Amid Deficit Fears, Obama Freezes Pay

?The hard truth is that getting this deficit under control is going to require some broad sacrifice, and that sacrifice must be shared by employees of the federal government,? Mr. Obama told reporters. He called federal workers ?patriots who love their country? but added, ?I?m asking civil servants to do what they?ve always done? for the nation.

The pay freeze amounted to an opening bid as the president and Republican Congressional leaders begin jousting in earnest over tax and spending policy. It also illustrated how Mr. Obama can use his office on occasion to get ahead of newly elected Republicans; they had been talking about making such a move when they assume control of the House and additional Senate seats in January.

But while the move represents a gesture toward public anger over the anemic economic recovery and rising national debt, the $5 billion to be saved over two years will barely dent a deficit that has exceeded $1 trillion for the past two years. And even those savings would be swamped by the multitrillion-dollar costs of the bigger issue dividing Mr. Obama and the Republicans ? what parts of the Bush-era tax cuts to extend beyond their Dec. 31 expiration, and for how long.

That issue and others will be on the agenda on Tuesday when Mr. Obama will host the House and Senate leaders of each party at the White House for the first time since the midterm elections.

Tuesday will also be the last day for emergency federal assistance for about two million Americans who have been unemployed for long periods, and on Friday a temporary measure providing money for government operations will run out. The two parties are at odds over both matters, with many Republicans opposed to additional unemployment aid and demanding more cuts from domestic spending for the fiscal year that began in October.

Mr. Obama nonetheless expressed optimism that the meeting would be a productive fresh beginning.

?We can?t afford to fall back onto the same old ideologies or the same stale sound bites,? he said.

As Mr. Obama made his comments at the announcement of the pay freeze, the bipartisan commission he established in February to propose ways to reduce the growth of the national debt entered a final two days of negotiations over combinations of spending cuts and revenue increases. In a sign of the struggle to find a compromise that could attract Democratic and Republicans votes, the commission chairmen ? Alan K. Simpson, a former Senate Republican leader, and Erskine B. Bowles, a chief of staff to President Bill Clinton ? decided to meet privately with members one at a time on Monday and Tuesday instead of convening all 18 members.

The Republicans on the panel are generally opposed to raising taxes and the Democrats to big changes in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson revised their draft debt-reduction package over the Thanksgiving holiday break to reflect members? criticisms. Their goal is to reduce projected deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the coming decade. That is roughly the same amount that would be added to the national debt by extending the Bush-era tax rates ? a juxtaposition that underscores the contradictory impulses of elected officials as constituents demand smaller deficits and low taxes.

In advance of Tuesday?s bipartisan White House meeting, Mr. Obama and Democratic Senate leaders conferred by phone to try to coordinate strategy.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to have the House vote on the approach that she, Mr. Obama and the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid, prefer, which would extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for income up to $250,000 a year for couples and $200,000 for individuals. But faced with defections from Democrats in swing districts and states, they are considering fallback plans, including one that would keep the Bush-era rates in place for income up to $1 million.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democratic Senate leader from New York, is the main proponent of that plan, which he is labeling the ?millionaires? tax.? He has picked up adherents among Democrats facing re-election challenges in 2012, including Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

The lame-duck session of Congress could end up passing a temporary extension that kicks the matter, like other issues, into the next Congress, which convenes in January. On Monday, the House approved a Senate measure that blocks until Jan. 1 a scheduled 23 percent cut in doctors? reimbursements from Medicare ? once again buying time to resolve the costly issue.

The pay freeze Mr. Obama announced wiped out plans for a 1.4 percent across-the-board raise in 2011 for 2.1 million federal civilian employees, including those working at the Defense Department, and it would mean no raise in 2012. The freeze would not affect the nation?s uniformed military personnel, and civilian workers who are promoted would still receive the higher pay that comes with the higher grade or position.

The move would save $2 billion in the 2011 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30 and $5 billion by the end of two fiscal years. Over 10 years, it would save $60 billion, according to Jeffrey Zients, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and the government?s chief performance officer.

While Congress has final word on federal pay, the president?s freeze seemed certain, given the political environment; if anything, lawmakers may go further by cutting pay. Republicans noted that some of them had called for a pay freeze for months. ?We are pleased that President Obama appears ready to join our efforts,? said Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the incoming Republican majority leader.

With Republicans vowing to make deep budget cuts, Mr. Obama must decide how far he is willing to go and where he will draw a line. He pointed out that he has already called for a three-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending, found $20 billion in savings from eliminating or scaling back unnecessary programs, identified $150 billion in improper payments.

The federal work force is an obvious first target, if one fraught with political risk for a president who relies on union support. Opponents of big government have been trying to build a political case that federal employees are being overpaid. In a report in June, Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization in Washington, found that federal civilian workers had an average annual wage of $81,258 in 2009, compared with $50,464 for the nation?s private-sector workers. Average federal salaries rose 58 percent from 2000 to 2009, compared with 30 percent in the private sector.

Union leaders, though, cited other data showing that federal workers were paid 24 percent less than their private sector counterparts, and they accused Mr. Obama of playing politics. ?Sticking it to a V.A. nurse and a Social Security worker is not the way to go,? John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said in an interview.

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=b194c27294d553f3a7fdd3b500f43ba5

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Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

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Facebook now valued at $50 billion

To All Facebook Market Participants:

Thank you for your feedback and participation in last weeks Facebook auction. As we had hoped, there was robust seller and buyer participation the auction fully cleared at a per share price of $20.76. In addition, there was overwhelmingly positive feedback on the auction process. As a result, we will be continuing to conduct these auctions for the foreseeable future. For this week, the process will remain reasonably similar, with slight tweaks to the timeline. The reserve price for this week will be $20.60, the same as last week.

If you own shares that you are eligible to sell and wish to participate as a seller, please complete the attached Seller Information Sheet and submit it to SecondMarket at fb@secondmarket.com by tonight, Monday, November 29th, at midnight EST.

If you would like to participate as a buyer, please complete the attached Buyer Information Sheet and submit it to SecondMarket at fb@secondmarket.com by Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00 PM EST.

Please see below for more detailed results on last weeks auction and for this weeks auction calendar:

11/22-11/26 Auction Results:

Total Number of Shares Offered for Sale: 1,896,265
Number of Shares Cleared in Auction: 1,896,265
Reserve Price: $20.60
Clearing Price: $20.76

11/29-12/3 Auction Timeline:
Monday, November 29th at 10:00 AM EST Auction process commences
Monday, November 29th at 11:59 PM EST Seller order forms due
Tuesday, November 30th at 9:00 AM EST Buyers informed of share quantity available
Wednesday, December 1st at 12:00 PM EST Buyer order forms due
Wednesday, December 1st at 5:00 PM EST Participants informed of auction results
Wednesday, December 1st at 8:00 PM EST Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers
Friday, December 3rd at 4:00 PM EST Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers
Friday, December 3rd at 7:00 PM EST Notice to be sent to Facebook, Inc.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41366-facebook-now-valued-at-50-billion.html

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The Caucus: Second Hat in the Ring for Republican Leader

In a video announcement to members of the national committee, Ms. Wagner said the party needed new leadership to prepare for the 2012 presidential campaign, as well as a renewed focus on fund-raising, transparency and accountability.

?We must be efficient, relevant, professional and credible,? Ms. Wagner said. ?We must start immediately to erase past debt and to restore the confidence of our donor base. We must have these resources in order to take back the White House and complete the job that was started this year.?

Ms. Wagner, a former national co-chairwoman of the committee who also served as an ambassador to Luxembourg under President George W. Bush, is the second person to formally announce intentions to run for the post. This month, a former Republican chairman from Michigan, Saul Anuzis, declared his intention to run.

Several other top Republican officials are considering making a bid, including Maria Cino, a longtime Republican leader with close ties to the Bush administration, and Gentry Collins, who recently left his position as political director for the national committee.

The current chairman, Michael Steele, whose term expires in January, has not said whether he intends to seek re-election. His stewardship of the party has been sharply criticized by many Republicans, especially his handling of fund-raising, even though the party scored sweeping victories in the midterm election and captured control of the House.

The 168 members of the Republican National Committee are scheduled to meet in Washington in January to elect a leader.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2f81e3c55eec4f631a94ea9db2df49b1

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Find a clinic or caregiver when you need them with ClinicBook [TNW Canada]

When you?re sick and have to go to a walk-in clinic, waiting for hours is really the last thing you want to be doing. If you have kids (either as the sick ones or in tow), yeah the pain levels start increasing by orders of magnitude pretty darn quickly. This is the problem ClinicBook is out to solve: find the clinic closest to you with the shortest wait time.

ClinicBook?Clinicbook is a local health care website that helps over 60 000 Canadians each month find health care in a convenient and timely manner through consumer reviews and its up-to-date search directory. After launching the feature where the live wait time at walk-in clinics is displayed, Clinicbook will be demoing its online booking system for dental appointments in Greater Vancouver.

Getting clinic wait times is pretty slick, but like OpenCal and Xkey I talked about earlier, ClinicBook also want to work with other healthcare professionals like dentists, massage therapists, eye doctors, etc to help you book appointments more easily. Maybe you need an appointment fast (like for a dental emergency) or you just want to book online instead of calling around.  Either way, this is a pretty slick idea.

Here is what Winnie said about ClinicBook when I talked to her:

I think the calendar and online booking pattern is unmistakable here. People want to book more things online. We do it for travel, more and more we?re even ordering food online, why not booking appointments for the things we do day to day? There are some differences here both OpenCal and XKey have systems that businesses will have to buy into and adapt to, on the other hand ClinicBook is tapping into the electronic clinic management software itself. Clinics and offices don?t have to change how they do things, they just have to keep doing what they do. That might be the big difference that could push ClinicBook ahead of the pack.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/ca/2010/12/01/find-a-clinic-or-caregiver-when-you-need-them-with-clinicbook/

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Blog - Poker n' Face

Rumor: first Windows Phone 7 update will be massive

Chris Walsh, the creator of the first jailbroken app and one of the developers of ChevronWP7, is making some bold claims about the first update to Windows Phone 7 via his Twitter account. Rumored to be coming January, the first update will apparently be massive (rumors suggest Bing turn-by-turn directions, custom ringer support, copy and paste, as well as multitasking support), according to Walsh.

Here are the five most important Walsh made regarding the update, in chronological order:

I'm hearing the first #wp7 update is going to be MASSIVE!
@tomhounsell Haha, they've been working on this update long before they actually shipped v1 :
@keyboardP As @tomhounsell said, MS took 3 months to do what Apple did in 3 years. ;-)
@danvy Can't disclose the sources, but can disclose the details. More to come #wp7
@adamUCF Let's just say, they could have called it Windows Phone 8 :P

The first update to Windows Phone 7 will be arguably more important than any other. First of all, it will be the first attempt by Microsoft to update its new mobile OS and test its system to do so. Microsoft has tested its mobile OS update system before, but only internally, and never on a large scale. Secondly, it will show exactly how significant Windows Phone updates will be. Is Walsh right in that the update will be massive or will it mainly include bugfixes?

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41364-rumor-first-windows-phone-7-update-will-be-massive.html

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Geotoko pulls your business? location deals into one place [TNW Canada]

If you?re a business that wants to capitalize on Facebook Places, Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and all the other location based services you face two big challenges: claiming your locations on multiple services and managing the deals offered on multiple services. Geotoko saw this problem and has hit it head on with their service:

Geotoko?Geotoko is a promotional campaign management platform for geo-location based services. By leveraging existing API?s that provide checkin functionality (foursquare, gowalla, twitter, etc?), Geotoko help businesses engage their customers.  By creating simple self serve tools to create, manage and track promotional campaigns and reward loyal costumers, Geotoko aims to reduce the friction for businesses to get into the growing geo-location trend.  We?ll be officially launching our app at LPV.

Just like the daily deal aggregators, except Geotoko is first out of the gate on this I think, Geotoko saw that there is money to be made in offering businesses not only a way to streamline their work, but also provide much sought-after data on deals. Which deals work on which services? Are there better days and times to offer something? Do men use one location service more than women do? These are important questions if you want to take advantage of all that Foursquare and Facebook Places have to offer. This is what Adarsh says about Geotoko:

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/ca/2010/12/01/geotoko-pulls-your-business-location-deals-into-one-place/

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The Caucus: Second Hat in the Ring for Republican Leader

In a video announcement to members of the national committee, Ms. Wagner said the party needed new leadership to prepare for the 2012 presidential campaign, as well as a renewed focus on fund-raising, transparency and accountability.

?We must be efficient, relevant, professional and credible,? Ms. Wagner said. ?We must start immediately to erase past debt and to restore the confidence of our donor base. We must have these resources in order to take back the White House and complete the job that was started this year.?

Ms. Wagner, a former national co-chairwoman of the committee who also served as an ambassador to Luxembourg under President George W. Bush, is the second person to formally announce intentions to run for the post. This month, a former Republican chairman from Michigan, Saul Anuzis, declared his intention to run.

Several other top Republican officials are considering making a bid, including Maria Cino, a longtime Republican leader with close ties to the Bush administration, and Gentry Collins, who recently left his position as political director for the national committee.

The current chairman, Michael Steele, whose term expires in January, has not said whether he intends to seek re-election. His stewardship of the party has been sharply criticized by many Republicans, especially his handling of fund-raising, even though the party scored sweeping victories in the midterm election and captured control of the House.

The 168 members of the Republican National Committee are scheduled to meet in Washington in January to elect a leader.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2f81e3c55eec4f631a94ea9db2df49b1

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