STOP LOSS: Democrats Bent on Forcing Small Businesses into ...

As the Peak has pointed out time and time again, the Democrat-controlled Colorado state legislature have paid ample lip service to small business and economic issues, but their actions during the session tell a different story altogether.? Far left social issues such as civil unions, gun control, and sex ed have taken most the air out of the room, and when the democrats actually expended the effort to address business issues, they are have been throwing up more regulations, impediments, and interference in the marketplace.? Denver Rep. Beth McCann has offered the latest example.

Legislators on the left have targeted health plans popular with small businesses to force small businesses into the more expensive small-group market.? Eliminating the popular stop-loss insurance option is important to the left because the small business health exchange that the state plans to launch needs the small businesses with young, healthy employees in order to spread out costs and to prevent the state?s program from becoming almost impossibly expensive.

Stop-loss insurance is a simple type of policy that many small businesses use as an alternative to expensive group policies.? In a stop-loss insurance arrangement, the company self-insures to a certain extent, and then purchases stop-loss insurance to protect against catastrophic claims.? In Colorado, it?s common for the stop-loss coverage to kick in at $15,000 per person, and a higher aggregate amount for the entire company.? This is a great option for small companies with young, healthy employees.? In fact, testimony at the legislature this year included a vignette about a local company with five employees who took advantage of stop-loss insurance, and had a scant $300 in claims above what they spent on the annual premium last year.

Unfortunately for growing businesses that view this type of insurance as a way to provide benefits for employees and control costs, these types of plans pose a threat to the future small-group state insurance exchange by attracting companies with low-risk employees.? But Beth McCann had a plan:? if she could pass a law that would radically increase the minimum stop-loss coverage amount, a quick vote in the legislature and a stroke of Governor Hickenlooper?s pen could essentially wipe out this insurance option by rendering it economically useless.

At first she introduced a bill, HB13-1290, that stated that stop-loss insurance providers could not pay a penny in claims until an individual?s claims hit $30,000.? After an amendment lowering that amount to $20,000, she was able to convince enough of her fellow Democrats to get this one through the Health, Insurance and Environment Committee.? By the state changing the economics of these policies, it will invariably push companies into the more expensive small-group market, and grease the skids for the expensive, government-run exchange.

Source: http://coloradopeakpolitics.com/2013/04/23/stop-loss-democrats-bent-on-forcing-small-businesses-into-state-run-insurance/

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'The Voice' Teams Are Full: Meet The Latest Singers!

Usher, Shakira, Adam and Blake can finally keep their chairs forward for the season.
By Emilee Lindner

Usher on "The Voice"
Photo: NBC

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1705296/the-voice-teams.jhtml

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Obama, in Colorado, to press for gun measures

President Barack Obama gestures during his meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April, 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President Barack Obama gestures during his meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April, 2, 2013. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? In danger of losing congressional momentum, President Barack Obama is drawing attention to Colorado's newly passed gun control laws as he applies public pressure on Congress to pass similar federal measures.

Obama was traveling to the Denver suburbs Wednesday, stepping up his call for universal background checks for gun buyers as well as his demands for Congress to at least vote on an assault weapons ban and limits on large-capacity ammunition magazines.

The trip is heavy with political symbolism. Colorado expanded background checks and placed restrictions on magazines despite being a state with a deep-rooted hunting tradition, where gun ownership is a cherished right. Moreover, Obama will meet with law enforcement officials and community leaders at the Denver Police Academy, not far from the Aurora suburb where a gunman last summer killed 12 people in a movie theater. The president's trip is occurring in the same week that prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty for James Holmes, accused of carrying out the Aurora rampage.

With Congress due to return to Washington after a two-week Easter break, Obama has been scheduling high-profile events on gun legislation to push lawmakers and sustain a drive for some kind of action aimed at curbing gun violence more than three months after the massacre at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.

Last week Obama called for legislation while flanked by 21 mothers who have lost children to gun violence. "I haven't forgotten those kids," he declared then.

On Monday, just ahead of the planned start of the Senate's debate on gun legislation, Obama is scheduled to go to Hartford, Conn., where state lawmakers have announced a bipartisan agreement on gun legislation as a response to the shootings at Newtown's Sandy Hook Elementary School, which took the lives of 20 first-graders and six adult staff.

"If it were simple to pass measures through Congress that are very common sense but would reduce gun violence in America, those measures would have passed already," White House spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday. "And the president has always recognized that this is something that would be a challenge."

In selecting Colorado, Obama is showcasing a state with a long centrist tradition that prizes its Western frontier heritage. But an influx of young coastal transplants and growing Hispanic voter clout have helped Democrats win a string of victories in the state. Even before the Sandy Hook massacre energized gun control proponents, Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper said he was open to new gun control measures in the state.

Colorado Republicans fought the new legislation, contending that Democrats overreached and will be punished by the voters in November. Several county sheriffs have vowed not to enforce the new gun restrictions. Democrats contend that the measures are generally popular, especially among the suburban women who decide Colorado elections.

Obama's trip comes a day after a study commissioned by the National Rifle Association, which has opposed Obama's gun control measures, recommended that schools have trained, armed staffers to increase security for students. The American Federation of Teachers denounced the proposal.

With just days left before the Senate begins its debate, there were signs that sweeping congressional efforts to address gun violence have flagged.

A proposed ban on assault weapons has little hope of passage and the prospects for barring large-capacity magazines also seem difficult. Key senators have been unable to reach a bipartisan compromise that would require federal background checks for gun transactions between private individuals. Federal background checks currently apply only to sales handled by licensed gun dealers.

Carney said administration officials were looking for middle ground.

"We are working with lawmakers of both parties, and trying to achieve a compromise that can make this happen. Especially when it comes to the background checks," Carney told reporters. But he reiterated Obama's insistence that other measures get a vote.

In addition to his stop in Denver, Obama will travel to San Francisco to attend fundraisers Wednesday and Thursday for Democratic Party organizations.

___

Associated Press writers Nicholas Riccardi in Denver and Alan Fram in Washington contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-03-Obama/id-3fecf87b1fd5411098a343dd987f1f38

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New insights on how spiral galaxies get their arms

Apr. 2, 2013 ? Spiral galaxies are some of the most beautiful and photogenic residents of the universe. Our own Milky Way is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous arms. And nearly 70 percent of the galaxies closest to the Milky Way are spirals.

But despite their common shape, how galaxies like ours get and maintain their characteristic arms has proved to be an enduring puzzle in astrophysics. How do the arms of spiral galaxies arise? Do they change or come and go over time?

The answers to these and other questions are now coming into focus as researchers capitalize on powerful new computer simulations to follow the motions of as many as 100 million "stellar particles" as gravity and other astrophysical forces sculpt them into familiar galactic shapes. A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reports simulations that seem to resolve long-standing questions about the origin and life history of spiral arms in disk galaxies.

"We show for the first time that stellar spiral arms are not transient features, as claimed for several decades," says UW-Madison astrophysicist Elena D'Onghia, who led the new research along with Harvard colleagues Mark Vogelsberger and Lars Hernquist.

"The spiral arms are self-perpetuating, persistent, and surprisingly long lived," adds Vogelsberger.

The origin and fate of the emblematic spiral arms in disk galaxies have been debated by astrophysicists for decades, with two theories predominating. One holds that the arms come and go over time. A second and widely held theory is that the material that makes up the arms -- stars, gas and dust -- is affected by differences in gravity and jams up, like cars at rush hour, sustaining the arms for long periods.

The new results fall somewhere in between the two theories and suggest that the arms arise in the first place as a result of the influence of giant molecular clouds -- star forming regions or nurseries common in galaxies. Introduced into the simulation, the clouds act as "perturbers" and are enough to not only initiate the formation of spiral arms but to sustain them indefinitely.

"We find they are forming spiral arms," explains D'Onghia. "Past theory held the arms would go away with the perturbations removed, but we see that (once formed) the arms self-perpetuate, even when the perturbations are removed. It proves that once the arms are generated through these clouds, they can exist on their own through (the influence of) gravity, even in the extreme when the perturbations are no longer there."

The new study modeled stand-alone disk galaxies, those not influenced by another nearby galaxy or object. Some recent studies have explored the likelihood that spiral galaxies with a close neighbor (a nearby dwarf galaxy, for example) get their arms as gravity from the satellite galaxy pulls on the disk of its neighbor.

According to Vogelsberger and Hernquist, the new simulations can be used to reinterpret observational data, looking at both the high-density molecular clouds as well as gravitationally induced "holes" in space as the mechanisms that drive the formation of the characteristic arms of spiral galaxies.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Elena D'Onghia, Mark Vogelsberger, Lars Hernquist. Self-Perpetuating Spiral Arms in Disk Galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal, March 20, 2013 [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/shO5jSkUHKs/130402124821.htm

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Green Pea galaxies could help astronomers understand early universe

Apr. 3, 2013 ? The rare Green Pea galaxies discovered by the general public in 2007 could help confirm astronomers' understanding of reionization, a pivotal stage in the evolution of the early universe, say University of Michigan researchers.

Reionization occurred a few hundred million years after the Big Bang as the first stars were turning on and forming the first galaxies. During this period, the space between the galaxies changed from an opaque, neutral fog to a transparent charged plasma, as it is today. Plasma is gas that's electrically charged.

As for how this happened, the prevailing theory holds that massive stars in the early galaxies produced an abundance of high-energy ultraviolet light that escaped into intergalactic space. There, the UV light interacted with the neutral hydrogen gas it met, blasting electrons off the hydrogen atoms and leaving behind a plasma of negatively charged electrons and positively charged hydrogen ions.

"We think this is what happened but when we looked at galaxies nearby, the high-energy radiation doesn't appear to make it out. There's been a push to find some galaxies that show signs of radiation escaping," said Anne Jaskot, a doctoral student in astronomy.

Jaskot and Sally Oey, an associate professor of astronomy in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, have found that the Green Peas could hold that evidence. Their findings are published in the current edition of the Astrophysical Journal.

"The Green Peas are compact, highly star-forming galaxies that are very similar to the early galaxies in the universe," Jaskot said. "Our analysis shows they may be leaking ionizing radiation."

The researchers focused on six of the most intensely star-forming Green Pea galaxies, which are between one billion and five billion light years away. They studied their emission lines as observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Emission lines show how light interacts with matter, and in this case, they helped the astronomers understand the relationship between the stars and gas in these galaxies.

The emission lines told Jaskot and Oey how much light the galaxies absorbed. Then, to determine how much light was there to start with, they ran models to estimate, for example, how old the galaxies are and how many stars they contain. The galaxies, the researchers determined, produced more radiation than the researchers detected, so they infer that some of it must have escaped.

"An analogy might be if you have a tablecloth and you spill something on it. If you see the cloth has been stained all the way to the edges, there's a good chance it also spilled onto the floor," Jaskot said. "We're looking at the gas like the tablecloth and seeing how much light it has absorbed. It has absorbed a lot of light. We're seeing that the galaxy is saturated with it and there's probably some extra that spilled off the edges."

Jaskot says the Green Peas are exciting candidates to help astronomers understand a major milestone in the development of the cosmos 13 billion years ago.

The paper is called "The Origin and Optical Depth of Ionizing Radiation in the 'Green Pea' Galaxies. The research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

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Journal Reference:

1. A. E. Jaskot, M. S. Oey. The Origin and Optical Depth of Ionizing Radiation in the "Green Pea" Galaxies. Astrophysical Journal, 2013 [link]

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/XdoUR4HhPC8/130403141446.htm

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iPad: 3 years later

3 years ago today, Apple shipped the original iPad Wi-Fi. It had been called unimaginative. It had been called unnecessary. Even after Steve Jobs had taken the stage only a few months earlier and made the case that there was room for a new product category between the smartphone and the laptop, even after Apple's multitouch interface had mainstreamed computing like never before, it was called "just a big iPhone".

And it was. An iPhone gone IMAX. Widescreen experiences gone tall screen. Single column apps gone double column. Small device gone big.

If analysts didn't get it, if pundits didn't get it, if everyone inside Apple didn't get the full extent of it, it didn't matter. We got it. By the millions. Tens of millions.

It was early days still, before they were comfortable enough to have Peter Coyote say technology alone wasn't enough.

But even in its original form, the iPad made computing accessible to people for whom even Macs were confusing and intimidating, for whom mice and keyboards were awkward and off-putting, for whom multiple windows were frustrating and disorienting, for whom everything about a personal computers was still far too impersonal.

It empowered them.

Three years later, with the web in the palm of our hands, with games and videos that fill our field of vision, with apps that let us finger-paint with productivity and pinch and swipe and tap information around the world, with sizes both full and mini, the iPad is a success.

Undeniably, phenomenally, transformative-ly, confounding-ly a success.

And it's only been three years. How far can the iPad go in another three?

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/3aqw0roAMrc/story01.htm

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