Bills DE Williams fails to mediate ring dispute

FILE - In this March 15, 2012 photo, Buffalo Bills' Mario Williams poses for a photo with his fiancee Erin Marzouki smile after an NFL football news conference in Orchard Park, N.Y. Here's one thing that can happen when love goes bad: Bills defensive end Mario Williams is suing his ex-fiancee, demanding she return a $785,000 diamond engagement ring. In response, Marzouki has filed a countersuit, calling Williams' demands "ridiculous." (AP Photo/David Duprey, File)

FILE - In this March 15, 2012 photo, Buffalo Bills' Mario Williams poses for a photo with his fiancee Erin Marzouki smile after an NFL football news conference in Orchard Park, N.Y. Here's one thing that can happen when love goes bad: Bills defensive end Mario Williams is suing his ex-fiancee, demanding she return a $785,000 diamond engagement ring. In response, Marzouki has filed a countersuit, calling Williams' demands "ridiculous." (AP Photo/David Duprey, File)

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) ? Bills defensive end Mario Williams isn't any closer to getting back his $785,000 diamond engagement ring from his former fiancee, Erin Marzouki.

And Marzouki's attorney, Tony Buzbee, upped the ante on Friday by releasing a series of text messages he said were between his client and Williams that indicate how despondent the player was over their breakup in November.

Without going into detail, Buzbee said in an email that a court-encouraged effort to mediate the dispute was unsuccessful in Houston earlier in the day.

Accusing Williams of experiencing "dramatic mood swings" throughout the engagement, Buzbee also released an exchange of texts between the two he said he copied off his client's phone. It's a conversation dated as occurring between 4:51 and 8:26 p.m. Central Time on Nov. 11, and includes a break between 5:03-8:02 p.m.

During the exchange, Williams wrote: "No money in the world should leave me with suicidal thoughts."

Williams also wrote that he took three hydrocodones that morning ? that was the day of Buffalo's game at New England. And he planned to take two more on the plane home. Hydrocodone is classified as a narcotic, and prescribed to relieve moderate to severe pain.

Marzouki responded by urging Williams to get help.

"Why don't you talk to someone? Clearly you're not happy & if your takin pills that's bad," she wrote.

Williams apologized, and then wrote he agreed with her that he's furious and should not have texted her in "this state." Williams added: "I need to go back n my shell. There's no telling what Ill do to myself at this point. I'm sry Ill disappear from now on."

Messages left with Williams and his attorney, Monica Orlando, weren't returned.

Williams did post several notes on his Twitter account Friday night ? among his first since July. Though they didn't mention Marzouki or the lawsuit, the messages posted were in defense of his character.

"I'm still here and always will be," Williams wrote. "I'm too strong for ridicule and the childish extremes those will do to try and taint a persons name when in reality you make me stronger, hungrier and more determined."

In a separate post, he wrote: "The true character of someone is always revealed in times that we don't typically agree with. In these times it's how you respond and portray yourself to others that shows the ethics, character and true morals of a person. What's shown speaks for itself!"

Williams filed a lawsuit in Texas' Harris County district court May 3, demanding Marzouki return the ring and accusing her of breaking off the engagement in January. He alleged, Marzouki never had any intention of marrying him, accused her of absconding with the ring and using the relationship as a means to get at his money.

Williams is entering his second season with Buffalo. In March of last year, the Bills signed the free agent to a six-year, $100 million contract ? the richest awarded to an NFL defensive player.

Marzouki filed a countersuit this past week, calling Williams' claims "ridiculous" and "patently false," and accused the player of breaking off the engagement.

Marzouki added that Williams made it "abundantly clear in writing" that he wanted her to keep the ring following their last of many breakups in December. And, she said, Williams also communicated his wishes in text messages to her father and brother.

On Friday, Buzbee accused Williams of filing the lawsuit out of anger after Marzouki refused to reconcile after the last breakup.

"Ms Marzouki will not be bullied," Buzbee wrote. "In the court system, no matter how rich you are, everyone is treated equally."

Buzbee released a three-page long series of texts off his client's phone. The first 15 were blacked out, as were the last 15. In between, there were 30 consecutive texts that were shown to be exchanged between Williams and Marzouki.

Williams writes: "Ill focus on getting better all together and being string for myself." He then added: "Leave it alone. It's my business. I will get through it."

Marzouki responded by urging Williams to get help, and added: "The way you are handling it us incredibly self destructive."

Williams was at the Bills facility last week taking part in a three-day voluntary minicamp, and briefly discussed the lawsuit on Tuesday.

He referred to it as "something that happened and it is what it is," adding he doesn't believe it will be a distraction.

"When I'm here, this is my haven, this is my family and this is the most important thing for me, being around these guys," Williams said. "It's all about us, it's not about anything else. Anything personal is personal. You don't mix that with what we're trying to accomplish here."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-05-18-FBN-Mario-Williams-Ring-Lawsuit/id-8a5f4896d8d5491e97b8309c6c228cd4

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Artificial forest for solar water-splitting

Friday, May 17, 2013

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While "artificial leaf" is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an "artificial forest."

"Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts," says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, who led this research. "To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest."

Yang, who also holds appointments with the University of California Berkeley's Chemistry Department and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in the journal NANO Letters. The paper is titled "A Fully Integrated Nanosystem of Semiconductor Nanowires for Direct Solar Water Splitting." Co-authors are Chong Liu, Jinyao Tang, Hao Ming Chen and Bin Liu.

Solar technologies are the ideal solutions for carbon-neutral renewable energy ? there's enough energy in one hour's worth of global sunlight to meet all human needs for a year. Artificial photosynthesis, in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels, is regarded as one of the most promising of solar technologies. A major challenge for artificial photosynthesis is to produce hydrogen cheaply enough to compete with fossil fuels. Meeting this challenge requires an integrated system that can efficiently absorb sunlight and produce charge-carriers to drive separate water reduction and oxidation half-reactions.

"In natural photosynthesis the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast," Yang says. "We've integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future."

When sunlight is absorbed by pigment molecules in a chloroplast, an energized electron is generated that moves from molecule to molecule through a transport chain until ultimately it drives the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbohydrate sugars. This electron transport chain is called a "Z-scheme" because the pattern of movement resembles the letter Z on its side. Yang and his colleagues also use a Z-scheme in their system only they deploy two Earth abundant and stable semiconductors ? silicon and titanium oxide - loaded with co-catalysts and with an ohmic contact inserted between them. Silicon was used for the hydrogen-generating photocathode and titanium oxide for the oxygen-generating photoanode. The tree-like architecture was used to maximize the system's performance. Like trees in a real forest, the dense arrays of artificial nanowire trees suppress sunlight reflection and provide more surface area for fuel producing reactions.

"Upon illumination photo-excited electron?hole pairs are generated in silicon and titanium oxide, which absorb different regions of the solar spectrum," Yang says. "The photo-generated electrons in the silicon nanowires migrate to the surface and reduce protons to generate hydrogen while the photo-generated holes in the titanium oxide nanowires oxidize water to evolve oxygen molecules. The majority charge carriers from both semiconductors recombine at the ohmic contact, completing the relay of the Z-scheme, similar to that of natural photosynthesis."

Under simulated sunlight, this integrated nanowire-based artificial photosynthesis system achieved a 0.12-percent solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency. Although comparable to some natural photosynthetic conversion efficiencies, this rate will have to be substantially improved for commercial use. However, the modular design of this system allows for newly discovered individual components to be readily incorporated to improve its performance. For example, Yang notes that the photocurrent output from the system's silicon cathodes and titanium oxide anodes do not match, and that the lower photocurrent output from the anodes is limiting the system's overall performance.

"We have some good ideas to develop stable photoanodes with better performance than titanium oxide," Yang says. "We're confident that we will be able to replace titanium oxide anodes in the near future and push the energy conversion efficiency up into single digit percentages."

###

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/128299/Artificial_forest_for_solar_water_splitting

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Multiple concussions tied to more suicidal thoughts

By Andrew M. Seaman

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People who've sustained multiple brain injuries throughout their life were more likely to report suicidal thoughts than people with one or no concussions, according to a new study of deployed U.S. military personnel.

"Personnel who had sustained more than one concussion in their lives were significantly more likely to be suicidal in their past - as well as in the past year," said Craig Bryan, the study's lead author from the University of Utah National Center for Veterans' Studies in Salt Lake City.

Suicide is currently the second leading cause of death among military members, and claimed about 16 lives per 100,000 members in 2008. That's about a 50 percent increase since 2001, according to a 2011 report from the RAND Corporation.

Bryan and his colleagues write in JAMA Psychiatry that the increase in suicide is partially driven by a rise in psychiatric illnesses among military personnel, who may have been exposed to combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Traumatic brain injury, one of the signature wounds of the two wars, has also been linked to an increased risk of suicide. But the researchers write that few studies have looked at the effects of multiple brain injuries on suicide risk.

For the new study, the researchers used information on 157 military personnel and 4 civilian contractors who were sent to a combat support hospital in Iraq during 2009 for suspected brain injuries.

On questionnaires, 18 said they had never been diagnosed with a concussion before, 58 said they'd been diagnosed with a brain injury once and 85 reported multiple diagnoses. Most were mild injuries, Bryan said.

Also, 18 patients reported previous suicidal thoughts, two said they had planned a suicide and two said they attempted it.

Overall, the researchers didn't find evidence of suicidal thoughts among any of the patients who hadn't reported previous concussions.

About 7 percent of people with one diagnosed brain injury reported previous suicidal thoughts - about 3 percent in the past year. And about 22 percent of patients with multiple previous concussions reported suicidal thoughts in the past - 12 percent in the past year.

What's more, the researchers found the more concussions a service member had sustained, the stronger the association between depression and suicidal thoughts.

"In those individuals who had been repeatedly concussed, it's almost like they're more sensitized? It becomes easier for that individual to experience depression and suicidal (thoughts) as a result," he said.

BATTLEFIELD TO PLAYING FIELD

While the new results are limited to military personnel in a combat zone, Bryan suggested the findings may also have implications for other people at an increased risk of concussion, such as football players.

"What we learn in the military may help inform what we know about injuries in the athletes as well," he said.

Concussions in football have been thrust into the spotlight after reports of players suffering from depression or memory trouble long after retiring. Last year, former San Diego Chargers star Junior Seau committed suicide after what some believe were years of concussion-related depression.

Bryan cautioned, however, the research can't prove concussions caused the suicidal thoughts. Furthermore, he said their research shows the majority of people with multiple brain injuries don't report such thoughts.

"Even if you do experience suicidal thoughts, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make a suicide attempt," said Bryan, because there are treatments available.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/12dWxwV JAMA Psychiatry, online May 15, 2013.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/multiple-concussions-tied-more-suicidal-thoughts-210332495.html

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SoftMaker FreeOffice

Unless you live in Germany, where SoftMaker has a long-established and respected presence, you may never have heard of SoftMaker FreeOffice or its commercial big brother SoftMaker Office 2012. But SoftMaker's compact, powerful, and sleek application suite feels right at home in the English-speaking world, and the price of FreeOffice?free, as in FreeOffice?makes it especially attractive. Compared to its main freeware rival, LibreOffice, Softmaker FreeOffice can't compete on advanced features, but I prefer the FreeOffice interface, and FreeOffice is the only free office suite that displays documents as I want them displayed. More about that in a moment, but first I'll cover some basics about the suite as a whole.

FreeOffice Basics
SoftMaker gives away FreeOffice partly as an advertisement for its commercial suite. FreeOffice consists of the three basic office apps: TextMaker, a word-processor; PlanMaker, a spreadsheet app; and SoftMaker Presentations. The $79.95 commercial suite adds a programming language similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications; a $99.95 Professional version adds an Outlook 2013 work-alike. All three apps in the free version do an impressive job of importing Microsoft Office document.

Unlike LibreOffice, FreeOffice can open password-protected Microsoft Office documents if you know the password, and this feature alone is a good reason for installing FreeOffice on a USB stick so you can open your password-protected documents on someone else's computer. (The standard installation includes a Start Menu item that installs a "portable" version on a thumb drive.) Like LibreOffice, FreeOffice opens legacy WordPerfect documents?a major plus for law and government offices that typically have thousands of files in WordPerfect format.

I was pleasantly surprised by FreeOffice's speed. Complicated Microsoft Office documents that opened with painful slowness in LibreOffice opened instantly in FreeOffice ?including multipage worksheets and a 400-page Word document. All basic formatting features imported perfectly, but you can't expect perfection with advanced features. For example, when I used PlanMaker to open an Excel worksheet that uses Excel's fancy conditional formatting to color-code data, PlanMaker warned me that some conditional formatting would be lost?and indeed it was. Any formatting lost on import into FreeOffice will be lost forever if you save the file after editing, so make sure you know what you're doing when saving an imported Office file. (LibreOffice does a better job with Excel's conditional formatting and other graphic features.)

LibreOffice comes in versions for Windows, Linux, and OS X, with tablet versions coming later this year. FreeOffice runs on Windows only, but the commercial SoftMaker Office runs on Windows, Linux, and Android, and an older 2010 version runs on Windows Mobile and even the ancient Windows CE mobile platform?the only full-featured office suites for mobile Windows platforms.

FreeOffice's interface looks a lot like Microsoft Office 2003, with the traditional top-line menu and toolbars, and with bright and clear icons that make it easy to find what you're looking for. One icon I was glad to see was a PDF icon that saves the current document in PDF format without long detours to the menu, as in other major suites. The only major annoyance is the lack of a "live" word count, forcing you to click a button on a "Statistics" toolbar to see how many words are in your document.

Making Text With TextMaker
TextMaker impressed me most with its document-viewing options. In addition to the usual page view, which shows headers, page numbers, footers, and top and bottom margins, TextMaker has a "continuous" view, which displays only the main content of the page, without headers and footers, and with page breaks indicated only by a faint line across the page. This is the view I prefer to work in, because it shows me how my text will look on the page, but doesn't break up the text at the top and bottom of every page?and TextMaker is one of very few word-processors that offer it. (The others are Microsoft Word for Windows?not the version for OS X?and Corel WordPerfect.) LibreOffice doesn't have a "continuous" view, only a web view, which doesn't show the actual margins and font that your document will have when it prints, and that's too little formatting for me to feel comfortable with.

TextMaker offers most of the advanced features you'll find in Word, but with some significant exceptions. You can insert footnotes or endnotes, but not both, as you can in Word. If you want to create cross-references, or use mail-merge to create form letters, you'll need to buy the commercial SoftMaker Office, not the free version. The free version has limited graphic capabilities compared to the commercial version?for example, you can't apply shadows, and graphic shapes are limited to printing with 300 dpi resolution. None of these restrictions will affect anyone who creates basic documents, but advanced students and scientists may want to look elsewhere.

Spreadsheets and Presentations
PlanMaker opened my sample Excel worksheets smoothly, but this is an app best suited for basic data manipulations. You won't find anything like Excel's zero-effort pivot tables that reorganize your views of your data with a few clicks, but you do get filtering options for tables, which accomplishes the same thing with a bit more effort. Conditional formatting has to be built by hand, without the gallery of elegant color-coding and other graphic features that Excel and LibreOffice. Charting is adequate but not dazzling.

SoftMaker Presentations gives you enough features to get basic presentations built, and does a good job of importing uncomplex PowerPoint files, but look elsewhere if you want to put together a presentation that's visually memorable instead of something that looks as if was left over from the last millennium.

Fast and Free
Don't be misled by my focus on the limits of FreeOffice. This suite is fast, effective, and, overall, extremely well-designed. For the vast majority of users, FreeOffice does everything you need in an office suite, and does it more quickly and intuitively than LibreOffice, though LibreOffice is, overall, more powerful and up-to-date. If you want the state-of-the-art, you'll choose Microsoft Office, but SoftMaker FreeOffice has plenty to offer for anyone who wants solidly functional apps and doesn't want to pay for them.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/uIjO-xCI3Vw/0,2817,2419014,00.asp

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Recon Instruments Jet heads-up display debuts at Google I/O, we go hands-on (video)

Google Glass is a lot of things, but it's hardly a superstar when it comes to the world of sports. Though we've seen proof it is at least water resistant, it doesn't feel particularly durable and isn't entirely well-suited to wearing while, say, sweating profusely during a lengthy climb on a road bike. Recon Instruments has what it thinks is a solution: the Jet. It's a pair of sporting sunglasses with an integrated, Android-powered display that could make things like running and cycling far more exciting -- or at least far more information-packed. Join us after the break for our impressions.

Gallery: Recon Instruments Jet hands-on

Filed under: Wearables

Comments

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/15/recon-instruments-jet-hands-on/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

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True Cross Academy

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In a world where demons hunt humans, there is a certain type of human that prevails; exorcists. But to become someone so great, you have to start out young which is why there is True Cross Academy.

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Could i reserve a Female exorcist? :o

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Two girls abducted in Albuquerque in a week; police hunt person of interest

By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

Albuquerque police were hunting for a 31-year-old man Thursday after two young girls were abducted from the same apartment complex within a week.

David Jesus Hernandez was described as a person of interest wanted for questioning in Wednesday's child-snatching, which ended when the mother of the 4-year-old victim chased the kidnapper with her car.

Police said they were investigating a "possible connection" between that incident and one last week in which a 6-year-old girl was kidnapped, driven away in a car and sexually assaulted.

Hernandez has not been charged with a crime but police asked for the public's help in finding him.

In the latest incident, the little girl was playing in her yard in the early evening when a man forced her into a silver Buick. As he took off, some teenagers hanging around outside ran inside and alerted the child's mother, police said.

As she jumped in her own car to chase the Buick, the suspect pushed the little girl out of his vehicle. The mother didn't notice and kept going after the man.

"She was involved in a high-speed pursuit," Police Chief Ray Schultz said.

After tearing down several streets, the mother rammed the Buick several times to get it to stop, cops said. The driver jumped out and fled on foot.

"This appears to be a complete stranger abduction," Schultz said.

The 4-year-old was not harmed and was found wandering near the apartment complex.

In last week's incident, a silver or gray car was also used.

?

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