Today was a banner day for new Apple goodness. We got a thinner, lighter, iPad—the iPad Air—as well as a new retina display iPad mini, new Haswell chip-packed MacBook Pros, and a deeper look at the new Mac Pros. Do you feel like you need a cheat sheet to keep track? We've got just the thing:
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The newer, shinier, and freshly named iPad Air
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The HSA Foundation has released a new specification that could help run programs faster across devices with different configurations, which should make it easier to export games and applications from gaming consoles to PCs and smartphones.
The new queuing specification, called HQ, will allow processors to share more resources. The specification, which the Heterogeneous System Architecture Foundation announced Tuesday, also reduces latency and shortens the communication path between chips.
The HSA Foundation is developing a set of open-source programming tools so coders can write applications that are portable across architectures and devices. The tools, still under development, will make coherent use of computing resources available for better system performance at lower power consumption.
The HQ specification revolves around queuing and dispatch of tasks between CPUs and GPUs, with a larger burden of task execution moving from software to hardware. Under HSA, data packets can be moved directly between hardware resources, and the HQ specification allows GPUs and CPUs to create tasks and place them in execution queues native to either processor. The mesh system of messaging, queuing and dispatch makes it easier for processors to assess and grab tasks, which results in faster processing of applications.
The specification makes it easier for programmers working on high-level languages or writing libraries to tie GPUs to CPUs and other resources to get work done, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.
"GPUs didn't have that same kind of relationship. They were considered devices, and you had to go to them through device-driver interfaces," Brookwood said.
Developers will be able to write code for GPUs as easily as for CPUs, Brookwood said, adding the specification fits into HSA's theme of the processors being equal partners in computational environments.
"It's elegant, it's easier for the software developer while it's in place to build those heterogeneous applications that take advantage of CPUs and GPUs," Brookwood said.
Some of the world's fastest computers today are powered by CPUs and GPUs. More computing power will be needed for multimedia, voice recognition, face recognition and location-based computing, and faster access to GPUs will benefit those applications, said Ben Sander, senior fellow at Advanced Micro Devices, during a phone briefing.
AMD, ARM, Qualcomm and Mediatek are among the early backers of the HSA Foundation. HSA's programming tools are initially based on open-source parallel programming frameworks like OpenCL, but AMD officials have stated that HSA could ultimately have its parallel programming language.
HSA is releasing new specifications as it builds out the programming tools. In April, HSA announced a specification called HUMA, which unites different memory types in a system and makes them accessible to all processors. As a result, developers have access to a larger pool of shared memory in which code could be executed.
Intel and Nvidia are not yet members of HSA Foundation, and offer their own parallel programming tools to complement their chips. Intel offers developer tools and compilers for its Xeon Phi chips, while Nvidia offers CUDA for its graphics processors.
For the HQ specification, HSA Foundation will deploy a standardized task dispatch protocol for compatible chips from different companies, said Manju Hegde, corporate vice president of heterogeneous solutions at AMD.
Chips have their own proprietary dispatch format and will need to have the hooks to support HSA specifications. AMD plans to release an HSA-compatible chip code-named Kaveri for PCs next year.
HSA's specifications will be supported in Java Virtual Machines with Java 9 in 2015. The JVM will recognize HSA specifications and tap into compatible accelerators to speed up program execution without the need for extra layers of code.
The HQ specification likely is not related to AMD's Mantle low-level graphics API (application programming interface), which was introduced last month for the company's GPUs, Brookwood said.
Mantle has been compared to Microsoft's DirectX APIs used for Xbox and Windows games.
"Mantle has nothing to do with [HQ]," Brookwood said. "AMD hasn't talked about making Mantle multi-vendor."
Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com
Very few girls get the recommended 60 minutes of exercise daily. But physical activity could help with school, a study says.
Very few girls get the recommended 60 minutes of exercise daily. But physical activity could help with school, a study says.
Girls who were more physically active at age 11 did better at school as teenagers, a study finds. And the most active girls really aced science.
It's become pretty much a given that children do better academically when they get regular exercise, even though schools continue to cut or even eliminate recess time. But there's surprisingly little hard evidence to back that up.
This investigation used data from a British study that has been following the health of a large group of parents and children since 1991. They measured almost 5,000 children's physical activity at age 11 by having them wear an acclerometer for a week.
Few of the children were getting the recommended 60 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous exercise. Boys clocked 29 minutes a day on average, while girls managed just 18 minutes.
The more active the 11-year-olds were, the better they did on standardized school tests of English, math and science.
The surprise was that physically active girls were much better at science than their peers. That held true for five years, when the children took other standardized tests at age 13 and 16.
"We're not sure why that would be," Josie Booth, a lecturer in developmental psychology at the University of Dundee and lead author of the study, told Shots. It could be important, given that both Europe and the United States are trying hard to get more girls involved in science. "It could obviously be a chance finding," Booth adds. "We'd like to have a chance to look further into it."
More physical activity correlating with higher academic achievement in both boys and girls.
The researchers did adjust the results the analysis for factors that could affect school performance, including including birth weight, current weight, a mother's smoking while pregnant and the family's socioeconomic situation. The results were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
This study doesn't prove that the increased exercise was what improved the children's test scores, but parents aren't off base in thinking that it could help. Randomized controlled trials have shown that exercise improves brain function in older people, and a few studies have shown that in children, too.
Until Booth or other scientists can manage a randomized trial on girls, exercise and science, we'll have to just hope that bicycling or running will help our daughters become future Nobelists. (I'll hold off on booking my ticket to Stockholm for the awards ceremony.)
"There's certainly an association between more physical activity and better academic achievement," Booth says. "If parents can get their children to meet that goal of 60 minutes a day, it's going to be beneficial for a range of factors."
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Aitziber Lasa
a.lasa@elhuyar.com
34-943-363-040
Elhuyar Fundazioa
For many years two companies located in Bizkaia, Bilbao Chemicals (Barakaldo 1947-1987) and Nexana (Erandio 1952-1982), had been manufacturing lindane and dumping it into the environment with no control whatsoever. Today we have become aware of the need to solve the problems caused by this dumping and the difficulty in achieving this since there is no viable process that will safely destroy the lindane mixed with the soil. A study by the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry in collaboration with Tecnalia has confirmed the hypothesis of the high reactive capacity of iron nanoparticles to degrade lindane. The study has been published in the prestigious journal Chemosphere.
Lindane has been routinely used among farmers as an insecticide and pesticide, and although its use has now been banned, the consequences of lindane manufacture and use have not disappeared. The risk posed by lindane lies in the fact that it is not only toxic, it can be accumulated in living organisms. From an environmental point of view, it has low solubility, high stability and high persistence and resistance to degradation in the environment.
Although there is as yet no viable process for safely destroying lindane, an innovative, efficient alternative is to use iron nanoparticles. Iron nanoparticles have shown themselves to be very effective as a decontaminating agent when it comes to handling various families of highly toxic compounds like lindane. However, they have a number of drawbacks that limit and hamper their application, since they oxidize easily in the presence of air and their tendency to agglomerate limits their mobility in the medium in which one is seeking to apply them. So the need to protect them is done by using Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), polyaspartate (PAP) and poly (acrylic acid) (PAA) as biodegradable polymer coatings.
From the laboratory to the land
"The main aim of our study was to validate on a laboratory scale whether these iron nanoparticles can be applied and whether they have the capacity to eliminate the lindane," explained Itxaso San Romn, member of the UPV/EHU's Department of Analytical Chemistry. This requires advanced analytical techniques capable of monitoring the degradation process, which will take place in the presence of the various nanoparticles, determining the speed of the reaction and likewise detecting the possible by-products that are formed in the course of that reaction.
The process to degrade the contaminant itself was evaluated by analysing samples of water containing lindane using the technique called solid-phase extraction (SPE). That way the lindane remaining in the solution was measured over time. Likewise, the technique involving solid-phase microextraction (SPME) was used to detect the gas by-products generated during the degradation at each moment in the study by means of gas chromatography with a mass spectrometry (GC-MS) detector.
Through the techniques employed it was possible to compare and study the effectiveness of the various types of nanoparticles used to degrade the lindane and to find out the reaction speed in each case. The study showed how the lindane gradually disappeared in the presence of the nanoparticles over time (between 1 and 72 hours), revealing various reaction tendencies and speeds. "The protection of the nanoparticles increases the effectiveness of the degradation of the lindane and also prevents the agglomeration of the nanoparticles; the result is a greater reaction surface," pointed out Itxaso San Romn. However, "as the lindane concentration in water diminished over time, other less harmful by-products were seen to appear; as time passes these will probably be transformed into more innocuous compounds," she said. That way "both the coated and uncoated nanoparticles have been shown to be capable of transforming the lindane into other less harmful products," stressed San Romn. "This fact provides valuable information for applying them in the future as a decontaminating tool in real environmental matrices," she added.
###
About the author:
Itxaso San Romn is a researcher at the UPV/EHU's Department of Analytical Chemistry. The research referred to was conducted in collaboration with the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry and the Tecnalia Corporation.
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.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Aitziber Lasa
a.lasa@elhuyar.com
34-943-363-040
Elhuyar Fundazioa
For many years two companies located in Bizkaia, Bilbao Chemicals (Barakaldo 1947-1987) and Nexana (Erandio 1952-1982), had been manufacturing lindane and dumping it into the environment with no control whatsoever. Today we have become aware of the need to solve the problems caused by this dumping and the difficulty in achieving this since there is no viable process that will safely destroy the lindane mixed with the soil. A study by the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry in collaboration with Tecnalia has confirmed the hypothesis of the high reactive capacity of iron nanoparticles to degrade lindane. The study has been published in the prestigious journal Chemosphere.
Lindane has been routinely used among farmers as an insecticide and pesticide, and although its use has now been banned, the consequences of lindane manufacture and use have not disappeared. The risk posed by lindane lies in the fact that it is not only toxic, it can be accumulated in living organisms. From an environmental point of view, it has low solubility, high stability and high persistence and resistance to degradation in the environment.
Although there is as yet no viable process for safely destroying lindane, an innovative, efficient alternative is to use iron nanoparticles. Iron nanoparticles have shown themselves to be very effective as a decontaminating agent when it comes to handling various families of highly toxic compounds like lindane. However, they have a number of drawbacks that limit and hamper their application, since they oxidize easily in the presence of air and their tendency to agglomerate limits their mobility in the medium in which one is seeking to apply them. So the need to protect them is done by using Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC), polyaspartate (PAP) and poly (acrylic acid) (PAA) as biodegradable polymer coatings.
From the laboratory to the land
"The main aim of our study was to validate on a laboratory scale whether these iron nanoparticles can be applied and whether they have the capacity to eliminate the lindane," explained Itxaso San Romn, member of the UPV/EHU's Department of Analytical Chemistry. This requires advanced analytical techniques capable of monitoring the degradation process, which will take place in the presence of the various nanoparticles, determining the speed of the reaction and likewise detecting the possible by-products that are formed in the course of that reaction.
The process to degrade the contaminant itself was evaluated by analysing samples of water containing lindane using the technique called solid-phase extraction (SPE). That way the lindane remaining in the solution was measured over time. Likewise, the technique involving solid-phase microextraction (SPME) was used to detect the gas by-products generated during the degradation at each moment in the study by means of gas chromatography with a mass spectrometry (GC-MS) detector.
Through the techniques employed it was possible to compare and study the effectiveness of the various types of nanoparticles used to degrade the lindane and to find out the reaction speed in each case. The study showed how the lindane gradually disappeared in the presence of the nanoparticles over time (between 1 and 72 hours), revealing various reaction tendencies and speeds. "The protection of the nanoparticles increases the effectiveness of the degradation of the lindane and also prevents the agglomeration of the nanoparticles; the result is a greater reaction surface," pointed out Itxaso San Romn. However, "as the lindane concentration in water diminished over time, other less harmful by-products were seen to appear; as time passes these will probably be transformed into more innocuous compounds," she said. That way "both the coated and uncoated nanoparticles have been shown to be capable of transforming the lindane into other less harmful products," stressed San Romn. "This fact provides valuable information for applying them in the future as a decontaminating tool in real environmental matrices," she added.
###
About the author:
Itxaso San Romn is a researcher at the UPV/EHU's Department of Analytical Chemistry. The research referred to was conducted in collaboration with the UPV/EHU's Department of Physical Chemistry and the Tecnalia Corporation.
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.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 21-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Bridget Lewis
blewis@uta.edu
817-272-3317
University of Texas at Arlington
A new University of Texas at Arlington study about the elimination of malaria in the 1930s American South may have significant implications for solving modern day malaria outbreaks in parts of Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia.
Researchers challenged a leading argument that movement of Southern tenant farmers away from mosquito breeding grounds was the dominant factor in the decline of malaria in U.S. during the 1930s.
Instead, targeted public health interventions and the development of local-level public health infrastructure helped eradicate the disease, according to Daniel Sledge, assistant professor of political science at UT Arlington and lead author of Eliminating Malaria in the American South: An Analysis of the Decline of Malaria in 1930s Alabama, a paper recently published by the American Journal of Public Health.
We found that targeted public health interventions, supported by the federally backed development of state and local public health infrastructure, led to the decline of malaria despite widespread and deep-seated poverty, Sledge said.
Beth Wright, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UT Arlington, said Sledges research benefits the public, health professionals and policy makers globally.
Dr. Sledges work has far-reaching implications for those who work to eradicate malaria and similar diseases, Wright said. Huge challenges remain, but such research brings about better understanding of potential solutions and could ultimately help save lives.
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite called plasmodium and transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The disease causes fever, headache, and vomiting. Untreated, it can become life threatening.
Malaria killed an estimated 1.24 million worldwide in 2010 and decimated economies in the heavily populated, warm climate regions of the Global South, according to recent studies.
Malaria played a similarly devastating role in the American South until the 1930s, researchers detailed, by lowering the productivity of workers, deterring migration into the region and severely limiting economic growth.
Historian Margaret Humphreys argued in her landmark 2001 book, Malaria: Race, Poverty, and Public Health in the United States, that it was the removal of the malaria carrier and victim from the vicinity of the anopheles mosquito that likely had the largest effect on the decline of the disease.
But Sledge and co-author George Mohler, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University in California, found otherwise.
We assessed this argument using Census data on the number of farms operated by tenants during the 1930s. We found that highly malarial areas actually gained population during the period that malaria declined, Sledge said. Changes in the type of farms, meanwhile, didnt lead to a decline in malaria.
He added: Put another way, population movement didnt lead to the end of malaria in the United States public health work did.
During the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration put unemployed Southerners to work draining millions of acres of wetlands. Along with the federally sponsored creation of local health departments, these drainage projects led to the decline of malaria, the authors said.
The federal government further ramped up its efforts during World War II, creating the agency that became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically to fight southern malaria. After the war, the CDC used the insecticide DDT to eradicate the few remaining pockets of the disease.
For their study, Sledge and Mohler used a mathematical model to analyze the decline of malaria in each of the 67 counties in Alabama, an archetypical Deep South cotton state that experienced high levels of malaria incidence well into the 1930s.
In the model, we categorized counties into three risk levels and then estimated the dependence of mortality rates on variables related to weather, WPA projects, and population movement, Mohler said. After drought, the most important variable for predicting a decline in mortality rates was the amount of drainage in a county, rather than movement out of high risk counties or a reduction in tenant farms.
In addition to drainage work, researchers point to the importance of measures such as screening and public health infrastructure as well as the training of public health workers in the elimination of the disease.
While the team concedes that there are considerable distinctions between the current Global South and the American South of the 1930s, they argue that malaria can be controlled in the face of poverty and economic dislocation and without major social change.
Today, disease surveillance, drainage measures and screening work to ensure that, on those occasions when malaria is reintroduced from outside of the U.S., the chain of transmission does not begin again, Sledge said.
###
Sledges work is representative of the world-class research under way at The University of Texas at Arlington, a comprehensive research institution of more than 33,000 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more.
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.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 21-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Bridget Lewis
blewis@uta.edu
817-272-3317
University of Texas at Arlington
A new University of Texas at Arlington study about the elimination of malaria in the 1930s American South may have significant implications for solving modern day malaria outbreaks in parts of Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia.
Researchers challenged a leading argument that movement of Southern tenant farmers away from mosquito breeding grounds was the dominant factor in the decline of malaria in U.S. during the 1930s.
Instead, targeted public health interventions and the development of local-level public health infrastructure helped eradicate the disease, according to Daniel Sledge, assistant professor of political science at UT Arlington and lead author of Eliminating Malaria in the American South: An Analysis of the Decline of Malaria in 1930s Alabama, a paper recently published by the American Journal of Public Health.
We found that targeted public health interventions, supported by the federally backed development of state and local public health infrastructure, led to the decline of malaria despite widespread and deep-seated poverty, Sledge said.
Beth Wright, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UT Arlington, said Sledges research benefits the public, health professionals and policy makers globally.
Dr. Sledges work has far-reaching implications for those who work to eradicate malaria and similar diseases, Wright said. Huge challenges remain, but such research brings about better understanding of potential solutions and could ultimately help save lives.
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite called plasmodium and transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The disease causes fever, headache, and vomiting. Untreated, it can become life threatening.
Malaria killed an estimated 1.24 million worldwide in 2010 and decimated economies in the heavily populated, warm climate regions of the Global South, according to recent studies.
Malaria played a similarly devastating role in the American South until the 1930s, researchers detailed, by lowering the productivity of workers, deterring migration into the region and severely limiting economic growth.
Historian Margaret Humphreys argued in her landmark 2001 book, Malaria: Race, Poverty, and Public Health in the United States, that it was the removal of the malaria carrier and victim from the vicinity of the anopheles mosquito that likely had the largest effect on the decline of the disease.
But Sledge and co-author George Mohler, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University in California, found otherwise.
We assessed this argument using Census data on the number of farms operated by tenants during the 1930s. We found that highly malarial areas actually gained population during the period that malaria declined, Sledge said. Changes in the type of farms, meanwhile, didnt lead to a decline in malaria.
He added: Put another way, population movement didnt lead to the end of malaria in the United States public health work did.
During the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration put unemployed Southerners to work draining millions of acres of wetlands. Along with the federally sponsored creation of local health departments, these drainage projects led to the decline of malaria, the authors said.
The federal government further ramped up its efforts during World War II, creating the agency that became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically to fight southern malaria. After the war, the CDC used the insecticide DDT to eradicate the few remaining pockets of the disease.
For their study, Sledge and Mohler used a mathematical model to analyze the decline of malaria in each of the 67 counties in Alabama, an archetypical Deep South cotton state that experienced high levels of malaria incidence well into the 1930s.
In the model, we categorized counties into three risk levels and then estimated the dependence of mortality rates on variables related to weather, WPA projects, and population movement, Mohler said. After drought, the most important variable for predicting a decline in mortality rates was the amount of drainage in a county, rather than movement out of high risk counties or a reduction in tenant farms.
In addition to drainage work, researchers point to the importance of measures such as screening and public health infrastructure as well as the training of public health workers in the elimination of the disease.
While the team concedes that there are considerable distinctions between the current Global South and the American South of the 1930s, they argue that malaria can be controlled in the face of poverty and economic dislocation and without major social change.
Today, disease surveillance, drainage measures and screening work to ensure that, on those occasions when malaria is reintroduced from outside of the U.S., the chain of transmission does not begin again, Sledge said.
###
Sledges work is representative of the world-class research under way at The University of Texas at Arlington, a comprehensive research institution of more than 33,000 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more.
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.
A Sparks Middle School student cries and is comforted after being released from Agnes Risley Elementary School, where some students were evacuated to after a shooting at SMS in Sparks, Nev. on Monday, October 21, 2013 in Sparks, Nev. A middle school student opened fire on campus just before the starting bell Monday, wounding two boys and killing a staff member who was trying to protect other children, Sparks police said Monday. The lone suspected gunman was also dead, though it's unclear whether the student committed suicide. (AP Photo/Kevin Clifford)
A Sparks Middle School student cries and is comforted after being released from Agnes Risley Elementary School, where some students were evacuated to after a shooting at SMS in Sparks, Nev. on Monday, October 21, 2013 in Sparks, Nev. A middle school student opened fire on campus just before the starting bell Monday, wounding two boys and killing a staff member who was trying to protect other children, Sparks police said Monday. The lone suspected gunman was also dead, though it's unclear whether the student committed suicide. (AP Photo/Kevin Clifford)
A Sparks Middle School student cries with family members after being released from Agnes Risley Elementary School, where some students were evacuated to after a shooting at Sparks Middle School in Sparks, Nev. on Monday, Oct. 21, 2013 in Sparks, Nev. A student at the Sparks Middle School opened fire on campus, killing a staff member who was trying to protect other children, police said Monday. (AP Photo/Kevin Clifford)
Swat team members secure the scene near Sparks Middle School in Sparks, Nev., after a shooting there on Monday, Oct. 21, 2013. Authorities are reporting that two people were killed and two wounded at the Nevada middle school. (AP Photo/Kevin Clifford)
Map locates Sparks, Nev., where at least 2 people are killed in a shooting at Sparks Middle School.; 1c x 2 inches; 46.5 mm x 50 mm;
A Sparks Middle School student, back to camera, cries with family members after being released from Agnes Risley Elementary School Monday Oct. 21, 2013, in Sparks Nev., after a shooting at Sparks Middle School. A student at the Sparks Middle School opened fire on campus, killing a staff member who was trying to protect other children, police said Monday. (AP Photo/Kevin Clifford)
SPARKS, Nev. (AP) — Students at a Nevada middle school were filing off buses and reuniting with friends on the playground after a weeklong vacation when the pop of gunfire shattered the morning calm. Children fled the campus for their lives before the first bell rang.
Police said a Sparks Middle School student was the lone gunman who injured two young classmates, killed himself and took the life of an 8th-grade math teacher who tried to stop the rampage. The teacher, former serviceman Michael Landsberry, 45, was being hailed for trying to protect students from a shooting that was witnessed by 20 or 30 children.
"We have a lot of heroes today, including our children ... and our fallen hero, an amazing teacher," Washoe County School District Superintendent Pedro Martinez said.
Authorities did not provide a motive for the shooting, and it's not known where he got the gun. The 12-year-old wounded students were listed in stable condition. One was shot in the shoulder, and the other was hit in the abdomen.
Parents clung to their teary-eyed children at an evacuation center, while the community struggled to make sense of the latest episode of schoolyard violence to rock the nation less than a year after the massacre in Newtown, Conn. Sparks, a city of roughly 90,000 that sprung out of the railway industry, lies just east of Reno.
"It's not supposed to happen here," said Chanda Landsberry, the slain teacher's sister-in-law. "We're just Sparks — little Sparks, Nevada. It's unreal."
Investigators were still trying to piece together the chain of events that began around 7:15 a.m. Monday, 15 minutes before classes were set to begin for roughly 700 students in the 7th and 8th grades.
"As you can imagine, the best description is chaos," Reno Deputy Police Chief Tom Robinson said. "It's too early to say whether he was targeting people or going on an indiscriminate shooting spree."
It was no shock to family members that Landsberry — a married military veteran with two stepdaughters — would take a bullet.
"To hear that he was trying to stop that is not surprising by any means," said Chanda Landsberry. She added his life could be summed up by his love of family, his students and his country.
On his school website, Michael Landsberry posted a picture of a brown bear and took on a tough-love tone, telling students, "I have one classroom rule and it is very simple: 'Thou Shall Not Annoy Mr. L.'"
"The kids loved him," Chanda Landsberry said.
Sparks Mayor Geno Martini said Landsberry served two tours in Afghanistan with the Nevada National Guard and was well known in the school community.
"He proudly served his country and was proudly defending the students at his school," he said. The mayor praised the quick response from law officers who arrived at the scene within 3 minutes of the initial 911 calls to find the gunman with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
"They got it under control very quickly and shut down the scene," said Martini, who urged listeners on a local radio station hours after the shooting to be sure all guns in their homes are locked away safely.
"I couldn't understand how this kid got a gun," he said. "I'm sure his parents didn't give it to him."
Students from the middle school and neighboring elementary school were evacuated to the nearby high school, and classes were canceled. The middle school will remain closed for the week along with an adjacent elementary school.
"We came flying down here to get our kids," said Mike Fiorica, who came to the evacuation center to meet up with his nephew, a Sparks Middle school student. "You can imagine how parents are feeling. You don't know if your kid's OK."
The violence erupted nearly a year after a gunman horrified the nation by opening fire in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., leaving 26 dead. The Dec. 14 shooting ignited debate over how best to protect the nation's schools and whether armed teachers should be part of that equation.
The Washoe County School District, which oversees Sparks Middle School, held a session in the spring in light of the Connecticut tragedy to educate parents on what safety measures the district takes.
The district has its own 38-officer police department. No officers were on campus at the time of the shooting.
___
Associated Press writer Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas and news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York City contributed to this report.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-10-22-Middle%20School%20Shooting/id-87e041d23ca14e3aa832b42a6ad92625
Photo by Shaun Best/Reuters
See Slate's complete coverage of Obamacare. David Auerbach explains what's gone wrong with healthcare.gov, and David Weigel explains why Republicans are calling for Kathleen Sebelius to be fired.
Last week Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that doctors could not unilaterally ignore a Toronto family’s decision to keep their near-dead husband and father on life support. In the same breath, however, the court also confirmed that, under the laws of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, a group of government-appointed adjudicators could yet overrule the family’s choice. That tribunal, not the family or the doctors, has the ultimate power to pull the plug.
In other words: Canada has death panels.
I use that term advisedly. Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made it famous in the summer of 2009, when Congress was fighting over whether to pass Obamacare. As Republicans and Democrats continue to spar over health care, we should pause to wonder why millions of Canadians have come to accept the functional equivalent of an idea that almost sank health care reform even though, in this country, it was imaginary.
Ontario’s Health Care Consent Act has been on the books for nearly two decades. Like similar laws in many Canadian provinces—and American states—it sets out the process for making treatment decisions when a patient cannot provide or withhold her consent—when she is in a coma and on life support, for example. In such cases, power automatically shifts to a “substitute decision maker,” usually a close relative. When these family members disagree with a patient’s doctors, and when the doctors are nonetheless determined to act, the dispute generally goes to court, where it can take months or even years to resolve. That is how it works in other Canadian and American jurisdictions, anyway. In Ontario, by contrast, the provincial legislature decided in 1996 to create a quasijudicial tribunal, the Consent and Capacity Board, to make these life-and-death decisions more quickly. If a patient’s substitute decision maker withholds consent, then doctors may apply to the board—comprised of lawyers, mental health professionals, and community members—for a determination that the proposed treatment is in the patient’s best interest. If so, the board has the power to consent on the patient’s behalf.
At issue in the Ontario case was the fate of Hassan Rasouli, a retired engineer who has been comatose in a Toronto hospital since he suffered complications following brain surgery three years ago. When Rasouli’s doctors determined that he had no reasonable prospect of recovery, they sought to pull the plug. His family, convinced that Rasouli was slowly recovering, took his doctors to court.
Last Friday, they won. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled 5–2 that Ontario doctors may not decide to withhold treatment from patients in Rasouli’s condition without consent from the next-in-line decision maker. In Rasouli’s case, that is his wife. But, if she refuses consent, then her husband’s doctors can still ask for a ruling from Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board. The Supreme Court confirmed last week that the board has the power to overrule her.
Most media coverage of the Canadian ruling has focused on the first part—that doctors cannot overrule family members—rather than the second—that an administrative tribunal can. Most Ontarians are evidently content with—or indifferent to, or simply ignorant of—the fact that the Consent and Capacity Board has the power to make difficult, even existential health care decisions on behalf of patients who are still (technically) alive. Americans, I expect, would be apoplectic.
In Canada, with our single-payer health care system, Rasouli’s situation has a very public bottom line: Should taxpayers foot the bill for his family’s indefinite goodbye?
But American critics of Canadian health care will declare that merely asking this question is unacceptable, unethical, even unthinkable—and that it proves that the Canadian system gives doctors a dangerous incentive to kill off their patients as quickly as possible. They are wrong. The Hippocratic Oath’s promise to do no harm still applies. But they are also only wrong in part. When taxpayers provide only a finite number of acute care beds in public hospitals, a patient whose life has all but ended, but whose family insists on keeping her on life support, is occupying precious space that might otherwise house a patient whose best years are still ahead.
The incentives in the American health care system point in the opposite direction. In the United States, keeping an all-but-dead patient alive on life support in a hospital bed generates income for the hospital, for as long as its bills get paid.
Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board provides an objective process for resolving these difficult, end-of-life dilemmas. The board is instructed by law to focus on the patient’s best interests, not the health care system’s, or the government’s bottom line. Still, the law recognizes that, though it is usually in the patient’s best interests to be kept alive, it is not always so. As Rasouli’s doctors told the Supreme Court, prolonging his life would entail the risk of infection, bedsores, and organ failure. When recovery is out of the question, in other words, there may be fates worse than death.
Yet, the question remains: Who decides? Remember that, outside of Ontario, the resolution of these end-of-life disputes is generally reserved for judges. Ontario has simply replaced them with experts and wise community members. That’s a lead other jurisdictions should consider following when families’ emotions and doctors’ judgments collide.
Perhaps it is easier for Canadians to trust government-appointed panels, rather than judges, with decisions like these. For reasons that arguably go back to our respective foundings, Canadians tend to have more faith in our government and our bureaucratic processes than Americans do in theirs. Look at gun control: Canada lacks a constitutional guarantee of a right to bear arms in part because we never fought a war of independence that made one seem necessary. Similarly, when conservative politicians in the United States condemn Obamacare as a “government takeover” of health care, a lot of Canadians roll our eyes.
Still, the Rasouli family’s situation is familiar, and it will only become more commonplace. Modern medicine increasingly allows us to extend life indefinitely, and so the question is no longer whether we can “play God,” but when, how, and who should do so. When humanity demands haste, and justice demands expert knowledge, Ontario’s death panels offer a solution—whatever Sarah Palin says.
Daughter first popped up on our radar when we heard the London band's song "Landfill" while preparing for SXSW early last year: Achingly pretty and melancholy, the track builds to an absolute gut-punch of a line — "I want you so much, but I hate your guts" — that conjures a pitch-perfect mix of gloom, desire and hostility.
The group has since released a full-length album, this year's lovely If You Leave, but Daughter was kind enough to resuscitate "Landfill" for this stripped-down performance at the Tiny Desk. As you'll see and hear, that aforementioned gut-punch is a recurring specialty for the band: In all three of these sad, searing songs, singer Elena Tonra showcases a remarkable gift for coolly but approachably dishing out weary words that resonate and devastate.
Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius, Stephen Thompson; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Parker Miles Blohm, Chloe Coleman, Denise DeBelius; photo by Chloe Coleman/NPR
