Pictures From Historic Northeast Blizzard








































































































');
















































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































































 $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_saleprice_t +'';
} else {
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
}
html += '
';

$("#ecom_43331 ul.ecommerce_all_img").append(html);




o.totItems++;

}// end for loop
} // end if data.response.numFound != 0

if(o.totItems != o.maxItems){
if(o.defaultItems.length > 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage && !o.searchComplete){
o.doSearchPage();
} else if(!o.searchComplete) {
o.byID = false;
o.doSearch();
}
}// end if
}// end parseResults function

o.trim = function(str) {
return str.replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
}

o.doSearchPage = function(){
o.byID = false;

var tempSearch = window.location.search;
var searchTerms ="default";
var temp;

if( tempSearch.substr(0,7) == "?search"){
temp = tempSearch.substr(7).split("&");
searchTerms = temp[0];
} else {
temp = tempSearch.split("&");
for(var j=0;j 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage){
o.doSearchPage();
} else {
o.doSearch();
}

}// end init function

}// end ecommerce object

var store_43331 = new ecommerce_43331();





store_43331.init();
































































Great Energy Challenge Blog













































































































Read More..

After Blizzard, Northeast Begins to Dig Out













The Northeast began the arduous process of cleaning up after a fierce storm swept through the region leaving behind up to three feet of snow in some areas.


By early this morning, 650,000 homes and businesses were without power and at least five deaths were being blamed on the storm: three in Canada, one in New York and one in Connecticut, The Associated Press reported.


The storm dumped snow from New Jersey to Maine, affecting more than 25 million people, with more than two feet falling in areas of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The Postal Service closed post offices and suspended mail delivery today in New England.


As the storm waned, officials in the hardest hit areas cautioned residents to remain indoors and off the roads to ease the clean-up.


Massachusetts was hard hit by the storm, with more than two feet of snow in Boston and even more in coastal areas. State police and national guard troops helped rescue more than 50 stranded motorists and even helped deliver a baby girl, according to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.


Patrick enacted the first statewide driving ban since the 1978 blizzard, which left 27 inches of snow and killed dozens. The ban was to be lifted at 4 p.m. today, the governor said.


However, Patrick cautioned residents to act with extreme caution even after the ban is over.


"Stay inside and be patient," Patrick said.


In Massachusetts a boy reportedly died of carbon monoxide poisoning as he helped his father shovel snow on Saturday, according to ABCNews.com affiliate WCVB-TV in Boston.


For residents along the coast, the waning snowfall didn't mean the end of the storm. Storm surges along the Massachusetts coastline forced some residents out of their homes Saturday morning.


"We've got 20-foot waves crashing and flooding some homes," Bob Connors on Plum Island told WCVB. "We have power and heat and all that. We just have a very angry ocean. In my 33 years, I've never seen the seas this high."






Darren McCollester/Getty Images











Blizzard Shuts Down Parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts Watch Video









Blizzard 2013: Power Outages for Hundreds of Thousands of People Watch Video









Blizzard 2013: Northeast Transportation Network Shut Down Watch Video





FULL COVERAGE: Blizzard of 2013


In Connecticut, Gov. Dannel Malloy declared a state of emergency and closed all roads in the state. The state police responded to more than 1,600 calls over the last 24 hours and the governor called up an additional 270 National Guard members.


"If you're not an emergency personnel that's required to be somewhere, stay home," Malloy said.


Overnight, snow fell at a rate of up to five to six inches per hour in parts of Connecticut. In Milford, more than 38 inches of snow had fallen by this morning.


In Fairfield, Conn. firefighters and police officers on the day shift were unable to make it to work, so the overnight shift remained on duty.


PHOTOS: Blizzard Hits Northeast


The wind and snow started affecting the region during the Friday night commute.


In Cumberland, Maine, the conditions led to a 19-car pile-up and in New York, hundreds of commuters were stranded on the snowy Long Island Expressway. Police and firefighters were still working to free motorists early this morning.


"The biggest problem that we're having is that people are not staying on the main portion or the middle section of the roadway and veering to the shoulders, which are not plowed," said Lt. Daniel Meyer from the Suffolk County Police Highway Patrol.


In New York, authorities are digging out hundreds of cars that got stuck overnight on the Long Island Expressway.


Bob Griffith of Syosset, N.Y., said he tried leave early to escape the storm, but instead ended up stuck in the snow by the side of the road.


"I tried to play it smart in that I started early in the day, when it was raining," said Griffith. "But the weather beat us to the punch."


Suffolk County Executive Steven Bellone said the snow had wreaked havoc on the roadways.


"I saw state plows stuck on the side of the road. I've never seen anything like this before," Bellone said.


However, some New York residents, who survived the wrath of Hurricane Sandy, were rattled by having to face another large and potentially dangerous storm system with hurricane force winds and flooding.


"How many storms of the century can you have in six months?" said Larry Racioppo, a resident of the hard hit Rockaway neighborhood in Queens, New York.


READ: Weather NYC: Blizzard Threatens Rockaways, Ravaged by Sandy


Snowfall Totals


In New York, a little more than 11 inches fell in the city.


By this morning, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said nearly all of the primary roads had been plowed and the department of sanitation anticipated that all roads would be plowed by the end of the day.


"It looks like we dodged a bullet, but keep in mind winter is not over," said Bloomberg.






Read More..

Data-wiping algorithm cleans your cellphone



Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
Mailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in the hands of, well, anyone the phone ends up with.  
To remedy the problem, British company BlackBelt Smartphone Defence of Skelmersdale, Lancashire claims to have developed a software algorithm that can securely delete data on cellphone memory chips. The trouble with data in a flash memory chip is that it is protected by an on-chip protection algorithm called the wear leveller. This hard-coded routine does its best to ensure the chip's lifetime is maximised so that each memory cell's ability to store charge is not worn out.




"The problem is that the wear-levelling algorithm ends up working
against the data wiping technique used for hard drives, which tries to
overwrite all the data,"
says the company's Ken Garner.
What the firm has done is write their own algorithm, called BlackBelt DataWipe, that works with,
rather than against, the leveller routine to render data
irrecoverable. "It is like having a shredder for personally identifiable
data," says Garner.
However, they don't yet know if their method is proof against sophisticated, nation-state level attacks - which might use electron microscopes
to read the last vestiges of the zeros and ones on a memory chip. "I imagine
if you're GCHQ you'll probably have technology that could get around
this and recover it in some way," says Garner.



Read More..

Football: Second-half rally sees PSG go six points clear






PARIS: Paris Saint-Germain shook off a lacklustre first half to defeat Bastia 3-1 on Friday and go six points clear at the top of Ligue 1 in a morale-boosting win ahead of their Champions League duty next week.

PSG, who will tackle Valencia on Tuesday in the first leg of their last 16 tie in Europe, moved onto 51 points, taking their recent run to 12 matches without defeat in all competitions.

Jeremy Menez, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Ezequiel Lavezzi were all on target for PSG although Wahbi Khazri's 83rd-minute free-kick from 30 metres, which made the score 2-1, meant goalkeeper Salvatore Sirigu's proud unbeaten record ended at the 947-minute mark.

"We earned and took three points which was our objective," said PSG coach Carlo Ancelotti.

"It's true that the first half wasn't very good, the second half was different. We can look forward to our next match with confidence."

Menez put PSG ahead in the 56th minute with Ibrahimovic, who had started on the bench for the first time in his Ligue 1 career, making it 2-0 with a 71st-minute penalty.

After Khazri's thunderbolt, Argentina international Lavezzi settled PSG's nerves with an 89th-minute goal to put the pressure back on second-place Lyon who welcome Lille on Sunday.

Ancelotti insisted that Ibrahimovic had no arguments over being demoted to the bench.

"It wasn't hard to convince Ibra, he understands that there are always risks of injuries and we need to avoid that," said the coach.

- AFP/de



Read More..

Big iPad game 'Infinity Blade: Dungeons' delayed again



Epic demoing Infinity Blade: Dungeons at the third-generation iPad event last March.

Epic demoing Infinity Blade: Dungeons at the third-generation iPad event last March.



(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET)


It's turning out to be a bumpier road than expected for high-profile iPad game Infinity Blade: Dungeons.


The game, which was previewed on-stage by Epic Games as part of Apple's debut of the third-generation
iPad last year, now faces further delay following the closure of Impossible Studios, the team put in charge of the project.


Epic today said it was closing the six month old studio and laying off its team, a move that means another delay for the unreleased game.


"When former members of Big Huge Games approached Epic last year, we saw the opportunity to help a great group of people while putting them to work on a project that needed a team," Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney said in a post late Friday. "It was a bold initiative and the Impossible folks made a gallant effort, but ultimately it wasn't working out for Epic."



Back in October Epic said Dungeons had been delayed while Impossible reworked the focus of the game, which is part of the Infinity Blade universe -- Epic's highly successful venture on iOS.


The title was demoed on stage to show off the graphical prowess of Apple's third-generation iPad, which quadrupled the number of pixels from the previous generation machine, and added a quad-core graphics processor. At the time, Epic said simply that it was "coming soon." Apple proceeded to release a fourth-generation model just months later at its
iPad mini event last October, which further updated the device's graphics capabilities and other internal components.


Sweeney says the employees that the company is letting go will be given three months of severance, as well as the option to keep the Impossible Studios name and logo.


(via Gamespot)



Read More..

From Our Vault: Busy Postman on Break, 1951


The United States Post Office announced this week that it intends to stop Saturday letter delivery beginning in August, 32 years after Congress mandated a sixth day of mail service.

First class mail volume has been dropping by about five billion pieces annually since 2007. And the USPS operated almost $16 billion dollars in the red in 2012.

In the 1950s, when this photo was taken, the federal agency was more flush with money. Five hundred thousand employees carried 54 billion items when National Geographic magazine published the article "Everyone's Servant, the Post Office" in July of 1954. Mail volume had doubled since the previous decade, and was growing at a rate of about seven percent a year.

This photo from 1951 didn't make it into that article, landing instead in the National Geographic image archive. Working during the postal boom years, this mailman delivering to houses in Hays, Kansas, likely didn't have time to notice the slight.

National Geographic photographer John E. Fletcher explained the mailman's decision to lunch in a mailbox in a note on the back of the photo.

"He told me that a new regulation from the Washington headquarters of the U.S. Post Office required that postmen while on delivery at noontime must stop and have their lunch at the spot, rather than taking time off to go home and eat," Fletcher wrote.

"This mailman told me that each day his wife would drive to this particular corner and meet him and hand him his lunch box," he continued. "The most convenient spot that he could find to eat his lunch was to open a storage mail box, get himself comfortably seated, and eat his lunch right on the street corner."

Editor's note: This is the first in a series of pieces that looks at the news through the lens of the National Geographic photo archives.


Read More..

Blizzard of 2013 May Bring More Than 2 Feet of Snow













A blizzard of possibly historic proportions is set to strike the Northeast, starting today and could bring more than two feet of snow and strong winds that could shut down densely populated cities such as Boston and New York City.


A storm from the west will join forces with one from the south to form a nor'easter that will sit and spin just off the East Coast, affecting more than 43 million Americans. Wind gusts will reach 50 to 60 mph from Philadelphia to Boston.


"[It] could definitely be a historic winter storm for the Northeast," Adrienne Leptich of the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y., said. "We're looking at very strong wind and heavy snow and we're also looking for some coastal flooding."


The snow began falling in New York City shortly before 7 a.m. ET. The snow is expected to mix with some sleet and then turn back into snow after 3 p.m.


Airlines have started shutting down operations between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. at major airports in the New York area as well as in Boston, Portland, Maine, Providence, and other Northeastern airports. More than 4,000 flights have been cancelled on Friday and Saturday, according to FlightAware. Airlines hope to resume flights by Saturday afternoon.


New York City is expecting up to 14 inches, which is expected to start this morning with the heaviest amounts falling at night and into Saturday. Wind gusts of 55 mph are expected in New York City and Cape Cod, Mass., could possibly see 75 mph gusts.


PHOTOS: Northeast Braces for Snowstorm








Weather Forecast: Northeast Braces for Monster Blizzard Watch Video









Winter Storm to Hit Northeast With Winds and Snow Watch Video







Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and other New England cities canceled school today. Boston and other parts of New England could see more than 2 feet of snow by Saturday.


Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon and announced a ban on all traffic from roads after 4 p.m. It is believed that the last time the state enacted such a ban was during the blizzard of 1978.


Beach erosion and coastal flooding is possible from New Jersey to Long Island, N.Y., and into New England coastal areas. Some waves off the coast could reach more than 20 feet.


"Stay off the streets of our city. Basically, stay home," Boston Mayor Tom Menino warned Thursday.


Blizzard warnings were posted for parts of New Jersey and New York's Long Island, as well as portions of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, including Hartford, New Haven, Conn., and Providence. The warnings extended into New Hampshire and Maine.


To the south, Philadelphia was looking at a possible 4 to 6 inches of snow.


Thousands of flights have already been canceled in anticipation of the storm. Amtrak said its Northeast trains will stop running this afternoon.


Bruce Sullivan of the National Weather Service says travel conditions will deteriorate fairly rapidly Friday night.


"The real concern here is there's going to be a lot of strong winds with this system and it's going to cause considerable blowing and drifting of snow," he said.


Parts of New York, still reeling from October's Superstorm Sandy, are still using tents and are worried how they will deal with the nor'easter.


"Hopefully, we can supply them with enough hot food to get them through before the storm starts," Staten Island hub coordinator Donna Graziano said.


New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said plows and 250,000 tons of salt were being put on standby.


"We hope forecasts are exaggerating the amount of snow, but you never can tell," Bloomberg said Thursday.


Residents of the Northeast have already begun to hit stores for groceries and tools to fight the mounting snow totals.


The fire department was called in to a grocery store in Salem, Mass., because there were too many people in the store Thursday afternoon trying to load up their carts with essential items.


"I'm going to try this roof melt stuff for the first time," Ian Watson of Belmont, Mass., said. "Just to prevent the ice dam. ... It's going be ugly on that roof."


ABC News' Max Golembo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.



Read More..

Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track








































MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions.












Cindy Bethel at Mississippi State University in Starkville and her team showed 100 "witnesses" a slide show in which a man steals money and a calculator from a drawer, under the pretext of fixing a chair. The witnesses were then split into four groups and asked about what they had seen, either by a person or by a small NAO robot, controlled in a Wizard of Oz set-up by an unseen human.













Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses' recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn't have an effect.












"It was a very big surprise," says Bethel. "They just were not affected by what the robot was saying. The scripts were identical. We even told the human interviewers to be as robotic as possible." The results will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.












Bilge Mutlu, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that robots may avoid triggering the misinformation effect simply because we are not familiar with them and so do not pick up on behavioural cues, which we do with people. "We have good, strong mental models of humans, but we don't have good models of robots," he says.












The misinformation effect doesn't only effect adults; children are particularly susceptible, explains the psychologist on the project, Deborah Eakin. Bethel's ultimate goal is to use robots to help gather testimony from children, who tend to pick up on cues contained in questions. "It's a huge problem," Bethel says.












At the Starkville Police Department, a 10-minute drive from the university, officers want to use such a robotic interviewer to gather more reliable evidence from witnesses. The police work hard to avoid triggering the misinformation effect, says officer Mark Ballard, but even an investigator with the best intentions can let biases slip into the questions they ask a witness.












Children must usually be taken to a certified forensic child psychologist to be interviewed, something which can be difficult if the interviewer works in another jurisdiction. "You might eliminate that if you've got a robot that's certified for forensics investigations, and it's tough to argue that the robot brings any memories or theories with it from its background," says Ballard.


















The study is "very interesting, very intriguing", says Selma Sabanovic, a roboticist at Indiana University. She is interested to see what happens as Bethel repeats the experiment with different robot shapes and sizes. She also poses a slightly darker question: "How would you design a robot to elicit the kind of information you want?"












This article appeared in print under the headline "The robot inquisition"




















It's all about how you say it







When providing new information, rather than helping people recall events (see main story), a robot's rhetoric and body language can make a big difference to how well it gets its message across.









Bilge Mutlu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison had two robots compete to guide humans through a virtual city. He found that the robot which used rhetorical language drew more people to follow it. For example, the robot saying "this zoo will teach you about different parts of the world" did less well than one saying "visiting this zoo feels like travelling the world, without buying a plane ticket". The work will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.











































If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.




































All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.


If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.








Read More..

Tennis: Injured Li Na out of Qatar Open






DOHA: China's Li Na has pulled out of next week's $2.3 million Qatar Open after failing to recover from the ankle injury she suffered in her Australian Open final defeat to Victoria Azarenka.

"Li Na has withdrawn from QatarTennis due to her ankle injury from the Australian Open final. #WTA #tennis," the WTA said on its Twitter account.

The Qatar Open starts on Monday.

- AFP/de



Read More..

Guess what? Vine videos are longer than six seconds



It turns out that Vines are actually 6.5 seconds long, not six.



(Credit:
James Martin/CNET)



Among the many curiosities about Twitter's Vine app has been how the company decided six seconds was the magic number for a clip's length.


Well, guess what? It turns out that the maximum length of a Vine isn't six seconds at all. In fact, they top out at 6.5 seconds.


And how do we know? After watching a Vine today that was tweeted by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, I came away with the feeling that it felt longer than advertised. A bit of quick work using iShowU by CNET videographer Jared Kohler then proved that a Vine works out to six seconds and 14 frames, played at 28.77 frames per second. In other words, almost exactly 6.5 seconds. Don't believe it? Grab a stopwatch and time the Vine below.



What does that mean? Well, it means you're actually getting 8.3 percent more video than you thought you were. And that's a good thing, right?


But the fact that the videos are really 6.5 seconds long does make one wonder why that's the length. At the time of Vine's launch last month, Twitter explained that the six-second limit was a choice made after lots of testing. "The team tested various video lengths, ranging from about four seconds to ten seconds, as they were building Vine," a Twitter spokesperson told CNET at the time. "They found that six seconds was the ideal length, from both the production and consumption side."


Aha! But then why is the real number 6.5 seconds? Is that extra half-second crucial for production and/or consumption? It's hard to say because Twitter didn't respond to a new request for comment. And because, let's be honest, an extra half a second isn't all that big a deal.


Still, if the folks at Vine were making an arbitrary decision about length, then why did they actually settle on 6.5 seconds instead of six? We'd love your thoughts -- even those that make fun of us for caring about small details like this. Please leave them in the comments section.


Read More..