an expression of British influence, but the president delighted Cameron's advisers by appearing to endorse his attempt to fix the relationship.
(Additional reporting by Mohammed Abbas, William James, Costas Pitas and William Schomberg; Writing by Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Giles Elgood)
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Public release date: 19-May-2013
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