Taking the Mystery out of the Machine

"The commercial gambling industry is at the forefront of responsible gaming," Patterson said.The association's leaflet "Taking the Mystery out of the Machine: A guide to understanding slot machines" states "There is no research indicating slot machines trigger addiction."However, Ohio's top addiction expert, Anderson, said readers should consider the source."The machines are manufactured to get people playing longer, faster and more," he said.Schüll says there is robust evidence that the machines can lead to addiction faster than any other form of gambling."You can play three to four games a minute, 1,200 games an hour. That's an incredibly high event frequency," Schüll said. "It's rapid and continuous. You and the machine get into the zone."
There is no waiting for the ponies to race, for the cards to be dealt or the roulette wheel to spin. The machines are angled to avoid eye fatigue. Stools are ergonomically correct to extend time on a device. Audio is set to draw the attention of passersby, even if the payout is less than the bet.Robert Breen, director of the Gambling Treatment Program at Rhode Island Hospital, works with gamblers in a state where the gaming industry is ranked third in terms of revenue. Many of his clients have lost everything."It's not as simple as saying the machines are addictive or that a person has an addictive personality," Breen said. "Sitting at that machine and pushing that button over and over again, is like an IV drip. You get a lot of little doses that build up a dependence."
According to Breen's research, slot machine gamers can develop the diagnostic criteria for compulsive gambling in about 12 months compared to 3.5 to five years for other forms of gambling."They don't see it happening. They look back and say, ‘how did I get here?'" Breen said.Jenny Campbell-Roux, a nationally certified gambling addiction counselor, has been treating Dayton-area gamblers since 2005. The slots players she treats are mostly in their 40s, both male and female and often successful in business."Gambling transforms them. They have no worries or cares, when they're seated at a machine," she said. "They will wipe out their retirement funds, their children's college funds, take out mortgages on their homes.""They never know how much money they've lost," Campbell-Roux said.In older slot machine, the player pulls a lever, a reel spins and stops at random, revealing a combination of symbols. Because each machine had a limited set of symbols, predicting the outcome was theoretically possible.

This Beautiful Design Finally Fulfills the Washer’s Round-Machine Destiny

Could sharp, pointy corners and box-like form factors join faux-wood finishes in the industrial design graveyard? Bauknecht, Whirlpool's European brand, has collaborated with German designer Arman Emami to create this stunning round washing machine that looks like it belongs front and center in your living room—not your basement.In fact, a round washing machine makes some sense—the drum is a round, spinning cylinder. Why has it always had to conform to an oversized square box? A washing machine could naturally resemble jet engine, giving the impression that dirt is being sucked right off your clothing.
So what if you can't stack this unit, or fold towels on top of it, or stash your laundry detergent and stain remover above it? When your washing machine looks like it was borrowed from The Jetsons' apartmentIt's hard to even lament the fact that this new design is no more efficient than current models.Now, if only Bauknecht could let us know if and when this beauty goes on sale. Because right now, it's just making us feel bad about the mundane white boxes hiding in our laundry rooms.Phoenix says that Vicarious's software, like the human brain, essentially learns by seeing a series of images and forming connections in response.Use Fixed Size Disks to Speed Up Your Virtual Machines.This means it's smart enough to identify an object even if there's missing information—it will, for example, still recognize an arm even if it's obscured by paint or a wristwatch.
Vicarious has not published details of its technology. But the company, which was created in 2010, has piqued the interest of some investors. Last month, it raised a $15 million series A round of venture funding from a group of investors that includes Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz.The judge said since the machine was going to be used to access all call subscriber details, including what numbers a mobile phone had called, this is an invasion of people's privacy.It is at this point that the judge said the machine had the potential to be abused as it had the capability to eavesdrop into people's conversations, emails and text messages.In October last year the High Court in Blantyre also stopped MACRA from switching on the machine.At that time, just is the case with the latest ruling, the court gave an order to government's telecommunication regulating arm, restraining it from getting Call Details Records from the country's telephone operators.Politicians and human rights activists led the masses challenged implementation of the 'spy machine' which at that time MACRA was planning to silently switch on amidst vehement protest from telecommunication companies and subscribers.

Use Fixed Size Disks to Speed Up Your Virtual Machines

Virtual machines are great for running another operating system on top of your desktop, like testing out Windows 8 or running OS X inside Windows. They can be notoriously slow, though, and using a fixed size disk can help you speed things up.Our friends over at the How-To Geek round up a bunch of tips for speeding up your virtual machines. Some you may already know, like allocating more RAM or CPU resources to the system, while others you might not. Here's one we didn't know about: using a fixed size disk can actually make your machine run faster than using the space-saving, dynamically allocated disk—particularly when you're writing large amounts of data to your virtual machine (big file transfers, downloads, and so on). It'll also decrease the amount of fragmentation your disk experiences. To use a fixed size disk, just choose the option when prompted during the initial setup of your machine.
The How-To Geek has all sorts of other performance-boosting tips in their guide, from placing VMs on another drive to excluding those files from antivirus apps. Hit the link below for the full guide.Borchetta said, "As great and leading visionaries in the broadcast world continue to look into the future, they are seeing where listeners are going in regards to how radio is being used now and where and how it will be used in the very near future.  Among the many choices in the audio entertainment landscape, radio is now portable again thanks to smartphones and soon-to-be-ubiquitous Internet streaming in the car. David Field and his cutting-edge team at Entercom Communications completely understand this vision. I'm honored that they have joined us as partners in growing digital radio as well as compensating the artists that provide great musical content for their terrestrial stations. They have chosen to lead and everyone in the artist and creative community applauds their bold leadership role."
The group only has two EP's to their name, both receiving critical acclaim and creating a fanbase dying for more. Metropolis Pt. 1 follows a world gone to hell, with each song focusing on various angles of an overall story arc. The video for "Glow" follows a similar path of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," with a disgruntled young lady building a gigantic killer robot who then slays her entire classroom. Fun! If anything, it's the band in a microcosm: what they start off doing is never where they end, and an emotional toll is taken by the time your ears are resting. They have also provided a couple remixes: one for pop group Passion Pit's "Take a Walk" and a unique twist on the Kill The Noise/Datsik collaboration "Lightspeed."

Show of Strength for Brooklyn Democratic Machine

He was one of Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez's most conspicuous opponents, the young upstart who muscled his way into a district leader's job in the machine-driven Brooklyn Democratic Party and then used his perch to denounce Mr. Lopez for what he called his patronage and corruption.And now the upstart, Lincoln Restler, may become one of Mr. Lopez's latest casualties, a testament to the enduring strength of the scrappy assemblyman even as he prepares to hand over the reins of the party in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal involving four female employees.
As the ballot-counting stood on the day after the primary on Thursday, Mr. Restler was 136 votes behind Mr. Lopez's preferred candidate, Chris Olechowski, for the usually obscure post of district leader, though absentee ballots and procedural challenges could still change the outcome. In other races, candidates backed by Mr. Lopez, like Martin Malavé Dilan, who is running for re-election to the New York State Senate, brushed off opponents who billed themselves as party reformers.And despite the negative attention he has garnered in recent weeks, Mr. Lopez himself seems to be on his way to easily winning another term in the State Legislature.The platform and the device should provide comprehensive development tools.The primary election comes a week before the district leaders, including the incumbent Mr. Restler, vote to pick a new Democratic county chairman. Mr. Lopez is stepping down from the post, and his friend and protégé Frank R. Seddio is viewed as the favorite to succeed him. Mr. Seddio has publicly distanced himself from Mr. Lopez and has called on him to resign as an assemblyman.
Kenneth K. Fisher, a former councilman, said that the Lopez-supported candidates proved they had built up their own records and supporters independent of their political patron. "For the challengers it may have been a referendum about Vito, but for those candidates, it was a race about themselves," he said.Though the challengers appealed to gentrifying newcomers in neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the results, he added, showed that "there are still vibrant, resilient ethnic communities that have been there for decades, and those loyalties run deep."A good example was the primary race for leader of the 50th Assembly District, where Mr. Restler's strategy was to round up as many of the newer urban professionals and artists, as well as some converts from the older communities, to offset the strength that Mr. Lopez has shown in turning out his supporters in the Hasidic and Polish communities. Two years ago, Mr. Restler, now 28, seized the mantle of reform by knocking out Mr. Lopez's candidate for district leader.

Dr. Gibbon's heart-lung machine thrives against the odds

Born September 29, 1903, in Philadelphia, Pa., John Heysham Gibbon Jr. hailed from several generations of physicians and kept the tradition unbroken when he too became one. But even in such illustrious company, Gibbon would set himself apart by not only inventing the heart-lung machine (also known as the pump oxygenator), but also by pioneering the first successful open-heart bypass surgery.It was an unfortunate run-in with a young woman with a blood clot in her lungs that first propelled Gibbons into the medical history books. In 1931, during his Harvard research fellowship, Gibbon worked with a team whom performed emergency surgery on the woman. When this effort resulted in her death, a frustrated Gibbon envisioned an artificial device for bypassing the heart and lungs, allowing for more sufficient heart surgery techniques. He reckoned many patients' lives could be spared if blood remained oxygenated during lung procedures.
It seemed, though, that the cards were stacked against Gibbon. For one, he had no engineering background. And wet blankets were thrown over his innovative idea left and right. Despite all this, he continued to push his invention, and his persistence paid off. In 1935, to everyone's astonishment, Gibbon was able to keep a cat alive for 26 minutes with a prototype heart-lung bypass machine. He continued experimenting on cats and dogs, until taking a leave of absence from his promising research to enlist in the World War II army service in the China-Burma-India Theater. Upon his return in 1946, Gibbon resumed his research, becoming a faculty member at Jefferson Medical College of Philadelphia. His timing was impeccable, as it wasn't long until he had the fortune of bumping into none other than Thomas Watson, the CEO of International Business Machines (IBM), a company that hadn't yet become a household name. Watson was trained as an engineer and completely game for the heart-lung machine project. He promptly threw cash at the project and sent five IBM technicians to work with Gibbon.
When trialed on dogs, the team's first milestone was an improved machine that incurred a 10 percent mortality rate, and in 1945, Clarence Dennis, another pioneering surgeon and inventor, built a modified Gibbon pump. This model had major drawbacks though — it was tough to clean and caused infections. The technology finally reached human testing phase when Swedish physician, Viking Olov Bjork, invented an oxygenator with "multiple screen discs that rotated slowly in a shaft, over which a film of blood was injected; oxygen was passed over the rotating discs and provided sufficient oxygenation for an adult human."

The platform and the device should provide comprehensive development tools

It should provide advanced wireless device management capabilities beyond simply pushing out firmware or configuration changes. Energy companies should choose platforms that can provide granular information about device health and status to allow them to quickly diagnose issues. If a device has lost wireless signal strength, for example, the IT manager needs to know if it is an issue with the device or the cellular network. The M2M platform should provide the necessary information to debug those issues and effectively communicate with the network operator about any problems.The selected M2M gateways should include advanced tools to manage and monitor connected assets. The device's embedded software and the remote management user interface should include a wide array of configuration parameters, as well as embedded industrial and security protocols to simplify integration with legacy equipment and ensure a secure connection.
To avoid the need for extensive and expensive custom software development and integration, the M2M platform should make it as easy as possible to connect with deployed field assets.Lansing officials to consider video poker machines next month.Developers should be able to easily capture control parameters and command systems for any connected asset using standard programming languages. In addition, they should be able to easily access exposed application programming interfaces (APIs) to incorporate features and functions into the control system.
The platform and the device should provide comprehensive development tools. The most functional M2M platforms include application simulation tools that provide developers with detailed information about a planned function before anyone uses the application, allowing users to make smarter business decisions. As one example, the solution should be able to provide accurate predictions of cost differences between collecting status updates on all pumps every 20 minutes vs. once per day. With an application development environment on the device, the intelligent decision making also can be moved. Specific industry intelligence that once only existed in a remote terminal unit (RTU), for example, can now be programmed into an intelligent gateway. This type of capability enables the omission of a second piece of equipment, lowering the cost and complexity of the solution.
The M2M platform must be designed to support large-scale, industrial environments under less than ideal conditions. An industrial-strength M2M platform will be fully redundant, highly reliable and able to quickly recover from faults. It will also be highly secure to protect system assets and data, and meet regulations governing critical infrastructure communications. And, the solution will be scalable enough to accommodate large regional and national deployments without adding management complexity.

Lansing officials to consider video poker machines next month

Village President Norm Abbott said he expects local officials to vote in October to permit some local businesses to apply for state licenses required for video poker machines.How the ordinance regulating the machines will be crafted, however, is yet to be determined.Abbott said Tuesday following a Village Board meeting that the measure is being crafted, and he is not sure of its final form yet.But Abbott reiterated his belief that an ordinance can be crafted that would permit the businesses currently operating the machines for amusement purposes only to apply for state licenses allowing the machines to pay out prizes to the winners."We're trying to grandfather those machines in without creating more machines," Abbott said.
That ordinance has been the cause of concern for some Lansing business owners such as taverns, restaurants and bowling alleys who are eager to apply for licenses from the Illinois Gaming Board to allow them to install the video poker machines that are now legal in Illinois.When state officials said earlier this year they would start implementing the new video poker machine law and issuing the licenses, many municipalities rushed to change their local restrictions on gambling.Those communities include Calumet City, Chicago Heights and Glenwood.But Lansing has resisted. Some village trustees have said they wouldn't mind keeping a gambling ban in place."What we want to do is keep our ordinance against gambling on the books, while permitting some exceptions," Abbott said.
Abbott said 20 machines are currently in Lansing businesses.He said that local ordinances currently allow businesses to have up to five of the machines, but added that he is unaware of any local business that has more than three in place.Donald Genovese, owner of the Lan-Oak Lanes bowling alley at 2524 Ridge Road, said he filed his application for a license earlier this summer, not realizing Lansing officials would be reluctant to change local ordinances.Charles Mabry, hall manager of the American Legion Edward Schultz Post 697, continued to plead the issue Tuesday."We'd like to see this brought to a vote (before the Village Board) as quickly as possible," Mabry said.How soon that could be was questionable because Abbott was vague beyond saying "October." The Village Board has meetings scheduled for Oct. 1 and 15, with a Committee of the Whole session also scheduled for the Oct. 1 date.Abbott said the issue could be discussed by trustees at that committee session but would not commit that it would get a final vote at the latter Village Board meeting."We'll discuzs it then, but we'll have to see what the trustees think," he said.

Several women at CIL excel as heavy drill machine operators

Diamonds are but chunks of coal that stuck to their jobs, said Malcolm Forbes, the man who spawned an empire chronicling tales of grit and glory. Well, tell that to Damyanti Devi, a 29-year-old widow from one of India's poorest districts, whose daily job is to ensure that coal sticks to its job of being coal enough so that the rest of India can live in light.Damyanti is a woman who dared into a territory where until recently one had to be man enough to survive, let alone succeed. She is a coal driller operator, a daily chore that involves maneuvering a machine that's larger than two trucks combined and has multiple controls that drills into the coal seams making way for explosives to blast the fossil fuel.
The eight-standard pass lost her husband 10 years ago, but has managed to keep her kids in school - her eldest kid is in the 11th now - thanks to the income from her job at Kendla open cast project at Hazaribagh area under Central Coalfields.And taking a cue from the initiative shown by the likes of Damyanti, the 3.8 lakh-strong Coal India staff has started a project to identify women who have the interest and knack for operating complex machines that operate in mines or take up jobs in workshop.Hadoop on your PC: Cloudera's CDH4 virtual machine.As of now, there are just three more women in this field apart from Damyanti.
Damyanti Devi, however, did not go through any formal training for operating a drill. "I used to assist a shovel operator at one of the mines in Central Coalfields. I used to stand behind the operator and watch what he was doing. It took me about eight days to learn how to operate the vehicle. Later, a manager at the mine, Sanjay Kumar, asked me if I wanted to learn how to operate a drill machine. I was a little afraid at the time since it was a huge machine, but I gathered some courage and decided to learn," Damyanti told ET."Damyanti took about a month to learn operation of the complex machine. She is now an expert and is, in fact, teaching Sangeeta Devi (32), a woman who also lost her husband a couple of years ago," said Ashok Kumar, manager-personnel at Central Coalfields."In most cases employees recruited on compassionate ground against employees working in mines take up menial jobs of safai karmachari or peon as category 1 general mazdoor. It is only a few women like Damyanti Devi, Sangeeta Devi, Dharani Devi and Thotoiyaganjhu who have shown interest in taking up jobs that are generally the forte of guys in mines. Of course, mine managers have played a big role in encouraging them to take up the jobs," said Dr Kiran.