Ag-Gag Laws Could Make America Sick | Later On

Businesses strongly oppose activities and regulations that expose dangerous practices, corner cutting, and other questionable (and often illegal) activities. Now that they are gaining control of the government, they are trying to make it illegal to expose business wrong-doing. Brandon Keim writes at Wired Science:

A wave of laws that target animal welfare activists who take undercover videos at factory farms has been criticized for chilling free speech and allowing cruelty to continue in secret. But it?s not only animal well-being at issue. So is public health.

Some food safety experts say these so-called ag-gag laws will cloak disease-spreading industry practices, such as processing ill cattle and housing poultry in filthy conditions, in secrecy, raising risks of food contamination.

?The ag-gag laws are touted as preventing animal activists from getting access to private places, but there?s a much broader concern the public should have,? said Elisabeth Holmes, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Center for Food Safety. ?Public health issues, food safety issues, environmental issues: all those things can be exposed through undercover investigations.?

The?first-ever ag-gag prosecution, involving a Utah woman who took roadside videos of cows at a Draper City slaughterhouse, was announced this this week. Charges?were soon dropped, but the incident hinted at a future in which farms are largely hidden from public sight.

Ag-gag laws were passed in Iowa, Missouri and Utah in 2011 and 2012, and submitted for consideration in ten state legislatures ? Arkansas, California, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Vermont ? this year. Broadly speaking, they make it illegal to take photographs or videos without farmer consent, though some go further.?Pennsylvania?s proposed law, criminalizes downloading such material over the internet.

The laws have drawn disapproval from many quarters, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Press Photographers Union, who say they threaten public discourse, though most criticisms focus on?abuse of animals?that might go unchecked in the absence of activist attention.

Against these criticisms, farm industry advocates argue that activists often misportray what actually happens on farms, turning isolated incidents into inflammatory narratives of routine abuse that further anti-meat-eating goals. The industry also portrays undercover video-taking as a violation of farmer rights.

?At the end of the day it?s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy,? said Bill Meierling, a spokesman for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business group that?drafted the model?for many of the ag-gag laws,?to the Associated Press. ?You wouldn?t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.?

The nation?s food, however, doesn?t come from people?s homes. It comes from farms ? and in a food system that?s?both vulnerable and productive, with a single burger containing meat from multiple farms, making problems at a single facility a potentially national issue, hidden cameras are often the only cameras. Much of what?s publicly known about factory farms comes from activities that could soon be illegal. . .

It?s amazing to see what are obviously bad-faith or fallacious arguments advanced in favor of the ag-gag laws. If those are the best reasons in favor of the laws, the laws are extremely bad.

Source: http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/ag-gag-laws-could-make-america-sick/

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Facebook helps you log back in with a little help from your Trusted Contacts

Facebook wants you to log in. Real bad. But the social network hasn't traditionally gone out of its way to streamline password recovery. The site's finally make things a little smoother with Trusted Contacts, a redesign and rebrand of its Trusted Friends offering. Go into Security Settings and you can list three to five e-pals, who can help you log back into the site before your farm goes belly up. Contact them and let them know you need in, and they'll get a security code and instructions to help you get back to the wall.

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New zooming technique for entering text into smartwatches

Apr. 30, 2013 ? Technology blogs have been abuzz that smartwatches may soon be on their way from companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft. But as capable as these ultra-small computers may be, how will users enter an address, a name, or a search term into them? One solution is an iterative zooming technique developed and tested by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

Called ZoomBoard, this text entry technique is based on the familiar QWERTY keyboard layout. Though the full keyboard is impossibly small on a watch-size display, simply tapping the screen once or twice will enlarge an individual key until it can be comfortably and accurately pressed.

Capital letters can be typed by momentarily holding a key. A swipe to the left deletes a character. A swipe to the right types a space. An upward swipe calls up a secondary keyboard of numbers and other symbols.

"You aren't going to write a novel, but it gets the job done," said Stephen Oney, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "This opens up new possibilities for devices such as smartwatches, which generally lack any means of entering text, as many aren't powerful enough for voice recognition."

"Users can enter about 10 words per minute at high accuracy on a keyboard the size of a penny," said Chris Harrison, a Ph.D. candidate who will soon join the HCII faculty. "That's plenty fast enough to dial a phone number, or enter 'where is pizza?' or get 'directions home.'"

Oney and Harrison developed and evaluated ZoomBoard with fellow HCII students Amy Ogan and Jason Wiese. They will present their findings May 1 at CHI 2013, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Paris, where the research was awarded an honorable mention for Best Paper.

A video demonstration and other material is available at the project website, http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/Zoomboard.

"A lot of people are banking on voice for text entry on very small devices, and no doubt voice will play an increasingly central role," Harrison said. "But sometimes you need to enter something discretely and without a big fuss; for that, ZoomBoard is great."

Other approaches to text input on small devices have included new keyboard layouts and gesture-based characters. But the HCII team opted to use the conventional QWERTY keyboard because the configuration is instantly familiar to users.

Further development of ZoomBoard might include a language model, a standard feature on most soft keyboards that suggests possible words based on the first few letters typed; for ZoomBoard, this might also involve adjusting the centering point of the first zoom step over a predicted letter.

The researchers say ZoomBoard also could be useful on larger keyboards for people who have movement disorders that make typing difficult or for people who are using their keyboards while jogging.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/information_technology/~3/LRlQwXwef9w/130430131538.htm

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ECB weighs rate cut as eurozone economy struggles

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) ? Economists say the European Central Bank could cut interest rates as soon as Thursday because of fears that the euro area's economy isn't recovering ? even though top bank officials themselves caution that a cut won't do much good.

Market expectations have risen in recent days of a reduction in the ECB's benchmark rate from its current record low of 0.75 percent when bank's 23-member governing council gathers to debate the issue in Bratislava, Slovakia.

The economy of the 17 European Union countries that use the euro certainly needs a boost. The ECB says the eurozone will shrink 0.5 percent for all of this year and unemployment is at 12.1 percent. Meanwhile, annual inflation is only 1.2 percent, well below the ECB's goal of just under 2 percent. That gives the ECB freedom to cut if it wants to.

The low inflation data make it "virtually impossible" that the ECB will fail to lower the refinancing rate Thursday, said Janet Henry, chief European economist at HSBC. Cuts done at the wrong time can worsen inflation, but it appears there is little risk of that for now.

At 0.75 percent, the ECB rate is still higher than at other major central banks. The Fed is at 0-0.25 percent, the Bank of Japan at 0-0.1 percent, and the Bank of England at 0.5 percent.

ECB president Mario Draghi said at his last news conference April 4 that bank officials "stand ready to act" if their forecast for a recovery later this year appears to not be coming true.

But economists caution a cut isn't a sure thing Thursday. Some say that the bank may wait until its June rate meeting, when it has new staff economic projections to justify any move.

The ECB's refinancing rate determines what banks pay the ECB for credit. This in turn influences a host of other short-term rates charged by banks to consumers and companies. So an ECB cut should, in normal times, make it cheaper for companies to borrow to expand and create jobs.

However there's a problem: Stimulus is not getting through to the places that need it most.

Whatever the decision on Thursday, Joerg Asmussen, the bank's chief of international relations, cautioned last week that the "pass-through" from any cut to the wider economy would be "limited."

Analyst Holger Schmieding at Berenberg Bank says that's one reason a cut "isn't a done deal" although he sees a 60 percent chance for a cut at either the May or June meeting.

"Everyone knows a rate cut won't make much of a difference," he said. "That's why we have it at 60-40 rather than saying it will definitely happen."

The ECB has pointed out that its current record low rates are not being passed on to businesses because banks are struggling with their own financial problems. This is especially the case in countries hardest hit by the eurozone's financial crisis such as Spain and Italy. There, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), the chief job-creators in the economy, are not getting affordable credit.

However, a rate cut might offer some help in other ways. It might lower the euro's exchange rate against other currencies. That could help exporters, whose goods become cheaper abroad. And a cut would also lower the cost of ECB emergency credit to the hardest-hit banks. That would take some pressure off their finances so that they could lend more.

The ECB has stayed away from a key tool to help stimulate an economy that is already used by the Fed, Bank of Japan, and Bank of England. Quantitative easing, or the purchase of securities with newly created money, pushes down longer-term interest rates and aims to increase the overall supply of money in the economy. Draghi has said such a step would be difficult for the multinational ECB, since each eurozone member country's debt market is different.

Analysts say the ECB needs to find another way to spur small-business lending. One way would be to encourage banks to bundle small business loans as securities and then to use them as collateral to obtain credit from the ECB. It's not clear whether anything along those lines will be announced Thursday.

Analyst Carsten Brzeski at ING thinks say the ECB may hold off cutting rates so it can first come up with ways to make sure lower borrowing costs are actually passed on. Draghi has indicated the bank is studying possible steps, and mentioned possible involvement by governments and outside agencies such as the European Investment Bank. The EIB already offers reduced interest loans to midsize companies through local banks.

Without such additional measures, a cut "would quickly go up in smoke and could even be regarded as an act of despair," Brzeski said. "It is hard to believe that the ECB would cut rates first and come up with a broader SME funding scheme later."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ecb-weighs-rate-cut-eurozone-economy-struggles-094739832.html

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Texas foreclosures numbers remain among the highest in U.S.

Texas is one of the largest states for completed foreclosures, according to a new report from CoreLogic.

Once again, the Lone Star State has made it into the top five.

Over the 12 months ended March 2013, Texas had 53,359 completed foreclosures, according to Irvine, Calif.-based CoreLogic.

A completed foreclosure occurs when a property is sold at auction to either a third party or to the lender holding the mortgage.

It?s a familiar scenario for Texas. CoreLogic?s February report also had Texas listed among the top five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures.

Three states completed more foreclosures than Texas over the past 12 months ? Florida with 102,847 foreclosures; California with 83,310 foreclosures; and Michigan with 70,315 foreclosures. These are the same three states that were ranked above Texas in February as well.

As was the case in February, Georgia was once again the one state with less completed foreclosures than Texas ? with a total of 48,199 completed foreclosures in March, CoreLogic reports.

Of the five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures, only Florida follows the judicial foreclosure process. In such states, lenders have to provide evidence to the courts before it can issue notices of default, and thus begin the foreclosure process.

In non-judicial states like Texas, lenders can issue notices of default directly to borrowers.

On the national front, a total of 55,000 foreclosures were completed during the month of March ? marking a 16-percent decline from the 66,000 foreclosures completed in March 2012, CoreLogic reports.

It?s a start, but the market still has a ways to go. Between the years 2000 to 2006, the country was averaging 21,000 completed foreclosures a month.

Tricia Lynn Silva covers real estate, retail, construction, and law firms; she also plans and edits some special reports.

Source: http://feeds.bizjournals.com/~r/bizj_sanantonio/~3/XZHsn9USD8A/texas-foreclosures-numbers-remain.html

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