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Sunday, May 19, 2013

Collision closes New York area train route as NTSB investigates (+video)

A team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived Saturday to investigate a?commuter rail collision that?caused a prominent railroad line near New York City to be partially closed.

By Mark Trumbull,?Staff writer / May 18, 2013

Emergency workers arrive at the scene of a train collision in Fairfield, Conn. The accident involved a New York-bound train leaving New Haven. It derailed and hit a westbound train.

Christian Abraham/The Connecticut Post/AP

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A commuter rail collision Friday injured more than 60 people and left behind a scene of damage that has caused a prominent railroad line near New York City to be partially closed.

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Amtrak service between New York and New Haven, Conn., is also closed while the incident is investigated and damage repaired.

At about 6:10 p.m. Friday a Metro-North train heading east from New York City derailed outside Bridgeport, Conn., and was hit by a westbound train on an adjacent track. Some 700 passengers were on board the trains, the Associated Press reported.

The cause was unclear. Some local officials said it did not appear to be terrorism, and a team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived Saturday to investigate issues ranging from crew performance to the condition of the track.

The New York area?s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) said its commuter rail service between South Norwalk and New Haven is suspended until further notice, while regular service will operate between Stamford and Grand Central Terminal.

Commuters could be affected all week as the investigation proceeds.

The MTA said damage on the two affected tracks is ?extensive,? and that the two other tracks on this segment of the railway are out of service for a project replacing overhead wires.

?The [damaged] train cars cannot be removed until the on-scene investigation is complete, and they will need to be removed by crane,? the MTA said.

According to news reports, more than 60 people went to hospitals with injuries related to the collision.

Commuter rail accidents are relatively rare. One federal?study, looking at the decade between 1996 and 2005, found a declining rate of accidents (with 33 accidents or incidents per million total commuter-train miles in 2005).

Injuries generally totaled fewer than 2,000 per year, and fatalities fewer than 100 per year, during that 10-year period.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/29cHyd3QmYc/Collision-closes-New-York-area-train-route-as-NTSB-investigates-video

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Cannes helps actors Bejo and Rahim cross borders

CANNES, France (AP) ? The magic and glamour of Cannes can be hard to spot on a day when rain is lashing the palm trees, roiling the gray Mediterranean and pooling in puddles along the Croisette.

But the world's leading film festival can transform careers ? something no one knows that better than actors Berenice Bejo and Tahir Rahim, stars of director Asghar Farhadi's festival entry "The Past."

Bejo shimmered on-screen in Cannes two years ago in "The Artist," her director husband Michel Hazanavicius' vivacious silent homage to Hollywood's Golden Age. It went on to win five Academy Awards, including best picture.

Rahim was the breakout star of the 2009 festival in Jacques Audiard's poetic and brutal prison drama "A Prophet," as a youth growing to manhood behind bars.

Cannes exposure helped boost both performers onto the international stage. While once most European actors could choose between stay at home and playing Hollywood villains, their paths suggest a more globalized movie world.

"It was quite a miracle for me," Bejo said Saturday, as rain drummed remorselessly on a Cannes rooftop lounge. "Two years ago my life changed a little bit in Cannes.

"I don't think Asghar Farhadi would have cast me in this movie if I hadn't done 'The Artist.'"

It's hard to think of two movie styles further apart than the flamboyant artifice of "The Artist" and the anatomically detailed domestic drama of "The Past"

Bejo plays Marie, a harried Frenchwoman with two children, a new boyfriend with a young son, and an Iranian ex who has returned after four years to finalize their divorce. Rahim is her boyfriend Samir, a man with complex family ties of his own.

All the characters are trying to move on ? but the past keeps dragging them back.

Bejo said she did a screen test for Farhadi, then didn't hear from him for a month, so initially thought she hadn't got the part.

"He said to me, I was looking into your face if I could see the doubt," she said. "I guess because he saw me in movies where I was quite positive, quite sunny, quite glamorous. He needed to see if I could show another part of myself ? and I guess he found it."

For Bejo, as for Rahim, working with the Iran director was a dream come true. "The Past" is the first film Farhadi has shot outside his homeland, and the actors say they loved his working methods ? two months of rehearsal to delve into character, break down barriers and forge bonds, followed by a four-month shoot.

With its Iranian director and largely French cast, it's one of several border-hopping movies at Cannes this year. French director Arnaud Desplechin's made-in-America "Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian" stars France's Mathieu Amalric and Puerto Rican actor Benicio Del Toro. Another French filmmaker, Guillaume Canet, has a multinational cast including Clive Owen, Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard in his New York crime drama "Blood Ties."

It's a trend Bejo is happy to embrace.

"In America you have Christoph Waltz, you have Marion Cotillard," she said. "In France we have Italian and Spanish actors. ... I think it's great. We are used to strangers and foreign accents, and it's great that we can see that in our movies now."

Both she and Rahim have been busy since their Cannes breakthroughs. Bejo recently made French heist movie "The Last Diamond" and soon starts filming Hazanavicius' next project, a war movie set in Chechnya.

Rahim's projects include the English-language Roman-era adventure "The Eagle" and another movie appearing at Cannes this year, the nuclear power plant romance "Grand Central."

Coming up, he plays a cop in the French movie "The Informant," and is currently shooting a globe-spanning 1920s-set drama with Turkish-German director Fatih Akin, another pillar of culture-crossing cinema.

Despite the busy international career ? and post-"Prophet" expressions of interest from the United States ? Rahim says Hollywood remains a hard nut to crack for non-Anglophone actors.

"It's not what you expect at first," Rahim said. "You'd like to be with Michael Mann or (directors) like this, but you don't have those parts that easily. Because first you have to speak English, you have to erase your accent."

For now, he's just happy to be back in Cannes, an experience that is easier the second time around.

"The difference is that now I'm not afraid when I come here," he said. "I'm (saying) 'OK I'm going to take every good vibe and keep it.'"

___

Jill Lawless can be reached at http://Twitter.com/JillLawless

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/cannes-helps-actors-bejo-rahim-cross-borders-165726670.html

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After tornado, Texas town begins to pick up the pieces

Though devastation is widespread, residents of Granbury, Texas will be able to return to their homes and retrieve what may be left after a huge tornado struck the town on Wednesday.

By Angela K. Brown,?Associated Press / May 18, 2013

Emergency personnel look through debris on near Granbury, Texas on Thursday. Ten tornadoes touched down in several small communities in Texas Wednesday night, leaving at least six people dead, dozens injured and hundreds homeless.

Rex C. Curry/AP

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Residents whose homes were torn apart or blown away by a North Texas deadly tornado can soon return to retrieve what belongings may be left and start cleaning up, authorities said Friday.

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In Granbury, the area hardest hit by Wednesday night's exceptionally strong tornado, workers are trying to restore water service, raise electrical lines and clear debris piles filled with insulation, roof tiles, pieces of carpet, a shoe, a teddy bear, a woman's purse.

Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds said authorities will only allow residents of the Rancho Brazos Estates neighborhood back in to survey things starting Saturday morning.

But Jerry Shuttlesworth won't be one of them. He doesn't know where his mobile home ended up, but he finally has his only treasured possession: his bull-terrier mix, Junior, who had been missing since the tornado that left six people dead swept through the city 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth.

Shuttlesworth, 53, broke three bones in one of his feet and suffered a 2-inch gash in his forehead.

Friends helped spread the word about his dog through social media. On Friday, someone found Junior and took him to a shelter, where a worker called Shuttlesworth.

"You could call it a miracle," he said. "He's scratched up and a little traumatized, but he's eating. He's my baby. I don't care about anything else."

Gov. Rick Perry and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Friday toured Granbury, which bore the brunt of the damage during Wednesday's outbreak of 16 tornadoes in North Texas.

Perry said the devastation is almost incomprehensible. Abbott urged residents to be cautious of those who might try to scam them as they rebuild.

The National Weather Service said Friday that the Granbury tornado was an EF-4, based on the Fujita tornado damage scale. Winds in an EF-4 tornado are between 166 and 200 mph. An EF-5 is the most severe.

Earlier Friday, the Hood County Sheriff's Office said the death toll is unlikely to change, as those who were reported missing were with relatives or friends and are safe.

Workers on Friday cleared debris in nearby Cleburne, where a tornado cut a mile-wide path through part of the city Wednesday and damaged about 600 homes. The weather service said it was an EF-3, which has winds between 136 and 165 mph. No deaths or severe injuries were reported.

Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle in Granbury also contributed to this report.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/7Ox7VRYhb4Q/After-tornado-Texas-town-begins-to-pick-up-the-pieces

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Don?t you know the crime rate?s going up up up up up? (Balloon Juice)

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IRS chief declines to identify employees involved in scandal (reuters)

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Most scientists agree: Humans are causing climate change

Friday, May 17, 2013

Do most scientists agree that human activity is causing global climate change? Yes, they do, according to an extensive analysis of the abstracts or summaries of scientific papers published over the past 20 years, even though public perception tends to be that climate scientists disagree over the fundamental cause of climate change.

To help put a stop to the squabbling, two dozen scientists and citizen-scientists from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the US?including Sarah Green, professor and chair of chemistry at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich.? analyzed the abstracts of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed scientific papers on climate change published between 1991 and 2011. They also surveyed the authors of those papers, to find out how well the analysis agreed with the authors' own views on how their papers presented the cause of climate change.

They found that more than 97 percent of the scientists who expressed any opinion in their papers about the primary cause of global climate change believed that human activity was the cause. Approximately the same percentage of authors who responded to the survey said that their papers endorsed anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. Nine of the scientists, including Green, reported their findings today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, published by the Institute of Physics.

Green says she got involved because she was curious about the apparent disconnect between the general public's lack of concern about climate change and what she calls "the clear scientific evidence that humans are changing the planet's atmosphere." That led her to SkepticalScience.com, a web site that tracks and addresses common myths about climate change. She has since contributed several articles.

John Cook, who maintains the web site, is a climate communications fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia. He found that one dominant myth about climate change is the idea that scientists disagree about the cause. To investigate how much disagreement there really is in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, Cook set up an on-line system that enabled a group of SkepticalScience.com authors to rate nearly 12,000 abstracts from the Web of Science database (1991-2011) on whether they report human activities as the main contributors to climate change.

"John cleverly set up the rating process so it felt like a game to me," says Green. "After I rated five abstracts, another five would quickly appear, and counters showed how many each person had done, making it like a contest."

The abstract raters were a combination of professional and citizen-scientists from Australia, Canada, the UK, Finland, the US and Germany. The group was organized through the skeptical science web site.

"I read and rated 4,146 abstracts for this study, over about 4 months in winter/spring 2012," Green explains. "This is the first time I've published a paper where all the research was accomplished sitting on my couch."

Green adds, "I found it fascinating to see the array of implications of climate change identified in the abstracts?beyond the usual ones we hear about. They examined everything from production of tea in Sri Lanka, the stripes on salamanders, child undernutrition, frequency of lightning strikes, distribution of prickly pear cactus (and pine trees, kelp beds, wild boars, penguins, arctic fishes, canine leishmaniasis, and many, many others), mitochondrial electron transport activity in clams, copper uptake by minnows, lake effect snowfall, the rotational speed of the Earth and the prevalence of naked foxes in Iceland."

Green also found a large number of papers addressing mitigation of climate change through alternative energy and other ways to limit carbon emissions.

"It is critical to raise public awareness of the scientific consensus on climate change, so the public can make policy decisions based on factual evidence," she says. "Typically, the general public thinks that only around 50 percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This research has shown that the reality is 97 percent."

###

Michigan Technological University: http://www.mtu.edu

Thanks to Michigan Technological University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128294/Most_scientists_agree__Humans_are_causing_climate_change

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Tech, labor brandish dueling studies in U.S. immigration fight

By Caren Bohan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The technology industry and organized labor are locked in a fight that threatens to complicate the U.S. Senate's immigration bill.

At the heart of the debate is whether there is a shortage of Americans with the math and science skills needed for work at technology firms like Facebook Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp.

Labor is brandishing research that says the scarcity of workers is a myth while the tech industry is pointing to other studies that say the shortage is very real and is a threat to U.S. competitiveness.

In behind-the-scenes maneuvering that has created a quandary for Senate supporters of a broad immigration bill, lobbyists say Silicon Valley is pulling out all the stops to fight restrictions on a foreign-worker visa program known as H-1B that is aimed at making sure Americans get the first crack at any job openings.

Talks are expected to be ongoing this weekend to try to resolve the dispute over the high-skilled visa program that has proved to be a stumbling block for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which aims to vote on the immigration legislation by the end of the month.

If a deal can't be reached, it could alienate tech companies that have told lawmakers they might reconsider their support for the bill. It could also cost the vote of a key Republican senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is on the fence about the legislation.

LABOR SAYS PLENTY OF U.S. WORKERS

The immigration bill, President Barack Obama's top domestic legislative priority, would create a path to citizenship for some 11 million undocumented immigrants, step up border enforcement and nearly triple the number of visas for high-skilled foreign workers. The legislation, drafted by a bipartisan group of eight senators, would also create new guest worker programs for low-skilled jobs such as waiters, hotel workers and construction workers.

The AFL-CIO has accused the tech industry, which has put its huge lobbying muscle into the fight, of becoming "greedy." The companies have already had a great deal of influence on the legislation and are now "trying to get more and more and more," said Andrea Zuniga DiBitetto, legislative representative with the AFL-CIO.

A study that labor and its allies have been touting has become a flashpoint for its dispute with Silicon Valley. The report from the liberal Economic Policy Institute (EPI) think tank, says the United States has "more than a sufficient supply" of workers with education in science, technology, engineering and math, known as STEM. It says that for every two students graduating from U.S. colleges with such degrees, only one has been getting hired in science or technology fields. (EPI study: http://r.reuters.com/myv28t)

The EPI study also says there has been wage stagnation in these fields for years, which it says means workers lack the power to bid up salaries because there aren't enough job openings.

"If there's a shortage, why don't you increase wages?" said Hal Salzman, one of the authors of the EPI study.

In a scathing criticism of the EPI study, Robert Hoffman of the Information Technology Industry Council (ITIC) - which represents companies such as Apple Inc, Microsoft and Google - pointed to 83,000 job openings that were listed on Dice.com, which posts tech job listings. He also cited data at the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics that he said shows a huge demand for computer science majors that is not met by the number of people graduating in the field.

"This would suggest, for EPI at least, that U.S. employers are engaged in a massive conspiracy to advertise for U.S. STEM jobs that do not exist," Hoffman wrote in a blog post last month on the ITIC web site. "That's quite a conspiracy. I wonder if EPI thinks we faked the moon landing."

TECH FIRMS SAYS SHORTAGE OF WORKERS

Hoffman pointed to a separate study put out this month by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation that accused EPI of "cherry-picking" poorly performing tech-related fields to include in its study and of "misreading" labor market signals. (ITIF study: http://r.reuters.com/nyv28t)

Hatch is championing the cause of the tech industry, which wants changes in a provision requiring that companies advertise jobs on a government-run website and offer them first to qualified Americans. Tech companies want most firms to only be required to make "good faith" efforts to hire Americans.

The AFL-CIO's most powerful ally in the fight over skilled-worker visas is Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who sits on both the Judiciary Committee and is one of the eight senators who wrote the immigration bill.

In a sign that he is at least open to talking about a way to satisfy the tech industry, Durbin, when asked if there was a deal yet on the dispute, said on Thursday morning, "We're working on it."

(Additional reporting by Rachelle Younglai; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tech-labor-brandish-dueling-studies-u-immigration-fight-000930024.html

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