Softbank founder goes on the attack, sees 'no need' to improve offer for Sprint network

Despite bidding competition from Dish, Softbank's founder, Masayoshi Son, has told Reuters that he sees no need to adjust his company's offer for Sprint. In fact, he's even seen support from Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who stated in a letter to the FCC last week that a third competitive national carrier is "very compelling."

During the company's financial results today, Softbank's Son went on the attack, spending a big chunk of the presentation pitching what his company would offer over its rival's bid. He kicked off by saying that Dish's offer (and comparisons) was "illusory" and how the Japanese carrier's offer had a 21 percent premium over its rival's, along with a swifter turnaround: two months compared to a year. Son also said that his company's offer would sidestep the difficulties in combining spectrum in the US, as Softbank doesn't currently hold any US wireless spectrum at the moment. The CEO added: "If our deal doesn't go through with Sprint... the carrier won't have the cash to follow through with their network vision [this year]."

Earlier in the earnings event, Son said that his company's healthy native position was "just a stepping stone", and that he's now aiming for the number one spot in mobile internet globally -- Sprint appears to be a big part of those plans.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Sprint

Comments

Source: @masason (Twitter)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/30/softbank-update-sprint/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

Chris Dorner 1800 Flowers walking dead The Pope bruno mars the Grammys 2013 State of the Union 2013

Gov. Patrick, Students Stock Jamaica Pond [VIDEO] - Brookline Patch

Gov. Deval Patrick alongside state wildlife officials and JFK Elementary School students helped stock Jamaica Pond from the banks of Jamaica Pond Thursday morning.

The students took buckets of fish to the shore and helped 1,250 rainbow, brook, brown and tiger trout swim away.

Here is some additional information on the annual event from the state Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs:

This stocking event is part of an annual program that distributes various species of trout to 500 bodies of water throughout the Commonwealth. This year, the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife (MassWildlife) will release more than 510,000 trout produced at state-operated hatcheries in Belchertown and Sandwich. The 60-foot deep pond, the largest body of freshwater in Boston, is also home to snapping turtles, crayfish, eels and clams.?

Here is a list of trout-stocked waters around Massachusetts and other fishing information.

Source: http://brookline.patch.com/articles/gov-patrick-students-stock-jamaica-pond-video-132baa29

Suki Waterhouse dancing with the stars Bates Motel Michelle Shocked ncaa bracket bracket Jason Terry

How we decode 'noisy' language in daily life: How people rationally interpret linguistic input

Apr. 29, 2013 ? Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child."

A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information -- the "noise" interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it.

"Even at the sentence level of language, there is a potential loss of information over a noisy channel," says Edward Gibson, a professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Gibson and two co-authors detail the strategies at work in a new paper, "Rational integration of noisy evidence and prior semantic expectations in sentence interpretation," published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"As people are perceiving language in everyday life, they're proofreading, or proof-hearing, what they're getting," says Leon Bergen, a PhD student in BCS and a co-author of the study. "What we're getting is quantitative evidence about how exactly people are doing this proofreading. It's a well-calibrated process."

Asymmetrical strategies

The paper is based on a series of experiments the researchers conducted, using the Amazon Mechanical Turk survey system, in which subjects were presented with a series of sentences -- some evidently sensible, and others less so -- and asked to judge what those sentences meant.

A key finding is that given a sentence with only one apparent problem, people are more likely to think something is amiss than when presented with a sentence where two edits may be needed. In the latter case, people seem to assume instead that the sentence is not more thoroughly flawed, but has an alternate meaning entirely.

"The more deletions and the more insertions you make, the less likely it will be you infer that they meant something else," Gibson says. When readers have to make one such change to a sentence, as in the ice cream example above, they think the original version was correct about 50 percent of the time. But when people have to make two changes, they think the sentence is correct even more often, about 97 percent of the time.

Thus the sentence, "Onto the cat jumped a table," which might seem to make no sense, can be made plausible with two changes -- one deletion and one insertion -- so that it reads, "The cat jumped onto a table." And yet, almost all the time, people will not infer that those changes are needed, and assume the literal, surreal meaning is the one intended.

This finding interacts with another one from the study, that there is a systematic asymmetry between insertions and deletions on the part of listeners.

"People are much more likely to infer an alternative meaning based on a possible deletion than on a possible insertion," Gibson says.

Suppose you hear or read a sentence that says, "The businessman benefitted the tax law." Most people, it seems, will assume that sentence has a word missing from it -- "from," in this case -- and fix the sentence so that it now reads, "The businessman benefitted from the tax law." But people will less often think sentences containing an extra word, such as "The tax law benefitted from the businessman," are incorrect, implausible as they may seem.

Another strategy people use, the researchers found, is that when presented with an increasing proportion of seemingly nonsensical sentences, they actually infer lower amounts of "noise" in the language. That means people adapt when processing language: If every sentence in a longer sequence seems silly, people are reluctant to think all the statements must be wrong, and hunt for a meaning in those sentences. By contrast, they perceive greater amounts of noise when only the occasional sentence seems obviously wrong, because the mistakes so clearly stand out.

"People seem to be taking into account statistical information about the input that they're receiving to figure out what kinds of mistakes are most likely in different environments," Bergen says.

Reverse-engineering the message

Other scholars say the work helps illuminate the strategies people may use when they interpret language.

"I'm excited about the paper," says Roger Levy, a professor of linguistics at the University of California at San Diego who has done his own studies in the area of noise and language.

According to Levy, the paper posits "an elegant set of principles" explaining how humans edit the language they receive. "People are trying to reverse-engineer what the message is, to make sense of what they've heard or read," Levy says.

"Our sentence-comprehension mechanism is always involved in error correction, and most of the time we don't even notice it," he adds. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to operate effectively in the world. We'd get messed up every time anybody makes a mistake."

The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Peter Dizikes.

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

---

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/~3/_IIiQYNk9ww/130429164950.htm

earth day Luis Suarez Earth Day 2013 westboro baptist church reese witherspoon meteor shower NBA

Cyberattack suspect had 'bunker' in north Spain

MADRID (AP) ? A Dutch citizen arrested in northeast Spain on suspicion of launching what is described as the biggest cyberattack in Internet history operated from a bunker and had a van capable of hacking into networks anywhere in the country, officials said Sunday.

The suspect traveled in Spain using his van "as a mobile computing office, equipped with various antennas to scan frequencies," an Interior Ministry statement said.

Agents arrested him Thursday in the city of Granollers, 35 kilometers (22 miles) north of Barcelona, complying with a European arrest warrant issued by Dutch authorities.

He is accused of attacking the Swiss-British anti-spam watchdog group Spamhaus whose main task is to halt ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills reaching the world's inboxes.

The statement said officers uncovered the computer hacker's bunker, "from where he even did interviews with different international media."

The 35-year-old, whose birthplace was given as the western Dutch city of Alkmaar, was identified only by his initials: S.K.

The statement said the suspect called himself a diplomat belonging to the "Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Republic of Cyberbunker."

Spanish police were alerted in March by Dutch authorities of large denial-of-service attacks being launched from Spain that were affecting Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the U.S. These attacks culminated with a major onslaught on Spamhaus.

The Netherlands National Prosecution Office described them as "unprecedentedly serious attacks on the nonprofit organization Spamhaus."

The largest assault clocked in at 300 billion bits per second, according to San Francisco-based CloudFlare Inc., which Spamhaus enlisted to help it weather the onslaught.

Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a server with traffic, jamming it with incoming messages. Security experts measure the attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks ? such as the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year ? have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second, one third the size of that experienced by Spamhaus.

Netherlands, German, British and U.S. police forces took part in the investigation leading to the arrest, Spain said.

The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to face justice in the Netherlands.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-04-28-Spain-Cybercrime/id-b01d1a301b88423f832d38ac77012027

man of steel gucci mane Chicago sinkhole Panda Express illuminati illuminati ricin

Employment data will cap off busy week on Wall Street

Patti Domm , CNBC.com ? ? ? 9 hrs.

The Federal Reserve is expected to repeat its dovish message in the coming week, providing a potential safety net for markets facing a wave of earnings and the important April jobs report.

Dozens of S&P 500 companies report in a heavy week of earnings, which includes names like Facebook, General Motors, MasterCard and major drug companies, Merck and Pfizer.

There is also a sizable economic calendar,with ISM manufacturing data in the U.S. Wednesday, and PMI manufacturing reports for the euro zone and China on Thursday. The week ends with Friday's U.S. employment report, expected to show 150,000 new nonfarm payrolls in April, according to Thomson Reuters.

While no fresh news is expected when the Fed issues its post-meeting statement Wednesday, markets are on high alert for a possible quarter-point rate cut from the European Central Bank Thursday.

"It could be wild. It's the first week in a couple where we shift our focus to the macro," said Art Hogan of Lazard Capital Markets. "We've got PMI, the ECB, the Fed meeting and the job number. All of that could steal the show. On top of that, we have a huge parade of earnings."

The Fed is expected to reaffirm that it will continue with its quantitative easing policy, or asset purchases. It may tweak its comments to reflect a weaker economy. But there is unlikely to be any talk of "tapering" off of the Fed's $85 billion in monthly Treasury and mortgage securities purchases,which had been raised by some Fed members.

"They're in a watchful, waiting mode right now, waiting to see if the summer swoon is upon us, or whether there will be a break of the trend," said Tony Crescenzi, strategist with Pimco. "That will determine whether there's going to be talk of tapering."

(Read More: Jim Cramer: Mid-Week Selloff Ahead? )

"We're going to have to watch the payroll numbers in particular and the performance of labor-market indicators," he said, adding investors will also be watching for clues several weeks later when the meeting minutes are released. The Fed has made it clear it will base its decisions on policy moves on the economy and employment, in particular.

Stocks were higher in the past week, recovering much of the losses of the prior week. The Dow gained 1.1 percent, to finish at 14,712, and the S&P 500 gained 1.7 percent, ending at 1582 while the Nasdaq rose 2.3 percent to 3,279. The worse performing sectors were the defensive ones, which have been leading the market higher. Telecom was down a half percent. Consumer staples was off 0.4 percent and the healthcare sector was down 0.2 percent.

Analysts have been expecting a stock-market correction, but Hogan said the market may be experiencing sector corrections instead and is consolidating through sideways trading. "What we saw this week was a lot of safety plays corrected,"he said.

Commodities markets also gained in the past week, after a big sell off the week before. Gold was up 4.2 percent and West Texas Intermediate crude was up more than 5 percent.

Richard Bernstein of Richard Bernstein Capital Management said the commodities correction is a positive for stocks. "That is a reflection of what you saw in terms of rotation in large caps in the first quarter. The rest of the world is weakening more than people think," he said. But it is a positive for the U.S., as prices for things like gasoline fall, providing a break for consumers.

Bernstein said he remains bullish on the stock market. "We had a string of really good economic numbers for a while. Now we're getting a string of kind of 'eh' numbers. The big thing is that the economy continues to improve. I don' think there's been too much data that says the economy is deteriorating. It's a question of how rapidly or slowly it's decelerating," he said. The latest piece of data to disappoint, was the first-quarter GDP report,which at 2.5 percent was softer than the 3-percent growth expected.

(Read More:The Economy May Stink, but the Market Doesn't Care)

Crescenzi said the market is used to deteriorating economic data in the spring, as it has in the past three years, but this spring should be a bit better.

"Markets are expecting weakness," he said. "For markets to be affected by the seasonal swoon, the data would need to even worse than in the last few years. The weakness would have to intensify for the 'risk off' mentality to surface." But if no summer rebound materializes, as expected, that would be a big negative for markets.

Bernstein said he's fairly optimistic about the stock market. "The most important question is are corporate profits going to improve from here or not, and everything we look at says, they're going to improve. It looks to us like the trough in the growth rate in corporate earnings could be now," he said. He had previously expected earnings to trough in the second quarter.

So far, about half the S&P 500 companies have reported and 69 percent are beating earnings estimates, according to Thomson Reuters data. The revenue numbers in the first quarter have been surprisingly weak, with 58 percent of companies missing forecasts.

"As long as people worry about the economic numbers, and as long as people worry about volatility, that's what bull markets are all about. It's when people are confident the market is going up and people are confident the economy is ripping, that's when I worry about the market," he said.

What to Watch

Monday

8:30 am: Personal Income

10:00 am: Pending home sales

10:30 am: Dallas Fed survey

Tuesday

Fed meeting begins

9:00 am: S&P/Case-Shiller home price index

10:00 am: Consumer confidence

Wednesday

May Day

Monthly auto sales

8:15 am: ADP employment

10:00 am: ISM manufacturing

2:15 pm: Fed statement

Thursday

Chain store sales

7:30 am: Challenger layoff report

8:30 am: International trade

8:30 am: Productivity and costs

Friday

8:30 am: Employment report

10:00 am: Factory orders

10:00 am: ISM nonmanufacturing

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653351/s/2b45605f/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cbusiness0Cemployment0Edata0Ewill0Ecap0Ebusy0Eweek0Ewall0Estreet0E6C9640A0A0A2/story01.htm

carson daly heejun han donovan mcnabb donovan mcnabb lottery ticket megga millions what is autism

Earnings beating forecasts but jury's out on rest of season

By Caroline Valetkevitch and Ben Berkowitz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. companies have easily beaten expectations for first-quarter earnings so far in the reporting season, but nearly half of the members of the S&P 500 are yet to announce results and they are unlikely to be as robust.

With results in from 271 of the S&P 500 companies, year-over-year earnings growth is projected at 3.9 percent, compared with a forecast for 1.5 percent growth at the start of the earnings season, Thomson Reuters data shows. That figure includes those that have reported and analyst estimates for those who have not.

The companies yet to report are expected to post an aggregate earnings decline of 0.4 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data - whereas the companies that have already reported have posted growth of 6.1 percent.

Among the biggest companies yet to report are Dow components Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Home Depot .

Some 69 percent of the S&P 500 have beaten forecasts, once again conforming to the pattern of lowering expectations enough to "surprise" by beating them. The 69 percent figure exceeds the long-term average of 63 percent. This has been the pattern for the last 15 quarters, with growth estimates at the beginning of earnings ultimately being beaten by at least a full percentage point.

From April 1 to April 24, S&P 500 earnings growth expectations fell 170 basis points for the second quarter, 130 basis points for the third quarter and 70 basis points for the fourth quarter.

"If this recent pattern holds, you're going to find that those beats will continue and therefore lead earnings season to be one of continued positive surprise," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia.

So far, this has been good enough for investors. Since earnings season began with Alcoa's report on April 8, the S&P 500 has gained 1.2 percent, and it closed Friday less than 1 percent from its all-time high of 1,593.37 reached on April 11. So far this year, it has climbed nearly 11 percent.

GOING FORWARD, WITH CAUTION

Even though profits have been better than expectations, revenue forecasts have declined, a sign, once again, that companies are exceeding results on the bottom line because of reduced expenses, and not because of stellar sales. So far, just 42 percent of companies are beating revenue expectations, below the long-term average.

First-quarter revenue now is expected to fall 0.3 percent, which is worse than the forecast for 1 percent growth when the season started.

That means companies - yet again - have been able to squeeze out higher profits through cost-cutting and other measures. But that does not bode well for hiring and stands as a potential headwind to the economy in coming quarters.

"It does concern me. It's not sustainable over the medium or the long term. There's only so much companies can do to sustain growth without increasing sales," said Paul Zemsky, head of asset allocation at ING Investment Management, in New York.

There are plenty of examples of major companies that were deeply reserved about the second quarter or the remainder of the year.

Among those were Apple Inc and Amazon.com Inc . Apple, until recently the world's biggest company by market value, saw its first quarterly profit decline in a decade and issued a soft outlook for the second quarter that fell short of investor hopes. The stock has lost about 40 percent of its value since September.

"The market was telling you the numbers were too high," BGC analyst Colin Gillis said of Apple's outlook, adding that it was "pretty much even worse than even I was expecting."

(Additional reporting by Rodrigo Campos and Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/earnings-beating-forecasts-jurys-rest-season-211325703.html

marilyn monroe Nathan Adrian London 2012 Synchronized Swimming London 2012 hurdles Taylor Kinney Beach Volleyball Olympics 2012 Jessica Ennis

The iTunes Store Is A Decade Old Today

For better or worse, Apple has been peddling digital wares for ten years through its iTunes store. What started as a 99 cent, iPod-centric music seller has evolved into the billion dollar behemoth we know today. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/oUKhq5PTiaQ/the-itunes-store-is-a-decade-old-today

ncaa final four 2012 uk vs louisville university of kansas buckeye west side story final four 2012 bridesmaids

Gizmodo's Transformers Trip:How They're Made,Where They Come From

Recently, Gizmodo had a chance to go out to the Transformers HQ at Hasbro's home office outside of Providence, Rhode Island. We got to see how the classic toys are designed from the ground up, as well as the workshop where early prototypes for all of Hasbro's toys are put together. It was a pretty great time.

Autobots Assembled: How Transformers Come to Life

Some of the lead designers of the newest Transformers line took us through how they dream up, sketch out, and engineer the designs and transformations of your favorite Transformers characters.

Where the Toys Come From: Inside Hasbro?s Model Workshop

We took a tour around the Hasbro prototype workshop and saw how the earliest models of toys are put together?sometimes grown?right in the Hasbro's workshop. We saw 3D printers, master model makers at work, and the man who hand-paints every single Transformers prototype.

Michael Bay Is Why Transformers Got So Complicated

Transformers are HARD to put together. Some of the head designers explained how it got to be so bad, and why things are going to get better some time soon.

Here's a Skinless, Laughing Elmo to Terrify You Forever

We also saw this. It was horrifying.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/gizmodos-transformers-trip-how-theyre-made-and-where-484520999

roy williams divine mercy chaplet matt lauer albert pujols the shining mariano rivera mariano rivera

James leads Heat over Bucks and into next round

MILWAUKEE (AP) ? LeBron James can cross another item off his to-do list.

James scored 30 points, Ray Allen had another big game against his old team and the Miami Heat got their first playoff sweep in the Big Three era, advancing to the Eastern Conference semifinals with an 88-77 victory over the Milwaukee Bucks on Sunday.

"It was our next big step as far as our growth," James said. "It's so hard to win on the road in the playoffs, in someone's building ? especially when someone is playing for their last life. It's a big step for us."

And now the Heat have some much-needed time to rest. Dwyane Wade sat out Sunday's game, only the second postseason game he's missed in his career, because of his aching right knee. But with Miami not playing until next Saturday, at the earliest, he'll have plenty of time to treat the three bone bruises that caused him to miss six games near the end of the regular season.

Miami plays the winner of the Brooklyn-Chicago series. The Bulls lead that series 3-1, with Game 5 on Monday night in New York.

"It's big," Wade said of the time off. "Obviously, we're one of the oldest teams in the league, maybe the oldest team in terms of rotation players. Guys have some bumps and bruises coming out of this series, so it's going to be great to get some rest. But also we have to take this time to continue to stay sharp, to continue to stay in shape as well."

Judging by the clinical way in which the Heat dissected the Bucks in this series, that isn't likely to be a problem.

The defending NBA champions won each game by double digits, getting contributions from their stars and subs alike. Allen finished with 16 points, the third time in the series he scored in double figures, and was 4 of 7 from 3-point range.

Udonis Haslem added 13 points and five rebounds, and Mario Chalmers kicked in eight rebounds and six assists for Miami, which never trailed Sunday.

"They had the whole package," Bucks coach Jim Boylan said. "When you can afford to sit guy like Dwyane Wade and perform at the level they performed at, that's a championship-caliber team."

Monta Ellis led the Bucks with 21 points, and Larry Sanders had 11 rebounds to go with seven points.

But Milwaukee got almost nothing again from Brandon Jennings, who didn't even play in the fourth quarter. Jennings, who had guaranteed the Bucks would win the series in six games, finished with three points on 1-of-7 shooting.

After scoring 26 points in Game 1, Jennings had 27 total in the final three.

"Frustrated, a little down because I came into this season with so much confidence," he said. "I thought we had a chance to steal a game in Game 1, Game 2. We let that slip away from us. Game 3, we came back home. Had a 10-point lead, lost that. I mean it's frustration all around."

The Heat had chances to sweep their first-round series in each of the last two seasons, taking 3-0 leads on Philadelphia (2011) and New York (2012). But they couldn't close it out, losing Game 4 each year.

That wasn't going to happen against the Bucks. Even with Wade reduced to a spectator.

Wade got treatment "around the clock" the last two days in hopes of playing Sunday, and he tested his knee before the game. But he and the Heat decided it wasn't worth risking aggravating the injury further, and he spent the entire game on the bench in his warmups.

"He gave me the nod saying he wasn't going to go, so I knew had to pick it up a little more and try to bring us home, bring this win home for us," James said.

That he did, adding eight rebounds, seven assists and three steals to his 30 points.

"We just space the floor and see if they can stop him. If not, he knows where we are," Allen said. "We just give him that room to operate."

The Heat led by as many as 11 in the first half, only to see the Bucks steadily chip away at the lead. When Mike Dunleavy drained a 3 and Ellis scored on a floater, it cut Miami's lead to 69-67 with 9:34 to play.

Ellis was fouled by Allen on the play, but he missed the free throw and James grabbed the rebound. He fed Allen, who knocked down ? what else, a 3. J.J. Redick missed a long 3 and James found an open Chalmers for another 3 that gave the Heat a 75-67 lead with 8:27 left.

The 3 was Chalmers' 80th in the postseason, tying Tim Hardaway's franchise record.

After Luc Richard Mbah a Moute made the second of two free throws, James scored on a layup. Redick made a jumper, but Shane Battier and Allen closed out the Bucks with a pair of 3s. James then converted a three-point play and added a layup to complete the 19-5 run ? a spurt in which he had a hand in every single Miami score.

"At some point during that stretch right there, he decided he was going to put his imprint on the game and he did. In a big way," Boylan said. "When you're a superstar player like he is, that's what superstar players do."

NOTES: The Heat have won eight straight postseason games dating to last season. That matches the franchise record. ... NBA Commissioner David Stern was in attendance. ... James scored 30 or more for the 54th time in the postseason, second only to Kobe Bryant among active players. ... Milwaukee had seven of its 16 turnovers in the first quarter. ... The Bucks are now 20-26 in elimination games. ... Packers LB Clay Matthews was at the game.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/james-leads-heat-over-bucks-next-round-220510707.html

hbo luck unc asheville stephen jackson marchmadness mike d antoni nba trade rumors desean jackson

Turtle genome analysis sheds light on turtle ancestry and shell evolution

Apr. 28, 2013 ? From which ancestors have turtles evolved? How did they get their shell? New data provided by the Joint International Turtle Genome Consortium, led by researchers from RIKEN in Japan, BGI in China, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK provides evidence that turtles are not primitive reptiles but belong to a sister group of birds and crocodiles. The work also sheds light on the evolution of the turtle's intriguing morphology and reveals that the turtle's shell evolved by recruiting genetic information encoding for the limbs.

Turtles are often described as evolutionary monsters, with a unique body plan and a shell that is considered to be one of the most intriguing structures in the animal kingdom.

"Turtles are interesting because they offer an exceptional case to understand the big evolutionary changes that occurred in vertebrate history," explains Dr. Naoki Irie, from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, who led the study.

Using next-generation DNA sequencers, the researchers from 9 international institutions have decoded the genome of the green sea turtle and Chinese soft-shell turtle and studied the expression of genetic information in the developing turtle.

Their results published in Nature Genetics show that turtles are not primitive reptiles as previously thought, but are related to the group comprising birds and crocodilians, which also includes extinct dinosaurs. Based on genomic information, the researchers predict that turtles must have split from this group around 250 million years ago, during one of the largest extinction events ever to take place on this planet.

"We expect that this research will motivate further work to elucidate the possible causal connection between these events," says Dr. Irie.

The study also reveals that despite their unique anatomy, turtles follow the basic embryonic pattern during development. Rather than developing directly into a turtle-specific body shape with a shell, they first establish the vertebrates' basic body plan and then enter a turtle-specific development phase. During this late specialization phase, the group found traces of limb-related gene expression in the embryonic shell, which indicates that the turtle shell evolved by recruiting part of the genetic program used for the limbs.

"The work not only provides insight into how turtles evolved, but also gives hints as to how the vertebrate developmental programs can be changed to produce major evolutionary novelties." explains Dr. Irie.

Another unexpected finding of the study was that turtles possess a large number of olfactory receptors and must therefore have the ability to smell a wide variety of substances. The researchers identified more than 1000 olfactory receptors in the soft-shell turtle, which is one of the largest numbers ever to be found in a non-mammalian vertebrate.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:

---

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by RIKEN, via AlphaGalileo.

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

---

Journal Reference:

1. Zhuo Wang, Juan Pascual-Anaya, Amonida Zadissa, Wenqi Li, Yoshihito Niimura, Zhiyong Huang, Chunyi Li, Simon White, Zhiqiang Xiong, Dongming Fang, Bo Wang, Yao Ming, Yan Chen, Yuan Zheng, Shigehiro Kuraku, Miguel Pignatelli, Javier Herrero, Kathryn Beal, Masafumi Nozawa, Qiye Li, Juan Wang, Hongyan Zhang, Lili Yu, Shuji Shigenobu, Junyi Wang, Jiannan Liu, Paul Flicek, Steve Searle, Jun Wang, Shigeru Kuratani, Ye Yin, Bronwen Aken, Guojie Zhang, Naoki Irie. The draft genomes of soft-shell turtle and green sea turtle yield insights into the development and evolution of the turtle-specific body plan. Nature Genetics, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/ng.2615

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/top_news/top_environment/~3/8zHOVHrvis0/130428144848.htm

Colorado Marijuana elizabeth warren puerto rico diane sawyer Washington Election Results drudge report Presidential Election 2012

Oculus' Palmer Luckey on the Motorola StarTAC and living in the meatspace

Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.

Oculus VR founder and designer Palmer Luckey has a go at our weekly set of questions while chatting perception modification and the importance of a meatspace presence. Join us beyond the jump in order to peruse the full collection of responses.

Filed under: Misc, Gaming

Comments

Source: Engadget Distro

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ohPctyvJrnY/

a wrinkle in time benjamin netanyahu storm shelters nick lachey lifelock chevy volt christina hendricks

Best Business Blogs | Content for Reprint

Author: Martie McCabe | Total views: 122 Comments: 0
Word Count: 1167 Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2013 4:27 PM

Online marketing is essential for any business owner in this day and age. There are a ton of ways in which you can target new customers and drum up business. You can do a lot of these things without spending any money at all. The information here can introduce you to Website marketing, and help you build up your online business to achieve higher profits than you ever expected.

When making your website, try to make it visibly appealing with as much interesting content as possible. You need to give your customers the information they need so that they can make informed decisions about their purchases. Repeat information, fluff and unreliable information should be avoided.

To increase the quality of your internet promotion, start blogging. A blog gives you another way to communicate with your customer base. As you increase the breadth of your site, you will cause more visitors to show up.

It can be a bit overwhelming when you try and decide exactly what type of business you want to create. To start off, you need to narrow down all of your interests until you find the one you enjoy the most. Pick something that you like and know much about. Creating a tangible goal will make it much easier to market your website.

The internet is an effective free resource to help evaluate your market approach since you may not be able to afford a marketing consultant for best business blogs. Consider joining up with an online forum, groups in your hometown, or borrowing books from your local library.

One fun marketing campaign is to have a contest on your website that offers great prizes. For instance, make your site like a scavenger hunt with hidden words scattered around the page. Ask visitors to find them. Offer prizes and discounts for those that find them. When customers are involved in the site, they are more likely to feel comfortable making a purchase from you.

Don't overlook the little details. Place your site's title in the top corner of each page. Also, place a description of your site here. Visitors may get to different pages, depending on their search. If they do not know exactly what your page has to offer, they may simply leave.

The language you use on your site should be rich, creative and descriptive, especially for a niche marketing blog. People like adjectives so make sure that you use plenty of them in any item descriptions. Come up with creative turns-of-phrase, and find ways to amaze people with your writing. Engender a desire to come back to your website, just to see what you might say next.

If you are good at writing, write an article about your business and submit it to magazines that accept submissions. Make sure these articles are signed with your full name and contain information about your business. If you get published in an online magazine, include a link to your site. Ask the editors if they would accept some free products or commission on affiliate work if they will put your articles on their site.

Create a well-designed and interesting website. What your website looks like, as well as the content it contains, will have a huge bearing on your degree of success. Interesting articles and a user friendly design will go a long way in keeping visitors on your site. The design should be engaging enough to grab your audience's attention, making them want to keep looking around.

If you want your site to be successful, it should contain rich, entertaining text. You want the information on your website to appear at the front of search engines, but you also want it to be original enough that you will bring in visitors.

To get a better idea of what is most effective with your customers, test your emails. A/B testings is a great option. Develop your email campaign, then focus on changing only one thing. Choose something to compare. For example, you may want to test a couple of different subject lines or intro paragraphs in your marketing copy. You would then send both types of emails out to two different equal-sized subsets of customers, measuring the results. Whichever methods test as the most successful can become the singular method or format you keep to finish out the campaign.

Put yourself in your customers' shoes. Is your site easy to navigate through? Does it offer enjoyment to the reader? Can orders be placed on your website quickly and easily? You don't want to bring in business only to lose it because of a poorly designed website.

Your URL should be memorable, so that people come back. You will want to incorporate your brand name or your business's name into your site address, if you can. Use an URL that will be easy to remember for your customers. They will be more likely to visit your website if they can remember it.

Try to get inside the brain of your customers when creating your website. If you can provide them with the information or products they are searching for, then sooner or later your marketing efforts will have paid off and result in many sales. Ask visitors for their direct input and objective analysis of your site. Ask friends or family, or even ask for comments from those in a marketing forum. Research well and develop a site that will give people the help they need.

When advertising a deal or product include words that make them feel like they are getting a deal. People shop online because they are tired of what their local stores have to offer. Online consumers seek unique products different from what they are used to seeing. By offering a product that is limited in quantity, it will cause customers to snap them up quickly, so that they don't lose out on something that is different or unusual.

People often do not believe everything they read in ads. For years, advertising has been misleading. This makes it very important to support every claim you make on your site as fully as possible. You can use reviews, before-and-after pictures, test reports, and testimonials. Don't claim that your product or service does something you're not able to prove. Your customers should be treated like they're smart and are informed. You should not take advantage of any person -- ever. Build a trustworthy reputation, and customers will flock to your business.

As has been revealed earlier, web marketing is an amazing way to reach out to customers and to bring attention to your business and products. The opportunities are endless and the benefits are immense. By utilizing the information in the article, you can build your customer base and bring new recognition to your company.

Martie McCabe is an internet marketer.. My articles focuses on developing strategies and tips on promoting your blog. Learn more about promoting your blog and blog names. For more articles go to my blog at http://www.empowernetwork.com/10k/best-business-blogs/

Related to: best business blogs - niche marketing blog - network marketing blog - business marketing blog - promoting your blog - online business blog

-- HTML code --

1: Article Marketing Strategy: Putting Together a "Class Schedule" For Your Article Topics

Businesses go to so much trouble when there is one sure-fire, simple, very inexpensive way to attract new clients to a business: Teach a free class. That is what article marketing is like. Your articles are just like free classes. You teach your target readers something helpful in your article. Your resource box then says, "If you enjoyed this article you can visit my website and apply what you have learned."

by: Steve Shaw on: Sat, 23 Apr 2011

2: Why You Need To Build Multiple Streams of Income For Yourself

Being an entrepreneur and earning multiple streams of income is a dream that many have, but in reality it does take some initial hard work to achieve this. Earning multiple streams of income is the wave of the future, and here are some tips and advice for you when you are looking for ways in which to do this for yourself.

by: Michel Maling on: Sat, 29 Sep 2012

3: Understanding Online Business Success

Starting a home based business to earn income online takes a significant amount of time and energy upfront to get things going. Not seeing results immediately can be discouraging and cause people to give up too early. In this article, we look at the process of starting a home based business and working through the frustrations to be there when the sales come flowing in.

by: Mike Christie on: Sat, 29 Sep 2012

4: What is Cyber Marketing And Why It Is So Important For The Success Of Your Website

Cyber marketing has now become an indispensable segment of e-commerce as well as the internet and World Wide Web related topics. Cyber marketing simply refers to a technique of attracting potential customers by advertising your products or services through such means as websites, emails, and banners.

by: WJaegel on: Tue, 18 Dec 2007

5: The Best Way To Optimise Your Website SEO For Google Panda

If you want your SEO to work you now need to concentrate on appeasing Google Panda, and to do this you need to know what Google Panda's spiders/bots will be looking for. Find out here how to search engine optimise your website for the latest Google Panda algorithm, and achieve the success you deserve.

by: K Damian Qualter on: Mon, 26 Mar 2012

Source: http://www.content4reprint.com/internet-marketing/best-business-blogs.htm

davey jones dead boston weather dr seuss birthday derrick williams romney michigan railgun jk rowling new book

Belief in God Can Improve Mental Health Outcomes | Psych Central ...

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on April 26, 2013

A new study suggests belief in God may significantly improve the outcome of those receiving short-term treatment for psychiatric illness.

Researchers followed patients receiving care from a hospital-based behavioral health program to investigate the relationship between patients? level of belief in God, expectations for treatment and actual treatment outcomes.

In the study, published in the current issue of Journal of Affective Disorders, researchers comment that people with a moderate to high level of belief in a higher power do significantly better in short-term psychiatric treatment than those without.

?Belief was associated with not only improved psychological well-being, but decreases in depression and intention to self-harm,? says David H. Rosmarin, Ph.D., an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

The study looked at 159 patients, recruited over a one-year period. Each participant was asked to gauge their belief in God as well as their expectations for treatment outcome and emotion regulation, each on a five-point scale.

Levels of depression, well-being, and self-harm were assessed at the beginning and end of their treatment program.

Of the patients sampled, more than 30 percent claimed no specific religious affiliation yet still saw the same benefits in treatment if their belief in a higher power was rated as moderately or very high.

Patients with ?no? or only ?slight? belief in God were twice as likely not to respond to treatment as patients with higher levels of belief.

Investigators believe the study demonstrates that a belief in God is associated with improved treatment outcomes in psychiatric care.

?More centrally, our results suggest that belief in the credibility of psychiatric treatment and increased expectations to gain from treatment might be mechanisms by which belief in God can impact treatment outcomes.?

Investigators hope that the study will lead to additional investigation on the clinical implication of spirtual life as more than 90 percent of the U.S. population hold religious beliefs.

Source: McLean Hospital

APA Reference
Nauert PhD, R. (2013). Belief in God Can Improve Mental Health Outcomes. Psych Central. Retrieved on April 26, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/04/26/belief-in-god-improves-mental-health-outcomes/54121.html

?

Source: http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/04/26/belief-in-god-improves-mental-health-outcomes/54121.html

sea lion si swimsuit 2012 westminster dog show abe lincoln vampire hunter xi jinping matt bomer westminster kennel club dog show

Qualcomm?s Snapdragon 800 to enter mass production next month

By Terry Daley ROME, April 27 (Reuters) - Udinese beat Cagliari 1-0 on Saturday thanks to a goal from Roberto Pereyra to move above Inter Milan into fifth place in Serie A, which brings a Europa League spot for next season. Pereyra's curling strike after 56 minutes saw Francesco Guidolin's side move up to 54 points, one ahead of Inter who visit relegation-threatened Palermo on Sunday (1300 GMT). Cagliari, who had striker Mauricio Pinilla sent off in added time, remain 10th on 42 points, two points and one place above Bologna, who drew 1-1 at Atalanta in the other early kickoff. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/qualcomm-snapdragon-800-enter-mass-production-next-month-220056651.html

johan santana viktor bout ncaa hockey role models ferdinand porsche gregg williams theraflu

GOP faces Senate recruitment woes in key states

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) ? Republicans are struggling to recruit strong U.S. Senate candidates in states where the party has the best chances to reclaim the majority in Washington.

It's a potentially troubling sign that the GOP's post-2012 soul-searching could spill over into next year's congressional elections.

The vote is more than 18 months away, so it's early. But candidate recruitment efforts are well underway, and thus far Republicans have been unable to field a top-tier candidate in Iowa or Michigan.

In those two Mideast swing states, the GOP hopes to make a play for seats left open by the retirement of veteran Democrats.

The GOP is facing the prospect of contentious and expensive primaries in Georgia and perhaps West Virginia, Republican-leaning states where incumbents, one from each party, are not running again.

President Barack Obama is not on the ballot, so Republicans may have their best chance in years to try to retake the Senate. Changing the balance of power in the Senate would put a major crimp on Obama's efforts to enact his agenda and shape his legacy in the final two years of his presidency.

Republicans need to gain six seats to gain control of the Senate. Democrats will be defending 21 seats to Republicans' 14, meaning the GOP has more opportunities to try to win on Democratic turf.

Only recently, Republicans were reveling in the fact that several veteran Democrats were retiring in states where the GOP had not had a chance to win in decades.

Last week, Democrat Max Baucus of Montana became the latest to announce his retirement in a state that typically tilts Republican.

But so far there's been a combination of no-thank-you's from prospective Republican candidates in Iowa, slow movement among others in Michigan and lack of consensus elsewhere over a single contender.

All that has complicated the early goings of what historically would be the GOP's moment to strike. In the sixth year of a presidency, the party out of power in the White House usually wins congressional seats.

Democrats, despite this historical disadvantage, are fighting to reclaim the majority in the U.S. House, where control will be decided by a couple of dozen swing states.

After embarrassing losses in GOP-leaning Indiana and Missouri last year, the new Republican Senate campaign leadership is responding by wading deep into the early stages of the 2014 races.

Strategists are conducting exhaustive research on would-be candidates, making hard pitches for those they prefer and discouraging those they don't, to the point of advertising against them. The hope is to limit the number of divisive primaries that only stand to remind voters of their reservations about Republicans.

"It's more about trying to get consensus and avoid a primary that would reopen those wounds, rather than the party struggling to find candidates," said Greg Strimple, a pollster who and consultant to several 2012 Republican Senate campaigns.

The party's top national Senate campaign strategists are so concerned about squandering potential opportunities by failing to persuade popular Republicans to run in critical states that they were in Iowa last week to survey the landscape. The visit came after top Senate prospects U.S. Rep. Tom Latham, a prolific fundraiser, and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, a rising star, decided against running despite aggressive lobbying by the National Republican Senate Committee.

The committee's senior spokesman, Kevin McLaughlin, and its political director, Ward Baker, met privately Wednesday with state Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey and state Sen. Joni Ernst, who have expressed interest.

They invited Mark Jacobs, the former CEO of Reliant Energy, to breakfast Thursday. They also tried again, and in vain, it turns out, to persuade Terry Branstad, Iowa's longest-serving governor, to run for Senate instead of seeking another term as governor.

Despite all that, the Washington delegation shrugged off the recruitment troubles. "It's more important to take the time to get it right than it is to rush and get it wrong," McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin and others have lamented the national party's decision not to intervene in the candidate selection last year, when Republicans lost races viewed as winnable in Indiana, Missouri and elsewhere.

The mission in Iowa for 2014 is to beat Democrat Bruce Braley, a four-term congressman trying to succeed retiring six-term Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin. Braley is the party's consensus prospect. He's won Harkin's endorsement and already has raised more than $1 million for his campaign.

Democrats are similarly set in Michigan, where Democrat Carl Levin is leaving the Senate after six terms. The Democratic field has been all but cleared for three-term Rep. Gary Peters, who already has more than $800,000 toward his campaign.

Last week, Debbie Dingell, wife of Michigan Rep. John Dingell, opted not to run for the Senate, after some of her key donors made clear they were for Peters.

But, as in Iowa, Republicans have faced recruitment challenges in Michigan.

The GOP's Senate campaign committee is planning a visit soon to Michigan and hopes to coax U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers into the race.

There's a belief in GOP circles in Washington and in Michigan that the seven-term Rogers, a former FBI agent who's chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, would be a stronger candidate than two-term Rep. Justin Amash, a tea party favroite with little money in his campaign account.

National Republican officials also are working to head off primaries in several states and are taking sides when they can't. That includes in West Virginia, which Republican president nominee Mitt Romney won in 2012 and where six-term Democratic Sen. Jay Rockefeller is retiring.

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito quickly announced her candidacy and became a favorite of the GOP establishment. Some conservatives complained about her votes for financial industry bailouts, and former state Sen. Patrick McGeehan has announced plans to challenge her.

National Republican Senate Committee officials said they would campaign and run ads against McGeehan if he appeared to be a threat.

In Georgia, several Republican candidates are considering trying to succeed the retiring Republican Saxby Chambliss. But so far, the two who have entered the race are arch conservative House members Paul Broun and Phil Gingrey.

National Republicans are treading carefully to avoid enraging the conservative base in Georgia. But the primary field could eventually include up to a half-dozen people.

At the local level, some Republicans are worried the delay is costing precious organizing and fundraising time.

"Every day Iowa Republicans spend talking about potential candidate deliberations ... is a day lost," said Matt Strawn, a former Iowa Republican Party chairman.

But others say that the meddling from Washington stifles the voices of voters, who they say ought to be in charge of shaping the party's future, even if the primary is loud and divisive.

"It's a truer reflection of where the Republican Party needs to go," said Iowa Republican Doug Gross, a veteran adviser to Branstad.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gop-faces-senate-recruitment-woes-key-states-071637703.html

kirk cousins ovechkin one world trade center bks new dark knight rises trailer khloe and lamar oklahoma city thunder

Michael Giltz: Theater: Alec Baldwin Adopts "Orphans," Fiona Shaw Delivers "The Testament Of Mary"

ORPHANS ** 1/2 out of ****
THE TESTAMENT OF MARY ** 1/2 out of ****
THE DRAWER BOY ** out of ****

Two revivals and one new play all reveal works that are in some way flawed -- but at least one good performance in each make the shows worth checking out for serious theater fans.

ORPHANS ** 1/2 out of ****
GERALD SCHOENFELD THEATRE

Time has not been kind to Orphans, an award-winning play that has the imprimatur of Steppenwolf, a list of major stars that have tackled key roles (including Albert Finney in the so-so movie version) and a long history of successful regional productions. It's easy to see why small theater companies like it: this three-hander by Lyle Kessler has one set; is filled with juicy, showy parts; and boasts a solid middle section almost guaranteed to score some laughs. It's also pure hokum, with broad types rather than real characters and a deflating finale after the show runs out of steam.

Ben Foster (in his Broadway debut and practically his theater debut as well) stars as Phillip, a two-bit tough guy who indulges in petty crime to keep him and his little brother in tuna fish. Their folks left long ago, with mom dying and dad taking off. That left Phillip with Treat (Tom Sturridge) and at first it seems like Treat is a weighty responsibility. Treat apparently has never left their home (not since he was very small, at least) and these two young men are trapped together.

Treat bounds around like a puppy, trying to never touch the floor as he leaps from couch to chair to windowsill and waiting breathlessly for Phillip to come home and maybe bring him some more Hellman's mayonnaise. He might be mentally or at least physically challenged, or so it seems. But then we realize Treat has apparently taught himself to read, loves new words, can remember every movie he's seen (and he's seen a lot of them) and is pretty smart after all. Phillip told Treat he'll die from allergies if Treat steps outside, but was that to protect him from getting lost or to keep him home and dependent on his older brother? They're alone in the world, but Phillip soon seems a lot more vulnerable than the open-hearted Treat.

That becomes crystal clear when Phillip brings home a drunken businessman named Harold (Alec Baldwin). Harold is holding a briefcase filled with valuable stocks and bonds so Phillip devises a cockamamie plan to hold Harold for ransom and make a million bucks. Too bad no one gives a damn about Harold and in fact the people Phillip contacts sound like they'd rather see Harold dead. In a very satisfying twist, Harold escapes his bonds, befriends Treat and takes Phillip under his wing. They're orphans, dead end kids just like Harold was and he wants to help them. But is Harold using them the way Phillip used Treat? Maybe he just needs a place to hide.

That's the set-up under the brisk direction of Daniel Sullivan; but this revival can't paper over the shortcomings of the original work and it's stronger on the comedy than the whiplash changes from humorous to serious. That split personality is personified by the awkward score of Tom Kitt, who veers from rock and roll in the early scenes to soppy sentiment towards the end.

The costumes by Jess Goldstein combine with the sets of John Lee Beatty for the show's most effective moment: the transformation of the home and the clothes of the characters from act one to act two. Just seeing the place spiffed up, Phillip in a sharp new suit and Treat lovingly cradle yellow loafers draw the best laughs of the evening.

Baldwin is a pro and has fun as Harold, the gangster on the lam. He certainly doesn't miss any opportunities for laughs, though without stronger support he can't hit it out of the park. Sturridge is a solid stage actor and does well in a very tricky part -- Treat can easily be infantilized, played to the hilt for easy sympathy. Sturridge doesn't quite get prickly as Treat, but it's not a performance that sacrifices authenticity for playing to the audience. Foster is the weak link here. In what is clearly his first major stab at stage acting, he has stayed on his feet. Foster nails most of the humor but can't quite pull off the tricky transitions that Phillip must go through. He wavers from unstable to sweet, from dangerous to passive, from dominating to eager to please and Foster doesn't make those changes convincing. To be fair, Phillip is a confusing construct, an idea of a hood desperate for a father figure more than a flesh and blood character. Foster can hold his head up; with more time, more experience and a better play, he might show the same talent on stage he's demonstrated in film.

Orphans will never be an orphan; it's proven too commercially successful over the years for community theater to abandon it now. But this Broadway stint has shone a harsh spotlight on a work that wisely avoided the glare its first time around.

THE TESTAMENT OF MARY ** 1/2 out of ****
WALTER KERR THEATRE

I'm a big fan of author Colm Toibin, from his work at The London Review Of Books to his nonfiction to his brilliant evocation of the writer Henry James in The Master. If you want to sample his work, start with Brooklyn, a marvelous novel that is engaging enough to be perfect for book clubs but brilliant enough to prove deeper and more satisfying than a mere entertainment. (Though god knows, a mere entertainment is something to be cherished.) Here's a profile I did of him back in 2004.

I'm also a Catholic who has loved works that draw inspiration from the Gospels, from The Last Temptation Of Christ to the Jesus Tales of playwright Romulus Linney. So you can believe I was excited to plunge into his new novel The Testament Of Mary, a monologue of sorts in which the mother of Jesus sorts through her emotions while living in a small home, constantly questioned by followers for details about his death and resurrection and dealing with the pain of having watched her child be brutally executed. While there are details not strictly kosher, it is by no means a disruptive or shocking work. It's an author giving voice to a woman who has figured prominently in Christianity but has rarely been allowed to speak. I admired the skill of his work but frankly this brief book failed to get under my skin.

Still, in the blink of an eye it has been adapted into a monologue by Toibin and staged on Broadway with the great Fiona Shaw as Mary under the direction of her longtime collaborator Deborah Warner. I've never forgiven myself for missing Shaw and Warner tackle T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (at the time, $40 for a 40 minute performance was too rich for me). So seeing them now is a treat.

Assuredly, they have breathed life and humor and sweat and tears into Toibin's piece, from the surreal set (Tom Pye) to the evocative music and sound design (Mel Mercier) to the pre-show spectacle of placing Mary in a glass box staring out beatifically into the audience while ticket holders are allowed to walk around on stage, taking pictures and trying to avoid the rather large bird perched on a shelf of sorts. This piece might have simply presented Shaw alone on a stage baring her soul; instead, they've judiciously created some genuine theater.

Here's video of the creative team chatting with Broadwayworld.com about the show.

Certainly hearing Shaw intone the words of Toibin (words he has condensed down to their essence) adds greatly to their effect. Mary is living alone sometime after her son has died. (She can't bring herself to say his name because it might break her.) Every day, followers of him come to Mary and ask her about those final days and other details of Jesus. They insist that their words will change the world. "All of it?" she asks puckishly. Oh yes, all of it.

Some wonderful insights emerge. Like most parents, it's hard for Mary to see her son as a prophet and leader; that's not heretical, surely. She also characterizes his followers as misfits; Jesus drew the misfits to him, though he wasn't one himself she insists. Mary tells of the wedding where Jesus began his public ministry, how people started treating her so very different just because she was his mother and the terrible, wrenching final day of the crucifixion.

For some reason, the raising of Lazarus always brings out the best in artists. Martin Scorsese made that miracle the awe-inspiring center of his film version of The Last Temptation Of Christ. Toibin also finds inspiration in the story, using brilliant imagery to show the frightening reality of how it happened and the way Lazarus perhaps was distraught over being pulled back into this world. It's a high point of a show that could use more focus and storytelling like that.

Above all, we are watching a woman in mourning. (The Gospels don't mention Jesus appearing to Mary after his Resurrection.) Even if her son has risen from the dead (a dream she had that it happened has since been repeated back to her as if it were fact), Mary still suffered the inutterable agony of seeing him die in a particularly painful, terrible way. Fearing for her life, she fled the scene before it was over. But when Mary bares her body and bathes in water onstage, it's not a baptism for forgiveness, it's an attempt to wash away the pain. Like any mother, she wishes this horror had never happened. He died to save the world? It wasn't worth it.

This simple, stark piece has some vivid moments, as I said. But by and large it's more vague than moment-to-moment transfixing. Shaw is surely the ideal person to deliver it. Every nuance, every laugh, every bitter insight available is drawn out of the work by her. The lighting (by Jennifer Tipton) and sound work hard to keep the proceedings varied and building to emotional peaks, with subtle changes in background lighting and the echoing crash of a chair being tossed onto the stage amplified. Simply having Shaw lug around a ladder the way Jesus shouldered the Cross (or to be accurate, probably the cross beam) can be an intriguing touch. They can't fully dramatize what is an internal and not wholly illuminating monologue, but they certainly do their best.

Frankly, it's all there at the beginning before the play proper even starts. The audience lines up in the aisles and then troops onstage, like visitors to Lourdes. They walk around, stare at the props, take photographs and encircle the glass box where Mary is sitting on a chair, holding flowers and staring ahead with an inscrutable look of warmth or wisdom or is it indifference on her face. Mary is a mother, a woman, a wife, a parent -- that's her testament. She's a living, breathing person. But even before she's opened her mouth Mary has been boxed in, put on display and positioned more like a statue than a human being. After all, that's what draws the crowds. And when she's behind glass you never have to worry about her stating any uncomfortable truths.

THE DRAWER BOY ** out of ****
SOHO PLAYHOUSE

It took far too long for The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey to make its New York debut. This solid, low-key effort may be set on a farm in Canada in the 1970s, but it's a universal story. The play debuted in 1999 and has been a major regional hit ever since. Like Orphans, this play is a three-hander that only needs a kitchen and a small outdoor space to tell its story. The staging at Soho Playhouse is far from ideal and only one of the three actors really nails their role, but it's enough to see the piece has merit.

The story is simple. Miles (Alex Fast) is a very earnest actor who has come to this small town with a troupe. They're embedding themselves in the lives of local farmers so they can create a new piece that captures what life is like for this community. Morgan (Brad Fryman) is nonplussed by the kid's eager desire to capture truth and beauty and the plight of the farmer. But a farm can always use an extra pair of hands so he lets the kid stay. Miles soon understands how isolated Morgan truly is since the stoic farmer's main contact day after day is Angus (William Laney). They were best friends fighting overseas when Angus was hit during the Blitz and became the rather slow and simple man he is today, incapable of remembering much of anything but the simplest of daily chores. Miles has to introduce himself to Angus over and over again.

Needless to say, the well-intentioned but rather clueless Miles upends their routine with disastrous, even dangerous results. He overhears Morgan repeating the story of how Angus got injured. It's clearly an oft-told tale involving London, possible war brides that get killed in an auto accident and plans for a home that would contain two families on one farm, a home that was never built. Miles uses this story in the theater piece his company is working on. Morgan is humiliated, it seems, but Angus is thrilled. He understands what Miles was doing ("That was us!") and even remembers it. For the first time he actually remembers the story and who Miles is and the details of the tragedy that stunted their lives. Angus wants to visit the graves of the two women they were going to marry. The only problem, we realize, is that the story isn't true.

Like Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce (and many other plays), this show is about the stories we tell ourselves to keep going. They don't have to be true to help, of course and Morgan means no harm. Fryman is excellent as Morgan and lets us know how much more satisfying this play might be with a stronger production. He makes the most of the monologue in Act One where Morgan tells Angus their "bedtime" story while sitting under the stars. And in Act Two he's even better when finally telling Angus the real story about what happened to them. Fryman has fun teasing the actor in their midst, pretending the cows live in terror of being eaten or ordering the kid to polish gravel before they throw it in a ditch. But his wry sense of humor doesn't disguise an innate seriousness or the emotional toll of the burden Morgan has carried all these years.

Laney has a difficult part as the slow, forgetful Angus. It's an awkward role but you can imagine it not feeling so awkward in other hands. It's telling that when he quotes a poem at the end, it comes across without any meaning or beauty. Weakest of all is Fast as that rather dim-witted actor. Miles sometimes seems even slower on the upkeep than Angus. His stagecraft isn't in the same league as Fryman; for example, when he's in the kitchen and Fryman is telling that hypnotic story, it takes a while before we realize Miles can hear what's being said. Even after it's clear and he's standing by the door, eavesdropping, we have no sense of him following the story or being moved by its import.

Soho Playhouse is a tiny place but the set by Rebecca Lord-Surratt nonetheless feels ungainly. Alexander Dinelaris directs but you get the strong impression Fryman didn't need any while Fast and Laney could have used a lot more. Perhaps after 14 years Healey deserved even better. But despite the many flaws the appeal of the play -- and the talent of Fryman -- shine through.

THE THEATER SEASON 2012-2013 (on a four star scale)

As You Like it (Shakespeare in the Park withLily Rabe) ****
Chimichangas And Zoloft *
Closer Than Ever ***
Cock ** 1/2
Harvey with Jim Parsons *
My Children! My Africa! ***
Once On This Island ***
Potted Potter *
Storefront Church ** 1/2
Title And Deed ***
Picture Incomplete (NYMF) **
Flambe Dreams (NYMF) **
Rio (NYMF) **
The Two Month Rule (NYMF) *
Trouble (NYMF) ** 1/2
Stealing Time (NYMF) **
Requiem For A Lost Girl (NYMF) ** 1/2
Re-Animator The Musical (NYMF) ***
Baby Case (NYMF) ** 1/2
How Deep Is The Ocean (NYMF) ** 1/2
Central Avenue Breakdown (NYMF) ***
Foreverman (NYMF) * 1/2
Swing State (NYMF) * 1/2
Stand Tall: A Rock Musical (NYMF) * 1/2
Living With Henry (NYMF) *
A Letter To Harvey Milk (NYMF) ** 1/2
The Last Smoker In America **
Gore Vidal's The Best Man (w new cast) ***
Into The Woods at Delacorte ** 1/2
Bring It On: The Musical **
Bullet For Adolf *
Summer Shorts Series B: Paul Rudnick, Neil LaBute, etc. **
Harrison, TX ***
Dark Hollow: An Appalachian "Woyzeck" (FringeNYC) * 1/2
Pink Milk (FringeNYC)* 1/2
Who Murdered Love (FringeNYC) no stars
Storytime With Mr. Buttermen (FringeNYC) **
#MormonInChief (FringeNYC) **
An Interrogation Primer (FringeNYC) ***
An Evening With Kirk Douglas (FringeNYC) *
Sheherizade (FringeNYC) **
The Great Pie Robbery (FringeNYC) ** 1/2
Independents (FringeNYC) *** 1/2
The Dick and The Rose (FringeNYC) **
Magdalen (FringeNYC) ***
Bombsheltered (FringeNYC) ** 1/2
Paper Plane (FringeNYC) ** 1/2
Rated M For Murder (FringeNYC) ** 1/2
Mallory/Valerie (FringeNYC) *
Non-Equity: The Musical! (FringeNYC) *
Blanche: The Bittersweet Life Of A Prairie Dame (FringeNYC) *** 1/2
City Of Shadows (FringeNYC) ***
Forbidden Broadway: Alive & Kicking ***
Salamander Starts Over (FringeNYC) ***
Pieces (FringeNYC) *
The Train Driver ***
Chaplin The Musical * 1/2
Detroit ** 1/2
Heartless at Signature **
Einstein On The Beach at BAM ****
Red-Handed Otter ** 1/2
Marry Me A Little **
An Enemy Of The People ** 1/2
The Old Man And The Old Moon *** 1/2
A Chorus Line at Papermill ***
Helen & Edgar ***
Grace * 1/2
Cyrano de Bergerac **
Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? ***
Disgraced **
Annie ** 1/2
The Heiress **
Checkers ** 1/2
Ivanov ***
Golden Child at Signature ** 1/2
Giant at the Public *** 1/2
Scandalous * 1/2
Forever Dusty **
The Performers **
The Piano Lesson at Signature *** 1/2
Un Ballo In Maschera at the Met *** 1/2 (singing) * (production) so call it ** 1/2
A Christmas Story: The Musical **
The Sound Of Music at Papermill ***
My Name Is Asher Lev *** 1/2
Golden Boy **
A Civil War Christmas ** 1/2
Dead Accounts **
The Anarchist *
Glengarry Glen Ross **
Bare **
The Mystery Of Edwin Drood ** 1/2
The Great God Pan ** 1/2
The Other Place ** 1/2
Picnic * 1/2
Opus No. 7 ** 1/2
Deceit * 1/2
Life And Times Episodes 1-4 **
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (w Scarlett Johansson) * 1/2
The Jammer ***
Blood Play ** 1/2
Manilow On Broadway ** 1/2
Women Of Will ** 1/2
All In The Timing ***
Isaac's Eye ***
Bunnicula: A Rabbit Tale Of Musical Mystery ** 1/2
The Mnemonist Of Dutchess County * 1/2
Much Ado About Nothing ***
Really Really *
Parsifal at the Met *** 1/2
The Madrid * 1/2
The Wild Bride at St. Ann's ** 1/2
Passion at CSC *** 1/2
Carousel at Lincoln Center ***
The Revisionist **
Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella ***
Rock Of Ages * 1/2
Ann ** 1/2
Old Hats ***
The Flick ***
Detroit '67 ** 1/2
Howling Hilda reading * (Mary Testa ***)
Hit The Wall *
Breakfast At Tiffany's * 1/2
The Mound Builders at Signature *
Vanya And Sonia And Masha And Spike *** 1/2
Cirque Du Soleil's Totem ***
The Lying Lesson * 1/2
Hands On A Hardbody *
Kinky Boots **
Matilda The Musical *** 1/2
The Rascals: Once Upon A Dream ***
Motown: The Musical **
La Ruta ** 1/2
The Big Knife *
The Nance ***
The Assembled Parties ** 1/2
Jekyll & Hyde * 1/2
Thoroughly Modern Millie ** 1/2
Macbeth w Alan Cumming *

Thanks for reading. Michael Giltz is the cohost of Showbiz Sandbox, a weekly pop culture podcast that reveals the industry take on entertainment news of the day and features top journalists and opinion makers as guests. It's available for free on iTunes. Visit Michael Giltz at his website and his daily blog. Download his podcast of celebrity interviews and his radio show, also called Popsurfing and also available for free on iTunes. Link to him on Netflix and gain access to thousands of ratings and reviews.

Note: Michael Giltz is provided with free tickets to shows with the understanding that he will be writing a review. All productions are in New York City unless otherwise indicated.

?

Follow Michael Giltz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelgiltz

"; var coords = [-5, -72]; // display fb-bubble FloatingPrompt.embed(this, html, undefined, 'top', {fp_intersects:1, timeout_remove:2000,ignore_arrow: true, width:236, add_xy:coords, class_name: 'clear-overlay'}); });

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-giltz/theater-alec-baldwin-adop_b_3160326.html

Olympic Schedule Kyla Ross Montenegro Olympic Games Dana Vollmer Ryan Dempster Phelps