Light goes infinitely fast with new on-chip material

Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have done just that, designing the first on-chip metamaterial with a refractive index of zero, meaning that the phase of light can travel infinitely fast.

This new metamaterial was developed in the lab of Eric Mazur, the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics and Area Dean for Applied Physics at SEAS, and is described in the journal Nature Photonics.

"Light doesn't typically like to be squeezed or manipulated but this metamaterial permits you to manipulate light from one chip to another, to squeeze, bend, twist and reduce diameter of a beam from the macroscale to the nanoscale," said Mazur. "It's a remarkable new way to manipulate light."

Although this infinitely high velocity sounds like it breaks the rule of relativity, it doesn't. Nothing in the universe travels faster than light carrying information -- Einstein is still right about that. But light has another speed, measured by how fast the crests of a wavelength move, known as phase velocity. This speed of light increases or decreases depending on the material it's moving through.

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151019122240.htm

Meet the husband and wife team destroying Worker's Comp across America

If you live in a state where Bill Minick and his company Partnersource has done its dirty work, your employer can opt out of Worker's Compensation plan and replace it with one designed by Minick -- he also writes state laws defining the terms for private replacements to Worker's Comp -- and backstopped by his wife Dr. Melissa Ton's medical practice, who gets to decide whether you deserve treatment. If she denies your claims, Minick's company gets a bonus from his clients.

Minick's pitch goes like this: eliminate worker's comp and companies will save money while providing more benefits and rooting out benefits cheats. The reality is that under Minick's system; supervisors get to accompany workers to the doctor's office; employers can deny claims if for employees who seek a second opinion or take more than 24 hours to initiate a claim; employees who are permanently disabled can have their benefits arbitrarily capped.

Minick maintains that while his system allows for these abuses, they're checked by the power of employees to sue their employers for bad behavior. But Minick's system limits employees' legal choices through dirty tricks like requiring them to sign away their right to sue while they are bleeding on stretchers in an emergency room; or limiting their recourse for bad employer actions to arbitration conducted by a panel chosen and hired by employers.

What happens to employees who are crippled by their employers when employers are let off the hook for it? The taxpayer foots the bill.

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http://boingboing.net/2015/10/20/how-a-lobbyistdoctor-couple-a.html

Shuttered: The End Of Abortion Access in Red America

WRITTEN BY IRIN CARMON

FORT WORTH, Tex. — Some mornings, Bhavik Kumar starts his day at 5 a.m. and thinks about a life different from the one he began this year. In that other life, the 30-year-old physician lives minutes from work and doesn’t have to look over his shoulder for his safety. He doesn’t have to travel hundreds of miles a week, by car and plane, to provide abortions.

In New York, where Kumar trained after medical school, the women who came to him to end their pregnancies didn’t try so hard to justify their decision. He doesn’t ask patients to do that; their insistence on doing so makes him uncomfortable. In New York, he didn’t have to recite a script mandated by Texas lawmakers that the state’s current lieutenant governor described as offering a woman “all the information she deserves before making a decision to end a life.”

“This is not normal,” Kumar tells his patients before reading the statement. “The state requires me to do this.”

In New York, he wasn’t required to give women a medically unnecessary sonogram, or describe to them the embryonic or fetal development, or make them listen to the fetal heartbeat. They weren’t required to wait 24 hours after counseling for the procedure, as women in Texas must. New Yorkers can use state Medicaid money to cover the cost of the abortion and get birth control the same day. Texans — whose governor refused the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and whose laws prohibit even covering birth control at an abortion clinic, let alone paying for an abortion — cannot. The patients Kumar saw in New York rarely had to drive hundreds of miles to receive care, as Texas women increasingly do.

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http://www.msnbc.com/shuttered

Parents promise lawsuit after son dies in Adams County jail

BRIGHTON, Colo. -- Tyler Tabor told medical staff at the Adams County Detention Facility he was going through a heroin withdrawal when he was booked May 14 for outstanding warrants.

His parents said the 25-year-old should’ve never died from dehydration three days later while still in custody.

"I absolutely feel like they dropped the ball out there and, yeah, they took my son from me out there,” said Tabor's father, Ray Tabor.

Tabor’s death was ruled “natural causes” and last week, Adams County District Attorney Dave Young released his report that found no criminal negligence on the part of jail staff.

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http://kdvr.com/2015/10/19/parents-promise-lawsuit-after-son-dies-in-adams-county-jail/

Bernie Sanders Favorability Ratings Skyrocketed During the Past Two Weeks

The latest candidate to gain on overall favorable ratings in our latest poll is a big surprise for both the establishment left and right.

Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders saw upticks in their favorability ratings, according to the latest poll conducted by Google Consumer Surveys for IJ.com, but Clinton’s small gains has been overshadowed by a leap from Sanders.

Senator Sanders has seen a jump from 36% to 44% favorability rating among very likely voters polled:



The spike is, of course, likely attributed to Sanders’ performance during the first ever 2016 Democratic presidential debate.

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http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/449123-prez-candidate-seeing-biggest-uptick-favorability-answer-will-surprise-conservatives/

Talk Therapy Found to Ease Schizophrenia

More than two million people in the United States have a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and the treatment for most of them mainly involves strong doses of antipsychotic drugs that blunt hallucinations and delusions but can come with unbearable side effects, like severe weight gain or debilitating tremors.

Now, results of a landmark government-funded study call that approach into question. The findings, from by far the most rigorous trial to date conducted in the United States, concluded that schizophrenia patients who received smaller doses of antipsychotic medication and a bigger emphasis on one-on-one talk therapy and family support made greater strides in recovery over the first two years of treatment than patients who got the usual drug-focused care.

The report, to be published on Tuesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, comes as Congress debates mental health reform and as interest in the effectiveness of treatments grows amid a debate over the possible role of mental illness in mass shootings.

Its findings have already trickled out to government agencies: On Friday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published in its influential guidelines a strong endorsement of the combined-therapy approach. Mental health reform bills now being circulated in Congress “mention the study by name,” said Dr. Robert K. Heinssen, the director of services and intervention research at the centers, who oversaw the research.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/health/talk-therapy-found-to-ease-schizophrenia.html

Trey Gowdy comes undone: The GOP’s new Ken Starr has lost all claims to credibility

After being courted by Republican Benghazi investigators for nearly three years, all the time benefiting from endless committee leaks on Capitol Hill, the Beltway press now faces the prospect of a messy break-up. With Benghazi Select Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) under increasing outside fire from Democrats, who claim his inquiry has jumped several sets of rails, and under internal fire from a whistleblower who alleges the committee’s investigative work is overwhelmingly partisan, the committee stands poised to lose its remaining credibility.

That flashpoint might come next week when Hillary Clinton returns to Capitol Hill more than 30 months after testifying about Benghazi — in order to once again testify about Benghazi. Or more specifically, to testify about her private emails, which have become the all-consuming focus of Gowdy’s inquisition.

By any commonsense standard Gowdy’s inquiry has been a Congressional bust. ($4.6 million spent to hold just a handful of public hearings?) If that’s effectively highlighted during Clinton’s nationally televised testimony, and if Democrats continue to press forward with their procedural attempts to dismantle the costly committee, Gowdy’s time in the spotlight might be quickly ending.

And that’s where the messy break-up looms. The Benghazi committee has been very good to a Beltway press corps anxious to pursue storylines about Clinton’s supposed incompetence and crooked ways. This year, the Benghazi committee has helped pundits produce months’ worth of baseless speculation about looming email indictments and the potential for a Clinton campaign “collapse.” The Benghazi committee has provided institutional cover for the press to game out wild, what-if scenarios in which Clinton inevitably plays the villain, or a bumbling bureaucrat in over her head.

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http://www.salon.com/2015/10/20/trey_gowdy_is_the_new_ken_starr_an_obsessive_clinton_chaser_who_needs_to_go_partner/

Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialist Capitalist

In last week’s Democratic Party debate, Bernie Sanders stuck up for the idea that Americans are prepared to elect a democratic socialist, which is how he describes himself. “We’re gonna win,” he said, when the moderator, Anderson Cooper, pressed him on his electability under any kind of socialist label.

This led Hillary Rodham Clinton to defend capitalism, saying, “We would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in history,” though she allowed the need to “rein in the excesses of capitalism.”

The weirdest thing about this fight is that Mr. Sanders, a Vermont senator, is not really a socialist. Or at least, if he is a socialist, he is also, at the same time, a capitalist.

“I think Bernie Sanders’s use of the word ‘socialism’ is causing much more confusion than it is adding value,” said Lane Kenworthy, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego. Mr. Kenworthy, who recently wrote a book called “Social Democratic America” and thinks about these sorts of things for a living, offered a suggestion: “He is, if you want to put it this way, a democratic socialist capitalist.”

Ugh. Do we have to put it that way? In addition to being a mouthful, that still seems as if it’s going to confuse a lot of people.

After all, Mr. Sanders does not want to nationalize the steel mills or the auto companies or even the banks. Like Mrs. Clinton, he believes in a mixed economy, where capitalist institutions are mediated through taxes and regulation. He just wants more taxes and more regulation than Mrs. Clinton does. He certainly seems like a regular Democrat, only more so.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/upshot/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialist-capitalist.html?_r=1

Bernie Sanders Is Very Worried About Your Data

by Drew Millard

During last week's Democratic presidential debate, avowed pinko and every cool teen's favorite Larry David impersonator Bernie Sanders had some dire warnings about our online privacy.

"Virtually every telephone call in this country ends up in a file at the NSA. That is unacceptable to me," Sanders told debate moderator Anderson Cooper. "I think the government is involved in our emails, is involved in our websites."

Then he took it a step further. "But it's not just government surveillance," he said, as (I assume) a dark cloud made up of ones and zeroes gathered over his head slightly out of view of CNN's cameras. "Corporate America is doing it as well."

In an email to VICE this week, a Sanders campaign spokesperson expanded on the 2016 candidate's comments, saying, "In addition to government surveillance, the Senator is concerned about the lack of privacy consumers have, and how their information is often unwittingly collected, shared, and sold." The campaign also pointed to Sanders' vote against the controversial NSA reform bill earlier this year, and to an amendment the Senator attempted to attach to this year's National Defense Authorization Act. The amendment, which did not make it into the final version of the NDAA, would have created a two-year commission to investigate changes in data collection, and the possible impact on privacy rights and surveillance.

"I believe we need to take a look at how the public and private sectors are gathering data on the American people and how we are moving toward an Orwellian society in which your location and movements can be tracked at any time through your smartphones and computers," Sanders said in a June statement announcing his plans to introduce the amendment.

more

http://www.vice.com/read/bernie-sanders-is-very-worried-about-your-data-1019

Tuesday Toon Roundup 3: The Rest

Democrats










Voting






Oh Canada




Police





The Issue









War