The American Federation of Government Employees is launching a nationwide advertising campaign this weekend calling out Republican lawmakers for supporting a plan to pay for the payroll tax relief extension by slashing federal employee wages.

The new ads feature three federal employees from AFGE Locals representing Veterans Affairs nurses, Defense Department workers and federal corrections officers. Each of the employees asks GOP lawmakers to “explain it to me” how cutting federal pay and benefits helps put Americans back to work.

“I earn less than $ 45,000 a year. Explain it to me, GOP, how cutting my pay creates jobs,” says Paul Hoban of AFGE Local 1647, which represents employees at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

“Twelve percent of the salary I earn caring for veterans goes to my retirement. Explain it to me, GOP, how cutting my retirement puts people to work.” – Teresa Capecchi AFGE Local 3669,

“I pay more than $ 9,000 a year for family health insurance. Explain it to me, GOP, how cutting my take-home pay lowers unemployment.“- Eric Young AFGE Local 501

The 30-second television ad will premiere in the Washington area during the Sunday morning talk shows on ABC and CBS and will air Monday and Tuesday on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. A full-page print ad will run in Monday’s Politico newspaper, which is distributed to every lawmaker on Capitol Hill. Versions of both ads also are being sent to AFGE locals to run in their local communities.

Republicans in Congress have proposed paying for the payroll tax relief extension by freezing federal employee salaries for another year.

“Federal employees already have given up their pay raises for two years in a row and many are in danger of losing their jobs because of drastic agency downsizing efforts,” AFGE National President John Gage said. “Freezing their wages for another year adds insult to injury and does nothing to get Americans back to work.”

Hundreds of AFGE members from every major federal agency and representing all 50 states will be in Washington for AFGE’s annual Legislative and Grassroots Mobilization Conference Feb. 12-15. Members will be meeting with their Congressional representatives during the week to address the attacks on federal employees’ pay, pensions and benefits.

The new ads build on the “Explain it to me, GOP” campaign that AFGE launched in December. A special website, www.ExplainItToMeGOP.org, has been created to share information regarding the issue. Copies of the ad can be viewed on this website.

The consensus was that modifying the EMV chip will be the foundation necessary to move to the next level of secure and convenient payments, whether in the form of contact, contactless and/or mobile.

The Summit is being held through February 10th at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“The answer is simple: it’s time.” – Ed McLaughlin chief emerging payments officer MasterCard Worldwide

MasterCard recently revealed its road map, which includes the path for migration from magnetic stripe to EMV technology. Referring to EMV as “the foundation of the future of payments,” McLaughlin detailed MasterCard’s plans to encourage the rapid adoption of more secure contact and contactless chip cards by giving more benefits to merchants that invest in secure, dynamic authentication methods.

Visa’s Jennifer Fischer, head of U.S. payment system risk, agreed. She stressed that EMV’s dynamic authentication is critical for a more secure payments industry, maintaining that it will lay the groundwork for contact, contactless and mobile EMV under the same infrastructure. Visa guidelines promote an “always online” strategy that does not mandate offline authentication with PIN. Issuers have flexibility to choose cardholder verification options, whether it is online and/or offline PIN; signature; or no verification method.

The differing mobile wallet solutions emerging in the marketplace was a hot topic yesterday, with presenters commenting on consumers’ increasing use of mobile phones to compare prices, browse, and purchase. George Peabody, director of Mercator Advisory Group’s Emerging Technologies Advisory Service, called these consumers “weaponized shoppers.” Both MasterCard and Visa included mobile in their vision of the future of U.S. payments, while Isis and PayPal took the floor to talk commerce.

Isis director of sales Jim Stapleton announced that the company’s upcoming summer pilot in Salt Lake City will “transform the way people shop and pay.” Stapleton called the Isis mobile payment infrastructure — a joint venture formed by AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon — a “convening of the industry” that gives banks and merchants “tinker toys” to develop payment and loyalty programs for customers in the form of a mobile wallet that is “safer than your other wallet.”

Patrick Gauthier, head of PayPal’s product strategy and business operations, retail services, focused on commerce and the consumer experience in his presentation. Citing that in the last few decades payments have driven commerce, Gauthier said that at least in the next 15 years, “commerce will drive what payments need to do.” He suggested that mobile wallet solution providers should roll out infrastructures and programs with merchants’ and consumers’ wants and needs in mind, as these are the parties that are going to drive usage.

Open Transit Payments

Several large U.S. transit agencies talked about their plans to move to open fare collection systems. All were looking to “future proof” systems, and all had aggressive implementation schedules. John McGee, SEPTA’s (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) chief officer of new payment technologies talked about their recent open payment system contract award, and their goal of a future where virtual ticketing plays a major role.

The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), which recently awarded a $ 454 million contract to Cubic Transportation Systems, will skip pilots and aim for full implementation of its open payment system in the second quarter of 2014. Eric Reese, general manager of business development, said the main objective is to let consumers use the same payment mechanism across all of the CTA’s areas of service, adding, “NFC is a thought. When that time comes, we will be ready.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) of New York is ready to commit to open payments as well. Amy Linden, the MTA’s senior director for new fare payment systems, said that their Tap & Ride™ project is about consumers being able to “buy fare products anytime, anywhere, and manage accounts anytime, anywhere.” With the goal to mainstream payments and leverage existing payment technologies and networks, Linden said the MTA aims to “go live” within three years of the design notice to proceed (NTP).

The results of the 4,000-plus-participant clinical study are being presented at the 32nd annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine in Dallas on Feb. 9, 2012. The study was recently published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

In women having routine prenatal diagnosis, CMA detected additional genetic abnormalities in about 1 out of every 70 fetal samples that had a normal karyotype. When a birth defect was imaged by ultrasound, CMA found additional important genetic information in 6 percent of cases.

“These results suggest that CMA may soon replace karyotyping for prenatal testing.”  - Dr. Ronald Wapner Director Reproductive Genetics NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital

“Why would anyone want to continue to use the standard method, which gives only part of the answer?” says Dr. Wapner.

Wagner led the 34-center study funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

CMA is not routinely used for prenatal testing but has become the primary genetic test to evaluate newborns with birth defects, as well as infants and young children with developmental delays.

Dr. Wapner describes the observed difference in accuracy between the two tests this way: “With karyotyping, we can see only when pieces of the genome of about 5 million base pairs are missing from a chromosome. With CMA, we can see missing pieces of fewer than 100,000 base pairs.”

CMA is based on a method that determines whether the right amount of genetic material is present at numerous locations in the fetus’ genome.

This study was the first to examine the two methods in a blinded head-to-head comparison. Fetal samples were collected from the amniotic fluid or placenta of 4,450 participants. “These were women who were seeking prenatal testing for the usual reasons, which could be age, increased risk of inheritable disease, or a structural abnormality in the fetus,” Dr. Wapner says.

Each participant’s sample was split and sent, in a blinded fashion, to one of four laboratories that perform CMA – NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, Emory University, Baylor College of Medicine or Signature Genetics. The other portion of the sample was sent to Genzyme Genetics for standard karyotyping.

Results show that CMA and karyotyping were equally effective at identifying chromosomal abnormalities such as the duplicate chromosomes that cause Down syndrome and Trisomy 18. But CMA provided significantly more clinically relevant information in two situations.

“In 6 percent of the cases where there’s a structural abnormality of the fetus but karyotyping is normal, CMA will provide additional significant information,” Dr. Wapner says. “And in about 1.7 percent of cases where the procedure was done because of the mother’s age or similar concerns and the chromosomes were normal, CMA reveals additional information of concern.”

Both tests offer information on conditions that can be life-threatening to a newborn baby or that can signal a possible health threat that might be treatable. “We are looking for the same thing in both tests,” Dr. Wapner says. “But we find more abnormalities with CMA.”

CMA can identify at least 150 known conditions and tell us exactly what the problem is and what it means for a child. Although karyotyping provides the same kind of information, CMA will likely provide more information on other potential disorders that might not otherwise be picked up such as intellectual disability or autism.

“It does not always mean that a child will necessarily develop these disorders, because many are due to multiple influences,” Dr. Wapner says. “But it will help parents because they can be on the lookout for a particular disorder and have a treatment plan in place. I believe it is important to give parents as much information as they need about their child.”

“Wolfram|Alpha Pro is a major step forward for Wolfram|Alpha and the concept of computational knowledge.” – Stephen Wolfram Founder & CEO of Wolfram Alpha

“It is the single most important development for Wolfram|Alpha since the original website launched in 2009.” he announced

Wolfram|Alpha Pro emphasizes closer interaction between the user and the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine. A key feature is the ability to upload virtually any common kind of file or data for automatic analysis. Raw tabular data, images, audio, XML, and dozens of specialized scientific, medical, and mathematical formats are among the more than 60 formats currently supported by Wolfram|Alpha Pro.

“Our goal is to do what a top data scientist would do if given the user’s data — but to do it automatically in just a few seconds,” Wolfram added.

It also adds richer output to Wolfram|Alpha, automatically generating CDF (Computable Document Format) with interactive controls for animation and manipulation. In addition, users of Wolfram|Alpha Pro gain options for customizing graphical and tabular output for presentations and other purposes, and for downloading raw generated data in more than 60 formats.

Itincludes a host of other convenient new features, such as history, favorites, display options, whole-page download, and an on-screen keyboard for special technical symbols.

Free trial access to Wolfram|Alpha Pro is available immediately, with subscriptions starting at an introductory price of $ 4.99 per month, or $ 2.99 per month for students. Educational and site pricing are also available. The “standard” Wolfram|Alpha will remain free of charge to everyone, but only subscribers will have access to new Pro-level features and functionality.

More information is available at www.wolframalpha.com/pro.

However, they both affect a person’s skin, can be quite difficult to treat or remove and, now, dermatologists are discovering new laser therapies which enhance treatment for both conditions.

“Dermatologists are now finding that new laser therapies can significantly improve melasma and even remove tattoos more safely and effectively than laser procedures we have used in the past.” – Arielle N.B. Kauvar Clinical Professor Dermatology  New York University School of Medicine

Combination Laser Therapy Targets Melasma

Melasma is caused by an overproduction of melanin, a natural substance in the body that gives skin its color and can lead to dark patches on the face. While melasma may occur in anyone, the condition most commonly affects women with darker Mediterranean skin, Asians and Hispanics. Dr. Kauvar explained that melasma is typically controlled with topical medications that contain ingredients to lighten the skin, such as hydroquinone or retinoids.

However, this therapy may only provide temporary improvement in more difficult cases – particularly in patients with mixed-type melasma. In this type of melasma, excess pigment is produced in both the epidermis and dermis – the upper and lower levels of the skin. While high-energy lasers for pigment removal and laser resurfacing have been investigated to treat this type of melasma, Dr. Kauvar explained that the procedures were too harsh and could wound the skin, leading to increased pigment production and worsening of melasma. More recently, fractional lasers – which are less aggressive lasers – have been used, but there have been reports of an increased incidence of melasma recurring as well.

“Effective treatment of mixed-type melasma requires a very low-energy and low-impact procedure because irritation and inflammation can worsen melasma,” said Dr. Kauvar.

With the new combination therapy, the dermatologist performs a microdermabrasion immediately followed by a low-energy laser treatment with a Q-switched YAG laser. Patients then begin a topical regimen using hydroquinone and sunscreen.

In Dr. Kauvar’s study of 27 women with mixed-type melasma, 22 subjects (81 percent) experienced greater than 75 percent improvement of their melasma after an average of 2.6 laser treatments. Of those, 11 subjects (40 percent) achieved over 95 percent improvement of their melasma. In addition, she found that clearance of melasma was maintained for at least six months.

Tattoos Getting the Boot with New Laser Therapies

While lasers have been used to remove tattoos for several years, the procedure requires multiple treatment sessions (typically six to 10 treatments or more) and treatments are painful, requiring a few weeks of healing time between procedures. Dr. Kauvar noted that the process of tattoo ink removal is inefficient since every color of ink absorbs different wavelengths of light, requiring the use of multiple lasers. Some colors – such as yellow, orange, turquoise or fluorescent ones – remain more difficult to treat.

“Unfortunately, there is no ideal laser to remove all tattoo colors, but new approaches have recently been introduced that appear to produce better results with fewer treatment sessions,” said Dr. Kauvar.

These four separate treatments are administered at 20-minute intervals and have demonstrated much faster clearance of tattoo inks. Other research involves the use of the fractional ablative laser in conjunction with traditional tattoo-removal lasers to speed up clearance – resulting in as much as 50 percent tattoo ink removal in just one treatment session. In another new study, Dr. Kauvar is investigating the effectiveness of administering two treatments in one day using a combination of laser wavelengths to target different ink colors.

With this procedure, Dr. Kauvar first uses a Q-switched YAG laser on the tattoo, followed by a Q-switched alexandrite laser (which is better at treating blues and greens) 20 minutes after the first laser. Dr. Kauvar noted that initial results of this procedure have shown significant improvement in removing blue, green and black inks.

The MACH5 solution includes a combination of stream-splitting, pre-population and advanced video caching technologies to scale the use of live or on-demand internal company video, as well as external Web video, with minimal network impact.

This prevents video from saturating a company’s Wide Area Network (WAN) or Internet gateway, or crippling the performance of other business critical applications while making video available to employees throughout the company.

“Most companies want to significantly increase their use of internal video for training and communication but are limited by the capacity constraints of their existing WAN links to branch offices.” – Steve Daheb chief marketing officer and senior vice president Blue Coat Systems

“Blue Coat removes most of the network impact associated with video by fully integrating video optimization with our MACH5 WAN optimization solution to accelerate a full range of business traffic, including Web, cloud and video applications,” he explained.

Blue Coat video optimization already includes the ability to optimize Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, HTML5, QuickTime and Microsoft Windows Media. The addition of optimization for RTMPe and RTMPte encrypted Flash expands the MACH5 capabilities to optimize video used by providers for maintaining end-user digital rights management (DRM).

This is especially critical as enterprises leverage cloud-delivered video services for news and analysis related to their industries.

Rather than a third-party add-on, the video optimization capabilities provided by the MACH5 solution are an integral part of its architecture and scales to support large numbers of users. For instance, a single stream of live video from corporate headquarters can be split to serve hundreds of users in a branch office with little more impact than serving a single user.

In addition, video optimization can be conducted simultaneously with acceleration of enterprise applications, such as SharePoint or SAP.

Blue Coat takes a comprehensive approach to WAN optimization with its MACH5 appliances and virtual appliances by enabling businesses to better utilize the potential presented by their WAN. The MACH5 WAN Optimization solution accelerates remote branch office access to files, email, storage and enterprise applications as well as Web, cloud and video applications.

The Blue Coat approach to next generation WAN optimization can enhance branch office collaboration, improve productivity and accelerate business applications.

Patients use a remote control to gradually create a space within their chest wall for a breast implant.

Breast cancer patients, who wish to have reconstructive surgery after mastectomy, used to undergo a process involving injections of saline to gradually expand skin and muscle of their chest. The process can be painful and may require frequent doctor’s visits over the course of four to six months or longer.

“Unfortunately, less than half of all women who have mastectomies in the United States undergo reconstructive surgery. One major factor in this decision may be limitations of the traditional approaches.” – Dr Jeffrey Ascherman Site Chief Division Plastic Surgery Columbia University Medical Center

The new approach is designed to promote a higher quality of life for patients dealing with cancer recovery. Once a small expander device is implanted in the patient’s chest, she can control the process in the comfort of her home – without any injections and with fewer doctor’s visits. At a moment of the patient’s choosing, a remote control is used to activate the device and release a small amount of compressed carbon dioxide.

“The whole process is also a lot quicker,” says Ascherman.

The procedure is offered as part of an ongoing clinical trial designed to compare the outcomes of the traditional saline expansion method with the investigational, remote-controlled tissue expander. NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia was the first center in the U.S. to receive Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for a trial of the new technique, the first center in the U.S. to begin using the device, and it is currently the only hospital in the Eastern U.S. to be actively participating in the trial.

Study funding is provided by AirXpanders Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.

Eligible patients include non-obese women from 18 to 65 years of age who do not smoke, have not had previous tissue expansion or radiation therapy, and who are opting for breast reconstruction with tissue expansion after mastectomy. For more information about the trial, patients can contact Dr. Ascherman at jaa7@columbia.edu or (212) 305-9612.
Columbia University Medical Center

Textbook prices have increased considerably over the last four years, at four times the rate of inflation. The average annual cost for college textbooks is now $ 1,260. At California’s community colleges, attended by more than 2.8 million students, textbook costs make up 75 percent of total student expenditures. On average, publishers release a new edition every three years, with each one costing 12 percent more than the last.

State Auditor Elaine Howle will present an audit report on the affordability of college textbooks, followed by testimony from representatives of California’s three public systems of higher education, Academic Senate presidents, Cal PIRG, publishers and non-profit foundations.

“We want to explore what California’s three public higher education systems have done to help students with these unmanageable book costs since the report was issued 900 days ago,” said Lara. “The state auditor’s report strongly suggested new education technology solutions as a way to lower the cost, and we are hitting the ‘refresh button’ to let students know we have not forgotten about them.”

Non-profit 20 Million Minds Foundation has been working on making college more affordable by lowering the cost of textbooks and recently unveiled an “open source” Collaborative Statistics e-textbook, available at Kno.com, which is free and available to professors to adopt, providing students with an interactive experience using videos, applets, graphics, exercises and a variety of navigation and enhancement features.

“California can do better by offering our students quality, free and open access to college textbooks.” – Dean Florez President 20 Million Minds Foundation and past Senate Majority Leader California

“It is unacceptable that students are dropping out of class because they can’t afford a textbook. This hearing comes at a time when students are wondering whether legislators are even aware of the high costs of textbooks. It is a hearing long overdue,” he explained.

The State Auditor’s report can be found at: http://www.bsa.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2007-116.pdf.

The bones play a key role in a world-first study, led by University of Adelaide researchers, which analyses special genetic modifications that turn genes on and off, without altering the DNA sequence itself. These ‘epigenetic’ changes can occur rapidly between generations – without requiring the time for standard evolutionary processes.

Such epigenetic modifications could explain how animal species are able to respond to rapid climate change.

In a collaboration between the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and Sydney’s Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, researchers have shown that it is possible to accurately measure epigenetic modifications in extinct animals and populations.

The team of researchers measured epigenetic modifications in 30,000-year-old permafrost bones from the Yukon region in Canada, and compared them to those in modern-day cattle, and a 30-year-old mummified cow from New Zealand.

“Epigenetics is challenging some of our standard views of evolutionary adaptation, and the way we think about how animals use and inherit their DNA. In theory, such systems would be invaluable for a wide range of rapid evolutionary adaptation but it has not been possible to measure how or whether they are used in nature, or over evolutionary timescales.” -  Alan Cooper Project leader  and Director of ACAD

Epigenetics specialist and co-investigator Dr Catherine Suter, from the Victor Chang Institute, has been studying the role of epigenetics in adaptation in laboratory animals. She jumped at the chance to test epigenetic methods in ancient DNA, which had never previously been attempted.

“This is the first step towards testing the idea that epigenetics has driven evolution in natural populations,” Suter says.

“The climate record shows that very rapid change has been a persistent feature of the recent past, and organisms would need to adapt to these changes in their environment equally quickly. Standard mutation and selection processes are likely to be too slow in many of these situations,” Cooper added.

“Standard genetic tests do not detect epigenetic changes, because the actual DNA sequence is the same.” – Bastien Llamas Lead Author and Senior Researcher Australian Research Council

“There is growing interest in the potential evolutionary role of epigenetic changes, but to truly demonstrate this will require studies of past populations as they experience major environmental changes,” he says.

This work has been published in the online peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.

Source: NewsWise

In a world obsessed with the constant availability of new information, PollTell.com offers an accurate real-time polling statistics available in the United States.

Catering to the election newbie and political junkie alike, PollTell has revolutionized the polling world. The site, which incorporates data driven from automated phone surveys, features up-to-date poll information for every region of the United States from the swing-vote state of Florida to the “red”-peppered state of Ohio.

Rather than waiting for major news networks to release the latest poll information, people can visit PollTell’s website, which populates data in real-time, meaning that as the results come through the system they are immediately published onto the site.

“As technology advances and the need for information becomes more urgent, why should 24 hours be the norm for pollsters to publish their results?” – Scott Broomfield PollTell CEO

Social media enthusiasts addicted to the live feeds provided by social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter will find a thrill in PollTell’s real-time data software.

Whereas typical pollsters poll an average of 2,000 individuals a day, PollTell seeks to obtain the most accurate vote possible by polling hundreds of thousands of individuals each day.

“We poll an average of 250,000 people in each poll and publish the results in real-time on our site,” said Broomfield.

“Every state and nearly every city in America is polled to ensure precision. Our results are more accurate than other pollsters because of the sheer volume of people that we poll.”

Although this state-of-the-art technology immensely benefits the general public, it also provides a significant advantage to those on the campaign trail by offering data-specific statistics to candidates. The results gathered by PollTell are indicative of the sentiments of their constituents, allowing candidates to strategize their campaign efforts according to polling changes.

Visitors of PollTell’s interactive site are able to maneuver through the site with the aid of color-coded graphs depicting the results of the questions asked in the polls.

Using the site’s three-dimensional map of the United States, visitors can meander through the polling statistics of even the most recent primary. Traversing the state of Florida from the Kardashian-infested beaches of Miami to the ever-indecisive I-4 Corridor with a click of the mouse, visitors can view district-by-district voting trends.

Just as Facebook changed the culture of social interaction and Twitter eliminated the communication barrier between celebrities and fans, PollTell has revolutionized the election world, creating content from and delivering it into the hands of the American people. So whether Americans bleed red, white, or blue, PollTell will be their most reliable newsfeed for the 2012 election.