Knife-wielding man stunned by police outside Buckingham Palace

By Alastair Jamieson, Staff writer, NBC News

A man holding a knife to his neck was immobilized with a stun gun by police outside London?s Buckingham Palace during Sunday?s Changing of the Guard ceremony.

Smartphone video of the incident, published on news sites including the Daily Telegraph, showed the man being brought to the ground by the police weapon.

He was immediately arrested and is in custody, according to a Metropolitan Police spokesman, although it is not yet clear if he will be charged with any offense.

The incident happened at 11:55 a.m. local time (6:55 a.m. ET) on the street outside the palace gates in the west end of central London.

It was witnessed by hundreds of tourists who had gathered to see the 45-minute Changing of the Guard ceremony.

The queen and her husband, Prince Philip, were at their rural home in Sandringham, Norfolk, at the time.

Buckingham Palace said it would not comment, according to ITV News.

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/03/16827649-knife-wielding-man-stunned-by-police-outside-buckingham-palace?lite

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Competition or Cooperation: What's your Strategy? ~ Future of CIO

Porter's 5 Force strategy model is a framework that is based on the thinking of threat for competition, survival and intensity of competitive rivalry. It made significant impact on businesses strategy planning cross-sector in last century, however, the emerging trends such as digitalization and globalization make the businesses & world much more inter-connected and interdependent with each other, is such competitive, defensive view of world still good for customers or society as a whole? Shall we get evolving to more collaborative and customer centric model from profit-centric Five Forces? What are your strategic plans to sustain your enterprise in 21^st century at digital era?? ?

1.??? From Competition to Collaboration

On the face of it, it appears that the current global economic woes could be the root source for the failure as with many other companies? world-wide. However, there is much that gives pause for thought about good strategy crafting and nature of business dynamic, as ?the old industrial model (profit making model) of business is breaking down, and new digital model is emerging:

?

??????? From ?Push Out? the Competition to ?Pull up? the Partners: The 5CF model is valid at certain degree, and, most importantly, the 5CF model is only ONE of many considerations (tools) when formulating business strategy. In the 5CF, there is no single force that discusses collaboration aspects between partners and customers. At digital eco-system, customers and partners are co-creating ideas, collaborate more seamlessly in order to design next generation of products and services, organizations shouldn?t just focus on competitions, but need pull up the resources and partners to build up new business differentiators.

??????? From Competitors to Coopetitors: More often than not, today?s businesses are not only competing for getting more customers, but they need cooperate with each other to set up policy, tune business ecosystem, and overcome common barriers facing in their verticals. We are seeing a paradigm shift in our culture away from competition to cooperation. These shifts happen at "glacial speed". :-), that?s why the new hybrid word ?coopetitiors? emerging.

??????? From unhealthily internal competition to cross-functional collaboration:

Some organizations may use Five Forces as gospel, even influence their culture improperly; when one only holds competition in mind, use Five Forces as hammer, they may think all other functions or colleagues as nails, to make unhealthily internal competition for limited resources, to cause silo thinking and overall business ineffectiveness, as well as toxic business culture. Only balancing with collaborative thinking and behavior, business can be run with harmony and stick to long term strategy.? ??

2.??? From Compete on Everything to Compete for BlueOcean

• The three key conceptual building blocks of BlueOcean Strategy are:

???????????? a)?Value innovation

??????? ?????b)?Tipping point leadership

???????????? c)?Fair process

• The Six Principles of BlueOcean Strategy

a) ?Reconstruct market boundaries

??????????? b)? Focus on the big picture, not the numbers

??????????? c)??Reach beyond existing demand

??????????? d) Get the strategic sequence right

??????????? e)?Overcome key organizational hurdles

??????????? f)??Build execution into strategy

• From Competition Forces to Technology Forces: In order to sustain the enterprise in the 21st century, organizations need to understand the 5 Forces at play and understand market value chains and systems. It is the forces within the model which change. "Nexus of New Technology (SMAC --Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud)" are forces at play within the model, look for analyst report and see what trends is well suited for the industry where the enterprise fall and layout appropriate social, cloud, big data, mobility strategy.?

3. From Competition Driven to Customer-Focus

Competition-driven may also make business stress out, with ignorance of noble business purpose: How to create an delight customers??

• Strategy requires a clear articulation of targeted customer segments and the value proposition required to please them. Clarity of this value proposition is the single most important dimension of strategy." There is no clear view represented in the 5CF model.?

• Look at the business strategy as to what business are saying and suggesting for their customer acquisitions and relationship side. The only safe heaven today is to engage with the customer and continuously add more value through redefining and redesigning what we offer and how we engage. Customer design experience is how to win decently, but not with the competition.
  
  
• The Balanced Scorecard: Can be used to better inform decision takers.?It
  normally manifests itself by means of a dashboard metaphor. In other words, it is a reporting front end. Underpinning it must be a means to translate data into information, but with a considerable degree of distillation and reduction to present in dashboard form. The associated concept of the Key Performance Indicator and its purpose seems to be often misunderstood. Indicators are frequently based on qualitative or quantitative measurements. To make it truly effective, indicators should be well designed to reflect customer-centric and multi-dimensional values ??

In summary, the adoption of a model, whatever it is, aside from being one way of articulating strategy is also the thing on which so much of the organizations policy and associated governance is put into coherent form. However, the amount of work involved in making sure these models work is often not properly, addressed/described by their proponents. Thus, a considerable degree of thought and design is must to ensure model works for business, not the other way around. Seeing the business beyond ?competition? angle, and always see the world objectively, holistically, with positive and progressive tone, as the world we see is dependent on the lens we use and what we see. Finally, the intension of such debate is not about how to prove the strategy analytics framework such as Five Forces wrong, more about how to update and upgrade our thinking/knowledge, being learning agile, understand context, hunt for BlueOcean, and never forget noble business purposes.

Source: http://futureofcio.blogspot.com/2013/02/competition-or-cooperation-whats-your.html

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Biden: Still time for Iran diplomacy to work

MUNICH (AP) ? U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is telling an international security conference that there's still time for diplomacy to succeed in resolving concerns over Iran's nuclear program ? but he's insisting that it's up to Tehran to show good faith.

Biden's comments on Saturday came a few days after Iran, in a defiant move ahead of new talks expected later this month with leading world powers, announced plans to vastly increase its pace of uranium enrichment. That can be used to make both reactor fuel and the fissile core of warheads.

Biden told the Munich Security Conference that "there is still time, there is still space for diplomacy backed by pressure to succeed." He didn't specify any timeframe.

He insisted that "the ball is in the government of Iran's court."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/biden-still-time-iran-diplomacy-085145736.html

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No priest, no sheik means no marriage in Lebanon

BEIRUT (AP) ? She was an English language tutor with an easy smile and an independent streak. He was a gym receptionist who wanted to better himself.

They met for English lessons, swapped views on life and fell in love. Three months ago, a notary married them before their friends and family ? but not in the eyes of the Lebanese government.

The government has not recognized the marriage of Kholoud Sukkarieh and Nidal Darwish because a religious official did not register it. The case has sparked a fierce debate in Lebanon over civil marriage and how its legalization would affect the country's tenuous sectarian system.

Public figures have spoken up, with the president suggesting a new law and the top Sunni cleric threatening Muslims who support it with damnation.

Underlying these arguments is the deep sectarianism of Lebanon, where religious affiliation is often tied to where one lives, how one speaks and which TV station one watches. Many Lebanese seem to have a sixth sense for divining others' sects based on dress, hometown and other factors.

Reflecting these divides ? and perpetuating them, some argue ? is a political system in which posts are allocated to specific religious groups. The parliament and Cabinet must be half Muslim and half Christian, while an unwritten agreement ensures, for example, that the president is a Christian, the prime minister is a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of parliament is a Shiite Muslim.

All significant political parties have well-known sectarian affiliations that are usually more important than their policies in attracting voters.

Defenders of this system say it is the only way that 4.2 million people from 18 recognized sects can share their tiny country without killing each other. Indeed, many of the sensitivities and arrangements trace back to the country's brutal 15-year civil war and the agreement that ended it in 1990.

Others note that Lebanon's system allows more freedom than the dictatorships in other Arab countries ? exempting it from the recent uprisings against autocratic regimes.

Still, tensions are always high. Consider these recent news items:

? For weeks, Lebanese politicians have been arguing about revising a law that determines how sects' votes are counted.

? On Jan. 24, a Christian allegedly shot and killed a Shiite and his son during a dispute over gravel, causing residents of the Shiite man's village to block a major thoroughfare with burning tires.

? That same day, a hardline Muslim cleric took busloads of supporters to a ski resort in a Christian area, causing a tense stand-off and brief fisticuffs with residents. The army intervened.

Critics of the sectarian system, including the newlyweds, say it exacerbates such tensions and limits rights by viewing people primarily as members of a religious community.

"The underlying issue is how the Lebanese citizen relates to the state," said Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch. "Does he relate only through his religious community, which he was born into, or does he relate as a citizen with a set of rights directly from the state?"

The couple's attempt to register their civil marriage is a push for latter.

"We dream of a country that is not sectarian and where people don't just have rights from their sect," said Sukkarieh, the bride. "We're working to get rid of the sectarian system."

Under conventional Lebanese law, marriages must be between members of the same sect and registered by a religious authority.

If people from different sects wish to marry, their only options are for one partner to convert or to marry abroad. This option is so common that Lebanese travel agents offer "civil marriage" packages, usually to Cyprus.

Darwish and Sukkarieh ? who are Shiite and Sunni Muslims, respectively ? tried to subvert this system by basing their marriage contract on a 1936 law they say permits civil marriage for those with no religious affiliation.

With the help of legal activists, they went through a months-long process to strike their sects from their government records, then signed a civil marriage contract with a notary, who sent it to the Interior Ministry for registration.

The ministry has yet to respond, but news of the couple's "civil marriage" unleashed a tidal wave of reactions.

On Jan. 20, President Michel Suleiman expressed support on his Facebook page for a law legalizing civil marriage, calling it "a very important step in eradicating sectarianism and solidifying national unity." The post garnered hundreds of comments and nearly 8,000 "likes."

This week, Lebanon's top Sunni cleric, Grand Mufti Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, fired back, blasting the effort to "plant the germ of civil marriage in Lebanon" with a religious edict declaring any Muslim official who participated in its legalization an "apostate."

Such officials will "bear the sins of any Muslim sons or daughters who enter into this illegal relationship until judgment day," he said.

Christian leaders have been less outspoken, although they have opposed such laws in the past.

Father Abdo Abou Kassm, director of the Catholic Media Center, said the church recognizes only religious marriages, and that those married elsewhere can't participate in sacraments like baptism or communion until they right themselves.

He said if civil marriage became legal in Lebanon, the church would follow the laws, but noted that other personal status issues like divorce and inheritance are also handled by religious authorities. Changing that would require a host of new laws that he said are unlikely to pass.

"To do this would mean separating religion from the state, and I don't think you can do that in Lebanon," he said.

Most doubt the couple's marriage will be approved or that Lebanese politicians will push to legislate civil marriage. No one has proposed such a law since 1998, and Prime Minister Najib Miqati has dismissed the issue as too divisive to address at this time.

Paul Salem of the Carnegie Middle East Center said religious authorities would fiercely oppose any such law because officiating marriages and divorces preserves their influence in society and earns them money.

"Civil marriage is a break in all of those dikes," he said. "It really is a test case for how the sectarian system protects itself."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/no-priest-no-sheik-means-no-marriage-lebanon-200005226.html

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Genome-wide atlas of gene enhancers in the brain online

Friday, February 1, 2013

Future research into the underlying causes of neurological disorders such as autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia, should greatly benefit from a first-of-its-kind atlas of gene-enhancers in the cerebrum (telencephalon). This new atlas, developed by a team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is a publicly accessible Web-based collection of data that identifies and locates thousands of gene-regulating elements in a region of the brain that is of critical importance for cognition, motor functions and emotion.

"Understanding how the brain develops and functions, and how it malfunctions in neurological disorders, remains one of the most daunting challenges in contemporary science," says Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab's Genomics Division. "We've created a genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain - the switches that tell genes when and where they need to be switched on or off. This enhancer atlas will enable other scientists to study in more detail how individual genes are regulated during development of the brain, and how genetic mutations may impact human neurological disorders."

Visel is the corresponding author of a paper in the journal Cell that describes this work. The paper is titled "A High-Resolution Enhancer Atlas of the Developing Telencephalon." (See below for a list of co-authors.)

The cerebrum is the most highly developed region of the human brain. It houses the cerebral cortex, the so-called "gray matter" where complex information processing events take place, and the basal ganglia, a brain region that helps control movement throughout the body and is involved in certain types of learning. Many of the genes responsible for development of the cerebrum have been identified but most of the DNA elements responsible for expressing these genes - turning them on/off - have not. This is especially true for gene enhancers, sequences of DNA that act to amplify the expression of a specific gene. Characterizing gene enhancers tends to be difficult because an enhancer does not have to be located directly adjacent to the gene it is enhancing, but can in fact be located hundreds of thousands of DNA basepairs away.

"In addition to acting over long distances and being located upstream, downstream or in introns of protein-coding genes, the sequence features of gene enhancers are poorly understood," Visel says. "However, gene-centric studies have provided strong evidence that gene enhancers are critical for normal embryonic development of the brain and have also linked human diseases to perturbed enhancer sequences."

Visel and an international team of researchers met the challenges of systematic identification and functional characterization of gene enhancers in the cerebrum through a combination of ChIP-seq studies and large-scale histological analyses in transgenic mice, in which the activity patterns of human telencephalon enhancers can be studied. ChIP-seq, which stands for "chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing," is a technique for genome-wide profiling of proteins that interact with DNA.

This combination of approaches enabled Visel and his colleagues to identify over 4,600 candidate embryonic forebrain enhancers. Furthermore, studying mouse embryos they mapped the activity of 145 of these enhancers at high resolution to define where exactly in the developing brain they drive the expression of their respective target genes. The result is a comprehensive, electronically accessible database for investigating the gene regulatory mechanisms of cerebrum development, and for studying the roles of distant-acting enhancers in neurodevelopmental disorders.

"By mapping hundreds of gene enhancer sequences and defining where exactly in the developing brain they are active, our enhancer atlas provides important information to connect non-coding mutations to actual biological functions," Visel says.

As an example of how the enhancer atlas could be used in this manner, Visel says that if through genetic studies a certain region of the human genome has been linked to a specific neurological disorder but that region does not contain any protein-coding genes, checking the atlas could reveal whether the region is home to any distant-acting gene enhancers.

"If there is a gene enhancer in the region," Visel says, "researchers could determine exactly how the enhancer or a mutated form is related to the disorder. This encompasses a lot of territory in the human genome. More than half of all the disease-related DNA sequence changes discovered in genome-wide screens to date fall within the 98-percent of human genome sequences that do not code for proteins. These 'non-coding' sequences were once dismissed by many as 'junk DNA' but are now known to harbor critical gene regulatory functions."

Visel says the enhancer atlas also provides a "molecular toolbox" that can be used to re-locate the expression of certain genes to specific regions of the brain in experimental applications. This could help researchers gain new insights into how the brain develops and how the human brain has evolved.

"The evolution of the gene regulatory architecture may have been one of the drivers of the extremely advanced brains that we see in primates in general and humans in particular," he says.

While continuing to map and annotate additional enhancers, Visel and his colleagues are now also studying the biological mechanisms related to some of these enhancers in more detail.

"We still only partially understand how gene enhancers work in the context of a living brain, i.e., what proteins bind to them, how mutations change their function, and what exactly the role of these sequences is in the context of human neurological disorders," Visel says. "Clearly, there is more work to do."

###

DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://www.lbl.gov

Thanks to DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/126586/Genome_wide_atlas_of_gene_enhancers_in_the_brain_online

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Archimedes's favourite insight printed in 3D

See more in our gallery: "3D printer reveals mathematical beauty ? and surprise"

ARCHIMEDES was at the cutting-edge of Ancient Greek technology but he might have increased his ability to engage with ordinary folk had he access to a 3D printer.

One of the polymath's favourite proofs was showing mathematically that a sphere that fits exactly inside a cylinder fills two thirds of its volume. A representation of this was displayed on his tomb.

Now, to mark the 2300th anniversary of his birth, Elizabeth Slavkovsky and Oliver Knill of Harvard University have used a 3D printer to create an object of the precise dimensions needed to demonstrate the insight visually.

They printed a slightly different version of the proof - a hollow hemisphere supported above a cylinder which contains a cone that takes up one third of the cylinder's volume (pictured). Fill the hemisphere with water and it drains into the cylinder, filling it exactly to the brim. Using a hemisphere means you can see the water drain, making it easy to grasp what Archimedes proved (arxiv.org/abs/1301.5027).

The pair reckon that 3D printers - which make it easy to create objects based on equations - could transform mathematics education. Slavkovsky has helped students print personalised mathematical objects. "It gave them a tangible thing to consider," she says.

This article appeared in print under the headline "3D-printed proof of Archimedes"

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Farmington seminar to help business leaders improve customer ...

January 31, 2013 by Mark?

The Farmington Chamber of Commerce is presenting A Passion for Service ? a seminar on how to give the best customer services you can and how to deal with difficult customers.

The seminar will be taught by Bill Drury and there will be the choice of a morning or an afternoon session. The seminar will teach business leaders how to keep customers, how to show they care, how to personalize service for each customer, how to use online tools such as Facebook and Twitter to engage customers, how to get ready for the inevitable changers that will occur in business, and how to convince unhappy customers to continue to do business with them. All of the strategies taught are proven and successful techniques.

Customer service is important because when someone gets bad service, they will definitely tell their friends and it can result in the loss of future business. The seminar will also discuss ?How to handle the ten most difficult customers?, which includes those who are abusive to staff, those who complain about absolutely everything, and those who demand service immediately. This seminar should draw Farmington business leaders from every industry, including local printing companies.

A Passion for Service will be held at the Farmington Chamber of Commerce on February 2. The morning session will take place from 8:30 ? 11:30 am and the afternoon session will take place from 1:00 ? 4:00 PM. Tickets for each session are $109 for chamber members and $199 for non-members.

Source: http://www.shop.minutemanpress.com/news/midwest/missouri/farmington/farmington-seminar-to-help-business-leaders-improve-customer-service-27742.html

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