Sunday, March 31, 2013

Bushwick's Pet Superette Offers Adorable Cats and Kittens for ...

Adoptable munchkins at Pet Superrete (all photos by Katarina Hybenova for Bushwick Daily)

Adoptable munchkins at Pet Superrete (all photos by Katarina Hybenova for Bushwick Daily)

Have you always dreamt of adopting a cute little munchkin cat but never got around it? Now it?s easier than ever with Pet Superette, a new pet store located on 12 Cypress Ave, you can adopt your kitten right here in Bushwick!??

pet superette4

Pet Superette is a sister store to PS9 Pets on North 9th in Williamsburg and, if you ask us, it?s not just any pet store. Sure, they offer high quality food for your cat, dog, fish, iguana, you name it, and a variety of beds, funny dog outwear, and other pet necessities. Most importantly,?however, is that?they are really engaged in helping street cats and in cat adoption.

Pet Superette has tw kittens and?two adult resident cats who temporarily live in the store and are available for play, foster care or even adoption. Most of the cats are rescues from the Bushwick/Ridgewood area, which is known for a particularly high number of feral cats.?I personally brought in Billy Jean, an adorable skinny kitten born in my backyard, who morphed from a scared cat into a leader of kitten mischief in the store. ?This morning I came in to the store and it looked like they had a party while we were closed,? laughed Dottie Evans, an employee at the store.?Apparently, the kittens managed to rip open a bag of catnip and cat food, and spent the night running around the store, tossing around toys and beds.

Kitten is pretty tired after partying all night on catnip.

Kitten is pretty tired after partying all night on catnip.

In addition to the resident kitties, Pet Superette closely collaborates with a cat rescue organization, Kitty Karetakers that runs a regular adoption day at Per Superette. Every Saturday (not Sundays anymore), the organization brings in cats in cages available for adoption or foster care. Members of Kitty Karetakers are present in the store during the adoption day, and they are also very knowledgeable people to consult if you have any questions regarding feral cats living in your backyard or on your block, affordable spay and neuter programs, etc.

As you can imagine, cat rescue and vet services are not exactly cheap. To support this endeavor, you can donate any amount online or in-person at Pet Superette. Additionally, Kitty Karetakers is a?501(c)(3) not-for-profit no-kill organization, and the donations are tax-deductable.

This one is also pretty sleepy.

This one is also pretty sleepy.

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About Katarina Hybenova

Combination of a writer+photographer, and the founding editor of Bushwick Daily. She can easily be moved by reflection of the sky in a puddle. Yogi, runner, Buddhist.

Source: http://bushwickdaily.com/2013/03/bushwicks-pet-superette-offers-adorable-cats-and-kittens-for-adoptions/

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Saturday, March 30, 2013

NICWA's Terry Cross: In Defense of Dusten Brown

PORTLAND,?Ore., March 29, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --?Terry Cross, the executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, released the following op-ed.

"He opted to look the other way. He should be absolutely ashamed of his character."
"He doesn't really care about the child."
?????????????????????Anonymous comments on media coverage of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

At the heart of the case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl is the story of a father who desperately wants to raise his daughter. Dusten Brown is a good father and an honorable man who has found himself in extraordinary circumstances. He is also a parent who has weathered scathing criticism from a public largely miseducated on the facts of the case that brought him into a national spotlight that he never sought.

As followers of this case, what we know to be true can be found in court records. While the public relations firm retained on behalf of Adoptive Couple has been masterful in creating a withering narrative of Brown??spinning a tale of the deadbeat dad who waited two years before using a "legal loophole" to retrieve his daughter?it is clear that what makes for compelling PR doesn't always bode well for truth or decency.

In reality, court records paint a different portrait of Brown. Stationed at Fort Sill Army Base and engaged to be married when his daughter was conceived, Brown hoped to push his wedding date up so that his military benefits would provide for the mother and his child. Instead, the mother broke the engagement and cut off communication.

Shockingly little has been reported regarding Brown's military status and how it affected his daughter's removal to South Carolina and his subsequent efforts to contest adoption proceedings. In the months just after his daughter's birth, Brown was in the midst of intense pre-deployment preparations. He was being prepared to go to war.

Understanding this, attorneys for Adoptive Couple waited until days before his deployment to Iraq to serve him with notice of their intent to adopt his daughter. The process server threatened Brown with arrest when he questioned the true purpose of the papers he signed. Brown immediately sought legal counsel and took every legal measure he could to stop the attempt to adopt his child. He sought to have his daughter placed with his parents while he was in Iraq, a request staunchly opposed by Adoptive Couple.

Are these the actions of a deadbeat dad?

It took more than a year for Brown to fulfill his obligations to our country, completing his service honorably and admirably. Only upon his return could the adoption hearing occur. When the South Carolina Family Court finally heard the case, it denied Adoptive Couple's petition to adopt. More importantly, the court found that Brown "did not voluntarily consent to the termination of his parental rights or the adoption; and [that Adoptive Couple] failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Father's parental rights should be terminated or that granting custody of Baby Girl to Father would likely result in serious emotional or physical damage to Baby Girl."

When these are the facts, why have they been seldom mentioned? This winter, as I followed the case of another military father embroiled in a custody case that closely paralleled the one involving Brown, I often wondered this. In the case, Terry Achane, a U.S. Army drill instructor, won custody of his daughter from a Utah couple after it was revealed that his estranged wife cut off all communication with him while he was deployed and gave the child up for adoption without his consent.

While initially indicating they would fight the ruling, the Utah couple changed their minds. Their attorney explained that because they "love the child deeply and want her to succeed in life, they are willing to put her needs before their own hopes and desires and would rather drop the appeal than risk the child suffering potential psychological and emotional consequences."

The outpouring of support for Achane stands in stark contrast with Brown's treatment in the media. However, the tide is changing. The media has started to dig deeper in its reporting. As they do, more light is shed on Dusten Brown as a father and veteran. I can only hope that once these facts come to light, the same public that has vilified Brown will come to recognize him simply as a man who loves his daughter very much.

Terry Cross is a member of the?Seneca Nation?and the executive director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association in Portland, Oregon.

Media Contact: Nicole Adams, +1-503-754-0466, nicole@nicwa.org

SOURCE National Indian Child Welfare Association

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nicwas-terry-cross-defense-dusten-brown-023300981.html

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Thursday, March 28, 2013

Engineers enable 'bulk' silicon to emit visible light for the first time

Mar. 27, 2013 ? Electronic computing speeds are brushing up against limits imposed by the laws of physics. Photonic computing, where photons replace comparatively slow electrons in representing information, could surpass those limitations, but the components of such computers require semiconductors that can emit light.

Now, research from the University of Pennsylvania has enabled "bulk" silicon to emit broad-spectrum, visible light for the first time, opening the possibility of using the element in devices that have both electronic and photonic components.

The research was conducted by associate professor Ritesh Agarwal, postdoctoral fellow Chang-Hee Cho and graduate students Carlos O. Aspetti and Joohee Park, all of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Their work was published in Nature Photonics.

Certain semiconductors, when imparted with energy, in turn emit light; they directly produce photons, instead of producing heat. This phenomenon is commonplace and used in light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which are ubiquitous in traffic signals, new types of light bulbs, computer displays and other electronic and optoelectronic devices. Getting the desired photonic properties often means finding the right semiconducting material. Agarwal's group produced the first ever all-optical switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires, for example.

Semiconducting materials -- especially silicon -- form the backbone of modern electronics and computing, but, unfortunately, silicon is an especially poor emitter of light. It belongs to a group of semiconducting materials, which turns added energy into heat. This makes integrating electronic and photonic circuits a challenge; materials with desirable photonic properties, such as cadmium sulfide, tend to have poor electrical properties and vice versa and are not compatible with silicon-based electronic devices.

"The problem is that electronic devices are made of silicon and photonic devices are typically not," Agarwal said. "Silicon doesn't emit light and the materials that do aren't necessarily the best materials for making electronic devices."

With silicon entrenched as the material of choice for the electronics industry, augmenting its optical properties so it could be integrated into photonic circuitry would make consumer-level applications of the technology more feasible.

"People have tried to solve this problem by doping silicon with other materials, but the light emission is then in the very long wavelength range, so it's not visible and not very efficient and can degrade its electronic properties," Agarwal said. "Another approach is to make silicon devices that are very small, five nanometers in diameter or less. At that size you have quantum confinement effects, which allows the device to emit light, but making electrical connections at that scale isn't currently feasible, and the electrical conductivity would be very low."

To get elemental, "bulk" silicon to emit light, Agarwal's team drew upon previous research they had conducted on plasmonic cavities. In that earlier work, the researchers wrapped a cadmium sulfide nanowire first in a layer of silicon dioxide, essentially glass, and then in a layer of silver. The silver coating supports what are known as surface plasmons, waves that are a combination of oscillating metal electrons and of light. These surface plasmons are highly confined to the surface where the silicon dioxide and silver layers meet. For certain nanowire sizes, the silver coating creates pockets of resonance and hence highly confined electromagnetic fields -- in other words, light -- within the nanostructure.

Normally, after excitation the semiconductor must first "cool down," releasing energy as heat, before "jumping" back to the ground state and finally releasing the remaining energy as light. The Penn team's semiconductor nanowires coupled with plasmonic nanocavities, however, can jump directly from a high-energy excited state to the ground state, all but eliminating the heat-releasing cool-down period. This ultra-fast emission time opens the possibility of producing light from semiconductors such as silicon that might otherwise only produce heat.

"If we can make the carriers recombine immediately," Agarwal said, "then we can produce light in silicon."

In their latest work, the group wrapped pure silicon nanowires in a similar fashion, first with a coating of glass and then one of silver. In this case, however, the silver did not wrap completely around the wire as the researchers first mounted the glass-coated silicon on a sperate pane of glass. Tucking under the curve of the wire but unable to go between it and the glass substrate, the silver coating took on the shape of the greek letter omega -- ? -- while still acting as a plasmonic cavity.

Critically, the transparent bottom of the omega allowed the researchers to impart energy to the semiconductor with a laser and then examine the light silicon emitted.

Even though the silicon nanowire is excited at a single energy level, which corresponds to the wavelength of the blue laser, it produces white light that spans the visible spectrum. This translates into a broad bandwidth for possible operation in a photonic or optoelectronic device. In the future, it should also be possible to excite these silicon nanowires electrically.

"If you can make the silicon emit light itself, you don't have to have an external light source on the chip," Agarwal said. "We could excite the silicon electrically and get the same effect, and we can make it work with wires from 20 to 100 nanometers in diameter, so it's very compatible in terms of length scale with current electronics."

The research was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Institutes of Health.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Chang-Hee Cho, Carlos O. Aspetti, Joohee Park, Ritesh Agarwal. Silicon coupled with plasmon nanocavities generates bright visible hot luminescence. Nature Photonics, 2013; 7 (4): 285 DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2013.25

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/electronics/~3/U1h28iUkbn4/130327133517.htm

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