Monica Seles Is Working on Memoir
Former tennis great Monica Seles is working on a memoir.
She said in a statement Wednesday that she hopes “to share how I found balance, strength and happiness in my life after a rollercoaster ride of exhilarating accomplishment and sometimes overwhelming tragedy”
The book, currently untitled, will be published in 2009 by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA).
Seles, 34, won nine Grand Slam tournaments and as a teenager was the top-ranked women’s player for three years, in the early 1990s. But she is also known for one of the sport’s most bizarre and terrifying incidents: In April 1993, at a tournament in Hamburg, Germany, she was stabbed in the back by a man who climbed out of the stands.
Seles returned to the game 27 months later and immediately reached the 1995 U.S. Open final. Her final Grand Slam title then came at the 1996 Australian Open. She did reach two more major finals but was hampered by a left foot injury. Her last match was a first-round loss at the 2003 French Open. She officially retired last month.
Seles, who has struggled with weight problems, is currently a contestant on the hit ABC series “Dancing With the Stars.”
“After years of having every aspect of her training, diet and life dictated and scrutinized by others, Monica took control, deciding what she wanted from life and set out to obtain it,” her publisher, Avery, said in a statement.
“Cutting through the fog of sadness, fear and frustration that made Seles overweight and unhappy, today she looks and feels better than ever and has created a life in balance.”
via AOL
Tennis icon Monica Seles has sold her memoir to Avery, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). The untitled project is scheduled for publication in March 2009. The auction for world rights was conducted by Dana Beck at Bill Adler Books.
In this inspiring and revealing memoir, Seles will explore her remarkable journey of brilliant tennis, fame, tragedy, loss and self-discovery. After years of having every aspect of her training, diet and life dictated and scrutinized by others, Monica took control, deciding what she wanted from life and set out to obtain it. Cutting through the fog of sadness, fear and frustration that made Seles overweight and unhappy, today she looks and feels better than ever and has created a life in balance.
Seles said, “On February 14th, I officially retired from professional tennis, closing one chapter of my life. I’m now opening a new chapter where I hope to share how I found balance, strength and happiness in my life after a rollercoaster ride of exhilarating accomplishment and sometimes overwhelming tragedy. Avery is giving me the opportunity to put this journey in words, and I’m thrilled to be working with them.”
Megan Newman, Publisher at Avery, said, “Avery is delighted to be publishing Monica Seles’ book. Her remarkable, uplifting story is one that will resonate with readers — those who were fans during her illustrious tennis career and those who will meet her for the first time. It is an honor to be working with such a talented athlete and promising author.”
John Steele, Senior Vice President at IMG, who represents Seles in her non-tennis activities, added, “Since Monica won the French Open at age 16, she has been living in the public spotlight but she has never really discussed the struggles that went along with all the victories. It will be both a remarkable read and a motivating story of finding health and happiness.”
About the Author
Earlier this year, Seles, 34, announced her retirement from professional tennis. Over her extraordinary career, she earned nine Grand Slam titles and won 53 singles and six doubles tournaments. She first became No. 1 in the world in March 1991. Seles was No. 1 for 178 weeks during the next two years — the youngest No. 1 ever at the time — until tragedy struck in April 1993, when she was stabbed in the back by a deranged fan during a match in Hamburg, Germany. She was not able to play again for more than two years. When she did return, she won even more hearts with her comeback win at the Canadian Open, and then reached the U.S. Open final the following month. Remarkably, she then won her ninth Grand Slam title at the Australian Open in January 1996. Seles joined the cast of the sixth season of ABC’s hit “Dancing with the Stars” in 2008.
About Penguin Group (USA)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc. is the U.S. member of the internationally renowned Penguin Group. Penguin Group (USA) is one of the leading U.S. adult and children’s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks, including Viking, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Penguin Press, Riverhead Books, Dutton, Penguin Books, Berkley Books, Gotham Books, Portfolio, New American Library, Plume, Tarcher, Avery, Philomel, Grosset & Dunlap, Puffin, and Frederick Warne, among others. The Penguin Group is part of Pearson plc, the international media company.
About IMG
Operating in 30 countries, IMG’s diverse businesses include: consulting services; event ownership and management; fashion events and models representation; licensing; golf course design; and client representation in golf, tennis, broadcasting, speakers, European football, rugby, cricket, motor sports, coaching, Olympic sports and action sports. IMG Academies are the world’s largest and most advanced multi-sport training and educational facilities, delivering world-class sports training experiences to more than 12,000 junior, collegiate, adult, and professional athletes each year.
IMG’s media and entertainment operations include content production subsidiaries Darlow Smithson Productions and Tiger Aspect Productions. Globally, IMG produces and distributes more than 11,000 hours of sports, documentary, drama, comedy, entertainment, popular factual and children’s content annually. IMG also represents the broadcast rights to many of the world’s premier sporting events and has the world’s largest sports archive with more than 250,000 hours of footage.
Forstmann Little & Co. purchased IMG in 2004.
via MSN
Why scientists love games consoles
Leading scientists are turning to the extraordinary power of games consoles to do their sums and simulate everything from colliding black holes to the effects of drugs.
Reprogram a PlayStation and it will perform feats that would be unthinkable on an ordinary PC because the kinds of calculations required to produce the realistic graphics now seen in sophisticated video games are similar to those used by chemists and physicists as they simulate the interactions between particles ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.
Such simulations are usually carried out on a supercomputer, but time on these machines is expensive and in short supply. By comparison, games consoles are cheap and easily available, says New Scientist.
“There is no doubt that the entertainment industry is helping to drive the direction of high performance computational science - exploiting the power available to the masses will lead to many research breakthroughs in the future,” comments Prof Peter Coveney of University College London, who uses supercomputing in chemistry.
Prof Gaurav Khanna at the University of Massachusetts has used an array of 16 PS3s to calculate what will happen when two black holes merge.
According to Prof Khanna, the PS3 has unique features that make it suitable for scientific computations, namely, the Cell processor dubbed a “supercomputer-on-a-chip.” And it runs on Linux, “so it does not limit what you can do.”
“A single high-precision simulation can sometimes cost more than 5,000 hours on the TeraGrid supercomputers. For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer using PS3s. It works just as well, has no long wait times and can be used over and over again, indefinitely,” Prof Khanna says.
And Todd Martinez has persuaded the supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to buy eight computers each driven by two of the specialised chips that are at the heart of Sony’s PlayStation 3 console.
Together with his student Benjamin Levine he is using them to simulate the interactions between the electrons in atoms, as part of work to see how proteins in the body dovetail with drug molecules.
He was inspired while browsing through his son’s games console’s technical specification “I noticed that the architecture looked a lot like high performance supercomputers I had seen before,” he says. “That’s when I thought about getting one for myself.”
The Wii, made by Nintendo, has a motion tracking remote control unit that is cheaper than a comparable device built from scratch. The device recently emerged as a tool to help surgeons to improve their technique.
Meanwhile, neurologist Thomas Davis at the Vanderbilt Medical Centre in Nashville, Tennessee, is using it to measure movement deficiencies in Parkinson’s patients to assess how well a patient can move when they take part in drug trials.
via telegraph
Reference: A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or electronic device that manipulates the video display signal of a display device (a television, monitor, etc.) to display a game. The term “video game console” is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal computer, which has many other functions, or arcade machines, which are designed for businesses that buy and then charge others to play.
Why Republicans like Obama and what it means
Barack Obama is not only popular among Democrats, he’s also an appealing figure to many Republicans. Former GOP House member Joe Scarborough, now a host on MSNBC, reports that after every important Obama speech, he is inundated with e-mails praising the speech — with most of them coming from Republicans. William Bennett, an influential conservative intellectual, has said favorable things about Obama. So have Rich Lowry of National Review and Peggy Noonan. And so have I.
A number of prominent Republicans I know, who would wage a pitched battle against Hillary Clinton, like Obama and would find it hard to generate much enthusiasm in opposing him.
What is at the core of Obama’s appeal?
Part of it is the eloquence and uplift of his speeches, combined with his personal grace and dignity. He seems to be a well-grounded, decent, thoughtful man. He comes across, in his person and manner, as nonpartisan. He has an unsurpassed ability to (seemingly) transcend politics. Even when he disagrees with people, he doesn’t seem disagreeable.
“You know what charm is,” Albert Camus wrote in The Fall, “a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.” Obama has such charm, and its appeal is not restricted to Democrats.
A second reason Republicans appreciate Obama is that he is pitted against a couple, the Clintons, whom many Republicans hold in contempt. Among the effects of the Obama-Clinton race is that it is forcing Democrats to come to grips with the mendacity and ruthlessness of the Clinton machine. Conservatives have long believed that the Clintons are an unprincipled pair who will destroy those who stand between them and power — whether they are political opponents, women from Bill Clinton’s past or independent counsels.
When the Clintons were doing this in the 1990s, it was viewed by many Democrats as perfectly acceptable. Some even applauded them for their brass-knuckle tactics. But now that the Clintons are roughing up an inspiring young man who appears to represent the hope and future of the Democratic Party, the liberal establishment is reacting with outrage. “I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons,” writes Jonathan Chait of the New Republic. Many conservatives respond: It’s about time.
A third reason for Obama’s GOP appeal is that unlike Clinton and especially John Edwards, Obama has a message that, at its core, is about unity and hope rather than division and resentment. He stresses that “out of many we are one.” And to his credit, Barack Obama is running a color-blind campaign. “I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina,” Obama said in his victory speech last weekend. “I saw South Carolina.” That evening, his crowd of supporters chanted as one, “Race doesn’t matter.” This was an electric moment. Obama’s words are in the great tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Obama, more than any figure in America, can help bind up the racial wounds of America. In addition, for the past eight years, one of the most prominent qualities of the American left has been anger, which has served it and the country very poorly. An Obama primary win would be a move away from the politics of rage.
The one thing that will keep Obama’s appeal from translating into widespread support among Republicans is that he is, on almost every issue, a conventional liberal. And while rhetoric and character matter a lot, politics is finally and fundamentally about ideas and philosophy. Whether we’re talking about the Iraq war, monitoring terrorist communications, health care, taxes, education, abortion and the courts, the size of government, or almost anything else, Obama embodies the views of the special-interest groups on the left. In this respect, he should borrow from the Clinton strategy in 1992, when Bill Clinton ran as a “New Democrat,” championed free trade, promised to “end welfare as we know it” and criticized, on hawkish grounds, the “butchers of Beijing.”
Bill Clinton ran an intellectually creative race whose ideas appealed to non-Democrats. Barack Obama has shown no such inclination so far (his speeches, while inspiring, mostly avoid a serious discussion of policies). If he wanted to demonstrate his independence from liberal orthodoxy, for example, he could come out in favor of school choice for low-income families, which would both help poor families and demonstrate support for some of the best faith-based institutions in America: urban parochial schools.
If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee and fails to take steps such as this, his liberal views will be his greatest vulnerability. Obama will try to reject the liberal label — but based on his stands on the issues, at least so far, the label will fit, and it will stick.
Barack Obama is among the most impressive political talents of our lifetime. If he defeats Hillary Clinton, the question for the general election is not whether he can transcend his race but whether he can reach beyond his ideology.
by chron
Reference: Barack Hussein Obama is the junior United States Senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. The U.S. Senate Historical Office lists him as the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history, the third to have been popularly elected, and the only African American currently serving in the Senate.
Obama was born in Honolulu to a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. He lived most of his early life in the U.S. state of Hawaii. From ages six to ten, he lived in Jakarta, Indonesia with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, University of Chicago lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office and serving in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. After an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he announced his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003.
The following year, while still an Illinois state legislator, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with 70% of the vote. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama co-sponsored legislation for controlling conventional weapons and for promoting transparency in public life; in addition, he made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the 110th, and current, Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel.
Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as major priorities. He married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has written two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics.
Led Zeppelin concert off until at least September
British rock band Led Zeppelin enjoyed jamming together again last year in a charity concert but won’t have another session before September at the earliest, lead guitarist Jimmy Page said in Tokyo on Monday.
A successful reunion show in London in December rekindled hopes of a world tour, but Page said that singer Robert Plant’s tour with U.S. country singer Alison Krauss is keeping him busy for now.
“I can assure you the amount of work that we put into the O2 (concert), for ourselves rehearsing and the staging of it, was probably what you put into a world tour,” Page said.
But, “Robert Plant also had a parallel project running and he’s really busy with that project, certainly until September, so I can’t give you any news.”
Page, in Tokyo to promote a greatest hits release, painted a happy picture of the reunion.
“It was exhilarating, fantastic, every week was a week to look forward to,” he said. “We did the show and it was great.”
The band, formed in 1968 by Page, Plant, bass guitarist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, became arguably the world’s biggest rock group by the early 1970s.
Their fourth album, released in 1971, included their most famous song, “Stairway to Heaven,” while the band has sold an estimated 300 million albums worldwide.
The group decided to break up shortly after Bonham died in September 1980, although Page and Plant collaborated at times over the years.
Plant, Page and Jones performed together in London before about 20,000 fans on December 10, with Bonham’s son Jason on the drums.
When the concert was announced, the Internet site selling tickets crashed with applications, while the possibility of a new world tour had fans around the globe excited.
Page said after many years the song indeed remained the same.
“That is what was so thrilling really — to come together after all this time and find that there was so much chemistry and so much electricity involved in these four characters.”
by Reuters
Reference: Led Zeppelin were an English rock band that formed in September 1968. Led Zeppelin consisted of Jimmy Page (guitar), Robert Plant (vocals), John Paul Jones (bass guitar / keyboards) and John Bonham (drums). With their heavy, guitar-driven sound, Led Zeppelin are regarded as one of the first heavy metal bands. Their rock-infused interpretation of the blues and folk genres also incorporated rockabilly, reggae, soul, funk, classical, Celtic, Indian, Arabic, pop, Latin, and country. The band did not release the popular songs from their albums as singles in the UK, as they preferred to develop the concept of album-oriented rock.
Over 25 years after disbanding following Bonham’s death in 1980, Led Zeppelin continue to be held in high regard for their artistic achievements, commercial success, and broad influence. The band have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide, including 109.5 million sales in the United States, and they are the only band to have had all their albums reach the U.S. Billboard Top 10.
Olga Kurylenko is New Bond Girl, Filming Begins on Bond 22
Production begins today in London on Bond 22, with Daniel Craig reprising the role of Agent 007 and Olga Kurylenko as his leading lady, according to a press release issued today by the film studios.
Previous reports were that Gemma Arterton would be the new Bond girl, but it turns out that she’s actually playing the role of MI6 Agent Fields. It’s Ukranian actress Kurylenko (Hitman) that’s the new Bond girl — the dangerously alluring Camille, who challenges Bond and helps him come to terms with the emotional consequences of Vesper’s betrayal.
French actor Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Munich) will star as the film’s sinister villain Dominic Greene, a leading member of the villainous organization introduced in Casino Royale, who will be a powerful counterpart to Craig’s portrayal of Bond.
Also returning for Bond 22 (the film’s working title) from Royale (the first to star Craig as James Bond) are Judi Dench as M, Jeffrey Wright as Felix Leiter, and Giancarlo Giannini as Mathis.
MGM and Sony Pictures will share distribution rights worldwide with Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Releasing International distributing the film to theaters worldwide on November 7, 2008. Marc Forster directs the screenplay by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. The unit includes Production Designer Dennis Gassner, Director of Photography Roberto Schaefer, Editors Matt Chesse and Rick Pearson, and 2nd Unit Director Dan Bradley.
by geeksofdoom
Reference: Olga Kurylenko born November 14, 1979 is a Ukrainian model and actress.
She was born in Berdyansk and discovered by a female model scout while on vacation in Moscow at the age of fifteen.[1] She began her film career in France in 2005. She received the certificate of excellence award at the 2006 Brooklyn International Film Festival for her performance in L’Annulaire, and also starred in the Paris, je t’aime segment Quartier de la Madeleine opposite Elijah Wood. In 2007, Kurylenko starred in Hitman alongside Timothy Olyphant. She will also star as Bond girl Camille in the newest 007 film, provisionally titled Bond 22.
Eva Longoria Parker (born March 15, 1975) is a Golden Globe Award-nominated American film and television actress. She plays Gabrielle Solis in the ABC television series Desperate Housewives. She has also become an internationally recognized model after appearing in several high-profile advertising campaigns and numerous men’s magazines. Longoria is also known for her high profile relationship with French NBA guard Tony Parker, whom she married in 2007.
How Clinton Lost Her Invincibility
When Hillary Clinton launched her campaign nearly a year ago, the media buzz deemed it near impossible for the likes of Barack Obama and John Edwards to overcome her daunting campaign machine. The endorsements, the money, and the cream-of-the-crop strategists combined with the former First Lady?s incumbent image to make her the clear-cut choice of the Democratic Party establishment.
But the onset of the Iowa caucuses finds Clinton aides racing to lower expectations, bracing for a possible loss there and contemplating a dwindling lead in the polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina. So, what has stripped the mighty Clinton campaign juggernaut of its image of invincibility?
For one thing, it has been a victim of the media hype it helped create. The campaign?s warnings that Iowa was going to be a tough state for Clinton fell mostly on deaf ears. “Iowa was always going to be a challenge and we consistently said that,” says Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson. “Nobody hands anyone a presidential nomination.” But her campaign also failed to invest in Iowa until it was nearly too late. While Obama and Edwards spent the better part of the year moving in hundreds of staff and building relationships with grassroots Democratic constituencies, Clinton in the last month belatedly added a hundred staffers.
And while the Clinton campaign hired the best and brightest faces to run its Iowa shop, there?s only so much that can be done without the resources or the candidate. A month away from the caucuses, Clinton had spent 52 days in state, visiting just 38 counties compared with the 99 visited by Edwards and the 68 by Obama. Since then, her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle has moved out to Iowa to personally oversee the operation here, while Clinton has spent an additional 11 of the last 14 days in the state, adding another 14 county visits.
“She has never really been ahead here in Iowa,” says Arthur B. Sanders, a politics professor at Drake University in Des Moines and author of Losing Control: Presidential Elections and the Decline of Democracy. “Her national lead made it easy to assume she would win here as well, especially since her national campaign gave off an image of her ‘inevitable’ victory. And a national press that had not spent time here did not really understand how different the situation was here.”
Clinton has also shaken up her message in recent weeks, trying on different hats: angry Hillary; warm-and-fuzzy mommy Hillary; commander-in-chief Hillary; insurgent change-candidate Hillary. “It’s a very close race in Iowa, and quite naturally, the Clinton campaign has decided to throw in everything it’s got, plus the kitchen sink,” says Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia?s Center for Politics. “She?s both the candidate of change and the candidate of experience, the candidate with a hard side and a soft side, and the candidate of the establishment past and the progressive future. Maybe voters are getting confused, or maybe she?s patching together just enough voters to win or tie. We’ll all find out together on January 3rd.”
In the last week, Clinton straddled both the past and future. She?s paraded an impressive stream of former Clinton Administration officials — including former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, former Veteran Affairs Secretaries Togo West and Hershel Gober, former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark and, of course, her husband, President Bill Clinton — through Iowa while declaring herself an agent of change. “Somebody said at one of my events a little while ago, ?You know, it looks like it takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush,? and I?m ready for the job if that?s what it takes,” Clinton said at a town hall event in Johnston, Iowa, last week.
In harkening to the 1990s, Clinton risks alienating voters who want change. The majority of likely Democratic caucus-goers, 56%, believe change is more important than experience, according a December 19 ABC News/Washington Post poll of likely caucus-goers. Of those, half said they support Obama and 23% are committed to Edwards. Clintongarnered only 15% of the change vote. Conversely, 33% of those polled said they preferred experience over change, and Clinton led amongst those voters, 49% to Edwards? 15% and Obama?s 8%.
Wolfson argues that it takes experience to bring about change: “Hillary brings a lifetime record of accomplishments to this campaign — and yes, some of them were during the ’90s. We think voters are asking — at a time when every candidate is talking about change — who actually has a record of accomplishing it their entire adult life?”
Next week, Clinton will roll out her final pitch to Iowan voters, a tour entitled ‘Time to Pick a President? in which she?s expected to underline her experience in the White House and promise to restore the nation’s good times. “Her closing argument is that America faces huge challenges and has enormous opportunities, and that the nation needs a President with the strength and experience to lead on day one and make the changes we need,” Wolfson says. The jury’s still out on whether the Democratic base in Iowa will buy the idea of insider experience as an effective force for change. But not for long.
Reference: Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is the junior United States Senator from New York, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 presidential election. She is married to Bill Clinton—the 42nd President of the United States—and was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham attracted national attention in 1969 when she delivered a controversial address as the first student to speak at commencement exercises for Wellesley College. She began her career as a lawyer after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973, moving to Arkansas and marrying Bill Clinton in 1975, following her career as a Congressional legal counsel; she was named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979 and was listed as one of the one hundred most influential lawyers in America in 1988 and 1991. She served as the First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, was active in a number of organizations concerned with the welfare of children, and was on the board of Wal-Mart and several other corporate boards.
As First Lady of the United States, she took a prominent position in policy matters. Her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval by the U.S. Congress in 1994, but in 1997 she helped establish the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Adoption and Safe Families Act. She became the only First Lady to be subpoenaed, testifying before a federal grand jury as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal in 1996. She was never charged with any wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband’s administration. The state of her marriage to Bill Clinton was the subject of considerable public discussion following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Moving to New York, Clinton was elected to the United States Senate in 2000, the first time an American first lady ran for public office and the first female senator from that state. There she initially supported the George W. Bush administration on some foreign policy issues, which included voting for the Iraq War Resolution. She has subsequently opposed the administration on its conduct of the Iraq War and has opposed it on most domestic issues. She was re-elected by a wide margin in 2006. Long described as a polarizing figure in American politics, during 2007 she has consistently been the front-runner in polls for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president.
FBI planning world’s largest biometric database
The FBI has announced it plans to assemble the world’s largest biometric database, nicknamed the Next Generation Identification system. Currently, the FBI stores fingerprints, facial features, and palm print characteristics at its facilities in Washington DC. The agency’s $1 billion dollar database, however, will hold far more information on any given person.
Moving forward, the FBI expects to make this comprehensive biometric database available to a wide variety of federal, state, and local agencies, all in the name of keeping American safe from terrorists (and illegal immigration). The FBI also intends to retain (upon employer request) the fingerprints of any employee who has undergone a criminal background check, and will inform the employer if the employee is ever arrested or charged with a crime.
Lofty goals are one thing, practical implementation is another. The biometric database the FBI envisions will rely heavily on realtime (or very nearly realtime) comparisons. According to the Washington Post, this could include general face recognition, specific feature comparison (notable scars, shape of the earlobe, etc), walking stride, speech patterns, and iris comparisons. To date, facial-recognition technology hasn’t exactly reshaped the face of law enforcement. A German study last year showed some progress in the technology—existing implementations proved more than 60 percent effective during the day—but accuracy fell to 10-20 percent at night. German law enforcement officials have stated they would accept a 0.1 percent error rate across a 24 hour period, which leaves current technology with quite a gap to close.
The FBI plans to work closely with the CITeR (Center for Identification Technology Research) research center to improve existing metrics and create new ones. CITeR is reportedly working on an iris scanner that can identify people at up to 15 feet as well as a facial-recognition scanner capable of identifying faces accurately at a range of up to 200 yards.
The FBI’s decision to implement this kind of tracking and identification system raises a number of concerns regarding citizen privacy , as well as serious questions about the accuracy of collected data. Any database that isn’t closely monitored and continuously updated will inevitably grow out-of-date. It’s also not clear that a biometric system of the type the FBI espouses couldn’t become confused simply by the natural aging process, weight loss, weight gain, injury, or permanent disability. While there are proven methods of identification that remain accurate even in the presence of such factors, none of them yield realtime results that can be immediately pegged as belonging to an individual even in a crowd of people.
Certain aspects of the FBI’s track record in recent years make this proposal even less attractive. In 2003, the FBI exempted its National Crime Information Center, the Central Records System, and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime from subsection (e) (5) of the 1974 Privacy Act. That particular subsection mandates that each agency that maintains a system of records shall “maintain all records which are used by the agency in making any determination about any individual with such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.”
According to the FBI, discharging this duty conflicts with the agency’s primary purpose as a law enforcement organization, because it is “impossible to determine in advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely, and complete.” Information once thought innocuous may also eventually prove to be critical may eventually shed critical details as an investigation continues, and the restrictions of (e) (5) “would limit the ability of trained investigators and intelligence analysts to exercise their judgement in reporting on investigations and impede the development of criminal intelligence necessary for effective law enforcement.”
At this point, the FBI’s proposed biometric identification system contains no recourse for citizens who are misidentified, no formal method for the update and correction of biometric information, and no indication that citizens would even be allowed to view their own biometric profiles.
The organization’s technology track record is anything but good. The organization’s Trilogy project launched in 2000 as an effort to update the FBI’s IT infrastructure and create a new type of Virtual Case File (VCF) ended in collosal failure in 2005. The agency is currently working on a new, more ambitious system (codenamed Sentinel), but little information is available on how that project is progressing at this time. Once considered the definitive voice of bullet analysis, a six month investigation by CBS television show 60 Minutes and the Washington Post recently uncovered fundamental flaws in the FBI’s methodology and basic premises. As a result, evidence presented as fact for the past 40 years has now been called into serious question, simply because the FBI, which claimed it could match bullet fragments to similar bullets—right down to the very same box—never scientifically tested the basic premise.
Even in the best of scenarios, it’s unclear whether or not any national database of biometric information could be kept secure, updated, and available for citizen review. The FBI’s past history and the agency’s decision to remove itself from the requirements of the 1974 Privacy Act leave the current scenario far from ideal, and open the door for any number of misidentifications or abuses.
Wikipedia Reference: Biometrics (ancient Greek: bios =”life”, metron =”measure”) refers to two very different fields of study and application. The first, which is the older and is used in biological studies, including forestry, is the collection, synthesis, analysis and management of quantitative data on biological communities such as forests. Biometrics in reference to biological sciences has been studied and applied for several generations and is somewhat simply viewed as “biological statistics.”
More recently and incongruently, the term’s meaning has been broadened to include the study of methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.
Some researchers, have coined the term behaviometrics for behavioral biometrics such as typing rhythm or mouse gestures where the analysis can be done continuously without interrupting or interfering with user activities.
Biometrics are used to identify the identity of an input sample when compared to a template, used in cases to identify specific people by certain characteristics.
possession-based: using one specific “token” such as a security tag or a card
knowledge-based :the use of a code or password.
Standard validation systems often use multiple inputs of samples for sufficient validation, such as particular characteristics of the sample. This intends to enhance security as multiple different samples are required such as security tags and codes and sample dimensions.
Biometric characteristics can be divided in two main classes, as represented in figure on the right:
physiological are related to the shape of the body. The oldest traits, that have been used for more than 100 years, are fingerprints. Other examples are face recognition, hand geometry and iris recognition.
behavioral are related to the behavior of a person. The first characteristic to be used, still widely used today, is the signature. More modern approaches are the study of keystroke dynamics and of voice.
Strictly speaking, voice is also a physiological trait because every person has a different pitch, but voice recognition is mainly based on the study of the way a person speaks, commonly classified as behavioral.
Other biometric strategies are being developed such as those based on gait (way of walking), retina, hand veins, ear recognition, facial thermogram, DNA, odor and palm prints.
Biometric systems
The diagram on right shows a simple block diagram of a biometric system. When such a system is networked together with telecommunications technology, biometric systems become telebiometric systems. The main operations a system can perform are enrollment and test. During the enrollment, biometric information from an individual is stored. During the test, biometric information is detected and compared with the stored information. Note that it is crucial that storage and retrieval of such systems themselves be secure if the biometric system is be robust. The first block (sensor) is the interface between the real world and our system; it has to acquire all the necessary data. Most of the times it is an image acquisition system, but it can change according to the characteristics desired. The second block performs all the necessary pre-processing: it has to remove artifacts from the sensor, to enhance the input (e.g. removing background noise), to use some kind of normalization, etc. In the third block features needed are extracted. This step is an important step as the correct features need to be extracted and the optimal way. A vector of numbers or an image with particular properties is used to create a template. A template is a synthesis of all the characteristics extracted from the source, in the optimal size to allow for adequate identifiability.
If enrollment is being performed the template is simply stored somewhere (on a card or within a database or both). If a matching phase is being performed, the obtained template is passed to a matcher that compares it with other existing templates, estimating the distance between them using any algorithm (e.g. Hamming distance). The matching program will analyze the template with the input. This will then be output for any specified use or purpose (e.g. entrance in a restricted area).
Jay-Z stepping down as Def Jam president
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Universal Music Group said on Monday that rap artist and hip-hop mogul Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is stepping down as president of its Def Jam Records unit, effective by the end of the year.
Carter, 38, has been president of the rap label since 2005, and has signed acts including R&B singers Rihanna and Ne-Yo.
Universal said Carter, a top-selling rapper who performs as Jay-Z, will continue recording for its Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam label. But the company did not give a reason for his decision to quit the executive suite.
“Now it’s time for me to take on new challenges,” he said in a statement. “I am pleased to have had the opportunity to build upon the Def Jam legacy,” he added.
Carter will focus on his expanding franchise of 40/40 Nightclubs over the next year and other businesses, according to a source familiar with his plans.
Carter regularly tops the lists of richest hip-hop moguls, and was No. 9 on Forbes’ Celebrity 100, the annual roster of the world’s most powerful — and best paid — celebrities, with an estimated compensation of $83 million.
Carter, who has said he was a street hustler growing up in the Marcy public housing project in a tough section of Brooklyn, New York, has sold millions of records and launched an array of media and fashion businesses.
Though known for his cutting-edge rap lyrics and rags-to-riches story, Carter often is mentioned in local gossip columns because of his romantic relationship with R&B singer Beyonce Knowles. Last week, he denied rumors that the couple had married in secret.
The rapper joined Def Jam as president to help turn around the fortunes of the then-struggling seminal rap label. His move to management followed his 2003 retirement from recording. His albums, including “Hard Knock Life” (1998), “The Blueprint” (2001) and his classic debut “Reasonable Doubt” (1996).
He returned to recording last year with the album “Kingdom Come” and this year followed up with an album inspired by the movie “American Gangster”.
Def Jam’s successes during his tenure as president, included Rihanna and Ne-Yo, who this month racked up 11 Grammy nominations between them.
“Jay made it clear to us that he feels the time has come to take on different challenges in his life. While we regret his decision to move on, we certainly respect it,” said Antonio ‘L.A.’ Reid,” chairman of Island Def Jam.
Universal Music, a unit of French media and telecommunications group Vivendi, is the world’s largest music company with 30 percent of the worldwide market share.
Wikipedia Reference: Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969) better known by his stage name Jay-Z, is an American rapper and current president and CEO of Def Jam Recordings and Roc-A-Fella Records. In addition, he co-owns The 40/40 Club and the New Jersey Nets NBA team. He is one of the most financially successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in America. Known for his flow and blending of street and popular style, he can compose lyrics without the use of pen and paper. His critically acclaimed album, The Blueprint, was allegedly written in only two days. After announcing his retirement from recording music in 2003, he returned in late 2006 with the album Kingdom Come which sold 680,000 copies in its first week, Jay-Z’s highest-selling album in a one-week period.
Along with Damon “Dame” Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Jay-Z was one of the founders of Roc-A-Fella Records, a hip hop record label. Jay-Z is the richest hip hop Entertainer (followed by Sean “Puffy” Combs, a.k.a. Diddy), having a net-worth estimate of $547 million.
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