Not to scare you or anything, but Air Force officers have left the blast doors to nuclear-tipped missiles open at least twice in the past year. These are the guys who help guard the launch codes who are also tasked with watching over the arsenal. Leaving the missiles available and unattended is a very, very big no-no.
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Retina has finally hit the iPad Mini,
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Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Daniel Radcliffe
LONDON – One Direction tops the latest annual heat magazine list of the richest British celebrities under the age of 30, with combined estimated earnings of $95.70 million (£59.33 million) for the past year.
Ranking just behind the boy band is Daniel Radcliffe, with an estimated $90.64 million (£56.19 million), making him the top-earning individual on the list. The Harry Potter star had topped the list since its inception in 2010.
PHOTOS: The New A-List: 23 Salaries From Angelina Jolie to Robert Downey Jr. Revealed
One Direction are Harry Styles, 19, Niall Horan, 20, Zayn Malik, 20, Liam Payne, 20, and Louis Tomlinson, 21.
Rounding out the top five are Robert Pattinson ($71.23 million, £44.16 million), Keira Knightley ($60.13 million, £37.28 million) and Emma Watson ($45.05 million, £27.93 million).
The top new entrant on the young British celebrity rich list is DJ Calvin Harris, with estimated earnings of $35.80 million (£22.20 million).
Other new additions include singer Jessie J ($9.16 million, £5.68 million), model/actress Rosie Huntington-Whiteley ($9.08 million, £5.63 million), The Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield ($8.06 million, £5 million) and boy band JLS ($7.85 million, £4.87 million).
The biggest gain goes to The Great Gatsby star Carey Mulligan, who rose 10 spots to come in 19th.
Heat magazine's list is compiled by a panel of experts that analyzes celebrities' earnings for the past year based on their TV and film deals, music sales and product endorsements.
E-mail: Georg.Szalai@THR.com
Twitter: @georgszalai
Briggo's Coffee Haus takes up about 50 square feet of space, has a nice exterior wood design, and accepts orders either on-site or via a website.
Briggo's Coffee Haus takes up about 50 square feet of space, has a nice exterior wood design, and accepts orders either on-site or via a website.
A new trend is brewing in the coffee world: coffee prepared by a robot, able to be preordered via cellphone and picked up at an unmanned kiosk, perfectly adjusted to your taste and ready to go.
To some, this might seem lamentable: the beginning of the end of coffee shops as we know them. No more huddling around warm cups of coffee with friends or sipping a refreshing iced latte while reading.
But to others, this might be just what they've waited for: no lines when you're in a rush, and coffee prepared by a machine that is programmed to make it perfectly time and time again.
The latest company to present such a coffee kiosk is Austin-based Briggo. As Quartz recently reported, Briggo opened its first kiosk on the University of Texas' Austin campus in July of this year. The kiosk — dubbed "The Coffee Haus" — takes up about 50 square feet of space, has a nice exterior wood design, and accepts orders either on-site or across campus via a website, informing the customer precisely when the drink will be ready.
Customers are able to control every detail to their liking, including the flavor, the type of sweetener and milk, and the amount of each ingredient. A variety of choices are offered, from espressos and lattes to iced coffees and hot chocolate. If customers create an account online, the system will remember their favorite order (of course, your friendly neighborhood barista probably does the same thing).
While the convenience of such a machine is probably its biggest selling point, consumers who've sampled Briggo's brew tell The Salt that the quality of the coffee is nothing to sniff at, either.
Unlike baristas in training, who need to figure out the tricks of the trade, their robotic counterparts have been programmed to control every aspect of the process, with the goal of creating a consistently tasty product.
"The coffee tastes good and it always tastes the same," Yamit Lavi, a student at UT Austin, tells us. "I would say the consistency of the taste makes it better than a standard coffee shop."
The machine, after all, can measure humidity, temperature, water pressure, timing and other such factors to a T. And while institutions host the coffee kiosks, Briggo retains ownership of the machines so it can closely manage the entire process, from origin of its direct-trade beans to cup in hand.
Briggo isn't the only company to pursue a robotic coffee venture. There's also the Marley Coffee Machine, which croons Bob Marley tunes while the robot within the box prepares coffee from freshly ground beans. And Starbucks' satellite brand, Seattle's Best, is pairing with the company that owns Redbox to set up one-dollar coffee kiosks in hundreds of supermarkets across the country.
And yet, although students at UT Austin enjoy the Briggo "Coffee Haus," many of them still hold on to the value of a real coffee shop experience.
"At coffee shops you can build relationships with the people making your drink and have a more personal interaction," says Mina Ghobrial, another student at UT. "I believe that's very important in today's society, especially since electronics have taken over face-to-face interactions."
The coffee kiosks don't have to eliminate coffee shops altogether. Instead, they can be a nice addition: something there when we need it — and not bad-tasting to boot.
By Steven Brill
1. Can we get our money back for the failure of Healthcare.gov?
Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal scored a scoop of sorts, getting the first interview with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius since her ill-fated appearance on "The Daily Show." She addressed the failure of her Healthcare.gov website to function as the enrollment marketplace for the 36 states that are having the federal government operate their Obamacare insurance exchanges, instead of doing exchanges on their own.
The Journal quoted Sebelius as saying "she would see if the government was entitled to any refunds, once the work is done." With $400 million having been spent on outside contractors for the collapsed website, reporters ought to follow up on that aggressively.
Government contractors usually escape responsibility for cost overruns, lapsed schedules or downright failure to produce a product that works by claiming, rightly or wrongly, that the instructions they were given destined the project for failure, were not explicit enough, or were changed midway through the work. In the case of Healthcare.gov, the Statement of Work instructing the lead contractor, CGI Federal, was 60 pages, single-spaced. So lack of detail may not be a great defense. But were the instructions poorly conceived — or changed in a way that caused the current fiasco? Or are other factors responsible for the failure, making it unlikely that we taxpayers can get some of our money back?
More generally, it seems as if every government contract results in delays, overruns, or failure. Has the government ever gotten its money back? When? How? What were the circumstances?
And who and what is to blame for situations where the contractors failed miserably but there was no accountability? One related example that I will harp on until someone does the story: Are we getting any money back from Booz Allen Hamilton for what their guy Edward Snowden cost us? Booz, by the way, was also a contractor on the Obamacare project.
2. Making D.C.'s lobbying mess look good:
Last February, I suggested a story that would "compare lobbying practices and regulations in the United States to those in other venues, including the European Union and its constituent countries." On Saturday, the New York Times did just that, in a terrific report by Eric Lipton and Danny Hakim. Lipton and Hakim scored fly-on-the-wall accounts of lawyers meeting with big corporate clients and unabashed quotes from former European Union officials now working for America-based law firms touting the access they had to their former colleagues. The Times team even provided details of what that kind of access produces: "Last year, Hogan Lovells helped an American semiconductor company secure an exemption in European environmental law that allowed it to continue using a potentially hazardous substance in the computer chips it makes. The firm also helped a group of American chemical companies avoid having to retest products to meet a new chemical safety law…."
Their story also explained how the European Union does not require the same publicly-available registration and client-disclosure reports from lobbyists that are required by U.S. law, allowing the influence industry to operate in near-secrecy.
It would be great if Lipton and Hakim now followed up and gave us a sense of the landscape in other important venues, such as London, Paris and Berlin. More important, although they pointed out that the lobbyists' influence at the EU is more about access to people they have worked with than it is about money (because political campaigns in Europe aren't nearly as fueled by special interest campaign contributions), they or someone else should try to analyze just how much difference that makes. Is the relative transparency of lobbying in Washington trumped by the reality that the Washington lobbyists and their clients control so much of the money that keeps those they are lobbying in office?
3. A-Rod's cheering squad — grassroots or Astroturf?
A group called Hispanics Across America has put up this website called "Support A-Rod 13" (13 is our hero's Yankee uniform number, assuming he ever puts it on again).
"LET'S SEEK JUSTICE," the homepage proclaims. "PLEASE JOIN US IN STOPPING THE INJUSTICE REGARDING THE 211 GAME SUSPENSION."
Below the headline is a picture of A-Rod's adoring fans, some wearing "Support A-Rod 13" T-shirts, gathered to cheer on their imperiled hero as he arrived for an arbitration hearing in New York that will decide whether Major League Baseball's suspension of A-Rod on charges he used performance-enhancing drugs and then covered it up will stand.
To the side is a click-through to send donations to Hispanics Across America. Its last federal tax exempt status filing with the IRS says that as of 2011 the organization was based in White Plains, New York and had revenue for the year of $3,800 and expenses of $452.
It shouldn't take Bob Woodward's curiosity and nose for a good story for someone to check out Hispanics Across America. Could this really be a spontaneous outpouring of support for someone not usually thought of as an Hispanic icon? Or is some tentacle of A-Rod's multimillion-dollar network of lawyers and PR people pulling the strings?
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/column-refund-healthcare-gov-european-lobbyists-rods-curious-135314406.html![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Aimee Frank
media@gastro.org
301-941-2620
American Gastroenterological Association
Bethesda, MD (Oct. 22, 2013) -- Coffee consumption reduces risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer, by about 40 percent, according to an up-to-date meta-analysis published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Further, some data indicate that three cups of coffee per day reduce liver cancer risk by more than 50 percent.
"Our research confirms past claims that coffee is good for your health, and particularly the liver," said Carlo La Vecchia, MD, study author from the department of epidemiology, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri," and department of clinical sciences and community health, Universit degli Studi di Milan, Italy. "The favorable effect of coffee on liver cancer might be mediated by coffee's proven prevention of diabetes, a known risk factor for the disease, or for its beneficial effects on cirrhosis and liver enzymes."
Researchers performed a meta-analysis of articles published from 1996 through September 2012, ultimately studying 16 high-quality studies and a total of 3,153 cases. This research fills an important gap as the last meta-analysis was published in 2007, and since then there has been data published on more than 900 cases of HCC.
Despite the consistency of results across studies, time periods and populations, it is difficult to establish whether the association between coffee drinking and HCC is causal, or if this relationship may be partially attributable to the fact that patients with liver and digestive diseases often voluntarily reduce their coffee intake.
"It remains unclear whether coffee drinking has an additional role in liver cancer prevention," added Dr. La Vecchia. "But, in any case, such a role would be limited as compared to what is achievable through the current measures."
Primary liver cancers are largely avoidable through hepatitis B virus vaccination, control of hepatitis C virus transmission and reduction of alcohol drinking. These three measures can, in principle, avoid more than 90 percent of primary liver cancer worldwide.
Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world, and the third most common cause of cancer death. HCC is the main type of liver cancer, accounting for more than 90 percent of cases worldwide. Chronic infections with hepatitis B and C viruses are the main causes of liver cancer; other relevant risk factors include alcohol, tobacco, obesity and diabetes.
###
Learn more about liver cancer in AGA's patient brochure, "Understanding Cirrhosis of the Liver".
About the AGA Institute
The American Gastroenterological Association is the trusted voice of the GI community. Founded in 1897, the AGA has grown to include 17,000 members from around the globe who are involved in all aspects of the science, practice and advancement of gastroenterology. The AGA Institute administers the practice, research and educational programs of the organization. http://www.gastro.org.
About Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology
The mission of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology is to provide readers with a broad spectrum of themes in clinical gastroenterology and hepatology. This monthly peer-reviewed journal includes original articles as well as scholarly reviews, with the goal that all articles published will be immediately relevant to the practice of gastroenterology and hepatology. For more information, visit http://www.cghjournal.org.
Like AGA and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology on Facebook.
Join AGA on LinkedIn.
Follow us on Twitter @AmerGastroAssn.
Check out our videos on YouTube.
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: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Aimee Frank
media@gastro.org
301-941-2620
American Gastroenterological Association
Bethesda, MD (Oct. 22, 2013) -- Coffee consumption reduces risk of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common type of liver cancer, by about 40 percent, according to an up-to-date meta-analysis published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Further, some data indicate that three cups of coffee per day reduce liver cancer risk by more than 50 percent.
"Our research confirms past claims that coffee is good for your health, and particularly the liver," said Carlo La Vecchia, MD, study author from the department of epidemiology, Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri," and department of clinical sciences and community health, Universit degli Studi di Milan, Italy. "The favorable effect of coffee on liver cancer might be mediated by coffee's proven prevention of diabetes, a known risk factor for the disease, or for its beneficial effects on cirrhosis and liver enzymes."
Researchers performed a meta-analysis of articles published from 1996 through September 2012, ultimately studying 16 high-quality studies and a total of 3,153 cases. This research fills an important gap as the last meta-analysis was published in 2007, and since then there has been data published on more than 900 cases of HCC.
Despite the consistency of results across studies, time periods and populations, it is difficult to establish whether the association between coffee drinking and HCC is causal, or if this relationship may be partially attributable to the fact that patients with liver and digestive diseases often voluntarily reduce their coffee intake.
"It remains unclear whether coffee drinking has an additional role in liver cancer prevention," added Dr. La Vecchia. "But, in any case, such a role would be limited as compared to what is achievable through the current measures."
Primary liver cancers are largely avoidable through hepatitis B virus vaccination, control of hepatitis C virus transmission and reduction of alcohol drinking. These three measures can, in principle, avoid more than 90 percent of primary liver cancer worldwide.
Liver cancer is the sixth most common cancer in the world, and the third most common cause of cancer death. HCC is the main type of liver cancer, accounting for more than 90 percent of cases worldwide. Chronic infections with hepatitis B and C viruses are the main causes of liver cancer; other relevant risk factors include alcohol, tobacco, obesity and diabetes.
###
Learn more about liver cancer in AGA's patient brochure, "Understanding Cirrhosis of the Liver".
About the AGA Institute
The American Gastroenterological Association is the trusted voice of the GI community. Founded in 1897, the AGA has grown to include 17,000 members from around the globe who are involved in all aspects of the science, practice and advancement of gastroenterology. The AGA Institute administers the practice, research and educational programs of the organization. http://www.gastro.org.
About Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology
The mission of Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology is to provide readers with a broad spectrum of themes in clinical gastroenterology and hepatology. This monthly peer-reviewed journal includes original articles as well as scholarly reviews, with the goal that all articles published will be immediately relevant to the practice of gastroenterology and hepatology. For more information, visit http://www.cghjournal.org.
Like AGA and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology on Facebook.
Join AGA on LinkedIn.
Follow us on Twitter @AmerGastroAssn.
Check out our videos on YouTube.
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.
This morning, Steve Inskeep admitted to Morning Edition listeners that he, like many of them, often finds himself choked up over the Friday morning StoryCorps segments on NPR. These intimate conversations are a small sampling from the nearly 50,000 interviews recorded as people share the incredible stories of their lives. This week marks the 10th anniversary of the oral history project, and in that time StoryCorps has built up one of the largest collections of human voices ever gathered. To celebrate, Morning Edition will be checking in all this week with people whose stories you've heard on NPR over the years. We'll be tooting the StoryCorps horn right here as well, and we're starting with the man who made it all possible, StoryCorps Founder Dave Isay.
StoryCorps Founder Dave Isay in the recording booth located in New York City's Foley Square.
My name... Dave Isay
StoryCorps employee since... 2003 (the very beginning!)
Public radio listener since... I was 22 years old - the day I recorded my first radio story.
My job is... Founder of StoryCorps.. Once upon a time (ten years ago) I made radio documentaries for NPR. Now I spend all of my time fundraising and/or evangelizing for the organization. Highlight of each week: spending a blessed 10 minutes working with our brilliant production team on the Friday Morning Edition broadcast. All in all, I couldn't be happier—StoryCorps is my calling.
When I tell people about StoryCorps, they often say... "Why do you make me cry every Friday??"
Something you might not know about the StoryCorps Airstream trailer MobileBooths is... one of them is named after the great oral historian Studs Terkel.
I've learned the most about radio from... Gary Covino, former All Things Considered weekend producer and radio genius.
I wanted to be... anything but a kid when I grew up.
In my suitcase, you'll find... Tuesday NYT's crossword puzzles—they help me fall sleep—I'm not smart enough for Wednesday-Sunday.
I use social media to... What's social media?
Wait, Wait... Don't Tell Me that... my kids changed the time on my alarm clock (again!).
On Sunday morning, you'll find me... on an adventure with my kids.
If I could share a coffee with anyone, it would be... my wife.
Listening is most important when... someone feels they don't deserve to be heard.
I make it a point to never miss... an opportunity to eat a good, cheap meal.
I can't live without... artichokes.
Caitlin Sanders contributed to this post.
