Devin Coldewey

Law enforcement officials have been systematically tracking license plates for a long time ? at the border, for instance. But a DEA project in Utah may be overstepping the bounds of good governance, tracking every vehicle on a major highway and sharing the data with thousands of other agencies.

Using official or hidden cameras to snap pictures of license plates isn’t a new technology by any means, though it is proliferating rather quickly. In fact, this writer got a ticket from one just last week. But they are usually restricted to monitoring traffic or borders. Recently, however, police have begun centralizing records in a number of places: Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C. So now a state would not only know when you crossed the border, but when you entered a city, when you turned at various intersections and which way, and it is holding all that data for up to three years.

The DEA is proposing such a system for the Utah portion of the?Interstate 15 highway, citing installations in California and Texas “drug trafficking corridors” and border use. The ACLU and?Utah’s legislators are skeptical that such a measure is lawful or well-advised.

There are already automatic license plate recorders in place in Utah, but the DEA would centralize the data and make it accessible to law enforcement around the country. Data would be kept on record for two years.

Now, argues the ACLU, it’s one thing for an intersection to record traffic violations and license plates??after all, you’re in public. And it’s another for a police department to monitor state highways?for a known and wanted plate or vehicle. But a federally?run program that appears to be created with the object of disbursing the information nationally is a serious step up in scope, and there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of limitation or documentation, contends the civil liberties organization.

The DEA says the tracking data would only be used in the pursuit of drug traffickers and for investigation of “serious crimes.” But as the ACLU points out, and as history has shown when other valuable data (like GPS, internet records and DNA) has been made accessible to law enforcement, the cases for which sensitive data is used tend to multiply over time ? and create new privacy concerns.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

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Frenzied demand, especially from individual investors hoping to buy into an Internet juggernaut that touches hundreds of millions of people every day, is expected to drive Facebook well above its initial public offering price of $38 a share, which was already at the top end of its target of $34 to $38.

Analysts were divided on how high the price might go on the first day of trade, with some expecting a relatively modest gain of 10 percent to 20 percent while others said anything short of a 50 percent jump would be disappointing.

“It will be bananas tomorrow,” said Greencrest Capital analyst Max Wolff. “This is all about the future, so it really is a lottery ticket.

“The stock could initially rise and then it could go parabolic on a wave of retail investor hope. These shares are going to trade on hope. I do not know how to value hope,” said Wolff.

Facebook is selling an up to 18 percent stake in the company at a valuation of $104 billion, comparable to the market worth of Amazon.com Inc, and exceeding that of Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc combined.

The highly anticipated offering, the largest by a U.S. Internet company and the second-largest in U.S. history after Visa Inc, vaults the eight-year-old Facebook to the front ranks of corporate America.

It will give 28-year-old Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, a net worth of nearly $20 billion.

Enthusiasm for Facebook shares comes despite questions about the company’s long-term money-making capabilities, particularly after it reported a quarter-to-quarter revenue slide in April.

Others warn that the price tag, equivalent to over 100 times historical earnings versus Apple Inc’s 14 times and Google Inc’s 19 times, makes Facebook a risky bet.

“I think they’ll make money – it will just take them a little bit longer because they’re pioneering new ways for advertisers to reach customers,” said Walter Price, a portfolio manager at RCM Capital Management. “It’s not like there’s a simple formula. They have to try different things.”

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to people that the growth rate is going to moderate over the next couple of years,” he said, adding that he expects the stock to trade at around $42 on Friday, which would be an 11 percent gain.

HAVES, AND HAVE-NOTS

Wall Street’s top brokerages fought tooth-and-nail to ensure their wealthiest and most reliable clients got a slice of the IPO. Those with big accounts and a long history as customers likely got first dibs, and would-be buyers who had no such ties were lucky to get any, industry sources said.

A Morgan Stanley Smith Barney adviser based in the northeast said he saw internal figures that showed the firm had more than 60,000 orders for the IPO from 6,600 brokers in over 570 offices – eclipsing a more typical 500 brokers in 300 offices.

The brokerage arm of Morgan Stanley — the lead underwriter on the IPO and therefore expected to get the most shares — initially capped the number each retail client account could receive to 500 shares, which was lower than Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s ceiling of 2,000 shares.

But Morgan Stanley Smith Barney emailed its wealth advisers late on Thursday afternoon to say that it had raised the cap to 5,000 shares, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I am sure they were getting calls,” said Alois Pirker, research director at Aite Group LLC. “One of the advantages of being a lead underwriter is that you get preferential treatment. I am sure there were some wealthy individuals who were wondering if it would be better to be with Merrill Lynch.”

A spokeswoman for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a venture with Citigroup Inc, declined to comment.

For most retail investors, their first chance to invest in Facebook, which has some 900 million users, will be on Friday, when they risk getting trampled by institutional funds.

Financial advisers are warning that if the stock skyrockets, the average person might end up getting orders filled at a price much higher than they wanted and then face the possibility of losses as funds steamroll in and then zip back out, taking the price off its highs.

But these warnings are largely falling on deaf ears.

“A lot of retail investors are not concerned about valuation. That’s what is going to drive the first-day pop,” said Jim Krapfel, analyst at Morningstar. “I think anything over 50 percent will be considered a successful offering — anything under that would be underwhelming.”

CHALLENGES REMAIN

Facebook shares will begin trading at around 11 a.m. on Friday, when the well-known brand could attract enough interest to exceed the 458 million shares traded the day General Motors went public after emerging from bankruptcy in 2010.

Facebook will celebrate its Wall Street debut with an all-night “hackathon” at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters starting on Thursday evening, a tradition in which programmers work on side projects that sometimes turn into mainstream offerings.

Zuckerberg, fictionalized in the Oscar-winning 2010 film “The Social Network,” will control roughly 56 percent of the company’s voting shares after the offering.

His majority control has raised flags among some investors, uneasy with ceding so much power to the “hoodie”-wearing executive who wrote in a letter to potential shareholders that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

Facebook also faces challenges maintaining its growth momentum. Some investors worry the company has not yet figured out a way to make money from the growing number of users who access Facebook on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Meanwhile, revenue growth from Facebook’s online advertising business, which accounts for the bulk of its revenue, has slowed in recent months.

One UBS adviser initially received calls from 12 clients clamoring to buy shares of Facebook, but over the past couple of weeks, two have changed their minds.

“A lot of people are thrown off by the recent negative stories in the press,” the adviser said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “One guy was worried about General Motors stopping its advertising on Facebook.”

GM said on Tuesday it would stop placing ads on Facebook, raising questions about whether display ads on the site are as effective as traditional media.

Overall, financial advisers are struggling to manage clients’ expectations about what the stock will do and in some cases, if they will be able to get any stock for them.

This week, Facebook increased the size of its IPO by almost 25 percent to 421 million shares, or a 15 percent stake in the company — a day after hiking its target price range about 14 percent.

If a greenshoe option for underwriters is exercised, as expected, the stake sold increases to 18 percent, raising north of $18.4 billion.

More than half of the proceeds of the IPO will go to existing shareholders, including early backers such as Accel Partners and Russia’s DST Global.

The more bullish had expected Facebook to price at $40 per share. However, the Nasdaq Composite Index fell by more than 2 percent on Thursday, quelling such optimism.

“I expect it to open at a nice premium, but I don’t expect a LinkedIn-type performance because of the sheer size of this IPO,” said Scott Sweet of research firm IPO Boutique.

Shares of professional networking company LinkedIn Corp doubled on their first day of trading.

Lee Simmons, industry specialist at Dun & Bradstreet, forecast a 10 percent to 20 percent gain for Facebook on Friday.

“You’ve got a large offering at an increased price, so a huge pop may be difficult to achieve,” Simmons said. “When you’re talking about doubling or a pop the size of LinkedIn…, the others were smaller floats, under 10 percent, so you had this artificial feeding frenzy.”

Facebook has 33 underwriters for the IPO, led by Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

(Additional reporting by Jessica Toonkel and David Gaffen in New York, Alistair Barr and Edwin Chan in San Francisco, Writing by Edwin Chan, Editing by Tiffany Wu, Phil Berlowitz, Steve Orlofsky and Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Advertising revenue is the “bread and butter” for everything from television and radio to the Internet. Daina Middleton, Performics Global CEO and Larry Woodard, Graham Stanley Advertising, discuss whether the business model still works.

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Trop is a brand new literary website, the collective project of 19 writers scattered all over the United States. Editor Tom Dibblee, an MFA candidate at CalArts in Valencia, lives in Los Angeles, and agreed to talk to the Los Angeles Review of Books about the new venture. This interview was recorded in Tom?s black Chevy pickup truck as Dibblee drove LARB Senior Humanities Editor Evan Kindley from Los Feliz to Claremont, California, where they were meeting some other people for brunch. They ended up being twenty minutes late, but it all turned out fine in the end (in case you were worried).

?

EVAN KINDLEY:?Tom, first of all, thanks for the ride. Second of all, what is?Trop?and how did it come to be? TOM DIBBLEE: In 2010 I was living in Milledgeville, Georgia. My friends Roger Sollenberger and Stephan McCormick and I started putting on shows at Metropolis Cafe ? ?the Trop? ??which was our hangout. TD: They were variety shows: one was a fake award show designed to give us opportunities to accept these absurd awards we designed for ourselves, like Top Chanamasala and Most Haggard Bastard Alive. Another was a roast of the owner, Deepak. And then we had a musical comedy show, with judges and lengthy commentary. Our fourth show was supposed to be a musical called Sweatpants Wedding, but Stephan and I got to writing it and realized it was a bigger project than we had time for, because I was about to move. But the good news is that it?s still going ? Stephan?s driving across the country to move here right now, so you can expect Sweatpants Wedding to hit a stage in L.A. some time soon. Anyway, after I moved back to L.A. in 2011, we wanted to keep collaborating. So we came up with the idea for this website. EK: The main people involved are all living in different places? TD: Right; that?s actually one of the main features of the site. We?ve got people in D.C., New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, L.A., New Orleans, Nashville, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. EK: What kind of writing are you going to be publishing? TD: We?re doing serialized creative writing; we call them columns, but a wide range of stuff falls into that category. One column, Jill Riddell?s ?Acupuncture After the Apocalypse,? is a serial novel, updated daily; another, Roger?s ?The New Kroger,? is a series of stories that always touch down on the New Kroger, which is the third biggest grocery store in Georgia and the biggest thing to hit Milledgeville since General Sherman. There?s my column, ?Letters to Jake,? which is a series of letters to my most morally upstanding friend. So we?ve got a range of topics in the columns, but also a range of degrees of fiction: Jill?s ?Acupuncture? is pure fiction; I consider my letters fiction, but the real Jake has been writing in the comments section below my posts; and Roger?s stories are mostly nonfiction, though not always. We don?t get hung up drawing boundary lines; when in doubt, we call it ?quasi-fiction.? And this is a term we really celebrate. Evan Allgood writes our Twitter feed, and even there we’ve got some quasi-fiction going on: he tweets about our articles from the perspective of his alter-ego, a Trop intern much abused by my own alter ego, the Chief. EK: I like how you write about the vagueness of the boundaries in L.A. in one of your ?Letters to Jake?: ?Nobody ever knows where they are, even though there are signs everywhere. Within five hundred yards of my apartment, for example, are four different signs for four different neighborhoods ? Los Feliz, Franklin Village, Little Armenia, and Thai Town. But all of it?s really East Hollywood.? TD: In our columns, we try to pay attention to place. We want to bring together stories from all the different places we live in and tie them together, into a wider view of the States, and into a group identity. John Teschner writes about place explicitly in ?Concrete Jungle,? a column that focuses on Minneapolis. And A.C. DeLashmutt writes about a house in Virginia in ?Welcome to Our Home.? And then there?s ?The Weather,? a group column where we all talk about what?s going on with the weather wherever we are. EK: Do you guys edit, or is it blog-style, where people just post whatever they want? TD: With the columns, we do peer editing. That?s actually been one of the great pleasures of the site for me: connecting all these writers. The two big contingents are a group of MFA graduates from Georgia College and a group of current MFA students at CalArts. With the reviews, there?s a more extensive editing process? EK: Hold on a second. I just want to point out this picture of Chucky from Child?s Play on the side of this truck here. [points out picture of Chucky; both laugh] So you?re primarily doing fiction reviews? TD: Yeah, primarily fiction, focusing on young writers. The idea of the reviews is to provide access points to the Trop contributors, so our readers know where we?re coming from, who we?re reading, and what world our creative writing sits in. We?re going to write pop culture reviews too, of movies and TV and music, but the function is the same ? to illustrate who we?re watching and listening to, in order to contextualize our creative writing. ? We?re also doing interviews: so far we have one with Rebecca Makkai, who wrote The Borrower, and one with Jesse Ball. Sam Freilich is working on one with Ramona Ausubel, and I just finished one with Amelia Gray; those will come out in the next few weeks. EK: How often are you going to be updating the site? TD: We?re doing a full-length article every weekday; that could be either a column, a review, or an interview. On Saturdays we?ll have podcasts ? we?re calling ?em ?Tropcasts.? Our first one, which went up last weekend, is an interview with Lisa Marie Basile from the Poetry Brothel, a group that organizes private one-on-one poetry readings ? like a lap-dance. We?re also going to be recording readings of short stories; Natalie Jones, a radio journalist in D.C., is producing those for us. And the third thing we?re doing is ?Life Advice Radio,? in which Jake of ?Letters to Jake? asks me and my friend Peter Nichols to give advice to? shit, 10 West? I gotta drive for a second? [Tom drives for a second.] TD: ?to my friend J.R. Nutt, who?s got a lot of problems. EK: Are there any particular magazines or websites that you think of as a model or inspiration for what you?re doing? TD: There were a few that we referred to a lot while designing the site. One was Slake, here in L.A. ? the way they?re trying to channel the voice of the city, we?re trying to channel the voices of all the pockets where we live. The other one was The Tottenville Review, edited by Alex Gilvarry. They focus on young American writers, and we?re going to be doing that, too, though not exclusively. EK: Well, I admire what you?re doing. The L.A. Review of Books is a really big tent, which is a great thing, but sometimes I envy the more concentrated, collective model you guys are pursuing. The classic ?little magazine? structure. Are you open to pitches from writers outside your circle, though? Or are you trying to keep it limited to the group you already have?

TD: We?re definitely open, and would love to bring in more people. We just want to make sure we keep a group identity, a Trop identity, so our columns are not just plucked from the ether, but complement what we have going. I think one of our?strengths is that, because our creative writing happens in recurring columns, it?s all Trop specific; we?re not just mashing together whatever short stories we have sitting on our hard drives. We?re playing off each other, and I like to think we?re making each other better. When I post a new ?Letter to Jake,? I want whoever?s above and below me in the queue to be proud to show their writing alongside mine. And that?s a function of being a collective. We all know each other, if not in person, then from emails, and we all care about each other?s work. Speaking for myself now, I think of my fellow Trop writers as my most important audience, and having this audience has been really helpful. They?ve pushed me as a writer, and given me a really fruitful incentive to write well. ?

?

Trop?is now live and ready for perusing.

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Beta-carotene, selenium and folic acid ? taken up to three times their recommended daily allowance, these supplements are probably harmless. But taken at much higher levels as some supplement manufacturers suggest, these three supplements have now been proven to increase the risk of developing a host of cancers.

“It’s not that these nutrients are toxic ? they’re essential and we need them, but we need them in a certain balance,” says Tim Byers, MD, MPH, professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and associate director for prevention and control at the University of Colorado Cancer Center.

Byers is senior author of a commentary recently published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that discusses the clinical and policy implications of the increased cancer risk from high dose dietary supplements.

“We have a window into less than half of the biology of what these nutrients are doing,” Byers says. “We say generalized things about them, calling them an antioxidant or an essential mineral, but true biology turns out to be more complex than that. The effects of these supplements are certainly not limited to the label we give them. And, as we’ve seen, sometimes the unintended effects include increased cancer risk.”

Currently the FDA regulates dietary supplements as food, but, as Byers and colleagues suggest, supplements, especially at high doses, are more accurately described as inhabiting a mid-ground between food and drugs. Like drugs, supplement ingredients are biologically active ? sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.

“We need to do a better job as a society in ensuring that the messages people get about value versus risk is accurate for nutritional supplements,” Byers says. “My conclusion is that taking high doses of any particular nutrient is more likely to be a bad thing than a good thing.”

###

University of Colorado Denver: http://www.ucdenver.edu

Thanks to University of Colorado Denver for this article.

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State police in St. Lawrence County say the shooting occurred around 5 p.m. Sunday in the rural town of Stockholm when 25-year-old Shawn Mossow of neighboring Norfolk relented to his friend’s repeated requests and shot him once in the right leg with a .22-caliber rifle.

The 24-year-old man from Norfolk is expected to make a full recovery. Police haven’t released his name.

Mossow was charged with reckless endangerment. He’s being held in the county jail on $10,000 bail. It could not be immediately determined if he had a lawyer.

Associated Press

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An enormous sunspot group has taken shape on the surface of the sun, hinting that our star may soon start spouting off some powerful storms.

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The huge sunspot complex, known as AR 1476, rotated into Earth’s view over the weekend. It measures more than 60,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) across, researchers said. Scientists with NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, a space-based telescope watching the sun, dubbed the solar structure a “monster sunspot” in a Twitter announcement.

AR 1476 is big enough for amateur astronomers with decent equipment to spot from their backyards, weather permitting. (Warning:?Never look at the sun directly with telescopes or the unaided eye. Special filters are required for safe solar viewing to avoid serious eye damage.)?

“With at least four dark cores larger than Earth, AR 1476 sprawls more than 100,000 km from end to end, and makes an easy target for backyard solar telescopes,” the website Spaceweather.com reported Monday (May 7).

Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the surface of the sun that are caused by intense magnetic activity. These structures sometimes erupt into?solar flares, which send high-energy radiation streaming into space.

Solar physicists classify flares into three main categories: C, M and X, with C being the least powerful and X the strongest. X-class flares can cause long-lasting radiation storms in Earth’s upper atmosphere and trigger radio blackouts. M-class flares can cause brief radio blackouts in the polar regions and occasional minor radiation storms, while C flares have few noticeable consequences.

AR 1476 has already proven quite active, firing off a number of C flares?over the past few days. And another sunspot group, AR 1471, erupted Monday evening with one that seems?to be an M1, one of the least powerful M flares, according to Spaceweather.com.

Big solar flares are often associated with coronal mass ejections (CMEs), massive clouds of solar plasma that streak through space at 3 million mph (5 million kph) or more.?If these clouds hit Earth, they can wreak havoc, spawning geomagnetic storms that can disrupt GPS signals, radio communications and power grids. CMEs also often super-charge the northern and southern lights, providing dazzling shows for skywatchers at high latitudes.

Monday evening’s eruption from AR 1471 apparently generated an Earth-directed CME, which should hit Earth sometime Wednesday morning (May 9) Eastern time, researchers said.?

After remaining surprisingly quiet from 2005 through 2010, our star began waking up last year, spouting off numerous powerful flares and CMEs.

Most experts expect such outbursts to continue over the next year or so. Solar activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle, and scientists think the current one ? known as Solar Cycle 24 ? will peak in 2013.

You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom?and on Facebook.

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Continue reading NVIDIA reports Q1 earnings: rakes $60.4 million profit on $924.9 million in revenue

NVIDIA reports Q1 earnings: rakes $60.4 million profit on $924.9 million in revenue originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 May 2012 08:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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