Eideard

The capital of Wisconsin is buying 600 iPads this spring and plans to buy another 800 this fall, all paid for using funds from the state’s settlement with Microsoft related to consumer lawsuits claiming the company overcharged customers for its software…

Smojver added that the new iPads will enable students to wirelessly share their work and enable schools to replace textbooks with digital apps or ebooks, referring to Apple’s recent announcement related to iBooks 2, iBooks Author and digital textbooks as a “significant development.”

District deputy superintendent Sue Abplanalp noted that Madison administrators had been impressed by the results of an iPad trial by Chicago Public Schools, which found the tablets were successful in keeping students more engaged in the classroom.

Wisconsin’s iPads are being paid for through $3.4 million of the nearly $80 million settlement Microsoft agreed to pay the state to settle claims that it has systematically cheated consumers into paying too much for its software…

Har! Something somewhere in there about karma.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

In the growing rivalry between the emerging superpowers China and India, Beijing scored a symbolic victory on Thursday: a Chinese woman won a chess match.

The woman, Hou Yifan, 17, easily retained the Women’s World Chess Championship title when she drew the eighth game of a match against Humpy Koneru, the best Indian woman to play the game.

The final score of the best-of-10 match was 5.5 points to 2.5 points. Despite the lopsided score, the victory was not as easy as it appeared, Ms. Hou said in a telephone interview from Tirana, Albania, where the match was held. “Every game was interesting. Both of us had chances,” she said. The difference was that “in the middle games, I caught her mistakes…”

The match was sponsored by Taci Oil International, whose chief executive, Rezart Taci, is president of the Albanian Chess Federation. Ms. Hou will receive 60 percent of the $267,000 prize fund, and Ms. Koneru 40 percent.

Ms. Hou became the youngest world champion in history last year when she was 16. The match against Ms. Koneru, 24, was Ms. Hou’s first defense of the title.

In some ways, the match was a competition between the world’s two most populous countries as well as the two players. In recent years, the Chinese have dominated women’s chess, but the overall world champion is Viswanathan Anand of India. Ms. Koneru had a chance to make India the holder of the chess world’s most important titles.

Though Ms. Hou is ranked No. 3 in the world among women and Ms. Koneru is No. 2, Ms. Hou was a slight favorite because she had beaten Ms. Koneru in the semifinals of last year’s championship as well as the one in 2008…

Though Ms. Hou is the world champion, Judit Polgar, a Hungarian, is the best female player and the only woman to ever be ranked among the world’s top 10. But she does not play in competitions that are limited to women, which is why she has never won the women’s title…

Ms. Hou added that she hoped to find time in her competitive schedule to go to college.

“I have to know some more things,” she said. “I have to open my eyes to see the whole world.”

Bravo.

Armenia, one of the world players in chess, has made it mandatory in school for ages seven to nine.

Chess is a national obsession in the country of three million.

The passion was fostered in modern times by the exploits of chess champion Tigran Petrosian, who won the world championship in 1963 and then successfully defended his title three years later…

Armenian authorities say teaching chess in school is about building character, not breeding chess champs.

The education minister says taking the pastime into classrooms will help nurture a sense of responsibility and organization among schoolchildren, as well as serving as an example to the rest of the world.

“We hope that the Armenian teaching model might become among the best in the world,” Armen Ashotyan told The Associated Press.

Half a million dollars were allocated to the national chess academy to draw up a course, create textbooks, train instructors and buy equipment. Another $1 million went toward buying furniture for chess classrooms.

Two characteristics educators hope to encourage are quoted in the article – by the father of an 8-year-old whiz at chess. He hopes that continued involvement with and study of chess will encourage logical thinking and the ability to improvise.

Not bad attributes for your life’s culture.

A hoax bomber has been jailed for claiming his wife was carrying explosives aboard a transatlantic flight because he wanted to “humiliate” her after their relationship ended.

Kevin Flynn, a 31-year-old chef, phoned police to say a device was being taken on a New York-bound aircraft by his wife, Kerensa, from either Heathrow or Gatwick airport.

Flynn made the anonymous call from a phone box in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, after the couple decided to end their relationship and she was travelling home to the United States…

Judge William Wood QC said: “When there is a chance of large-scale disruption or evacuation of buildings or aeroplanes and airports, this class of misconduct is so serious there is no possibility to do anything but impose an immediate custodial sentence…”

Following the sentencing, a spokesman for Sussex Police said: “Flynn acted without care for any anxiety or disruption he might cause and our investigation and the sentence reflects the seriousness with which we and the courts take such hoaxes.”

RTFA for the details of the soap opera.

Fact is that if the coppers hadn’t been sharp and connected Flynn to an earlier call from his home they might have gone for an emergency evacuation of the plane and the nearby terminal. You don’t always succeed in something like that being safe and orderly. Some innocent person could have been injured in a fear-driven stampede – just for his anger at his wife.

Wait till he tries for the gate and cut him off!

Dog walkers who take their pets on countryside strolls have been warned that they face a growing menace from temperamental continental cows.

Hard-pressed farmers have been gradually replacing more docile native breeds in favour of the larger and more profitable – but potentially more aggressive – Limousin and Charolais.

Over the past two decades, with supermarket customers demanding ever cheaper meat, the rather more docile Hereford, Aberdeen Angus and British Friesian have started to be phased out. It means that, while walkers out with their dogs would be wise to be wary of any breed, the character of the animals they are likely to come across in farmers’ fields may be very different from what they had experienced in the past.

Bryan Jones, a former vice president of the Farmers’ Union of Wales, said the Limousin and Charolais tended to be “more temperamental, more highly strung”…

His warning came after retired school secretary Marilyn Duffy, 61, was trampled to death by a herd of cows as she walked through a field just yards from her home in Radyr, near Cardiff.

The animals involved were believed to be Friesians and Mr Jones said that in general all breeds of cattle “don’t like dogs”.

Dog owners whose pets are attacked by cows are advised to let the dog go as when let off the leash it should be able to outrun its pursuer.

Consideration of this problem is nothing new for folks like me who lives places where the law defining fences – for example – is that you are fencing something out not something in. That’s because until recently the county where I live in New Mexico was classified as open range. You don’t want cows in your front garden? It’s your responsibility to keep them out.

As for breeds like Limousin? Coming upon just a few of these critters while out on a stroll – with or without Fido – is like casually waltzing back into the days when wooly rhinos dotted the mesa tops. They are huge! I would be afraid of one stepping on me just by accident.

Another Republican the Kool Aid Party hates

If the debt-ceiling showdown made your blood boil, if the shutdown of air-traffic-control work related to the airline-ticket tax drove you crazy, then you should unplug your TV and power down your computer in late September, as the deadline for extension of the federal gasoline tax draws near.

…A sizable chunk of Republicans, led by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona, want to abolish the tax that pays for the federal highway program and replace the whole system with one overseen by individual states.

This insurgency, inspired by the Tea Party, reflects flawed thinking on economics, transportation policy and even American history.

Like many other excise taxes, the federal highway tax comes up for periodic renewal, which is usually noncontroversial. But not this time. If Congress doesn’t act to renew the tax by Sept. 30, gas stations all over the country have to stop collecting it; the highway trust fund will never get the money; and new work on federal highway projects will come screeching to a halt.

A delay of just 10 days in renewing the tax would mean the permanent loss of $1 billion in highway funding (and layoffs for thousands of workers). Longer delays would measurably increase the national unemployment rate.

…Tea Partiers and their allies on this issue haven’t given up the fight over ending the tax; if they can’t abolish it outright just yet, they’ll push to allow states to opt out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Redbelly the dog receiving award from local coppers

A mother imprisoned for lying to police about her pregnancy is battling for custody of the child she left in the yard of a neighbor shortly after his birth.

Nunu Sung is scheduled for parole in January after serving some of a three-year prison term imposed after she pleaded guilty in October 2010 to felony obstruction of justice. In exchange, prosecutors agreed they would not seek to terminate the woman’s parental rights.

However, prosecutors are now involved in terminating Sung’s parental rights to 2-year-old Joshua in favor of a Wheaton couple who are the child’s foster parents.

DuPage Circuit Judge Blanche Hill Fawell said…prosecutors may have erred in making the promise but were legally obligated to get involved in the parental termination proceedings. The judge said Sung’s only option is to file a post-conviction request to reopen her plea and sentence…

Sung’s attorneys said she hid her pregnancy because she was afraid she would be punished and scorned by her family…

A civil attorney appointed by Fawell as Joshua’s guardian filed paperwork to terminate Sung’s parental rights based largely on her abandoning the child…

The newborn was found in June 2009 by a Wheaton man who noticed the baby with its umbilical cord still attached after his dog spotted the child under a tree and barked. Prosecutors alleged the child might have died if he hadn’t been found.

“The baby, who was left outside on the cold, hard ground, had a body temperature in the low 80s and was hypothermic,” Assistant State’s Attorney Anne Therieau wrote earlier this year in court records. “But for a dog, who was let out in the morning hours, this baby would have died.”

Tough decision for lot of folks. I’d come down on the side of the wee’un who’s been living with folks who loved him from the gitgo. It’s nice that Joshua’s natural mother wants to retake the responsibility of raising him – but, she was equally ready to leave him to die.

New Mexico State Court

A Santa Fe federal court jury has awarded a woman $1.26 million in damages from a debt-collection law firm that pursued her for three years in a case of mistaken identity.

Denver-based Farrell & Sandlin twice filed to garnish the wages of Lucinda Yazzie of Farmington — the second time despite assurances from her employer that the collectors had the wrong person — and didn’t back off until Yazzie filed her federal court lawsuit, said Rob Treinen of Albuquerque, Yazzie’s attorney.

“They had been on notice that they had been pursuing the wrong person for three years,” Treinen said. “They just would not stop coming after her.”

Treinen said the jury awarded Yazzie $161,000 in actual damages for emotional distress and $1.1 million in punitive damages.

The Target credit card debt that the firm was trying to recover — the responsibility of another person named Lucinda Yazzie, with a different Social Security number, address and other identifiers — was about $5,000, Treinen said…

But Farrell & Sandlin filed a complaint in state court for money due against the wrong Lucinda Yazzie in April 2007 and obtained a garnishment of wages writ against her employer, a Farmington energy company. Yazzie couldn’t solve the problem with calls to Farrell & Sandlin, but the garnishment was dropped when Yazzie’s boss filed an answer saying she was the wrong person…

U.S. District Judge Bruce Black, in a pretrial order in the case, wrote that Farrell & Sandlin admitted that the Social Security number of the actual debtor “was changed in the Law Firm’s records by an unauthorized act of a former employee” and as a result the firm went after the wrong Lucinda Yazzie.

Target National Bank, the financial arm of Target stores, had provided the firm with correct information, the judge’s order says.

Aside from the egregious incompetence of the debt collection firm – Farrell & Sandlin – there is nothing that matches the sheer stupidity of the bureaucratic hacks working in the state court system who also had access to the fact that wrong information was being used to harass Ms. Yazzie.

And still they issued an order to garnish her wages – twice! They should all be fired and forced to find an honest job.

Vasik Rajlich, creator of Rybka

Players who use computers to cheat are a growing concern in the chess world. Now the developer of Rybka, the winner of the last four World Computer Chess Championships, has been accused of plagiarizing code to create the program.

Rybka has been stripped of its titles, and the developer, Vasik Rajlich, has been barred from entering programs in competitions.

The ruling on Rybka and Mr. Rajlich was made Tuesday by the International Computer Gaming Association, the group that organizes the championships. It concluded that Mr. Rajlich, who has American and Czech citizenship and lives in Poland, had used source code from programs called Crafty and Fruit…

The group’s president, David Levy, who is also an international master, said in an e-mail that Mr. Rajlich had been invited to defend himself but declined to do so.

When questions were first raised about Rybka earlier this year, Mr. Rajlich wrote on a forum on his program’s Web site that “Rybka is and always was completely original code, with the exception of various low-level snippets which are in the public domain.”…

Mark A. Lemley, a Stanford law professor who specializes in science and technology issues, wrote in an e-mail that because Fruit and Crafty are freely available may mean that Mr. Rajlich is not guilty of misconduct if he copied some of the code. But, Mr. Lemley added, “I can see why the Computer Gaming Association might want to prohibit it under its rules.”

Larry Kaufman, a grandmaster who helped Mr. Rajlich in the development of Rybka, but who now works on a rival called Komodo, said in an e-mail that he believed only earlier versions of Rybka were based on Fruit and Crafty.

This gets into the issue of what we have lost in chess as a result of computers. We have gained so much as well.

I look forward to following the discussions on this one.

Peter Falk with Grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi

Peter Falk died at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif., Thursday night. He was 83.

The “Columbo” star won four Emmy Awards for his portrayal of the cigar-chomping detective who always looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed. Falk played Columbo on television regularly from 1971 to 1978 and then sporadically from 1989 until 2003…

In a court document filed in December 2008, Falk’s daughter Catherine Falk said her father was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

“Columbo” began its history in 1971 as part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie series…

Columbo — he never had a first name — presented a contrast to other TV detectives. “He looks like a flood victim,” Falk once said. “You feel sorry for him. He appears to be seeing nothing, but he’s seeing everything. Underneath his dishevelment, a good mind is at work.”…

Columbo’s trademark was an ancient raincoat Falk had once bought for himself…

Peter Michael Falk was born Sept. 16, 1927…. At 3 he had one eye removed because of cancer. “When something like that happens early,” he said in a 1963 Associated Press interview, “you learn to live with it. It became the joke of the neighborhood. If the umpire ruled me out on a bad call, I’d take the fake eye out and hand it to him.”…

When not working, Falk spent time in the garage of his Beverly Hills home. He had converted it into a studio where he created charcoal drawings. He took up art in New York when he was in the Simon play and one day happened into the Art Students League.

He recalled: “I opened a door and there she was, a nude model, shoulders back, a light from above, buck-ass naked. The female body is awesome. Believe me, I signed up right away.”

Falk is survived by his wife Shera and his two daughters.