AAA??May. 3, 2012?7:07 PM ET Scientists use airship to look for meteorites AP
Carrying scientists and researchers, the zeppelin, Eureka lifts off from McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., to search for pieces of a meteorite, Thursday, May 3, 2012. The researchers are using an aerial search hoping to locate sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Carrying scientists and researchers, the zeppelin, Eureka lifts off from McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., to search for pieces of a meteorite, Thursday, May 3, 2012. The researchers are using an aerial search hoping to locate sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Peter Jenniskens, right, the NASA scientist in charge of a group of researchers searching for pieces of a meteorite, walk to the zeppelin, Eureka, at McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, May 3, 2012. Researchers from NASA and the SETI Institute are using the slow moving airship in hope of spotting sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
NASA scientist Peter Jenniskens, second from right, leaders of a group of researchers searching for pieces of a meteorite, goes over the search plan before take off from McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., Thursday, May 3, 2012. Researchers from NASA and the SETI Institute are using the zeppelin, Eureka for their aerial search in hope of spotting sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Wearing blue flight suits, four NASA researchers walk to the zeppelin, Eureka, at McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., that will be used to search for pieces of a meteorite Thursday, May 3, 2012. The researches from NASA and the SETI Institute are hoping to spot sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
NASA researchers walk to the zeppelin, Eureka, at McClellan Air Park in Sacramento, Calif., that will be used to search for pieces of a meteorite Thursday, May 3, 2012. The researchers from NASA and the SETI Institute are hoping to spot sites where large fragments landed after a meteor exploded in the atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada in late April. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) ? A group of scientists took to the skies in a slow-moving airship Thursday in search of meteorites that rained over California's gold country last month.
It's the latest hunt for extraterrestrial fragments from the April 22 explosion that was witnessed over a swath of Northern California and Nevada.
Treasure hunters have swarmed the Sierra Nevada foothills over the past two weeks, snatching up pieces of meteorites. Most of the recovered space rocks have been tiny, with the largest weighing in at 19 grams, or the weight of one AA battery.
Researchers from NASA and the nonprofit SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., were on the lookout for larger fragments. After a brief weather delay, they took off from a Sacramento airfield aboard an airship outfitted with sensors and cameras.
From the air, scientists scoured the terrain for places where sizable meteorites might have scattered. The survey took them over the area where James W. Marshall first discovered gold in California in 1848. Once they pinpoint possible impact sites, they plan to follow up with a search party.
"Only small pieces have been found. There has to be big pieces out there," SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens said before the trip. "We're just hoping to collect more meteorites for research."
Days after the approximately 154,300-pound meteor plunged through Earth's atmosphere with a loud sonic boom that was heard from Sacramento to Las Vegas, Jenniskens organized a team and found a 4-gram meteorite in the parking lot of a park.
NASA estimated the minivan-sized meteor released energy equal to one-third the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. An event this size occurs once a year usually over unpopulated areas.
Initial inspection of rock fragments indicates this type of meteorite is among the oldest, dating to the solar system's birth 4 billion to 5 billion years ago.
___
Online:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov
Associated PressNews Topics: Meteors and meteorites, Space exploration, Gold mining, Science, Astrobiology, Astronomy, Precious metal mining, Metal mining, Mining, Metals and minerals, Materials, Industries, Business, Biology
Unconscious racial attitudes playing large role in 2012 presidential votePublic release date: 7-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Molly McElroy mollywmc@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many proclaimed that the country had entered a post-racial era in which race was no longer an issue. However, a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year's presidential election.
The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks either consciously or unconsciously also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.
"People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case," said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.
The study's findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don't believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.
"Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having 'done the right thing' then are now letting other considerations prevail," said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.
In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled "automatic white preference" on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.
In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.
The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.
In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how "warmly" they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum as well as Obama.
Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don't realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.
Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents' racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study's finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.
"The study's findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?" Greenwald said.
He suspects that Obama's power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have "brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008."
Another possibility is that Republican candidates' assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency "may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation," Greenwald said.
Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people's attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters' comparisons of Romney with Obama.
###
They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html
Other collaborators on the Decision 2012 IAT project are Teri Kirby and Kaiyuan Xu, both at UW, and Brian Nosek and Sriram Natarajan, at the University of Virginia. Nosek and Banaji have collaborated with Greenwald in developing uses of the Implicit Association Test since the test's creation in the 1990s.
For more information, contact Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Banaji at 617-384-9203 or mahzarin_banaji@harvard.edu, or Nosek at nosek@virginia.edu.
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Unconscious racial attitudes playing large role in 2012 presidential votePublic release date: 7-May-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Molly McElroy mollywmc@uw.edu 206-543-2580 University of Washington
After the 2008 election of President Barack Obama, many proclaimed that the country had entered a post-racial era in which race was no longer an issue. However, a new large-scale study shows that racial attitudes have already played a substantial role in 2012, during the Republican primaries. They may play an even larger role in this year's presidential election.
The study, led by psychologists at the University of Washington, shows that between January and April 2012 eligible voters who favored whites over blacks either consciously or unconsciously also favored Republican candidates relative to Barack Obama.
"People were saying that with Obama's election race became a dead issue, but that's not at all the case," said lead investigator Anthony Greenwald, a UW psychology professor.
The study's findings mean that many white and non-white voters, even those who don't believe they tend to favor whites over blacks, might vote against Obama because of his race. These voters could cite the economy or other reasons, but a contributing cause could nevertheless be their conscious or unconscious racial attitudes.
"Our findings may indicate that many of those who expressed egalitarian attitudes by voting for Obama in 2008 and credited themselves with having 'done the right thing' then are now letting other considerations prevail," said collaborator Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard University.
In the study, a majority of white eligible voters showed a pattern labeled "automatic white preference" on a widely used measure of unconscious race bias. Previous studies indicate that close to 75 percent of white Americans show this implicit bias.
In a study done just prior to the 2008 presidential election, Greenwald and colleagues found that race attitudes played a role in predicting votes for the Republican candidate John McCain.
The 2012 data, collected from nearly 15,000 voters, show that race was again a significant factor in candidate preferences.
In an online survey, Greenwald asked survey-takers about their political beliefs, how "warmly" they felt toward black and white people, and which presidential contender they preferred. Because the survey was conducted in the first four months of 2012, it included the five main Republican hopefuls Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum as well as Obama.
Greenwald also measured unconscious race attitude using the Implicit Association Test, a tool he developed more than a decade ago to gauge thoughts that people don't realize they have. Different variations of the test measure implicit attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.
Greenwald found that favoritism for Republican candidates was predicted by respondents' racial attitudes, both their self-reported views and their implicit biases measured by the IAT. Greenwald emphasized that the study's finding that some candidates are more attractive to voters with pro-white racial attitudes does not mean that those candidates are racist.
"The study's findings raise an interesting question: After nearly four years of having an African-American president in the White House, why do race attitudes continue to have a role in electoral politics?" Greenwald said.
He suspects that Obama's power as president in 2012, compared with his lesser status as candidate in 2008, may have "brought out race-based antagonism that had less reason to be activated in 2008."
Another possibility is that Republican candidates' assertions that their most important goal is to remove Obama from the presidency "may have strong appeal to those who have latent racial motivation," Greenwald said.
Greenwald and his research team will continue to collect people's attitudes about the 2012 presidential candidates as part of their Decision 2012 IAT study. Now that Mitt Romney has emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee, the researchers are modifying their survey to focus on voters' comparisons of Romney with Obama.
###
They plan to post summaries of the data each month until the November election. Anyone can take the test online: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/featuredtask.html
Other collaborators on the Decision 2012 IAT project are Teri Kirby and Kaiyuan Xu, both at UW, and Brian Nosek and Sriram Natarajan, at the University of Virginia. Nosek and Banaji have collaborated with Greenwald in developing uses of the Implicit Association Test since the test's creation in the 1990s.
For more information, contact Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Banaji at 617-384-9203 or mahzarin_banaji@harvard.edu, or Nosek at nosek@virginia.edu.
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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.
Facebook is expanding Offers, a free, DIY-coupon generator for local businesses that bears more than a passing resemblance to Deals, which was widely touted as a potential "Groupon-killer" when it launched last year. Offering local deals isn't easy: Facebook scrapped Deals after four months.?
"Local and daily deals in general are very labor intensive, and contrast sharply with Facebook's business model of being engineering-heavy," Sam Hamadeh, CEO of PrivCo LLC, said via email.?Making Offers free and self-serve isn't the solution, though, according to experts in the business of monetizing data.
Facebook needs to stop emulating daily deal strategies and instead take a page from the playbook of credit card companies, which are slicing and dicing the reams of customer information at their disposal to connect businesses only with the people who are likely to become customers ? or who already shop at their competitors.
Offers was announced back in February along with other changes to Facebook's advertising platform. It's still in beta, but was made available to?most local businesses in the United States last week.?"Offers are a free new way for businesses to share discounts and promotions directly from a Facebook Page," the company said in a statement when it launched.?
This is a tool intended for the mom-and-pop small business with tiny marketing budgets.?While deals can either be posted on a business's news feed or made into a "sponsored story" ? Facebook-speak for ad ? the video tutorial on Facebook's site focuses on the free aspect and includes a short Marketing 101 lesson on structuring a coupon.?
Once it's created, the offer goes onto the business's timeline, which means people who have liked the business page will see it on their news feeds, and anyone who views the business's timeline will be able to see the offer. This is likely to be too scattershot an approach to deliver much businesses to the local restaurants, retailers and service providers Facebook is targeting.
"You can't drop this stuff like they're leaflets from airplanes," said Brian Riley, senior research director at CEB TowerGroup.
Sites like Groupon and its rivals probably don't have to start worrying just yet, since Offers has to develop a traction it never managed to achieve with Deals. "Groupon has a huge presence in local,"?Ken Sena, an analyst at Evercore Partners, said via email. "Therefore, it could be disruptive longer term but I think initially they will be somewhat separated."
But if Facebook takes a more data-driven, targeted approach to offers, daily deal sites might have to contend with much stiffer competition.?"A lot of the information on Facebook is so general, you've got to be able to drive that down... and really turn it from data into information," Riley said.?
Banks that issue credit and debit cards are doing this using a model the industry calls "merchant funded rewards." The issuer or a third-party middleman slices and dices anonymized spending and demographic data and uses that to present offers to customers.?Merchants pay the cost of the discount plus a cut to the bank or third-party firm only for offers actually redeemed.?
For instance, imagine a chain coffee shop wants to reach females under the age of 35 who earn more than $50,000 a year and who make purchases at a competing coffee chain. They create an offer ? say, for a half-price blended coffee drink ? that goes out only to consumers who match those specs. This way, the coffee chain avoids giving offers to customers who would have made a purchase there anyway, or to deal-hunters who will take the discount and never return.
"What I'm noticing what's happening with those types of programs is they're generally incorporating a variety of anonymized data," said?Beth Robertson, director of payments research at Javelin Strategy & Research, and that data is what makes users more likely to only receive offers to which they'll respond.
PrivCo's Hamadeh said it's promising that Facebook is letting businesses combine an offer with a targeted ad, but Robertson said Facebook needs to exploit the information it has at its disposal more aggressively.
"Facebook?could do those things but theres no indication it's offering that right now," she said. Although Facebook doesn't have information about users' spending patterns ? with the exception of the brisk sale of game-related virtual goods ? it has plenty of demographic information along with information about what businesses users like, and this is what could eventually give it an edge over deal sites.
"Making it more sophisticated draws it out of the daily deal sort of generic offering and would add value to the merchant," Robertson said.?
CNBC's Becky Quick discusses her conversation with Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett regarding his perspective on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. It's too difficult to value, he says.
A nearly full moon rises behind the cross of the Frauenkirche in the German city of Dresden in May 4.
By Alan Boyle
Tonight's "supermoon" is the biggest and brightest full moon of the year, due to the fact that the moon is near the closest point in its orbital path around Earth. But just how much bigger and brighter does it look? That's a tricky question.
Most reports say the moon looks 14 percent bigger than usual, which is close to the truth but isn't quite right. They also say it's 30 percent brighter than usual, which isn't right, either. James Garvin, chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, ran the numbers to come up with an explanation that seems to make the most sense.
First of all, it's important to note that the moon itself is not getting significantly bigger or smaller. There's a scientific debate over whether the moon is slowly shrinking or spreading out. But in either case, the change isn't noticeable on human time scales.
The difference in the moon's apparent size is basically a function of how close it is to Earth in its elliptical orbit. That orbit isn't changing on human time scales, either. It just so happens that tonight, the moon is coming closest to Earth at the same time that it's going full.?Because the moon and the sun are precisely opposite each other, relative to Earth, tonight's ocean tides may be a bit higher than typical ? but again, the effect is nowhere near big enough to worry about.
So how noticeable is the visual effect? Here what Garvin told me in an email today:
"The biggest predictable effect on the brightness of the full moon is how close the moon is to Earth.? With everything else the same, a full moon is about 30 percent brighter?when the moon is closest to Earth in its orbit (called perigee) compared to a full moon when the moon is farthest from Earth in its orbit (called apogee).? Today?s full moon is at perigee."
"Also, when the moon is high in the sky (as it is now), we are closer to the moon by approximately the radius of Earth compared to when the moon is on the horizon. (Note: Earth?s radius is about 6,371 kilometers)."
"Since the distance from the center of Earth to the center of the moon is on average about 384,403 kilometers, the radius of the earth is about 6,371 kilometers, and brightness changes as the square of the distance, being closer to the moon by about the radius of the earth increases the brightness of the full moon by about 3 percent." ?
"Thus the present supermoon is, at maximum, only about 9 to 10 percent larger in an angular (appearance) sense than a typical full moon and is also brighter (by a few percent), making it appear 'super.'"
"Meanwhile, our intrepid Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter continues its remarkable mapping of our nearest celestial neighbor, coming up (in June) on its three-year anniversary of being in lunar orbit with its amazing array of 7 instruments," Garvin added. ?"As of now, the data returned from LRO (over 300 trillion bytes) is larger than all of the rest of the data acquired for planets in the solar system combined (except for Earth, of course)."
Which just goes to show that every day is a "super moon" day for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and its science team. Check out NASA's Web site for more wisdom from James Garvin.
A NASA video explains the science behind the "supermoon."
Geoff Chester, an astronomer at the U.S. Naval Observatory, says the moon appears 14 percent larger in angular size when it's at the closest point in its orbit, compared with its appearance when it's farthest away from Earth. That's not 14 percent larger than average. That's 14 percent larger than the minimum apparent size.
"You'd be very hard-pressed to detect that with the unaided eye," Chester told The Associated Press. Seasoned skywatchers, however, say they can definitely tell the difference. Can you? Take a look at the moon tonight ??before, during or after the moment of maximum fullness at 11:35 p.m. ET ??and tell us what you see.
Update for 6:45 p.m. ET May 5: Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait observes that the moon's angular size is roughly equivalent to that of a dime as seen from 6 feet away. You can bet I'll have a dime taped onto a south-facing window tonight to make the observations. Also, tonight's supermoon will be a little less super than last year's supermoon, because the moon is about 240 miles farther away at peak fullness than it was in March 2011. For what it's worth, next year's supermoon will be imperceptibly smaller than this year's. I wonder if there'll be perceptibly less hype.
Update for 2:20 a.m. ET May 6: Yes, the weather was clear enough for supermoon-gazing in my Seattle-area neighborhood ? and yes, I really did tape a dime onto a window to compare its angular size with the moon's. But it seemed to me that the sizes were about the same at a dime distance of 4 or 5 feet, rather than the?6-foot distance that Phil Plait suggested. Which just goes to show you: YMMV (your moon may vary). You can see what I saw by checking my Twitpic gallery.
More about the supermoon:
If you snap a great photo of the moon, feel free to upload it into msnbc.com's FirstPerson in-box.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
If Sony's German site is to be believed, then it's safe to say the outfit's had a change of heart recently. According to a revealing spec sheet on the website, there's now a T13 Ultrabook model with one of Intel's latest chips on board. Just last week, Sony announced the Euro-bound T13 would be sporting a last-gen Core i3-2367M CPU, but the recent finding shows an i5-3317U variant (you know, the one on Sammy's Series 9) could be in the works. Still, it's unknown whether this Ivy Bridge-packing VAIO would replace its Sandy Bridge sibling or if it's just going to be a complete different offering. We'll have to wait and see.
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Public release date: 7-May-2012
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