Gates Seeking to Contain Military Health Costs

?It is so cheap compared to what Booz Allen has,? Colonel Brady said in a recent interview, acknowledging that premiums called for by private employers can run many times greater.

Of nearly 4.5 million military retirees and their families, about three-quarters are estimated to have access to health insurance through a civilian employer or group. But more than two million of them stay on Tricare. As the costs of private health care continue to climb, their numbers are only expected to grow.

Now, as part of a broad offensive to cut Pentagon spending, that group is once again in the sights of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is seriously considering whether to ask for Tricare fee increases in next year?s budget ? and perhaps start one of the last fights of his public career.

Already, he has met with the chairmen of President Obama?s bipartisan fiscal commission, which faces a deadline this week for getting an agreement on a plan to address the federal budget deficit.

The battle over Tricare pits the efforts of the Pentagon to contain the exploding cost of health care for nearly 10 million eligible beneficiaries against the pain and emotions of those who say they have already ?paid up front? with service in uniform, particularly those who deployed to America?s two current wars. The 10 million figure includes active-duty personnel, retirees, members of the National Guard and Reserves and their families.

The arguments reflect the broader debate over the huge Pentagon budget that will intensify next year when Mr. Gates, who says he will step down in 2011, continues his campaign to cut off what he calls the ?gusher? of defense spending. Total health care costs for the Pentagon, which is the nation?s single largest employer, top $50 billion a year, a tenth of its budget and about the same amount that it is spending this year on the war in Iraq. Ten years ago, health care cost the Pentagon $19 billion; five years from now it is projected to cost $65 billion.

But Tricare fees have not increased since 1995.

?Health care costs are eating the Defense Department alive,? Mr. Gates said in a much-noticed speech in May. Defense budget analysts say that rising health care costs will make less money available for new weapons, repairs to a worn-out arsenal and quality-of-life programs like schools on military bases.

?In the long run, it could actually limit our ability to field a military of sufficient size,? said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.

Veterans groups and military officers? lobbies have responded by going on high alert. One of the most powerful of them, the Military Officers Association of America, is preparing a public relations campaign that will focus on what it calls the broken promise between the nation and the people who defend it.

?Don?t ask the folks who have done so much more for this country, who have been called to act since 9/11, to be the first in line to give some more,? said Norbert R. Ryan Jr., a retired vice admiral and president of the military officers? group. As for Tricare?s generous benefits, Admiral Ryan said that anyone ?can get this good deal ? go over to a recruiting office and sign up for Iraq and Afghanistan.?

Defense officials point out that Mr. Gates is weighing only whether to increase the cost of health insurance for retirees and their families, not those on active duty, who receive Tricare at no cost. Any fee increases would also not affect military retirees 65 and older, who use a free program called Tricare for Life that supplements Medicare. It is not possible to estimate the exact savings without knowing what rate increase might be proposed, but analysts say even a modest rise could recoup billions of dollars annually for the Pentagon.

If the past is any guide, veterans groups are expected to point out that any fee increases could affect those disabled by the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan who do not use the free services available to them at veterans? hospitals, either because they choose not to or because they live too far away.

Mr. Gates has included proposals to increase Tricare fees for retirees in three of his past four Pentagon budgets. In 2008, when he held the same job under the Bush administration, Mr. Gates proposed a five-year phased increase of the annual $460 family fee for Tricare Prime, the popular H.M.O.-like option offered to military retirees, to a maximum of $1,260 to $2,460, depending on a retiree?s income, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

Tricare refers to the $460 payment as an ?enrollment fee,? not a premium. With $12 co-pays per doctor visit, some drug prescription payments and other costs, the current annual out-of-pocket expense for a family on Tricare Prime is estimated at $1,200 per year, still substantially less than what is available from private employers.

Congress, unwilling to be seen as inflicting any kind of pain on the military or veterans, rejected the increases. Mr. Gates said he got the message ? ?The proposals routinely die an ignominious death on Capitol Hill,? he said in May ? and he did not try again in 2010. But in shaping that budget proposal, Obama administration officials also told the Pentagon not to raise it, lest it distract from Mr. Obama?s overhaul of the nation?s health care system earlier this year.

Some Pentagon officials and military advocacy groups have suggested alternatives to raising fees that could cut costs. One idea is to renegotiate the lucrative Tricare packages with the insurance companies, hospitals and drug companies that actually operate the programs. Another is to promote a cost-saving mail-order pharmacy.

Defense officials say that Mr. Gates has to make up his mind about any health care fee increases in the next weeks, in time for the Pentagon to submit its 2012 spending plans to the White House budget director in December. Defense analysts who spoke to Mr. Gates over the summer said he told them that he did not know if it was realistic to try to increase military health care costs while troops were at war.

But Defense Department officials have since said they see a window of opportunity in the growing alarm over the federal debt, the focus of two bipartisan panels that are proposing deep cuts in government spending.

Mr. Gates met in recent weeks with the leaders of one of the panels, former Senator Alan K. Simpson, a Republican, and Erskine B. Bowles, a Democrat and the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton. They are the co-chairmen of Mr. Obama?s fiscal commission, which has proposed raising Tricare fees. The panel is trying to deliver a final report to the White House on Wednesday, if the members can reach a consensus that fast.

The panel is considering proposals to increase fees for military retirees working for civilian companies, but it would also require employers to reimburse the government for a share of the health insurance costs of those on their payroll who opt for Tricare. That measure alone, described as an effort to make civilian employers pay ?a normal business expense,? could recoup $3 billion annually for the Pentagon.

In the meantime, Colonel Brady, 51, said he did not want to be overly dramatic about what was at stake. Although he spent 22 years in the Marines, six of them deployed, including to the 1991 Persian Gulf war, he said he could not buy the argument about a broken promise.

?Tricare is a very good deal for me, and if it costs some more, well, O.K.,? he said. Raising Tricare fees would be a financial burden for many retirees, he acknowledged, but he could not honestly say it would be for him.

?Not that I want to pay a ton of money,? he said.

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=49d3a914698b42ccc89c4586afa295c2

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Survey: Apple first in mobile OS brand loyalty, Microsoft last

Smartphone manufacturers are going to have to fight hard to keep their customers; 75 percent of smartphone owners surveyed by German marketing company GfK say they may switch to another operating system when they buy their next phone. The survey was conducted in October and November among 2,653 mobile phone users in Brazil, Germany, Spain, Britain, the US, and China. GfK also found that 37 percent of feature phone owners plan to upgrade to a smartphone when they buy their next phone.

"Loyalty with a handset is a lot more complicated these days in that people buy into experiences at the high-end level," Ryan Garner, an analyst with GfK, told Reuters. "If a phone doesn't do what it says it will do or what the owner hopes it will do, the maker will lose loyalty."

The iPhone had the highest loyalty, with 59 percent of respondents saying they were sticking with Apple's iOS. Research in Motion's BlackBerry was second at 35 percent, Google's Android was third at 28 percent, and Nokia's Symbian was fourth at 24 percent. Owners of smartphones running Microsoft software were the least loyal in GfK's survey, with only 21 percent saying they would stick to the platform. This is not too surprising given that Microsoft has only just reset its mobile OS platform from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41346-survey-apple-first-in-mobile-os-brand-loyalty-microsoft-last.html

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Google Earth 6 released, with 3D trees!

Google has introduced Google Earth 6, adding a number of significant upgrades and improvements. Most importantly, Street View has been more deeply integrated into Google Earth and users can now fly from space to the street wherever Google has Street View imagery. To do so, pick up the little Pegman icon docked right alongside the navigation controls and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road.

Google has also added more historical imagery, which allows users to see earlier photography of the same location on a timeline (from 1945 to the present). Furthermore, it's now easier to spot said imagery: when you fly to an area where it is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar as a clickable option at the bottom of the screen.

Last but not least, Google Earth now has 3D trees to make its environments more realistic. Google says dozens of species of trees are represented in a number of 3D-modeled parks and public places. The search giant has planted more than 80 million virtual trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo, with more to come.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41344-google-earth-6-released-with-3d-trees.html

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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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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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PayPal payments increase 19% on Black Friday

With the year's busiest shopping days now behind us, early reports on holiday spending are coming out. Although many analysts expect a slow season (especially for tech), it seems sales have been at least mildly positive for e-commerce, with some reporting decent figures for Black Friday.

PayPal for instance witnessed a 27% on-year increase in payment volume on Black Friday and a whopping 310% jump in overall mobile shopping. For comparison's sake, transactions rose 19% over the typical Friday in 2010. Most of that activity occurred between 9AM and 10AM PST.


PayPal partly attributes that increase to the bruised economy. That sounds a little backwards, but PayPal senior director Amanda Pires explains that "the tough economy has made shoppers more price-conscious, and this year's Black Friday results show that they're going online to find the best deals."

Unsurprisingly, the most popular items purchased on eBay (owner of PayPal) included Microsoft's Kinect for the Xbox 360 with an average selling price of $228, as well as Apple's iPad and iPhone 4, which sold for $650 and $724 on average. Did you buy any tech items during Black Friday or Cyber Monday?

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41347-paypal-payments-increase-19-on-black-friday.html

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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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Google Earth 6 released, with 3D trees!

Google has introduced Google Earth 6, adding a number of significant upgrades and improvements. Most importantly, Street View has been more deeply integrated into Google Earth and users can now fly from space to the street wherever Google has Street View imagery. To do so, pick up the little Pegman icon docked right alongside the navigation controls and drop him wherever you see a highlighted blue road.

Google has also added more historical imagery, which allows users to see earlier photography of the same location on a timeline (from 1945 to the present). Furthermore, it's now easier to spot said imagery: when you fly to an area where it is available, the date of the oldest imagery will appear in the status bar as a clickable option at the bottom of the screen.

Last but not least, Google Earth now has 3D trees to make its environments more realistic. Google says dozens of species of trees are represented in a number of 3D-modeled parks and public places. The search giant has planted more than 80 million virtual trees in places such as Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo, with more to come.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41344-google-earth-6-released-with-3d-trees.html

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China?s Counterfeit Crackdown: Is this one for real? [TNW Asia]

The Chinese government has launched a new crackdown on product piracy after continued pressure from Western governments.

Announcing the move at a press conference, a deputy commerce minister, Jiang Zengwei  promised closer cooperation with the United States, Japan and Europe.

The crackdown comes after the World Trade Organisation sided with the USA in January in a complaint that China wasn?t doing enough to enforce patents, copyright and trademarks.  The World Trade Organisation decision could open the doors to allow the US to claim compensation from China and even to impose trade sanctions.

When most of us think about product piracy in China, we usually think about software, DVDs, luxury brand name goods and the ubiquitous watch salesmen hawking their wares wherever tourists are found.  However, there is a far more serious side to the matter with a growth in the fake medicine market.  American officials say fake Chinese-made heart and anti-cancer drugs have been found as far away as Africa.

It is not unusual for the Chinese government to announce crackdowns on piracy, but, in the past, these crackdowns have not always been enforced as rigorously as the west would like.  There has also been a tendency for the authorities to overlook smalltime offenders or copies of CDs and DVDs, for example, that have not been passed by the state censors and are therefore not available through official channels.

In the software market though, the Chinese Government has already met with some success.

After introducing legislation forcing all computers sold in China to be sold with an operating system installed a few years ago, the number of PCs shipped with legitimate software has risen from 88% in 2007 to 98% in 2009.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/11/30/chinas-counterfeit-crackdown-is-this-one-for-real/

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