CHICAGO (AP) ? GOP Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois said Tuesday he supports same-sex marriage, becoming the second sitting Republican senator to make such an announcement in recent weeks.
Kirk, who previously opposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, said in a post on his blog that "same-sex couples should have the right to civil marriage."
"Our time on this Earth is limited, I know that better than most," said Kirk, who suffered a stroke in January 2012. "Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back ? government has no place in the middle."
Kirk went through months of rehabilitation before returning to work in Washington this January. He said in his blog post that when he went back to the Senate he promised himself he would return "with an open mind and greater respect for others."
Kirk is Illinois' ranking Republican lawmaker. His announcement comes less than three weeks after Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio became the first Republican in the Senate to say he supported gay marriage.
Kirk previously voted to end the policy barring gays from openly serving in the military, known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." He's a lead co-sponsor of a bill to ban employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and has opposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
He also supported Illinois GOP Chairman Pat Brady after Brady announced his support for same-sex marriage earlier this year. When some members of the state central committee attempted to oust Brady, Kirk said Brady had his full support.
German automaker BMW is flaunting the Harman Kardon sound system in its vehicles through QR codes on the windows of certain models displayed at the New York International Auto Show.
The QR code was displayed on a sticker on BMW vehicles and offered a chance to win a Premium Audio System by Harman Kardon after registering personal information. A QR code can be an effective way to engage consumers in a placement such as this since it will target those who are most interested in the brand.
?Harman Kardon and BMW could identify that the use of the QR codes is?tremendously?more effective than relying on the customer to type a URL into a browser,? said Stacy Morris,?corporate communications manager of marketing and culture at?BMW of North America,?Woodcliff Lake, NJ.
?Since smartphones and QR codes reading devices are very common, it is also a much faster approach to delivering information to the customer,? she said.
Scan to win The sticker with the QR code was placed on the side of several BMW vehicles that offered the Harman Kardon system.
The sticker showed a picture of two people in a BMW and the Harman Kardon home system at the bottom. It had the call to action, ?Test Drive the Harman Kardon system available in your BMW ? ?And win one for your home.?
Sticker with QR code
Scanning the QR code leads consumers to a microsite where they can give their personal information to be entered to win a home audio system.
Contest entry
After submitting their information, consumers can select a model of BMW to experience the Harman Kardon sound system. The choices are the BMW 1 series coupe or the BMW 3 series sedan.
Vehicle choices
Then, consumers can engage in a mobile interactive experience that offers text and a voice-over explaining the audio system in the BMW vehicles.
Sound system display
Since the contest is?available?to anyone at the New York Auto Show ? not just BMW enthusiasts ? there may not be much further engagement with the brand.
?The reason [QR codes] can be so effective is that in this case, the consumer needs to take action, so it will likely be a small percent who actually scan the QR code, but those who do are then more qualified,? said Jeff Gunderman, senior vice president and general manager atEye, New York.
?Presumably most consumers would want a home audio system even if they do not like BMW,? he said.?The issue is BMW is reaching consumers who just want to win as opposed to those who are really interested in BMW.
?Likely at a car show this is all right because you already have the consumer looking at BMW, but it still is not as relevant.?
Mobile engagement Other automakers at this year?s New York Auto Show are engaging attendees through mobile and social platforms.
Audi, Bentley Motors, Jaguar, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and BMW are each using social media to engage show attendees and share information with those who are not present at the New York Auto Show March 29-April 7. As with all major auto shows, social media is vital to showcasing an automaker?s models at the large event (see story).
Using mobile to allow consumers to learn more about automakers and vehicles can be an effective strategy since the consumer makes the first move and, therefore, the automaker can engage with those consumers who are interested.
?Car manufacturers have been using QR codes extensively on the sticker at the dealership, since it is a great way to expand on the information for the consumer when the messaging format has a limited space,? Mr. Gunderman said.
?I like the ability for the dealer to capture attention with pictures, headlines and limited text and then engage the consumer if they want more,? he said.
?This is an extension of that strategy at an auto show where BMW can further engage the consumer by allowing them to interact with the information via their mobile device and get more information.?
Final take Erin Shea, editorial assistant on Luxury Daily, New York?
Erin Shea is an editorial assistant on Luxury Daily. Her beats are automotive, consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, financial services, media/publishing, software and technology, telecommunications, travel and hospitality, real estate, retail and sports. Reach her at erin@napean.com.
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Who wants to die early or live with a chronic illness? Yet, 95 percent of the population lives with an identifiable risk factor, and the U.S. spends $2.5 trillion on health care ? 70 percent of which is spent on lifestyle-related disease.
For people who are committed to changing that reality, Minneapolis will be the place to be in April. Some of the nation?s top thought leaders and experts in health promotion and well-being will be here, and Minnesotans will show how communities have connected successfully to transform everyone?s health. A new national conference, Connecting to Transform Communities: Stakeholders in Health & Wellness, is being hosted by the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and Allina Health. The event will be held at the Radisson Plaza Hotel Minneapolis on Thursday, April 25 and Friday, April 26, 2013, and will bring James Fowler, Ph D; Dan Buettner and David Katz, MD, MPH, three of the world?s most renowned health care and wellness experts, to the stage.
?The influential professionals who have agreed to join us at this conference are engaged in conversations at a national level on how we improve health care and on how we improve the wellness of our communities,? said Jackie Boucher, vice president of education at Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and program director for this event. ?To bring all of these stakeholders together in Minneapolis is a rare and exciting opportunity for us to learn from each other, and ultimately contribute to improving the health of our communities.?
Fowler?s commentary on social networks is broadly covered by media such as the New York Times, NPR and ABC News. His work is recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Harvard Business Review and his acclaimed book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks has been cited by Oprah Winfrey and the New York Times Book Review. One of the foremost thinkers on the topic of social networks, Fowler will keynote the first day of the conference.
Buettner, a Minneapolis resident, is founder of Blue Zones and the author of Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way. He is a past finalist for the National Magazine Award for ?The Secrets of Living Longer,? an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, a New York Times best-selling author and a three-time Guinness World Record holder.
Katz is the founding director of Yale University?s Prevention Research Center and is counted among the 100 Most Influential People in Health & Fitness 2012. He is a past nominee for the U.S. Surgeon General post, one of the nation?s top physicians in Preventive Medicine, and the first inductee into the Marketing Disease Prevention in America Hall of Fame for efforts related to childhood obesity control.
The conference will highlight programs and strategies from across the country to improve the health of entire communities, including innovative Minnesota initiatives such as Hearts Beat Back: The Heart of New Ulm Project, and Allina Health?s Backyard Initiative and Healthy Communities Partnership. Community, health care and business leaders, and program staff will have the opportunity to discuss innovative approaches and strategies to help engage communities, maintain momentum and measure impact.
?We are pleased to be able to sponsor a dialog that will help us to engage our communities in health, digital health communications strategies, and creating accountable care communities,? said Boucher, who is also the director of The Heart of New Ulm Project. ?Connecting to Transform Communities: Stakeholders in Health & Wellness promises to be an event that not only highlights the good work being done here in the Twin Cities, but also one that contributes to the dialog that is occurring across the country on how nutrition and wellness can benefit whole communities.?
Along with national presenters, local presenters include representatives from Alliance for a Healthier Minnesota, Allina Health, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, Minneapolis Heart Institute, Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, Minnesota Department of Health, Penny George Institute for Health and Healing, StayWell Health Management, UnitedHealth Group?s Center for Health Reform & Modernization, University of Minnesota and several local and regional initiatives.
Provided by Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation
As much as we love Google Drive, its neither the prettiest nor simplest cloud storage interface. New UI tweaks rolling out to users starting today aren't suddenly going to change that hierarchy too much, but they should add some much needed polish. When you view shared folders now, you'll get a much more visually appealing layout and access to the new preview function that lets you quickly flip between files. And, perhaps the most welcome change, is the new "Add to Drive" button that will conspicuously live in the upper right-hand corner. Now adding shared material to your own Drive account is just a single click away. Normally, this is where we'd say hit up the source for more details, but that's really it. Enjoy!
An inside look at carnivorous plantsPublic release date: 2-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Clarisse Hart hart3@fas.harvard.edu 978-756-6157 Harvard University
Harvard Forest researchers track the importance of microscopic inhabitants
When we imagine drama playing out between predators and prey, most of us picture stealthy lions and restless gazelle, or a sharp-taloned hawk latched on to an unlucky squirrel. But Ben Baiser, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Forest and lead author of a new study in Oikos, thinks on a more local scale. His inter-species drama plays out in the humble bogs and fens of eastern North America, home to the carnivorous pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea. "It's shocking, the complex world you can find inside one little pitcher plant," says Baiser.
A pitcher plant's work seems simple: their tube-shaped leaves catch and hold rainwater, which drowns the ants, beetles, and flies that stumble in.
But the rainwater inside a pitcher plant is not just a malevolent dunking pool. It also hosts a complex system of aquatic life, including wriggling mosquito, flesh fly, and midge larvae; mites; rotifers; copepods; nematodes; and multicellular algae. These tiny organisms are crucial to the pitcher plant's ability to process food. They create what scientists call a 'processing chain': when a bug drowns in the pitcher's rainwater, midge larvae swim up and shred it to smaller pieces, bacteria eat the shredded pieces, rotifers eat the bacteria, and the pitcher plant absorbs the rotifers' waste.
But that's not the whole story. Fly larvae are also eating the rotifers, midge larvae, and each other, and everybody eats bacteria. It's a complex food web that shifts on the order of seconds.
Aaron Ellison, a co-author on the new study and senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest, says the pitcher plant food web is an ideal model for understanding larger food webswith top predators like wolvesthat change over a longer period of time. He points out, "With pitcher plants, you can hold the whole food web in your hand. The vast number of pitcher plants in one bog provide endless opportunities for detailed experiments on how food webs work, not only in pitcher plants, but also in bigger ecosystems that are harder to manipulate, like ponds, lakes, or oceans."
With funding from the National Science Foundation, the research team traveled to bogs in British Columbia, Quebec City, and Georgiathe full extent of the plant's rangeto analyze the aquatic food webs from 60 pitcher plants. They found 35 different types of organisms inside, with a large contingent of bacteria counting as just one type. Then, says Baiser, "We wanted to know: how did we get different food webs in individual pitchers from the same species pool? What caused these food webs to form the way they did?"
A few well-established scientific models predict how food webs form based on a ranked system of ecosystem factors. For the Oikos study, Baiser and his team checked their real-world observations against those models. He explains: "Say you've got a bunch of lakes. And you've got a big bucket holding all the species that can live in those lakes. When you dump out the bucket, which creatures end up in which lake? What matters more: the size of the lake, or the fact that predator species X is there, too? Or is it random? Those models help us tease those factors apart."
According to the Oikos study, the way pitcher plant food webs assemble is not random. In fact, it seems the predator-prey interactions are of key importance. "You take out one species, and that affects everything else," says Baiser.
###
The Harvard Forest, founded in 1907 and located in Petersham, Mass., is Harvard University's outdoor laboratory and classroom for ecology and conservation, and a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site funded by the National Science Foundation. Its 3,500 acre property is one of the oldest and most intensively studied research forests in the U.S. Open to the public year-round, the site includes educational and research facilities, a museum, and recreational trails.
More information can be found at: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/.
The full Oikos paper, "Predicting food-web structure with metacommunity models" (April 2013) and photos available at: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/press-resources-inside-look-pitcher-plants-4113.
For an interview with Baiser or Ellison, contact:
Clarisse Hart
Harvard Forest Outreach Manager
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
An inside look at carnivorous plantsPublic release date: 2-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Clarisse Hart hart3@fas.harvard.edu 978-756-6157 Harvard University
Harvard Forest researchers track the importance of microscopic inhabitants
When we imagine drama playing out between predators and prey, most of us picture stealthy lions and restless gazelle, or a sharp-taloned hawk latched on to an unlucky squirrel. But Ben Baiser, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Forest and lead author of a new study in Oikos, thinks on a more local scale. His inter-species drama plays out in the humble bogs and fens of eastern North America, home to the carnivorous pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea. "It's shocking, the complex world you can find inside one little pitcher plant," says Baiser.
A pitcher plant's work seems simple: their tube-shaped leaves catch and hold rainwater, which drowns the ants, beetles, and flies that stumble in.
But the rainwater inside a pitcher plant is not just a malevolent dunking pool. It also hosts a complex system of aquatic life, including wriggling mosquito, flesh fly, and midge larvae; mites; rotifers; copepods; nematodes; and multicellular algae. These tiny organisms are crucial to the pitcher plant's ability to process food. They create what scientists call a 'processing chain': when a bug drowns in the pitcher's rainwater, midge larvae swim up and shred it to smaller pieces, bacteria eat the shredded pieces, rotifers eat the bacteria, and the pitcher plant absorbs the rotifers' waste.
But that's not the whole story. Fly larvae are also eating the rotifers, midge larvae, and each other, and everybody eats bacteria. It's a complex food web that shifts on the order of seconds.
Aaron Ellison, a co-author on the new study and senior ecologist at the Harvard Forest, says the pitcher plant food web is an ideal model for understanding larger food webswith top predators like wolvesthat change over a longer period of time. He points out, "With pitcher plants, you can hold the whole food web in your hand. The vast number of pitcher plants in one bog provide endless opportunities for detailed experiments on how food webs work, not only in pitcher plants, but also in bigger ecosystems that are harder to manipulate, like ponds, lakes, or oceans."
With funding from the National Science Foundation, the research team traveled to bogs in British Columbia, Quebec City, and Georgiathe full extent of the plant's rangeto analyze the aquatic food webs from 60 pitcher plants. They found 35 different types of organisms inside, with a large contingent of bacteria counting as just one type. Then, says Baiser, "We wanted to know: how did we get different food webs in individual pitchers from the same species pool? What caused these food webs to form the way they did?"
A few well-established scientific models predict how food webs form based on a ranked system of ecosystem factors. For the Oikos study, Baiser and his team checked their real-world observations against those models. He explains: "Say you've got a bunch of lakes. And you've got a big bucket holding all the species that can live in those lakes. When you dump out the bucket, which creatures end up in which lake? What matters more: the size of the lake, or the fact that predator species X is there, too? Or is it random? Those models help us tease those factors apart."
According to the Oikos study, the way pitcher plant food webs assemble is not random. In fact, it seems the predator-prey interactions are of key importance. "You take out one species, and that affects everything else," says Baiser.
###
The Harvard Forest, founded in 1907 and located in Petersham, Mass., is Harvard University's outdoor laboratory and classroom for ecology and conservation, and a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site funded by the National Science Foundation. Its 3,500 acre property is one of the oldest and most intensively studied research forests in the U.S. Open to the public year-round, the site includes educational and research facilities, a museum, and recreational trails.
More information can be found at: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/.
The full Oikos paper, "Predicting food-web structure with metacommunity models" (April 2013) and photos available at: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/press-resources-inside-look-pitcher-plants-4113.
For an interview with Baiser or Ellison, contact:
Clarisse Hart
Harvard Forest Outreach Manager
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Vision care insurance usually pays for the following basic services:
A yearly eye examination, including refraction to check your vision
Eyeglass lenses
Eyeglass frames
Contact lenses
LASIK?and PRK vision correction procedures at a discounted rate
Your specific vision insurance plan may have a limit (such as every two years) on how often it will pay for lenses and frames.
Where Can I Buy Vision Care Insurance if I Can?t Get It From an Employer?
Similar to dental insurance, you may be able to purchase vision care coverage through a local business group, college alumni association, fraternal organization, or religious group. If you are over 65, you may have a vision care benefit if you are part of a Medicare Advantage Plan.
Should I Buy Vision Care Insurance?
If you wear corrective lenses and need periodic eye exams and changes in your eye lens prescription, it may be worthwhile to purchase vision care insurance. If you do not currently wear or need glasses, you may be able to get a periodic eye exam through your regular health insurance plan.
When you purchase vision insurance, whether it is a benefits package or a discount plan, you buy two products:
Access to a network of eye care providers?who have agreed to provide services and/or products at reduced prices (either to you or to the company administering the plan). These providers typically are?optometrists?and general?ophthalmologist. In some cases, ophthalmologists who are refractive surgeons and provide?LASIK?and other vision correction procedures may be included.
Specific eye care services and products, such as eye exams, eyeglasses and contact lenses. Therefore, when choosing a vision insurance plan, you need to evaluate both the eye care provider?and the services being offered.
For more information regarding vision care insurance, call Benefit Specialists?at (701) 492-7372.
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Public release date: 2-Apr-2013
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