threshold poetical: May 2013

Saturday, May 4, 2013

Warner Brothers Is Being Sued For Using Nyan Cat Without Permission

Warner Brothers?a company all too keen to leap on anybody infringing its copyright?is being sued for unauthorized use of the Nyan Cat meme. Oops.

Campaign finance within constitutional bounds | Harvard Gazette

Obert C. Tanner, a jewelry store magnate who grew up herding sheep in Utah, put himself through college in the 1920s by getting up early every morning to light furnace fires. He died in 1993, but his philanthropy is still creating light and heat, predominantly through the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Established in 1976, they are delivered annually at nine universities.

At Harvard this year, the Tanner Lectures were delivered May 1-2 by Dean Robert C. Post of Yale Law School. He took up an issue that generates a lot of heat but could use some extra light: the constitutional debate over campaign finance reform.

In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a case so starkly contentious that ?constitutional arguments slide past each other with scarcely a moment of mutual engagement,? said Post. The issue centered on a single question: Should corporations be allowed to give political campaigns unlimited amounts of money? The Supreme Court, by 5-4, said yes.

At issue was the constitutionality of section 441b of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which banned corporations from funding ?electioneering communication.? But a majority of the justices wondered: What was the government?s ?compelling interest? in requiring the prohibition? Didn?t it violate free speech?

Arguments in favor of the reform law cited ?three major state interests,? said Post: to promote equality, to remove the ?distortion? that immense corporate wealth could invite, and to eliminate corruption. In the end, though, none of these interests was powerful enough in constitutional terms to sway a majority of justices.

To this day, Post said in his opening lecture, campaign finance reform remains ?among the most vexing constitutional issues of our time.? Reformers still call the influx of cash a threat to political integrity. Advocates still argue that limiting contributions would limit free speech.

Constitutional law ?is meant to affirm common principles of agreement,? said Post. But Citizens United was ?instantly controversial and unpopular,? he said, and merely hardened positions in an already intractable debate. The majority opinion held that it was ?stranger than fiction for our Government to make ? political speech a crime.? On the other side, one critic declared that Citizens United ?practically supplanted Dred Scott as the worst Supreme Court decision of all time.? The line was so bright between the two sides, said Post, it was as if they ?inhabited entirely different constitutional universes.?

He called the divide ?a horrifying disjunction,? but offered two reasons why it was a reality. For one, the Supreme Court has so far failed to clearly explain First Amendment jurisprudence, and for 80 years or more has relied on abstractions and rhetoric. So it is not possible for the court to ?think carefully? about First Amendment principles and how they can be reconciled with campaign finance reform, said Post.

For another, he said, jurists who favor campaign finance reform have so far failed to show how the idea of such regulation is compatible with the idea of free speech.

To smooth the waters, Post offered his Tanner Lectures ? rapidly paraphrased from a version 158 pages long, with copious footnotes ? as a way for constitutional scholars to find common ground and to recast the debate. Perhaps ?practical reform? would result from his Tanner ideas someday, said Post, but that was not his intent; nor would the lectures offer a concrete plan for mobilizing change.

Instead, he offered a strategy to get to common ground. First, establish that the First Amendment?s purpose is to make self-government possible. After all, he said, the 18th century bedrock of the United States was ?the premise of self-government? and ?the value of self-determination? ? reactions to coercive and unrepresentative British rule.

After that, establish ?a managerial domain? within the First Amendment ? a way that ?speech may be regulated as necessary to maintain the fundamental constitutional value of electoral integrity,? he said.

Without a sense of electoral integrity, ?we are at risk,? said Post, especially in an era of increasingly expensive electoral contests. ?The public cannot help but worry that he who pays the piper will call the tune.?

Source: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/05/campaign-finance-within-constitutional-bounds/

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Celebrate Star Wars Day By Blinding General Grievous, Losing R2

Beep boop boop bee squeee! Happy May 4th a k a Star Wars Day (say the date out loud and you'll figure out why). In celebration, quite a few hardware vendors have released special gear for the day, thereby allowing you to celebrate the magic of George Lucas in proper Mandalorian fashion.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/U5hWPo-Ov-A/

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Friday, May 3, 2013

Hagel: US rethinking possibly arming Syrian rebels

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond participate in a joint news conference at the Pentagon, Thursday, May 2, 2013, where the talked about Syria. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel escorts British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond into the Pentagon, Thursday, May 2, 2013, through an honor cordon prior to their meeting. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Obama administration is rethinking its opposition to arming the rebels who have been locked in a civil war with the Syrian regime for more than two years, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Thursday, becoming the first top U.S. official to publicly acknowledge the reassessment.

During a Pentagon news conference with British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond, Hagel said arming the rebels was one option that the administration was considering in consultation with its allies. But he said he personally had not decided whether it would be a wise or appropriate move.

"Arming the rebels ? that's an option," he said. "You look at and rethink all options. It doesn't mean you do or you will. ... It doesn't mean that the president has decided on anything."

Hammond said his country was still bound by a European Union arms embargo on Syria, but he said Britain would look at the issue again in a few weeks when the ban expires and make a decision based on the evolving situation on the ground.

Hagel's comments affirmed what had been a quiet but emerging dialogue within the Obama administration: That arming the rebels might be preferable amid growing indications that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people, an action President Barack Obama characterized as a "game-changer" that would have "enormous consequences."

Asked for his thoughts on the evolving issue, Obama said Thursday that the U.S. will continue to evaluate its options.

"We want to make sure that we look before we leap and that what we're doing is actually helpful to the situation as opposed to making it more deadly or more complex," Obama said at a news conference in Mexico.

Both Hagel and Hammond also indicated that strong evidence still was needed to provide a solid legal basis for any military action the U.S. or its allies might take. While neither would detail the evidence already collected from several reported incidents of chemical weapons use by the Bashar Assad regime, Hammond said the public still remembers that claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 turned out to be untrue.

"There is a very strong view that we have to have very clear, very high-quality evidence before we make plans and act on that evidence," Hammond said. "If there were future use of chemical agents, that would generate new opportunities for us to establish a clear evidence of use to a legal standard of evidence."

Officials have said that intelligence assessments of the use of sarin gas in Syria are based in part on "physiological samples," which could include human tissue, blood or other body materials, in addition to soil samples. Asked whether the U.S. and Britain have separate samples or are examining the same material, Hammond declined to specify, but said the two countries were working closely on the analysis.

Hagel said each country uses its own intelligence agencies but works to share information with allies.

Administration officials said Wednesday that arming the opposition forces was seen as more likely than any other military option. They cited U.S. intelligence beliefs that the rebels may be distancing themselves from the al-Qaida-linked group there. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss publicly the options under consideration.

Some senior leaders, including Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been publicly skeptical about the wisdom of arming the rebels because of concerns that U.S. weapons could end up in the hands of al-Qaida-linked groups helping the Syrian opposition or other extremists, such as Lebanon-based Hezbollah.

But officials say there is a growing realization that, under increasing pressure from Congress and other allied nations, the U.S. might soon have to do more for the Free Syrian Army.

The administration announced last week that it believed Assad has used chemical weapons but said the intelligence wasn't definitive.

Damascus has denied it has used chemical weapons, saying the Syrian rebels were trying to frame the regime.

Asked about Syria's chemical weapons caches, Hammond said Britain believes the Assad regime remains in control of its principal weapons sites.

"I think we have a great deal of knowledge of location of chemical weapons," Hammond said. "That is not the same as saying that I can put my hand on my heart and say we know where every last item is."

Other military options under discussion include creating a no-fly zone over the country or a limited safe zone where Syrians could be free from violence. There has been little appetite for putting U.S. military boots on the ground in Syria.

Syria's two-year civil war has left an estimated 70,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-02-US-US-Syria/id-9e835de51d5c4927942a4d5a0537ee34

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News from the Front in War on Cancer--Mission Not Accomplished

Janet Rowley noticed something odd about the glowing chromosomes revealed by her microscope. It was the early 1970s, the first years of the so-called "war on cancer," and she was using a new staining technique to examine cells from patients with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a cancer of the blood that was almost always fatal. The technique highlighted bands within the chromosomes, and she could see an extra piece on the end of chromosome 9. That fragment was nearly the same size as a "missing" chunk of chromosome 22 that other researchers had detected a decade earlier. To Rowley, it looked as if the tips of these two chromosomes had swapped places, or translocated. During the next few years she found two other cases of chromosomal translocation in different forms of leukemia. The finds forever changed the way scientists thought about cancer. Shuffled chromosomes in leukemia established that broken, scrambled and messed-up genes cause cancer. The genetic code details when cells should grow, divide and eventually die. Cancer is a disease of misinformation?cells ignore the rules, growing despite multiple molecular signals telling them to stop and invading other tissues because they no longer respond to biological messages to stay put or even destroy themselves. In the past four decades scientists have identified thousands of genetic mistakes that either cause cancer or boost the risk of developing it. The effects of these typos are sometimes dramatic?the gene variants BRCA1 and BRCA2 can boost women's lifetime risk of developing breast cancer from 12 percent to 60 percent. Some errors are found only in cancer cells themselves; other changes can be passed from generation to generation. The latter are the mistakes that may be passed down and boost the risk of developing cancer?this is the inherited genetic risk, or the reason that people with a familial history of a disease may want to get tested earlier or more often. As researchers uncover more genetic mistakes and delve deeper into the human genome, it may be possible to pin down the exact probabilities conferred by inherited genetic risk. If clinicians could scan a healthy person's genes for variations that explain their probability of developing cancer, perhaps they could prevent or catch the disease before it became a problem: Spit into this vial and the doctor will tell you what will ail you in 20 years. Despite the plummeting cost of DNA sequencing technology, much of the information is a jumble of alphabet soup. Science can figure out what gene variants and markers a person has, but they can't tell exactly what it means for his or her health. It will take researchers years to untangle the genetics of cancer. Even large steps, heralded as a major advances, answer few questions and pose many more. This spring, a massive international collaboration doubled the number of known genetic regions associated with the risk of breast, prostate or ovarian cancers. The genetic markers are signpost that researchers can follow to better understand the biology of these cancers. Only a few of the 74 newly identified markers are shared by more than one type of cancer, underscoring cancer's complexity. Yet exactly how the findings can inform public health recommendations remains to be discovered. Each marker is associated with small modifications of risk, but the effects add up. The findings could lead to more accurate cancer screening and hint at ways cancers could be caught before the disease becomes aggressive. Only further study, however, will show where to draw the lines between risk percentages that tell patients "not to worry" or "get tested now." Reams of data
The impressive number of hits in the new work stems from the size of the research effort: 160 institutions around the world analyzed a pool of more than 200,000 individuals' genetic sequences. The international project is called the Collaborative Oncological Gene-environment Study (COGS). To find the dozens of new cancer risk regions, researchers combed the pooled genetic information for variations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). A SNP is change in a single letter of the DNA code, likely introduced as a "typo" during gene replication. If such a change happens within a gene, it can affect the structure of proteins. If it falls within a stretch of DNA that regulates genes, it can affect the amount of protein a cell produces. The COGS researchers put 211,000 SNPs of interest, which were previously identified in other studies, on a custom-made DNA array that looks a bit like a computer chip. Then they used the chip to scan the pooled genetic information to look for differences between people who had cancer and those who did not. If a particular SNP popped up more often in the group of people who had cancer, that SNP could be linked to increased risk for that cancer. Most of the SNPs the cancer teams identified are specific to one of the three cancers, but 17 are shared risk factors for all three. The new SNPs, combined with 75 previously known markers, explain a proportion of inherited genetic risk for these cancers: 28 percent for breast, 4 percent for ovarian and 30 percent for prostate cancer. The research was published as a collection of 13 papers in April in Nature Genetics, Nature Communications, PLoS Genetics, The American Journal of Human Genetics, and Human Molecular Genetics (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). Comparing genomes to uncover SNPs of interest is one way that researchers dig down to find the genetic basis of complex diseases. "We get little bits that we put together," says Stephen Chanock, chief of the Laboratory of Translation Genomics at the National Cancer Institute. Chanock was involved in several of the new studies. Complex diseases such as cancer spring from many gene variants that all contribute to the disease. These studies are helping researchers fill in the list of risky genetic markers. "What is emerging is the complicated genetic architecture of different diseases," he says. Following the signs
Rowley's swapped chromosomes eventually led researchers to find a way to treat CML. Now patients can take a pill that jams a monkey wrench into a process vital to the cancer's development. The drug, called imatinib (first marketed as Gleevec in the U.S.), often grants patients a normal life expectancy with minimal side effects. Few cancer treatments have met this high bar, but researchers still comb the genome for cancer's fingerprints and clues to what might stop the disease. Indeed, the COGS findings provide signposts for future research. For example, a handful of SNPs associated with prostate cancer risk fall within genes important for the binding of a cell to a surface. That surface could be another cell to facilitate communication or create a barrier through which pathogens cannot pass. Cell?cell adhesion is important for immune response and is also involved in tumor metastasis?tumor cells use cell adhesion to stick to a new location in the body. Understanding the mechanisms for cell?cell adhesion may offer insights for new treatments. In a number of regions the SNPs are involved in more than one type of cancer cluster. "In some cases we are beginning to understand why that is," said Doug Easton, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the main breast cancer paper at a press conference before the papers were published. One of the COGS papers honed in on a genetic region that helps control the length of telomeres, which are protective caps on the end of DNA strands. The so-called TERT locus harbors SNPs relevant to both breast and ovarian cancer risk, making it a prime candidate for further study. The next step for the international cancer teams is an even larger study with a new chip called OncoChip, made by Signature Genomics. They plan to screen 600,000 SNPs of interest to see if they are involved five malignancies?ovarian, breast and prostate as well as colorectal and lung cancers. The larger numbers will give the researchers more statistical power to uncover less common gene variants. In addition researchers will map the already discovered variants to figure out which genes and biochemical pathways are involved. Studies of gene function are critical to characterize cancer biology, says Mathieu Lupien, a scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute and assistant professor at the University of Toronto who was not involved in COGS. "Now we can move forward and understand why it is those genetic defects promote cancer," he says. Weighing the risks
Genetic markers may lead to better treatments, but researchers also hope to catch cancer before it starts. Clinicians already use cancer-risk calculators to group people into high- and low-risk categories based on lifestyle choices, environment and family history. The new SNPs could be additional indicators that make the stratification more accurate and efficient. High-risk groups could get targeted recommendations for avoiding risky behaviors or whether to get screened for a type of cancer. Currently, cancer screening is saddled with a lot of false positives, which means people who do not have cancer are told they are positive. Such results lead to unnecessary and even dangerous procedures?not to mention the anxiety felt by those who believe they have a potentially life-threatening disease. For example, screening for prostate, lung, colorectal and ovarian cancers in 68,436 people over a period of three years led to a least one false positive for 60 percent of men and 49 percent of women. Another study found that follow-up procedures (such as a biopsy) after a false positive cost an average of $1,024 for women and $1,171 for men. The challenge is figuring out where to draw the line for high-risk, says Ros Eeles, a professor of oncogenetics at the Institute of Cancer Research in London and one of the principal investigators involved in the main prostate cancer paper. "We could do the test and give a risk profile, but we don't know what you should do when you have the information," she says. Studies that retroactively profile genetic risk markers in patients could reveal where the lines should fall and what interventions are most effective. "We're not to the point of being able to predict an individual's risk," says Joe Gray, a professor at Oregon Health & Science University's Knight Cancer Institute and not involved in the COGS studies. A more thorough understanding of risk factors and better cancer screening could lead to a future where doctors can "prevent people from having cancer we don't know how to treat," he says. More information about how different genetic variants contribute to risk of disease could help refine the definition of high-risk groups. A well-tested SNP profile could sort out individuals at the top of the spectrum, where the benefits of screening would outweigh the risks. Once the genetic risk is understood, public health professionals can employ the same communication strategies used to counsel people about heart disease risk. "We do [stratified screening] all the time with cardiovascular risk," says Hilary Burton, director of the PHG Foundation based in England. Right now the evidence on breast cancer screening is "finely balanced between benefits and harm," she says. The newly identified SNPs can help tip the balance for some carefully identified individuals. The vision the researchers outline could be in the not-too-distant future. People in their 40s today might see safer, stratified risk screening for some cancers within their lifetimes, Cambridge?s Easton said in a press conference. Still, before all patients can receive the benefits of safe screening, researchers will need to address a gap common to current genome-based discoveries: The 200,000 people in the COGS pool are largely of European descent and live Australia, North America and Europe. Whereas the consortium did find some risk markers specific to people of Asian descent, other genetic groups such as African and indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia are underrepresented. "We are still very much in the discovery mode," Chanock says. Decades after uncovering the genetic basis of cancer, that is a sobering statement. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.
? 2013 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/news-front-war-cancer-mission-not-accomplished-110000269.html

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