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ATLANTA — Adrian Gonzalez sees no reason to praise any of the pitchers who are shutting down the Padres these days.

“It comes down to, it doesn’t matter who the pitcher is out there,” said Gonzalez, the best hitter on the team. “Could be a young guy or an inexperienced guy or a veteran guy. Doesn’t matter. We’re just not producing.

“As a team, we’re not doing it.”

Gonzalez was speaking after the team’s 16th defeat in the past 20 games, a 5-2 setback at Turner Field Wednesday night.

For the 16th time this season — or 47 percent of the contests — the Padres scored two runs or fewer.

It’s one thing for a Padres offense to go thirsty in April, when cooler weather tends to make Petco Park play as if it were the Deadball Era.

As for the pitching the Padres faced in April, manager Bud Black said he’s never seen better pitching for one month since he entered the majors in 1981.

But the Padres — poor at slugging, dismal at getting on base, prone to striking out and able to combine slow footspeed with bad baserunning — are still doing almost nothing of substance on offense.

Almost every night, they continue to put their starting pitcher on a tightrope. Wednesday night it was Randy Wolf who worked without a safety net, opposite a stout, athletic Braves offense that is averaging more than six runs per home game and has Mark Kotsay as its No. 8 hitter.

When Wolf put a 2-2 game into the home team’s hands by loading the bases with none out in the seventh, Black enlisted Joe Thatcher, he of the 6.75 ERA. Thatcher gave up a single, a sacrifice fly and two more singles.

Ballgame.

“It’s really hard,” Wolf (2-2) said of the team’s struggles. “It’s very difficult. I play the game because I want to win and obviously we’re not doing that. It’s very frustrating.”

If you want to dig really deep, you could chalk up Wednesday night’s striking talent disparity to Braves scouts who are so adept at finding amateurs and the Padres’ two-decades-long underachievement in that area.

From 1988 through 2006, the Padres were the only National League team that never got one 20-home run season from a homegrown player; in that same span, the Braves got 45 seasons of at least 20 homers from nine players.

This Braves lineup, loaded with homegrown producers such as Chipper Jones, Brian McCann and Jeff Francoeur, is so deep that Kotsay was in the No. 8 hole with a .308 batting average. “That’s a good eight-hole baseball player,” Wolf said.

Kotsay, hitting a slider that Wolf said was a good pitch, singled with two outs to put the Braves ahead 2-1 in the second. The Padres’ Tadahito Iguchi tied it in the sixth, scoring on Kevin Kouzmanoff’s double play after leading off with a single, stealing second and reaching third on Gonzalez’s single. The Padres were done scoring, though.

So it was left to Padres pitchers to be perfect from there, and they fell short. Picking on Wolf’s first two pitches of the seventh, the Braves smacked a double and single, and Kotsay came back from 0-2 to earn a walk off Wolf’s 86th pitch.

Enter Thatcher, a left-handed sidewinder. Black would let him face four right-handers. The first, pinch-hitter Greg Norton, hit a go-ahead single off a 1-2 pitch. The Braves pulled away, and right-handers against Thatcher improved their average from .320 to .351.

Black had better luck demoting struggling Jim Edmonds one spot to the sixth hole, but even after Edmonds went 1-for-2 with a walk, Black lifted him for pinch-hitter Callix Crabbe.

Before the game, General Manager Kevin Towers declined comment when asked if the club is planning to release Edmonds. The Braves, meantime, are pleased with Kotsay, whom they acquired cheaply from Oakland last offseason, at a time when the Padres decided to get Edmonds instead.
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Got milk? No? No biggie–just zip to your local supermarket and pick up a carton. Got raw milk? Now that’s trickier. Carol Peterson, an IT manager at Xerox, drives almost two hours each month to her favorite farm in upstate New York for her unpasteurized supply. Susan Mueller, a mother of two in Ithaca, N.Y., bought shares in a dairy farm so she could pick up her raw milk and yogurt at a drop-off point closer to home. And they consider themselves lucky. In Manhattan some raw-milk drinkers hire a mule to bring the white stuff to an agreed-upon location in the city, where they stock up during a strictly enforced two-hour window. “Sometimes I just can’t believe this is all about milk,” says Peterson.Believe it. Since 1987, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required that milk sold and distributed between states for human consumption be pasteurized, meaning it must first be heated to kill off most of the bacteria that might be lurking in the barn or flourishing in the cow. But a growing contingent of natural-food fans is demanding the right to bring milk from teat to table, convinced that pasteurization strips away the very stuff that makes milk so nutritious to begin with. Farmers are more than willing to meet the demand, since raw-milk products–milk, cheese, yogurt and cream–can be sold at a thick premium. But both buyer and seller may be at odds with the law. Though the FDA allows the sale of raw-milk cheese that has been aged for 60 days, it doesn’t permit the sale of raw milk over state lines. Six states allow the sale of raw milk in stores, and 28 let consumers buy the straight stuff only on the farm where it is produced. In the rest, raw milk exists only on the black market.

Why drink raw milk at all? Fans are convinced that heating destroys the good bacteria–the same probiotic critters that retailers now add back into some yogurts–as well as enzymes that can be beneficial to your health. They claim that drinking raw milk can relieve asthma and eczema as well as give flagging immune systems a boost. Mueller started her daughter on raw milk last winter as an experiment. “The previous year, she had bronchitis, an ear infection, a urinary-tract infection and three or four colds,” Mueller says. “This year she missed two days of school all winter.” That’s why Mueller joined the cow-share program, in which members pay quarterly fees of $100 to $200 for the upkeep of the animals and get raw milk in return. As an owner, her family receives its raw milk as dividends. No state or federal authority can prevent you from drinking milk from a cow you own, right?

Not everyone is sold on raw milk. The growing consumption of unpasteurized products has food-safety authorities warning about a potential uptick in the milk-borne illnesses that pasteurization was designed to prevent. Disputes over the safety of raw milk are being waged on websites like Realmilk.com and increasingly in the courts. California food and agriculture officials began battling with farmers last month over a new state law requiring raw milk to meet the same safety standards as pasteurized milk. John Sheehan, director of dairy-food safety at the FDA, has likened drinking raw milk to “playing Russian roulette with your health”; advocates accuse the agency of relying on outdated information and harassing raw-milk producers in order to protect the pasteurizing industry. “The heat from the government against us is just palpable,” says Mark McAfee, founder of Organic Pastures Dairy in Fresno, Calif., which produces and ships raw milk across the country.

So who’s right? The available evidence suggests that without a bug-killing step like pasteurization, even the cleanest dairy with the healthiest cows cannot always expect to produce safe milk. In testimony before Maryland state delegates, the FDA’s Sheehan stressed that raw milk in any form “should not be consumed by anyone, at any time, for any reason.” He cited 45 outbreaks of disease from 1998 to 2005 that were traced to unpasteurized milk or cheese–and pointed to the dangers of exposing the vulnerable immune systems of young children, the elderly and those with immune disorders to the colonies of bugs that can populate untreated dairy. Raw milk makes up less than half of 1% of milk sales in the U.S. but accounts for twice as many disease outbreaks as pasteurized milk.

Farmers like McAfee counter that all raw milk is not created equal. Government surveys, they claim, lump together raw milk that is destined for pasteurization–and therefore doesn’t have to be table-ready–along with milk, like McAfee’s, that is produced for human consumption. But that doesn’t convince Kathryn Boor, chair of food science at Cornell University, who grew up on a farm drinking raw milk–but won’t do it now. “You can’t always tell when a cow is sick,” she says. “And cows can sometimes kick the milking machine off. Generally, what’s on the barn floor is not something I want in a glass.”

So could raw milk ever be made safer to drink? Maybe. It would help to mandate that it meet the same bacteria-count standards as pasteurized milk, as Washington and Maine currently do. But even with regulations, consumers would still be putting a lot of trust in the farmer and the health of the cow. In the end, that may be too much work for a glass of milk.

Women for Women International helps women recover from the ravages of war and gain a voice POWER OF ONE, PAGE 140

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By KAREN TUMULTY
36 minutes ago
 
For all her talk about “full speed on to the White House,” there was an unmistakably elegiac tone to Hillary Clinton’s primary-night speech in Indianapolis. And if one needed further confirmation that the undaunted, never-say-die Clintons realize their bid might be at an end, all it took was a look at the wistful faces of the husband and the daughter who stood behind the candidate as she talked of all the people she has met in a journey “that has been a blessing for me.”

It was also a journey she had begun with what appeared to be insurmountable advantages, which evaporated one by one as the campaign dragged on far longer than anyone could have anticipated. She made at least five big mistakes, each of which compounded the others:
1. She misjudged the mood
That was probably her biggest blunder. In a cycle that has been all about change, Clinton chose an incumbent’s strategy, running on experience, preparedness, inevitability - and the power of the strongest brand name in Democratic politics. It made sense, given who she is and the additional doubts that some voters might have about making a woman Commander in Chief. But in putting her focus on positioning herself to win the general election in November, Clinton completely misread the mood of Democratic-primary voters, who were desperate to turn the page. “Being the consummate Washington insider is not where you want to be in a year when people want change,” says Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod. Clinton’s “initial strategic positioning was wrong and kind of played into our hands.” But other miscalculations made it worse:
2. She didn’t master the rules
Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state’s 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified - and let Penn know it. “How can it possibly be,” Ickes asked, “that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn’t understand proportional allocation?” And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don’t get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she’d be the nominee. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign now acknowledges privately:
3. She underestimated the caucus states
While Clinton based her strategy on the big contests, she seemed to virtually overlook states like Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas, which choose their delegates through caucuses. She had a reason: the Clintons decided, says an adviser, that “caucus states were not really their thing.” Her core supporters - women, the elderly, those with blue-collar jobs - were less likely to be able to commit an evening of the week, as the process requires. But it was a little like unilateral disarmament in states worth 12% of the pledged delegates. Indeed, it was in the caucus states that Obama piled up his lead among pledged delegates. “For all the talent and the money they had over there,” says Axelrod, “they - bewilderingly - seemed to have little understanding for the caucuses and how important they would become.”
By the time Clinton’s lieutenants realized the grave nature of their error, they lacked the resources to do anything about it - in part because:
4. She relied on old money
For a decade or more, the Clintons set the standard for political fund-raising in the Democratic Party, and nearly all Bill’s old donors had re-upped for Hillary’s bid. Her 2006 Senate campaign had raised an astonishing $51.6 million against token opposition, in what everyone assumed was merely a dry run for a far bigger contest. But something had happened to fund-raising that Team Clinton didn’t fully grasp: the Internet. Though Clinton’s totals from working the shrimp-cocktail circuit remained impressive by every historic measure, her donors were typically big-check writers. And once they had ponied up the $2,300 allowed by law, they were forbidden to give more. The once bottomless Clinton well was drying up.
Obama relied instead on a different model: the 800,000-plus people who had signed up on his website and could continue sending money his way $5, $10 and $50 at a time. (The campaign has raised more than $100 million online, better than half its total.) Meanwhile, the Clintons were forced to tap the $100 million - plus fortune they had acquired since he left the White House - first for $5 million in January to make it to Super Tuesday and then $6.4 million to get her through Indiana and North Carolina. And that reflects one final mistake:
5. She never counted on a long haul
Clinton’s strategy had been premised on delivering a knockout blow early. If she could win Iowa, she believed, the race would be over. Clinton spent lavishly there yet finished a disappointing third. What surprised the Obama forces was how long it took her campaign to retool. She fought him to a tie in the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests but didn’t have any troops in place for the states that followed. Obama, on the other hand, was a train running hard on two or three tracks. Whatever the Chicago headquarters was unveiling to win immediate contests, it always had a separate operation setting up organizations in the states that were next. As far back as Feb. 21, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was spotted in Raleigh, N.C. He told the News & Observer that the state’s primary, then more than 10 weeks away, “could end up being very important in the nomination fight.” At the time, the idea seemed laughable.
Now, of course, the question seems not whether Clinton will exit the race but when. She continues to load her schedule with campaign stops, even as calls for her to concede grow louder. But the voice she is listening to now is the one inside her head, explains a longtime aide. Clinton’s calculation is as much about history as it is about politics. As the first woman to have come this far, Clinton has told those close to her, she wants people who invested their hopes in her to see that she has given it her best. And then? As she said in Indianapolis, “No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic Party because we must win in November.” When the task at hand is healing divisions in the Democratic Party, the loser can have as much influence as the winner. View this article on Time.com

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By ROHAN SULLIVAN, Associated Press Writer
Thu May 8, 7:39 AM ET
 SYDNEY, Australia - Scientists said they have mapped the genetic makeup of the platypus — one of nature’s strangest animals with a bill like a duck’s, a mammal’s fur and snake-like venom.
The researchers, whose analysis of the platypus genome was published Thursday in the journal Nature, said it could help explain how mammals, including humans, evolved from reptiles millions of years ago.

The platypus is classed as a mammal because it has fur and feeds its young with milk. It flaps a beaver-like tail. But it also has bird and reptile features — a duck-like bill and webbed feet, and lives mostly underwater. Males have venom-filled spurs on their heels.

“At first glance, the platypus appears as if it was the result of an evolutionary accident,” said Francis S. Collins, director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, which funded the study.

“But as weird as this animal looks, its genome sequence is priceless for understanding how mammalian biological processes evolved,” Collins said in a statement.

The research showed the animal’s multifaceted features are reflected in its DNA with a mix of genes that crosses different classifications of animals, said Jenny Graves, an Australian National University genomics expert who co-wrote the paper.

“What we found was the genome, just like the animal, is an amazing amalgam of reptilian and mammal characteristics with quite a few unique platypus characteristics as well,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Scientists believe all mammals evolved from reptiles, and the animals that became platypuses and those that became humans shared an evolutionary path until about 165 million years ago when the platypus branched off. Unlike other evolving mammals, the platypus retained characteristics of snakes and lizards, including the pain-causing poison that males can use to ward off mating rivals, Graves said.

More than 100 scientists from the United States, Australia, Japan and other nations took part in the research, using DNA collected from a female platypus named Glennie.

Their work adds to the growing list of animals whose genetic makeup has been unraveled.

By comparing platypus genes to those of humans and other mammals, scientists hope to fill in gaps in knowledge about mammals’ evolution and better identify certain species’ specific traits.

Des Cooper, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New South Wales who did not take part in the research, said it represented a big step forward in the world’s knowledge of mammals.

“Platypuses are often thought of as primitive because they lay eggs,” Cooper said. “This paper demonstrates there is a mixture of characters, which they share with other mammals, and of highly specialized attributes.”

Graves said the research contained some surprises, such as the conclusion that genes which determine sex in a platypus are similar to those of a bird, not a mammal. Researchers also found genes that indicate platypuses — which rely on electrosensory receptors in their bills to navigate as they rummage with closed eyes in waterways — may also be able to smell underwater.

Unique to Australia, the platypus has confounded observers for centuries. Aboriginal legend explained it as the offspring of a duck and an amorous water rat. When the British Museum received its first specimen in 1798, zoologist George Shaw was so dubious he tried to cut the pelt with scissors to make sure the bill had not been stitched on by a taxidermist.

Platypuses live in the wild along most of Australia’s east coast. Their numbers are not accurately known because they are notoriously shy. Hunted for years for their pelts, they have been protected since the early 1900s and are not considered to be endangered, though scientists say their habitat is vulnerable to human development.

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It’s April 15th which means one thing: taxes PS3 firmware 2.30 is due. Right on cue, Sony made good on the new PlayStation Store and DTS-HD Master Audio sound reproduction sure to make audiophile-types lean in for a listen. The Store is acting a bit sluggish at the moment, something that’s likely to get sorted once the rolling update is completed. Nevertheless, users are claiming easier navigation and richer experience. So whatcha looking at — get out of here kid, there’s on-line updating to be done.
source:engadget

Has Rick Schwartz thrown in the towel?

Schwartz posted his would be final post on March 20 as a response to the minimal financial support the Internet Commerce Association has been receiving.

The little support apparently has convinced Schwartz that he is wasting his time.
Click here to read more!

Source : DNJournal – With Ron Jackson’s Permission – March 22, 2008

American Airlines have announced they are making their website accessible via mobile devices, but not via a .mobi domain name as many companies are doing these days. Rather, when accessing AA.com on a mobile phone or device their system recognises when customers are accessing AA.com via mobile devices and directs them to the mobile version of AA.com.On the mobile version, content is condensed, the design is simplified, and the connection is fast, making the site ideally suited for navigation on a mobile device. The option to access a full HTML version of the site is also available. Could this move mean a slowing of demand for .mobi names? It is likely other companies will have their websites designed to recognise when being accessed by a mobile device. But it is also likely mobile-only websites will still proliferate. The news release announcing the launch of the AA.com mobile version is available from www.aa.com/content/amrcorp/pressReleases/2008_03/11_aacom.jhtml. 
 

The necessity for the move to IPv6 is the focus of an article from Forbes recently. The article quotes Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for ISOC, who says it is simple math: the Internet Protocol addresses that are assigned to differentiate networks and individual computers at the edges of the Internet have 32 digits, allowing for only a finite number of addresses–about 4.2 billion. Daigle also says the move to IPv6 would help to limit spam since “[i]n today’s addressing system, large groups of IP addresses–what Daigle calls ‘the swamp’–are often assigned and then left unused for a period of time. Spammers can impersonate those virtual identities to circumvent e-mail filters based on blacklisted IP addresses.
“By starting a new accounting system from scratch, IPv6 could allow more careful tracking of which IP addresses are assigned where, limiting the IP identities that spammers can spoof, she says.”

Of course, the move to IPv6 is not so simple with IPv4 requiring the reworking of “the entire infrastructure of the Internet–not just revamping software but replacing much of the outdated networking equipment installed in Internet service providers, large enterprises and governments.”

However there are others who do not believe the end of the world is nigh, such as Gartner research analyst Lawrence Orans. He tells Forbes he’s “heard doomsday warnings for more than 10 years, he says, and year after year, businesses have found solutions other than switching to IPv6. He doubts that a shortage of IP addresses–even with the current technology–will severely cripple the Internet.”

Even so, the problem won’t go away by itself, Orans concedes and he likens the IP problem to that of the Y2K bug, though even bigger.

Munich, Germany–March 17, 2008 –From March 17 to May 25 owners of German-speaking .INFO-Websites can apply for the .INFO-Award that will award 18.000 Euro in prize money later this year. The Award is created by global domain name registry Afilias in media-cooperation with INTERNET WORLD Business and addresses .INFO domain owners from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
A panel of judges will create a shortlist of final contenders based on the criteria of “presentation of content”, “functionality of the website”, “design”, “usability” and “originality”. The shortlist of the top ten best sites will be published at www.info-award.info on April 28. From April 28 until May 25, interested Internet users can also vote for their favorite site. These scores will be combined with scores from a select panel of judges.
The panel of judges is composed of five experts of the online sector: Philipp Grabensee, Chairman of the Afilias Board of Directors; Dominik Grollmann, chief editor of INTERNET WORLD Business; Tania Leuschner, Head Of Content Operations Marketing live! of Vodafone D2 GmbH; Christian Paavo Spieker, CEO of One Advertising AG; and Richard Wein, CEO of nic.at.
The .INFO-Award rewards professionally created Web sites from Germany, Austria and Switzerland that provide the best user-value. Prizes for the awards are allocated as: 10.000 Euro for the winner, 5.000 Euro for second place, and 3.000 Euro for third place. All winners will be announced by online business newspaper “INTERNET WORLD Business” in June 2008.

For more details see www.info-award.info (German speaking only).

Source: Afilias Press Release Submission to DomainNews.com - March 18th, 2008

RED’s trifecta of hot new gear announcements at NAB wrapped up with the RED RAY optical disk drive, which promises to play back 4K video from the RED ONE, 3K video from the new Scarlet and the usual assortment of HD formats from RED Disc and RED Express media, as well as native R3D RAW files from CompactFlash. 5K video from the new EPIC isn’t supported, though. As with all of RED’s announcements today, specs are promised to change, but the clever name of the drive has us thinking that it’s based on Blu-ray — we’ll keep digging for details.

source:engadget