New Trade Group?s Focus Will Be Marijuana Industry

Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.

Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.

?This is an industry that is emerging ? from the dispensaries to the ancillary businesses that are now coming out of the shadows,? said Aaron Smith, a medical marijuana advocate in Phoenix and the group?s executive director. ?While there is good work being done, there isn?t anyone out there representing the industry?s interests directly.?

The group?s board members, which include some of the more prominent names in the medical marijuana industry, say the need for a national association has become increasingly apparent with the explosion of the legal marijuana business. Such businesses include dispensaries, growing facilities and equipment suppliers.

J. B. Woods, a former insurance agent for Allstate who now sells property and product-liability insurance to medical marijuana businesses in Colorado and other states, is one of the 23 board members. Mr. Woods said the industry had grown so quickly and laws had changed so rapidly that it can be difficult for medical marijuana businesses ? and the property owners and banks they deal with ? to know if they are operating legally.

?A lot of times these dispensaries can make a huge capital investment only to find out that the local municipality changed its rules, and they have to close down,? he said. ?You are in an industry that is very complicated, and ultimately it?s about having a source of credible information.?

The group will officially begin at a national convention in Denver next month.

?This is an industry in its infancy,? said Bob Selan, a board member and chief executive of Kush magazine, a medical marijuana lifestyle publication. ?But it is an industry now.?

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New Rules Tell Insurers: Spend More On Care

The rules, intended to benefit consumers, vastly expand federal authority to direct the use of premiums collected by companies like Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint. While some states have had such requirements, Monday?s announcement is the first such mandate by the federal government and grows out of the new national health care law.

?Millions of Americans will get better value for their health insurance premium dollar,? Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in issuing the rules.

Ms. Sebelius said the rules would protect nearly 75 million people: 10.6 million with individual policies, 24.2 million with small-group coverage and 40 million covered by large employers.

Starting next year, she said, insurers in the individual and small-group markets must spend at least 80 percent of their premium revenues on medical care and activities to improve the quality of care. Insurers in the large-group market must spend at least 85 percent of premium dollars for those purposes.

Insurers that do not meet the standards next year will have to pay rebates to consumers, starting in 2012. Ms. Sebelius estimated that up to nine million people could get rebates worth up to $1.4 billion. About 45 percent of people with individually purchased insurance are in health plans that do not meet the new standards, known as medical loss ratios, federal officials said.

At a news conference on Monday, administration officials repeatedly refused to respond to Republican attacks on the health care law. Nor would they discuss Republican calls to repeal the law, a centerpiece of President Obama?s domestic agenda.

?We are just trying to implement this regulation,? said Jay Angoff, the rules? chief author. He is director of the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

He said most insurers should be able to meet the standards because ?their profitability and reserves are at an all-time high.?

However, state officials said the standards could destabilize insurance markets in some states. Specifically, they said they feared that some carriers would withdraw from the market in some states, resulting in fewer choices and less competition.

Under the rules, federal officials can lower the standard for up to three years in states where ?there is a reasonable likelihood that market destabilization, and thus harm to consumers, will occur.?

Mr. Angoff said that Georgia, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina had asked for such adjustments.

Joshua R. Raskin, a senior analyst at Barclays Capital, an investment bank, said, ?With these rules, the federal government will, for the first time, hold health insurance companies accountable for putting a minimum amount of premiums toward medical expenses.?

The rules allow special treatment for health plans that provide limited benefits at a more affordable price. At least 1.4 million people are enrolled in such ?mini-med? plans, which may cap coverage for one or more benefits at $5,000 or $10,000 a year ? or perhaps $25,000.

Employers offering such coverage had said they might end it because they could not meet the 80 percent standard next year.

Premiums are usually lower for mini-med plans than for regular insurance, and administrative costs may be high because these plans often cover employees with high turnover rates. As a result, administrative costs account for a higher share of premium revenues.

In addition, some consumer groups said mini-med plans had higher profit margins than traditional insurance.

?The administration has made a wise accommodation that will temporarily preserve this coverage, which is very important to many employees in the retail and restaurant industries,? said E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation.

The dispensation for mini-med plans is for one year. The government will collect data on these plans next year and decide how to proceed in 2012 and 2013. ?In 2014, we anticipate that these mini-med policies will disappear and be replaced by more comprehensive health plans,? said Steven B. Larsen, a federal insurance regulator.

The rules generally follow recommendations from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state regulators.

However, ?we have a difference of opinion? on one point, said Jane L. Cline, the insurance commissioner of West Virginia and president of the association.

State officials said Mr. Obama should allow states to phase in the requirements over several years, to avoid disruption of the individual or small-group insurance market. The White House said, ?The law allows adjustments of the medical loss ratio for the individual market in a state and does not apply to the small-group market.?

Consumers Union, the American Heart Association and Democratic members of Congress praised the rules.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said the rules showed the folly of efforts to repeal the health care law.

?If Republicans succeed,? Mr. Miller said, ?they will be taking money right out of the pockets of millions of average Americans.?

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Are Security Scanners Safe?

As millions of U.S. travelers get ready for the busiest flying day of the year, scientists still can't agree over whether the dose of radiation delivered by so-called backscatter machines is significantly higher than the government says. This is despite months of public debate between the White House, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and independent scientists.

Full-body scanners have been installed at many U.S. airports. The machines use either low-energy, millimeter wavelength radiation, which is harmless, or X-rays, which can potentially be hazardous. X-rays can ionize atoms or molecules, which can lead to cancerous changes in cells. Even if the government has significantly underestimated the dose of radiation delivered by an X-ray scanner, it is likely to be relatively small.

The low-energy X-rays emitted by the second type of scanner?also known as a backscatter machine?can pass through clothing but not skin or metal. This makes it possible to spot concealed weapons or explosives, although it also reveals a person, essentially, in the nude. To address this, the U.S. Transportation Security Agency is working on software that converts an image of person into a stick figure, or a blob, without obscuring objects that might pose a security threat. Passengers can also opt to be frisked instead of scanned.

In April, four scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote a public letter to the White House warning that the government may have underestimated the dosage of ionizing radiation delivered to a person's skin from a backscatter machine by one or two orders of magnitude. The scientists, who have expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, oncology, and X-ray crystallography, pointed out that the government's estimate was based on radiation exposure for the entire body. During scanning, the majority of radiation will be focused on the surface of the body, meaning a more concentrated dose of radiation is delivered to the skin.

The Health Physics Society has worked with the FDA to determine the safety of backscatter machines. Spokeswoman Kelly Classic says a dummy made of acrylic is used to measure exposure to ionizing radiation. Sensors attached to the surface of the dummy determine the dose of radiation a person would get from the machine.

The FDA asserts that its method is correct. "This is how we measure the output of X-ray machines and how we've done it for the past 50 years," says Classic.

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Blog - A Way to Spot Secret Nuclear Reactors From Afar

One of the thornier problems facing the international community is to monitor the spread of nuclear technology and prevent it spreading to rogue regimes. This task falls to the International Atomic Energy Authority based in Vienna and it is by no means easy.

Which is why the IAEA is exploring various new technologies for monitoring nuclear reactors at a distance. These technologies fall into two categories. Near-field devices must sit within a few tens of metres of a reactor to do their job. A couple of years ago we looked at a promising example of such a device being developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

By contrast, far-field technologies can do the same job from much further afield. The goal here is to spot clandestine reactors in other countries. But how might they work?

Today we get a fascinating insight thanks to Thierry Lasserre at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission and a few amis.

First, a little background. Fission reactors are prodigious sources of antineutrinos. A gigawatt-sized reactor produces some 10^21 antineutrinos each second. By that measure, these reactors light up like Christmas trees.

The trouble is that antineutrinos interact only very weakly with ordinary matter so spotting these particles is hard. But they can be detected given large enough volumes of matter. The standard technique is to fill a giant swimming pool with water and wait for an antineutrino to smash into a proton, generating a positron and a neutron. The positron produces Cherenkov radiation which can be picked up by light detectors around the pool.

In principle, a large enough detector could pick up the signal produced by any reactor.

But there is a caveat. In analysing the data from this detector, physicists would have to be able to screen out any background signal. This is tricky because there are numerous sources of noise. These fall into two main classes. First, there are the many legal reactors working around the world which are luminous beacons of antineutrinos themselves. These would all have to be taken into account when analysing the signal.

Then there is the Earth itself, which is full of radioactive stuff that wreaks of antineutrinos. These too would have to be subtracted from the measured signal.

But Lasserre et amis are equal to this task. Their idea is to turn a supertanker into an antineutrino detector by kitting it out with the necessary photon detectors and filling it with 10^34 protons in the form of 138,000 tons of linearalkylbenzene (C13 H30). They call this detector a SNIF (a Secret Neutrino Interactions Finder).

The plan is to sail the supertanker to the coast of a suspicious state and temporarily sink it in up to 4 kilometres of water. The supertanker would then watch for the telltale signs of undeclared antineutrino activity.

Lasserre et amis have even calculated what kind of background signal their detector is likely to see and what a suspicious signal would look like from an undeclared reactor placed in various locations, such as on an island, a peninsula or a flat shore.

"Our study attests that 138,000 ton neutrino detectors have the capability to detect and even localize clandestine reactors from across borders," they say. However, they also acknowledge that such a detector would present formidable practical, political and technological challenges.

Will we ever see such a device in action? That's an interesting question, which is not as easy to answer as the mind-boggling complexities of the task might suggest.

One interesting clue is that Lasserre and co say that near-field devices are already being tested in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. That suggests a significant interest in nuclear monitoring technology.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.3850: SNIF: A Futuristic Neutrino Probe for Undeclared Nuclear Fission Reactors

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Panasonic's Blu-ray players get Vudu movie streaming

Panasonic and Vudu have announced that Panasonic's 2010 line of Viera Cast-enabled Blu-ray disc players will offer instant streaming of Vudu's HD movie library (more than 4,000 1080p movies) beginning on November 24. Viera Cast, Panasonic's IPTV, already includes Netflix, Skype voice and video calling, Twitter, Pandora, Amazon Video-on-Demand, YouTube, Google's Picasa Web Album, FOX Sports, Bloomberg News, and a weather service. The following six Panasonic Blu-ray disc players feature Viera Cast: DMP-BDT350 (Full HD 3D), DMP-BDT300 (Full HD 3D), DMP-BDT100 (Full HD 3D), DMP-BD85, DMP-BD65, and DMP-B500 (portable Blu-ray disc player). They all let consumers turn any flat panel HDTV into an IPTV or connected TV via Viera Cast.

Vudu offers instant streaming (no download time) of movies and TV programs through IPTV-enabled HDTVs and Blu-ray disc players with no computer, cable, or satellite TV service required. The user also doesn't need to pay a monthly subscription fee. The video-on-demand service claims it has the world's most extensive library of HD movies from all Hollywood studios and leading independent distributors, with its new release titles available the same day as the DVD release. Movie renters can enjoy a two-night movie rental for $2.

"Connected TV will continue to become an increasingly important feature for consumers and Panasonic is working tirelessly to build upon the already robust entertainment and connectivity experiences our VIERA CAST customers can enjoy," Merwan Mereby, Panasonic Corporation of North America Vice President, said in a statement. "The addition of VUDU to our 2010 VIERA CAST offerings gives consumers access to a virtually endless library of TV and High Definition movie content when they want it and instantly streamed into their TV without ever having to leave the couch."

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Developer of The Witcher 2 plans to hunt pirates

TomSEA said:
"should make you wonder why these companies can spend so much money on targeting pirates..."

Oh gosh - I'm sure the thought that they're losing millions of dollars in lost revenue after years of development and literally tens of millions invested in that development has something to do with it.

More and more PC gaming companies are banging the drum on this because they've had it with the colossal amount of theft of their products. Many have turned to console development only and might do a shitty PC port after the fact. (thanks very much thieving a-holes) as a result. PC gaming and developers have taken a helluva beating from theft and all these asinine, "I would never buy it so that entitles me to steal it" excuses make it that much worse by encouraging even more theft.

"In an economic crisis it should make you wonder why these companies can spend so much money on targeting pirates, gain so little, then complain about lost money."

Guess what, princeton, if there wasn't any theft - or even a minimal amount of theft - they wouldn't be doing this.

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This Land: At Checkpoint, Looking for Threats and, Now, at Testy Travelers

Behind an unmarked door, in a cluttered break room of half-eaten lunches and morale-boosting posters, a dozen Transportation Security Administration officers listened to their airport supervisor deliver another much-needed pep talk that contained the reminder: ?I get paid to be paranoid, and so do you.?

The supervisor, Philip Burdette, the federal security director at Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, quickly addressed the recent criticism that the agency?s stepped-up security measures had gone too far; that passing through a checkpoint for a routine flight to Newark was now like entering a maximum-security prison for a protracted stay.

?Pat-downs have changed because of what?? he asked, searching for answers that might then be shared with inquisitive, even annoyed, passengers.

?Threat?? someone softly volunteered.

?Threat,? Mr. Burdette agreed. ?Especially after Abdulmutallab.? That is, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian whose alleged attempt last Christmas to blow up a Detroit-bound airplane with plastic explosives hidden in his underwear has transformed air travel in the United States.

The supervisor moved on to discuss reports of an organized opt-out day on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, one of the year?s busiest for travelers. Some protesters ? who seem to be grossly overestimating the patience of their fellow passengers ? plan to disrupt the flow at checkpoints by choosing the slower, more deliberate pat-downs instead of passing through the full-body scanners, which critics consider to be too invasive.

?That?s their right,? Mr. Burdette said. ?I don?t know if it?s 10 people or 10,000 people. Just be professional. Assume you?re being videotaped.?

With that, Mr. Burdette reminded everyone to remain vigilant, wished them a ?good shift? and opened the unmarked door to a pre-holiday flow of travelers oblivious to the many worries for their safety.

It can be argued that the T.S.A. has failed in customer relations, that in its zeal to anticipate every conceivable threat, it has forgotten to take a deep breath and calmly explain why it does what it does to us ? for us.

For example, the agency recently intensified its pat-down procedures, but, for what it says are security reasons, has declined to answer basic questions that might allay concerns that the new pat-downs are glorified grope sessions. How are these different from the old pat-down procedure? No comment. How are the officers trained to conduct these pat-downs? No comment.

The void created by the unanswered questions is filled, then, by libertarian complaints about privacy and ?Saturday Night Live? skits that mock front-line transportation security officers for following government orders, while administrators far removed from checkpoints in Baltimore and Seattle, Miami and Green Bay, Wis., struggle to make the right moves in a high-stakes game of Risk.

Patrick Smith, who writes the ?Ask the Pilot? column for Salon.com, is among many who argue against treating people as potential terrorists ? ?bullying people,? he says ? simply because they want to fly. He said the T.S.A. should streamline its checkpoint operations and reallocate officers to conduct more thorough scanning of luggage for bombs and explosives.

?We can?t protect ourselves from every conceivable threat, and we need to acknowledge that,? Mr. Smith said. ?There?s always going to be a way for a resourceful enough perpetrator to skirt whatever measures we put in place.?

But Mr. Burdette said this type of thinking reflected post-Sept. 11 amnesia. He said each security measure, from the new pat-down procedures to the increased use of body scanners, was driven by intelligence, not by a desire to create busywork.

Mr. Burdette, 41, is a former Marine and counterterrorism investigator who keeps his hair short and his dark-blue suits crisp. As the supervisor of the 700 or so officers at B.W.I. who screen as many as 40,000 travelers a day ? of whom fewer than 3 percent request pat-downs ? he takes the morale of his troops seriously, and resents any smirking dismissal of them as burger-flippers in toy-cop uniforms.

This perception was once so pervasive, and the officers were feeling so beleaguered, that two years ago the T.S.A. changed their uniform shirts to blue from white, and issued gold badges to replace their badge-shaped patches. The agency also began an internal campaign called I.G.Y.B. ? for ?I?ve Got Your Back.?

For government benefits and a salary that starts at $12.85 an hour, these unarmed officers swallow the irritation of others, apply security methods that intensify by the day, stifle the awkwardness they might have about touching other people ? oh, and be on alert for bombs, liquid containers holding more than 3.4 ounces, sharp objects, explosive ingredients and the next Abdulmutallab.

?I want them to think Abdulmutallab with every pat-down,? Mr. Burdette said.

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Internet Hijackings Prove Hard to Stop

On April 8, the networking hardware that routes traffic on the Internet got new marching orders: Requests for data from 15 percent of Internet addresses?including Dell.com, Yahoo.com, Microsoft.com, and U.S. government sites?were directed to go through China.

Incidents like this are known as Internet hijackings. Although they generally aren't the result of malevolence, they can upend the usual efficiency of Internet routing so badly that sites get knocked offline. The April hijacking happened when a small Chinese Internet service provider updated its routing information, advertising that its network was the best way to get to various blocks of Internet addresses assigned to government agencies and companies worldwide. China's state-owned ISP, China Telecom, duly propagated the updates using the lingua franca of Internet routers, the border gateway protocol (BGP).

Experts have debated whether the hijacking was an accident, as China Telecom claims. Most accept the explanation, given that a flaw in the structure of the Internet leads to such accidents from time to time, and makes them hard to stop. The essence of the flaw is that the method for router updates runs on the honor system.

"There is no central authority that says which updates are good and which are bad," says Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager of Internet operations firm Renesys. "Right now, if you make a mistake, 30 seconds later, every router on the Internet is updated with it."

The history of similar incidents stretches back more than a decade, including one episode in which Pakistan Telecom said its network was the best path to certain Web addresses owned by YouTube. The result: The ISP's network was temporarily knocked off the Internet by all the traffic, and many people around the world could not reach YouTube.

The latest incident stands out partly because China Telecom was able to route its hijacked traffic to the correct destinations, fueling allegations that it may have captured the communications for analysis. The April incident was discovered at the time, but it got renewed attention this month in a report to Congress from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Solving the problem of router updates and Internet hijackings is not easy. BGP was designed for one purpose: to make the Internet reliable, says Steve Santorelli, a director for an Internet security firm, Team Cymru Research NFP. "BGP was never designed with security in mind," Santorelli says. "It was designed to efficiently communicate hundreds of thousands of routes between different network providers."

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How to Train Your Own Brain

Technology might not be advanced enough yet to let people read someone else's mind, but researchers are at least inching closer to helping people to read and control their own. In a study presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, scientists used a combination of brain-scanning and feedback techniques to train subjects to move a cursor up and down with their thoughts. The subjects could perform this task after just five minutes of training.

The scientists hope to use this information to help addicts learn to control their own brain states and, consequently, their cravings.

Scientists have previously shown that people can learn to consciously control their brain activity if they're shown their brain activity data in real time?a technique called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers have used this technology effectively to teach people to control chronic pain and depression. They've been pursuing similar feedback methods to help drug users kick their addictions.

But these efforts have been difficult to put into practice. Part of the problem is that scientists have had to choose which part of the brain to focus on, based on existing knowledge of neuroscience. But that approach may miss out on areas that are also important for the particular function under study.

In addition, focusing on a limited region adds extra noise to the system?much like looking too closely at just one swatch of a Pointillist painting?the mix of odd colors doesn't make sense until you step back and see how the dots fit together. Psychologist Anna Rose Childress, Jeremy Magland, and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have overcome this issue by designing a new system of whole-brain imaging and pairing it with an algorithm that let them determine which regions of the brain are most centrally involved in a certain thought process.

"I think it's very exciting, and I think it's likely to be just the tip of a large iceberg of possibilities," says Christopher deCharms, a neuroscientist and founder of Omneuron, a company dedicated to using real-time fMRI to visualize brain function. "It's a small case demonstration that you can do this and you can do it in real time."

Childress asked 11 healthy controls and three cocaine addicts to watch a feedback screen while alternately envisioning two 30-second scenarios: Repeatedly swatting a tennis ball to someone, and navigating from room to room in a familiar place. By analyzing whole-brain activity, researchers found that a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area was most active during an imagined game of tennis. They then linked this pattern to an upward movement of a computer cursor. They did the same with the navigation task, linking it to downward movement of the cursor. After four cycles or fewer?less than five minutes of training?the subjects had learned to alternate between the two states of mind, as well as associate each one with its corresponding cursor position. From there onward, they could move the cursor up or down with their thoughts.

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How to Train Your Own Brain

Technology might not be advanced enough yet to let people read someone else's mind, but researchers are at least inching closer to helping people to read and control their own. In a study presented last week at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, scientists used a combination of brain-scanning and feedback techniques to train subjects to move a cursor up and down with their thoughts. The subjects could perform this task after just five minutes of training.

The scientists hope to use this information to help addicts learn to control their own brain states and, consequently, their cravings.

Scientists have previously shown that people can learn to consciously control their brain activity if they're shown their brain activity data in real time?a technique called real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Researchers have used this technology effectively to teach people to control chronic pain and depression. They've been pursuing similar feedback methods to help drug users kick their addictions.

But these efforts have been difficult to put into practice. Part of the problem is that scientists have had to choose which part of the brain to focus on, based on existing knowledge of neuroscience. But that approach may miss out on areas that are also important for the particular function under study.

In addition, focusing on a limited region adds extra noise to the system?much like looking too closely at just one swatch of a Pointillist painting?the mix of odd colors doesn't make sense until you step back and see how the dots fit together. Psychologist Anna Rose Childress, Jeremy Magland, and their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have overcome this issue by designing a new system of whole-brain imaging and pairing it with an algorithm that let them determine which regions of the brain are most centrally involved in a certain thought process.

"I think it's very exciting, and I think it's likely to be just the tip of a large iceberg of possibilities," says Christopher deCharms, a neuroscientist and founder of Omneuron, a company dedicated to using real-time fMRI to visualize brain function. "It's a small case demonstration that you can do this and you can do it in real time."

Childress asked 11 healthy controls and three cocaine addicts to watch a feedback screen while alternately envisioning two 30-second scenarios: Repeatedly swatting a tennis ball to someone, and navigating from room to room in a familiar place. By analyzing whole-brain activity, researchers found that a part of the brain called the supplementary motor area was most active during an imagined game of tennis. They then linked this pattern to an upward movement of a computer cursor. They did the same with the navigation task, linking it to downward movement of the cursor. After four cycles or fewer?less than five minutes of training?the subjects had learned to alternate between the two states of mind, as well as associate each one with its corresponding cursor position. From there onward, they could move the cursor up or down with their thoughts.

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