Headline, October08, 2013

^^^ !!! *** ELECTIONEE​RING 

& TECHNOLOGY : 

HIP -HELP- HORRAY *** !!! ^^^

!WOW! : The World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless , owned by all the students of the world, with one  -share-peace-piece- for each and every student,  would soon be announcing the warm ups of its.

Worldwide Elections to elect  ''Students Leaders''  to their Honours. 

This then is first Arrow across your bow!.

Grassroots event and more  -and details on it, in later posts that will soon follow. In the meantime, and for now, let me give you a primer sweep on abstractions and visualization  to get your imagination soaring.

President Barack Obama's  Arlington, Va., campaign office looked a lot like a kindergarten classroom, with butcher paper, tempera paint and colored marker.

 But one Saturday morning, in 2012, Student  Ian Redman, a 19 year old field organizer wearing Converse high-tops patterned after the American flag, sat there glimpsing the future of politics in his hand.

''This is what is really cool,'' said the Wisconsin native to a handful of volunteers around him, who all looked down at their smart phones.

The volunteers tapped along on their individual screens, exploring deeper into the electioneering app that the Obama Campaign had released that August. 

Tap one button and there are forms to register voters, automatically tailored to the precinct that the phone and its users are in.

Tap another and there is a way for donors to give money using the device. Tap a third and there are locally tailored factoids,  Twitter messages and other social-media links that can easily be shared with friends.

Tap a fourth and suddenly election workers are looking at a Google map of the neighborhood around them, with a little blue flag at each house where the Obama Campaign wants a door knocked. 

Another tap produces sample scripts for approaching voters, complete with first names for residents of the flagged houses.

''If a volunteer is hanging out on a Saturday and they want to go canvassing but they are not really sure where to go canvassing,'' Redman explained, ''they can click  '' Load households in this area' and it pulls a list from their general radius.''

Just as important as the fieldwork it facilitates, the app helps the campaign build and refine its most valuable asset : its database. 

All the information helping canvassers is tied in real time to the campaign's main voter list, ''Vote Builder'' , so no two people are sent to the same address.

The phones prompt volunteers to report back to the main database how the door knock went, recording each household as committed voter, an undecided one or a foe of the President, so future communications like direct mail can be targeted.

Not so long ago, when Obama mounted what was a cutting edge campaign, the U.S. was living in another technological age. Twitter was a geek's pastime. Facebook was used by fewer than 40 million Americans, compared with over 180 million plus today. Smart phones were still largely a professional luxury.

But in the later cycle, virtually every American voter not only had a phone but also increasingly used it to go online. And with this transformation, came the political shift, that was very very huge. 

''It's not a one-trick pony anymore. It's a Swiss Army Knife,'' says Peter Pasi, a Republican Digital Consultant who worked most recently for Rick Santorum's presidential campaign. '' Everything you want to do online you can do mobile.''  .   

The environment soon produced a blizzard of innovations, many of which got tested for the first time in President Obama's  last campaign. Obama camp soon and then, deployed a new program Quick Donate, that allowed people to give repeat donations by simply sending the number of dollars by text messages.

In no time, the Federal Election Commission went on track to allow cell phone carriers to serve as middlemen for low-dollar donations, eliminating the need to enter credit-card information even for the first donation.

The Post continues:

With respectful dedication to the march of Democracy, Liberty and Freedom.

With warm and respectful dedication to President Barack Obama. 

See Ya, Sir, on the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless :!The LightBox !

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless

LA students get iPads, crack firewall, play games

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Education officials in the nation's second-largest school district are working to reboot a $1 billion plan to put an iPad in the hands of each of their 650,000 students after an embarrassing glitch emerged when the first round of tablets went out.

Instead of solving math problems or doing English homework, as administrators envisioned, more than 300 Los Angeles Unified School District students promptly cracked the security settings and started tweeting, posting to Facebook and playing video games.

"'Temple Run.' 'Subway Surfing.' Oh, and some car racing game I can't remember the name of," said freshman Stephany Romero, laughing as she described the games she saw fellow Roosevelt High School students playing in class last week.

That incident, and related problems, had both critics and supporters questioning this week whether LAUSD officials were being hasty or overreaching in their attempt to distribute an iPad to every student and teacher at the district's more than 1,000 campuses by next year.

"It doesn't seem like there was much planning that went into this strategy," said Renee Hobbs, director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. "That's where the debacle began."

It's crucial, she said, to spend extensive time drawing students into a discussion on using iPads responsibly before handing them out. And, of course, installing a firewall that can't be easily breached.

At Roosevelt High, it was the unanimous opinion of more than a dozen students that the school district's security setup was so weak that even the most tech-challenged parent could have gotten past it.

"It was so easy!" said freshman Carlos Espinoza.

He explained that all one needed to do was access the tablet's settings, delete the profile established by the school district and set up an Internet connection. He did it, he said, because he wanted to go on Facebook.

"They kind of should have known this would happen," said Espinoza's friend Maria Aguilera.

"We're high school students after all. I mean, come on," she added.

As word spread, with the speed of a microprocessor, that anyone could crack the firewall, officials quickly confiscated the devices and put a freeze on using them off campus. In the meantime, they promised to improve the security settings.

When they started distributing the iPads at 47 district schools in August, administrators touted the move as a means of leveling the academic playing field in a public school system where 80 percent of the students come from low-income families.

Now, they said, everyone would have equal access to the most cutting-edge educational software programs, not just the children of parents with deep pockets.

But after the first shot in that digital revolution led to a flood of tweets, other concerns arose.

Among them:

— Who pays if a kid drops one of these $678 gadgets into a toilet or leaves it on a bus?

— Is it realistic to tell a student she can use it to do her homework, then not allow the device to connect to the Internet from home? (Schools will be wired.)

— And since the tablet without Web access is only as good as the educational software placed on it, how good is that software?

A parent, Scott Folsom, said he heard from one source that families would have to pay for broken iPads and from another that the school would.

District officials have said there was confusion over that issue but that it's been decided schools will cover the cost of an iPad accidentally broken, lost or stolen, while families are on the hook for one negligently damaged.

Of more serious concern to Folsom is the software. He sampled one of the new iPads, he said, and found no program to adequately support English-as-a-second-language students. That would seemingly be crucial for a district whose students are 73 percent Hispanic and where only 14 percent of English learners can speak the language fluently, according to a 2011 Department of Education study.

As a parent representative to the district's bond oversight committee, Folsom voted to recommend spending $30 million last June to buy the first batch of iPads. He says he still supports the program but worries that maybe educators are trying to implement it too quickly.

"This is the future," he said. "But whether LAUSD is stepping too quickly into the future — based on the fact that it's so big, and we seem to be in such a hurry — those are questions to consider."

Duke honors first African-American students

DURHAM (WTVD) -- Duke University celebrated five trailblazers who changed the course of the school's history Saturday.

Fifty years ago, they became Duke's first African-American undergraduate students, and on Saturday, a special town hall meeting was held to honor them.

The town hall meeting commemorated the integration of Duke University in 1963 and gave past and present students a chance to hear about a campus without racial diversity.

"For many years, Duke was a school that did not admit black students, did not recruit black faculty. It had black workers but did not open its more prestigious ranks to black people," said Duke University President Richard Brodhead.

Half a century later, those restrictions are a memory.

Pioneers who broke Duke's color line talked about support they found from the community in the early years of social change at the university.

"People on the ground in Durham, people who worked on the campus, who were just like the people who raised us at home, took us in, embraced us and prayed for us. And there's a whole list of those names," said Reverend Dr. William Turner, Class of 1970.

"We got the signal from the cafeteria workers, from the maids at the time. We did have maids, which was unusual for us! But always silently encouraging us, and not so silently, to be and to do, and you can and you will," added Nathaniel "Nat" White, Class of 1967.

Those five students paved the way for all African-Americans and can now provide inspiration for today's students earning degrees at Duke. It is still a tough and competitive university, but it is now open to all who have what it takes to make it there.

Oceans face 'deadly trio' of threats, study says

OSLO (Reuters) - The world's oceans are under greater threat than previously believed from a "deadly trio" of global warming, declining oxygen levels and acidification, an international study said on Thursday.

The oceans have continued to warm, pushing many commercial fish stocks towards the poles and raising the risk of extinction for some marine species, despite a slower pace of temperature rises in the atmosphere this century, it said.

"Risks to the ocean and the ecosystems it supports have been significantly underestimated," according to the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), a non-governmental group of leading scientists.

"The scale and rate of the present day carbon perturbation, and resulting ocean acidification, is unprecedented in Earth's known history," according to the report, made with the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The oceans are warming because of heat from a build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Fertilizers and sewage that wash into the oceans can cause blooms of algae that reduce oxygen levels in the waters. And carbon dioxide in the air can form a weak acid when it reacts with sea water.

"The ‘deadly trio' of ... acidification, warming and deoxygenation is seriously affecting how productive and efficient the ocean is," the study said.

Alex Rogers of Oxford University, scientific director of IPSO, told Reuters scientists were finding that threats to the oceans, from the impacts of carbon to over-fishing, were compounding one another.

"We are seeing impacts throughout the world," he said.

EXTINCTIONS:
Current conditions in the oceans were similar to those 55 million years ago, known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, that led to wide extinctions. And the current pace of change was much faster and meant greater stresses, Rogers said.

Acidification, for instance, threatens marine organisms that use calcium carbonate to build their skeletons - such as reef-forming corals, crabs, oysters and some plankton vital to marine food webs.

Corals might cease to grow if temperatures rose by 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) and start to dissolve at 3 degrees (5.4F), the study said.

Scientists said the findings added urgency to a plan by almost 200 governments to work out a deal by the end of 2015 to limit a rise in average world temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6F) above pre-industrial times.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 degree Celsius (1.4F). The report also urged tougher management of fish stocks including a ban on destructive bottom trawlers and granting more power to local communities in developing nations to set quotas.

Last week, a report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) raised the probability that mankind was the culprit for most global warming to 95 percent, from 90 in a report in 2007.

The Global Ocean Commission, a group of politicians working to advise governments, urged stronger action.

"If the IPCC report was a wake-up call on climate change, IPSO is a deafening alarm bell on humanity's wider impacts on the global ocean," said Trevor Manuel, co-chair of the Commission and minister in the South African Presidency.

Once 'Extinct' Pinocchio Lizard Pokes His Nose Out

This ain't no lie: The Pinocchio lizard was thought to be extinct for 50 years, but has been rediscovered in the cloud forests of Ecuador.

After searching for the long-nosed animal for three years, a team of photographers and researchers found the lizard recently in a stretch of pristine cloud forest in the northwest part of the country, said Alejandro Arteaga, a co-founder of the educational and ecotourism company Tropical Herping, which conducted the search for the lizard.

Also called the Pinocchio anole (an anole is a type of lizard), the animal is named after a certain dishonest wooden puppet and was first discovered in 1953, Arteaga said. But wasn't seen between the 1960s and 2005, when an ornithologist saw one crossing a road in the same remote area in northwest Ecuador. This is only the third time scientists have spotted it since 2005, Arteaga added.  [Album: Bizarre Frogs, Lizards and Salamanders]

Scientists typically look for lizards at night when most of the animals sleep, and when their coloring becomes paler and they are less likely to scurry away, Arteaga told LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet. One of his colleagues found a single male Pinocchio anole clinging to a branch over a stream in January. The team then kept it overnight before photographing it in the morning in its natural habitat.

"After looking for so long … It was very thrilling to find this strange lizard," Arteaga said. The team then let the animal go.

Arteaga and his colleagues were searching for the Pinocchio anole because it was the last lizard they needed to complete their book, "The Amphibians and Reptiles of Mindo," a rural region a two-hour drive north of Quito, Ecuador's capital. The book was published this summer.

Pinocchio anoles (Anolis proboscis) are an endangered species and have been found in only four locations, mostly along a single stretch of road, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global environmental group. They have one of the smallest ranges of any lizard in the world, Arteaga said.

The lizard's noselike appendage is a sexually selected trait that likely serves no functional purpose but to advertise a male's good genes; females of the species have no such "noses." Other examples of sexually selected traits include the peacock's brilliant tail-feathers. Extensive research has shown that these traits communicate to the opposite sex that the animals are fit and will sire high-quality offspring.

Halle Berry Welcomes Baby Boy

It's a boy for Halle Berry and her husband, actor Olivier Martinez!

The 47-year-old actress and her French husband, also 47, welcomed a son in Los Angeles Saturday, Berry's publicist Meredith O'Sullivan Wasson told The Associated Press.

Berry broke the news in April that she was unexpectedly expecting.

"This has been the biggest surprise of my life, to tell you the truth," she told CNN. "Thought I was kind of past the point where this could be a reality for me. So it's been a big surprise and the most wonderful."

Martinez revealed the news that they were expecting a boy in June at the Champs-Elysees Film Festival, where he told People magazine, "My son will be an American. But I remain French."

The couple confirmed their engagement last March and recently tied the knot in France's Burgundy region in July during an intimate ceremony attended by 60 guests.

Berry, who had been married twice before, once vowed never to do it again.
"The traditional form of marriage is not for me," she said.

This is the first child for the couple. Berry has a 5-year-old daughter, Nahla, from her previous relationship with model Gabriel Aubry.

School tells cop not to wear uniform to pick up his own kids

An elementary school principal in Mesa, Ariz. has asked a police officer not to wear his police uniform or his gun when he picks up his daughter at school, reports local Fox affiliate KSAZ.

The reason: it’s just too scary for some parents because the officer was — gasp! — carrying a gun.

The Daily Caller is not making this up.

The cop, SWAT officer Scott Urkov, is a police officer in Coolidge, about 40 miles from the Mesa. His daughter attends Entz Elementary School in the Phoenix suburb.

“One of our parents at the elementary school is a SWAT officer and he dropped his children off at school one day in full uniform, fully armed,” explained Mesa Unified School District spokeswoman Helen Hollands.

Later, the Entz Elementary principal contacted Urkov and requested that he never again come to school in uniform.

He responded by venting on Facebook:
“Nothing like your kids school calling and asking if I could not come to pick up my daughter in uniform cause parents were concerned when their kids came home telling them there was a man at school with a gun. Are you freaking kidding me?”
Hollands defended the principal’s decision to tell the police officer not to come to school dressed as a police officer. She also offered a half-assed apology for the ages on behalf of the school district.

“We apologize that he took the discussion the wrong way perhaps,” Hollands told KSAZ. “That was not the intent of the principal to offend him.”

The school has since invited Urkov back to Entz Elementary — armed and in uniform — to speak with children at a special school assembly about the job a police officer does. School officials are calling it “a teachable moment.”

“I wouldn’t say he’s being singled out,” Hollands explained to the Fox affiliate. “I’d say he’s being appreciated for what he does.”

Urkov told the Fox affiliate that he has no further comment on the story because his superiors at the Coolidge Police Department told him to “just let it be.”