High school football Q&A: Owasso's James Willis

By MIKE BROWN World Sports Writer on May 22, 2013, at 2:23 AM??

Q&A: James Willis Owasso, DE

Willis and his family lived in Moss Point, Miss., until 2005 when Hurricane Katrina destroyed their home. They were moved to Owasso by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He was the Rams' leading pass-rusher last season, totaling 6 1/2 sacks, and had 79 tackles.

Do you remember what it was like being in Hurricane Katrina?

I was outside playing basketball, having a good time, and then my dad came out and warned us that there was gonna be a hurricane.

What happened next?

We had to go to a shelter. We went to the New Orleans (Louisiana Superdome) football stadium.

What are the differences between here and where you grew up?

Mississippi is more humid than Oklahoma. It has a different atmosphere. I feel more at home when I go back there. I love Owasso, but it's not my hometown. Most of my family still lives in Mississippi.

What are you planning to do this summer?

I plan on helping my team by becoming a better football player and getting a summer job.

Have you had many jobs in the past?

Not besides babysitting, and sometimes I'll help people who are moving.

Babysitting? Have you done a lot of that?

My (oldest) sister pays me to watch my nephews and I'll watch my little sisters.

How many sisters do you have?

I have seven. The one is on her own, and then I have six others. The youngest are 11, 14 and 15. And I have (an 18-year-old) twin.

What have you learned from growing up around so many females?

That you won't ever win an argument with a girl.

What other jobs are you looking for?

I would mow grass or do just about anything to make a little money. It wouldn't matter.

What are your plans after Owasso?

Hopefully get a scholarship to play football and get my college paid for.

Original Print Headline: Q and A

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Source: http://www.tulsaworld.com/article.aspx/High_school_football_QA_Owassos_James_Willis/20130522_227_B5_ULNSbQ12390?rss_lnk=227

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Copyright 101.2 : Columbia Journalism Review

How CopyrightX managed to convince hundreds of online students to stick with a course on copyright law

CopyrightX, an online course run out of Harvard this spring as part of the EdX program, was unusual in a couple of ways. It might not strictly be called a MOOC?a massive open online course?because it wasn?t open. More than four thousand people applied, and enrollment was capped at 500. Half of the selected students were women. There were equal number of students from the United States and from other countries. Students outside the US came from 70 different countries, in total. The youngest student was 13, the oldest 83. Although CopyrightX was a class about copyright law, only thirty of the 500 students were lawyers.

And these students stuck with the course. Most online courses have an appalling rate of attrition. Students start out with the best of intentions. But week after week, lecture after long, academic lecture, commitment flags. Usually around 90 percent of students drop out. For CopyrightX, two-thirds of those students made it through until the end. Fully half of them took the final exam ?a typically grueling and mind-bending, four-hour law school take-home test, not much different from the exam Prof. Fisher gave Harvard Law School students.

?We built this course in part to engage people on a sustained basis, and they stuck with it,? Fisher says. The course?s design helped deliver that outcome: a team at Harvard spent months before the course thinking about how it would work. They focused on creating small groups, led by Harvard Law teaching fellows, that would meet regularly online to discuss course materials. The teaching fellows and the project?s coordinator, Nathaniel Levy, met regularly during the spring term to assess how the tools they were using to engage online students were working. But that deliberate design included the choice of materials, too. Fisher teaches real property law, legal history, and the various subfields of intellectual property law, and among those options he chose copyright as the subject of the course for a reason.

?All of the subfields of intellectual property are very important from an economics standpoint now, but copyright is the most culturally significant,? he says. ?It influences the most diverse array of cultural practices? It permeates our life. It seemed a subject appropriate for an audience that I expected would be predominantly non-lawyers.?

Many of the students worked in fields where copyright law affected their work and livelihood?film, photography, software design, library science, and music. These are people who copyright law is meant to serve and who, proponents of copyright reform often say, are being badly served by a law that?s difficult for non-lawyers to understand. But it does seem that?for anyone willing to devote hours each week to law lectures and discussion sections?it is possible.

The CopyrightX class ran parallel to Fisher?s traditional Harvard Law class on copyright, and the two courses shared materials. The recorded lectures that CopyrightX students watched had to be at the same level as lectures prepared for some of the smartest law students in the country, because those students were watching them, too, in place of some of their more traditional lecture sections. If anything, Fisher says, the lectures were ?more sophisticated than I congenitally produce in class, because I had more time to prepare them.? Some CopyrightX students initially struggled to adapt to the difficulty of reading dry case law, but, like any law student, they got the hang of it quickly enough. By the end of the course, it was clear that ?people without any legal training can embed knowledge of copyright law into their own work and play,? says Fisher.

Although the CopyrightX was successful, limiting enrollment posed a problem. Fisher is committed to openness in education, a principle in tension with the decision to limit the class? size. As a partial solution, Fisher made all the materials for the course available online, under a Creative Commons license, and invited others to lead their own version of the course.

One group that took up this challenge (at the urging of another Harvard Law professor) was based in Jamaica and led by Sarah Hsia Hall, a Harvard Law graduate. This group aimed to explore a simple question: ?How can we shape copyright law in a way that enables us to better mobilize our creative content?? Jamaica has a remarkably high debt-per-capita ratio, but it also has Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Bob Marley.

?Copyright mobilizes creative content, and creative content is what Jamaica does best,? says Hall.

Like the enrolled CopyrightX students, Hall?s group watched Fisher?s lectures each week and met in a small group. ?I would edit the reading for length because my crew was not a set of hard-core academics,? she said. When she could, she used examples from Jamaica of the issues they were discussing. Her class included law students, one of Jamaica?s biggest music producers, the head of the country?s IP office, a high-ranking judge, an art critics, a visual artist, a prolific reggae writer and singer, and a record distributor and house music producer. Copyright discussions can get rowdy, and with such a diverse group of students with strong opinions, there was always some discord in the discussions, Hall said.

?They were hearing perspectives that they?d never heard before,? she says. ?The judge would say these things and the whole class was like ?What??? But it was great because they got to see what the practical judicial perspective is versus the creative perspective.?

Although, in the lectures, Fisher presents various ways of understanding the law, he, too, has a perspective, on how both copyright and legal online education should work. To get a better sense of his view on copyright, check out Lecture 10 from CopyrightX. To get a better sense of his view on online legal education, consider applying for the class next year, when it will be offered again.

?The goal is to create, in an online setting, the kind of supervised discussions?discussions moderated by people who know the subject?that grip people and direct them along paths that are enlightening. It?s that combination that creates value,? Fisher says. ?My goal is to make that value available widely, without charging.?

Disclosure: CJR has received funding from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to cover intellectual-property issues, but the organization has no influence on the content.

Sarah Laskow is a writer and editor in New York City. Her work has appeared in print and online in Grist, Good, The American Prospect, Salon, The New Republic, and other publications.

Source: http://www.cjr.org/cloud_control/copyright_1012.php?page=all

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Senate panel approves immigration bill

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., right, confers with the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 20, 2013, as the committee assembles to work on a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions. The panel is aiming to pass the legislation out of committee this week, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., right, confers with the committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 20, 2013, as the committee assembles to work on a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions. The panel is aiming to pass the legislation out of committee this week, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senate Judiciary Committee members Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., left, and Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. confer on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, May 20, 2013, as the committee assembled to work on a landmark immigration bill to secure the border and offer citizenship to millions. The panel is aiming to pass the legislation out of committee this week, setting up a high-stakes debate on the Senate floor. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Far-reaching legislation that grants a chance at citizenship to millions of immigrants living illegally in the United States cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on a solid bipartisan vote Tuesday night after supporters somberly sidestepped a controversy over the rights of gay spouses.

The 13-5 vote cleared the way for an epic showdown on the Senate floor on legislation that is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities ? yet also gives the Republican Party a chance to recast itself as more appealing to minorities.

The action sparked rejoicing from immigration activists who crowded into a Senate committee room to witness the proceedings. "Yes, we can! Si, se puede" they shouted, reprising the campaign cry from Obama's first run for the White House in 2008.

In addition to creating a pathway to citizenship for 11.5 million immigrants, the legislation creates a new program for low-skilled foreign labor and would permit highly skilled workers into the country at far higher levels than is currently the case.

At the same time, it requires the government to take costly new steps to guard against future illegal immigration.

In a statement, Obama said the measure is "largely consistent with the principles of common-sense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system."

There was suspense to the end of the committee's deliberations, when Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who serves as chairman, sparked a debate over his proposal to give same-sex and heterosexual spouses equal rights under immigration law.

"I don't want to be the senator who asks people to choose between the love of their life and the love of their country," he said, adding he wanted to hear from others on the committee.

In response, he heard a chorus of pleas from the bill's supporters, seconding private appeals from the White House, not to force a vote that they warned would lead to the collapse of Republican support and the bill's demise.

"I believe in my heart of hearts that what you're doing is the right and just thing," said one, Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "But I believe this is the wrong moment, that this is the wrong bill."

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat who has played a central role in advancing the legislation, said he would have voted against the proposal if Leahy had pressed the case ? a defection that would have caused it to fail on a tie even if the rest of the committee Democrats stuck with Leahy. But even before Durbin and Schumer spoke, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., voiced her opposition to Leahy's provision, and after listening to the debate Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also joined in with reluctant concerns.

In the hours leading to a final vote, the panel also agreed to a last-minute compromise covering an increase in the visa program for high-tech workers, a deal that brought Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah over to the ranks of supporters.

Under the compromise, the number of highly skilled workers admitted to the country would rise from 65,000 annually to 110,000, with the possibility of a further increase to 180,000, depending in part on unemployment levels.

Firms where foreign labor accounts for at least 15 percent of the skilled work force would be subjected to tighter conditions than companies less dependent on H-IB visa holders.

The compromise was negotiated by Hatch, whose state is home to a growing high tech industry, and Schumer. It is designed to balance the interests of industry, which relies increasingly on skilled foreign labor, and organized labor, which represents American workers.

AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka attacked the deal sharply as "anti-worker," although he also made clear organized labor would continue to support the overall legislation.

Robert Hoffman, senior vice president for government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council, welcomed the deal. "We obviously want to keep moving the bill forward and building support for the legislation, and this agreement allows us to do so," he said.

The issue of same-sex spouses hovered in the background from the start, and as the committee neared the end of its work, officials said Leahy had been informed that both the White House and Senate Democrats hoped he would not risk the destruction of months of painstaking work by putting the issue to a vote.

"There have been 300 amendments. Why shouldn't we have one more?" he told reporters at one point, hours before calling the committee into session for a final time to debate the legislation.

A few hours later, Republicans and Democrats both answered his question bluntly.

"This would fracture the coalition. I could not support the bill," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was a member of the bipartisan so-called Gang of Eight that drafted the core elements of the bill.

Republicans and Democrats alike also noted that the Supreme Court may soon issue a ruling that renders the controversy moot.

In a statement issued after Leahy's action, Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said his group was "extremely disappointed that our allies did not put their anti-LGBT colleagues on the spot and force a vote on the measure that remains popular with the American people."

The issue is certain to re-emerge when the full Senate debates the legislation, although it is doubtful that sponsors can command the 60 votes that will be needed to make it part of the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said he will bring the legislation to the Senate floor early next month for a debate that some aides predict could consume a month or more, with an outcome that is impossible to predict.

The fate of immigration legislation in the House is even less clear, although it is due to receive a hearing in the Judiciary Committee there on Wednesday.

Despite the concern that bipartisan support for the legislation was fragile, there was no doubting the command over committee proceedings that Senate backers held.

In a final reminder, an attempt by Sen. Ted Cruz., R-Texas, to delete the pathway to citizenship failed on a 13-5 vote.

In defeat, he and others said they, too, wanted to overhaul immigration law, but not the way that drafters of the legislation had done.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recalled that he had voted to give "amnesty" to those in the country illegally in 1986, the last time Congress passed major immigration legislation. He said that bill, like the current one, promised to crack down on illegal immigration, but said it had failed to do so.

"No one disputes that this bill is legalization first, enforcement later. And, that's just unacceptable to me and to the American people," he said shortly before the vote.

On the final vote, three Republicans ? Hatch, Graham and Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. ? joined the 10 committee Democrats in supporting the bill.

The centerpiece provision of the legislation allows the millions of people living in the U.S. illegally to obtain "registered provisional immigrant status" six months after enactment if certain conditions are also met.

Applicants must have arrived in the United States before Dec. 31, 2011, and maintained continuous physical presence, must not have a felony conviction of more than two misdemeanors on their record, and pay a $500 fine.

The registered provisional immigrant status lasts six years and is renewable for another $500. After a decade, though, individuals could seek a green card and lawful permanent resident status if they are up to date on their taxes and pay a $1,000 fine and meet other conditions.

Individuals brought to the country as youths would be able to apply for green cards in five years.

___

AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-21-US-Immigration/id-420171b50b6f455cb43276ea1cd680a6

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Tornado-Proofing Cities in the Age of Extreme Weather

Right now the death toll from the massive tornado that hit Moore, Oklahoma on May 20 seems?thankfully?to be less than first thought. City officials now say that 24 people have been confirmed dead, down from 51 people last night, due to double counting of some bodies in the confusion. But the new number still includes 9 children, and the toll could rise as rescuers search through the rubble.

This is the second time in less than 15 years that the town of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, has been hit squarely by a major tornado. That?s mostly down to bad luck?although Oklahoma City area might as well be the buckle of the tornado belt, as Alexis Madrigal points out in the Atlantic, the chances of actually being hit by a major tornado even in this danger zone remain low. Though I doubt that will provide much comfort to the grieving residents of Moore as they dig out from yet another destructive twister.

But as unlikely as a major tornado remains, the hundreds of twisters that touch down in the U.S. still cause major damage?second only to hurricanes, according to the reinsurer Munich Re. Few ordinary structures can withstand a direct hit from a tornado as strong as the one that passed through Moore yesterday, which now ranks as an EF5, with winds above 200 mph. Not much could have saved the homes and businesses destroyed by the Moore twister, but is there a way to ensure that the lives of people in tornado country can be protected from extreme weather?

The answer is yes?with the right policy and the right incentives. But first we have to understand how the risks from extreme weather are changing?and for the most part, increasing. (Hat tip to Andrew Revkin of Dot Earth, whose post earlier today touched on much of this material.) As I wrote yesterday, there?s no clear trend on the frequency or strength of tornadoes hitting the U.S. It had actually been a historically quiet 12 months for tornadoes until recently. And it?s not clear what, if any, impact warming temperatures are having on tornadoes.

(PHOTOS:?Tornado Flattens Oklahoma City Suburb, Kills Dozens)

But according to Peter Hoeppe, the head of the Geo Risks department at the Munich Reinsurance company, damages from tornadoes have been growing over the long term?a trend that?s been driven chiefly by the increase of people and property in vulnerable areas, like the tornado belt. More people in harm?s way mean more people to be harmed when a twister touches down. ?This is the major loss driver for both tornadoes and hurricanes,? says Hoeppe.

The population of Oklahoma City increased from around 400,000 in 1980 to nearly 600,000 today, driven in part by the city?s booming, fossil fuel-driven economy. In Moore, a major suburb of Oklahoma City, population has increased by some 57% since 1980, to 55,000 now. That?s a fairly dense for tornado country, which meant a lot of people and property were in the path of the twister on May 20. Just as the rapid growth of population along the coasts has made us more vulnerable to hurricanes and coastal flooding, more people in the tornado belt can multiply the damage done by those twisters

The best way to survive an EF4 or EF5 tornado is in an underground shelter, or in a specially-designed safe room. Cellars would be ideal, but as Megan Garber explains in the Atlantic, the environment in Oklahoma is not:

The relative dearth of storm cellars in Oklahoma comes down, as things so often do, to environmental factors. The soil in the state is composed largely of clay ? and that?s particularly true in central Oklahoma, where Moore is located. (?Soils in the Central Rolling Red Prairies,? geologists at Oklahoma State put it (pdf), ?are dark and loamy with clayey to loamy subsoils developed on Permian shales, mudstones, sandstones and/or alluvial deposits under tall grasses.?)

Building a private structure and full underground shelter that could withstand a major tornado is certainly possible, but as the economist Kevin Simmons of Austin College told me, ?it would be out of the reach of anyone who is not wealthy.? Private safe rooms can be built?Simmons, who lives in tornado country north of Dallas, just put one in his own house for $4,000?but it?s still likely to be out of the reach of a lot of people in Oklahoma.

The state of Oklahoma and the federal government have begun to use financial incentives to encourage more resilient construction in tornado zones. Oklahoma is instituting a lottery to provide people with a maximum rebate of $2,000 to go towards building a tornado safe room, using funds provided by the federal government. More than 10,000 above and below-ground safe rooms have been built so far using that money.

But that funding comes with trade offs. In a 2006 study Simmons co-authored with Daniel Sutter of the University of Texas-Pan American, Simmons found that a program for building safe rooms in permanent dwellings would cost $52 million for every life saved. That ?exceeds estimate of the value of a statistical life based on market tradeoffs,? as the authors wrote. (?This is where economists sound horrible,? Simmons notes.) Those figures reflect just how rare tornado fatalities remain today, especially ones that occur to people living in permanent dwellings, which can usually weather the weaker but more common twisters. The chance of death from tornado if you live in a mobile home is 10 times greater, however, since they provide virtually no place to shelter in the event of a twister. Simmons estimates that the cost of saving a life by building a safe rooms for mobile homes?which would most likely take the form of a collective shelter for an entire trailer park?is a comparatively economical $4.8 million. ?There may be some good arguments made for some form of public assistance to build community shelters in trailer parks,? says Simmons.

Another place where shelters and safe rooms are important is in schools. Many of the children killed by the Moore tornado were huddling in the Plaza Towers Elementary School, which took a direct hit. On Tuesday Albert Ashwood, the top emergency management official for Oklahoma, told reporters that neither Plaza Towers nor another elementary school in the storm?s path, Briarwood, had safe rooms or basements for students and teachers to take refuge in.?Although the state of Oklahoma mandated after the 1999 tornado that all new schools would need to have a safe room, Plaza Towers was built in 1966. We can?t say for sure whether ?shelters and safe rooms would have saved the students who died at Plaza Towers?initial reports suggested that the children actually drowned to death?but it should be clear now that public spaces like schools or churches or even highway rest stops can and should have some kind of place where crowds could ride out even the strongest twisters.

The truth is that there?s only so much that can be done to protect vulnerable populations from tornadoes as powerful and as wide as one that tore through Moore. If the death toll remains at 24, the town and Oklahoma may well count itself lucky, as physically devastating as this twister was. Still, we can do more to protect ourselves from nature if we take the initiative. ?We will rebuild and we will regain our strength,? Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin said after surveying the carnage in Moore today. The question is whether we can and will rebuild even better.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/tornado-proofing-cities-age-extreme-weather-220627648.html

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Tornadoes slam Plains, Midwest; 1 dead in Okla.

A flag flies in the debris of a mobile home after a tornado struck a mobile home park near Dale, Okla., Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A flag flies in the debris of a mobile home after a tornado struck a mobile home park near Dale, Okla., Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

A tornado touches down southwest of Wichita, Kan. near the town of Viola on Sunday, May 19, 2013. The tornado was part of a line of storms that past through the central plains on Sunday. (AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Travis Heying)

Alli Christian, left, returns Jessica Wilkinson's dog Bella to her after finding her among the wreckage of Wilkinson's home shortly after a tornado struck near 156th street and Franklin Road on Sunday, May 19, 2013 in Norman, Okla. No one was in the home when the storm struck. (AP Photo/The Oklahoman, Steve Sisney)

Debris is scattered in what was a mobile home park where a tornado struck near Dale, Okla., Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

The frame of a mobile home is pictured with debris after a tornado hit a mobile home park near Dale, Okla., Sunday, May 19, 2013. (AP Photo Sue Ogrocki)

SHAWNEE, Okla. (AP) ? Hearing on the radio that a violent storm was approaching her rural Oklahoma neighborhood, Lindsay Carter took advantage of the advanced warning, gathered her belongings and fled. When she returned, there was little left of the community she called home.

Several tornadoes struck parts of the nation's midsection Sunday, concentrating damage in central Oklahoma and Wichita, Kan. One person was killed near Shawnee, Okla., and 21 injuries were reported throughout the state.

Victims and emergency responders might not get much of reprieve as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center was forecasting similar weather for Monday over much of the same area.

The worst of the damage Sunday appeared to be at the Steelman Estates Mobile Home Park located amid gently rolling hills about 35 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.

"It took a dead hit," resident James Hoke said. Emerging from a storm cellar where he sought refuge with his wife and two children, Hoke found that their mobile home had vanished. "Everything is gone."

Hoke said he started trying to help neighbors and found his wife's father covered in rubble.

"My father-in-law was buried under the house. We had to pull Sheetrock off of him," Hoke said.

Forecasters had been warning of bad weather since last Wednesday and on Sunday said conditions had ripened for powerful tornadoes. Wall-to-wall broadcasts of storm information spread the word Sunday, leaving Pottawatomie County Sheriff Mike Booth grateful.

"There was a possibility a lot more people could have been injured," Booth said. "This is the worst I've seen in Pottawatomie County in my 25 years of law enforcement."

Carter had heard on a radio broadcast that a storm that had originated southwest of Oklahoma City was headed toward Shawnee.

"We got in the truck and left," Carter said. With upward of 30 minutes' notice for Pottawatomie County, Carter had time to leave one of the few frame homes in Steelman Estates ? and most of her house was intact when she returned.

"I walked up, and the house was OK. Part of the roof was gone," she said.

The scene was different a short distance away.

"Trees were all gone. I walked further down and all those houses were gone," she said.

Booth said a 79-year-old man was found dead out in the open at Steelman Estates, but the sheriff didn't have details on where he had lived.

"You can see where there's absolutely nothing, then there are places where you have mobile home frames on top of each other, debris piled up," Booth said. "It looks like there's been heavy equipment in there on a demolition tour.

"It's pretty bad. It's pretty much wiped out," he said.

Tornadoes were reported Sunday in Iowa, Kansas and Oklahoma as part of a storm system that stretched from Texas to Minnesota.

Following the Oklahoma twisters, local emergency officials went from home site to home site in an effort to account for everyone. Keli Cain, a spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management, said that, many times in such situations, people who are not found immediately are discovered later to have left the area ahead of the storm.

A storm spotter told the National Weather Service that the tornado left the earth "scoured" at the mobile home park. At the nearby intersection of Interstate 40 and U.S. 177, a half-dozen tractor-trailers were blown over, closing both highways for a time.

"It seemed like it went on forever. It was a big rumbling for a long time," said Shawn Savory, standing outside his damaged remodeling business in Shawnee. "It was close enough that you could feel like you could reach out and touch it."

Gov. Mary Fallin declared an emergency for 16 Oklahoma counties that suffered from severe storms and flooding during the weekend. The declaration lets local governments acquire goods quickly to respond to their residents' needs and puts the state in line for federal help if it becomes necessary.

Heavy rains and straight-line winds hit much of western Oklahoma on Saturday. Tornadoes were also reported Sunday at Edmond, Arcadia and near Wellston to the north and northeast of Oklahoma City. The supercell that generated the twisters weakened as it approached Tulsa, 90 miles to the northeast.

"I knew it was coming," said Randy Grau, who huddled with his wife and two young sons in their Edmond home's safe room when the tornado hit. He said he peered out his window as the weather worsened and believed he saw a flock of birds heading down the street.

"Then I realized it was swirling debris. That's when we shut the door of the safe room," said Grau, adding that they remained in the room for 10 minutes.

In Wichita, Kan., a tornado touched down near Mid-Content Airport on the city's southwest side shortly before 4 p.m., knocking out power to thousands of homes and businesses but bypassing the most populated areas of Kansas' biggest city. The Wichita tornado was an EF1 on the enhanced Fujita scale, with winds of 110 mph, according to the weather service.

Sedgwick County Emergency Management Director Randy Duncan said there were no reports of fatalities or injuries in Kansas.

There were also two reports of tornadoes touching down in Iowa on Sunday night, including one near Huxley, about 20 miles north of Des Moines, and one in Grundy County, which is northeast of Des Moines, according to the Des Moines Register. There were no immediate reports of major damage or injuries.

In Oklahoma, aerial television news footage showed homes with significant damage northeast of Oklahoma City. Some outbuildings appeared to have been leveled, and some homes' roofs or walls had been knocked down.

In Katie Leathers' backyard in Edmond, the family's trampoline was tossed through a section of fence and a giant tree uprooted.

"I saw all the trees waving, and that's when I grabbed everyone and got into two closets," Leathers said. "All these trees just snapped."

___

Associated Press writers Ken Miller in Shawnee, Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Mo., and Kelly P. Kissel in Little Rock, Ark., contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-05-20-Severe%20Weather/id-803d0ada940f46ae9ff65e53643bb575

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Tumblr Updates iOS App With New Path-Like Interface

Tumblr is still shipping.?Despite all the noise surrounding the Yahoo-Tumblr acquisition, the company has just pushed out an update to its iOS application introducing a new user interface that now includes the almost Path-like post chooser, previously introduced in the Android version. This interface design is becoming more common today, but it’s most reminiscent?of things like Mac’s Fan Stack feature, for example, or social network Path, which popularized the concept on mobile devices. For those unfamiliar, the post chooser is the button you tap to add content to your Tumblr blog, including text, photos, video, quotes, links and more. Now, instead of having a compose button at the bottom right of the screen that launches a page of these options as a starting point for your post, in the updated version of Tumblr’s iOS app, the compose button will fan out the choices overlaid on your current window?as small, round tappable buttons. The revamped interface is the most notable change in today’s update, though Tumblr for iOS now also allows for app attribution in posts, according to its description in iTunes. The iOS version of Tumblr’s application was updated just last month, at that time forgoing the then Android-only interface, in favor of a feature that actually made Tumblr’s infamous animated GIFs animate when you scrolled down. (At last!).?That release also introduced more social sharing options to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instapaper and Pocket, and more, as well as additional gestures. The updated version of Tumblr for iOS is now live here in iTunes. In case you don’t remember how the iOS app looked before, here’s an earlier version showing the old post screen: (h/t parislemon)

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kTcikXhvZqM/

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Kinks and curves at the nanoscale

Public release date: 19-May-2013
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Contact: Joshua Brown
joshua.e.brown@uvm.edu
802-656-3039
University of Vermont

New research shows 'perfect twin boundaries' are not so perfect

One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely smallone nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hairthey are going to become more perfect.

"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, "with smaller crystalsin for example, gold or copperit's easier to have fewer defects in them."

And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistantor a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.

Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about one special of arrangement of atoms in metals and other materials called a "coherent twin boundary" or CTB.

Based on theory and experiment, these coherent twin boundaries are often described as "perfect," appearing like a perfectly flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.

Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundariesfound at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copperare highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electronsan important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.

But new research now shows that coherent twin boundaries are not so perfect after all.

A team of scientists, including Sansoz, a professor in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere, write in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials that coherent twin boundaries found in copper "are inherently defective."

With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.

Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary's strength and other desirable qualities.

"Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information," Sansoz says

The experiment, led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and "boomit revealed these defects," says Sansoz.

This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with "atomistic simulations" on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered "kink" defects into his calculations. Using UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to "rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale," he says, that do not exist with perfect twin boundaries.

With the computer model, "we found a series of completely new mechanisms," he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call "tensile ductility") properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.

"We had no idea such defects existed," says Sansoz. "So much for the perfect twin boundary. We now call them defective twin boundaries."

For several decades, scientists have looked for ways to shrink the size of individual crystalline grains within metals and other materials. Like a series of dykes or walls within the larger structure, the boundaries between grains can slow internal slip and help resist failure. Generally, the more of these boundariesthe stronger the material.

Originally, scientists believed that coherent twin boundaries in materials were much more reliable and stable than conventional grain boundaries, which are incoherently full of defects. But the new research shows they could both contain similar types of defects despite very different boundary energies.

"Understanding these defective structures is the first step to take full use of these CTBs for strengthening and maintaining the ductility and electrical conductivity of many materials," Morris Wang said. "To understand the behavior and mechanisms of these defects will help our engineering design of these materials for high-strength applications."

For Sansoz, this discovery underlines a deep principle, "There are all manner of defects in nature," he says, "with nanotech, you are trying to control the way they are formed and dispersed in matter, and to understand their impact on properties. The point of this paper is that some defects make a material stronger."

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 19-May-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Joshua Brown
joshua.e.brown@uvm.edu
802-656-3039
University of Vermont

New research shows 'perfect twin boundaries' are not so perfect

One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely smallone nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hairthey are going to become more perfect.

"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, "with smaller crystalsin for example, gold or copperit's easier to have fewer defects in them."

And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistantor a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.

Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about one special of arrangement of atoms in metals and other materials called a "coherent twin boundary" or CTB.

Based on theory and experiment, these coherent twin boundaries are often described as "perfect," appearing like a perfectly flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.

Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundariesfound at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copperare highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electronsan important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.

But new research now shows that coherent twin boundaries are not so perfect after all.

A team of scientists, including Sansoz, a professor in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere, write in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials that coherent twin boundaries found in copper "are inherently defective."

With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.

Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary's strength and other desirable qualities.

"Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information," Sansoz says

The experiment, led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and "boomit revealed these defects," says Sansoz.

This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with "atomistic simulations" on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered "kink" defects into his calculations. Using UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to "rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale," he says, that do not exist with perfect twin boundaries.

With the computer model, "we found a series of completely new mechanisms," he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call "tensile ductility") properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.

"We had no idea such defects existed," says Sansoz. "So much for the perfect twin boundary. We now call them defective twin boundaries."

For several decades, scientists have looked for ways to shrink the size of individual crystalline grains within metals and other materials. Like a series of dykes or walls within the larger structure, the boundaries between grains can slow internal slip and help resist failure. Generally, the more of these boundariesthe stronger the material.

Originally, scientists believed that coherent twin boundaries in materials were much more reliable and stable than conventional grain boundaries, which are incoherently full of defects. But the new research shows they could both contain similar types of defects despite very different boundary energies.

"Understanding these defective structures is the first step to take full use of these CTBs for strengthening and maintaining the ductility and electrical conductivity of many materials," Morris Wang said. "To understand the behavior and mechanisms of these defects will help our engineering design of these materials for high-strength applications."

For Sansoz, this discovery underlines a deep principle, "There are all manner of defects in nature," he says, "with nanotech, you are trying to control the way they are formed and dispersed in matter, and to understand their impact on properties. The point of this paper is that some defects make a material stronger."

###

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-05/uov-kac051713.php

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