GEO executive investigated in son's domestic-violence case

Thomas Wierdsma was asked by a Boulder attorney during a court deposition in 2011 if it was wrong to give false testimony to a federal agency.

The senior vice president for The GEO Group Inc., the largest provider of contract prison and immigration detention services for the U.S. government, lowered his head and thought for a few seconds before answering.

The GEO Group and his company's close connections with federal immigration authorities to have his former daughter-in-law deported after she reported his son, Charles Wierdsma, to police for domestic violence.

A jury in that civil case last year found Wierdsma guilty of outrageous conduct for the actions he took after his son was arrested and convicted of regularly beating his Hungarian-born wife, Beatrix Szeremi, for more than a year. Boulder District Attorney Stan Garrett's office is investigating Thomas Wierdsma for possible criminal culpability in the matter related to his interference with the victim.

GEO Group contracts with the U.S. government to run 111 for-profit, so-called "turnkey" facilities. They include the Aurora Detention Center that GEO Group operates for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The company also operates the Southern Peaks Regional Treatment Center in Ca?on City and five reporting centers for supervised detainees around the state.

Group's website as senior vice president of project development for a company that does more than half its business with the federal government and last year reported revenues of $1.48 billion.

Neither Thomas nor Charles Wierdsma's attorneys returned calls asking for comment.

Thomas Wierdsma's jump from behind-the-scenes corporate executive to defendant happened in the spring of 2011 after his then-daughter-in-law fled a beating in her home one morning and called Boulder police, according to a police report.

Szeremi, a Hungarian immigrant with a green card making her a legal resident, had married Charles Wierdsma a year earlier after the two met through the eHarmony Internet dating site.

According to police reports, Charles Wierdsma had repeatedly beaten and threatened to suffocate and drown Szeremi over the course of their marriage before she finally reported the abuse. She told family and friends about the beatings, and they had photographed some of her injuries, but she also told them and investigators that she had been afraid to go to police.

Charles Wierdsma was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, third-degree assault and false imprisonment. A restraining order banned him from having any contact with Szeremi.

Thomas Wierdsma became involved when he tried to evict her from the Boulder home where she and Charles Wierdsma had been living. The elder Wierdsma owned the home. He also pressured her in texts and phone calls to delete photos of her bruised face from her Facebook page, according to court documents.

After she refused, he sent her an e-mail complaining about that and stating: "I will be copying the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement with this and other information. As you know, I funded the legal work and processing fees for you to become a citizen but am now disappointed in your actions which now require legal proceedings."

A week later, the elder Wierdsma, from an Alaskan cruise ship, sent a letter to an attorney representing Szeremi. He wrote that he would be involving ICE, "with all relevant information, including her social media postings, legal actions required for her eviction and other information we possess regarding her application for citizenship."

In court-documented e-mail exchanges between Thomas and Charles Wierdsma during that time, the two discuss how deportation could be used to their advantage.

Charles Wierdsma wrote to his father that Szeremi's attorneys "have threats from our side to use the heavy hand of GEO to get Beatrix out of the country. This should be our bargaining chip going forward, not theirs."

Several weeks later, Thomas Wierdsma wrote: "Let's drop the immigration issue and particularly any involvement of Geo. If I elect to get in touch with immigration after she is evicted, that is my business and in no way related to what is currently going on."

After Thomas Wierdsma began his eviction proceedings against Szeremi, she filed a counterclaim alleging a laundry list of wrongs, including victim intimidation, abuse of process, outrageous conduct and civil conspiracy against Thomas Wierdsma, and assault, battery, false imprisonment, outrageous conduct and negligence against Charles Wierdsma.

That is when the details of the physical abuse as well as the abuse of power got a public airing, including a video of Thomas Wierdsma's threats and deposition admissions that Szeremi's attorney, John Pineau, posted on YouTube.

After a week-long trial, a jury in that civil case found that both Wierdsmas had exhibited outrageous behavior and awarded Szeremi $1.2 million. The judge later lowered the damages to $12,000, based on a state law that limits punitive damages.

Szeremi has appealed that ruling, a matter that is expected to take several more years to move through the court system.

Catherine Olguin of the Boulder District Attorney's Office said an investigator is working the case on the criminal end and that it would likely take several more months before a decision is made about criminal charges against Thomas Wierdsma. If he is charged, it could be tied to witness tampering, witness retaliation or witness intimidation.

Recipe collection takes on a life of its own

That wouldn’t be too strange, but most of us keep right on cutting out recipes even though we have at least five recipes for every type of dish imaginable, including tuna casserole which most of us loathe. Even if we live alone and only cook for one we continue to snip away.

I’m not sure why the sight of a recipe so stirs us to keep collecting. Why the sight of yet another recipe for “easy” lasagna so excites us.

And since in my case, I’ve been snipping away for quite a long time, I’ve got a huge collection. They’re in my recipe drawers. They are all flung in there without rhyme or reason. So when I’m looking for the recipe for zucchini bread, I have to sort through 30-plus years of clippings to find it.

Oh, I started off neatly. I had a little recipe index card box. All the recipes were on neat little cards. That lasted a few years.

Then I started cramming the clippings into the index card box. After a time, I couldn’t cram anymore in. Then I shoved all the recipes into a small drawer. The collection outgrew that. Now the recipes are in two big drawers, but they’re full.

I have nightmares that someday I will be keeping my recipes in a room by themselves — like the hoarders I have seen on TV.

I tried to organize during the big blizzard of ‘82. I purchased photo albums with plastic pages and put the recipes in those. I labeled the pages with separate headings for meat, poultry, fish, etc. But my undoing was that I didn’t have enough albums for all the micellaneous items like pickles and mock Twinkies. So as my collection grew I resorted to tossing the recipes into the drawers.

And the worst part is, most of these recipes I’ve never bothered to cook. I have high hopes as I flip through magazines, clipping away, and thinking “Ah, roast pork with apple dumplings would make a great dinner.” But I always find I’m fresh out of pork and apples. So another recipe gets filed in the drawer.

I think I know why I still clip recipes. It’s become habit I can’t resist like shopping at a shoe store when they’re having a half-price sale, though I know I should stay home because I really don’t need any more shoes.

One thing that’s comforting about this habit is the thought that after I’m gone, if somebody goes through my recipe drawers, that person will be bound to utter in reverent tones, “This one must have been some cook!”

 Beneficiaries of Vajpayee Arogyasri scheme in Karnataka, living in places close to the State’s borders, can now get medical attention at all networked hospitals in the city nearest to them even if they are in other States, said N. Ramesh, Regional Consultant, Mysore Division, Vajpayee Arogya Sri, Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust, Government of Karnataka.

He was speaking to The Hindu at a camp held to get more people registered for the scheme, organised by Father Muller Hospital and K. S. Hegde Medical Academy (KSHEMA) in Government Wenlock Hospital on Tuesday. The hospitals oganising the camp are part of the networked hospitals offering the scheme, said Dr. Saroja, Resident Medical Officer (RMO), Wenlock Hospital.

Dr. Ramesh said the change, effective from the current year, meant that beneficiaries from Bellary can go to Hyderabad and Kurnool, beneficiaries from Belgaum can go to Miraj and Sholapur, and beneficiaries from Raichur can go to Mehboobnagar and Hyderabad.

 Sharif from Adyar, who brought his father for treatment, said there was “no problem” and Zameela from Irathottigram, said she had got her BPL card. Kusum, an Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) worker, was one of at least five ASHA workers who were there to help their patients get registered for the scheme. Three more hospitals in the city have been inspected to see if they could be brought under the scheme. Some of the listed hospitals in Mangalore are: K.S. Hegde Hospital (KSHEMA), Father Muller Hospital, A.J. Hospital, KMC. Of 132 networked hospitals in the State, more than 70 are in Bangalore. From April, 447 hospitals (from 402) in the state will be networked for the scheme, he said.

The camp registered 144 people, of whom 40 were taken for treatment in networked hospitals. The rest did not have health problems covered under the scheme, said Dr. Ramesh.

Narayan, a resident of Derebail, looked crestfallen at the camp. He said the people at the counter had told him the BPL card was essential and he did not have the card. “I am single. I was told single persons cannot get a BPL card. What am I to do? Will I be left to die?” He said he lived in his brother’s house as he did not own a house and the brother did not belong to the BPL category.

There’s no escaping it, the Medion Erazer X7819, like most gaming laptops, isn’t just a brick, it’s the entire 6ft wall. At a 17-inch screen size, it was always going to take up desk space but once you open the thing up, it rather feels like you’ve stepped into a time warp and leapt back to the very first days of mobile computing when the term “portable machine” described a laptop that you could just about lift up.

Sure, you can rest the Medion Erazer X7819 on your thighs; hell, you can put it in your bag and carry it around with you if you want but, unless you’re heading off to a LAN party somewhere or simply moving to another room in your house, you probably wouldn’t want to. This is 3.8kg of super-mean gaming machine and, though technically a laptop, expect it to live out the majority of its existence atop your desk.

Nonetheless, there’s something satisfying about the design of the Medion Erazer X7819. It’s big, it’s black, it’s got a mock brushed-metal - but actually just nicely made plastic – finish but, despite being the physical antithesis to, say, Bang & Olufsen or Apple, it’s actually very pleasant. This is machine for fragging your friends and tea-bagging n00bs and there’s no subtleties necessary.

The blue LED streaks on the outside of the lid and the three to highlight the trackpad and stereo speakers, once you open it, are further evidence to fact. As it goes, Medion could have gone a lot further with the gaudiness and we’d probably have enjoyed. It’s certainly not the light show that you get with other big brand gaming PCs, such as Dell’s Alienware range, and it’s a pity that you can’t control the colour or the brightness of the LEDs but the money has been spent wisely here and, frankly, industrial design doesn’t win you PvP deathmatches.

Has Obama administration gone wobbly on Syria?’

Syria, chemical weapons and the United States. If nothing else, President Barack Obama last month was emphatic. “I want to make it absolutely clear to Assad,” Obama declared at the National Defense University in early December, “….The world is watching. The use of chemical weapons is…totally unacceptable….[T]here will be consequences and you will be held accountable.”

But what a difference a New Year makes. At a January 10 news conference, the administration’s senior security officials, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff head Martin E. Dempsey, recoiled: Consequences won’t involve the Pentagon. Better wait to secure the arsenal after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls, Panetta said. Dempsey stated: “Preventing the use of chemical weapons would be almost unachievable.” The result, as Panetta explained: “We’re not working on options that involve boots on the ground.”

Assad must have smiled. Washington had gone wobbly on chemical weapons. With the deterrent value of the president’s remarks in question – and one unconfirmed report that Syria used a chemical agent in Homs on December 23 – the chemical specter remains. This raises the key question: Would Obama really stand by if the Syrian government gassed thousands of its citizens?

Before we answer, let’s hit the pause button for a reality check: Are chemical weapons really more heinous than the bombs that have already killed some 60,000 Syrians. This continuing mayhem has not justified military intervention so far. Why would chemical weapons be different?

Lift the pause button and one suspects it would be hard for the U.S. government to turn a blind eye to a Halabja on steroids – Halabja being the last case where an Arab regime (Iraq in 1988) killed thousands of its people in a chemical attack.

But the tug to save lives is countered by another specter: Quashing Assad’s chemical capacity could plunge the U.S. into a new military quagmire.

Obama clearly has the authority to act. If he wishes to use force, under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, he can do so for at least 60 days without congressional approval.

But to avoid Congress now would be a mistake. The flummoxed administration needs another set of eyes to determine what is in the national interest. Congress can do this, assuming it can act with independence and reverse the legacy of deferring to the executive branch on matters of war and peace. Granting presidents, for example, broad authority to use military force without proper vetting – as the Gulf of Tonkin and Iraq war resolutions illustrated – ill-served the country.

To this end, Congress should reconvene the hearings begun last session. This time, however, it must press for details about the administration’s assumptions about intervening or not. In addition, all the hearings should be public – not secret, as the administration prefers. This will give the American people confidence in the decision-making.

Congress should mold its findings into a joint House and Senate resolution – still plausible on national security issues even as legislators divide on budgetary matters – unblemished by executive branch drum-beating or quaking.

If Congress does this, it won’t just be addressing the Syrian challenge. It will finally begin to right the imbalance of power between the executive and lawmakers that for too long has dominated American war deciding.

This will begin to fulfill what the War Powers Resolution intended – to “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the president will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities.”

Bowlsby gave the typical conference realignment double-talk by saying that the Big 12 feels, “very good about where we are”, but not failing to mention that, “we’d be unwise to be oblivious to all that is going on around us. We need to be constantly vigilant”. That is about as close as us Big 12 supporters are going to get to having Bowlsby guarantee that the Big 12 will expand prior to 2014, though he did mention that staying at 10 members or allying with other conferences without adding teams were possibilities.

Though it might seem like the most pressing matter, conference composition was not the number one item on the agenda for the meetings. Rather, the primary focus of the ADs was to discuss the future of Big 12 bowl tie-ins.

The conference has to do so because the Cotton Bowl, which currently has the first pick of non BCS bound Big 12 teams come bowl season, is set to become part of the rotation of semifinal game sites once the new playoff system comes into effect in 2014. Bowlsby stated that once the host bowls are finalized over the next few months, the Big 12 will want to reach out to different bowls in order to secure spots for its members in prestigious games. He went on to say that both the Alamo Bowl and the Meineke Bowl (it is the friggin’ Texas Bowl people, COME ON!) have, “expressed a desire to move up and-or maintain a high level of association” with the Big 12.

Other potential sites for future Big 12 bowl engagements include games played in Florida. Siting the fact that the majority of the nation’s recruits come out of Texas, Florida, and California, Bowlsby expressed that the Big 12 desires to have a strong presence in all three states during bowl season. They already have Cali ties due to their involvement with the Holiday Bowl.

Midwives see growth curve for birthing options

The sacred rite of giving birth has seen its share of changes over the centuries, most of them packed into the last half-century or so.

By the 1950s, the days of calling in the local midwife came to be seen as both arcane and dangerous. Women were rushed to the hospital to give birth while strapped to a gurney. Waiting around for baby to arrive in its own sweet time became a thing of the past, as sedation and forceps sped things along.

Most modern hospitals now offer a completely different birth experience — more gentle, more comfortable and more in tune with the needs of the woman having the baby. Bonner General Hospital would be a prime example, with its family-centered maternity unit, where babies stay with mom after birth and there’s even room for dad to spend the night.

Moving along on a separate track has been the role of midwives in the modern world. Not terribly long ago — the 1970s, to be exact — they had to provide their service in secret in places like California, where it was against the law to assist in an out-of-hospital birth.

In Bonner County, where midwifery has been a popular option for more than 30 years, there are now at least six midwives available for assisting in the birthing process. Just as hospitals have shifted, philosophically, midwives have made some moves of their own.

Denise Midstokke was one of those California midwives whose work was cloaked in secrecy before moving to North Idaho in 1985.

“At the time, midwifery was just trying to put together a process of certification,” she said, adding that education, training and testing to meet national standards all fell under the certification procedures. Two years ago, legislation was passed in Idaho — “pushed through,” as Midstokke describes it — to allow midwives to be licensed.

“We wanted to do it because there was some noise that they were going to try and make out-of-hospital births illegal in Idaho,” she said.

That would have been a decision that flew in the face of popular opinion in places like Bonner County, which last year saw a  25 percent increase in out-of-hospital births over the past year at Midstokke’s Sandpoint-based Pend Oreille Midwifery Services offices. According to the midwife, the increase is part of a national trend.

“I had been doing about 45 births a year,” she said. “Last year, I did 60.”

Much of that increase has been due to the birth center at Pend Oreille Midwifery Services, which, with its location just minutes from the hospital, offers a more conservative option to home birth. There, too, however, midwives have seen growth in the number of families who want the experience to take place in familiar surroundings.

“A lot of people come up here to get back to the land and midwifery is seen as part of that movement,” Midstokke said, pointing out that “home” can mean different things to different people. “As midwives, we do births everywhere. I’ve done them in places with dirt floors, in tipis, trailers, yurts and school buses.

“I tease that I haven’t done one in a finished house yet.”

Emily Baker, another licensed midwife serving the local area, recently returned to the practice after having a baby of her own.

Her experience also points to heightened interest, especially with the advent of birth centers as an alternative to having a baby at home.

“I think that any midwife with a birth center will tell you that she sees an increase in families choosing that option,” said Baker.

“Word of mouth is a powerful promoter and the more women who have positive out-of-hospital birth experiences, the more women we see coming to inquire about our care as midwives.”

What they find in many cases is an environment where traditional approaches to birth have linked up with modern technology. Licensing also has changed the landscape for midwives, Midstokke noted.

“There’s a real sweetness to the traditions of midwifery,” she said. “But as we license each other, we face a different set of circumstances.

“Things have changed,” she added. “Now, we’ve become so medical that the question is: Are we becoming ‘med’-wives?”

At Pend Oreille Midwifery Services, pre-natal care includes lab work and ultrasound checkups — though the latter was added to satisfy parental curiosity as much as to provide early warnings for things such as cleft palates, heart problems, spinal bifida or organ development.

“More people are interested in wanting to know the sex of the baby than in the value of a medical ultrasound,” Midstokke said.

Baker agrees that licensing has changed things, but believes the basic principles of midwifery have stayed the same.

“There are some more specific guidelines we have to follow, but, essentially, I don’t think it changes the way we provide our service at its core,” she said. “We still provide women with the opportunity to birth their babies safely and naturally in a supportive environment — and licensing doesn’t change that.”

In stark contrast to California in the 1970s, Sandpoint had at least one general practitioner who provided home deliveries during that time, often working alongside one of the local midwives.

Those days are gone, as “GPs” have stepped away from births due to the potential of malpractice suits, according to Midstokke. Obstetricians, whose qualifications make them an obvious provider for care before, during and after pregnancy, have filled the gap.

The relationship between midwives and “OBs” is positive, both Baker and Midstokke said, though they say the doctors would prefer that women give birth in the hospital setting, in case something went wrong.

Therein lies the fundamental difference in philosophy between traditional midwives and traditional medicine.

“Our philosophy is that we’re going to think everything is OK until you prove that it’s not,” Midstokke said.

“There is a bit of philosophical difference between medicine and midwifery, but the two are, at times, overlapping,” said Baker. “I think that we will see, in the future, a greater benefit from and need for collaboration between the two. There is no reason they should be mutually exclusive — I think there is potential for a symbiosis, a system where all parties feel there is a good balance and benefit from having both medicine and midwifery available in the community.”

The decision to give birth at home or in a birth center, as opposed to the hospital setting, requires considerably more responsibility on the part of mothers, in particular, as they become the key player on a team whose goal is to deliver a healthy baby.

"Anything On The Web Will Be Discovered"

“Not a day goes by that I don’t hear about a virus or a breach. For me, there is a very clear equation since I began my service in the NSA: If you put something on the Web, it will be discovered. There will always be threats. Every software has holes. I can’t speak about specific events, but the threats exist and they are real,” says Nick Combs, Chief Technological Officer of the federal department at EMC, in an interview held during his visit to Israel in June.

Combs made his way to the commercial field after nearly 30 years in which he presided in a variety of senior positions in the US intelligence community, in organizations such as the NSA, DoDIIS and others. Today he is responsible for EMC’s interface with the intelligence community, the postal service and all branches of government, in intelligence and the Department of Defense in the United States. In the framework of his job, he learned of technological developments and challenges in both the commercial world and the defense field, and like other senior officials in the IT field around the world, he believes that cyber exists and represents a genuine threat.

“The cyber war is a genuine threat. The critical infrastructures are based on technology and electricity, and it’s enough to think of a scenario in which a nuclear facility loses control to emphasize the threat. In the field of crucial infrastructure defense, it would be a disaster if the systems are revealed. This is why there is a need to transition from static architecture to proactive control. This is not just to allow for entry, but also to protect the information itself. The next war will be fought in the cyber expanse, that much is sure.

“A senator approached me once and asked, ‘tell me, Nick, with all these cyber threats, why does nothing work?’. I replied that the hackers don’t want the systems to work. They want to be there, see what we are planning to do and be prepared. The working assumption is that hackers are inside all of our systems.

“Today, security is no more than a broken defense network, with security solution points in the form of products. We need to build the defensive measures directly into the hardware. We must build an architecture that begins in the software, through the operating system and up to the hardware. This is another way to look at information security.

“A border security (entry) needs to be passed to manage the information. The commercial industry does this well. For example, if I travel to the US and I've stopped to fill up on fuel at a place that is beyond my ordinary behavior pattern, I need to provide my zip code in addition to my credit card. In another instance, if I made a payment in Los Angeles and was at the east coast two hours later, the system automatically halts my payments. This is identification over several stages.

“To take another scenario, in the military, if I enter my office every day, then perhaps I don’t need security to be so strong on my stationary computer. However, if I take my portable computer, then several stages of identification are needed. We must put information security around the information itself, and limit the access to it in a manner that will allow every element to be exposed solely to the information it requires. This is all about information management rights.”

“It all depends on how you define a cloud. There are public, private and hybrid clouds. There are dozens of governmental organizations and six large intelligence agencies in the United States, and they are all collected to a cloud. This can be done with a public cloud, and these capabilities can also be brought to the intelligence community via a hybrid cloud. This is a collection of clouds connected together with a shared infrastructure.

“In today’s intelligence, we need to be able to exchange information between the different organizations. There are challenges in connecting between groups such as the DEA, NSA and others, but it is possible to establish such a community cloud for intelligence. People need to understand that you can still supply a cloud and supply the necessary sensitivities pertaining to the information. If we can do this in the US, it can also be done in other places.”

“It is a considerable challenge. If you see the US army and think of a perception that says ‘every soldier is a sensor', in the sense that the soldier is a source of information and there are 1.5 million soldiers – then we are talking about 1.5 million sensors. There are capabilities such as 3G and 4G networks that the military is thinking of incorporating in the battlefield. One of the most difficult things to do is to incorporate such communication capabilities in the last mile. How do I incorporate these capabilities, and how do I enable national tactical systems to communicate with the soldiers in the field? This is not a simple challenge.

“Another challenge is to develop analysis and fusion capabilities for big data. Today, we can collect the information and analyze, but one of the challenges is to carry out a decentralized analysis via an ‘information marker’, which is an entity present in various places in the field, carrying out local analysis and working with the central system.

Reading the Beautiful Mysteries of Louise Penny

Great novels, each one, and now I am left with the agony of waiting for the next installment. A whole year? I cannot wait that long! Write quickly, dear Ms. Penny, write quickly!

Penny's novels are rich and full, intelligent and entertaining, and worthy of all the many awards they've garnered (including the Agatha Award for Best Novel, and the Dilys, Arthur Ellis, Anthony, Macavity, and Nero Awards).

Set in the province of Quebec, Penny uses the history of old Canada to set up her characters, and illustrate their differing personalities and backgrounds. She then takes on huge themes -- memory, guilt, hope, love, friendship -- that are amplified but never overtaken by the murder mystery the quietly heroic and hugely kind Inspector Gamache must solve, time after time -- and time and again in the tiny but absolutely enchanting village of Three Pines, with its lively citizenry of artists, a poet (rude beyond belief but with a core of gold), a gay couple, a retired psychologist running a bookstore, and a slew of minor originals, including a young man nicknamed "Old" and his wife, nicknamed "the Wife."

Not all the stories take place in Three Pines (there is only so much murder a small village can tolerate -- or produce) and although at first I missed the small town atmosphere and charm (blooming bushes! crackling hearths! bottles of wine and loaves of bread and boards of cheese and long walks along the rustic river), Penny makes sure her characters eat well no matter where they are, and her writing guarantees that atmosphere never takes a back seat.

In her latest, The Beautiful Mystery, Gamache finds himself behind centuries-old stonewalls, soaking up the beauty of Gregorian chants and the ugliness of murder (along with the delights of rich stews, breads, cheeses, and wild blueberries dipped in dark chocolate). In Bury Your Dead, he is in Quebec City for Winter Carnival; but except for a few mentions of revelers and Caribou (a fatal drink made from vodka, brandy, sherry and port), the focus is on an old library of the tiny English community, and its connection to the hero of Quebec and French separatists, Samuel Champlain. Penny never skimps on her research of food, history, location, or psychology and the result is books that are absolutely addicting.

But not only are we drawn into Penny's novels by the places and the food and the murder itself (always a bit strange and fascinating) but because Penny writes books about people whom we come to know as friends -- compelling friends, who deserve our interest and ignite our caring.

With that caring comes pain. Not all of Penny's characters come through the darkness imposed by murder and make it through to the light on the other side. Penny doesn't write feel-good, frothy novels with everything falling neatly into place by the finish, but instead she creates real scenarios that expose the tolls exacted by real living, where good is not always rewarded and evil not always punished. Penny shows us that lives can be overtaken by the tolls of abuse, deceit, greed, and revenge -- and lives lost.

I finish reading the novels of Louise Penny with feelings of great satisfaction, renewed awe, and just a bit of anxiety: She leaves a question (or two, or three) unanswered but persistent, and we poor readers must wait! We must wait for the next novel to find out how and where, when and if, justice will be delivered, love affirmed, and happiness awarded to those that have waited too long for it. Waiting, waiting -- must I really wait a whole year to find out what happens next to Gamache, his sidekick Beauvoir, and the friends that surround them, the enemies that invade them?

Yes, I must wait. But in the meantime, I can reread the seven novels that came before. Because there are new clues to be found, I am sure; there are people to meet again, and see in a new light; and there are places to return to (food and hearth, wine and conversation!). And always, always there is murder. Awful murders, wonderful novels.

How industries are embracing efficiency

Deprive your body of water and you'll be dead within a week. The survival rate is similar for some of the largest industries equally dependent on water to grow food and make goods such as jeans, beverages, electric power, homes, chemicals and even computer chips.

While many people depend on these products, at the same time, many local communities are competing with manufacturers for limited water resources. For example, the computer chip maker Intel estimates it takes 16 gallons of water to produce a single chip, which explains its huge appetite for water in 2011: some 8.3bn gallons from local water systems. Comparatively, the average American uses about 100 gallons of water each day; the average African just five gallons.

Competition for water is only expected to increase, as highlighted recently at the World Water Week conference. For companies in these water intensive industries, addressing these competing demands and implementing an effective water management strategy has become essential.

At Intel, an increased focus on environmental issues came in the 1990s, as the computer industry grew rapidly. Since then, while their consumption of water has increased each year, so have their efforts to reduce the impact to local communities, according to Todd Brady, the company's global environmental manager.

For these efforts, in 2007, the US Environmental Protection Agency recognised the company as a water efficiency leader. And by 2011, some 80% of the water it used was recycled and sent back to local water systems, where it was used for irrigation, in other industrial purposes, or for drinking water. This journey, according to Brady, was a process of engaging employees, local communities and industry partners.

"The semi-conductor manufacturing process goes through hundreds of steps," Brady explained, "and in between those steps we have to rinse off the surface of the wafer with ultra-pure water." When searching for ways to reduce and reuse the water used in this process, one of the first places Intel looks is inside, soliciting ideas from the engineers who are closest to the manufacturing process.

Intel encourages employees to come forward with ideas on conserving resources, and then matches the best ideas with a grant to develop them. "We thought we would eventually run out of ideas, but the programme is still going strong," says Brady. Most of these innovations, he adds, not only save on resources but also money, providing a payback in three years or less.

Among environmental impacts, water use is a particularly local challenge, more so than greenhouse gas emissions, the impact of which may be several states away, says Brady. To compound this challenge, Intel has located several of its largest fabrication plants in areas that are particularly water-constrained, such as Arizona and Israel.

Rather than offer a one-size-fits-all approach, Intel attempts to tailor its water management solutions for each municipality in which it operates. "We engage with the community and the water districts early on to understand their needs, discuss our needs and find solutions that work for both of us," he says.

At the Israel location, for example, working with the local government, Intel was able to change some of the chemicals used in its manufacturing so the water from this process could be treated and reused for irrigation on local farms.

The company has also learned to be as transparent as possible. "By opening your books to what you are doing, you build trust. Otherwise there is suspicion and mistrust," says Brady.

Earlier this year, Intel collaborated with engineering firm CH2M Hill and Arizona State University to help develop the website WaterMatch. The idea is to maximise the reuse of so-called "greywater". This is wastewater that can be treated and reused for industrial or agricultural purposes, but not for drinking water.

The website, which is free to use, will match entities that have excess wastewater, like water treatment plants, with those that can use it in lieu of taking fresh water from local supplies. CH2M Hill showcased the website at World Water Week.

Intel has made steady progress to conserve the amount of water used in its manufacturing. Still, the company failed to meet its most recent goal to cut the water required per chip below 2008 levels by year-end 2011. The challenge, says Brady, is the pace of technical innovation and the increasing complexity of the products each year. As you pack more transistors on the chip, you increase the number of steps that use water to rinse and clean the chip, he explains.

The takeaway here for Intel and others, he says: "You must be proactive, be strategic in your thinking. You can't just look at issues year-to-year. You must consider where your business and products are going over the next decade and how you can intercept that to achieve the goals you've set."

County workforces less diverse than residents

As suburban metro-area counties grow more diverse, their workforces have not.

In Carver, Scott, Washington and Anoka counties, minorities hold between 2 and 5 percent of county jobs, while the overall minority populations range from 9 to 15 percent. The 849-member Carver County workforce included 16 people of color this year; just 56 of 1,760 Anoka County workers are minorities.

Officials cite familiar reasons for the numbers: tight budgets that have curtailed hiring or caused job cuts, commuters who face limited transportation options, and resources that remain scarce for outreach in minority communities. One county also acknowledged that its top officials haven't pushed diversity hiring as a high priority.

But as current employees retire, suburban areas are beginning to face up to the challenge of hiring more minorities and making their workforces reflect their communities, where 60 percent of the region's minority population now lives.

"Changing the system of how you operate takes a real commitment," said the Rev. Paul Slack, president of ISAIAH, a Twin Cities faith coalition that works on housing and economic issues. "They've been able to say for a long time that we tried. They now have to say that effort wasn't good enough."

It isn't an insurmountable challenge, activists contend.

Hennepin and Ramsey counties, for example, have minority workforces of 21 and 22 percent, respectively, and minority populations of 29 and 33 percent.

When waves of Hmong, Somali and Latino immigrants came to the Twin Cities, leaders in those two counties were quick to realize that a commitment to diversity "wasn't just a nice thing to do, but the right thing to do," said Louis King, a longtime activist who currently runs a nonprofit center offering minority-oriented job skills training.

Other counties "should shamelessly steal ideas from their success," he said.

Of the seven metro-area counties, Carver has the smallest overall minority population, at 9 percent. Diversity recruiting "is not an area we've been asked in a real powerful way to pursue" by our leaders and elected officials, said Doris Krogman, the county's employee relations director.

Jobs are posted at workforce centers and elsewhere, officials attend job fairs and "we are happy when we see people of color coming through to apply for jobs," Krogman said. The county also has a good record of retaining minority employees, she said.

A lack of worker diversity is a source of frustration to Jack Kemme, Scott County's employee relations director. The county is experiencing an influx of people of color, but finding a talent pool with the requisite skills to fill a shrinking number of county jobs has proved difficult, Kemme said.

"In our last resident survey, most felt the community as a whole is open to people of diverse backgrounds," he said. "We just need to keep recruiting. If we get a larger base of diverse employees, it becomes its own recruiting source."

In Washington County, reduced state aid the last few years resulted in a hiring freeze, putting minority recruiting on the back burner, said County Administrator Molly O'Rourke. With a minority population that has doubled in the past decade, however, the county has hired a consultant to rework strategic planning to put more emphasis on recruitment and retention of minority employees, she said.

"People tend to like to live where they work. You look at the radius around our government center in Stillwater and the population base is mostly white," she said. "Most of our minority population lives along the western edge of the county, and it's easier to get to downtown St. Paul instead of Stillwater. We need to reach out to those folks."

About 4.7 percent of Wash-ington County employees are people of color, while the county as a whole has a minority population of about 14 percent. However, the latter number is inflated by the inmates in state prisons in Stillwater and Oak Park Heights.

In Dakota County, 9 percent of county workers are minorities. Employee Relations Director Nancy Hohbach said the county prepared a plan to encourage diversity hiring after a boom in the minority population starting in 2004. The county trained managers in cultural competency and established a diversity trainee program, she said. The numbers are also helped by having government centers in Hastings, Apple Valley and West St. Paul instead of a single, central location.

Analysis concludes Md. can support 6th casino

Maryland's gambling market could support a casino in Prince George's County and generate more money for the state by allowing the new site and table games there and at five casinos currently allowed under state law, state analysts and consultants concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The joint study by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services and PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the amount of gambling expected to occur in Maryland is well within the thresholds met or exceeded in other metropolitan areas around the nation.

"And on top of that, our analysis does conclude that significant additional revenues could be generated by the addition of gambling outlets," said Warren Deschenaux, the General Assembly's chief budget analyst. "The question then is: What we do with those additional revenues?"

It's hard to know how much money a new casino and table games would bring in. Lawmakers are considering changes in the state's unusually high 67 percent tax on gambling revenues.

The report projects the state could receive about $101 million more annually for education and lottery revenue with no additional compensation to operators beyond new table game revenues and a regular Prince George's facility. It's also unclear how much would be made from table games, because lawmakers would need to decide how much they would tax those. A 20 percent tax rate on table games would raise about $50 million a year for the state at the five currently authorized locations and $60 million with a Prince George's facility.

"It would be hard not to get to $100 (million) making reasonable allowances," Deschenaux said, after he was asked to consider whether the projections turn out to be high.

A work group comprising mostly lawmakers and members of Gov. Martin O'Malley's administration is examining ways to expand gambling. The governor has indicated he would hold a special session next month to take up the issue, if the group can reach a consensus.

Deschenaux said the analysts who made the projections were working in a peculiar environment. That's because they do not have a lot of hard data on actual revenues. Only two of the five now-legal casinos have been open for more than a year, one in Perryville and another in Berlin. The state's largest, in Anne Arundel County, only opened last week. Two more casinos -- one in Baltimore and one in western Maryland -- are still in the works.

"So what we will be sharing is our best judgment in a world of uncertainty," Deschenaux said.

While pondering expansion, the work group heard Tuesday from William Rickman, the owner of the Ocean Downs casino in Berlin, which lost $2.5 million in its first year of operations. Rickman told the panel that the demographics of his location near Ocean City is strongly susceptible to seasonal dropoffs. He said he did not believe his casino would remain in business with only 33 percent of the gambling proceeds. He said Ocean Downs needs more like 50 percent to make a decent return.

"If you want us to only limp by, we need to be about 45 percent," said Rickman, who said he expects significant loses again this year. "If you want a failure in the future, it would stay where it is now and there would be a failure in the future."

A key part of the debate will involve how much lawmakers lower the tax rate to help allay losses at other venues caused by a casino in Prince George's. For example, the report released Tuesday estimates the Anne Arundel casino would lose $37 million in slot machine revenue, and Baltimore would lose about $21 million.

The Radical Theory of Evolution That Explains Democrats

Why does the United States have two political parties that espouse such opposing philosophies? The Republicans fight for the conservative ideals of "individual rights -- and the responsibilities that go with them," from which flows the belief in limited government and few regulations. Democrats argue for the liberal notion that "we also rise or fall as one nation ... I am my brother's keeper, my sister's keeper," from which derives the support for social-assistance programs and universal access to health care. Why do these two parties -- and the divided populations they represent -- see "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" so differently? Is it cultural, or is there something innate in our biology that explains these differences?

Scientists have spent the last decade examining the physiology of political thought, but they have only succeeded in identifying the symptoms and not the root cause. So, forget about the MRI studies showing that Democrats and Republicans respond differently to fear, with greater or less blood flow to specific parts of the brain. Ignore the finding that conservatives have enlarged amygdalas, the part of the brain associated with anxiety and emotions, but that liberals have a larger anterior cingulate, which is associated with optimism. Skip over the research that says we inherit our politics from our parents. They all tell us the "how," not the "why."

The underlying reason for the eternal conflict between Republican "individual rights" and Democratic "we're all in this together" is explained by a radical and magisterial theory of evolution outlined in Edward O. Wilson's groundbreaking new book The Social Conquest of Earth. Wilson, who has dominated evolutionary thinking for the past 40 years, has synthesized a lifetime of work into a "theory of everything". Greatly simplified, his argument is that two rival evolutionary forces drive human behavior: first, individual selection, which rewards the fittest individuals by passing along their genes; and second, group selection, in which the communities that work best together come to dominate the gene pool. Wilson argues that these two evolutionary forces are at work simultaneously, so that both self-serving and altruistic behaviors are constantly competing at the individual and at the group level. As he explains, "Members of the same group compete with one another in a manner that leads to self-serving behavior .... At the higher level, groups compete with groups, favoring cooperative social traits among members of the same group." In other words, individuals with self-serving behaviors beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of individuals with self-serving behaviors.

Extending this evolutionary theory, two competing forces are at work within the political organism: the "Republican genotype," which favors individualistic behaviors, and the "Democratic genotype," which favors altruism. Both forces are simultaneously at work at the individual and group levels. Different individuals -- and different groups -- will respond more or less to each of these forces depending upon the political and economic environment. The physiological differences between Democrats and Republicans in fear response, anxiety, etc., are simply symptoms of these competing genetic influences, and not the root cause of their divergent political beliefs.

Dozens of guns seized inside Venezuelan prison

Authorities seized about 125 guns stashed inside a prison following a standoff between armed inmates and troops that ended more than two weeks ago, Venezuela's prisons chief said Sunday.

Officials are carrying out an exhaustive search of La Planta prison in Caracas and they have found some guns by destroying floors and walls where the weapons had been hidden, said Iris Varela, the government's minister for prisons. She said about 40 percent of the vast prison has not yet been fully searched.

Varela said at a news conference that the weaponry recovered included handguns, shotguns, one submachine gun, one telescopic sight, 27 explosive devices and more than 64,000 rounds of ammunition.

The three-week confrontation at the prison ended on May 17 when officials reached a deal with leaders of the inmates, who agreed to be moved to other prisons. The last of more than 1,600 inmates came out the following day. The prisoners had been holed up inside resisting authorities, and gunfire had erupted repeatedly during the standoff.

One man who lived near the prison was hit by a stray bullet and died. Varela said five other people were wounded during the shootouts, including two National Guard soldiers and three inmates.

The government shut down the prison, which had long been overcrowded, once the violence ended and the last of the inmates were moved out.

Speaking with reporters at the empty prison, Varela said officials also found 6 kilograms (13 pounds) of various types of drugs and hundreds of contraband cellphones

She vowed a thorough investigation into how the weapons were smuggled in.

"Those who end up being responsible for this whole situation are a bunch of traitors," Varela said. She said no one had been detained thus far in the investigation.

Prison unrest and crowding have become major problems for President Hugo Chavez's government. Violence is common inside Venezuela's prisons, where inmates often manage to obtain weapons and drugs with the help of corrupt guards.

The watchdog group Venezuelan Prisons Observatory says about 560 people died in Venezuelan prisons last year, up from 476 in 2010.

When Varela was asked whether inmates are armed in most of the country's prisons, she said: "There's a difficult situation, but they aren't the majority."

She also confirmed a recent news report that one prison in central Aragua state has a discotheque, and said various other prisons have swimming pools. She said such perks were allowed in the prisons starting more than a decade ago in an attempt to ease violence.

The Venezuelan newspaper El Universal recently said that inmates in Tocoron prison organized a Mother's Day concert, bringing in artists to perform at a discotheque called "Tokio."

Varela said the government plans to soon begin building eight new prisons, which are scheduled to be finished next year.

Enhancing Your Security With IP Surveillance

In today's world, an IP surveillance camera system may be the smart solution to security issues as terrorist becomes more sophisticated in devising new methods in carrying out there attack more people are turning to video surveillance to help identify threat and monitor events. In today article we will analyze the advantage of this equipments and how implementing it can proffer solutions. In a home, business, or other establishment. Compared to traditional security cameras, IP or Internet protocol has its advantages. As more and more people switch to IP surveillance system as against the old CCTV, ease of installation and higher resolution of video, CCTV (closed circuit television) and DVR methods are quickly becoming obsolete because IP allows business owner, law enforcement officers, etc to view video from anywhere with an Internet or network connection. With a wide market out there, some business owners may feel a little overwhelmed, but by configuring some key simple features one can relax and be rest assured that the desired solution will be achieved.

An IP camera captures and sends video footage over an IP network, allowing users to view, record, store, and manage their video surveillance images either locally or remotely over the network infrastructure. The camera can be placed wherever there's an IP network connection. It has its own IP address and unlike a webcam, doesn't require a connection to a PC in order to operate.

Along with streaming video footage, network cameras can include a number of additional functionalities, such as pan/tilt/zoom operation, motion detection, audio surveillance, integration with alarms and other security systems, automated alerts, intelligent video analytics, and much more. Many IP cameras can also send multiple streams of video, using different compression technologies for live viewing and archiving.

IP cameras offer flexible installation, ease of use, higher-quality images, stability, and scalability as new cameras can be added to the network at any time.

Video motion detection is a useful tool that allows you to program your network camera to begin recording, and perform other functions such as sending automated email alerts, when movement is detected within a scene. The functionality comes either built-in with your IP camera, or through video management software.

There are a number of advantages to using motion detection. Since you can limit recording to situations when activity is taking place, motion detection helps to conserve bandwidth, saves storage space, reduces CPU load on recording servers, and also allows for integration with other systems such as alarms and access control systems. The system can be set up so that unless movement is detected, no video is being recorded. It can also be programmed to send video at a low frame-rate until motion is perceived.

A number of actions can be triggered using motion detection. Examples include: saving images before or after an event, delivering video images to specific locations for recording or monitoring, sending email and phone alerts, activating door locks and lights, sounding alarms, and more.

Restaurants get tech savvy

When hungry patrons visit The Market House at Jackson Square when it opens in Oak Ridge later this month, they'll be greeted by servers with iPhones not notepads.

Gone are designated point of sale systems where servers go to punch in food and drink orders. Instead, servers will check out an iPhone and take orders in real time tableside.

The twenty-something owners, Dan Tremaine and Bo Shipley, say using this type of technology will prevent staff from misreading their own handwriting or forgetting to ask essential follow-up questions, like how a person wants their steak cooked.

"It's all right there. You can even add pictures of everything," Shipley said. "It's just cool."

As new technologies are developed for smartphones and tablets, more restaurants are flirting with ways to take advantage of opportunities to streamline processes, market directly to customers and ultimately lower costs.

"As far as technology goes, it takes a leap of faith," Tremaine said.

For the owners of the new farm-to-table restaurant, in the former Jackson Square Bistro location, the decision to forego a traditional point of sale system wasn't automatic.

"We considered it and then backed off, looked at other POS systems and then came back to it. Honestly, it was a heck of a lot cheaper," Tremaine added.

Tennessee Hospitality Association CEO Greg Adkins said customers can expect to see more restaurants trying to capitalize on a broad range of new technologies that can be used for marketing, loyalty and operations.

"They say that's the next wave," Adkins said of the latter. "It's very cutting edge. But it depends on the type of restaurant it is and the type of experience they want their guests to have."

Dylan Roskop of National Restaurant Properties, which is providing consulting services to The Market House, said it comes down to accuracy and speed.

"With all the technology and software that's being created, it can be a better way to go," Roskop said. "With their system, they will save 3 minutes per table."

Six months ago, the Old City gastro pub Crown and Goose replaced its buzzing pagers with an iPad app that sends a text message to waiting patrons, letting them know when their table is ready.

The No Wait app works much the same way as an old-fashioned, write-your-name-on-a-piece of paper list, when it comes to taking a person's name and the number of people in the party.

But the cloud-based system also prompts the hostess to enter a phone number, giving customers the flexibility to wander nearby, said Gretchen Paxton, the restaurant's marketing and events coordinator.

"It just works wonderfully. They can do their own thing," Paxton said.

The restaurant and pub at 123 S. Central St. doesn't have a large waiting area, so having a wait list management system tied to a person's mobile device provides flexibility. Guests can take a walk or hang out at the bar. It also syncs with its online reservation program, Open Table.

"It's so cutting edge, the patent is still pending," Paxton said.

At nearby Remedy Coffee, an iPad rests behind the counter, where orders are entered and customers pay. It sends them a receipt by text or email.

"If you could do a cash register the right way, this is the way it would look like," owner Sean Alsobrooks said.

Almost one year has passed since Alsobrooks made the decision to switch from a traditional processor to running his business off an iPad with Square, a payment system that allows businesses to accept credit cards on their mobile or tablet device. Nearly 1,500 people in Knoxville are using Square, according to the company.

"It came down to the fees. I got tired every time I got my bill of seeing a swipe fee, a batch processing fee, a card fee," he said.

The move has saved him almost $100 per month.

"It's a beautiful experience," Alsobrooks said. "Square was the first, but I think it's going to become more common."

M2M in healthcare: wellness connected

Advocates of machine-to-machine (M2M) enabling technologies are always ready to talk up the kinds of application it could benefit. Typically, M2M can be seen in a range of applications - security and surveillance, building automation, supply chains and logistics management - however, it is healthcare that is best placed to progress beyond proof-of-concept stage when it comes to the ‘device shall speak unto device’ model.In short, the M2M model uses wired or wireless connectivity to exchange information and communications between Web-connected devices without the need for human intervention.

The benefits are numerous for patients, carers and clinicians alike, and particularly if a migration from conventional to M2M is worked into planned technology upgrade cycles. Given that M2M can use a lot of mainstream ICT, its costs can be diffused and aligned with those IT lifecycles common to PC and Internet-connected medical devices, rather than very expensive specialist hardware and software. This benefits both physicians and healthcare finance offices.

Definitions of what M2M means for the healthcare sector vary between sources. Some benefits extend from established telemedicine systems; others are only practical using an M2M model and the assumption that patients have local access to broadband connection. M2M can, in theory, provide real-time statistics, faster responses and ongoing revenues throughout product lifetime.

The potential to automate healthcare procedures - freeing up staff and only involving doctors when they are actually required - is compelling for a healthcare sector looking to make best use of its available resources. Data regarding patients’ conditions can be more easily monitored, and can be fed into ‘big-picture’ data sets to be analysed for wide-scale trends. Applications can be more easily changed or upgraded. M2M also provides patients with more control over their treatment regime.

According to Vodafone’s mHealth programme, the need for technological intervention in the delivery of healthcare services is due to the kind of shifts in healthcare demand that are evident around the world: ageing demographics, a rise in chronic diseases (such as diabetes), allied to an increasingly technically-savvy patient population, are affecting the type and intensity of care required to the point where established healthcare models are becoming unsustainable.

Generically, the M2M model begins with a remote sensor gathering source data (blood pressure, heart rate, blood levels, say), and transferring it via a conventional Internet link through the public network, then routed to a controlling server; the data is then analysed and acted upon by host systems which can be hosted by a medical facility, or a cloud service provider, for example.

M2M is associated with telemedicine, a technology that has been around in various forms for some years. Telemedicine is the use of telecommunications and IT in order to provide clinical health care remotely, overcoming distance barriers, and providing access to medical support that might otherwise not be so accessible. Telemedicine can also be part of the life-saving equipment used in critical care and emergency situations. The interface between healthcare and IT is always growing and already starting to infiltrate the social dependency between individuals, community group members, and social media, as well as what might be termed ‘personal ICT’. A recent report from Carers UK highlights how this trend should play a key role in bringing advance healthcare to an ageing population as unsustainable demands are made on health organisations’ resources.

Traditional telemedicine has mostly relied on special dedicated communication channels involving human supervision, whereas in the M2M context, much of the monitoring, data gathering and analysis occurs automatically between the connected devices. Different M2M telemedicine solutions developers are looking at different architectural models. A typical example of M2M communications is road traffic control.

The system connects to the sensor monitors and sends information on volume and speed characteristics; this is sent to specialised software that controls the traffic devices, including traffic lights and information signs. The incoming data is then manipulated to control the traffic flow.

State agencies are already on the case. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has begun investigating ways to deploy M2M healthcare. The government has challenged the NHS to find 20bn worth of efficiency savings by 2015; M2M is viewed as one way that this can be achieved. One of the first areas for M2M applications is patient monitoring. The aim is to use M2M technology to bring better compliance with prescribed treatments, faster reaction times to medical emergencies, and generally better outcomes for patients.

A computer

Three years ago, 100 Parisians volunteered to wear a wristband with a sensor in it. The sensors measured air and noise pollution as the wearers made their way around the city, transmitting that data back to an online platform that created a virtual map of the city’s pollution levels, which anyone with an Internet connection could take a look at.

It was simple, elegant, effective — and a peek at the urban future, when “smart cities” will collect data of all kinds (in all kinds of ways) and use it to make themselves better places to live. The Paris wristband project shows how these efforts are already taking place, as urbanites conceive of solutions to their cities’ problems through creative uses of technology. It’s urban resourcefulness at its finest.

But it may not last. The smart-city movement is at a crossroads. With the market projected to be worth $16 billion by the end of the decade, big companies like IBM and Cisco have much grander — and more profitable — ambitions than these small-scale projects. They’re going all-in on smart cities, with designs that supposedly do everything from end traffic jams to prevent disease outbreaks to eliminate litter. “Almost anything — any person, any object, any process or any service, for any organization, large or small — can become digitally aware and networked,” said IBM Chairman Samuel J. Palmisano at the 2010 SmarterCities forum in Shanghai. “Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and instrumented things —cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines …”

Indeed, the goal of these companies is not just to participate in the evolution of smart cities, but to connect and control virtually everything with massive operating systems that will run these cities in their entirety. “Everybody wants to be the architects of these systems because then you own them forever,” says Greg Lindsay, author of “Aerotropolis” and an urban-technology reporter for Fast Company. “You could say it’s sort of a land grab.”

Which of these futures should smart cities shoot for — the bottom-up model or the top-down version? A few weeks ago, Lindsay and Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future debated just that question. It’s easy to feel a knee-jerk reaction against the top-down, evil-corporate-overlord schema, but it has some things going for it. Rio de Janeiro is perhaps the closest thing the world currently has to a top-down smart city. Two years ago, IBM built an enormous, Mission Control-like facility for Rio, from which emergency services, transit, traffic, air quality, weather, contagious disease outbreaks, landslides and just about everything else is now monitored and managed. “Eighty interchangeable digital panels project live video feeds from 450 cameras,” is how the Daily Beast described it, “plus a dizzying array of tricked-out Google Maps of schools and hospitals, car accidents … and close to 10,000 GPS-tracked buses and ambulances.”

It’s an undeniably nimble and efficient method (assuming the system doesn’t crash), and will come in handy when Rio hosts both the Olympics and the World Cup in the next four years. But it also consolidates power in the executive branch and creates an unsettling scope of surveillance. Its greatest novelty, however, may be that the system effectively puts a corporation, IBM, partially at the helm of a city of 6 million people.

“It has something like 70 different city departments under it,” says Lindsay of Rio’s system. “You create this entanglement where IBM almost becomes part of the city government. You couldn’t untangle it if you wanted to.”

Not to mention the fact that IBM is a computer company, not an urban planning consultancy. In his debate with Lindsay, Townsend asserted that the companies vying for smart-city dominance “know nothing about cities.” In fact, he said, despite having one of the biggest smart-city divisions in the IT world, IBM just hired its first urban planner last year. Why so little interest in what makes cities tick? “That’s probably the whole arrogance of the technology culture,” said Lindsay. “I think the software industry sees urban government as having failed.” Their attitude is: “‘We will come into your city and we will fix it.’”

High-Speed Collusion

However, the foundation for this success — a competitive market for high-speed Internet access — is in serious jeopardy. That’s because of a steady and unmistakable march away from competition and toward higher and higher levels of concentration in the market.

In the past seven years we’ve witnessed rampant consolidation. Sprint bought Nextel. AT&T merged first with Cingular and then with BellSouth. Verizon gobbled up Alltel. Comcast absorbed NBCUniversal. This trend finally paused when the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked AT&T’s takeover of T-Mobile.

The consolidation we’re experiencing isn’t a natural result of free-market forces. Rather, it’s the outcome of the FCC’s policy decisions, which discourage competition and place a disproportionate amount of the nation’s most valuable spectrum into the hands of just two companies: AT&T and Verizon.

Now one of these behemoths has asked the government to bless yet another unholy union. Verizon announced late last year that it intends to team up with a coalition of cable companies. In this deal, Verizon has agreed to stop competing with cable in exchange for the opportunity to buy a valuable chunk of “wireless spectrum” — the industry’s term for the public airwaves over which wireless traffic moves.

This latest deal to divvy up the market for high-speed Internet access would hurt consumers. We’d wind up with fewer options for broadband in our communities, higher prices, and increasingly unfair terms and conditions.

Verizon would control even more of the nation’s valuable mobile broadband spectrum, and it would cement AT&T’s and Verizon’s dominance in the wireless market.

Put simply, since Verizon controls more spectrum than any of its competitors, it doesn’t need this deal to meet growing consumer data demand. But it is the best way for Verizon to ensure that another wireless company cannot compete by using that spectrum to offer higher-quality services at lower prices.

The spectrum sale alone should be enough to tilt this transaction against the public interest. But the most stunning part of these deals is a series of cartel-like side agreements between Verizon and the cabal of cable companies — former competitors — to resell each other’s products. If all goes according to plan, you’ll be able to buy Verizon Wireless service from your local cable company, or get cable modem and cable TV service from the Verizon Wireless retailer around the corner.

That proposition would put an end to any hope for nationwide competition between truly high-speed Internet service providers. Competition benefits consumers when companies try to win subscribers from their competitors through better service and lower prices — not when they offer to sign up their own customers for their rivals’ services.

These agreements simply represent a pact between these companies to stay out of each other’s way, forever. They put former rivals on the path toward collusion rather than competition.

Consumers are already feeling the impact of the lack of competition as they get locked in to more expensive long-term contracts and bundles while alternatives are locked out of the marketplace.

There’s no reason this pattern of consolidation and consumer harm has to continue. The FCC and the Justice Department should protect consumers by stopping this deal. If the decision to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger was the down payment on future competition, preventing Verizon’s deal with the cable cartel should be the next installment.

Villagers in Almondsbury take legal action to keep access road open

A LEGAL battle is being waged by disgruntled villagers in Almondsbury after parish councillors put the only access road to their homes up for sale without warning.

Woodhouse Close residents first discovered that the lane and field at the back of their properties were up for auction when 'for sale' signs appeared on their street in March.

Alarmed Jean Cowan, Becky Chaplain and Brooke Stevenson immediately contacted the parish council, which owns the plot of land and path, appealing to members to grant them right of way on the road they drive on every day after the sale.

But, as their pleas fell on deaf ears, the dispute escalated and they felt they were left with no alternative but to take action and hire solicitors.

The group, who have shelled out 1,500 so far in legal fees, insisted that all councillors needed to do to put a stop to their nightmare was add a clause in the sale contract binding the buyer to allow them access.

Last Tuesday they turned up at a meeting of Almondsbury Parish Council begging councillors to hear them out.

Mother-of-two Mrs Chaplain, 32, called on members one last time to agree to a compromise before a sale went ahead.

She said: "What grounds have you for not putting a clause in the contract when it is causing so much distress to residents? We would pay for it, you would not have to spend any money."

Her neighbour Mrs Stevenson, 29, added: "You are meant to represent the people of Almondsbury and be our voice. We have always had access to that lane. We have no front access to our homes. What are we supposed to do? We are all worried sick."

Chairman Cllr Diane Wilson cut them short, saying the matter was now in the hands of solicitors.

She said: "You have not got a legal right to use it. You have had access free gratis as long as I can remember. This council has never charged you a penny for the use of that lane. You can get to your properties. You are exaggerating."

South Gloucestershire Councillor for Almondsbury and former parish council chairman Sheila Cook said she was "appalled" at the members' behaviour.

She said: "I’m very supportive of the residents’ case and I’m disappointed that the parish council are refusing to engage with them, which is why residents feel that they have no alternative but to go down the legal route – a route that will cost both the residents and the parish council."

Along with the residents, she set up a petition demanding that the sale, which was held on Tuesday evening, April 10, be postponed.

Yet, despite collecting 89 signatures, the auction went ahead and the land and lane were sold off for 74,000.