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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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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Story Source:

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.

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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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Panasonic's Big Beautiful New Plasma and LED TVs Are Here

Panasonic's latest Viera televisions. 16 Plasmas and 16 LEDs all up to 65-inches. They include new models of some of Panasonic's best models. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/8blvyzE2YEk/panasonics-big-beautiful-new-plasma-and-led-tvs-are-here

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Student Recreation | InnerVU | Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt Student Recreation Center

Intramural Registration
Registrations can be completed at the Office of Campus Recreation from 9 am ? 5 pm Mon. ? Fri. Each house?s vice president will be responsible for assisting the Office of Campus Recreation in promoting and registering teams for both the Commons sporting events and intramural sports. For more info call 3-8186.

Men?s & Women?s Programs Entry Date Start Date
Basketball??????????????????????????????????????????? Jan 7 ? 11?????????????????? Jan 20
Racquetball Doubles?????????????????????????? Jan 14 ? 18???????????????? Jan 27
Weightlifting??????????????????????????????????????? Jan 21 ? 25???????????????? Feb 3

Co-Rec Programs Entry Date Start Date
Volleyball??????????????????????????????????????????? Jan 14 ? 18???????????????? Jan 27
Mixed Doubles Racquetball??????????????? Jan 14 ? 18???????????????? Jan 27

For a complete calendar of activities for the 2013 Spring semester, ?please check out our website at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/studentrec/intramurals/calendar/.

Smoothie King is now open in the Vanderbilt Student Recreation Center.

Modified Pool Hours for Exam Week ? Dec. 7 ? 15^thhttp://www.vanderbilt.edu/studentrec/aquatics/hours-2/

ALL POOL HOURS: LAP SWIM?ONLY ? All hours are subject to change. Please call?343-6627 for the most up to date pool hours. Please note NO recreational/play swim will be permitted during modified hours and schedule.

The access point to the recreation center has moved a few yards west, closer to the outdoor running track.? This will be our new entrance throughout the construction project.

Patrons approaching the Rec Center from 25^th Ave will be diverted from the existing sidewalk to a temporary boardwalk. The?temporary boardwalk will be in place for several months while this project is completed.

Follow our progress @?http://www.vanderbilt.edu/studentrec/facilities-improvement-for-you/.

Wilderness First Aid Course

Dates: Saturday February 9 and Sunday February 10, 2013
Time: 8:00 am ? 5:00 pm both days (1 hour will be given for a lunch break)
Location: VU Outdoor Rec. Center
Cost: $225.00 (Only Cash, check, or Vanderbilt Commodore card accepted)
Registration Deadline: Jan. 11, 2013
Cost Includes: Instruction from Wilderness Medical Associates (WMA) instructors, lunch for the two days, text books, use of group equipment, and certification exam.

Course Overview

This course is designed to prepare individuals who program, recreate, and enjoy the outdoors to encounter medical emergencies in a back country setting with confidence and competence. Through a combination of classroom instruction and field based exercises, participants will gain valuable experience in addressing the needs of outdoor based emergencies. Over the course of the 16 hrs, or two 8 hour days, participants will learn: patient assessment, patient stabilization, comprehensive first aid and a variety of improvised implementation methods, as well as learn the skills necessary to implement patient evacuation.

This certification is nationally recognized and affords recipients the confidence to step into wild spaces with current knowledge and skills to face challenges in any environment. The course will be instructed by two WMA instructors. The WMA is a globally recognized leader in the field of wilderness medicine and takes pride and ownership over providing its students with meaningful hands on learning that prepares people for real world application and implementation of practices. For more information regarding the WMA please click?here.

***Special Consideration***
This course is structured in such a way that all the material is vital to your successful completion of the exam.? As such, you must be present for 100% of the course.? Please plan to be both physically and mentally present during each of the 8 hour days.? Lunch will be provided by the Vanderbilt Outdoor Recreation Center on both days.

TO REGISTER:

Come by the Vanderbilt Outdoor Recreation Center during business hours and remit payment. The cost of the course must be paid in full at the time of registration. Once you have registered you will be provided with an informational packet that outlines the steps you must take online to complete your registration process.

VU Outdoor Recreation Center is located at: 2600 Children?s Way, Nashville, TN 37212

Business Hours: Monday and Friday 12:00 ? 6:00 pm/ Tuesday ? Thursday 3:00 ? 6:00 pm

For additional information please contact:
Lee Collette/ (615)322-0811/?outdoorrec@vanderbilt.edu

Student Recreation Facility Hours:
Mon.- Thu ?????? 5:30 am ? 11 pm
Fri ?????????????????? 5:30 am ? 12 am
Sat?????????????????? 9 am ? 10 pm
Sun????????????????? 12 pm? ? 11 pm

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Source: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/innervu/news/student-recreation-24

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Utah city renames street due to sexual connotation

LEHI, Utah (AP) ? The Lehi City Council has renamed Morning Glory Road after a technology company planning to relocate to the street raised concerns about the name's sexual connotation.

Council members in the city about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City voted unanimously last month to change the name to Morning Vista Road.

Minutes from the meeting show that Xactware Solutions Inc., which provides software for the insurance industry, asked for the name change so that the road would fit with its "international corporate image."

"Morning glory" is the name of a flower and part of the title of a popular 1990s song from British rock band Oasis. But the term is sometimes used to describe male arousal.

Councilman Johnny Revill, who moved to approve the resolution at the Dec. 11 meeting, told the Salt Lake Tribune that he didn't know about the term's slang meaning previously but was happy to appease Xactware officials.

"That name has a negative meaning for some reason," Revill said. "When you use the word, there is a different meaning that can be taken from that."

Councilor Mark Johnson told the Daily Herald that he only knows of the noxious weed called Morning Glory that is difficult to control, but he also voted in favor of the resolution. Johnson said Lehi doesn't like to change street names, but it does in some cases to "honor people or organizations."

The street name was a red flag for Xactware officials when they began considering moving their company's headquarters from Orem to Lehi's Traverse Mountain, said Jonathan Gardner, commercial venture project director for the planned community.

The company was worried that the sexual connotation of morning glory would become too prominent in the minds of prospective clients, Gardner said.

Morning Glory is far from an R-rated word in most of America. It is the name of a 2010 Hollywood film starring Rachel McAdams as an upbeat television producer trying to revive a struggling morning show. That movie is rated PG-13.

In the popular 1960s TV show "Bewitched," the family lived at 1164 Morning Glory Circle.

Morning Glory is also the name of a small community near El Paso, Texas.

Xactware went "a little overboard," in requesting the street name change, said Lehi resident Emily Scanlon. She said she has never thought of the sexual connotation in her four years driving past the road.

Lehi, with a population of about 48,000 people, is named after a prophet in the Book of Mormon and is the former home of the Brown family that stars in the reality TV series, "Sister Wives." Kody Brown moved his wives and 16 children from Lehi to the Las Vegas area in January 2011 after Utah authorities began a bigamy investigation.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/aa9398e6757a46fa93ed5dea7bd3729e/Article_2013-01-04-Morning%20Glory%20Road/id-6e0a2fae3cfe4ab7880038a38cd7d580

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White House mulls broader gun control: Washington Post

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House is weighing a far broader approach to curbing U.S. gun violence than just reinstating a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

A working group led by Vice President Joseph Biden is seriously considering measures that would require universal background checks for gun buyers and track the movement and sale of weapons through a national database, the newspaper said.

The measures would also strengthen mental health checks and stiffen penalties for carrying guns near schools or giving them to minors, the Post said. The approach is backed by law enforcement leaders, it said.

President Barack Obama assigned Biden the job of designing the strategy after the massacre at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school last month that killed 20 children and six adults.

To sell such changes, the White House is developing strategies to work around the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby.

They include rallying support from Wal-Mart Stores Inc and other gun retailers for measures that would benefit their businesses, the Post said.

The White House has been in contact with advisers to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a gun control advocate who could emerge as a surrogate for the administration's agenda, the paper said.

The Post cited several people involved in the administration's talks on gun control for its story. They included Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum.

The White House had no immediate comment on the Post story. A White House spokesman told the newspaper that Biden's group was in the middle of its review and had not decided on its final recommendations.

The NRA has successfully lobbied federal lawmakers to stop major new gun restrictions since a 1994 assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. The ban also prohibited ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds.

When asked if Congress will entertain new gun regulation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that lawmakers needed to see Biden's recommendations.

"There will be plenty of time to take a look at their recommendations once they come forward," he said.

McConnell, a Republican, said that for the next three months Washington's debates would center on federal spending and the rising debt.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-mulls-broader-gun-control-washington-post-154313906--finance.html

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From the Amazon rainforest to human body cells: Quantifying stability

Jan. 6, 2013 ? As they typically result from severe external perturbations, it is of vital interest how stable the most desirable state is. Surprisingly, this basic question has so far received little attention. Now scientists of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), in a paper published in Nature Physics, propose a new concept for quantifying stability.

"Up to now, science was able to say if a complex system is stable or not, but it wasn't able to properly say how stable it is," says Peter J. Menck, lead author of the paper. The proposed concept is the first to fill this gap. "We conceive a system's alternative states as points in a mountainous landscape with steep rocks and deep valleys," explains Menck. "In the sinks between the peaks, a system comes to rest like a rolling ball would. Now the likelihood that the system returns to a specific sink after suffering a severe blow strongly depends on how big the surrounding valley is." In the high-dimensional systems Menck and his colleagues study, the equivalent of the valley is called the basin of attraction. The basin's volume is the measure the authors suggest to use for the quantification of stability.

Getting the actual data still is a challenge

The authors envision the new concept to become a powerful tool for complex systems studies, including the assessment of climatic tipping elements like the Amazon rainforest. Under unabated global warming, this ecosystem might change from its present fertile forest state to a much drier savanna state. Such a transition would destroy one of the planet's most important CO2 sinks, thus contributing to further climate change. "Amazonian bistability arises from a positive feedback: Deep-rooting trees take up water and transpire it to the atmosphere" Menck says. Forest cover in the region increases overall rainfall and thereby improves its own growing conditions. If the forest cover gets pushed below a certain threshold, this mechanism doesn't work any more -- the rainforest would die.

The "basin stability concept" is apt for quantifying this risk. However, it is critical to actually do this from measured data. "Other researchers recently have collected the characteristics in terms of precipitation, temperature, soil of rainforests and savannas under defined climatological conditions," Menck says. Still, the assessment is extremely challenging as the tipping of a forest is a rare event, so observation data is scarce. In contrast, observation data of human cells changing from a healthy state to cancer can be abundant. "So medical researchers told us that our concept could be quite helpful in better assessing the risk of sane cells to turning sick when disturbed by specific exogenous factors."

"Simple yet compelling -- that's the way fundamental physics looks like"

Power grids have to function in good synchronization to assure that lights can be switched on everywhere anytime. Previous theory suggested that this should most easily be achieved if power grids had what researchers call a random structure, which in fact would yield many short-cuts between distant nodes. Yet in reality, grids look far more regular. Applying the basin stability concept shows why that is: In more regular grids, the desired synchronous state possesses a far bigger 'basin', hence is much more stable against perturbations.

"The basin stability's applicability to high-dimensional systems allowed us to solve a puzzle that has long haunted complex network science," says J?rgen Kurths, a co-author of the paper and co-chair of PIK's research domain 'Transdisciplinary concepts and methods'. "Our new nonlinear approach jumps from a local to a whole system analysis, thus complementing previous research mostly based on linearization. This new concept is simple, yet compelling -- that's the way fundamental physics looks like."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Peter J. Menck, Jobst Heitzig, Norbert Marwan, J?rgen Kurths. How basin stability complements the linear-stability paradigm. Nature Physics, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS2516

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

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/ItxWuJXKM_w/130106145745.htm

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