Daily Archives: October 16, 2014

Paul: Brat would 'have an outsized role' in Congress

Posted: October 16, 2014 at 6:44 pm

Sen. Rand Paul says he believes that if elected, Dave Brat is positioned to have an outsized role in Congress, because of his historic victory against Eric Cantor in the Republican primary in June.

It was a virtually unprecedented election for a challenger; it sounds like there was something dramatic that he was presenting and saying, and I think that position seems to have a great deal of influence almost immediately in Washington, Paul said in an interview in Ashland on Wednesday.

Flanked by Brat, Paul, in jeans and cowboy boots, sat in a backroom at the Hanover Arts and Activities Center. His feet on the table, Paul leaned back in his chair.

The Republican junior senator from Kentucky, a potential aspirant for the 2016 presidential election and the son of a former presidential candidate, then-Rep. Ron Paul, has served in the Senate since 2011. He is considered a tea party favorite and has what he calls libertarian-ish views.

In his 10-minute speech Wednesday at a rally for Brat and Ed Gillespie, the Republican nominee to take on Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., he had lashed out against President Barack Obama and hailed Brat but spoke little about Gillespie, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a former Washington lobbyist.

While Gillespie may not have been the tea partys first choice to run against Warner, Paul hinted that he was looking at the bigger picture when pondering his endorsement.

There are differences within the Republican Party, but they pale in comparison between the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, he said.

I think in the biggest issues of the day, will Ed Gillespie vote for a lowering of taxes and a lessening of regulations just in general? Im guessing yes. Will Mark Warner vote to lower any taxes or lessening any regulations? No, and even if he tells you he will, his party wont.

Paul said he and Gillespie found common ground on that Republicans must be more inclusive if they want to win elections.

One of the things Ed and I talked about, we have a plan that specifically targets people in poverty and those who are unemployed. Its called Economic Freedom Zones, and my plan for Richmond would leave $600 million in that area, over 10 years that otherwise would be sent to the federal government, Paul said.

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Individualism, A Hole* In Right Libertarianism – Video

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Individualism, A Hole* In Right Libertarianism
So big i could stick my head through it.

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Schooling The Nation's Governors

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Te Cato Cato Institute has long issued areport card on the nations governors. The grades are based on what Cato thinks constitutes good fiscal policy. Governors who work for policy like that get As, and those who dont get Fs. Back when my libertarianism was still in the closet, I wrote critically of the Cato report card. I now regret my harsh critiques of the project because I believe Cato does the nation a great service by analyzing, assessing, and rating state executives.

That doesnt mean everyone does or should agree with Catos assessment of each governor. The report card serves as a marker representing the institutes views, and those views challenge liberal and traditional conservative thinking on fiscal issues. Reading the report card and other works by the institute may change some minds. But more importantly, it broadens the debate over the role of fiscal policy in particular and government more generally. So if you pray at the altar of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities or of Citizens for Tax Justice, I hope you wont reflexively dismiss the Cato report card. Rather, I hope youll seriously consider the arguments in it. I also encourage libertarians and conservatives to follow the work of theCBPP,Citizens for Tax Justice, andGood Jobs Firstclosely. Just because their political philosophy is different than yours doesnt make their fiscal arguments wrong.

Entrance to the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now that I have everyone holding hands, lets look at this years report card.There were only four A students, which tells you that Cato is a tough grader. IndianasMike Pence(R), MainesPaul LePage(R), KansassSam Brownback(R), and North CarolinasPat McCrory(R) were rated the only excellent governors when it comes to fiscal policy.

I realize that picking those four will jeopardize the possibility of any liberals taking the report card seriously. All four significantly cut taxes and have fought for less government spending, so its not surprising that Chris Edwards and Nicole Kaeding of Cato put them at the front of the class.

I like most of those choices. I think LePage (who removed 70,000 low-income citizens from the tax rolls), McCrory (who led significant reform), and Pence (who should get an A for fighting to eliminate the personal property tax on business equipment) deserved their grades. However, I disagree with the Brownback grade. While I generally like the idea of income and business tax cuts, I think Brownback deserves a D for supporting a policy that exempts from taxation income from passthrough entities. Thats bad tax policy whether youre conservative, liberal, or libertarian. By the way, LePage and Brownback are seeking reelection this year, and right now the polls suggest they wont be coming back to the governors mansion.

Eight governors failed: MinnesotasMark Dayton(DFL), OregonsJohn Kitzhaber(D), DelawaresJack Markell(D), WashingtonsJay Inslee(D), IllinoissPat Quinn(D), MassachusettssDeval Patrick(D), ColoradosJohn Hickenlooper(D), and CaliforniasJerry Brown(D). That sounds harsh to most Americans. We dont fail. Kids get straight As, go to Ivy League schools, and eventually work in a profession their parents can brag about. The failing governors are what we used to call tax-and-spend liberals. None have met a tax (or a spending policy) they didnt embrace. So I generally agree with Cato on its assessment of the worst kids in the class. Of those up for reelection, only Quinn is in any danger of not retaining his position.

The one governor who should have gotten an F but inexplicably received a B isAndrew Cuomo. The Democrat from New York pushed the worst tax policy idea of all time: tax-free zones. Im disappointed Cato didnt call him on it.

This post is an excerpt of an article that first appeared inState Tax Notes.

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Hadoop World: The executive dashboard is on the way out

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In their zeal to collect as much operational data as possible, organizations hoping to gain an advantage through the use of big data will also need to rethink how they process, analyze and present that material.

When all this information finally gets to the business, it is difficult for the business to understand what to glean out of the data, said Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, CEO and co-founder of big-data startup ClearStory Data. We know this has been a problem for several years now.

Shahani-Mulligan was one of a number of speakers at the OReilly Strata + Hadoop World conference Thursday in New York to offer tips on making the move from data to big data. She suggested that the executive dashboard is giving way to emerging technique of interactive storytelling, which gives data more readily apparent context and meaning.

Meanwhile, organizations should watch Google closely, advised M.C. Srivas, chief technology officer of Hadoop distributor MapR Technologies. Google, with its vast and varied infrastructure, can provide us with a glimpse into the future of where computing is going, said Srivas, who worked at Google before co-founding MapR.

One of the basic rules to pick up from Google is that more data beats complex algorithms, Srivas said. This is something that Google has demonstrated again and again: The company that can process the most data will have an advantage over everybody else in the future.

A number of MapR customers are following this principle, Srivas said.

Millennial Media, a leader in the mobile advertising market, collects up to about 4TB of mobile user data each day, combining with petabytes of data on hand to build profiles of mobile users.

Cisco collects data from its firewalls worldwide, aggregating about a million events per second, all to better detect security threats. Credit agency TransHuman collects data from multiple sources to provide real-time credit scores.

But once an organization has committed to collecting more data, the question becomes what to do with it.

Visualization is a handy tool, but picking the correct visualization is vitally important, advised Miriah Meyer, an assistant professor in the University of Utahs School of Computing.

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Futurist Fashion Designer Envisions a World of 3D-Printed Possibilities

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By Stephanie Walden2014-10-16 17:43:01 UTC

Fashion, posits Mary Huang, founder of high-tech concept brand Continuum, is an industry ripe for innovation.

In an age when nearly every industry is undergoing huge technological disruption, the fashion business, particularly when it comes to the manufacturing process, often employs antiquated methods that have existed for dozens or hundreds of years. "It's an interesting last frontier for technology," says Huang.

But all that may soon change. Huang's company which operates in her Brooklyn studio and apartment is at the forefront of a revolutionary concept: Fashion that you can design, download and print at home. In short, on-demand fashion. Continuum currently offers several products for sale online, with a focus on futuristic footwear as well as jewelry and even a 3D-printed bikini top, listed online as a piece suitable for the "boldly trendsetting."

"I saw that these [affordable] 3D printers were coming out, and I thought that the most logical thing to try to print would be something like a pair of shoes so you could download your shoes at night, and get new shoes in the morning," says Huang.

Prototype: leather upper with 3d printed base. Would take a while to get it to work right. Worth it??

View on Instagram

Huang was one of the first designers to begin dabbling in 3D-printed fashion. "Three or four years ago, no one else was doing this," she says. When it comes to the actual process of designing, some elements are similar to traditional methods: Each pair of shoes begins with a simple sketch.

The printing itself takes 8-12 hours and, at the moment, all orders placed with Continuum are printed and shipped from Huang's at-home studio. "It's like artisanal 3D printing," she says, laughing.

To date, Huang's work has appeared in a variety of museums, exhibitions and high-end concept stores such as STORY, located in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. The ultimate goal with Continuum, says Huang, is to solve the last piece of the puzzle when it comes to revolutionizing digital production of fashion how to get your design out of the computer.

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NASA's Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

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Newswise Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

"This has been a very challenging search, and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs that Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the Sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

"We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of SwRI. There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program in June, the New Horizons team was awarded telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. When the search was completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is "definitely reachable" and two other potentially accessible KBOs that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

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Hubble Telescope Finds Potential Kuiper Belt Targets for New Horizons Pluto Mission

Posted: at 2:49 am

Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

"This has been a very challenging search and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection - one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto. Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the sun and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, but none was reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

"We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of SwRI. "There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program in June, the New Horizons Team was awarded telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July.

When the search was completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is considered "definitely reachable," and two other potentially accessible KBOs that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

This was a needle-in-haystack search for the New Horizons team because the elusive KBOs are extremely small, faint, and difficult to pick out against a myriad background of stars in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the present direction of Pluto. The three KBOs identified each are a whopping 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. Two of the KBOs are estimated to be as large as 34 miles (55 kilometers) across, and the third is perhaps as small as 15 miles (25 kilometers).

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New Horizons space mission with Boulder ties finds new targets beyond Pluto

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An artist's rendering of a Kuiper Belt object, about 4 billion miles from the sun, which may be reachable by the Boulder-director New Horizons mission, (Courtesy illustration / NASA, aESA and G. Bacon)

The New Horizons mission to Pluto, a space adventure with strong Boulder ties, now has three new targets for its work in the distant reaches of our solar system.

NASA announced Wednesday that its Hubble telescope, through a dedicated observing program overseen by a New Horizons search team, had discovered three Kuiper Belt objects that the New Horizons spacecraft could possibly visit after it passes Pluto in July.

Alan Stern of Boulder's Southwest Research Institute is the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission, University of Colorado professor Fran Bagenal is a co-investigator, and the spacecraft carries an instrument known as the Student Dust Counter, designed and built by CU undergraduate and graduate students.

"The problem is that we wanted to go somewhere after Pluto, to compare Pluto with another object," Bagenal said Wednesday. That object was going to have to be on generally the same trajectory New Horizons is taking to Pluto, because its available fuel would permit no more than a 2 degree change in its current course beyond Pluto.

"If we hadn't been able to find a target (beyond Pluto) we'd be sailing off into nothingness," Stern said.

The New Horizons team started searching for suitable Kuiper Belt objects three years ago with some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth. They found several dozen KBOs, as they are known, but none could be reached with the fuel available on the New Horizons spacecraft.

The team was awarded Hubble telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July. By the time the search was finished last month, they identified one KBO that is considered "definitely reachable," and two others that may be accessible, but that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they also can be reached.

They are about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto, ranging in size from 34 miles across down to 15 miles across. Each is about 10 times the size of a typical comet and about 1 to 2 percent the size of Pluto.

"It's a big relief, because it means we get double the targets and double the science, right?" Bagenal said. "From what we've seen of the objects in the Kuiper Belt, they are all different colors, their composition and sizes differ, some of them have moons, some of them have atmosphere, some don't have atmosphere. So, getting to two out of the thousands-plus that we know are there will be at least twice as good as one."

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Afghan official says NATO airstrike killed civilians – Video

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Afghan official says NATO airstrike killed civilians
An Afghan official says seven civilians were killed by a NATO airstrike, but the international coalition says the "precision airstrike" killed eight militant...

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Taliban Attack On NATO Convoy And Base-New Video – Video

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Taliban Attack On NATO Convoy And Base-New Video
: FOLLOW...

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