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Two-time champion Cristie Kerr shot a 5-under 66 on Saturday to take a two-stroke lead over second-ranked Stacy Lewis and Suzann Pettersen after the third round of the LPGA Tour's Kingsmill Championship. With the Human Brain Project, Henry Markram and his team in Lausanne, Switzerland, are trying to bring together scientists worldwide to create a “virtual copy of the human brain.â€But initial collapse in output following financial crash was bigger than first thought, Office for National Statistics saysBritain never suffered a double-dip recession in 2012 but suffered a deepercollapse in output following the financial crash than previously thought, according to new data that show the economy is even further away from a full recovery.The Office for National Statistics has reworked its quarterly growth figures for the beginning of last year to show a flat performance instead of previous estimates of a 0.1% decline. Without a fall in GDP in the first three months of 2012, Britain did not suffer two consecutive quarters of negative growth that would have resulted in its second recession in three years – otherwise known as a double-dip.The ONS said, however, that the first post-crunch recession in 2008/2009 was deeper than first estimated, meaning that economic output is now 3.9% lower than its pre-crash peak, compared with a previous estimate of 2.6%.David Tinsley, UK economist at investment bank BNP Paribas, said the figures revealed a weak economy in need of  further stimulus from the Bank of  England."The data highlights both the damage done to the economy following the crisis and the size of the challenge still facing it to rebalance. Unless it bounces considerably it raises serious concerns that after a solid second quarter, growth will at best be weak.  These are good arguments for new Bank of England governor Mark Carney to consider a  significant easing in policy as early as next week."Carney takes over from Sir Mervyn King on Monday and is under pressure in some quarters to take a more active role than his predecessor. But the nine-strong monetary policy committee that he will head has shown little appetite in recent months to pump further central bank funds into the economy, under the £375bn quantitative easing programme. King and two other committee members have voted since February to increase the QE stock by £25bn, only to be blocked by the remaining six.Jeremy Cook, the chief economist at the foreign exchange firm World First said Carney and the chancellor need to take further action to bring about a sustainable recovery."Whether the UK entered a double-dip or - as today's numbers show, it didn't - matters little to the man on the street who is seeing large falls in real-term wage growth as a result of the lack of business output. Sterling has fallen in the aftermath of this announcement, and although this data is three months old and could be considered stale, the lack of real improvement since leaves the government and the new Bank of England governor a lot to do."Coming a day after George Osborne was forced to announce a further £11.5bn of cuts to government spending in 2015/16, the news that a double-dip recession has been written out of the economic history books will cheer the Treasury. Ministers have battled to show that the economy was healthier than official statistics showed during the  turbulent years of 2011 and 2012, which were marred by the eurozone crisis and fears that the currency zone would break up.Separate figures revealed the economy is further away from getting back to its early 2008 peak and disposable incomes are at levels last seen in 1987.  The ONS said the downturn in 2008/09 saw GDP decline by 7.2%, from the previous estimate of 6.3%.A deeper recession and a prolonged period of low growth leaves the government with a higher mountain to climb to restore the economy back to health, said analysts.Figures showing a long-term fall in disposable incomes emphasised the difficult task facing the Treasury as it struggles to tinnitus miracle review confidence and high street spending, both of which remain weak. Household disposable income fell by 1.7% in the first three months of 2013 compared with the previous quarter, which left it down by 0.3% year on year.Howard Archer, the chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, said the fall "undoubtedly reflected higher inflation, very low wage growth and faltering employment at the start of the year".Consumer  spending continued to rise, however, which Archer said was partly financed by a drop in the household savings ratio to 4.2% from 5.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012 and 7.1% in the third quarter. "This highlights the fact that consumers do still face serious headwinds," he said.Chris Leslie, Labour's shadow financial secretary to the Treasury, said the revised figures showed the economy has grown by 1.1% since 2010, compared to the 6% forecast at the time."That's why living standards are falling and the deficit  is not coming down."Economic growth (GDP)EconomicsEconomic policyOffice for National StatisticsBank of EnglandQuantitative easingPhillip Inmanguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the Stanley Cup playoffs after helping his team to the National Hockey League championship on Monday. Even if the new deadline of 2017 is met, bringing a third of Britain out of digital limbo will have taken a painfully long seven years from policy declaration to deliveryThe message had been sitting in the inbox, unopened, for months. But it could no longer be ignored. The coalition finally conceded on Thursday that the taxpayer funded project to bring decent broadband connections to the countryside won't be finished until 2017, two years behind schedule.Even if that new deadline is met, bringing a third of Britain out of digital limbo will have taken a painfully long seven years from policy declaration to delivery.Those close to the  government's Broadband Delivery UK body have been warning it was off track for months. The original deadline of 2015 looked hopeless. Of the 41 contracts due to be awarded by local councils in England under the BDUK framework, 17 have yet to be signed. Just three are due to complete in 2014. Those signed most recently have a target date of 2016 or later.There are 5m homes that cannot get access to the 2 megabits per second speed considered a minimum for the modern internet. No access to basic broadband means paying the BBC licence fee without being able to watch the iPlayer or any other kind of video online. It means your children struggle to complete homework. For those running a small business, or working from home, trade is held back by lack of access to technology.Critics blame a BDUK process that was dressed up as an open competition but skewed to ensure only BT could win. Certainly, the firm has scooped up  all contracts signed so far. With only one bidder and public buying power dispersed over 41 separate tenders, the ability to ensure value for money is limited.The Treasury is promising a shakeup. If that is the case, the arrival  in December on the Tory frontbenches of BT chief executive Ian Livingston, who has a fortune is tied up in shares in the former state monopoly, sends a very mixed message.BroadbandInternetTelecommunications industryBTIan LivingstonJuliette Garsideguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Francis’ march to the papacy began with the meetings of cardinals that occurred before the conclave. His remarks struck a chord, but he held on to a low profile. Visiting Europe in a time of turmoil; mortgage relief checks go out only to bounce; mold devastates impatiens, a garden staple, and other consumer-focused news from The New York Times. The forex growth bot configuration is learned in grade school, and forever committed to memory with the help of foam balls, deconstructed coat hangers, and paint. It's a fairly straightforward arrangement: The sun revolves at the center as eight planets — along with dwarf planet Pluto — orbit within the same plane, and in the same direction as the  sun's rotation. As it turns out, planets around far-off stars do not always obey these rules, as Josh Winn has found. Winn, who is the Class of 1942 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, searches for exoplanets — planets outside the solar system that revolve around far-off stars. In the last decade, astronomers have identified hundreds of exoplanetary systems in the Milky Way. Winn has found that many of these systems display very different properties from our own, with planets circling at odd angles, out of alignment with their stars' rotation. "The planet could be going over the poles of the star instead of the equator, or going backward, or revolving in the opposite direction," Winn says. "It's sort of a gift from nature that it turned out these systems could be so interesting."Winn and his group in  MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research are deciphering the geometry of newly discovered planetary systems. The group analyzes changes in starlight as a planet transits, or eclipses, its star. These signals can give scientists clues to a planet's orbit, as well as its size. After combining this information with data, such as a planet's distance from its star, researchers can calculate an exoplanet's mass, composition and atmosphere — essential ingredients for determining whether the planet may be habitable. "That's one of the big frontiers: studying these potentially habitable planets, and extracting as much information as we can from them," Winn says. "That will be a major preoccupation for us over the next 10 years."Finding a path to physicsWinn recently received tenure in MIT's Department of Physics, and is keen to continue his work in exoplanetary discovery. But early on in his career, he wasn't sure that astrophysics — or physics in general — was the path for him. Born and raised in Deerfield, Ill., Winn was an impressionable student. "When I took biology in high school, I thought I was going to be a biologist. When I took chemistry the next year, I thought for sure I'd be a chemist, especially since my father is a chemist," Winn recalls. "Then physics happened to be the last thing I took. And that definitely did stick."He followed his newfound interest to MIT, where he majored in physics, absorbing valuable perspective from his academic adviser, Alan Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics, and his thesis adviser, John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics. Both professors gave Winn a window into the life of an academic, from the stimulation of intellectual work to the practical business of winning grants and cultivating a research group."All the way up until the very end, I was absolutely sure I wanted to be a professor of physics," Winn says. "Then as the actual end of college approached, I started to wonder."After graduating, Winn skipped across the Atlantic to Cambridge University as a Fulbright Scholar, continuing to study physics and mathematics. When he returned to the United States, unsure whether he wanted to pursue purely academic studies, Winn looked to applied fields, landing temporarily on medical physics and a PhD program at the MIT-Harvard Health Sciences and Technology Program. Following his first year in the program, Winn was still uncertain, and cast around for inspiration. He had always enjoyed writing, and won an internship at The Economist, spending a summer in London."I'd write about forestry, archaeology, biology, whatever I'd happened to hear about that week," Winn says. "I really liked that. It was a really good release, like using a different part of my brain." Upon his return to the United States, Winn decided to transfer to MIT's natural vitiligo treatment in physics. There, he was required to take an introductory class in astrophysics, taught by Saul Rappaport, now a professor emeritus of physics — an experience that "reawakened" a childhood interest in astronomy. He quickly settled on a thesis project, working with professor of physics Jackie Hewitt on gravitational lensing — the study of gravity in distant galaxies. The project took him to New Mexico to observe galaxies with the Very Large Array, an observatory spread over a wide expanse of desert."I just remember being floored by my first sighting," Winn says. "There are these enormous radio dishes, 80 feet across, and there are 27 spread out over 20 to 30 miles of this flat plain in New Mexico. It's just beautiful surroundings."Winn continued working on gravitational lensing as a postdoc at Harvard University, although midway through his fellowship, he began to hear rumblings of an emerging field in astrophysics: the study of exoplanetary systems. "This field seemed wide open for discovery," Winn recalls. "There were a lot of simple questions that nobody had asked yet."Charting an exoplanetary courseWinn joined the MIT faculty in 2006, and has since focused on answering many of these questions, most recently regarding the geometry of exoplanetary systems. To get at such answers, he and others rely on the Kepler Telescope, a space observatory launched by NASA in 2009 to observe distant stars and orbiting planets. The telescope  is trained on a patch of sky, and continuously monitors thousands of stars as part of a mission to discover Earth-like planets. Data from Kepler has helped scientists identify more than 2,000 potential planets in the Milky Way galaxy; there are estimates that billions more Earth-like planets may exist. For Winn, some of the more exciting discoveries have been of systems such as Kepler 11, a star more than 2,000 light-years away. Five small planets revolve around this star, all orbiting closer than Mercury around our sun. "Those systems are fun to study, because the planets are all pushing and pulling on each other," Winn says. "These are tight little planetary systems that are superficially like our solar system in that there are lots of planets, but it's much closer in."Winn is among a team of MIT scientists that has submitted a proposal to NASA for a successor to Kepler, called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. While Kepler has identified thousands of potential planets, these objects orbit very faint, far-off stars, the light from which is difficult to analyze. In contrast, TESS — an observatory of four optical lenses positioned on a satellite at varying angles — would observe the brightest stars in the sky, giving scientists a much clearer signal to work with. Such improved target stars, Winn says, would make it easier for scientists to answer more complex questions, such as whether oxygen exists in a planet's atmosphere — a possible sign of habitability, or of life. Looking back on his winding path to astrophysics, Winn says he now feels very comfortable not only in his role as a professor, but as an adviser for MIT students who may be unsure of their next step. "I just feel really at home here, having spent so much time at MIT," Winn says. "Whenever I do meet a student who doesn't know whether to continue in physics, I know exactly what to say, and can tell them it's going to be OK." My sister Rozanne Purser, who has died aged 91, taught art in Sudbury for nigh on 40 years, with classes both for the boys of the grammar and the girls of the high school in the Suffolk town. After her eventual retirement, around 1980, she kept in touch with her star pupils and helped to organise exhibitions of their work, and even a few of her own.Our mother, Phyllis, had followed much the same path, as the first female student to be enrolled by a Sheffield art school. She had gone  on to trademiner successful postcard artist in the style of Mabel Lucie Attwell. Rozanne was born in Kingsdown, Kent, where our  father Jack's rather wandering career had led him on release from first world war service. I arrived four years later, in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire.Next came a brief spell in Leamington, Warwickshire, where somehow our parents failed to find Roz a school, and she would look back unbelievingly on a whole year of doing whatever she wanted to do.  In 1934 Jack made his final career move and joined Tarmac, the road-surfacing engineers, with an office in Liverpool and a seaside-suburban home on the Wirral peninsula. For Roz it was ideal timing. She was just the right age to start at West Kirby high school, ride there by bike, haunt the swimming baths and attract boyfriends.As the second world war loomed, she was just starting at Liverpool Art School, travelling in each day on the new electric train. She joined the Waafs, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, and saw service in Northern Ireland and other parts, as well as at the famous Bentley Priory, north of  London, where they plotted the movements of enemy aircraft. She was a lovely young woman and had many admirers. The one who told me he was definitely going to marry her was a local boy who had just qualified as a merchant navy apprentice officer. He sailed aboard a merchant ship and somewhere in the Atlantic a U-boat got it. There were no survivors. Roz never married.She went back to art school to finish her course and then applied for the Sudbury post. She was invited there for an interview, and I happened to answer the phone when she rang to tell us she had got the job. "And I have found a little house for me," she squeaked.Roz is survived by me and my wife Ann, and a nephew and two nieces.TeachingArtSecond world warPhilip Purserguardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated  companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Ryan Lochte and Missy Franklin each won two titles at the national championships in Indianapolis. The one thing that keeps Adam Scott from getting overly frustrated with his recent play is a green jacket in his closet. It could be years before scientists succeed in bringing species back from extinction, but they are thinking of ways to give new life to creatures like woolly mammoths and weird frogs. Ruling 5-4, the Supreme Court today struck down a federal law that recognized lawful marriages as only between between a man and a woman. In a separate case, the justices cleared the way for same-sex nuptials to resume in California. Connecticut guard Shabazz Napier, who led the team in scoring, will pass on the N.B.A. draft and return for his senior season. The former minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, was sentenced to eight years in prison in the second high-profile corruption conviction in a week in Greece. In his new book, “My Beloved Brontosaurus,†Brian Switek catches up on what has become of the dinosaurs you thought you knew from grade school. CAIRO - Libya's oil exports have "ground  to a halt" because of the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces, and it could be months before the country's crude resurfaces on world markets, the International Energy  Agency said Tuesday. Deutsch’s “Neighbors and Strangers†show suggests paintings that are short stories, somewhat like these colorful, gloomy examples. Ilya Kovalchuk stunned the league by announcing his retirement, walking away from the nearly $77 million left on his contract with the Devils. As an antiques dealer, I am used to going through the treasures of the dead, but this time I was confronted with details that resonated with my life. In Australia, unlike in America, a successful HPV vaccination campaign has resulted in a sharp decline in genital warts and precancerous lesions among young women and men. aquaponics-4-you background colour to the logo image or its containing element in the print CSS isn’t going to help either since most browsers by default do not print backgrounds at all. If you can’t change the image used for screen so that it will look good in print as well, you need to somehow make browsers use  a different image when printing. One way of doing that is by using CSS generated content.Read full postPosted in CSS.Copyright © Roger Johansson After weeks of deadlock, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday reached an agreement to form the country’s next government, said a spokeswoman for a party involved in the talks. While researchers have studied such systems for many years, “what was missing were the methodology and algorithm,†he says — the mathematics allowing a computer to solve such path-planning riddles rigorously but quickly enough to be useful in real-world deployments. “Because ocean environments are so complex,†he says, “what was missing was the integration of ocean prediction, ocean estimation, control and optimization†for  planning paths for multiple vehicles in a constantly changing situation. That’s what MIT’s Multidisciplinary Simulation, Estimation, and Assimilation Systems (MSEAS) group, led by Lermusiaux, has now developed. The team’s simulations have successfully tested the new algorithms in models of very complex environments — including an area of the Philippines amid thousands of islands with convoluted shorelines, shallows and multiple shifting currents. They simulated a virtual fleet of 1,000 AUVs, deployed from one or more ships and seeking different targets. Adding to the complication, the system they devised can even account for “forbidden†zones that the craft must avoid and fixed obstacles that affect both the underwater craft and the flow of the  currents, and even moving obstacles, such as passing ships.Taking advantage of the “free ride†offered by the currents, the craft often follow startlingly indirect pathways, meandering around in loops and whorls that sometimes resemble a random walk. That’s because it can be much quicker to drift with a current and then double back than to try to cut straight across, fighting the flow the whole time. In other cases, the AUV may find a quicker or more energy-efficient path by rising over, or diving under, jets, currents, eddies or other ocean features. Uncertainties in ocean predictions — and how they affect the optimal paths — can also be accounted for.In addition to finding paths that are quickest or most efficient, the system allows swarms of data-collection vehicles to collect the most useful data in the fastest time, Lermusiaux says. These  data-optimizing approaches could be useful for monitoring fisheries or for biological or environmental studies — such as a new National Science Foundation effort to characterize the New England Shelf Break, an area important to the region’s fisheries as well as for climate research.While the methodology and algorithms were developed for an underwater environment, Lermusiaux explains that similar computational systems could be used to guide automated vehicles through any kind of obstacles and flows — such as aerial vehicles coping with winds and mountains. Such systems could even potentially help miniature medical robots navigate through the circulatory system, he says.The algorithm allows for real-time control and adjustments — such as to track a plume of pollution to its source, or to determine how it is spreading. The system can also incorporate obstacle-avoidance functions to protect the AUVs.The team included mechanical engineering graduate students Tapovan Lolla and Mattheus Ueckermann SM ’09, Konuralp Yigit SM ’11, and research scientists Patrick Haley and Wayne Leslie. The work was funded by the Office of Naval Research and by the MIT Sea Grant College Program.Glen Gawarkiewicz, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in thus research, says, “This work is significant. It brings rigor to the difficult problem of designing sampling patterns for autonomous vehicles. As the capabilities and the numbers of autonomous vehicles increase, this methodology will be an important tool in oceanography and other |
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