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Monday, April 23, 2012
Jennifer Hudson to Testify in William Balfour Murder Case
Today will likely be one of the most difficult days of Jennifer Hudson's life
As we type, the Oscar winner is taking the stand to testify in the trial of William Balfour, the man accused of murdering her mother, brother and nephew in 2008.
Balfour - who has pleaded not guilty - faces first degree murder charges. Prosecutors believe he flew into a rage and committed these heinous acts after seeing a gift to Julia Hudson, Balfour's ex-girlfriend and Jennifer's sibling, that he thought was from a new man in her life.
The trial got underway this morning.
UPDATE: Jennifer reportedly broke down on the stand twice during her testimony when talking about her family and looking at a photo of her mom. She also said no one approved of her sister marring Balfour.
"Where he was, I tried not to be. So if I saw him, I separated myself," she said on the stand.
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Sunday, April 22, 2012
Male Office Flirters Do It Out of Boredom and Not For Sex—What? [Science]
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This Week?s Hot Deals from TechBargains
Walmart Camera Bags: Case Logic High Zoom dSLR Case $8.58 Nikon D5100 16MP Digital SLR Camera Body Only (REFURB) $492 Free Shipping Kodak EasyShare Z5010 14MP 21X Digital Camera w/ Batteries & Charger $99.99 Free Ship
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ASUS announces pricing and availability for the Transformer Pad TF300
Back when ASUS announced the new Transformer Pad 300 at Mobile World Congress they left pricing and availability up in the air. Here we are now a few short months later and ASUS is now ready roll the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor powered tablet featuring Android 4.0.3 out to the masses starting with online sales beginning on April 23rd and in-store options happening on April 30th depending on stock availability.
The Transformer Pad TF300 will be available in royal blue immediately but other colors such as torch red and iceberg white will be available in early June. US Pricing is $379 for the 16GB model, $399 for the 32GB model with the optional docking station retailing for $149. Keep in mind, if you're a ASUS Transformer TF101 or Transformer Prime TF201 owner, the docking station is not backwards compatible.
If you're not sure if the Transformer Pad TF300 is for you, no worries. We've got you covered with a full review of the device, spec sheet and more. If you're going to be picking up, drop a comment and let us know.
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The 'Mommy Wars' are back: And Republicans are losing! | THE ...
By Bill Press
Tribune Media Services
If there?s one special talent of Republicans, it?s turning a nothing issue into a raging controversy. They?ve done it before: with Van Jones, ACORN, and Obama?s birth certificate.
And they did it again with Hilary Rosen?s comments about Ann Romney. Judging from the feigned outrage, you?d think Rosen had accused Mrs. Romney of being a lazy welfare queen. When, in fact, all she did was tell the truth.
Most people don?t realize how this whole flap started. In her job as CNN contributor, Hilary Rosen was merely responding to a ludicrous comment by Mitt Romney that, despite being a multimillionaire, he can identify with average Americans because his wife keeps him informed of what working-class women are thinking.
Are you kidding, Rosen gasped. Ann Romney ?never worked a day in her life.? By which, of course, she meant ?never worked a day in her life outside the home.? The truth is, as Rosen was trying to point out: Ann Romney, in her life of luxury as a mother of five ? with multiple homes, dressage horses and Cadillacs ? has no more idea what it?s like to struggle as a single-mom waitressing in Las Vegas or Kansas City than Mitt does. But, with Ann Romney?s help, Republicans quickly turned Rosen?s comment into an attack on all stay-at-home mothers.
Clearly, what the Romney campaign was trying to do was divert attention from the Republicans? war against women, which they succeeded in doing, though only temporarily. Because the Republican war against women is real, deliberate, and ongoing. And there?s no denying it.
In one sense, the war on women is nothing new. It?s been raging longer than the war in Afghanistan. You can trace it back to decades of Republican opposition to early childhood education, child care, family and medical leave, equal pay, family planning, and every other government program designed to help women. But the current war on women started with successful Republican efforts, over 10 years, to kill what became known as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which makes it easier for women to sue for wage discrimination. President Obama finally signed it into law on Jan. 29, 2009.
The war has only escalated in recent weeks. Republicans tried to overturn new rules of the Obama administration making access to contraception, with no co-pay, part of every woman?s basic health insurance. Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a ?slut.? Rick Santorum said states should be able to make birth control illegal. Mitt Romney won?t say whether or not he?d have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. Senate Republicans voted for the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed any employer to refuse to cover any kind of health care service by citing ?moral reasons.? They are now blocking reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act and passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act.
Republican opposition to the Violence Against Women Act is especially odious. Written in 1994 by then-Senator Joe Biden to offer legal protection to women who are victims of domestic violence, it was passed, and has been re-authorized several times, with strong bipartisan support. Three provisions were added this year to extend protection to women in same-sex marriages, Native-American women and women immigrants who are here illegally. Because of those three amendments, all eight Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, voted against the bill. By their presumed logic, it?s wrong to beat up most women ? but lesbians, Native Americans, and undocumented women are fair game.
Equally puzzling is Republican opposition to the Paycheck Fairness Act. Even today, on average, according to the 2010 Census, women earn only about 77 cents for every one dollar a man earns. Yet the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to get one single Republican Senate vote in 2010. And Republicans vow to block it again this year.
Perhaps most importantly for Republicans, the war on women is not only morally wrong, it?s political suicide. No matter how hard Republicans try to deny they?re waging war on women, American women aren?t buying it. Asked in the latest CNN/ORC 2012 Presidential Poll which candidate is more ?in touch with the problems facing women today,? women rate Obama over Romney, 59 percent to 23 percent. Bad for Mitt. Good for Barack. Women aren?t stupid.
? 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Saturday, April 21, 2012
It's Time to Protect Your Family and Your Future | Littman Krooks ...
Estate planning is a financial process that can protect you and your family, and is a very important component of your overall financial planning. April is National Financial Literacy Month to put your estate planning house in order. If you don?t have an up-to-date estate plan and you happen to get hurt or sick and cannot manage your financial affairs, the courts will have to appoint someone to manage them for you. The person they appoint might not be the one you would want to perform those tasks.
Without an estate plan when you pass away, your affairs will be settled by default through a complex legal system called ?probate.? The handling of your financial affairs can turn into a costly and frustrating ordeal for your family and heirs.
The crafting of a good estate plan starts with planning, followed by the proper drafting and signing of appropriate legal documents such as wills, trusts, buy-sell agreements, durable powers of attorney for asset management, and an advanced health-care directive or health-care power of attorney. Having these documents in place saves you and your family a lot of money and time at a very difficult and emotional time.
Your estate planning should also address the coordination of the way you hold title to your various assets, your beneficiary selections, and the possible transfer of certain assets while you are alive.
Regardless of the extent of your net worth, estate planning is important for everyone. Complex strategies may be used by wealthy people to reduce death taxes and costs. Others may only require a simple will and/or trust to pass on property to their heirs and provide for minor children.
Even if a simple will is all you require, an estate plan is an essential part of your financial planning. Everybody will need it someday. The time to address or update your estate plan is now.
CHECKLIST ? SIX STEPS TOWARD SUCCESSFUL ESTATE PLANNING
1. DEFINE YOUR GOALS: What do you want to happen to your assets in the event of your death or disability? If your beneficiaries predecease you, who are your alternate selections? How will your assets be distributed, and when will these distributions take place?
Decisions on distribution of your estate assets should take into account the size of the estate, the ages and abilities of your children, and your personal desires. For example, a distribution to children over time might consist of 10 percent of the estate at age 18, 25 percent at age 21, 50 percent at age 24 or upon completion of college, and the balance at age 30.
Choose your appointees for important roles: Who will be your executor and, if applicable, trustee and/or guardians? It is advisable to list at least a first and second alternate for each appointment in case your first choice is unwilling or unable to serve.
If you have children who are minors, the appointment of a guardian is probably the most important decision you?ll make. With the court?s approval, this person, or persons, will raise your children. Consider appointing a family member and spouse, or another close couple who?ll care for your children the way you would want.
You may want to consider listing multiple executors, trustees and guardians to serve together in handling the details of your estate. This can provide a check-and-balance system for the appointees and help them avoid oversights or misappropriations. Consider appointing family members, friends, professionals, advisers and/or trust companies for this position.
There is some risk here: If these people disagree and have problems, they can each be represented in court by counsel paid for by your estate, so be very careful in making your selections.
Living trusts have become popular because less administration is required in comparison with a will. Be aware that having a living trust does not eliminate the need for a will and administration at either the first or second spouse?s death.
To get the benefits of the trust, certain details must be attended to, and this is the job of your appointees. For example, leaving a trust for the surviving spouse requires that the trust be funded properly and in a timely manner at the first death, or major tax benefits can be lost.
Is estate privacy an issue for you? Do you want your estate to be public record upon your death? Do you have any special gifts you want made to charity? Do you want an elderly parent or friend to be financially cared for? All of these circumstances should be noted in your plan.
2. GATHER & ORGANIZE YOUR DATA: There are three basic tasks to be accomplished:
- Review and update your financial position.
- Review how you hold title to your assets. Is it consistent with your estate plan?
- Review your beneficiary selections. Are they aligned with your estate plans?
Did you know that how you hold title to assets has a higher legal priority than your will? For example, if you and your best friend held title to an investment club account as joint tenants and you died, the property would revert to your friend even though you had willed your interest to your spouse.
3. ANALYZE YOUR SITUATION: Start by determining your current net worth, assuming your death occurred today. This can be done by totaling your current assets and liabilities, and adding the value of any life insurance.
Try sketching a picture or flow chart of your existing estate plan. Review your appointees:
- Guardian of the Person/of the Property
- Power of Attorney ? Property Management
- Advanced Health-Care Directive or Health-Care Power of Attorney
ESTATE PLANNING ALERT : On December 17, 2010, President Obama signed the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 (The 2010 Tax Relief Act) into law. Estate and gift tax laws have been reinstated along with many new temporary estate and gift tax provisions that will end on December 31, 2012 unless Congress extends or makes them permanent.
Estate Tax Exclusion & Top Rates:? Establishes an estate exclusion amount at $5 million and the top estate tax rate at 35%; indexes the $5 million exemption for inflation for decedents dying after 2011.
Portability:? Beginning for taxpayers dying after Dec. 31, 2010 the estate tax exclusion becomes ?portable? between spouses. This means that the surviving spouse?s exemption is increased by any exemption not used at the first spouse?s death.
Check with your financial advisors for updated information.
4. DEVELOP YOUR STRATEGIES: With the assistance of your estate planning advisor(s), identify the legal documents that need drafting or make any necessary adjustments to existing documents. Determine any other actions that must be taken for your wishes to be carried out.
5. IMPLEMENT YOUR PLAN: Do what needs to be done ? i.e., create new wills, trusts and powers of attorney, adjust title to your properties, change alternate beneficiaries of retirement plans and life insurance policies to trusts.
6. TRACK & MONITOR YOUR PROGRESS: Check your estate plan annually or any time there are changes in your family situation or net worth. Use your financial planning calendar to schedule your next review.
These materials are provided as a public service by The NAEPC Education Foundation for ?free-use? on websites, newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and other media broadcasts during the months of April and October as it relates to National Financial Literacy Month and National Estate Planning Awareness Week. For additional information or materials contact us at The NAEPC Education Foundation.
To assist with your estate planning, follow this link? at www.estateplanninganswers.org/protect-your-family-and-your-future/ to get a complimentary copy of the Your financial PARTNER ?Estate Planning Location Sheet,? in Excel worksheet format. For more information on estate and financial planning visit www.estateplanninganswers.org/category/financial-planning/personal-financial-management-system/ or visit our website at www.elderlawnewyork.com.
Tags: estate planning, National Financial Literacy Month
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5 Hot New Events in Business, Mobile, Social Media and More
From digital advertising conferences to programming hackathons and everything in between, you?ll definitely find a swanky locale to suit your professional and personal interests on Mashable?s new Events Board. Whether you?re an event organizer or an event-goer, our Events Board is an essential resource for helping you build relationships, engage face-to-face and learn about new trends in the business.
Exciting new events are always added to Mashable?s Events Board in a variety of industries, and every week, we round up five freshly-posted events that you should definitely add to your calendar. Keep checking the board for the newest listings of conferences, meetings and expos spicing up the tech scene around the world.
Date: 5/2/2012 ? 5/3/2012
Location: San Francisco, California
Speakers from Salesforce, DeVry and Comcast will join DocuSign for DocuSign Momentum 2012, a two-day event to help businesses get the most out of the cloud-based document management system. There will be breakout sessions on how to maximize DocuSign for Human Resources, sales, mobile and other business departments. In addition, there will be evening parties for attendees, by invitation only.
Date: 10/2/2012 ? 10/3/2012
Location: London, England
More than 5,000 developers, mobile marketers, mobile operators, device manufacturers, platform owners and industry professionals are expected to attend Apps World Europe 2012, a multi-track workshop and networking conference on mobile app development and design. The event will also feature free passes to its exhibition space, where vendors will be able to show off their latest mobile app offerings and attendees can participate in complimentary workshops.
Date: 5/15/2012-5/16/2012
Location: Palo Alto, California
Presented by Make: magazine, the Make: Hardware Innovation Workshop is a conference dedicated to the Maker Movement. The agenda is dedicated to entrepreneurs developing technological hardware from every step of the development process. Workshop topics include cutting-edge materials, capital strategies for hardware startups and prototyping.
Date: 6/12/2012 ? 6/15/2012
Location: Toronto, Canada
North by Northeast (NXNE) has partnered with Future.Innovation.Technology.Creativity (FITC) to present NXNEi, a three-day conference dedicated to technology and social media. The event has released their ?Priority Pass? ? which grants afternoon access to all NXNEi presentations and panels ? for $250 per person. A student rate of $125 is also available.
Date: 5/21/2012 ? 5/23/2012
Location: Washington, D.C.
The Institute for Defense and Government Advancement will hold its fifth-annual Social Media for Defense Summit for senior level professionals from the military, government agencies, private sector and the academic community to discuss the advancements and challenges of military social media strategy. Speakers include high-ranking officials from every major branch of the American military, as well as employees from popular government-oriented websites like GovLoop and OhMyGov.
Want to promote your upcoming event on Mashable?s Events Board? Click here.
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One doctor explains why the Internet hasn't changed medicine in ...
Every single person in the world has a health story. As a doctor, my job is to help people edit the story that your health is telling, and to treat your story as unique to make you healthier. It?s our signature challenge to become more efficient and accurate editors as digital healthcare begins to scale worldwide, which can create 8 billion health stories.
My own story as an MD ? and my interest in Big (Health) Data ? started when I was an intern in my hometown at St. Louis City Hospital in 1985. I thought I could make a contribution treating people in the inner city.
I spent many on call nights in the ER. The ER itself was like a war zone: violent, dirty, full of law enforcement officials, and in the middle of this chaos, families bringing in their sick kids for elective things. There wasn?t and still isn?t an evening option for working parents, and the system fails the indigent poor most dramatically.
After three years in the inner city hospital system, I realized that neither patients nor providers had the tools to deliver effective care and that the solutions to health problems there were largely political and out of my control.
I left St. Louis and moved on to training as a cardiologist and then as an interventional electrophysiologist. Seven years later, I became a high-tech specialist working at a major university in San Francisco, implanting sophisticated devices that treat and actually prevent sudden cardiac death.
It was lucky timing: 1995 was the beginning of an incredible 10-year high-tech wave in heart disease innovation. When I was in San Francisco during the 1990s dotcom boom, I watched as Silicon Valley introduced us to the Information Age. It has changed my world, but it hasn?t much changed how I practice medicine. Back then, we doctors and dotcomers were sitting in the same restaurants, but we weren?t drinking the same Kool-Aid.
It took a decade but the digital revolution finally started coming to medicine. I found myself sitting in meetings on Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists and technologists talking about the big opportunity in health: scaleable health care that could help hundreds of millions of people. But technology companies were too afraid to assail ? or too timid to tame ? the beast of healthcare.
Mostly, they still are. Today, we have thousands of health and fitness apps connecting us to digital ?coaches? and helping us socialize with our friends, but we don?t have a medical platform. We don?t have a medical Google, or an Amazon, or a Facebook. We don?t even have an AOL of medicine. What we mostly have is a Wikipedia for medicine, which I and my fellow clinicians and colleagues quote daily. (That?s a good thing.)
We have had some big successes with digital medicine. In my field about six years ago, device companies started putting antennas into implanted devices. We now analyze data from those devices in more than 200,000 patients. We?ve collected information on 20 million device downloads, recorded 150,000 life-saving interventions, and collected millions of pieces of valuable additional data. The numbers were clear. Here is what we?ve learned:
If you open up this implanted device to the network, people live longer.
We live longer and healthier lives when our health is continuously monitored by a device and exceptions to normal health are reported by the device to our caregivers. The technology exists and is often very inexpensive. It keeps people out of hospitals; saving money and lives. We?ve proven that.
So why aren?t we doing more monitoring? It?s not a regulatory problem or a lack-of-vision problem in the medical and technology companies; it?s that there?s too much perceived risk in changing the medical structure.
These technologies could profoundly improve the basics of how we practice medicine. Being connected fundamentally changes the doctor-patient relationship.
We get continuous data, review exceptional events daily, and can alert patients when they need help. We can catch disease patterns as they are happening. We have the potential to act within minutes or hours versus months in the traditional follow-up clinic. Patients can learn to partner in their care. They can be meaningfully engaged and empowered. We live in the so-called Information Age. A time when you can look up anything: bank records, flight information, and the price of tea in china. Just about anything.
But how many of us have a copy and control of our own health records or that of our family members? How many of us interact with our own health data as fluently and seamlessly as we do with our finances or sports scores?
A common view in the medical community is that people don?t know how to handle their own health information. That it takes a professional to interpret it. How would we feel if we were told we couldn?t handle our own banking information or our kids? report cards? Meaningful access to our personal health information is a right, and encouraging that access will become one of the most important civil rights issues of our era.
Over the next two years mobile phones and inexpensive sensors will better connect us, if we choose this path. We will see individualized care on a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Imagine your doctor calling you to schedule an appointment because she knows the condition of your body, rather than vice versa. We see products at the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing before they hit the market: sensors are becoming more powerful and much smaller.
At the USC Center for Body Computing, we conducted a study using the AliveCor ECG case. (We presented the results a couple weeks ago at the American College of Cardiology.) We gave it to 50 people with iPhones who attend our yearly Body Computing Conference. We found people transmitted an average of 36 30-second tracings a week.
I personally reviewed all the tracings. In one situation, I was able to diagnose acute cardiac ischemia in a Nigerian gentleman in Mumbai from my home in Los Angeles by reviewing a 30-second ECG collected on the iPhone. Helping this person was personally gratifying and represents a brilliant example of leveraging our experts across the globe.
We have a global wireless network that is ruthlessly efficient, more mobile phones than people, and global carriers that can deliver medical data continuously. We have tablets with medical grade image and video quality capability. We have diverse digital storage capabilities. We have vast social networks. The most successful companies in the world right now make or enable most of these products. That means there is a lot of interest. That means there is a lot of investment.
Sensors are becoming ubiquitous and advanced. They are in phones, in shoes, in your teeth, in small patches. At the CBC we?re testing them in cars, in athletes, and in kids games.
This is an important advance for several reasons. One night a few months ago, I was playing tennis with a 19 year-old who plays for a local junior college. On our last point, at the end of the 90-minute game, I was at the net and she missed a ball. She stumbled to the back fence and collapsed against it.
I ran over and felt her pulse and it was going extremely fast. I used the AliveCor case to diagnosis her arrhythmia and was able to terminate it with a physical maneuver before she passed out. Turns out that she?d already played several hours of tennis that day, hadn?t really eaten or hydrated and hadn?t gotten enough sleep the night before.
I had been thinking about, doing research on, and implanting devices in patients (including athletes) at risk for sudden cardiac death for 20 years, and yet I never considered that some of those sudden deaths occur because of the type of rhythm I witnessed first hand in the tennis player that night. What is generally considered a more pedestrian nonfatal rhythm in others can be deadly in an elite athlete.
This is the kind of on-demand medical information I was looking for my entire professional life.
By simply collecting basic vital signs we can help a kid in Ecuador with a heart arrhythmia, and a kid in Washington DC with diabetes. We can create ways to eventually help billions of people. The 21st Century version of the house call will be as far away as a smartphone.
So how do we start to deliver on the outrageously great and transformational potential that personalized digital medicine holds? We think it starts with that first point of contact. We need to get everyone connected?at least once?to the digital health ecosystem
To encourage wide adoption, we are building a platform to bridge the digital divide and connect the more than 5 billion mobile phones in the world to the health ecosystem. We want to use every day mobile phones to collect one piece of the world?s health data stream to increase the health information flow and to create ?Big Data? life analytics. Our initiative is called www.everyheartbeat.org. By 2013 we hope to create a system in which anyone can log-in and start recording their health narrative through their wireless phone. We estimate that recording 6 billion people?s heart rates will consume 1 terabyte of information a day; that is 1000 less than the movie Avatar. (As part of an ongoing study we have already recorded heart rates from 20 million device downloads.)
I think about the world in a few years and imagine owning and sharing health data just like we can share our life on social networks.
What will billions of heart beats show us?
It?s like the Human Genome Project.
We can use Big Health Data to study life patterns, identify disease, solve endemic health problems, and give us more control over our health.
It?s the beginning of an evolution toward knowing oneself and accepting the commonality of health needs and awareness across humanity. We are trying to tell the story of eight billon heart beats because we know it will help that sick kid in the ER at 3 a.m. in Mumbai, in Bangladesh, in Sao Paulo, in the Bronx, in East Los Angeles, in St. Louis. Everyone in the world can participate, and push medicine toward a health information revolution. This is the Internet of You. That helps 8 billion people. That helps all of us. One heartbeat at a time.
Leslie A. Saxon, MD, is the Founder and Executive Director of the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing, and the Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine. This essay was adapted from Dr. Saxon?s 2012 TEDMED talk.
Image courtesy of Monika Wisniewska, Shutterstock
Filed under: VentureBeat 
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iMore Picks of the Week for April 21, 2012
Every week the editors at iMore carefully select some of our favorite, most useful, most extraordinary apps, accessories, gadgets, and websites. This week’s selections include an iPad note taking app,
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