Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/298169479?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Exxon Mobil must pay $236M in NH pollution case
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) -- Exxon Mobil Corp. was found liable Tuesday in a long-running lawsuit over groundwater contamination caused by the gasoline additive MTBE, and the jury ordered the oil giant to pay $236 million to New Hampshire to clean it up.
The jurors reached their verdicts in less than 90 minutes, after sitting through nearly three months of testimony in the longest state trial in New Hampshire history.
The panel awarded the state the $236 million it was seeking to monitor and remediate groundwater contaminated by MTBE. The chemical was added to gasoline to reduce smog but was found to travel farther and faster in groundwater than gasoline without the additive.
"We appreciate the jurors' service during this long trial, but erroneous rulings prevented them from hearing all the evidence and deprived us of a fair trial," said Exxon Mobil lawyer David Lender.
Jurors found that Exxon Mobil was negligent in adding MTBE to its gasoline and that it was a defective product. They also found Exxon Mobil liable for failing to warn distributors and consumers about its contaminating characteristics.
The jury determined that the hazards of using MTBE gasoline were not obvious to state officials, who opted into the reformulated gasoline program in 1991 to help reduce smog in the state's four southernmost counties.
Lawyers for Exxon Mobil argued the company used MTBE to meet federal Clean Air Act mandates to reduce air pollution and should not be held liable for sites contaminated by unnamed third parties, such as junk yard owners and independent gas station owners who allowed gas containing MTBE to get into the ground.
The state says more than 600 wells in New Hampshire are known to be contaminated with MTBE and an expert witness estimated the number could exceed 5,000.
Jurors had more than 400 exhibits to sift through, including memos and reports dating back decades. Those memos included some dating back to 1984 in which Exxon Mobil researchers warned against using MTBE gasoline.
Jessica Grant, representing the state, said they were pleased the jury held Exxon Mobil accountable for widespread ground water contamination.
"The finding of Exxon's negligence is particularly important because it shows the jury understood that this problem could have been avoided," she said.
Jurors, via court personnel, said they did not want to talk to the media about their verdict.
Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil was the sole remaining defendant of the 26 the state sued in 2003. Citgo was a co-defendant when the trial began in January, but it began settlement negotiations with the state and withdrew from the trial. Citgo ultimately settled for $16 million, bringing the total the state has collected in MTBE settlement money to $136 million.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/exxon-mobil-must-pay-236m-172750946.html
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Oculus Rift Teardown Reveals The Secrets Of On-Your-Face 3D Gaming
I always wanted but never got a Virtual Boy, but I'm glad I waited since the Oculus Rift looks like a much better goggle-based gaming platform. The gadget got the teardown treatment over at iFixit today, thanks to a developer edition secured by the site. The Rift was remarkably easy to pull apart, earning it a very high repairability score. Rare for an iFixit teardown, the Oculus Rift one also includes some hands-on gameplay before the team pops the case.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/1IeSveo87SQ/
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New guidelines for writing abstracts will help authors summarise their research
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Public release date: 9-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Fiona Godwin
fgodwin@plos.org
01-223-442-834
Public Library of Science
New guidelines for writing abstracts will help authors summarise their research
A new extension to the PRISMA guideline on reporting systemic reviews and meta-analyses (types of studies that analyse information from many studies) will help authors to give a more robust summary (abstract) of their study and is detailed by an international group of researchers in this week's PLOS Medicine.
These guidelines for abstracts of systemic reviews and meta-analyses are important, as the abstract is the most frequently read part of most papers and these types of studies are particularly important for influencing evidence-based research.
New guidelines are necessary as despite published guidance on writing the abstract in previous guidelines (the PRISMA Statement); evaluations show that reporting of systematic reviews in journal and conference abstracts is poor.
An international group of researchers (the PRISMA for Abstracts Group) developed the new consensus-based reporting guidelines to give authors a checklist and framework for summarising their systematic review into the essentials for an abstract that will meet the needs of many readers.
The authors say: "Abstracts should not replace full articles in informing decision making, but for time-pressed readers and those with limited access to full text reports, the abstract must stand alone in presenting a clear and truthful account of the research."
They continue: "The PRISMA for Abstracts checklist will guide authors in presenting an abstract that facilitates a quick assessment of review validity, an explicit summary of results, facilitates pre-publication or conference selection peer review, and enables efficient perusal of electronic search results."
###
Funding: This research was supported (in part) by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Library of Medicine). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: TL is employed by The Cochrane Collaboration. TL is an editor (unpaid) for the Cochrane Airways Group. The authors have declared that no other competing interests exist.
Citation: Beller EM, Glasziou PP, Altman DG, Hopewell S, Bastian H, et al. (2013) PRISMA for Abstracts: Reporting Systematic Reviews in Journal and Conference Abstracts. PLoS Med 10(4): e1001419. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001419
IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001419
Contact:
Elaine Beller
Associate Professor
Bond University
Centre for Research in Evidence-Based Practice
University Drive
Robina, QLD 4229
AUSTRALIA
+61755955523
ebeller@bond.edu.au
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
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.
Public release date: 9-Apr-2013[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Fiona Godwin
fgodwin@plos.org
01-223-442-834
Public Library of Science
New guidelines for writing abstracts will help authors summarise their research
A new extension to the PRISMA guideline on reporting systemic reviews and meta-analyses (types of studies that analyse information from many studies) will help authors to give a more robust summary (abstract) of their study and is detailed by an international group of researchers in this week's PLOS Medicine.
These guidelines for abstracts of systemic reviews and meta-analyses are important, as the abstract is the most frequently read part of most papers and these types of studies are particularly important for influencing evidence-based research.
New guidelines are necessary as despite published guidance on writing the abstract in previous guidelines (the PRISMA Statement); evaluations show that reporting of systematic reviews in journal and conference abstracts is poor.
An international group of researchers (the PRISMA for Abstracts Group) developed the new consensus-based reporting guidelines to give authors a checklist and framework for summarising their systematic review into the essentials for an abstract that will meet the needs of many readers.
The authors say: "Abstracts should not replace full articles in informing decision making, but for time-pressed readers and those with limited access to full text reports, the abstract must stand alone in presenting a clear and truthful account of the research."
They continue: "The PRISMA for Abstracts checklist will guide authors in presenting an abstract that facilitates a quick assessment of review validity, an explicit summary of results, facilitates pre-publication or conference selection peer review, and enables efficient perusal of electronic search results."
###
Funding: This research was supported (in part) by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Center for Biotechnology Information (National Library of Medicine). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: TL is employed by The Cochrane Collaboration. TL is an editor (unpaid) for the Cochrane Airways Group. The authors have declared that no other competing interests exist.
Citation: Beller EM, Glasziou PP, Altman DG, Hopewell S, Bastian H, et al. (2013) PRISMA for Abstracts: Reporting Systematic Reviews in Journal and Conference Abstracts. PLoS Med 10(4): e1001419. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001419
IN YOUR COVERAGE PLEASE USE THIS URL TO PROVIDE ACCESS TO THE FREELY AVAILABLE PAPER:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001419
Contact:
Elaine Beller
Associate Professor
Bond University
Centre for Research in Evidence-Based Practice
University Drive
Robina, QLD 4229
AUSTRALIA
+61755955523
ebeller@bond.edu.au
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
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.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/plos-ngf040513.php
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Canadian high school student improves experimental cancer ...
By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 15:47 EDT
?
A Canadian high school student has improved an ineffective experimental cancer therapy with a simple tweak ? pairing it with antibiotics ? earning accolades from a panel of eminent scientists on Tuesday.
Cancer ?photothermal therapy? ? or PTT ? involves injecting a patient with gold nanoparticles. These then accumulate in tumors and, when heated using light, attack the cancer cells.
The idea has shown promise but is not very effective because the cancer cells fight back, producing heat-shock proteins to protect themselves.
However, India-born high school student Arjun Nair, 16, showed how an antibiotic (17-AAG) may overcome the defenses cancer cell deploy and make the treatment more effective.
The discovery earned Nair the top prize in the 20th Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge Canada, after he spent two years working on his idea at the University of Calgary?s Nanoscience Labs in Alberta.
?Proof-of-concepts were developed and tested in order to demonstrate the viability of PTT,? says Nair. ?Moreover, after analyzing the literature a mathematical model was developed to evaluate a theoretical synergetic treatment.?
A total of 208 high school students collaborating on 123 projects, all mentored in professional labs over several months, took part in the annual competition.
In addition to a Can$5,000 (US$4,919) award for his discovery, Nair also won a Can$1,000 (US$984) prize for the project with the greatest commercial potential.
Prizes were also awarded for research into how genetic mutations naturally help some HIV patients escape symptoms, how to tailor stem cell treatments for Parkinson?s disease, a potential new therapy to reduce the severity of diabetes, and a possible novel tactic to fight the world?s deadliest brain cancer.
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Giant John Paul II statue readied for unveiling
CZESTOCHOWA, Poland (AP) ? Workers are putting the finishing touches on a new statue of the late Pope John Paul II that its backer is calling the tallest one of the pontiff in the world.
The 13.8-meter (45.3-foot) white fiberglass figure will tower over the southern Polish city of Czestochowa, home to the predominantly Catholic country's most important pilgrimage site, the Jasna Gora monastery.
Funded by a private investor and put up on his land, the statue of the Polish-born pontiff shows him smiling and stretching his arms to the world. On Tuesday, workers were joining the pieces together and painting them before the official unveiling of the statue Saturday, to be attended by church and city authorities.
Leszek Lyson, who is funding the project, called the pope "a great and good man who has done a lot for the world: ended communism and opened borders in Europe, reached out to people in his pilgrimages around the world."
He said the statue "should make everyone stop and think about life."
Its construction comes as the traditionally respected church is facing criticism for its conservative views on the family and ethics, and its opposition to abortion, in-vitro fertilization and gay marriage.
Poland has long been predominantly Roman Catholic, but church statistics show attendance shrinking from some 50 percent of parish members in the 1980s; to 45 percent in 2005, the year the pope died; to 41 percent in 2010.
Born Karol Wojtyla in Wadowice, southern Poland, John Paul was elected pope in 1978, a surprise choice from communist-controlled eastern Europe.
In Poland, he is credited with inspiring the Solidarity movement that helped end communism in 1989. His death was a time of national mourning.
Lyson told The Associated Press that he wants the new statue to remind future generations of the Polish pope.
However, 22-year-old Ewelina Gozdek, who was watching the preparations with her friends, was skeptical. "It is an attraction now in a city where nothing ever happens, but will be forgotten soon enough," she said.
The unveiling ceremony will mark three years since Lyson saved his son from drowning and is a sign of thanks.
He is also trying to get the statue into Guinness Book of Records as the world's tallest one of John Paul.
That will generate comparisons with two John Paul statues in other countries.
Last year, an adapted version of a controversial 5.5-meter (18-feet) bronze sculpture of Pope John Paul II went on display in Rome. The original had irked many Romans who said it was ugly and didn't adequately capture the likeness of their beloved pope.
In Santiago, Chile, a small statue of the pope was inaugurated on San Cristobal Hill in 2011, after a proposal to build a 13-meter (43-foot) one was rejected as too big.
Poland already boasts that it has the world's tallest statue of Jesus, unveiled in 2010 in the western town of Swiebodzin.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/giant-john-paul-ii-statue-readied-unveiling-175747945.html
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Tuesday, April 2, 2013
New mathematical model shows how society becomes polarized
Mar. 29, 2013 ? Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes watching some of the more partisan "news" networks lurking in the bowels of cable television is aware that America has grown more polarized in recent years. What's not so certain is why. In a paper published online March 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of researchers at Stanford has devised a mathematical model that helps demonstrate what's behind the growing rift.
Hint: It's you, not them.
"We believe that polarization is less a reflection on the state of our society, but instead stems from the process people go through to form opinions," said Ashish Goel, a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) and co-author of the paper.
Prevailing theories
The prevailing sociological theory, known as homophily, is that like seeks like. Those who have similar opinions tend to aggregate together and reinforce opinions that grow more divergent from the center over time. This is the echo chamber model that would seem to gain validation in the era of talk radio, cable news and the Internet.
According to this theory, we are polarized precisely because we have greater ability to choose our social networks and news sources. We narrowly tailor our information sources by selecting them based on how closely they mirror our own tastes.
Mathematical models that try to use homophily to explain polarization have come up short, however. Most are based on something known as De Groot's model that assumes that people form opinions in a way that minimizes overall disagreement within their network of friends and relations. As a result, an individual's opinion gradually converges to an average of those in his or her network, or so the theory goes. The flaw in these models is that they predict that opinions in society as a whole can only become more uniform over time, resulting in depolarization rather than polarization.
"We show that repeated averaging of opinions always results in less divergent opinions, even in networks where the people are like-minded," said Pranav Dandekar, a doctoral candidate in MS&E and a co-author on the paper. "You can't create outliers by averaging."
A different approach
The Stanford team instead took a different approach based on a phenomenon well known in the social sciences called biased assimilation. In biased assimilation people more easily accept evidence that supports their opinion and, likewise, are prone to discredit evidence that does not fit. More specifically, people look at inconclusive evidence in a way that is most favorable to their existing point of view.
"It seems counter-intuitive that two individuals would arrive at a more divergent opinion when presented with identical information that is inconclusive, but that's what happens," said David Lee, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and a co-author of the paper. "You might think that seeing identical evidence would produce greater moderation and agreement, but it doesn't."
"It seems we look at the world with rose-colored blinders. We see what we want and ignore what doesn't fit," Dandekar said.
Putting the model into practice
The team has studied biased assimilation to help create Internet-based social systems that counteract polarization by what they describe as "surprising validators" -- counterbalanced evidence that is presented by otherwise well-known and trusted sources. Imagine Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow taking an unexpected stance. If you were aligned with one or the other, you might be more inclined to listen to the evidence if presented by the source most similar to you on other issues.
"We want to use the insight from our mathematical analysis to create recommendation engines and online collaboration tools to help people find common ground on difficult and divisive societal issues," Lee said.
One such example is Widescope, a budgeting tool built by Goel's research group, in which people take on the role of Congress to allocate the federal budget as they see fit and to compare their budgets against those proposed by various people in Washington -- Paul Ryan and President Obama for instance -- to see where the differences are.
"What you learn when you see the two budgets side-by-side is just how similar they really are. By articulating the similarities rather than the differences we can focus on collaborating to find a solution," said Goel.
Algorithm in practice
The team used their working model of biased assimilation to also study the polarizing effects of three popular Internet-based recommender systems. Recommender systems are widely used on the Internet to deliver personalized search results, news articles and product suggestions based on the user's likes and dislikes.
It has been claimed that these systems contribute to polarization by compounding the echo chamber effect where, for example, a left-leaning user is recommended more liberal articles and a right-leaning user is recommended more conservative ones.
"The system that recommends the most relevant item to a user turns out to be always polarizing. The other two systems, which chose a random item liked by the user and recommends an item most similar to it, were polarizing only if the user was biased to begin with. It was surprising to find that biased assimilation provides a useful framework to analyze the polarizing effects of recommender systems." Dandekar said.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Stanford School of Engineering, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. The original article was written by Andrew Myers, associate director of communications for the Stanford University School of Engineering.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- P. Dandekar, A. Goel, D. T. Lee. Biased assimilation, homophily, and the dynamics of polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1217220110
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
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