Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
JAY YAROW, Editor - Business Insider
Stephan: This will be a huge deal. How many channels that you never look at are the package you pay for? Would you sign up for packet where only the channels you want are included, and you could expand or contract your subscription a channel at a time? I certainly would.
If this happens, information and entertainment production and distribution will undergo a complete economic transformation. This is a whole new model, as this report describes. I think it is a good one. This is going to further the trend of non-corporate media.
Intel is reportedly on the cusp of delivering something that consumers around the world have been wanting for a long, long time.
Kelly Clay at Forbes reports Intel is going to blow up the cable industry with its own set-top box and an unbundled cable service.
Clay says Intel is planning to deliver cable content to any device with an Internet connection. And instead of having to pay $80 a month for two hundred channels you don’t want, you’ll be able to subscribe to specific channels of your choosing.
Here’s the key paragraph:
This set-top box, said by industry insiders to be available to a limited beta of customers in March, will offer cable channels delivered ‘over the top
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
Stephan: I have held this story for several days, waiting for a correction or fact based push back. No correction has been published, and no denial has been issued. The piece is more polemic than I would like, but its facts are correct, and little noted.
The business about hearing is genuine. When I was a target shooter in my teens I damaged my high frequency hearing. I got most of it back thanks to acupuncture, after I discovered Holistic healthcare. So I know this is a real issue. Better ear protection for sure. One possibility might be smaller loads of powder in the cartridge, depending on purpose. But the idea of using noise as a justification for legalizing silencers is really quite mad, in my opinion. Just think about what might happen if silencers were generally available.
A gruesome holiday season exercise: Think of some firearms and accessories that might have added to the body counts of Aurora and Newtown. More starkly, imagine the means by which coming Auroras and Newtowns will be made more deadly.
The exercise starts with a militarized baseline, as both shooters unloaded designed-for-damage rounds from high-capacity magazines loaded into assault rifles. Improving their killing efficiency would require one of two things: the ability to shoot more bullets faster, or more time. A fully automatic machine gun would provide the first. More minutes to hunt, meanwhile, might be gained by employing a noise suppressor, those metallic tubes better known as silencers. By muffling the noise generated with every shot by sonic booms and gas release, a silencer would provide a new degree of intimacy for public mass murder, delaying by crucial seconds or minutes the moment when someone calls the police after overhearing strange bangs coming from Theater 4 or Classroom D. The same qualities that make silencers the accessory of choice for targeted assassination offer advantages to the armed psychopath set on indiscriminate mass murder.
It should surprise no one that the NRA has recently thrown its weight behind an industry campaign to deregulate […]
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Thursday, January 3rd, 2013
MOLLY MCELROY, - University of Washington
Stephan: This report is part of the reason that it is in the national interest to assure that pregnant women get decent prenatal care. What happens in the nine months of gestation, when costs to help are relatively small, is well worth the cost and effort. The alternative later in the life is far more expensive and painful.
Babies only hours old are able to differentiate between sounds from their native language and a foreign language, scientists have discovered. The study indicates that babies begin absorbing language while still in the womb, earlier than previously thought.
Sensory and brain mechanisms for hearing are developed at 30 weeks of gestational age, and the new study shows that unborn babies are listening to their mothers talk during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy and at birth can demonstrate what they’ve heard.
‘The mother has first dibs on influencing the child’s brain,’ said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. ‘The vowel sounds in her speech are the loudest units and the fetus locks onto them.’
Previously, researchers had shown that newborns are born ready to learn and begin to discriminate between language sounds within the first months of life, but there was no evidence that language learning had occurred in utero.
‘This is the first study that shows fetuses learn prenatally about the particular speech sounds of a mother’s language,’ said Christine Moon, lead author and a professor of psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. ‘This study moves the measurable result […]
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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013
ARTURO GARCIA, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Here is the latest Red value state effort driven by the Theocratic Right to control women, and deprive them, particularly poor women, of decent health care. The state's social outcome measures -- from infant mortality to child abuse, to healthcare -- reflect a second world country on the skids; and based on the recent election that seems to be what the majority of Texans want.
But immigrants, both Caucasians and others, to Texas are changing this. I think Texas in the mid-term future is going to be a place of enormous political volatility as conservative Whites seek to resist the changes that these more socially progressive immigrants will precipitate.
A state judge ruled on Monday that Texas should be allowed to cut off funding to the state’s Planned Parenthood programs.
The Associated Press reported that, per the ruling of visiting Judge Gary Harger, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas will be excluded from the state’s version of the Medicaid Women’s Health Program, which is set to launch Tuesday.
‘It is shocking that once again Texas officials are letting politics jeopardize health care access for women,
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Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013
G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Correspondent - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Here is more on the shift in trends in religion in the U.S.: Churches and faiths are fading; Evangelical, Fundamentalist sects in the Blue value states are peopled by immigrants and are growing; and, people in Blue value states are tiring of hyper-politicized religious groups. In the Red states' though rigid highly politicized fundamentalism is a powerful force. And then note the quickest growing demographic is: Spiritual but not religious. All of this is adding fuel to the Great Schism Trend.
LEWISTON, MAINE — On a snowy 20-degree day in December, the visitors shiver as they move among vestiges of a long-closed Pizza Hut on this city’s struggling main street. A salad bar teeters off kilter. Dust collects on the dismantled facade of a soda dispenser. A few bolted-down tables and chairs remain – usable, but only after a good cleaning.
Yet none of this bothers the three leaders from the Auburn Seventh-day Adventist Church, who seem warmed by holy fire to carry out their task: Help transform the pizza joint into something with a bit more piety. Their church has reached capacity, having doubled attendance in the past year. So they’ve crossed the Androscoggin River to plant a second church, the Ark, in the heart of one of the nation’s least religious states.
This won’t be worship as usual. Starting early in the new year, a smorgasbord of community services will be served where deep-dish pepperoni used to be the lure. Vegetarian cooking classes and health seminars, hydrotherapy treatments and massage instruction, marriage classes and smoking-cessation clinics – all will be free of charge and led by volunteers. A vegan restaurant will open to bring in revenue. Worship services will begin next […]
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