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Official: Gadhafi son got VIP tour of AF Academy

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's youngest son visited the Air Force Academy in Colorado last month during a U.S. tour but couldn't have learned anything to benefit the Libyan military, an academy official said Wednesday.

Khamis Gadhafi, 27, got a standard VIP tour of the school on Feb. 7 — eight days before the Libyan uprising began, academy spokesman Lt. Col. John Bryan said.

After Gadhafi returned home, he led forces loyal to his father in an assault on a rebel-held city.

The tour of the academy included a look at academic, athletic and residential buildings, and briefings from Brig. Gen. Dana Born, dean of faculty, and Col. Tamra Rank, vice superintendent.

Bryan said the school conducts dozens of such tours every year.

The stop in Colorado was part of a wider U.S. tour by Gadhafi that included stops at businesses and other schools. It was organized by AECOM, a global infrastructure company with business interests in Libya.

Paul Gennaro, AECOM's senior vice president for global communications, told The Associated Press last week that the U.S. State Department approved of the trip and the government signed off on the itinerary.

However, State Department spokesman Mark Toner denied the agency had any role in planning, advising or paying for the trip and said the government didn't sign off on the itinerary.

The State Department greeted Gadhafi when he arrived, which Toner said is standard courtesy for the son of a national leader.

AECOM said Gadhafi went home before a scheduled visit to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y. West Point spokesman Francis J. DiMaro Jr. confirmed the visit did not take place.

Khamis Gadhafi led the Khamis Brigade, a professional military unit loyal to his father, in an all-out assault on rebels holding Zawiya, a city near Tripoli.

Libya has said that Khamis Gadhafi was injured in U.S. bombing raids in 1986 shortly after Libya was blamed for masterminding a bombing in West Berlin that killed an American soldier and woman. He would have been 2 or 3 years old at the time.

Telecom stocks push market higher; payrolls gain

Telecommunications companies led a broad stock rally Wednesday following a report that private companies are continuing to add workers.

All ten sectors of the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 index rose. AT&T Inc. led the 30 stocks that make up the Dow Jones industrial average with a 2.2 percent gain.

The Dow gained 71.60 points, or 0.6 percent, to 12,350.61. The S&P index rose 8.82, or 0.7 percent, to 1,328.26. The Nasdaq composite rose 19.90, or 0.7 percent, to 2,776.79.

The ADP National Employment Report said 201,000 new private sector jobs were added in March. That is roughly in line with the 210,000 analysts had expected. Investors were encouraged by a strong gain in small business hiring, said Ryan Detrick, a strategist at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

The report showed "that things are not as bleak as they seemed a few weeks ago," Detrick said.

The ADP report is seen as a precursor to the government's March payrolls report due Friday, but the two reports don't always paint the same picture of the overall labor market.

Cephalon Inc. surged 28 percent, the most of any stock in the S&P index, after Valeant Pharmaceuticals International offered to take over the biopharmaceutical company for $5.7 billion in cash. Valeant, based in Canada, rose 12 percent. The takeover bid is the latest in a string of deal-related news, another positive sign for investors.

"It shows that companies still think there are some good deals out there," said Detrick. "If they are willing to pay a premium, that's a good sign for the overall stock market."

The market plodded higher against a backdrop of unsettling international news. Concerns about European debt loomed as Portugal moved closer to needing a bailout and Spain's central bank forecast a lower growth rate and higher deficit than previously predicted.

Seawater near Japan's crippled nuclear facility tested at its highest radiation levels yet and the plant's owner publicly acknowledged that four of six nuclear reactors would have to be decommissioned. In Libya, NATO forces initiated a new wave of airstrikes against Gadhafi's troops.

Asset manager BlackRock Inc. gained 6.6 percent after Standard & Poor's said the company will replace Genzyme Corp in the S&P 500 index after the close of trading on Friday.

PPG Industries Inc. gained 5.9 percent after the industrial chemical company announced that its income forecast was well above Wall Street expectations.

Three stocks rose for every one that fell on the New York Stock Exchange. Consolidated volume came to 3.9 billion shares.

A Q-and-A With One of the Brains Behind Google Art Project

Last week, , a virtual museum tour of sorts based on Google's Street View technology. It's a cool idea, and a great way to visit famous art galleries without having to actually visit them. We athad the privilege of having an e-mail interview with Jason Brush, the Executive Vice President of User Experience at , the company that Google worked with to develop Google Art Project. Here's what he had to say.

GeekTech: What was the inspiration and motivation for this project?

Jason Brush: The goal was pretty simple: to make art accessible to more people around the world.For most people, traveling around the globe to see art is a luxury that's far out of reach, and Art Project was an opportunity to make that artwork available to anybody with an Internet connection. Google was also in a great position to make this a reality, since they had the technology needed.

GT: How big is the Google Art Project team?

JB: I'm not equipped to talk about the full breadth of everybody who worked on the project, given the many partners involved--the team at Google who came up with the idea, lead by Amit Sood, the museums, the team that shot the photographs, the street view team, the Google engineers who created the custom Street View and artwork viewer technology, and we at Schematic who designed and built the interface--but on Schematic's side it was a small group of designers and technologists.

GT:What tools did you use for the project?

JB: Powered by a broad, connected suite of Google technologies, Art Project is a Java-based Google App Engine Web application. The site exists entirely on Google's infrastructure, and was built using Google APIs that are available to the public.

The museum gallery view employs Google Street View. In each museum, featured artwork are mapped to their longitude and latitude within museum being delivered by Street View. This location data allows people to see which artwork can be explored further, and link to that information in the site's second main section, the artwork "microscope view".

The artwork microscope view uses Picasa to deliver high-resolution captures of artwork. People can then learn more about the artwork they are viewing through content delivered through the Google Scholar, Google Docs and YouTube APIs.

To share personalized collections of artwork, people can log in with their Google account. Using the integrated Goo.gl URL shortener, they can then share unique links to their collections by e-mail, or to various Web services.

GT: What was it like to work with the museums? What issues did you encounter? Did you show up when the museums were closed? Give us a little background on that.

JB: We at Schematic weren't involved with the capture of the images themselves, so I can't comment on the logistics involved (which were no doubt significant). However, we did encounter some interesting challenges working with the Street View captures of the museums that Google had created.

One issue was creating a design scheme for the links that appear next to artworks that have corresponding zoomable "microscope" views.We needed the links to be clearly readable, but without detracting from the gallery experience.However, the widely varied dcor of partner museums' galleries--ranging from the ornate Palace of Versailles to the MoMA's more minimalist style--made it a challenge to come up with a one-size-fits-all design style for the links, such as one sees in Street View's standardized head-up display elements. Our solution was to design a link style that scaled between museums--simple, modernist galleries got smaller icons, and more rococo galleries larger ones.

Another challenge involved the placement of these links vis-a-vis your perspective of the artwork on the gallery walls.In Street View's normal experience wandering city streets, it's helpful to have the head up display that labels a particular building or monument appear on top of its subject. However, in Art Project we needed to ensure that the links didn't block or obscure the artwork, but instead behaved more like museum labels--consistently placed off to the side. To achieve this, the placement of each link had to be manually adjusted, and we had to become experts in the layout of all the partner museums.Needless to say, many, many hours were spent virtually wandering the halls of each museum in the process of creating the site.

GT: Did you run into any notable technical issues along the way?

JB: The Google APIs really sped our development. The biggest challenge was the aforementioned issues of placing the contextual links into Street View. A particular technology and design challenge with this was making sure that the links to artwork details we created in Street View didn't overlap paintings, and were placed consistently next to the paintings they were annotating.

GT: How did you go about choosing which galleries and museums to feature?

JB: The museums selected which galleries and artworks they wanted to feature.

GT: How do you see this sort of thing playing out in the future? Are you planning to expand to other museums? Are there any other uses you see for this sort of technology?

JB: I think one of the most notable achievements of Art Project is how it introduces a new model for viewing art that can be expanded upon. In the same way that televised sports can't replicate the thrill of the live game, but gives you a unique point of view you couldn't have in person--with slow motion, close-ups, and instant replay--Art Project can't replace the feeling of looking at a painting with your own eyes, but makes art accessible like never before, providing a whole new perspective. While we don't know what our friends at Google's plans are to extend the experience--a mobile experience, or a new way to view sculpture are both things I'd personally like to see--I'm excited to see what comes next, and was honored to be a part of this groundbreaking first step.

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HP Launches First Run at the Tablet Market

Hewlett-Packard rolled out its debut entrant into the red-hot tablet market, the HP Touchpad, as well as two new smartphones -- all running the latest version of the webOS acquired last year when it bought Palm.

HP may be behind some competitors in introducing a tablet, but Todd Bradley, executive vice president of HP's Personal Systems Group, implied that the market is in its infancy as he kicked off the Wednesday event. "The market for connected devices is, conservatively, $160 billion. And we're in the early stages of a growing market," he said.

The HP Touchpad will be the first in a family of tablet devices, HP said. It has a high-resolution 1024x768 9.7 inch-display, weighs 1.6 pounds and is 13mm thick. It has a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and allows video calling. It comes with 16GB or 32GB storage and uses the dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. The Wi-Fi version will be available this summer in the U.S. and select markets worldwide, with 3G and 4G versions coming later, HP said. A compact wireless keyboard is available for the Touchpad.

The Touchpad interface groups applications logically as "card stacks"; when a user is finished with using an app she can simply flick it off the screen rather than shutting it down.

Touching a compatible WebOS phone to the tablet can automatically fire up a browser on the phone and display the same Web page that's displayed on the tablet. If a user finds directions to a restaurant on their tablet, for example, and wants to take them out in the car, she can tap the devices together and the page of directions appears on the phone.

HP's Synergy is used to synchronize WebOS devices, so WebOS phones and the tablet can share address books, e-mail and the like. Also included is TouchPad at Work software -- QuickOffice, Google Docs, and VPN. Flash is supported, unlike on the Apple iPad.

The smartphones unveiled at the event -- held at the Herbst Pavilion in the Fort Mason Center beside the San Francisco Bay -- were the tiny HP Veer and the Pre3.

The Veer, about the size of a credit card, features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and 2.6" 320x400 touchscreen display, and a touch area for navigation. It supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Flash and GPS, and includes a USB port and audio jack, as well as a 5 megapixel camera. The phone has 8G bytes of storage and the same amount of memory as the Pre2, and can be used as a Wi-Fi router for five devices. It will be available in the early spring.

The Pre3 has a 3.6-inch 480x800 display, and 5 megapixel camera that shoots HD video with stabilization, as well as a forward-facing camera for video calling. It runs on HSPDA+ or EVDO and uses a Qualcomm chip running at 1.4GHz. It will be available in the summer. Both phones are compatible with the Touchstone charging dock.

 

Since buying Palm, Bradley said, HP has deployed hundreds of additional engineers -- while keeping intact the leadership of Jon Rubinstein, who joined the HP team from Palm with webOS.

At Wednesday's event, Rubinstein called the product of that work, webOS 2.1, "the most important one we've done so far. It takes the original features that set webOS apart, like true multitasking, synergy ...and takes them further." The software has 50 new features like VPN, voice mode and others, and will be available on the Pre2 from Verizon Thursday, he added.

HP acquired webOS last April when it bought Palm for $1.2 billion in a surprise move. HP's own handset business had not been doing particularly well and it saw Palm as a way to give itself a leg up -- even though Palm was not a market leader either.

It soon became clear HP was looking beyond smartphones, however. It said it would use webOS for its Web-connected printers, and as the iPad took off it saw opportunities there as well.

Wednesday's event is being closely watched to see what kind of hardware HP rolls out to get the most out of webOS.

HP is entering a crowded field when it comes to tablets. Along with the mighty Apple iPad it will compete with devices based on Google's Android, the latest version of which, Honeycomb, will debut later this month in the Motorola Xoom tablet. That 10.1-inch device will retail for $800, according to a leaked BestBuy advertisement.

Research is Motion is also in the game with its PlayBook tablet, which runs its own BlackBerry software. There are also tablets based on Windows 7, though Microsoft has struggled to make an impression in the tablet market.

Louisiana Virtual Charter Academy to Open Fall 2011

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 7, 2011 – Innovative statewide online school now accepting applications for students in grades K-10

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Louisiana Virtual Charter Academy (LAVCA), one of the state's first online public charter schools, is now accepting student enrollment applications for Fall 2011.

LAVCA, sponsored by the Community School for Apprenticeship Learning (CSAL), expects to serve over 1,000 students in grades K through 10 from all around the state. The charter school was recently authorized by the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

LAVCA will hold a series of events across the state in the coming weeks to give families the opportunity to find out more about this innovative, tuition-free public school option and receive enrollment information. A schedule of events in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other cities, can be found at .

Open to all Louisiana families, LAVCA will utilize high quality curriculum, technology, and school services offered by K12 Inc., America's largest provider of proprietary curriculum and online school programs in kindergarten through high school. In partnership with school districts and public charter schools, K12 operates online public schools in 27 states and the District of Columbia. Since 2000, K12 has provided over 2 million courses to tens of thousands of students in the U.S. and worldwide and consistently receives high marks from parents and teachers. Students graduating from K12-operated schools have been accepted to some of the top colleges and universities in the country.

"We are excited to offer the students of Louisiana this excellent education option," said Dujan Johnson, Executive Director of CSAL. "The highly individualized program that LAVCA will offer students is exactly what many families are looking for in a school. I'm confident LAVCA will help increase opportunities for children and give families all over Louisiana a public school option that is high quality and accountable."

The K12 virtual school program combines its award-winning curriculumusing engaging online lessons and hands-on education materialswith highly skilled teachers, advisors, state-of-the-art technology, and numerous social opportunities that connect students to a vibrant school community. From advanced learners to children with special needs, LAVCA will offer a flexible and personalized learning program that works for all types of students.

The school's teachers and administrators will be available for students and parents every step of the way. Teachers provide instruction, guidance and support, and will communicate regularly with students and parents via phone, email, innovative web-based "e-classrooms," and face-to-face meetings. Teachers will also organize school field trips, activities, clubs, and events for students and families.

LAVCA will follow all the same state accountability standards. Like students in brick and mortar schools, LAVCA students will be required to meet state attendance requirements and participate in state assessments, such as the Louisiana Education Assessment Program (LEAP) tests.

Online learning is one of the fastest growing segments in education according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The demand for online schools among parents and students is high, and many teachers are also choosing to pursue their profession in online schools. A national report titled Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning shows that more than half the states in the U.S. offer full-time, statewide online public schools. With LAVCA, Louisiana is the latest state to provide students the option of statewide online public charter schools.

More information on LAVCA, including a complete list of events around the state, can be found at .

K12 is a registered trademark of K12 Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCELouisiana Virtual Charter Academy

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