Uber to expand private ride-sharing service in major U.S. cities

By Gerry Shih

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - At various times in its short life, Uber, a service that allows users to hail black sedans on their smartphones, has been charged with licensing offenses in Toronto, declared illegal in New York, and served with cease-and-desist orders by regulators from California to Massachussetts.

But that history did not stop Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick from announcing plans Friday to expand into another business that's been facing even more regulatory scrutiny: dispatching cars owned and operated by common citizens.

With the new service, called UberX Rideshare, four-year old Uber would begin to directly compete with popular startups like Lyft and Sidecar, which have proliferated across U.S. cities over the past 12 months while skirting more rules, some regulators say, than Uber itself.

While Uber mostly dispatches licensed limousine drivers who hold insurance policies during their off-hours, Lyft and Sidecar, which also provide smartphone apps to hail rides, coordinate stables of unregulated citizen drivers who operate their own vehicles.

Speaking to reporters in a conference call on Friday, Kalanick said he had withheld from launching a private vehicle-dispatching business until now due to its "extreme regulatory risk." But because Lyft and Sidecar have continued to operate without licenses in several cities, Kalanick said, Uber would also compete with them until they were shut down or regulated.

"In most cities around the country there are stiff citations for doing what is called ride sharing as well as the potential for criminal misdemeanor," Kalanick said.

"We're sort of taking cue in terms of, if they want to enforce, that's something they should do before a bunch of companies roll out services."

Kalanick said he was considering New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle and California among the markets where he would launch UberX Rideshare.

Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the California Public Utilities Commission, could not immediately comment on Uber's new service.

In recent months, the company has taken steps to settle its disputes with authorities. The California Public Utilities Commission, for instance, lifted its cease-and-desist order earlier this year and Uber has been allowed to operate its black car service on an interim basis until the commission determines a set of permanent regulations.

But in copying Sidecar and Lyft, Uber could risk antagonizing local authorities which have generally been more skeptical of services that involve private individuals who may not hold commercial insurance policies but moonlight as cab drivers.

Sidecar has been locked in a lawsuit against the city of Austin, Texas, where it has continued to operate after the city council passed a law earlier this year banning the service. The company has also defied the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which has tried unsuccessfully to shut it down.

Sidecar's spokeswoman Margaret Ryan declined to comment Friday, but its chief executive, Sunil Paul, has repeatedly argued that the company merely helps match willing drivers with those who want a ride, and is therefore not running a transportation service.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/uber-expand-private-ride-sharing-major-u-cities-035459078--finance.html

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Scientists await new worlds as CERN collider is refitted

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - As two yellow-helmeted electricians rise slowly on a hoist from the cavern floor to check cabling on a huge red magnet, CERN scientist Marc Goulette makes clear he sees cosmic significance in their task.

"When this refit is completed," he says, gesturing across the gigantic Large Hadron Collider (LHC), "we shall be ready to explore an entirely new realm of physics."

The collider is only five years old but, after swiftly finding a crucial missing link to support mankind's main concept of the universe, is now entering a two-year revamp to double its power in the hope of breathtaking new discoveries.

Some scientists predict it will help identify the nature of strange dark matter that lurks around planets, stars and galaxies; others that it might find a zoo of new particles or even catch hints that space has more than three dimensions.

Buoyed by the early success, experimental physicists and theorists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research housed on a sprawling campus near Geneva, hope more stunning findings may follow as soon as this decade.

To make this possible hundreds of engineers and technicians are preparing CERN's collider -- a 27-km (17-mile) subterranean complex of machinery and cables.

By 2015, it has to be made ready to double its power and its reach into the microscopic world of elementary particles that emerged from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

"It is a giant task," says senior CERN engineer Simon Baird, showing Reuters around the tunnel 100 meters (330 feet) below the Franco-Swiss border at the foot of the Jura mountains.

"Every connection must be checked and reinforced during this shutdown."

Just 10 days after the LHC was first fired up in 2008, a helium leak and resulting explosion in the tunnel caused major damage, and repairs took two years. "We have to be more certain than certain that can't happen again," adds Baird.

Despite the setback, in just over two years of operations -- involving 10,000 specialists around the world analyzing the data its particle collisions produced -- the LHC came up last summer with the long-sought elementary particle, the Higgs boson.

BEYOND STANDARD MODEL

That, explained Canadian physicist Pauline Gagnon, "was the final brick in the edifice of our concept of the universe" -- the three-decade old Standard Model that fits everything known about how particles, at the base of all matter, behave.

"With the LHC power doubled, we will start looking for what we think is out there beyond that model. And we always hope that something will turn up that no-one had ever thought of. The most likely is something totally unexpected."

But among the "known unknowns" to be sought, Gagnon plumps for dark matter -- the invisible stuff that makes up some 27 percent of the universe, six times more than the normal material that reflects light and can be seen from earth or space.

James Wells, a U.S. professor and theoretician at CERN for two years, looks to more exotic versions of the Higgs -- the particle whose associated energy field turned matter to mass after the Big Bang, shaping galaxies -- and life on earth.

Those, he said, "could lead us to supersymmetry" -- a theory, so far unsupported by LHC data, that every elementary particle has an invisible and heavier partner -- "and to up to eight more spatial dimensions".

Oliver Buchmueller, an experimental physicist, also hopes to see proof of supersymmetry -- popularly known among proponents as SUSY -- and of the extra dimensions foreseen in string theory -- the idea that particles are no more than vibrating strings.

Could that take science beyond, into the extension of string theory that predicts the existence of parallel universes or a perpetually growing galaxy of universes, unpenetrable one from the other, that cosmologists call the Multiverse?

"Not in our time," says Wells. "But we humans are amazingly creative. One day, if it exists, we will find a way to prove it."

(Edited by Richard Meares)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-await-worlds-cern-collider-refitted-161841634.html

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CloudCheckr Raises $2M To Help AWS Customers Analyze Resources, Costs And Security

Cutting through Amazon Web Services complexity is becoming quite a business. CloudCheckr is the latest to leverage AWS’ lack of tools for analyzing resources, costs and security with the news of a $2 million investment and the general availability of its freemium service.?The Series A round was led by Garrison Capital with Genesee?Capital also participating. Here’s how it works. Let’s say a customer has started using AWS. As time goes on, it becomes apparent that customers don’t have a simple way to get a picture of the overall health of what they have deployed. It’s possible to get the information, but the system is fairly complex. Enter CloudCheckr. Customers first configure their AWS accounts so they can be accessed by the CloudCheckr service. Then they configure their reporting settings, which can be customized to include particular modules such as resource monitoring. They can also monitor?multiple services and all regions within the deployment. Results are then displayed on a dashboard and graphically. For example, EC2 Summary reporting outlines resources by Size, Purchasing Type, Region, Platform, AMI, and Cost. The Detail report provides granular insight into individual instances by all of these lenses plus adds individual metrics such as launch time, utilization levels, attached EBS volumes, IP addresses, and more. CloudCheckr also offers a module for costs and best practices, which looks particularly helpful. With the module, CloudCheckr?assesses the state of a customer’s deployment against best practices being used across AWS. It then checks and alerts customers to exceptions. CloudCheckr competes in a quickly emerging space against companies such as Cloudability and Newvem. Cloudability gives visibility into online services that employees are using. It?provides an interface that lets a CFO see all of the company?s cloud accounts (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) from the different parts of the organization. The accounts may be viewed individually or as a combined spend. Drill-down reports allow the CFO to analyze the costs by service, by account or by users, providing a view of what?s costing the most. Newvem?particularly?monitors AWS instances for a customer. For example, last year it began offering?a Google Analytics type of service for AWS. It looks at baseline levels of usage that a customer will need during the length of the AWS contract. It examines the types of machines and instances they?ll need to meet their ?requirements. It also helps determine the best geographic location of the instances. In essence, it helps them have

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/CjoI8D3ezCg/

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Senators reach deal to expand background checks on gun buyers (Los Angeles Times)

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"Iron Lady" Thatcher made Britain great again - Cameron

By Estelle Shirbon and Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron led tributes to Margaret Thatcher on Wednesday, remembering a divisive and combative leader who transformed the country and set a political course still followed today.

In a special session of parliament, Cameron said his fellow Conservative "defined and overcame the great challenges of her age" after a remarkable journey from the family grocer's shop to the highest office in the land.

But in death as in life, Britain's first female prime minister sharply divided opinion and was accused by opponents of destroying working class communities with "brutal contempt".

It was the first time parliament had been recalled from holiday for the death of a public figure since Queen Elizabeth's mother died in 2002, underlining the importance of a leader who won three elections and reshaped British politics.

"She drew the lines on a political map that we here are still navigating today," said Cameron, wearing a dark suit and tie. "She made the political weather, she made history and let this be her epitaph ... she made our country great again."

Thatcher, who died at 87 on Monday from a stroke, overturned post-war political consensus, winning battles over union reform, nuclear arms and state ownership of industries, Cameron added.

"She certainly did not shy from the fight and that led to arguments, to conflict, yes even to division," Cameron said. "But what is remarkable, looking back now, is how many of those arguments are no longer arguments at all."

In an emotional session scheduled to last for up to seven hours, members of parliament who are still fiercely divided over Thatcher debated her legacy and traded anecdotes and jokes.

Opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband said she was a "unique and towering figure". However, some in his party went on the attack, condemning her as a heartless free marketeer who unleashed an age of greed that undermined British society.

"Too many industries, too many working class communities in the north were laid waste in those years," said former minister Michael Meacher. "And many of those are still desolated today."

"She was someone who took the fight to her opponents, who deployed a scorched earth policy to destroy them, which polarised the country."

Another Labour lawmaker, David Winnick, said Thatcher's economic policies, such as privatisation, spending cuts and a move away from heavy industry, caused "immense pain and suffering to ordinary people".

The rows of empty benches on Labour's side of the Commons were testimony to antipathy to Thatcher.

A few hours into the debate, barely a dozen Labour members were taking part. Even the Conservative seats were only a little more than half full as it went on into the evening.

Tulips and lilies were placed at the foot of a Thatcher statue outside the parliamentary chamber she dominated for years and which was the scene of a devastating resignation speech by her deputy Geoffrey Howe that precipitated her downfall in 1990.

'TRUE BLUE'

Plans for next Wednesday's funeral have become a security headache.

Parties in several cities to celebrate her death ended in arrests and media reported police may pre-emptively arrest known trouble-makers before they travel to her funeral.

Codenamed "Operation True Blue", the ceremonial funeral with military honours will begin with a procession through London to a service at St Paul's Cathedral.

In a break with protocol, marking Thatcher's stature, the Queen and her husband Prince Philip will attend. The last time the monarch attended a prime minister's funeral was when Winston Churchill died in 1965.

Thatcher's son Mark said she would have been "enormously proud and grateful" that the monarch was going to her funeral.

"My mother would be greatly honoured as well as humbled by her presence," he said. "By any measure, my mother was blessed with a long life and a very full one."

Many opposed to Thatcher's free-market ideology say she was too divisive a figure to be sent off in a style usually reserved for royals like Princess Diana or the Queen Mother.

"Let's privatise her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she'd have wanted," said filmmaker Ken Loach, whose films denounce the impact of Thatcher's policies on the working class.

"THE WITCH IS DEAD"

The Official Charts Company said the song "Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead", from "The Wizard of Oz", had climbed to number 10 in the singles chart after a campaign by Thatcher haters.

Such reactions were condemned by Conservatives as well as by some Labour figures such as former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

In Brixton, a south London area hit during the Thatcher era by riots in 1981, protesters scaled a cinema and replaced movie titles with the words "Margaret Thatchers dead LOL" (sic). They also hung a banner that read "The bitch is dead".

Disturbances took place in Liverpool and Glasgow, two cities ravaged by Thatcher's dismantling of state industries.

Hundreds of police and soldiers will guard the funeral. Security forces will have to watch for protesters and the threat from dissident groups from northern Ireland.

Thatcher escaped assassination in 1984 when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) blew up a hotel where she was staying. The IRA laid down arms as part of a peace deal, but Thatcher remains a hate figure to many on the other side of the Irish Sea.

(Reporting By Jason Webb)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thatchers-funeral-plans-divisive-iron-lady-herself-135415828.html

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Discovery of a blue supergiant star born in the wild

Apr. 10, 2013 ? A duo of astronomers, Dr. Youichi Ohyama (Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica or ASIAA, Taiwan) and Dr. Ananda Hota (UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in the Basic Sciences or CBS, India), has discovered a blue supergiant star located far beyond our Milky Way Galaxy in the constellation Virgo.

Over 55 million years ago, the star emerged in an extremely wild environment, surrounded by intensely hot plasma (a million degrees centigrade) and amidst raging cyclone winds blowing at four million kilometers per hour. Research using the Subaru Telescope, the Canada-France-Hawaii-Telescope (CFHT) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) revealed unprecedented views of the star formation process in this intergalactic context and showed the promise of future investigations of a possibly new mode of star formation, unlike that within our Milky Way.

About one thousand galaxies reside in a cluster filled with million-degree hot plasma and dark matter. The Virgo cluster, the nearest cluster of galaxies located about 55 million light years from Earth in the constellation Virgo, is an ideal laboratory to study the fate of gas stripped from the main body of galaxies falling into the intra-cluster medium. Does star formation take place in the clouds of stripped gas? If so, how? Dr. Ohyama and Dr. Hota focused on the trail of IC 3418 to explore a potentially new mode of star formation. Dr. Hota has been collecting data from multiple telescopes since 2006 to understand this galaxy, which he first spotted in the GALEX data during his Ph.D. research.

IC 3418 is a small galaxy falling into the Virgo cluster of galaxies at such a high speed (a thousand kilometers per second) that its blanket of cool gas strips off. As it passed through the cluster, its stripped-off cool gas formed a 55,500 light-years-long trail that looks very much like the water vapour condensation trail from a supersonic jet's path. Hot plasma surrounds the trail of IC 3418, and it has not been clear whether the clouds of cool gas would vaporize like water sprinkled on a hot frying pan or condense further to form new young massive stars. The GALEX ultraviolet image shows that new massive stars do form in the trail. How did the stripped gas condense to form new stars without getting vaporized by the hot plasma? This process does not conform to star formation in our Milky Way Galaxy where massive stars develop in groups inside of stellar nurseries sheltered within giant cold molecular gas clouds.

Dr. Ohyama suspected that a tiny dot of light emission in the trail of IC 3418 might be different from other blobs of ultraviolet light emissions in the trail. Spectroscopy of the little dot from Subaru Telescope's Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) revealed something stunning. Dr. Ohyama recalls, "When I first saw the spectrum, I was so puzzled, since it did not look like anything I had known of in extra-galactic astronomy." Unlike typical star-forming regions, the telltale signs of stellar nurseries were missing.

Intense UV-radiation usually ionizes/heats-up the surrounding gas when a star is born. Instead of any sign of heated gas, the observation showed fast winds blowing out of the stellar atmosphere at a speed of about 160 kilometers per second. Comparison with emissions from nearby stars made it clear that this massive, hot (O-type) star had passed its youth and was now aging; it was at a stage known as Blue Supergiant star and would soon face its explosive death as a supernova.

Dr. Ohyama commented on the significance of the research: "If our interpretations are correct, this is probably the farthest star ever discovered with spectroscopic observation. Since we only observed for a fraction of the night with the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope, there is huge potential for stellar spectroscopy with extremely large telescopes, e.g., the Thirty Meter Telescope, being planned for the future. We look forward to that exciting time."

Dr. Hota emphasized how important it is for astronomers to pay attention to this exotic system: "Precisely because the thermal and dynamic contrast of star formation that our research shows cannot be observed within our Milky Way, the details revealed by the Subaru Telescope's spectroscopy and the deep, sharp imaging of CFHT are opening up a new avenue for investigating the baffling fundamentals of star formation." Future in-depth investigations of this cocktail of hot plasma and turbulent, cold gas may reveal very different characteristics of stars, which may remain wild, exotic objects, challenging current theories of star formation.

This research was partially supported by the following:

• National Science Council of Taiwan (grant to Dr. Ohyama)
• National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR) and Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), both in India (for Visiting Astronomer position to Dr. Hota).

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Youichi Ohyama, Ananda Hota. Discovery of a Possibly Single Blue Supergiant Star in the Intra-cluster Region of Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal, 2013; 767 (2): L29 DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/767/2/L29

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.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/3UKjZOosQyI/130410194227.htm

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