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EA Sports has revealed the cover for FIFA 14 that will be sold in the United States and Mexico beginning this September.
On the cover, Lionel Messi and Javier ?Chicharito? Hernandez are featured, which will be used on all of the packaging for the game sold in Mexico and the US. As you can see, there are no MLS or USMNT players to be seen.
The last time a MLS or USMNT footballer was featured on the cover was FIFA 12, which had Landon Donovan in action wearing his LA Galaxy uniform.
MORE ? All the details about FIFA 14 including photos and video.
FIFA 14 will be released on September 24, 2013 and will be available on the following platforms: Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4, PS2, Microsoft Windows, Wii, iOS, Android, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita.
Pre-order FIFA 14 today so you?ll get it in your mailbox as soon as it?s available.
Founder and publisher of EPL Talk, The Gaffer (aka Christopher Harris) is a journalist who has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian and several other publications as well as on NPR, BBC World, CBC, BBC Five Live, talkSPORT and beIN SPORT. Harris, who lives in Florida, has supported Swansea City since 1979. Harris launched EPL Talk in 2005. View all posts by The Gaffer ?
U.S. President Barack Obama gestures during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German Chancellery on Wednesday, June 19, 2013, in Berlin. Obama will renew his call to reduce the world's nuclear stockpiles, including a proposed one-third reduction in U.S. and Russian arsenals, a senior administration official said. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
U.S. President Barack Obama gestures during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German Chancellery on Wednesday, June 19, 2013, in Berlin. Obama will renew his call to reduce the world's nuclear stockpiles, including a proposed one-third reduction in U.S. and Russian arsenals, a senior administration official said. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The last thing President Barack Obama wants to do is turn Edward Snowden into a grand enemy of the state or a Daniel Ellsberg-type hero who speaks truth to power.
In the shifting narrative of the Obama administration, the man whose leaks of top-secret material about government surveillance programs have tied the national security apparatus in knots and brought charges under the Espionage Act has now been demoted to a common fugitive unworthy of international intrigue or extraordinary pursuit by the U.S. government.
A "29-year-old hacker," in the words of Obama; fodder for a made-for-TV movie, perhaps, but not much more.
"This is not exceptional from a legal perspective," the president said Thursday of Snowden's efforts to avoid capture by hopscotching from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Russia.
"I'm not going to have one case of a suspect who we're trying to extradite suddenly being elevated to the point where I've got to start doing wheeling and dealing and trading on a whole host of other issues simply to get a guy extradited," the president told reporters in Senegal.
It was the second time in a week that the administration had toned down its rhetoric as Snowden remained out of reach and first China and then Russia refused to send him back.
Just Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry was talking tough against China and calling Snowden a traitor whose actions are "despicable and beyond description." By Tuesday, Kerry was calling for "calm and reasonableness" on the matter, and adding, "We're not looking for a confrontation. We are not ordering anybody."
There are plenty of reasons for Obama to pull back, beyond his professed desire to avoid international horse-trading for the leaker.
The president, in his own words, has "a whole lot of business to do with China and Russia." Why increase tensions in an already uneasy relationship when Obama is looking for Russia's cooperation in finding a path to peace in Syria, for example?
In addition, less-heated dialogue could make it easier to broker Snowden's return because, despite the latest shrugs, U.S. officials very much want him.
"There's a lot of signaling going on," said Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "If the White House were issuing ultimatums, then Russia might feel obliged not to cooperate. But if it's merely one request among many others, that might make it easier to advance to a resolution."
The president also may have a U.S. audience in mind for his comments.
Obama's Democratic base includes plenty of defenders of civil liberties who are sympathetic to Snowden's professed goal of making government more transparent.
Benjamin Pauker, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, said the president was loath to elevate Snowden to a state enemy or "an Ellsberg-type truth-teller," referring to the 1971 leaker of the Pentagon Papers, which showed the U.S. government had misled the public about the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg himself recently called Snowden's revelations the most significant disclosures in the nation's history.
The administration, though, would rather marginalize Snowden, a former National Security Agency systems analyst who is thought to have custody of more classified documents.
"Calling him a hacker, as opposed to a government contractor or an NSA employee, brings him down a notch to someone who's an irritant, as opposed to someone who has access to integral intelligence files," Pauker said. "To externalize him and brand him with a black-hat hacker tag distances him from the government."
The disdainful talk isn't just coming from the White House.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called Snowden "a high school dropout who had a whole series of both academic troubles and employment troubles" after a recent closed hearing on the leaks. The committee's top Democrat, C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger from Maryland, called Snowden "a legend in his own mind" for claiming to be able to use NSA systems to access any email or phone call anywhere ? something the NSA's director has said can't be done.
There may also be face-saving benefits for Obama in cutting down Snowden, who turned 30 last week. An unsuccessful full-court press for Snowden's return would only show the limitations of Obama's international influence.
It's not the first time a president has tried to reset expectations by first elevating and then playing down the importance of an international fugitive who eluded capture, at least for a time.
President George W. Bush went from putting out a "dead-or-alive" ultimatum for 9-11 terror mastermind Osama bin Laden to dismissing him as "a person who's now been marginalized."
"I just don't spend that much time on him," Bush said in March 2002.
Candidate Barack Obama pledged during the 2008 presidential campaign: "We will kill bin Laden, we will crush al-Qaida. That has to be our biggest national security priority."
By January 2009, just days before his inauguration, Obama was saying: "My preference, obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he's in a cave somewhere and can't even communicate with his operatives, then we would meet our goal of protecting America."
As it turned out, he got him.
___
AP Intelligence Writer Kimberly Dozier contributed to this report.
___
Follow Nancy Benac on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nbenac
WASHINGTON (AP) ? The Pentagon is spending more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to buy Russian-made helicopters and other aircraft for an Afghan aviation unit that lacks the troops and expertise to operate and maintain the equipment, a government watchdog warned.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a report Friday these shortcomings mean the helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft destined for the Afghan Special Mission Wing "could be left sitting on runways in Afghanistan, rather than supporting critical missions, resulting in waste of U.S. funds." The report recommended putting the purchases on hold until the Afghans develop the capacity to support the aircraft.
The findings are sure to reverberate on Capitol Hill, where there is stiff opposition to the purchase of the Mi-17 helicopters from Rosoboronexport, the state-run Russian arms exporter that is a top weapons supplier to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Pentagon announced June 17 that Rosoboronexport had been awarded a $554 million contract for 30 Mi-17s to be used by the Special Mission Wing, a move that came just days after the House approved a 2014 defense policy bill that included a prohibition on contracts with the Russian agency. The Senate Armed Services Committee included a similar ban in its version of the bill.
The defense policy bill for 2013 also barred the Pentagon from using funds from that fiscal year for contracts with Rosoboronexport. But the Pentagon said money from the 2012 fiscal year was being used for the Mi-17 acquisition, so the restriction does not apply.
A Defense Department spokesman said there was an "urgent, near-term need" to buy the wing the Mi-17s, a multimission aircraft designed to operate at high altitudes and uniquely suited for the wing.
"Careful consideration of all the information available to the department confirms that it would be in the public interest to procure the Mi-17s needed for the (wing) from Rosoboronexport," Army Lt. Col. Jim Gregory said in a statement.
In addition to the Mi-17s, the Pentagon is spending $218 million on 18 PC-12 cargo aircraft from the Sierra Nevada Corp. of Sparks, Nev., to allow the Special Mission Wing to perform counterterrorism and counternarcotics missions, the report said.
The special inspector general is recommending the purchase be suspended until the wing's staffing, recruiting and training problems are resolved. Chief among them is finalizing a memorandum of understanding between the Afghan interior and defense ministries that would give the military control of the wing. But the document remains unsigned due largely to the interior ministry's "resistance to surrendering authority" over the wing, according to the report.
Michael Dumont, the deputy assistant defense secretary for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, said in comments included in the report that delaying the purchase of the aircraft until the agreement was signed "would unacceptably delay our efforts to develop the (wing) into a capable force."
The wing was to have 806 personnel by mid-2015, but as of late January had just 180, according to the report.
Filling out the wing's ranks won't be easy, the report said, due to challenges of finding Afghan recruits who are literate in their own language, competent in English and can pass the strict, 18- to 20-month U.S. vetting process that includes eliminating candidates who have ties to criminal or insurgent activities.
The flow of Afghan trainees from helicopter flight training at Fort Rucker, Ala., to more intense training in the Czech Republic "has been slow and uneven, ranging from a low of two up to eight trainees at a time," according to the special inspector general.
The report blamed a lack of steady funding for the training from the Defense Department, failed background checks for prospective pilots and flight engineers, and the Czech government's requirement that each Afghan trainee have a certificate signed by Afghan authorities.
Compensation, especially for mechanics, is another barrier to recruitment because Afghans with a basic command of English are in high demand and can get higher pay elsewhere, the report said.
Another key shortcoming is the dearth of pilots capable of flying at night, when most counterterrorism missions are conducted. As of late January, only seven of the 47 pilots assigned to the wing were fully mission qualified to fly with night vision goggles, the report said.
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? New research pinpoints the current location of NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft: It's still in our solar system.
Since last summer, the long-running spacecraft has been exploring uncharted territory where the effects of interstellar space, or the space between stars, can be felt. Scientists don't know how thick this newfound region in the solar system is or how much farther Voyager 1 has to travel to break to the other side.
"It could actually be anytime or it could be several more years," said chief scientist Ed Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission.
Stone first described this unexpected zone at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union last year. A trio of papers published online Thursday in the journal Science confirmed just how strange this new layer is.
Soon after Voyager 1 crossed into this region last August, low-energy charged particles that had been plentiful suddenly zipped outside while high-energy cosmic rays from interstellar space streamed inward. Readings by one of Voyager 1's instruments showed an abrupt increase in the magnetic field strength, but there was no change in the direction of the magnetic field lines ? a sign that Voyager 1 has not yet exited the solar system.
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 to visit the giant gas planets, beaming back dazzling postcards of Jupiter, Saturn and their moons. Voyager 2 went on to tour Uranus and Neptune. After planet-hopping, they were sent on a trajectory toward interstellar space.
Voyager 1 is about 11 ? billion miles from the sun. Voyager 2 is about 9? billion miles from the sun. The nuclear-powered spacecraft have enough fuel to operate their instruments until around 2020.
In the meantime, scientists are looking for any clues of a departure. Given the time it takes to process the data, mission scientist Leonard Burlaga said there will be a lag between when Voyager 1 finally sails into interstellar space and when the team can confirm the act. Then there's always the possibility of surprises beyond the solar system.
"Crossing may not be an instantaneous thing," Burlaga said. "It may be complicated."
___
Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia
The genome of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense GSF30T identifies diverse strategies in the Herbaspirillum genus to interact with plants
Microbes whose habitat is inside other organisms, such as so-called "endophytic" bacteria that live inside plants, have evolved genes that enable them to overcome their host's defensive mechanisms. But once they have entered the host tissue, such microbes may actually benefit their host, for example, by activating genes that capture atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into natural fertilizer to promote plant growth. Daniel Straub and colleagues from the University of Hohenheim and the Helmholtz Zentrum Mnchen, Germany, found that the genomic "toolbox" of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense, which lives inside grasses, is very different from the toolbox of its closest relatives: unlike other Herbaspirillum species, H. frisingense can fix atmospheric nitrogen to benefits its host, and also uses very different molecular pathways and metabolic modules to enter and survive in host cells. These results can help to identity endophytic bacteria that can be added to soil to improve the yield of crops, without posing a risk to human health or to the environment.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Daniel Straub
Crop Science Institute,
University of Hohenheim, Germany
Email: d.straub@uni-hohenheim.de
Flying fruit flies correct for visual sideslip depending on relative speed of forward optic flow
Flies are spectacular in flight, executing precise maneuvers at high speed. But because they are small, they are easily blown off course, and must correct their heading using tiny brains with limited neural resources. When moving forward, images of distant objects travel across the retina more slowly than nearby ones. This geometrical effect, called motion parallax, informs us if we run through the forest that the hovering moon is far off, and that the tree branches whizzing by are near and must be dodged. To determine if flies use motion parallax for corrective flight maneuvers, Stephanie Cabrera and Jamie Theobald, of Florida International University, used a cube with images on the sides to simulate three dimensional forward flight for a fruitfly that was held in place in the cube's center. They found that fruitflies responded more strongly to images that, by virtue of speed, appeared closer. But the crucial variable wasn't absolute speed; it was that some images moved faster than others. These results suggest that tiny fly brains use geometrical clues to identify the closest objects during flight.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Jamie Theobald
Department of Biological Sciences
Florida International University, USA
E-mail: theobald@fiu.edu
Clustering the lexicon in the brain: a meta?analysis of the neurofunctional evidence on noun and verb processing
Virtually every known human language features two different classes of words, one for "calling" things like dogs, clouds, or rumours and one for saying something about how they are or what they do dogs bark, clouds are coming, rumours spread. These classes are called nouns and verbs in Western languages, and sits at the very heart of human communication. It was widely believed that separate areas in the brain subserve the production and comprehension of nouns and verbs, based on the outcome of individual studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Davide Crepaldi, Manuela Berlingeri and colleagues from the University of Milan Bicocca and the University of Milan have put together the evidence coming from those individual studies through a hierarchical clustering technique, and have found that, once results from different experiments are considered as a whole, evidence shows instead that the brain areas deputed to nouns and verbs are mostly overlapping, and the difference in the neural circuitries deputed to either grammatical class scale down to spatial and temporal resolutions that are far out of the grasp of current brain-snapshot techniques. According to the researchers, these results impact deeply on how functional specialization of individual brain areas is currently conceived.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Davide Crepaldi
Department of Psychology
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: davide.crepaldi1@unimib.it
A double-edged sword: how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes can contribute to chromosomal instability
Cells rely on an intricate network of signaling pathways to govern a number of processes ranging from tissue repair to programmed cell death. De-regulation of signaling pathways is a hallmark of cancer and responsible for driving tumor formation. Aneuploidy, defined as an abnormal chromosome number, is a distinct feature commonly observed in most solid tumors that arises from errors in cell division during mitosis. While some tumors maintain a stably aneuploid genome, many cancer cells persistently mis-segregate their chromosomes during mitosis, a phenomenon known as chromosomal instability (CIN). CIN is thought to drive the genomic re-shuffling that enables cells to acquire new phenotypes such as drug resistance and is intimately associated with loss of mitotic fidelity. Emerging data show that CIN and de-regulated cell signaling pathways are closely interrelated suggesting the roles that signaling pathways play in the accuracy of mitosis may be underappreciated. These results imply that the induction of CIN can no longer be thought of as a separate event from the cancer-associated driver mutations found in cell signaling pathways. In the context of tumorigenesis this may turn out to be a double-edged sword that combines de-regulated cell cycle progression with the disruption of mitosis to generate the highly complex genomic rearrangements typical of solid tumors. These results change the way we think about how to intervene therapeutically in cancer patients and provide insights on the molecular targets that may contribute significantly to improve patient prognosis.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Duane A. Compton
Department of Biochemistry
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA
Email: duane.a.compton@dartmouth.edu
For copies of embargoed papers, please contact: Gozde Zorlu, Communications Officer: Tel: +41 (0) 21 693 9203. Interview requests should be directed to the corresponding author and appropriate contact details are provided above.
For online articles, please cite "Frontiers in xxx" followed by the name of the field as the publisher and include a link to the paper; active URLs for each paper are listed.
About Frontiers
Frontiers is a community driven open-access publisher and research networking platform. Launched and run by scientists since 2007, and based in Switzerland, Frontiers empowers researchers to advance the way science is evaluated, communicated and shared in the digital era. Frontiers joined the Nature Publishing Group family in 2013.
The "Frontiers in" series of journals publish around 500 peer-reviewed articles every month, which receive 5 million monthly views and are supported by over 25,000 editors and reviewers around the world. Frontiers has formed partnerships with international organizations such as the Max Planck Society and the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). For more information, please visit: http://www.frontiersin.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
The genome of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense GSF30T identifies diverse strategies in the Herbaspirillum genus to interact with plants
Microbes whose habitat is inside other organisms, such as so-called "endophytic" bacteria that live inside plants, have evolved genes that enable them to overcome their host's defensive mechanisms. But once they have entered the host tissue, such microbes may actually benefit their host, for example, by activating genes that capture atmospheric nitrogen and turn it into natural fertilizer to promote plant growth. Daniel Straub and colleagues from the University of Hohenheim and the Helmholtz Zentrum Mnchen, Germany, found that the genomic "toolbox" of the endophytic bacterium H. frisingense, which lives inside grasses, is very different from the toolbox of its closest relatives: unlike other Herbaspirillum species, H. frisingense can fix atmospheric nitrogen to benefits its host, and also uses very different molecular pathways and metabolic modules to enter and survive in host cells. These results can help to identity endophytic bacteria that can be added to soil to improve the yield of crops, without posing a risk to human health or to the environment.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Daniel Straub
Crop Science Institute,
University of Hohenheim, Germany
Email: d.straub@uni-hohenheim.de
Flying fruit flies correct for visual sideslip depending on relative speed of forward optic flow
Flies are spectacular in flight, executing precise maneuvers at high speed. But because they are small, they are easily blown off course, and must correct their heading using tiny brains with limited neural resources. When moving forward, images of distant objects travel across the retina more slowly than nearby ones. This geometrical effect, called motion parallax, informs us if we run through the forest that the hovering moon is far off, and that the tree branches whizzing by are near and must be dodged. To determine if flies use motion parallax for corrective flight maneuvers, Stephanie Cabrera and Jamie Theobald, of Florida International University, used a cube with images on the sides to simulate three dimensional forward flight for a fruitfly that was held in place in the cube's center. They found that fruitflies responded more strongly to images that, by virtue of speed, appeared closer. But the crucial variable wasn't absolute speed; it was that some images moved faster than others. These results suggest that tiny fly brains use geometrical clues to identify the closest objects during flight.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Jamie Theobald
Department of Biological Sciences
Florida International University, USA
E-mail: theobald@fiu.edu
Clustering the lexicon in the brain: a meta?analysis of the neurofunctional evidence on noun and verb processing
Virtually every known human language features two different classes of words, one for "calling" things like dogs, clouds, or rumours and one for saying something about how they are or what they do dogs bark, clouds are coming, rumours spread. These classes are called nouns and verbs in Western languages, and sits at the very heart of human communication. It was widely believed that separate areas in the brain subserve the production and comprehension of nouns and verbs, based on the outcome of individual studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Davide Crepaldi, Manuela Berlingeri and colleagues from the University of Milan Bicocca and the University of Milan have put together the evidence coming from those individual studies through a hierarchical clustering technique, and have found that, once results from different experiments are considered as a whole, evidence shows instead that the brain areas deputed to nouns and verbs are mostly overlapping, and the difference in the neural circuitries deputed to either grammatical class scale down to spatial and temporal resolutions that are far out of the grasp of current brain-snapshot techniques. According to the researchers, these results impact deeply on how functional specialization of individual brain areas is currently conceived.
Researcher contact:
Dr. Davide Crepaldi
Department of Psychology
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
E-mail: davide.crepaldi1@unimib.it
A double-edged sword: how oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes can contribute to chromosomal instability
Cells rely on an intricate network of signaling pathways to govern a number of processes ranging from tissue repair to programmed cell death. De-regulation of signaling pathways is a hallmark of cancer and responsible for driving tumor formation. Aneuploidy, defined as an abnormal chromosome number, is a distinct feature commonly observed in most solid tumors that arises from errors in cell division during mitosis. While some tumors maintain a stably aneuploid genome, many cancer cells persistently mis-segregate their chromosomes during mitosis, a phenomenon known as chromosomal instability (CIN). CIN is thought to drive the genomic re-shuffling that enables cells to acquire new phenotypes such as drug resistance and is intimately associated with loss of mitotic fidelity. Emerging data show that CIN and de-regulated cell signaling pathways are closely interrelated suggesting the roles that signaling pathways play in the accuracy of mitosis may be underappreciated. These results imply that the induction of CIN can no longer be thought of as a separate event from the cancer-associated driver mutations found in cell signaling pathways. In the context of tumorigenesis this may turn out to be a double-edged sword that combines de-regulated cell cycle progression with the disruption of mitosis to generate the highly complex genomic rearrangements typical of solid tumors. These results change the way we think about how to intervene therapeutically in cancer patients and provide insights on the molecular targets that may contribute significantly to improve patient prognosis.
Researcher contact:
Prof. Duane A. Compton
Department of Biochemistry
Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA
Email: duane.a.compton@dartmouth.edu
For copies of embargoed papers, please contact: Gozde Zorlu, Communications Officer: Tel: +41 (0) 21 693 9203. Interview requests should be directed to the corresponding author and appropriate contact details are provided above.
For online articles, please cite "Frontiers in xxx" followed by the name of the field as the publisher and include a link to the paper; active URLs for each paper are listed.
About Frontiers
Frontiers is a community driven open-access publisher and research networking platform. Launched and run by scientists since 2007, and based in Switzerland, Frontiers empowers researchers to advance the way science is evaluated, communicated and shared in the digital era. Frontiers joined the Nature Publishing Group family in 2013.
The "Frontiers in" series of journals publish around 500 peer-reviewed articles every month, which receive 5 million monthly views and are supported by over 25,000 editors and reviewers around the world. Frontiers has formed partnerships with international organizations such as the Max Planck Society and the International Union of Immunological Societies (IUIS). For more information, please visit: http://www.frontiersin.org.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Because we don't have any real life superheroes in this totally lame world of ours, we obsess over the lives of silly celebrities with beautiful cheekbones and photoshopped curves and cry over athletes wearing fresh laundry. It's what we call fun! But if superheroes existed on Earth, all those puny humans would never make the cover of magazines ever again. We'd obsess over superheroes all the time.
Prince William? Kate Middleton? Psh. LeBron James? Tom Brady? Who? There would be no Kardashian to fret about. Nobody counting how many chins on Honey Boo Boo's mother. All of the familiar faces that stare back at you in line of a grocery store and spur 30 second conversations about would be gone. Insert: make believe people who could actually do stuff. Because that's much better than real people who actually do make believe stuff!
MediAvengers created a lovely website that pretends those heroes actually do exist in a world where the paparazzi are permanently watching anyone famous. Kim, the woman behind MediAvengers, expertly parodies the Marvel universe on Earth to hilarious results. She explains:
Articles are written in the style of the publication?s real world counterpart (hence Cap?s great butt in the US Weekly spreads, and the trashy, repetitive, and apparently badly researched nature of the pieces in general).
Every piece is carefully thought out, right down to what information would be ?allowed? into the public arena (say hello to Natalie Rushman), and incorporates quotes from the comics and other parts of the Marvel Multiverse to really give it a little more of an authenticity boost.
The January 1987 issue of the legendary (and sadly, now defunct) Omni magazine included predictions from 14 "great minds" about what the world might look like in twenty years. By the year 2007, musician David Byrne believed that computers would do little for future musicians outside of their bookkeeping. Noted rich guy Bill Gates wondered how much stimulation (read: overstimulation) people of the future might be able to handle. And feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich predicted that by the 21st century, ideas about sexual dysfunction and what constitutes a healthy sexual relationship will have changed dramatically.
I sent Ehrenreich an email to ask about her predictions. She responded with a note that the short piece attributed to her in Omni looked like something that was taken from an interview, rather than something she wrote. Either way, it's a fascinating (and rather prescient) look at the future of sex and relationships from the perspective of the 1980s.
Here's what she had to say a quarter century ago:
Sex will continue to be on center stage in the next 20 years. There are good reasons for that. It's only recently that large numbers of people have begun to think of sex as a pleasurable part of their lives, quite apart from some function such as reproduction. For many years we've had birth control, but the realization that sex can be something that is not connected to some other purpose in life is just gaining hold. People are understanding their own particular sexual needs for the first time.
A redefinition of heterosexual sex is occurring in which sex will be less bound to genital interaction. It's no longer just foreplay plus intercourse. The women's sexual revolution declared that women were not getting enough pleasure, and what is evolving is a much more varied kind of encounter that does not have to culminate in penetration and ejaculation by the man.
Our present notions of sexual dysfunction will look archaic in 20 years. It will seem incredible that all of our notions of sexual dysfunction came from a narrow notion of sex centered on intercourse.
We will, of course, continue to move away from a medical model of sexuality, which separates sexual activity into normal patterns over here and the dysfunctions or the illnesses over there. As we develop a broader definition of sexuality, it will appear particularly quaint to talk about dys- functions.
We won't rely on doctors or sexologists to define the problems or provide the answers. The biggest change in sex in the last 20 years has been that ordinary lay-people have begun to write about their experiences and have begun to introduce the subjective element.
In 20 years more people are going to have long periods of time when they are not in a marriage or other long-term sexual relationship. They should have options that do not depend on getting emotionally involved. You just might want to rent an exciting videotape instead of having an affair. I also think the sex-products industry will become important to people in monogamous marriage relationships and help keep those relationships together by an active interest in sexual possibilities.
There are issues that barely have been uncovered or discussed during the recent so-called sexual revolution. Why does our culture limit the idea of what is sexually attractive? Why do we limit it to people who are young and pretty in a conventional way? How do we begin to change that so that the possibility of being a sexually assertive person is open to all of us who fall outside the bounds of conventional attractiveness? American culture is already showing that its members are not ready to be asexual when they're fifty.
Twenty years ago I really believed that by this time we would be a much more egalitarian society. I really believed that by 1987 we wouldn't have about 20 percent of our own citizens in a state of poverty. In 20 years we have gone backward.
In response to how accurate she thinks her prediction was, Ehrenreich said, "I think was more or less right. Look at gay marriage!"
And aside from some minor nitpicking about the technology behind the "rent an exciting videotape" part, it does seem like she got a lot right. The most notable absentee is internet porn, and who could've predicted that before the world wide web even existed?
BERLIN (AP) ? German authorities are investigating two men of Tunisian origin suspected of planning to use model airplanes for terrorist attacks, prosecutors said Tuesday, as police in Germany and Belgium raided a series of sites searching for evidence of "possible attack plans and preparations."
No one was arrested in Tuesday's raids, which were carried out in the Stuttgart and Munich areas of southern Germany and in Saxony in eastern Germany, federal prosecutors said in a statement. One site in Belgium was raided, German officials said without elaborating.
Prosecutors said the investigation involved possible charges of "preparation of a serious, state-threatening act of violence," but they did not mention membership in any specific terrorist organization.
The two Tunisians are suspected of "procuring information and objects to commit Islamic extremist explosive attacks with remote-controlled model airplanes," prosecutors added. They gave no further information on the two men and didn't identify them.
However, the public broadcaster in southwestern Germany, SWF, quoted unnamed sources as saying that the two were studying aeronautics in Stuttgart and were suspected of trying to develop techniques for remotely piloting model planes using GPS technology.
German authorities would not say whether the alleged plot was far advanced, but the German news agency, quoting unnamed security sources, said the suspects had been under surveillance for more than a year.
The agency said authorities had recently detected "an increased interest in explosives and model aircraft."
However, authorities added that the national terror threat had not been raised, suggesting police believe the alleged plan ? if there were one ? was in early stages.
Among the locations raided were the apartments of four acquaintances of the two men who were suspected of financing Islamic extremism, officials said. The investigation also targeted another acquaintance suspected of money laundering. None of the suspects was identified.
Last November, a U.S. man, Rezwan Ferdaus, was sentenced to 17 years in prison over a plot to fly remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives into the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.
Last year, Spanish police released a video they claimed showed suspected al-Qaida members training for a bombing raid using a model plane. Two Russians of Chechen origin were charged with possession of explosives but were released in April for lack of evidence. A Turk living in Spain was also arrested but later released.
Germany has seen only one successful attack by an Islamic radical ? the fatal shooting of two U.S. airmen at Frankfurt airport in 2011 by a Kosovo native who grew up in Germany and became radicalized by watching jihadist propaganda on the Internet.
However, there have been several attempted attacks in the country, which is a major contributor to international forces in Afghanistan.
Separately Tuesday, French authorities said police detained six people in the Paris region on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks in France.
ISTANBUL (AP) ? Riot police cordoned off streets, set up roadblocks and fired tear gas and water cannon to prevent anti-government protesters from converging on Istanbul's central Taksim Square on Sunday, unbowed even as Turkey's prime minister addressed hundreds of thousands of supporters a few kilometers away.
The contrasting scenes pointed to an increasing polarization in Turkish society ? one which critics say Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has fueled with the fiery rhetoric he has maintained since they began more than two weeks ago.
A police crackdown Saturday evening that ended an 18-day peaceful sit-in at Taksim Square's Gezi Park sparked daylong unrest on the streets of Istanbul, while police also broke up demonstrations in the capital, Ankara, and the southern city of Adana.
The protests began in Gezi Park more than two weeks ago and spread to dozens of cities across the country. Erdogan has blamed them on a nebulous plot to destabilize his government. Five people, including a policeman, have died and more than 5,000 have been injured, according to a Turkish rights group.
Elected to his third term just two years ago with 50 percent of the vote and having steered his country to healthy economic growth, the protests are unlikely to prove an immediate threat to Erdogan's government. But they have dented his international image and exposed growing divisions within Turkish society. Never before in his 10-year tenure has Erdogan faced such an open or broad expression of discontent.
Critics have accused him of an increasingly autocratic way of governing and of trying to impose his conservative Muslim views on the lifestyles of the entire population in a country governed by secular laws ? charges he vehemently denies.
"They say, 'Mr. prime minister, you are too harsh,' and some (call me) 'dictator'," he said during his speech in his second political rally in as many days. "What kind of a dictator meets with people who occupy Gezi Park as well as the sincere environmentalists?" he questioned, referring to a meeting Thursday night with protest representatives.
Erdogan defended his decision to send police in to end the occupation of the park, where protesters had set up a tent city complete with a library, food distribution center, infirmary, children's activity area and plant nursery. Water cannon and tear gas forced thousands to flee, and cleanup crews ripped down the tents and food overnight.
"I did my duty as prime minister," he told his supporters. "Otherwise there would be no point in my being in office."
About 10 kilometers (six miles) away in the center of the city, police fired tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse thousands of protesters trying to converge on Taksim Square. In some neighborhoods, protesters set up barricades across streets while youths threw stones at police.
In others, police broke up demonstrations with dense clouds of stinging tear gas that sent protesters fleeing into side streets. Some took refuge in nearby cafes and restaurants, where waiters clutched napkins to their faces to ward off the gas.
Similar scenes developed in Ankara, where around 50 demonstrators were injured, including a 20-year-old woman who was in critical condition after being hit in the back of her head with a tear gas canister, according to Selcuk Atalay, secretary-general of the Ankara Medical Association.
In the southern city of Adana, police clashed with stone-throwing demonstrators, the state-run Anadolu Agency said. A fight broke also broke out between the demonstrators, with one group trying to prevent the other from throwing stones at police.
Anadolu said a total of 105 people were detained in Ankara, including a Russian and an Iranian.
Rights group Amnesty International said more than 100 people were believed to have been detained during Saturday's demonstrations in Taksim and nearby districts, and said police were refusing to give details of their whereabouts.
Some among the thousands who fled Gezi Park during Saturday night's police operation had still not managed to return home by Sunday afternoon, fearing being arrested by the police. Erdogan has repeatedly labeled those who attended the park protests as troublemakers and illegal groups, although he has also said he understood the complaints of those who had truly environmental concerns at heart.
One young man who had been demonstrating for days in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, said that as he and his friends fled the police operation in Gezi Park, they ran into a group of men armed with iron bars who chased them through the streets. It was unclear who they were.
Kenan, who spoke on condition his full name not be used for fear of arrest or being targeted in reprisals, said the group took refuge in an apartment building, where they were still hiding late Sunday afternoon.
Labor unions called for a one-day strike that would include doctors, lawyers, engineers and civil servants in support of the protesters. Strikes, however, often have little visible impact on daily life in Turkey.
In a potentially worrying development suggestive of a possible escalation in the violence, Erdogan said two police officers had been injured by bullets fired during the overnight unrest.
"(One) was shot with a bullet in the stomach, the other was shot in the leg," he said.
On Sunday, TV footage showed police detaining white-jacketed medical personnel who had been helping treat injured protesters, leading them away with their hands cuffed behind their backs.
Istanbul Gov. Huseyin Avni Mutlu denied they were medical staff.
"They wore doctors' white coats but had nothing to do with medicine or health. In fact, one of them had seven separate criminal records for theft," he said on his Twitter account, contradicting earlier comments in which he had said several doctors had been detained.
Amnesty International noted that the health minister had previously stated that the improvised infirmaries set up by protesters to treat those injured in clashes or during police intervention were illegal and that doctors could face prosecution.
"It is completely unacceptable that doctors should be threatened with prosecution for providing medical attention for people in need," Andrew Gardner, Amnesty International's researcher on Turkey, said in a statement. "The doctors must be released immediately and any threat to prosecute them removed."
___
Fraser reported from Ankara. Burhan Ozbilici and Jamey Keaten in Ankara contributed to this report.
ATLANTA (AP) ? Far from reversing course, Senate Democrats who backed President Barack Obama's health care law and now face re-election in GOP-leaning states are firming up their support for the overhaul even as Republican criticism intensifies.
Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Kay Hagan of North Carolina will face voters in 2014 for the first time since voting for the Affordable Care Act ? also known as "Obamacare" ? three years ago. They aren't apologizing for their vote, and several are pursuing an aggressive strategy: Embrace the law, help voters use it and fix what doesn't work.
"I don't run from my votes," Begich told The Associated Press. "Politicians who sit around and say, 'That's controversial so I better run from it,' just ask for trouble. Voters may not always agree with you, but they respect people who think about these issues and talk about them."
That means, Begich said, reminding voters that as a candidate in 2008 he called for prohibiting insurers from denying coverage based on existing health problems, ending lifetime coverage limits and making it easier for workers to leave a job and still have insurance, an option they'll have under new exchanges that consumers can begin using to buy individual policies this fall.
"There's a lot of good that people will realize as this all comes online," the first-term senator said.
Republicans argue just the opposite ? that there's a lot of bad in the sweeping law. More than a year before the elections, they use the law to pummel the four Democrats, three of them from the conservative South and all from states that Republican Mitt Romney carried last fall.
Begich highlighted that Senate Democrats have voted to repeal parts of the law: paperwork for businesses and a tax on medical equipment. And he promised aggressive outreach to help constituents use the exchanges and other consumer benefits.
Landrieu has gone on the offensive, too, criticizing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and her state's Legislature for refusing federal money to broaden Medicaid insurance for more low-income Americans. Along with the exchanges, the optional Medicaid expansion anchors the law's insurance coverage extension.
With those contentious parts slated to begin next year, Obama's signature legislative achievement is all but certain to be central in the 2014 midterm campaign as Republicans look to hang onto power in the House and gain the six seats they need to win control of the Senate for the final two years of the Democratic president's second term.
A Republican-aligned outside group already has aired a TV ad in Arkansas deriding Pryor as "the deciding vote for Obamacare" ? a label Republicans can apply to any Democrat since the bill passed with the exact number of votes necessary to avoid a GOP filibuster. The North Carolina GOP regularly hammers Hagan on her choice. And Louisiana Republicans recently tried to link Landrieu to comments from the state Democratic Party chairwoman, who suggested that opposition to Obama's law stems from the fact the president is black.
Initially, the law's 2010 passage roused tea party activists, who propelled Republicans to a House majority and Senate gains that fall. The lagging economy and anger over bank rescues, stimulus spending and budget deficits also played a role. Reprising the health care critique as part of their 2012 strategy, Republicans couldn't replicate their success: Obama defeated Romney decisively, and every Senate Democrat who voted for the health care law won re-election.
Public support for the law as a whole has never consistently reached a majority, according to most polls; opposition in Romney-won states exceeds 50 percent. Yet many individual provisions already in effect, like those Begich mentioned, have more support in polls.
The GOP bets that voters' displeasure will intensify in 2014 as more provisions take hold. Besides exchanges and Medicaid enlargement, businesses with at least 50 full-time employees will have to provide insurance coverage and state insurance regulators will enforce coverage minimums. Many market analysts predict premium increases for individual policies.
"It's not accidental that President Obama scheduled the most popular provisions to be in effect for his election year," argued Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the national GOP's Senate campaign arm. "He's left a lot of 2014 Democrats hanging out to dry with the unpopular provisions."
Democrats say Republicans need Obama's health care overhaul only to rally their core supporters, who are particularly important in midterm elections in which the electorate typically is older, whiter and more conservative.
Dayspring said the issue wins independents.
John Anzalone, a Democratic campaign consultant and pollster, retorted: "What happens when the boogeyman that's promised never comes?"
Anzalone, who counts Hagan among his politician clients, said the best counter for vulnerable Democratic incumbents is to use their office actively to help constituents take advantage of the law. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi outlined the same approach in a 78-page memo to her caucus members last month.
Democrats also argue that Republicans ignore their own vulnerabilities and individual state dynamics that could complicate a GOP effort to run a national campaign.
The law, Begich notes, established long-term coverage plans for Native Americans. "That's important to Alaska" and lingered in Congress for two decades before finding a place in the act, he said.
Landrieu can point to bonus payments she negotiated for Louisiana's Medicaid program to make up for money lost because of several hurricanes. Conservative commentators mocked the arrangement as the "Louisiana Purchase," but Jindal, who asked for the extra money, gladly used it to balance Louisiana's budget in multiple fiscal years.
Hagan and her North Carolina colleagues paid special attention to pharmaceutical companies that develop drugs called "biologics." They negotiated 12-year monopolies for those drugs, a win for the biomedical sector that dominates the "Research Triangle" around Raleigh.
Veteran North Carolina political observer Gary Pearce, a Democrat, said Hagan also could benefit from the fact that leading GOP candidates expected to challenge her come from the new legislative supermajorities that have pursued a long list of conservative priorities, including rejecting Medicaid expansion that North Carolina hospitals wanted. A Republican primary fight among top statehouse Republicans, Pearce said, could leave Hagan "in a good position to paint Republicans in a right-wing corner."
In Louisiana, the GOP may find its health care expert in Rep. Bill Cassidy, who spent several decades as a hospital physician in Baton Rouge and has served among leading GOP congressional critics of the law. But as a congressman, Cassidy voted with his caucus to repeal the law in full more than three dozen times.
Justin Barasky, Senate Democrats' campaign spokesman, said those votes give Democrats fodder to argue that the GOP candidate sided with big insurance companies. The same scenario could apply in Arkansas if Rep. Tom Cotton, who's expected to run, ends up as GOP nominee.
Landrieu also can use Jindal as a GOP counter on health care. Now chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Jindal has dismantled the state hospital system that Louisiana State University runs, closing some facilities and contracting with private firms to run others. Voters have not embraced the changes.
Arkansas Republican strategist Alice Stewart acknowledged that her party has had only mixed success using health care as a national issue, but she said Pryor's eventual GOP opponent can make it resonate.
"It's not just a generic criticism of Obamacare," she said. "This is part of explaining that Mark Pryor goes to Washington and doesn't represent the values of this conservative state." She recalled then-Rep. John Boozman ousting Sen. Blanche Lincoln in 2010 after her vote for the law.
"Voters here remember that going from Blanche to Sen. Boozman was an important step," Stewart said. "Mark's in the same boat."
___
Follow Bill Barrow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BillBarrowAP
After Blognix last weekend I thought I'd drop into town to do a bit of shopping and ended up buying 3 of the new Barry M nail polishes. Superdrug currently have an offer on whereby if you spend ?6 on Barry M products, you get your choice of a neon pink or a neon green limited edition polish. Now, despite my blog name, and my laptop colour..and my bedroom colour, I actually don't love the colour pink. And green is my favourite colour, so that was the one I went for! The first thing I love is the bottle, I really love the Aztec print cap, it's just so...jazzy!
Colour wise, this polish to me really is the definition of a traditional 'pea green' with a neon element. It has a standard Barry M brush, which I always think could do with being a little wider, (just saying!) and is a full sized polish, so worth roughly ?2.99. The formula is actually quite sheer, and 2 coats came out a little patchy but I hadn't noticed until I took the photo. A third coat did manage to solve this problem but the full drying time sharply increased, and in fact it didn't ever seem to fully dry, even after a few hours knocking the nail caused it to dent rather chip, rather like the High Shine Gelly polishes I have tried so far. I'm really not a fan of the formula, which is disappointing because the colour is such a nice one.
Overall, not a bad little freebie if you're planning on making a Barry M purchase already but unlike some of their past nail polish freebies, this one isn't one to sing about I don't think.?
Have any of you tried this yet? What did you think?
June 14, 2013 ? In the near future, a buzz in your belt or a pulse from your jacket may give you instructions on how to navigate your surroundings.
Think of it as tactile Morse code: vibrations from a wearable, GPS-linked device that tell you to turn right or left, or stop, depending on the pattern of pulses you feel. Such a device could free drivers from having to look at maps, and could also serve as a tactile guide for the visually and hearing impaired.
Lynette Jones, a senior research scientist in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, designs wearable tactile displays. Through her work, she's observed that the skin is a sensitive -- though largely untapped -- medium for communication.
"If you compare the skin to the retina, you have about the same number of sensory receptors, you just have them over almost two square meters of space, unlike the eye where it's all concentrated in an extremely small area," Jones says. "The skin is generally as useful as a very acute area. It's just that you need to disperse the information that you're presenting."
Knowing just how to disperse tactile information across the skin is tricky. For instance, people may be much more sensitive to stimuli on areas like the hand, as opposed to the forearm, and may respond best to certain patterns of vibrations. Such information on skin responsiveness could help designers determine the best configuration of motors in a display, given where on the skin a device would be worn.
Now Jones has built an array that precisely tracks a motor's vibrations through skin in three dimensions. The array consists of eight miniature accelerometers and a single pancake motor -- a type of vibrating motor used in cellphones. She used the array to measure motor vibrations in three locations: the palm of the hand, the forearm and the thigh. From her studies with eight healthy participants, Jones found that a motor's mechanical vibrations through skin drop off quickly in all three locations, within 8 millimeters from where the vibrations originated.
Jones also gauged participants' perception of vibrations, fitting them with a 3-by-3 array of pancake motors in these three locations on the body. While skin generally stopped vibrating 8 millimeters from the source, most people continued to perceive the vibrations as far away as 24 millimeters.
When participants were asked to identify specific locations of motors within the array, they were much more sensitive on the palm than on the forearm or thigh. But in all three locations, people were better at picking out vibrations in the four corners of the array, versus the inner motors, leading Jones to posit that perhaps people use the edges of their limbs to localize vibrations and other stimuli.
"For a lot of sensory modalities, you have to work out what it is people can process, as one of the dictates for how you design," says Jones, whose results will appear in the journal IEEE Transactions on Haptics. "There's no point in making things much more compact, which may be a desirable feature from an engineering point of view, but from a human-use point of view, doesn't make a difference."
Mapping good vibrations
In addition to measuring skin's sensitivity to vibrations, Jones and co-author Katherine Sofia '12 found that skin has a strong effect on motor vibrations. The researchers compared a pancake motor's frequency of vibrations when mounted on a rigid structure or on more compliant skin. They found that in general, skin reduced a motor's vibrations by 28 percent, with the forearm and thigh having a slightly stronger dampening effect than the palm of the hand.
The skin's damping of motor vibrations is significant, Jones says, if engineers plan to build tactile displays that incorporate different frequencies of vibrations. For instance, the difference between two motors -- one slightly faster than the other -- may be indistinguishable in certain parts of the skin. Likewise, two motors spaced a certain distance apart may be differentiable in one area but not another.
"Should I have eight motors, or is four enough that 90 percent of the time, I'll know that when this one's on, it's this one and not that one?" Jones says. "We're answering those sorts of questions in the context of what information you want to present using a device."
Roberta Klatzky, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, says that measurements taken by Jones' arrays can be used to set up displays in which the location of a stimulus -- for example, a pattern to convey a letter -- is important.
"A major challenge is to enable people to tell the difference between patterns applied to the skin as, for example, blind people do when reading Braille," says Klatzky, who specializes in the study of spatial cognition. "Lynette's work sets up a methodology and potential guidelines for effective pattern displays."
Creating a buzz
Jones sees promising applications for wearable tactile displays. In addition to helping drivers navigate, she says tactile stimuli may direct firefighters through burning buildings, or emergency workers through disaster sites. In more mundane scenarios, she says tactile displays may help joggers traverse an unfamiliar city, taking directions from a buzzing wristband, instead of having to look at a smartphone.
Using data from their mechanical and perceptual experiments, Jones' group is designing arrays that can be worn across the back and around the wrist, and is investigating various ways to present vibrations. For example, a row of vibrations activated sequentially from left to right may tell a driver to turn right; a single motor that buzzes with increasing frequency may be a warning to slow down.
"There's a lot of things you can do with these displays that are fairly intuitive in terms of how people respond," Jones says, "which is important because no one's going to spend hours and hours in any application, learning what a signal means."
Contact: Adam Barry aebarry@hhp.ufl.edu 352-294-1809 University of Florida
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Maybe better call that cab, after all: A new University of Florida study found that 35 percent of designated drivers had quaffed alcohol and most had blood-alcohol levels high enough to impair their driving.
Adam Barry, an assistant professor of health education and behavior at UF, and his team interviewed and breath-tested more than 1,000 bar patrons in the downtown restaurant and bar district of a major university town in the Southeast. Of the designated drivers who had consumed alcohol, half recorded a blood-alcohol level higher than .05 percent -- a recently recommended new threshold for drunken driving.
"If you look at how people choose their designated drivers, oftentimes they're chosen by who is least drunk or who has successfully driven intoxicated in the past -- successful meaning got home in one piece ... that's disconcerting," Barry said.
The results are published in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The researchers recruited patrons as they left bars between 10 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. across six Friday nights before home football games in fall 2011. The mean age of the 1,071 people who agreed to be tested was 28. Most were white male college students, while 10 percent were Hispanic, 6 percent were Asian and 4 percent were African-American.
After completing a 3-5 minute interview about demographic data and alcohol-related behaviors, participants then had their blood-alcohol content tested with a hand-held breath-testing instrument.
The non-driving participants had significantly higher levels than the designated drivers, but 35 percent of the 165 self-identified designated drivers had been drinking. Seventeen percent of all those drivers tested had blood-alcohol levels between .02 and .049 percent, while 18 percent were at .05 percent or higher.
The National Transportation Safety Board last month recommended all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content cutoff of 0.05 compared with the 0.08 standard used today to prosecute drunken driving. The American Medical Association made the same recommendation in the 1980s, Barry said.
Barry said he doesn't know why a designated driver would consume alcohol, but factors could include group dynamics or the driver's belief that one or two drinks won't impair his skills if he is an experienced drinker.
Some field-based research suggests designated drivers might drink because the group did not consider who would drive before drinking commenced. Barry also suggested that it's tricky for anyone to accurately evaluate their own sobriety.
"That's the insidious nature of alcohol -- when you feel buzzed, you're drunk," he said.
There is no universally accepted definition of a designated driver, according to the research. Although most U.S. researchers say drivers should completely abstain, international researchers believe they can drink as long as his or her blood-alcohol level remains below the legal limit. However, the U.S. limit is much higher than in most other countries.
At .08 percent, the U.S. has one of the highest allowable legal limits of any developed country. Countries such as Denmark, Finland and Greece use the .05 level; Russia and Sweden are at .02; and Japan has a zero percent tolerance.
###
Co-researchers were Beth H. Chaney and Michael L. Stellefson, also assistant professors in health education and behavior, College of Health and Human Performance.
Writer: Ron Wayne, 352-392-0186, rwayne@ufl.edu
Contact: Adam Barry, 352-294-1809, 352-519-9724 (cell), aebarry@hhp.ufl.edu
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Contact: Adam Barry aebarry@hhp.ufl.edu 352-294-1809 University of Florida
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Maybe better call that cab, after all: A new University of Florida study found that 35 percent of designated drivers had quaffed alcohol and most had blood-alcohol levels high enough to impair their driving.
Adam Barry, an assistant professor of health education and behavior at UF, and his team interviewed and breath-tested more than 1,000 bar patrons in the downtown restaurant and bar district of a major university town in the Southeast. Of the designated drivers who had consumed alcohol, half recorded a blood-alcohol level higher than .05 percent -- a recently recommended new threshold for drunken driving.
"If you look at how people choose their designated drivers, oftentimes they're chosen by who is least drunk or who has successfully driven intoxicated in the past -- successful meaning got home in one piece ... that's disconcerting," Barry said.
The results are published in the July issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The researchers recruited patrons as they left bars between 10 p.m. and 2:30 a.m. across six Friday nights before home football games in fall 2011. The mean age of the 1,071 people who agreed to be tested was 28. Most were white male college students, while 10 percent were Hispanic, 6 percent were Asian and 4 percent were African-American.
After completing a 3-5 minute interview about demographic data and alcohol-related behaviors, participants then had their blood-alcohol content tested with a hand-held breath-testing instrument.
The non-driving participants had significantly higher levels than the designated drivers, but 35 percent of the 165 self-identified designated drivers had been drinking. Seventeen percent of all those drivers tested had blood-alcohol levels between .02 and .049 percent, while 18 percent were at .05 percent or higher.
The National Transportation Safety Board last month recommended all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content cutoff of 0.05 compared with the 0.08 standard used today to prosecute drunken driving. The American Medical Association made the same recommendation in the 1980s, Barry said.
Barry said he doesn't know why a designated driver would consume alcohol, but factors could include group dynamics or the driver's belief that one or two drinks won't impair his skills if he is an experienced drinker.
Some field-based research suggests designated drivers might drink because the group did not consider who would drive before drinking commenced. Barry also suggested that it's tricky for anyone to accurately evaluate their own sobriety.
"That's the insidious nature of alcohol -- when you feel buzzed, you're drunk," he said.
There is no universally accepted definition of a designated driver, according to the research. Although most U.S. researchers say drivers should completely abstain, international researchers believe they can drink as long as his or her blood-alcohol level remains below the legal limit. However, the U.S. limit is much higher than in most other countries.
At .08 percent, the U.S. has one of the highest allowable legal limits of any developed country. Countries such as Denmark, Finland and Greece use the .05 level; Russia and Sweden are at .02; and Japan has a zero percent tolerance.
###
Co-researchers were Beth H. Chaney and Michael L. Stellefson, also assistant professors in health education and behavior, College of Health and Human Performance.
Writer: Ron Wayne, 352-392-0186, rwayne@ufl.edu
Contact: Adam Barry, 352-294-1809, 352-519-9724 (cell), aebarry@hhp.ufl.edu
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Founder and publisher of EPL Talk, The Gaffer (aka Christopher Harris) is a journalist who has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian and several other publications as well as on NPR, BBC World, CBC, BBC Five Live, talkSPORT and beIN SPORT. Harris, who lives in Florida, has supported Swansea City since 1979. Harris launched EPL Talk in 2005. View all posts by The Gaffer ? 
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