Netflix for Windows Phone 8 updated with support for 720p displays

After months of being wrapped in black bars, Netflix has updated its Windows Phone 8 app with fullscreen support for devices wielding native 720p displays. While this update doesn't add HD video playback, it definitely improves the app's image quality for phones with hi-res screens. So, if you're sporting a top-shelf WP8 device and you're looking to take full advantage of your display's real estate, head on over to our source link to pull down this 2MB refresh.

Filed under: Software, HD, Mobile

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Via: The Digital Lifestyle

Source: Windows Phone Store

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/04/netflix-wp8-update-720p-support/

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Study: Dementia tops cancer, heart disease in cost

Cancer and heart disease are bigger killers, but Alzheimer's is the most expensive malady in the U.S., costing families and society $157 billion to $215 billion a year, according to a new study that looked at this in unprecedented detail.

The biggest cost of Alzheimer's and other types of dementia isn't drugs or other medical treatments, but the care that's needed just to get mentally impaired people through daily life, the nonprofit RAND Corp.'s study found.

It also gives what experts say is the most reliable estimate for how many Americans have dementia ? around 4.1 million. That's less than the widely cited 5.2 million estimate from the Alzheimer's Association, which comes from a study that included people with less severe impairment.

"The bottom line here is the same: Dementia is among the most costly diseases to society, and we need to address this if we're going to come to terms with the cost to the Medicare and Medicaid system," said Matthew Baumgart, senior director of public policy at the Alzheimer's Association.

Dementia's direct costs, from medicines to nursing homes, are $109 billion a year in 2010 dollars, the new RAND report found. That compares to $102 billion for heart disease and $77 billion for cancer. Informal care by family members and others pushes dementia's total even higher, depending on how that care and lost wages are valued.

"The informal care costs are substantially higher for dementia than for cancer or heart conditions," said Michael Hurd, a RAND economist who led the study. It was sponsored by the government's National Institute on Aging and will be published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia and the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Dementia also can result from a stroke or other diseases. It is rapidly growing in prevalence as the population ages. Current treatments only temporarily ease symptoms and don't slow the disease. Patients live four to eight years on average after an Alzheimer's diagnosis, but some live 20 years. By age 80, about 75 percent of people with Alzheimer's will be in a nursing home compared with only 4 percent of the general population, the Alzheimer's group says.

"Most people have understood the enormous toll in terms of human suffering and cost," but the new comparisons to heart disease and cancer may surprise some, said Dr. Richard Hodes, director of the Institute on Aging.

"Alzheimer's disease has a burden that exceeds many of these other illnesses," especially because of how long people live with it and need care, he said.

For the new study, researchers started with about 11,000 people in a long-running government health survey of a nationally representative sample of the population. They gave 856 of these people extensive tests to determine how many had dementia, and projected that to the larger group to determine a prevalence rate ? nearly 15 percent of people over age 70.

Using Medicare and other records, they tallied the cost of purchased care ? nursing homes, medicines, other treatments ? including out-of-pocket expenses for dementia in 2010. Next, they subtracted spending for other health conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes or depression so they could isolate the true cost of dementia alone.

"This is an important difference" from other studies that could not determine how much health care cost was attributable just to dementia, said Dr. Kenneth Langa, a University of Michigan researcher who helped lead the work.

Even with that adjustment, dementia topped heart disease and cancer in cost, according to data on spending for those conditions from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Finally, researchers factored in unpaid care using two different ways to estimate its value ? foregone wages for caregivers and what the care would have cost if bought from a provider such as a home health aide. That gave a total annual cost of $41,000 to $56,000 per year for each dementia case, depending on which valuation method was used.

"They did a very careful job," and the new estimate that dementia affects about 4.1 million Americans seems the most solidly based than any before, Hodes said. The government doesn't have an official estimate but more recently has been saying "up to 5 million" cases, he said.

The most worrisome part of the report is the trend it portends, with an aging population and fewer younger people "able to take on the informal caregiving role," Hodes said. "The best hope to change this apparent future is to find a way to intervene" and prevent Alzheimer's or change its course once it develops, he said.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-03-US-MED-Alzheimer's-Toll/id-6d05c45596474a4c8b420a33e34653a3

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Anxiety awaits in sixth season of 'Mad Men' - KansasCity.com

LOS ANGELES ? In the first episode of the first season of "Mad Men," Don Draper's next-in-line affair, Rachel Menken, hears his brutal philosophy: Love is nothing more than an ad man's myth, and everyone is born alone and dies alone.

Stack up five years of equivalent cynicism and unfulfilled dreams and the result is a drama with a core of shattered glass, dazzling but menacing.

As the series returns for what creator Matthew Weiner says is the penultimate season, he's asking viewers to embrace other, more comfortable concepts: belief and trust.

They must believe that he knows what they will find satisfying for Don, Peggy, Pete and the other souls of "Mad Men," and trust in his vision as the AMC drama returns 9 p.m. EDT Sunday with a two-hour episode.

That he's putting his characters on the knife's edge of dread may not make that trust any easier - especially since Weiner believes we are living uneasily with a 21st-century version of their 1960s mindset.

"This season is very much capturing what's going on right now, in a strange way," Weiner said. "I think we have been thrown into a state of individual anxiety, based on being disconnected from events outside our control," including economic disarray.

The writer-director paraphrases a line from Sunday's episode that he deems key to the sixth season: People will do anything to alleviate anxiety.

If that's intriguing but maddeningly cryptic, that's how Weiner wants "Mad Men" to be approached pre-debut. No spoilers, not even a hint of what happens, when it happens and whether Don finally is taking the institution of marriage to heart.

But if Weiner won't talk about what the season is, he's at least willing to say what it's not.

"It's not about Lane's suicide. There is no eulogy for Lane. It's not all about Joan and the Jaguar guy," he said.

The references are to two of last season's more startling twists: the hanging death of ad agency partner Lane after he's fired for theft, and Joan's prostituting herself, under pressure, to win the luxury car account for the agency.

There are other stories to be told, Weiner said, even if viewers tend to cling to the past and would prefer the show pick up with the calendar flipped just a day or two ahead. That would become boring "really fast," Weiner said.

"They (viewers) don't know it, but that would get burned out. ... They have to trust me," he said, even if it takes a couple of episodes to unfold.

How will the latest chapter of "Mad Men" be received? Last season, its winning streak of four consecutive best-drama Emmy Awards was broken when it lost to "Homeland" and it failed to capture any other Emmy trophies.

Jon Hamm, the center-ring attraction as Don, the sharp-dressed man with the tortured psyche, has no qualms about following Weiner's lead once more.

When he was up for the role, Hamm said, "Matt, and really no one else, fought for me. ... For whatever reason, Matt's trust in me worked out. And that's why I have trust in him."

He credits Weiner's probing, self-analytic nature with producing the richly complex world of "Mad Men" and its parade of human and cultural foibles.

"Matt is a wickedly smart, very curious and deeply flawed person, and he likes exploring those flaws and pulling them apart and examining them," Hamm said. "All writers are wonderful observers, (and) Matt sees everything at a micro level and macro level."

Like a master magician, Weiner clearly relishes toying with his audience and his characters. When he talks about Draper and others repeating old mistakes, he chortles.

When he recommends facing down one's lifetime of errors - "Every person who goes through that process with me gets a horrible feeling in the pit of their stomach" - he cackles.

The thought of those who complain about how he's switched up the "Mad Men" world elicits a Weiner giggle.

Reflect back on the show's pilot, and you'll see his most beguiling trickery at work. We are introduced to Don, looking the picture of the carefree bachelor, as he makes a late-night visit to lover Midge and casually suggests marriage. Poor guy; she just brushes it aside.

It's not until the episode's last moments that we learn the truth. As the exotic jazz strains of "Caravan" play in the background, Don returns home to his wife and sleeping children, and the family is framed in a mockery of a Norman Rockwell moment.

While "Mad Men" has flipped through the mind-bending '60s, Don has remained steadfastly true to the music, liquor and tie-and-shirt dress code of his generation while his colleagues let it all hang out with Beatles albums, pot and turtlenecks.

But don't mistake Draper for a lead-footed dinosaur on the verge of extinction, Weiner said.

"The world has finally caught up with Don. The world is in a state of identity crisis and he is the ultimate survivor," he said. "He's comfortable because he's used to disaster."

Hamm, close to wrapping up work on this season's 13 episodes, has found himself tested over the years by his character's dark side.

"There's no vicarious thrill for me as an actor to doing any of this sort of bad behavior. I don't get off on it. ... There's a psychic toll it takes," he said. "I'm not comparing myself to a bricklayer or construction worker or miner. But it does take a psychic toll."

Those in the "Mad Men" audience cheering for Don to fall off the marriage wagon, or looking to him for guidance, give Hamm pause.

"The central conundrum is why people think this is a good person to model their lives after," he said, citing one area of exception: "Don, I feel, strives for excellence and doesn't settle for mediocrity, and demands that of people who work for him."

"I think that's beginning to be a lost art in our current culture of '140 characters and that's good enough.' The fact there are people who still strive for excellence ... is inspiring. That is the one good thing about Don; not that he looks good in a suit, not that he can drink, not that he (expletive) a lot of women."

With the journey nearing conclusion for Draper and his fellow travelers, Weiner is faced with the task of wrapping up the ambitious drama that put him in the front ranks of TV producers. There are 13 episodes planned for its last season, he said.

"I have an idea for what it feels like for the show to end, and I think I know how it ends, and I've known for a couple of years," Weiner said - cryptically, of course.

Could Don, at last, find happiness? Hamm tackles that question.

"Well, that's the hope. And at some point it will be the journey of the series, finding that happiness, or a balance."

That's the audience's challenge as well. And Mr. Weiner's call.

---

Online:

http://www.amctv.com/

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/04/04/4160942/anxiety-awaits-in-sixth-season.html

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Colorado suspect slipped ankle monitoring bracelet

DENVER (AP) ? Evan Spencer Ebel ran up a long list of felony convictions before turning 21, joined a white supremacist gang behind bars, assaulted one prison guard and wrote that he fantasized about killing others.

Along the way, he benefited from a series of errors in the criminal justice system before he became a suspect in the slaying of Colorado's prisons chief and a pizza deliveryman.

He got out of prison four years early because of a clerical error in a rural courthouse. He slipped his ankle bracelet and violated the terms of his parole last month, but authorities didn't put out a warrant for his arrest until after the killings of pizza deliveryman Nathan Leon and corrections chief Tom Clements.

Ebel's streak came to an end on March 21 after he was pulled over by a sheriff's deputy in rural Texas. He died after the ensuing car chase and shootout. The gun he used was the same used to kill Clements; the trunk of Ebel's car held a Domino's pizza box and shirt.

"We have to do better in the future," Tim Hand, the head of the Department of Correction's parole division, said in an interview Tuesday. "It forces us to step back and see what things we need to examine."

Ebel entered Colorado prisons in 2005 after a series of assault and menacing charges that combined for an eight-year sentence. Within six months he landed in solitary confinement, and he bounced in and out of that restricted state until his Jan. 28 release.

In 2006, he slipped his handcuffs, punched a guard in the face and threatened to kill the man's family. Ebel agreed to plead guilty to the attack and receive up to four years more in prison, to be served after his sentence ended.

There was no question in the courtroom that Ebel was supposed to stay in prison well after 2013. "I just think four years is a little stiff, you know," he told Judge David Thorson, according to transcripts of the 2008 hearing released Tuesday. "By the time I get out, I'll be 33."

The judge, however, didn't say the sentence was meant to be "consecutive," or in addition to, Ebel's current one, so it went to the prison system as a sentence to be served simultaneously. Prison officials say they had no way of knowing the intention had been for Ebel to remain behind bars for four more years.

As a result, Ebel was out before his 29th birthday.

Charles Barton, chief judge of the 11th Judicial District, and court administrator Walter Blair, said in a statement that the court regrets the oversight "and extends condolences to the families of Mr. Nathan Leon and Mr. Tom Clements."

Absent a huge audit, there's no way of knowing how common such random clerical errors might be in a legal system that churns out thousands of pages of documents daily, said Bill Raftery, an analyst at the Williamsburg, Va.-based National Center for State Courts.

When Ebel left prison Jan. 28, he entered an overwhelmed parole system that immediately flagged him as a high risk to re-offend. Half of Colorado's parolees end up back in custody.

The toughest cases are people released straight from solitary confinement, like Ebel. But officers who monitor them are deluged with cases ? the industry standard is they should supervise 20 high-risk parolees, but in Colorado they supervise an average of 35. Corrections officials say that's because budget cuts led to fewer resources for parole and more inmates released from prison.

Ebel was placed on the most intensive level of parole, requiring daily calls to corrections, a weekly urine test to see if he was on drugs and medical treatment that corrections officials say they cannot disclose due to federal privacy laws. Prison documents show that parole officials predicted he had a 2-in-3 chance of committing another crime. But he had one thing in his favor: His father.

Ebel's father, Jack, an attorney, found his son a place to live and hired him to work in his law firm performing menial tasks like moving filing cabinets, Hand said. Many offenders end up homeless with daunting prospects of finding work. And many end up re-offending in their first month out of prison.

In contrast, Ebel was, at first, a sterling parolee. He called in every day. He stayed away from alcohol and bars and did not leave the Denver area. He even once checked in because he was concerned he hadn't been subjected to his weekly surprise urinalysis yet.

"What's a surprise is, if you look at this in retrospect, this individual from late January to the middle of March seemed very much focused on doing what was expected of him," Hand said.

That changed at 1:54 p.m. on March 14, when a "tamper alert" was sent out from the vendor that operated the electronic monitoring bracelet around Ebel's ankle. That can mean a number of things, from a battery malfunction to a parolee slipping their bracelet and fleeing, Hand said.

That night, corrections officials left a message for Ebel telling him to report in two days and have the bracelet repaired, records show.

The next day, for the first day since his release, Ebel did not call in for his daily phone check-in.

On March 16, he missed his appointment to repair the bracelet. Only on the following day do the records show that a note was made in the corrections system that he failed to show up. By then, Leon, a father of three, was shot to death after answering a call for a pizza at a truck stop in Denver.

On March 18, parole officers contacted Jack Ebel. He told them he was concerned his son had fled and gave them permission to search Evan Ebel's apartment. The next afternoon, on March 19, two parole officers searched Ebel's apartment and concluded he had fled.

Hours later, Clements answered his doorbell and was fatally shot.

The next morning, still unaware of a connection with the most recent slaying, the state issued a warrant for Ebel's arrest on parole violations.

Authorities are still investigating whether Ebel killed Clements, and if so, why.

He clearly expressed anger at prison staff in the past.

"I just fantasize about catching them out on the bricks and subjecting them to vicious torture and eventual murder," Ebel said in a letter confiscated in 2006 by prison guards. "And that seems to get me through the days (with) a good degree of my sanity remaining intact."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-suspect-slipped-ankle-monitoring-bracelet-081044768.html

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International Law Reporter: New Issue: Criminal Law Forum

The latest issue of Criminal Law Forum (Vol. 24, no. 1, March 2013) is out. Contents include:

• Mohamed Elewa Badar & Iryna Marchuk, A Comparative Study of the Principles Governing Criminal Responsibility in the Major Legal Systems of the World (England, United States, Germany, France, Denmark, Russia, China, and Islamic legal tradition)
• Emily Haslam & Rod Edmunds, Managing a New ?Partnership?
• Manuel Ladiges, Criminal Liability of Directors of a Private Limited Company Seated in Germany
• Marko Divac ?berg, Processing Evidence and Drafting Judgments in International Criminal Trial Chambers

Source: http://ilreports.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-issue-criminal-law-forum.html

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EMarketer: Facebook US mobile ad revenue soaring

NEW YORK (AP) -- A research firm expects Facebook's mobile ad revenue to soar this year, hitting nearly $1 billion a year after the company started to splice ads into its users' mobile phones and tablets.

The forecast comes a day before Facebook is planning to unveil a new Android product. Speculation has centered on a mobile phone, made by HTC Corp., that deeply integrates Facebook into the Android operating system.

EMarketer said Wednesday that it expects Facebook Inc. to reap $965 million in U.S. mobile ad revenue in 2013. That's about 2.5 times the $391 million in 2012, the first year that Facebook started showing mobile ads.

Facebook is No. 2 behind Google Inc. when it comes to mobile advertisements, and it isn't expected to surpass the online search leader any time soon.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/emarketer-facebook-us-mobile-ad-212600614.html

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North Korea turns up volume by silencing final military hot line

What happens now?

By Robert Marquand,?Staff writer / March 27, 2013

South Korean Army soldiers patrol along a barbed-wire fence near the border village of Panmunjom in Paju, South Korea, Wednesday. North Korea said Wednesday that it had cut off a key military hot line with South Korea that allows cross-border travel to a jointly run industrial complex in the North.

Ahn Young-joon/AP

Enlarge

North Korea's edgy game of war talk continued?at ever higher volumes today with the announcement that it will cut off the last military hot line with South Korea.

Skip to next paragraph Robert Marquand

Staff writer

Over the past three decades, Robert Marquand has reported on a wide variety of subjects for?The Christian Science Monitor, including American education reform,?the wars in the Balkans, the Supreme Court, South Asian politics, and the oft-cited "rise of China." In the past 15 years he has served as the Monitor's bureau chief in Paris, Beijing, and New Delhi.?

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?Under the situation where a war may break out any moment, there is no need to keep North-South military communications,? said the regime, according to the Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang.

The severed line of communication comes as the North, under young and new President Kim Jong-un, has said it is moving into its highest military alert status and has threatened to target Hawaii and Guam with rockets, after last month conducting its third nuclear test.?

The escalating rhetoric has brought a new agreement between US and South Korean officials that would dictate military action should the North cross the border, shell islands, or harm shipping in the kind of low-level actions Pyongyang has attempted in recent years.?

US military officials called the North Korean statement ?bellicose.??Many have expressed doubt that North Korea?s rockets have the range to reach US bases in Guam and Hawaii, but a few, including the?editor of Jane?s Defense Weekly, estimated they could reach US military bases in Japan, according to USA Today.?

Yesterday the small, poor state that is anchored by devotion to the Kim family dynasty, and is now nearly entirely dependent on China for basic sustenance but has also devoted considerable resources to its military, repeated a longstanding threat to turn Seoul into a ?sea of fire,? among other similarly colorful threats.

Earlier this year, the North said it would no longer answer?a hot line at the Demilitarized Zone. The hot line that the country is now threatening to shut down linked the two Koreas at the?Kaesong industrial park, created in the North during the warming winds of unification in the 2000s. The economic complex has long been a symbol of the potential for North-South cooperation.?

The New York Times today notes the North?s threat on the hot line follows comments from?Park Geun-hye,?the newly elected president of South Korea, that North Korea needed to end its nuclear threats in order to gain better traction with the South:

?If North Korea provokes or does things that harm peace, we must make sure that it gets nothing but will pay the price, while if it keeps its promises, the South should do the same,? she said during a briefing from her government?s top diplomats and North Korea policy-makers. ?Without rushing and in the same way we would lay one brick after another, we must develop South-North relations step by step, based on trust, and create sustainable peace.?

Scott Snyder of the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, a veteran Korea-watcher once based in Seoul, tells The Christian Science Monitor that Pyongyang's main grievance appears to be recent United Nations sanctions targeted at the North.

Mr. Snyder argues that the meaning of the North?s sudden blustery behavior will only become clearer ?once the question of the consolidation of [Kim Jong-un?s] power becomes clearer.?

Agence France-Presse today said that a significant meeting among party elites and power brokers in the closed world of Pyongyang is about to take place.

"They will discuss how to handle the nuclear issue, inter-Korean relations and North Korea's longstanding demand for a peace treaty with the United States," Professor Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul told AFP.

Comparisons between the new Kim and his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, the patriarch of North Korea, are flowing freely, since there is a resemblance between the two. But Snyder notes that too little is yet known of the young Kim, who took over from his father Kim Jong-il last year, and that his youth is not necessarily a plus in such a high-stakes game.

?Right now the song is the same, but the volume is a lot louder. We don?t know his risk tolerance yet ? does he understand the game he is playing??

The US-South Korea military agreement follows a recent scrapping by the North of the historic legal armistice that effectively ended the Korean war in the 1950s. It came on the anniversary of the infamous sinking of the Choenan Navy vessel in 2010, which resulted in the deaths of 46 South Korean sailors, something that has had powerful emotional resonance in the South. (The Choenan was raised from the ocean floor, and forensics by the South claim the vessel was torpedoed by the North, something the North denies.)?

USA Today quotes an Asia-watcher who feels the key to dealing with Pyongyang runs through Beijing:

US diplomats should talk to their Chinese counterparts and say, "Your ally North Korea is acting in a very belligerent and destabilizing way," said [Richard] Bush, who heads the Brookings Institution Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. "They're acting in ways that are contrary to the principles you [China] have laid out. The situation is somewhat dangerous. You need to restrain your ally."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/P8CCMVqq_nQ/North-Korea-turns-up-volume-by-silencing-final-military-hot-line

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