James Francohit the Glendale, Calif. set of Lovelace on Thursday. The handsome, quirky actor, 33, was utterly transformed to film his cameo as none other than Hugh Hefner -- morphing into a younger version of the Playboy founder, 85.
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The normally hipster casual actor, artist and student wore Hefner's iconic red moking jacket and white scarf, with his hair in a 60s/70s style pompadour.
StarringAmanda Seyfriedas porn star Linda Lovelace, the film made a last-minute casting switch this week: Mary-Louise Parker is replacing the ailing Demi Moore in the role of Gloria Steinem, a source confirmed to Us Weekly exclusively.
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It has been known for some time that house mice (Mus musculus) produce ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) during courtship but it has generally been assumed that these are no more than squeaks. However, recent spectrographic analyses have revealed that USVs are complex and show features of song. Although the vocalizations are inaudible to human ears, when playbacks of recorded songs are slowed down their similarity to bird song becomes striking. Frauke Hoffmann, Kerstin Musolf and Dustin Penn of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna's Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology aimed to learn what type of information is contained in males' songs for the discerning ear of the female mouse to detect. Their initial studies, the first to study song in wild mice, confirmed that males emit songs when they encounter a females' scent and that females are attracted to males' songs. Additionally, the scientists discovered that females are able to distinguish siblings from unrelated males by their songs ? even though they had previously never heard their brothers sing.
In their recent studies, Penn's group recorded and analysed the courtship calls of wild-caught male house mice for the first time, using digital audio software to examine parameters such as duration, pitch and frequency. They found that males' songs contain "signatures" or "fingerprints" that differ from one individual to another. Moreover, they confirmed that the songs of siblings are very similar to one another compared to the songs of unrelated males, which helps explains how females can distinguish unrelated males. This finding could potentially lead us to understand how female mice avoid inbreeding.
Interestingly, in some species of birds the males with the most complex songs appear to be most successful at attracting females. Further studies are needed to determine whether the complexity of male mouse vocalizations has an effect on females that is similar to that of "sexy syllables" in birds.
The vocalizations of wild house mice differ significantly from those of inbred strains of laboratory mice. Wild male mice produce more syllables within high frequency ranges than laboratory mice, a result that is consistent with other studies that find genetic effects on mouse song. "It seems as though house mice might provide a new model organism for the study of song in animals," says Dustin Penn. "Who would have thought that?"
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The article "Spectrographic analyses reveal signals of individuality and kinship in the ultrasonic courtship vocalizations of wild house mice" by Frauke Hoffmann, Kerstin Musolf and Dustin J. Penn is published in the journal Physiology & Behavior (Volume 105, Issue 3, pp. 766-771). Abstract of the article online (full text for a fee or with a subscription): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.10.011
University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna: http://www.vetmeduni.ac.at
Thanks to University of Veterinary Medicine -- Vienna for this article.
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ASU center ensures access to archaeological data that otherwise may be lostPublic release date: 26-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julie Newberg julie.newberg@asu.edu 480-727-3116 Arizona State University
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides grant to support the Center and to develop and expand the Digital Archaeological Record
TEMPE (Jan. 26, 2012) - Preserving archaeological information, facilitating access to a wide range of digital documents and data, and enhancing archaeological research are vital services that Arizona State University's Center for Digital Antiquity (http://www.digitalantiquity.org) provides for researchers, students and the public.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant of $1.2 million beginning in March 2012 that will support the Center's operations and development. The grant enables the Center to greatly expand the content of its digital repository, to enlarge the community of users and to continue development and enhancement of software to improve the repository user's experience.
The Center for Digital Antiquity develops, maintains and oversees the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR http://www.tdar.org), the country's largest digital repository of world-wide archaeological data and information. The Center was established in 2009 with support from an earlier grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Technology has changed the way that people create and store information moving from books and paper to digital files stored on tape, floppy disks, CD-ROMs and other media. A problem associated with this shift is that digital files are far more susceptible to loss due to degradation of storage media, software obsolescence and inadequate documentation.
When this happens with archaeological data, it is especially tragic. It entails a loss of irreplaceable information about our national and global heritage and represents a waste of time, effort and public money that has been expended to collect, analyze and report the data.
"In laboratory-based science, experiments can be repeated; however, you can't dig a site twice," said ASU Professor and Sustainability Scientist Keith Kintigh, who was the principal investigator for the first Mellon grant and is a co-principal investigator on the new grant. "The archaeological record provides our only access to most of human history. For example, human societies both contribute to and respond to gradual environmental change. Archaeological evidence allows us to better understand the conditions under which societies are resilient to long-term change, and the configurations that lead to collapse."
Francis P. McManamon, Center for Digital Antiquity executive director and principal investigator for the new Mellon grant, notes that "approximately 40,000 archaeological investigations take place every year in the United States, yet only a handful thoroughly publish their findings and the supporting data in traditional, general distribution books. Most projects do produce limited distribution paper reports that end up in just a few of the thousands of state and federal agency offices and university libraries." Compounding this problem, there is no reliable way to discover the existence of reports relevant to a particular research topic and the reports are frequently difficult to use and expensive to obtain.
The situation with the supporting data is far worse. Even in the unusual case that the supporting data (notes, drawings, photos etc.) exists in a public repository, they are even harder to find and are rarely adequately documented or maintained. Adam Brin, Center for Digital Antiquity director of technology and a co-principal investigator on the new grant, adds: "we want to make sure that these unpublished reports and the almost-never published supporting data and analyses are easily discoverable and widely accessible now and in 100 years. We have designed and built tDAR to ensure this."
tDAR has been in full operation for about a year and is growing rapidly with thousands of documents, data sets and images, including 3-D scans of artifacts.
"By providing Web-based discovery and access of reports, images and well-documented data sets, tDAR enables archaeological syntheses that could never have been done before. tDAR's cutting-edge data integration tools allow researchers to analyze data across projects that span large areas and long time intervals yielding new knowledge about the past," Kintigh said.
Organizations that currently use tDAR as a digital repository include the Phoenix Area office of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Midwest Archeological Center of the National Park Service, the Mimbres Foundation and the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization.
"We have archaeological information from across the United States, from the Arctic to the Southwest, and from the West coast to New England. Documents, data sets and images from places like Cape Cod, coastal Georgia, the California desert, the Great Lakes region and New York City, as well as from right here in Phoenix and Tucson, can be found in tDAR," McManamon said.
"We believe that digital copies of reports, along with the photographs, data sets and the other digital data from each project should be deposited in a trusted digital repository, such as tDAR, as part of every project's normal workflow. This will ensure that these digital records are preserved and can be easily discovered, accessed and used by current and future scholars," he added.
The repository is ideal for public agencies, research organizations and individual scholars who want to preserve and protect their archaeological research project records, while making them readily available for use in research, leading to new discoveries and better understanding of the past. Agencies and scholars also will find tDAR an effective and efficient means of providing appropriate access to their research results to the general public.
"We now have in tDAR the archaeological reports from many large projects that were completed decades ago," McManamon said. "For example, the repository includes a large number of reports and detailed records from archaeological investigations in the Phoenix area that were completed in advance of the construction of the Papago Freeway, the Hohokam Expressway and the Central Arizona Project."
Securing a grant to ensure the future of The Center for Digital Antiquity represents an important professional milestone for McManamon, who spent 32 years at the National Park Service where he served as chief archeologist and recognized the need for an archaeological information repository like tDAR.
"We have a terrific tool," he said. "The repository has been a crucial need for many years. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its essential and steady support that is advancing scholarship and preserving irreplaceable records of human history. We're committed to rapidly expanding our collection of information and to building tDAR's user community while ensuring long-term digital access to the archaeological record."
The Center is associated with ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Global Institute of Sustainability, and the University Libraries.
###
Contact:
Julie Newberg
Arizona State University
Media Relations
(480) 727-3116
Julie.newberg@asu.edu
[ | E-mail | 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.
ASU center ensures access to archaeological data that otherwise may be lostPublic release date: 26-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julie Newberg julie.newberg@asu.edu 480-727-3116 Arizona State University
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides grant to support the Center and to develop and expand the Digital Archaeological Record
TEMPE (Jan. 26, 2012) - Preserving archaeological information, facilitating access to a wide range of digital documents and data, and enhancing archaeological research are vital services that Arizona State University's Center for Digital Antiquity (http://www.digitalantiquity.org) provides for researchers, students and the public.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a grant of $1.2 million beginning in March 2012 that will support the Center's operations and development. The grant enables the Center to greatly expand the content of its digital repository, to enlarge the community of users and to continue development and enhancement of software to improve the repository user's experience.
The Center for Digital Antiquity develops, maintains and oversees the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR http://www.tdar.org), the country's largest digital repository of world-wide archaeological data and information. The Center was established in 2009 with support from an earlier grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Technology has changed the way that people create and store information moving from books and paper to digital files stored on tape, floppy disks, CD-ROMs and other media. A problem associated with this shift is that digital files are far more susceptible to loss due to degradation of storage media, software obsolescence and inadequate documentation.
When this happens with archaeological data, it is especially tragic. It entails a loss of irreplaceable information about our national and global heritage and represents a waste of time, effort and public money that has been expended to collect, analyze and report the data.
"In laboratory-based science, experiments can be repeated; however, you can't dig a site twice," said ASU Professor and Sustainability Scientist Keith Kintigh, who was the principal investigator for the first Mellon grant and is a co-principal investigator on the new grant. "The archaeological record provides our only access to most of human history. For example, human societies both contribute to and respond to gradual environmental change. Archaeological evidence allows us to better understand the conditions under which societies are resilient to long-term change, and the configurations that lead to collapse."
Francis P. McManamon, Center for Digital Antiquity executive director and principal investigator for the new Mellon grant, notes that "approximately 40,000 archaeological investigations take place every year in the United States, yet only a handful thoroughly publish their findings and the supporting data in traditional, general distribution books. Most projects do produce limited distribution paper reports that end up in just a few of the thousands of state and federal agency offices and university libraries." Compounding this problem, there is no reliable way to discover the existence of reports relevant to a particular research topic and the reports are frequently difficult to use and expensive to obtain.
The situation with the supporting data is far worse. Even in the unusual case that the supporting data (notes, drawings, photos etc.) exists in a public repository, they are even harder to find and are rarely adequately documented or maintained. Adam Brin, Center for Digital Antiquity director of technology and a co-principal investigator on the new grant, adds: "we want to make sure that these unpublished reports and the almost-never published supporting data and analyses are easily discoverable and widely accessible now and in 100 years. We have designed and built tDAR to ensure this."
tDAR has been in full operation for about a year and is growing rapidly with thousands of documents, data sets and images, including 3-D scans of artifacts.
"By providing Web-based discovery and access of reports, images and well-documented data sets, tDAR enables archaeological syntheses that could never have been done before. tDAR's cutting-edge data integration tools allow researchers to analyze data across projects that span large areas and long time intervals yielding new knowledge about the past," Kintigh said.
Organizations that currently use tDAR as a digital repository include the Phoenix Area office of the Bureau of Reclamation, the Midwest Archeological Center of the National Park Service, the Mimbres Foundation and the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization.
"We have archaeological information from across the United States, from the Arctic to the Southwest, and from the West coast to New England. Documents, data sets and images from places like Cape Cod, coastal Georgia, the California desert, the Great Lakes region and New York City, as well as from right here in Phoenix and Tucson, can be found in tDAR," McManamon said.
"We believe that digital copies of reports, along with the photographs, data sets and the other digital data from each project should be deposited in a trusted digital repository, such as tDAR, as part of every project's normal workflow. This will ensure that these digital records are preserved and can be easily discovered, accessed and used by current and future scholars," he added.
The repository is ideal for public agencies, research organizations and individual scholars who want to preserve and protect their archaeological research project records, while making them readily available for use in research, leading to new discoveries and better understanding of the past. Agencies and scholars also will find tDAR an effective and efficient means of providing appropriate access to their research results to the general public.
"We now have in tDAR the archaeological reports from many large projects that were completed decades ago," McManamon said. "For example, the repository includes a large number of reports and detailed records from archaeological investigations in the Phoenix area that were completed in advance of the construction of the Papago Freeway, the Hohokam Expressway and the Central Arizona Project."
Securing a grant to ensure the future of The Center for Digital Antiquity represents an important professional milestone for McManamon, who spent 32 years at the National Park Service where he served as chief archeologist and recognized the need for an archaeological information repository like tDAR.
"We have a terrific tool," he said. "The repository has been a crucial need for many years. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its essential and steady support that is advancing scholarship and preserving irreplaceable records of human history. We're committed to rapidly expanding our collection of information and to building tDAR's user community while ensuring long-term digital access to the archaeological record."
The Center is associated with ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Global Institute of Sustainability, and the University Libraries.
###
Contact:
Julie Newberg
Arizona State University
Media Relations
(480) 727-3116
Julie.newberg@asu.edu
[ | E-mail | 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.
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) ? The United Nations will send its investigating judge to resume work at the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal in Cambodia, despite moves by the government to have him replaced, a top envoy said Wednesday.
Cambodia had no authority to block Swiss Laurent Kasper-Ansermet from taking up the post under a 2003 agreement between the government and the United Nations, said David Scheffer, special expert on U.N. assistance to the Khmer Rouge trials.
Scheffer said Kasper-Ansermet would go to work on investigating two more unidentified suspects in the highly controversial cases being referred to as 003 and 004, which relate to their roles in the "year zero" revolution that killed as many as 2.2 million Cambodians from 1975-1979.
The two cases have been a source of acrimony in the tribunal and have led to heated disagreements and several resignations. Cambodia's government is vehemently against indicting the two suspects, who are widely believed to be former Khmer Rouge military commanders.
"We do look forward to the judge returning to this country from his commitment in Switzerland this week and we look forward to him working on building a credible case files in case 3 and 4," Scheffer told reporters after meeting government officials.
"Recognizing that we believe in our interpretation of the (2003) agreement, namely regardless of that breach, the judge has full authority to operate as the international investigating judge," he said.
Critics have accused Cambodia's government of trying to prevent further cases from being investigated and Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge soldier, has even warned of a civil war if more indictments are issued.
CONTROVERSIAL CASES
The government said Monday its judicial bodies had full authority to reject judges if they did not consider them suitable and the United Nations was "confused" about an agreement it signed.
It gave no response Wednesday to Scheffer's announcement that the judge would return. Cambodian officials have said the government felt Kasper-Ansermet was unsuitable because he had used his Twitter account to draw attention to a debate over whether to purse cases 003 and 004.
The hybrid U.N.-Cambodian court is hearing case 002, involving three top members of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge regime, accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died in 1998.
Prosecutors have appealed the unexplained decision by a previous international judge Siegfried Blunk -- who resigned in October -- not to indict the two additional suspects, despite what rights groups say is overwhelming evidence to build a case against them.
Blunk's official reason for quitting was political interference.
The court, set up in 2005, has handed down just one sentence, a 35-year jail term commuted to 19 years for Kaing Guek Eav, also know as Duch, for his role in the deaths of more than 14,000 people at a torture center in Phnom Penh.
His appeal is due to be heard on February 3.
(Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Jennifer Lopez made this seemingly random assessment last night on American Idol, after the 19-year old Colorado native sang an original track for the judges. He titled the single "So Hard," but Jackson's soulful crooning made the panel's decision ever so easy.
Jairon was one of a number of Aspen contestants to celebrate this week with a Golden Ticket. Other standouts included Angie Zeiderman and Shelby Tweten.
SAN MATEO, Calif. ? Guidewire Software quickly found a following in its stock market debut Wednesday.
The insurance software maker's stock jumped to $18 within their first few hours of trading, a 38 percent gain from the initial public offering price of $13.
Guide Software Inc. sold 8.85 million shares in the IPO. The offering raised $115 million, before expenses.
The 11-year-old company is based in San Mateo, Calif. and employs about 200 people. It specializes in software that helps insurers analyze risks and manage claims.
After a history of early losses, Guide Software turned a profit in each of the last two fiscal years. It earned $36 million on revenue of $172 million in the year ending last July.
(Reuters) ? In the wake of news reports last week that presidential contender Mitt Romney owns an individual retirement account worth as much as $101 million, questions are growing over how it could have gotten so big when contribution limits are capped at $5,000 or $6,000 a year.
Tax lawyers and accountants suggest an answer: Romney may have made use of an Internal Revenue Service loophole that allows investors to undervalue interests in investment partnerships when first putting them into an IRA. These assets can produce returns far in excess of those that could be generated from other investments made at the capped level.
An investor could even set an initial value for a partnership interest at zero dollars, because under tax regulations an interest in a partnership represents future income, not current value, said Chris Sanchirico, co-director of the Center for Tax Law and Policy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Whether Romney used this technique, which is legal, when he put partnership interests into his IRA is a question that won't likely be answered when he discloses his 2010 tax returns on Tuesday.
Romney's IRA, valued at between $20.7 million and $101.6 million, as reported by The Wall Street Journal last Thursday, holds stakes in 13 investment entities run by Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he cofounded and led for 13 years.
"One possibility for its size is that he put his Bain partnership interests into the IRA and valued them at a very low number," said David Weisbach, a law professor who focuses on tax at the University of Chicago Law School.
Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, declined to respond to emails and calls.
In the wake of growing scrutiny of his personal wealth, Romney, one of the wealthiest contenders ever for the White House, told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday that on Tuesday he would release his 2010 tax returns and estimates for his 2011 return.
The release will not provide much insight into his IRA. That is because a personal income-tax return shows IRA contributions and withdrawals only for the year of the return, and not for previous years, and does not show whether any contributions were in the form of undervalued partnership interests. While an IRA investor can sometimes be required to file a separate return for the IRA, it is unclear whether Romney intends to release any such returns.
Romney's personal financial summary, disclosed last August under federal election rules, shows that his IRA holds his most lucrative investments, which are stakes in partnerships run by Bain Capital. Those stakes include Bcip Trust Associates III, a Bain fund that is his single largest investment, with assets valued at $5,000,001 to $25,000,000. Bcip Trust Associates III produced income to Romney's IRA of over $5,000,000 over 2010 and through August 12, 2011, according to the summary.
Robert Stack, head of international tax at law firm Ivins Phillips & Barker, said it is possible that Romney's IRA grew so large not only because of an increase in the value of the funds in which it invests but also through lucrative profits, typically 20 percent of investment gains per year, that funds can generate for their general partners.
It is not known whether Romney is a general partner in the Bain funds, meaning invested in the partnership responsible for managing the funds, or simply an investor in the funds. The Romney campaign has declined to comment on this issue.
The general partners' cut of the profit, known as carried interest, is taxable each year if the funds in which the IRA is invested earn certain management fees or borrow to make their investments. Tax lawyers say they want to know whether Romney's IRA holds any carried interest and whether it has paid tax on it - something not disclosed in his personal financial summary or on a federal income tax return. "In the context of a $100 million IRA, that is what we would want to know," said David Miller, a tax lawyer at Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft.
The average IRA held by Americans holds $42,500, according to the Investment Company Institute, a trade group. While the Romney campaign has said that some of his IRA consists of retirement savings rolled over from previous plans, accountants say rollovers would not likely explain the size of his IRA.
"Even if he rolled over a 401k, with the annual caps on contributions, you're still only talking about a few million dollars," said Robert Green, an accountant who is founder of Green Trading, a tax and accounting firm that caters to the investment industry. Last year, individuals could contribute a maximum of $16,500 a year to their 401(k) plans.
Tax lawyers say it is also important to know whether Romney's IRA holds stakes in Bain funds directly, or through related, offshore entities.
These entities, commonly used by tax-exempt investors such as Romney's IRA, legally allow the investors to avoid having to pay a special tax, known as the unearned business income tax, or UBTI.
While the Wall Street Journal suggested on Thursday that avoidance of the special tax was a big reason for the size of Romney's IRA, some tax lawyers said that its size might simply reflect the extreme profitability of a carried interest held by the IRA. "The best guess is that he put the carried interest into the IRA," Miller said.
Romney's IRA produced income of $1.5 million to $8.5 million over 2010 and through August 12, 2011, according to his financial summary, but it is unknown what, if any, taxes the IRA may have paid on its carried interest. Saul, Romney's campaign spokeswoman, declined requests for comment.
(Reporting by Lynnley Browning; Additional reporting by Gregory Roumeliotis; Editing by Amy Stevens, Eddie Evans and Carol Bishopric)
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Public release date: 26-Jan-2012
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