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To read a transcript of President Obama's address go here.
The White House announced: "This week the President recaps a busy week, from strides on fiscal discipline, to financial stability, to cracking down on tax havens and tax breaks for shifting jobs overseas. For his next big step, he calls for a credit card reform bill: "Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe. But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees that have become all-too common in our credit card industry." Watch Your Weekly Address to hear what he plans to do about it."
The White House continued: "In his weekly address, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pass a credit card reform bill, so that he can sign it into law by Memorial Day. The American people know that they must act responsibly and fairly, and credit institutions must do the same. Sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties, and hidden fees are too common and are hurting too many people. The set of principles the President has advocated will bring strong and reliable protections to consumers and strengthen monitoring, enforcement, and penalties for credit card companies that attempt to take advantage of ordinary Americans.
The New York Times reported: "President Obama called on Congress to pass a credit card reform bill, aimed at trying to stop credit card companies from imposing certain late fees.
"Saying that he is focusing on “clearing away the wreckage of this recession,” Mr. Obama focused his weekly radio address on the credit card legislation in Congress.
“Americans know that they have a responsibility to live within their means and pay what they owe,” Mr. Obama said. “But they also have a right to not get ripped off by the sudden rate hikes, unfair penalties and hidden fees that have become all too common to our credit card industry.”
"Mr. Obama will hold a town hall meeting next week in New Mexico to promote the bill, White House officials said on Friday.
"American banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, are facing new rules issued by the Federal Reserve that are aimed at preventing abusive credit card practices. The rules are supposed to be put in place by July 2010; several lawmakers and consumer groups say that date is too far off to help people who are struggling now.
"The credit card bill would aim to fix that by codifying the rules now. It would, among other things, make it illegal to market the cards to minors.
“You shouldn’t have to fear that any new credit card is going to come with strings attached, nor should you need a magnifying glass and a reference book to read a credit card application,” Mr. Obama said. “It is past time for rules that are fair and transparent.”
"He said that he was calling on Congress “to take final action to pass a credit card reform bill that protects American consumers so that I can sign it into law by Memorial Day.”
“There is no time for delay,” Mr. Obama said. “We need a durable and successful flow of credit in our economy, but we can’t tolerate profits that depend on misleading working families. Those days are over.”
"On Today Now!, Jim and Tracy meet James Kimura, a 12-year-old afflicted with the ability to spell long words normal kids don't even care about.."
Star Trek fans decry the new Star Trek prequel as beeing too different from previous Star Trek movies because it is "Fun," and "Watchable;" it even includes subtitles to allow non-Klingon speaking movie-goers to understand what the Kingons are saying!
"This has nothing to do with questions about where all the water came from, where it went, and how all those animals got into the ark. It's about the sedimentary evidence that shows there never was."
This is the second part of the Noah's Flood debunk. It's only showing two aspects of this myth which are easily blown out of the water ... sedimentary rock formations and the sorting of fossils."
It is a well established postulate that knowledge passes "from generation to generation in the animal kingdom as parents teach their children the things they will need to survive. But a new study has found that, even when the chain is broken, nature sometimes finds a way."
"Zebra finches, which normally learn their complex courtship songs from their fathers, spontaneously developed the same songs all on their own after only a few generations.
“We found that in this case, the culture was pretty much encoded in the genome,” said Partha Mitra of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, co-author of a study in Nature on Sunday.
"Birds transmit their songs through social interactions, as humans do for languages, dances, cuisine and other cultural elements. Though birds and humans have clearly followed different evolutionary paths, birdsong culture can still inform theories of human culture.
"Normally, male finches learn their complex courtship songs from their uncles and fathers. But if there are no vocal role models around, the song will deviate from the traditional song and be harsh to female finch ears. Each bird, then, must learn from his father or uncles, as they learned from their fathers, and so on — but this can only take us so far down the lineage.
“It’s the classic ‘chicken and the egg’ puzzle,” Mitra said. “Learning may explain how the son copies its father’s song, but it doesn’t explain the origin of the father’s song.”
"Mitra’s team wanted to find out what would happen if an isolated bird raised his own colony. As expected, birds raised in soundproof boxes grew up to sing cacophonous songs.
"But then scientists let the isolated birds give voice lessons to a new round of hatchlings. They found that the young males imitated the songs — but they tweaked them slightly, bringing the structure closer to that of songs sung in the wild. When these birds grew up and became tutors, their pupils’ song continue to conform, with tweaks.
"After three to four generations, the teachers were producing strapping young finches that belted out normal-sounding songs.
“It all happened so fast, and there was so little difference between the colony and in the one-to-one tutoring environment,” said lead author Olga Fehér of City College of New York. “So the process is pretty much hardwired. And the interesting thing was also that they could only get so close in a single generation, so the three to four generations were necessary for the phenotype to emerge.”
“Song culture can emerge ‘from the egg,’ as it were, if one allows for multiple generations to elapse,” Mitra said. ”In a similar way, we may ‘grow’ our languages.”
"Though there are approximately 6,000 different languages in the world, they all share certain structural and syntactic elements. Even when a language arises spontaneously, as it did in the 1970s among deaf school children in Nicaragua, it adheres to these stereotypical human language features.
“We can think about both birdsong and human culture — especially language but including other aspects of human culture, like music, cuisine, dance styles, rituals, technological achievements, clothing styles, pottery decoration and a host of others — in similar terms,” he said. These culturally-transmitted systems must all pass through the filter of biology.
“Look at all the different human cultures,” said Mitra. “They’re different, but they’re all within certain constraints, so those differences aren’t genetic. But now compare with the chimp culture — there are key differences. The possibilities between those cultures are constrained by biology.”
"Mitra admits that the analogies between bird culture and human culture are tenuous. “But there are resemblances. Culture is just learned behaviors. The motivating scenario is, if you isolate human babies from culture, put them on an island and come back after a few generations, what would their culture be like? What sort of language would they have? What sort of politics would evolve?”
"That experiment probably won’t take place in the near future. In the meantime, Fitch says we can learn valuable lessons about human culture from songbirds, both at theoretical and mechanistic levels.
“Social learning is shared between the two, and songbirds are a well-understood and experimentally tractable system,” he said. “These biologically-grounded studies will lead us beyond the tired ‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘biology versus culture’ dichotomies which dominate the social sciences today.”
"Sean Gourley, trained as a physicist, has turned his scientific mind to analyzing data about a messier topic: modern war and conflict.
"Physicist Sean Gourley thinks he may be able to model and predict violence in Iraq.
"And it's not just Iraq; Gourley, who works for the San Fransisco-based startup You Noodle, has used his military side project to map the distribution of attacks in wars in Afghanistan, Colombia and Senegal as well. His finding: the casualties in all four of those conflicts, despite the chaos, fall into a precise mathematical distribution.
"Using data from 130 publicly-available sources like newspapers, cable news, and NGO reports, Gourley and his team think they may have found the nature of war. By plotting the deaths in each conflict by time, place and frequency, Gourley discovered that the casualties fell along a well-clustered line of best fit, with a common slope of 2.5. That, he believes, means that his model could be used to predict the probability of attack in a given place.
"The secret lies in the group dynamics of the enemy. At a certain point in a war, Gouley argues, insurgent forces must adapt one of two specific models, or they collapse; they either become weaker and more numerous, or stronger and more consolidated. The degree to which they achieve one extreme or another corresponds to the slope of the line Gouley has graphed. To find out what his data says about the success of the recent surge in Iraq, watch the TED talk," http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/chris-dannen/techwatch/predicting-attacks-iraq.
"A Rhodes scholar, he's spent the past five years working at Oxford on complex adaptive systems and collective intelligent systems -- basically, using data to understand the nature of human conflict. As he puts it, "This research has taken me all over the world from the Pentagon, to the House of Lords, the United Nations and most recently to Iraq. I'm currently working as a political advisor to the new Iraqi government." Originally from New Zealand, he now lives in San Francisco, where he works on the internet startup younoodle.com and competes in decathlons."
Gourley explains: "I've spent the best part of the last 5 years studying at Oxford and trying to understand the mathematical patterns that seem to underly modern warfare. This research has taken me all over the world from the Pentagon, to the House of Lords, the United Nations and most recently to Iraq. I'm currently working as a political advisor to the new Iraqi government and writing a book about my research and experiences."
"The European Consortium For Mathematics in Industry was told today that an international team has developed a physics-based theory describing the dynamics of insurgent group formation and attacks, which neatly explains the universal patterns observed in all modern wars and terrorism.
"The team is advising the United Nations, the Pentagon and Iraq.
"Regardless of the origins and locations of modern conflicts, the insurgent groups in each case are operating in the same way. In short, it is effectively the same enemy on all fronts," said Prof Neil Johnson, of the University of Miami, who did work with Prof Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway College, University of London, Dr Sean Gourley, University of Oxford and colleagues in China and Columbia.
"The team told the meeting in University College London how it has taken advantage of the rise in amount of information available on conflicts, by filtering hundreds of online news sources and Government reports, and an emerging field, called complexity science.
"We use advanced computer simulations and mathematical models to create a plausible microscopic mechanism to explain the collective behaviour observed in a wide range of human conflict situations - from ongoing insurgent wars and terrorism, through to street-gangs and even online games," said Dr Gourley.
"Most remarkable, "or the case of modern insurgent conflicts, our results are in close agreement with observed casualty data."
"What we found was really quite startling," said Prof Johnson. "Although wars are the antithesis of an ordered system, the datapoints for each war fell neatly on to a straight line."
"The line meant they obeyed what scientists call a power law. The "power laws" describe mathematical relationships between the frequency of large and small events.
"This finding is remarkable given the different conditions, locations and durations of these separate wars. For example, the Iraq war is being fought in the desert and cities and is fairly recent, while the twenty-year old Colombian war is being fought in mountainous jungle regions against a back-drop of drug-trafficking and Mafia activity.
"This came as a shock, said the team, since the last thing one would expect to find within the chaos of a warzone are mathematical patterns.
"Wars are supposed to be chaotic places with random attacks, disorder and violence, yet patterns do exist and these patterns are the same for different wars all around the world from Sierra Leone to Iraq, Colombia and Afghanistan.
"This power-law finding also has some very important practical implications in terms of military planning. It means there is no typical size of event - unlike the bell-curve for population heights, for example, which is centred around an average height," said Prof Johnson.
"Deadly events with many casualties will occur-rarely, but they will occur. This is again unlike the case of heights, where the chances that someone will be taller than ten feet are truly negligible."
"Because it is a power-law distribution we know that conflicts are dominated by small attacks usually killing one or two people, but unlike what would be expected from a normal distribution, attacks that kill 100+ people will occur with a relatively high frequency," added Dr Gourley.
"We can use the power-law distribution to accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day. This is useful for military planning and allocating resources to hospitals.
"However the strength of the approach goes beyond simple statistics. By using the power-law distribution we can understand how insurgent cells form and break apart and how the insurgency as a whole is structured.
"Then by tracking the slope of the power-law, we can see in real-time how the structure of the insurgency changes in response to external actions such as the surge in Iraq."
"In particular, it suggests that the dynamics of insurgent group formation are the same across all arenas-from the jungles of Colombia through to the deserts of Iraq, and including the entire world stage of global terrorism.
"In short, the way in which modern wars and terrorism are being waged has less to do with geography or ideology, and more to do with the day-to-day mechanics of human insurgency- it is simply the way in which insurgent groups of human beings fight when faced with a much stronger, but more rigid, opponent.
"As a consequence of this, it would seem that unless the stronger, but more rigid, opponent can change its tactics, the same statistical patterns of casualties will be repeated indefinitely into the future.
"Unless this structure is changed then the cycle of violence in places like Iraq will continue," said Dr Gourley." We have used this analysis to advise the Pentagon, the Iraqi government and the United Nations."
