Monthly Archives: July 2010

A Democrat and a Republican, both from Staten Island, join together to oppose proposed Tanning Ban

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"Are we going to outlaw kids from going to the beach?"

From Eric Dondero:

Under consideration in the New York Legislature is a bill that would completely ban Teens under 18 from visiting a tanning salon.

Two Legislators both from Staten Island have come out strongly against the ban. Surprisingly, one is a Democrat and the other a Republican.

From SILive.com:

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- It's one thing for parents to try to enforce their kids' good behavior -- and quite another for state government to try to step in and do it for them.

So say Staten Island's two state senators, who are mostly of the same mind when it comes to pending legislation that would keep teens under 18 from visiting tanning salons...

Already on the books is a state law that requires parental consent before a young person between the ages of 14 and 18 can visit a tanning salon. Ms. Savino and Lanza think that's as far as it should go, and do not favor a bill that would ban teens under 18 altogether because of the potential cancer-causing health risks.

"Are we going to outlaw kids going to the beach?" asked Ms. Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn).

"Some things are harmful to your health and some things you need your parents' permission for," said state Sen. Diane Savino, "but where do we cross the line between having a nanny state and passing laws to protect kids? Are we, as lawmakers, trying to substitute our judgment for the judgment of parents?"

"As a lawmaker there is a tendency to want to help," said state Sen. Andrew Lanza. "But government goes too far when it tells people how to live, what to do and how to do it. We become a nanny state."

Savino is a very outspoken socially liberal Democrat, who is often highly confrontational with Republicans. Though oddly, she has been spotted at Republican fundraisers. (Source SILive).

Blue Collar (GOP) Libertarian Paul LePage way out ahead for Maine Gov.

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From Eric Dondero:

Republican Liberty Caucus, and Tea Party-backed GOPer for Governor of Maine Paul LePage has taken a commanding lead over his Democrat and Independent rivals. Rasmussen now has LePage out ahead with 39%.

From Rasmussen:

The latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Voters shows Republican candidate Paul LePage receiving 39% of the vote, while Democrat Libby Mitchell picks up 31%. Democrat-turned-independent Eliot Cutler now earns 15% support. Three percent (3%) favor some other candidate, and 12% are undecided at this point.

LePage is the longtime Mayor of the working class coastal town of Waterville.

Sarah Palin’s Midas Touch at work in the Deep South

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First Nikki Haley in South Carolina, now Karen Handel in neighboring Georgia

From Josh Painter:

With a little help from her friend Sarah Palin, former Secretary of State Karen Handel is now the front runner in the GOP governor's race, according to the results of a new statewide poll released Saturday. Atlanta radio station WSB reports:

Bolstered by an endorsement from conservative superstar Sarah Palin, former Secretary of State Karen Handel appears to have surged into the lead of the Republican race for governor, according to a new statewide poll conducted for the Georgia Newspaper Partnership.

The poll of 400 likely Republican primary voters taken Thursday and Friday put Handel in first place with 29 percent of Georgians polled saying she would get their vote. That's up 6 percentage points from an earlier poll that was partially taken before Palin's endorsement on Monday.

Handel is the former Secretary of State and a former Chair of the Fulton County Commissioners. From her website:

[In 2003] Running against two former commissioners and another candidate, Karen campaigned against high property taxes and for ethics reform. She won with nearly 60% of the vote in this heavily Democratic county.

During her tenure leading the most populous county in Georgia, she inherited a budget shortfall of nearly $100 million and was told there was no way to balance the budget without raising taxes. Karen said, “Bring it on.” She made the strategic cuts needed and balanced the county budget three times without raising taxes.

Georgians will go to the polls Tuesday to vote in the primaries of the two major political parties.

Josh is a longtime contributor to LR, and blogger for Texas for Palin.

FDA LDT meeting, bigger than just DTCG!

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At the FDA public hearing today, I began to hear a collective groan. The groan was from the LDT community that provide tests that are actually in clinical use today. You, see, this hearing is much more about LDT than it is about little 'Ol DTCG.

DTCG in fact was the perp walk that allowed LDT to now fall under question. For years, Home Brew labs up at Yale and Harvard and GeneDx and I could go on and on, went unscathed from FDA regs. Why? The tests were used by so few people and the case for harm was pretty weak.

Despite all of this, the FDA is now awoken and realizing it was asleep at the wheel here while the wagon train was being run by the Music Man! You can tell from the agenda that there is one thing at stake here........the future of nearly ALL genetic testing.

If you look at the list of speakers it was a hodgepodge of diagnostic labs, testing advocacy groups, consulting firms that bring biopharma through the pipeline and something called OMBU. WTF is OMBU?

Tomorrow is more of the same. Of course Wadsworth was there to represent some sanity in this process, thank god. But my big Gestalt from today's action is:

1. The FDA firnly believes it is time to get its act together in regulating genetic testing

3. The FDA regulates tests, not labs.

What does this mean.

Well I can tell you this. The FDA will regulate LDT and follow some line that it already has with things like AmpliChip.

I can also tell you, the LDT house is huge and a few little revolutionaries in DTCG have brought the entire house down. I am surprised that the genetic testing industry and academic labs didn't see this one coming. So many I know in the space were always pro DTCG, I warned them precisely against the regulatory scrutiny which LDT would face given "Oprah, Dr. Oz, Blimps, Open Bars and Trump"

They said, nawh, we are ok in this space and serve a need, why regulate us? I think in Genetech we just found the answer. How can we hold a corporation to a different standard than an academic lab? How can we hold a big company to a different standard from a small company? How can we justify that to the public? More importantly, to the court?

The answer: They can't.

The Sherpa Says: I don't think I could stand another moment of the FDA conference tomorrow. Instead I will play on loop C3PO saying "Please don't deactivate me"

Stephen Schneider, Leading Climatologist, is Dead at 65 | The Intersection

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StephenSchneider-byAnnePolanskyI am stunned, because he seemed so alive and vibrant when I saw him in December 09 in Copenhagen, and in Feb 2010 at the AAAS meeting in San Diego. But Stephen Schneider, one of the greats of climate science–and climate policy, and public outreach–died today of an apparent heart attack.

There are tributes from the WWF blog, DotEarth, HuffPost, and many more. Let me quote Andy Revkin:

I first interviewed Schneider in the early 1980s while trying to make sense of the  percolating notion of nuclear winter, which Schneider — always following the data — ended up determining would more likely be a “nuclear autumn.” It was his caustic honesty about the complex nature of global warming, and the inherent uncertainties in the science, that kept mereturning to him for input from 1988 onward. He was a participant in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from the beginning until the last days of his life. He encouraged scientists to get out and communicate directly with the public, maintaining a Web page, “Mediarology,” describing the challenges attending such a move.

Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, says:

His biggest goal in life was to see a rational approach to policy about climate change, where he tried to evaluate the odds and show people, just like in many other decisions in life, with climate they had to play the odds. He was trying to produce probabilistic ways to make evaluations that could work. In his lifetime, his approach on this became progressively more sophisticated.

Peter Gleick says:

His clear and comprehensive explanations of climate change, his encyclopedic knowledge of how the climate works, and his challenges to the fraudulent science that characterizes the arguments of the climate deniers, made it easier for politicians to understand the true climate threats that face us and to move the debate into the public arena. That debate continues, because the science and policy challenges are complicated, but the world is at least beginning to take key steps toward preventing a climate catastrophe because Stephen Schneider knew that the alternative was unacceptable and because he worked tirelessly to move us all in the right direction.

He will be missed….


Transmitter/Receiver

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I want to build a circuit that can transmit and receive signals to turn on a light source. The distance is about 80feet. Whats the best way to go about this, circuit diagrams and all I will need to start and complete this project. Thanks

Trunnion Support Modelling

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Hi all,

In modelling trunnion/dummy support in CAESAR II, what particular type of connection we consider between the two connection?

It is okey to consider a tee connection & put SIF by activating the SIF and TEE checkbox and consider the "unreinforced" type connection and put SIF valu

Big News for NASA Nebula

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NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Technology To Play Key Role In New Open Source Initiative

"The core technology developed for NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly-launched open source cloud computing initiative. It will pull together more than 25 companies to play a key role in driving cloud computing standards for interoperability and portability."

Rackspace and NASA open-source partnership could spur innovation, GCN

"Torlini acknowledged the concerns that many users have about security in the cloud. However, he said freeing up the code would present more opportunities to improve security. He also stressed that this shouldn't be seen as purely a Rackspace initiative, "Everyone is welcome to contribute," he said."

NASA and Rackspace part the clouds with open source project, ARS Technica

"Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on demand," said NASA CTO Chris Kemp in a statement. "To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source."

NASA gives OpenStack instant credibility, ZDNet

"The new OpenStack project will power NASA's own Nebula cloud and puts new pressure on Eucalyptus, as well as Amazon's EC2 and the whole Hadoop ecosystem. The system is being released under an Apache 2 license."