Washington (AFP) - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that a deal had been reached with Republican leaders to end a fiscal impasse that has threatened the United States with default.
Reid, speaking from the Senate floor, said the agreement called for reopening the federal government with a temporary budget until January 15 and to extend US borrowing authority until February 7.
"The compromise we reached will provide our economy with the stability it desperately needs," Reid said.
Senator Mitch McConnel, the top Republican, followed, confirming the agreement, which has to be approved by both the Senate and the Republican-controlled House.
US borrowing authority is on track to expire at midnight, and without an agreement the United States runs the risk of a default with potentially devastating consequences.
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
16-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.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.
NYU-Poly professors win Google Faculty Research Awards
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
16-Oct-2013
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Contact: Kathleen Hamilton hamilton@poly.edu 718-260-3792 Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Juliana Freire and Thanasis Korakis recognized for work in big data, improving home wireless performance
Brooklyn, New York Two faculty members from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) are among the latest recipients of the Google Faculty Research Awardsone-year grants supporting cutting-edge research in various disciplines of computer science and engineering.
Juliana Freire, professor of computer science and engineering, and Thanasis Korakis, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, are among the 100 university engineers and scientists from around the globe recognized by the web search giant.
Freire's research tackles one aspect of a major hurdle facing urban planners and policymakers at a time when more people than ever are living in cities: how to analyze extremely complex data sets to better understand the dynamics of cities, assess their service needs, and ensure that they are met. In this project, Freire is exploring data from a central element of urban life in New York Citytaxi cab ridesas a model for a new framework for analyzing spatio-temporal data.
With information provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, Freire used data from more than 540 million taxi cab rides over a three-year period to create a prototype visual exploration system that enables scientists and lay people to analyze data involving time and location on a scale that is currently impossible. Taxi rides are a rich source of information about urban life, providing insight into many aspects of New York City, including identifying areas that are most popular at certain times of day, neighborhoods underserved by taxis, and traffic patterns. These can in turn be used to better understand economic activity, human behavior, and mobility patterns.
"Tremendous amounts of data are available, but making sense of it is very challenging," Freire explained. "Social scientists and decision-makers are limited by the current tools for analysis, which can't handle large data sets. They can analyze slices of data, but it's much harder to appreciate the full picture," she said.
Freire's model will unify data selection and visual analysis to allow even lay users to explore large data sets through visual queries; for example, a user could explore taxi service in different neighborhoods at a certain time of day by selecting the regions and time frame on a map. The query results would present highly complex information in a simple visual format. Freire and her collaborators also plan to incorporate other data sets, including data from New York City's bike share program, Citi Bike.
Thanasis Korakis is developing a solution for a problem nearly every computer user has faced: slow broadband performance. As broadband access has become ubiquitous and wi-fi technology has been widely adopted, home wireless local networks (WLAN) have soared in popularity. The result, especially in densely populated urban areas, is extreme network congestion resulting in poor quality of service that is nearly impossible for users to address or solve on their own.
"Most home computer users don't have the expertise to diagnose and resolve local network issues, and they end up blaming their Internet service or content provider," said Korakis.
His fix, currently in development, is an app-based method to diagnose the cause of poor home WLAN performance, as well as a tool that can implement these diagnostics. Currently, there are several consumer products to aid troubleshooting of wired networks, but in the wireless space, detecting and remedying connectivity issues is considerably more complex.
Korakis will create extensive simulations of scenarios that can result in wireless access delay, and gauge the specific impact of each on quality of service. These include traffic congestion, overlapping channels, competition from older wi-fi-enabled devices, and low signal-to-noise ratio. Along with his students and collaborators, Korakis will devise classifications of so-called "wireless pathologies" based on the symptoms they create, ultimately arriving at a diagnostic tool that can determine the cause of WLAN problems. A complementary tool will then offer suggestions for home WLAN users to solve the problem through simple configuration changes.
As part of their grants, both Freire and Korakis will plan visits to Google to present their findings to the company's research teams.
###
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and the Polytechnic University, now widely known as NYU-Poly) is an affiliated institute of New York University, and will become its School of Engineering in January 2014. NYU-Poly, founded in 1854, is the nation's second-oldest private engineering school. It is presently a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a 159-year tradition of invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. It remains on the cutting edge of technology, innovatively extending the benefits of science, engineering, management and liberal studies to critical real-world opportunities and challenges, especially those linked to urban systems, health and wellness, and the global information economy. In addition to its programs on the main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn, it offers programs around the globe remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is closely connected to engineering in NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai and to the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) also at MetroTech, while operating two incubators in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For more information, visit http://www.poly.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.
Mark Rainery knows how to ride his snowboard. Check out his full part from last season. It's clean, and full of hairy but fun-looking lines, filmed in Montana and Alaska. Well done, Mark.
Amid all the tussling over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, a couple of bombshells went off in the blogosphere that may prove of more enduring importance.
They suggest that there is a nontrivial possibility that Obamacare may implode.
The first bombshell went off on Tuesday, from Ezra Klein of the Washington Post's Wonkblog.
Klein was one of those young writers who formed JournoList a few years ago so that like-minded Obama fans could coordinate their lines of argument. It was like one of those college sophomore clubs, not really necessary in an age of ready contact through email, but it shows him as a guy inclined to play team ball. So it's noteworthy when he writes, "So far, the Affordable Care Act's launch has been a failure. Not 'troubled.'
Not 'glitchy.' A failure."
Klein notes that the rollout of the Medicare prescription drug program was also rocky two weeks into the process. But later it got smoothed out.
Klein fears Obamacare won't. It's not just a problem of overloaded servers. Everyone knew there would be lots of traffic in a nation of 312,000,000 people. Information technology folks say it's easy to add servers.
It's harder to get software systems to communicate. And as Klein quotes insurance consultant Robert Laszewski, "the backroom connection between the insurance companies and the federal government is a disaster."
The reconciliation system isn't working and hasn't even been tested, Klein reports. Insurers are getting virtually no usable data from the exchanges.
Bloomberg.com columnist Megan McArdle, who unlike most Obamacare architects actually worked at an IT firm for a couple of years, sees the possibility of even more trouble ahead.
She points out that the administration delayed writing major rules during the 2012 campaign to avoid giving Republicans campaign fodder.
The biggest contractor did not start writing software code until spring 2013. They were still fiddling with the healthcare.gov website in September.
Instead of subcontracting the responsibility for integrating the software of the multiple contractors, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services decided to do it in-house -- "a decision," she writes, "equivalent to someone who has never even hung a picture deciding they should become their own general contractor and build a house."
"If the exchanges don't get fixed soon," she writes, "they could destroy Obamacare." You need the exchanges to enroll enough young healthy people to subsidize those who are sick and old, which is one of the central features of Obamacare.
Otherwise, premiums shoot up and up, pushing others out of the system -- a death spiral that can continue year after year.
"At what point," she asks, "do we admit that the system just isn't working well enough, roll it back and delay the whole thing for a year?" She suggests that if the system can't enroll 50 percent of its users by November 1, such a hugely drastic step would be in order.
That sounds like a nightmare of the first order -- for individuals, for insurers, for employers and for the Obama administration. A far worse nightmare than when Congress in 1989 repealed the Medicare prescription drug plan it passed the year before because of widespread dissatisfaction.
Of course it's possible this nightmare will not happen. Things will get ironed out somehow.
But if they don't, who's responsible? First, a president who is not much interested in how government works on the ground. As a community organizer he never did get all the asbestos removed from the Altgeld housing project.
Politico reports that his "universal heath care" promise was first made when his press secretary and speechwriter needed a rousing ending to a 2007 campaign speech to a liberal group.
Second, lawmakers and administrators who assume that, in an Information Age, all you have to do is to assign a task to an IT team and they will perform it. Cross your fingers, and it gets done.
Third, government IT procurement rules are kludgy. Apple didn't bid on this. The IT work went to insider firms that specialize in jumping through the hoops and ladders of government procurement rules.
Unfortunately, the consequences of a meltdown are enormous when a system is supposed to be used by everybody. If a private firm's software fails, it can go bankrupt. No one else much cares.
But if Obamacare's software crashes, the consequences will be catastrophic -- for the nation and for the Democratic Party.
Michael Barone is Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics and a contributor to Fox News.
This isn't the motorcycle you need. It's the motorcycle you deserve. You'll be able to conquer Bane and the morning rush hour commute aboard this insane Harley V-Rod mod. And yes, those are dual flamethrowers and shotguns up front.
Washington Capitals right wing Tom Wilson, left, ducks a punch by New York Rangers defenseman Justin Falk as they fight in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Washington Capitals right wing Tom Wilson, left, ducks a punch by New York Rangers defenseman Justin Falk as they fight in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Washington Capitals right wing Troy Brouwer, left, boards New York Rangers defenseman Marc Staal in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
New York Rangers defenseman Marc Staal, left moves to clear the puck as goalie Henrik Lundqvist, right, of Sweden, looks for it, with Washington Capitals right wing Joel Ward advancing, in the first period of an NHL hockey game, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2013, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Henrik Lundqvist earned his 46th NHL shutout, Brad Richards assisted on two New York goals less than two minutes apart in the second period, and the Rangers beat familiar postseason foe Washington 2-0 on Wednesday night to end a three-game losing streak.
Richards helped set up goals by Ryan Callahan and John Moore, and Lundqvist made the limited offense hold up in a 22-save performance against the Capitals. It was his first shutout during what has been a poor start to the season. By game's end, some Rangers fans were chanting his name.
The Rangers won for only the second time in six games under first-year coach Alain Vigneault. Their season-opening road swing still has three more stops.
Unable to generate much offense, even with their formidable power play, three-time NHL MVP Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals fell to 2-5.
These teams have met in four of the past five postseasons, splitting those series. The Rangers eliminated the Capitals in the first round in May, with Lundqvist getting shutouts in Games 6 and 7.
He was just as good Wednesday, earning chants of "Hen-reek!" late in the third period. His teammates got to Capitals goalie Braden Holtby with a couple of quick scores.
New York dominated the second period, outshooting Washington 21-6.
Moore scored his first goal of the season 12:05 into that period during 4-on-4 play, after Ovechkin was sent to the penalty box for slashing Derek Stepan during a short-handed breakaway. Callahan then knocked in his third of the season — and third in two games — by cutting across the crease to beat Ovechkin and defenseman John Carlson to Richards' centering pass.
The Capitals entered the night having been outscored 9-4 in the first period this season. While they again were outplayed at times, and outshot 11-8, over the first 20 minutes, they didn't fall behind right away.
New York took seven of the game's first nine shots, but Washington had some strong chances to score, including during 55 seconds of a 5-on-3 power play in the first period after hooking calls on Anton Stralman and then Taylor Pyatt.
One chance went awry when Ovechkin snapped his stick in two while trying to get off a shot. Another was wasted when some tic-tac-toe passing set up Joel Ward for a close-range, backdoor try, but he pushed the puck against the side of the net.
The shot differential was even more pronounced at the start of the second period, with New York taking nine of the first 10. The best opportunity among those came when Callahan sent a backhander to Richards out front, but the center's shot clanged off the post.
When Richards became the facilitator moments later, New York was able to get the puck in the net. He has four goals and three assists the past five games.
The Capitals entered the night second in the NHL on the power play, at better than 35 percent, but went 0 for 4.
Notes: New York lost its preceding three games by a combined 20-5. ... Rangers D Michael del Zotto was scratched because of illness. ... Capitals F Jason Chimera played his first game since being fined nearly $4,500 by the NHL for boarding Edmonton Oilers defenseman Justin Schultz in the first period of Washington's 4-2 victory Monday. ... The Rangers won't play their first home game until Oct. 28 against the Montreal Canadiens, New York's latest home opener in a non-lockout season since 1947. ... New York LW Rick Nash missed a third consecutive game because of a head injury from a hit by San Jose's Brad Stuart last week. Stuart was given a three-game suspension by the NHL. ... Washington D John Erskine sat out for a third game in a row, too.
___
Follow Howard Fendrich on Twitter at http://twitter.com/HowardFendrich
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