We love Shonda Rhimes. As far as we're concerned, every year is a Year of Yes. But when a star of not one but two of the prolific showrunner's series decides to willingly spill some tea about Shonda, of course we're going to be all ears.

That's exactly what Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice star Kate Walsh did when she appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen Wednesday night as she answered questions posed by the Shady Shonda Anaconda who slithered onto the screen.

Though Shonda is legendary for her gift giving, not every present has been a winner. "We once got, I think, just a box of potpourri," Kate said on WWHL. "We were like, 'Really? We just won every award known to man. That's cool. That's super cool.'"

Kate also revealed that she thought Grey's Anatomy jumped the shark during "the bomb episode," the Season 2 episode entitled "As We Know It." "But that's the one that made it everything, that made Grey's Anatomy," Kate explained. "I'd say she jumped that shark, but then we rode it all the way to the top."

So did Shonda ever throw any shade of her own? "Here's what I will say, we had on Private Practice, all I'll say is there was a no a-hole policy," Kate replied. "How about that?"

We guess we'll take it.

Watch Kate and her fellow WWHL guest Laura Dern spill some more Hollywood secrets, below.

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Kate Walsh Let the Shade Fly About Shonda Rhimes and Grey's Anatomy - Bravo (blog)

Police in Texas said Sarah Fowlkes, a 27-year-old anatomy teacher at Lockhart High School, engaged in sexual contact with a 17-year-old male student, KXAN-TV reported.

Fowlkes turned herself in after the Lockhart Police Department issued her arrest warrant Monday, the station said. And in a move some might consider unusual, Fowlkes was smiling broadly for her mug shot.

But her attorney Jason Nassour explained why: Youve got a young lady who was arrested on the statement of a 17-year-old kid with no corroborating evidence, he told KXAS-TV. This isnt a guilty person sitting there like they just got caught. When everythings fleshed out, it wont be as it appears.

Fowlkes bonded out the same day she turned herself in, KXAN said.

Investigators were notified March 10 by a school administrator of the alleged inappropriate relationship, KXAN reported, adding that police said the male student was in contact with Fowlkes in person and throughmessages.

Fowlkes who taught anatomy and physiology and environmental systems was suspended by the Lockhart Independent School District where shes worked since 2014, KXAN said.

Seventeen years old is obviously older, but at the same time it doesnt make anything right, Detective Jesse Bell told the station. If the kid is in school, parents trust the school to take care of their kids so its definitely not right that a teacher in a position of power over a student be able to take advantage of a student.

Originally posted here:
Anatomy teacher accused of 'sexual contact' with student smiles for mugshot. Her lawyer tells why. - TheBlaze.com

The standard dinosaur family tree may soon be just a relic.

After examining more than 400 anatomical traits, scientists have proposed a radical reshuffling of the major dinosaur groups. The rewrite, reported in the March 23 Nature, upsets century-old ideas about dinosaur evolution. It lends support to the accepted idea that the earliest dinosaurs were smallish, two-legged creatures. But contrary to current thinking, the new tree suggests that these early dinosaurs had grasping hands and were omnivores, snapping up meat and plant matter alike.

This is a novel proposal and a really interesting hypothesis, says Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Irmis, who was not involved with the work, says its a possibility that the new family tree reflects actual dinosaur relationships. But, he says, It goes against our ideas of the general relationships of dinosaurs. Its certainly going to generate a lot of discussion.

The accepted tree of dinosaur relationships has three dominant branches, each containing critters familiar even to the nondinosaur obsessed. One branch leads to the bird-hipped ornithischians, which include the plant-eating duckbills, stegosaurs and Triceratops and its bony-frilled kin. Another branch contains the reptile-hipped saurischians, which are further divided into two groups: the plant-eating sauropods (typically four-legged, like Brontosaurus) and the meat-eating theropods (typically two-legged, like Tyrannosaurus rex and modern birds).

Scientists have long-divided the dinosaurs into two main groups, the bird-hipped and the reptile-hipped (top). A new analysis breaks up the reptile-hipped lineage and suggests the bird-hipped group shares recent ancestors with meat-eating theropods (bottom).Scientists have been unsure where to put the confusing two-legged, meat-eating herrerasaurids (red lines, top). The new analysis suggests they are close relatives of the sauropods (bottom).

This split between the bird-hipped and reptile-hipped dinos was first proposed in 1887 by British paleontologist Harry Seeley, who had noticed the two strikingly different kinds of pelvic anatomy. That hypothesis of dinosaur relationships was formalized and strengthened in the 1980s and has been accepted since then.

The new tree yields four groups atop two main branches. The bird-hipped ornithischians, which used to live on their own lone branch, now share a main branch with the reptile-hipped theropods like T. rex. This placement suggests these once-distant cousins are actually closely related. It also underscores existing questions about the bird-hipped dinos, an oddball group with murky origins; they appear late in the dinosaur fossil record and then are everywhere. Some scientists have suggested that they evolved from an existing group of dinosaurs, perhaps similarly herbivorous sauropods. But by placing the bird-hipped dinos next to the theropods, the tree hints that the late-to-the-party vegetarian weirdos could have evolved from their now close relatives, the meat-eating theropods.

Sauropods (like Brontosaurus) are no longer next to the theropods but now reside on a branch with the meat-eating herrerasaurids. Herrerasaurids are a confusing group of creatures that some scientists think belong near the other meat eaters, the theropods, while others say the herrerasaurids are not quite dinosaurs at all.

The new hypothesis of relationships came about when researchers led by Matthew Baron, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge and Natural History Museum in London, decided to do a wholesale examination of dinosaur anatomy with fresh eyes. Using a mix of fossils, photographs and descriptions from the scientific literature, Baron and colleagues surveyed the anatomy of more than 70 different dinosaurs and non-dino close relatives, examining 457 anatomical features. The presence, absence and types of features, which include the shape of a hole on the snout, a cheekbone ridge and braincase anatomy, were fed into a computer program, generating a family tree that groups animals that share specialized features.

In this new interpretation of dinosaur anatomy and the resulting tree, many of the earliest dinosaurs have grasping hands and a mix of meat-eating and plant-eating teeth. If the earliest dinos were really omnivores, given the relationships in the new four-pronged tree, the evolution of specialized diets (vegetarians and meat eaters) each happened twice in the dinosaur lineage.

When the researchers saw the resulting tree, We were very surprised and cautious, Baron says. Its a big change that flies in the face of 130 years of thinking.

The arrangement of the new tree stuck even when the researchers fiddled around with their descriptions of various features, Baron says. The close relationship between the bird-hipped, plant-eating ornithischians and the reptile-hipped, meat-eating theropods, for example, isnt based on one or two distinctive traits but on 21 small details.

The lesson is that dinosaur groups arent characterized by radical new inventions, says paleontologist Kevin Padian of the University of California, Berkeley. The relationships are read in the minutiae, not big horns and frills. That said, Padian, whose assessment of the research also appears in Nature, isnt certain that the new tree reflects reality. Such trees are constructed based on how scientists interpret particular anatomical features, decisions that will surely be quibbled with. The devil is in the details, Padian says. These guys have done their homework and now everyones going to have to roll up their sleeves and start checking their work.

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Anatomy analysis suggests new dinosaur family tree - Science News

When he was growing up, a dream of Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds was to acquire the Acorn Archimedes, a groundbreaking personal computer with the first ARM RISC chips.

But in 1987, Archimedes wasn't available to Torvalds in Finland, so he settled for the Sinclair QL. In the meanwhile, the Archimedes failed and disappeared from the scene, killing any chance for ARM chips to dominate PCs.

Since then, multiple attempts to put ARM chips in PCs have failed. Outside of a few Chromebooks, most PCs have x86 chips from Intel or AMD.

The domination of x86 is a problem for Linaro, an industry organization that advocates ARM hardware and software. Many of its developers use x86 PCs to compile programs for ARM hardware. That's much like trying to write Windows programs on a Mac.

That fact doesn't sit well with George Grey, CEO of Linaro.

"Linus mentioned this a little while ago: How do we get developers to work on ARM first? Why are will still using Intel tools?" Grey asked during a speech at this month's Linaro Connect conference in Budapest.

A powerful Linux laptop or mini-desktop based on an ARM processor needs to built so developers can write and compile applications, he said.

"May be we can take a Chromebook design and put more memory, get upstream Linux support on it, and use it as a developer platform for developers to carry to conferences," Grey said then.

To further that idea, a group of ARM hardware enthusiasts gathered in a room at Linaro Connect to conceptualize a powerful ARM PC. The group settled on building a computer like the Intel NUC -- a mini-desktop with a powerful board computer in it.

The free-flowing session was entertaining, with attendees passionately sharing ideas on the chip, memory, storage, and other components in the PC.

The session, which is available on Linaro's site, also highlighted issues involved in building and supporting an ARM-based PC. There were concerns about whether ARM chips would deliver performance adequate to run powerful applications.

There were alsoconcerns about components and about providing a Linux user experience acceptable to users.

Also important was building a viable ARM PC that would attract hardware makers to participate in such an effort. One worry was the reaction of the enthusiast audience, who might sound off if an ARM desktop didn't work properly, putting hardware vendors and chipmakers at the receiving end of criticism and bad press.

"Based on a research and efforts today, building an ideal PC is going to be hard," said Yang Zhang, director of the technologies group at Linaro.

Attendees quickly agreed that the ARM PC would need an expandable x86-style board with DDR4 memory DIMM slot, and NVMe or SATA slots for plugging in SSDs or other drives. Other features would include gigabit slots and USB slots.

"Definitely, we need to be looking at something with real I/O, not some crappy mobile chipset with soldered-on 2GB of RAM," one attendee said. (Attendees aren't identified in the recording of the discussion.)

Many ARM-based computer boards like Raspberry Pi 3 and Pine64 can be used as PCs, but have limited expandability and components integrated on the board. They aren't ideal for PCs handling heavy workloads.

Also, Zhang pointed out that LPDDR4, which is used in such "mobile" chipsets, is slower than DDR4 memory, which is why the DIMM slots would be needed on the ARM PC.

Next, the discussion shifted to the system-on-chip, and suggestions were made to use CPUs from companies including Marvell and Nvidia. Chips from Qualcomm, Cavium, and HiSilicon weren't suggested because those companies were uninterested in building a PC-style computer for development with Linaro. Ironically, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 will be used in Windows 10 PCs later this year.

An interesting suggestion was Rockchip's RK3399, which is being used in Samsung's Chromebook Pro, which has PCI-Express and USB 3.0. Google and Samsung have been putting in adecent amount of work for Linux support on the chip. But it still is a mobile chip, and not designed for full-powered ARM desktop.

"I have a 24-core Opteron right. To replace that I would need a 64-core Cortex A73 or something, which doesn't exist," said the attendee who suggested the RK3399.

The discussion became a battle between server chips and mobile chips, which each had their issues. While the server chips boast good software support, they are expensive. The mobile chips are cheap but have poor Linux OS support. Software support would need to be added by independent developers, and that can be a considerable amount of work.

In 2015, 96boards -- the ARM hardware effort of Linaro --built a development board called HuskyBoard wth AMD's Opteron A1100 server chip, but that didn't go well. AMD has now abandoned ARM server chips and recently released the 32-core Naples chip based on its x86 Zen architecture.

The initial PC will perhaps have a server chip with decent Linux kernel support. Standard interfaces, sufficient memory, and decent graphics will matter more, as will ensuring that standard components like heatsinks and memory DIMMs can be bought off the shelf.

The purpose of the gathering was to get the ball rolling for the development of a real desktop based on ARM. The PC will likely be developed by 96boards, which provides specifications to build open-source development boards.

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The anatomy of a powerful desktop with an ARM chip - ITworld

Pop quiz! Where does the vulva end and the vagina begin? Is it too late to use an IUD as birth control if you've already had unprotected sex? What does the G in G-spot stand for, and how can you find it?

Despite our sex-ed teachers' and gynecologists' best efforts, the inner (and outer) workings of female genitalia remain largely mysterious to many of us. We know, for the most part, what goes in and what comes outbut what does it all mean? With the penis, things are pretty straightforward. There's one hole, and it's all, you know, on the outside. It's just there, a statement, a fact. You can't get around the penis!

But because for decades the medical community didn't take the claims and complaints of women seriously enough, vaginas are still considered "icky" and "weird." This myth, and the stigma around a woman's advocating for her own health, contribute to an unnecessarily high amount of ignorance. Any person with a vagina should know how it works.

In fact, the overall attitude about the elusive female orgasm, the mystery of the clitoris, and the "huh? what?" attitude about vaginal health terminology are all part of a culture that mistakenly puts women on pedestals. Women are not mysterious; you just need to listen to us explain things. Women are not crazy and moody; we just express our emotions. And we're not beautiful untouchable goddesses with orchids between our legs; we are real people who have normal body parts. Many of us have vaginas. Let's talk about it already!

And by the way, let's clear up one of those terminology problems: the vulva is the outside stuff (what you can see), and the vagina is inside. You can use an IUD as a form of last-minute birth control, and the G-spot is named after German physician Ernst Grfenberg. The more you know!

To explore all of the myths around the vagina, we sat down with Kendall McKenzie of Planned Parenthood, who taught us everything we ever wanted to know - and maybe even more. Check out "The Vagina Quiz Show!" on Glamour's podcast, Work Wives:

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Let's Talk About Our Vaginas: Myths, Anatomy, and Key Health Tips - Glamour

Based upon the poor condition of labor/management relations in our state now, it is hard to believe Wisconsin was the first state to adopt a public sector collective bargaining law in 1959.

This law allowed unions for cities, counties, other municipalities and school districts (public sector) to bargain for wages, hours and working conditions, but it did not have a working impasse resolution procedure. This law allowed for mediation, but both sides had to agree (which school boards rarely did) and strikes were expressly prohibited.

Many school districts took maximum advantage of the law by keeping entry salaries high, but all other salary-related amounts (increments, lanes, higher degree amounts) low plus only provided the bare minimum or nothing in fringe benefits.

These districts became training grounds and lacked significant teacher retention or experienced staff.

I know this because the district I taught in had far fewer benefits and much lower wages than Fond du Lac or West Bend, yet was geographically right between them. We lost a lot of good teachers to those districts.

The management side of the teeter-totter had all the power and teachers had none, but in 1974 two separate things happened. In January, I started bargaining for teachers and later the Hortonville teachers went on strike, because they felt they deserved higher wages and more benefits.

Those teachers were all fired because the strike was illegal, but it demonstrated to the entire state and legislators how mistreated teachers were in many districts.

State Senators and Assembly Representatives held hearings throughout the state and the result was Senate Bill 15 was passed giving public employees mandatory mediation and binding arbitration rights.

When I started bargaining, our teachers had five sick days versus 10 in other districts, did not have fully paid teacher retirement benefits and could not use sick days for maternity leave (just to name a few).

We had full-time teachers (not entry level) who qualified for food stamps and some teachers children qualified for free and reduced lunch at school. I asked for fairness and the ability for teachers to stay and keep educating children rather than being forced to relocate to other districts for economic reasons. Our teachers united in their beliefs.

Teachers unions trained leaders and mobilized members during unpaid time and used people power to bring about necessary changes without being greedy. No school districts went bankrupt and Wisconsin students won because test scores went up. In fact, Wisconsin ranked in the top five in ACT and SAT scores when compared to all other states.

Every year my union educated new teachers regarding the struggles we had to get them decent wages and benefits and warned they should not take them for granted.

However, other unions did not and just had teachers pay their dues with no other investment. New teachers graduating from college just assumed all the benefits were a right or entitlement rather than an investment that needed to be protected.

Originally posted here:
Anatomy of unions, Part 2 - Ashland Daily Press

Info 'Grey's Anatomy': Sarah Drew On The Fan Reaction To Big #Japril Episode & What's Next March 22, 2017 1:21 PM PDT

On the red carpet at PaleyFest Los Angeles 2017 honoring "Grey's Anatomy," Sarah Drew tells Access Hollywood about the fan reaction to the big April/Jackson (#Japril) episode. What's the status for the on/off couple on the show? And, could Eric Roberts come back as Jackson's dad? "Grey's Anatomy" airs Thursdays at 8/7c on ABC

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'Grey's Anatomy': Sarah Drew On The Fan Reaction To Big #Japril Episode & What's Next - Access Hollywood

OKLAHOMA CITY

With storm season right around the corner, it will be common to hear KOCO meteorologists and storm chasers use severe storm terms. Commonly used terms may be "wall cloud" or "mesocyclone.: Here is a breakdown of what these terms mean.

Supercell: An often dangerous thunderstorms that consists primarily of a single, rotating updraft, which persists for much longer than 1020 minutes.

Mesocylone: A cyclonically rotating vortex, around 1-6 miles in diameter, in a thunderstorm

Wall cloud: A local, often abrupt lowering from a cumulonimbus cloud base into a low-hanging accessory cloud. A wall cloud marks the lower portion of a very strong updraft, usually associated with a supercell or severe multicell storm. It typically develops near the precipitation region of the cumulonimbus. Wall clouds that exhibit significant rotation and vertical motions often precede tornado formation by a few minutes to an hour.

Updraft: The part of the supercell storm that has rising vertical motion moving towards the top of the storm. The downdraft is the part of the storm that falls vertically, which typically contains rain, hail and sometimes damaging winds.

Click the image above to see the diagram of a supercell storm and clickhere for a complete weather glossary.

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The anatomy of a tornadic storm - KOCO Oklahoma City

GLG has produced a new series of videos focused on decision making in the business world.

As part of the series, GLG, the world's leading membership network for professional learning, has interviewed a number of business leaders to ask about what considerations go into making important decisions.

In this installment, GLG speaks with former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson about her decision-making process in the newsroom.

Abramson said her background as an investigative journalist in Washington helped prepare her for the role of executive editor.

When you have to confront powerful people about unpleasant things that they dont want to talk about like their personal finances or their campaign finances, you develop a kind of calm steadiness that allows you not to get horribly nervous, Abramson explained.

Abramson discussed at length possibly the most difficult and important leadership decision she had to make during her career. Back in 2013, Times reporter Eric Schmidt was working on a story about an intercepted conversation between Al-Qaeda leaders that led the United States to raise the terror alert level at the time. Abramson received a phone call from the director of national intelligence, who told her that the New York Times would have blood on its hands if they chose to publish the story.

Abramson emphasized the importance of communication and placing trust in her team.

I spoke at length with Eric. It was very important to me. He was closest the reporter is always closest to the story, she said.

In talking to him, I really felt that we could go ahead and publish the story, but that Eric and I agreed we could withhold the details that it was Zawahiri and someone in Yemen. The story had other valuable information to explain this higher terror alert to our readers but that those details, while obviously its the leader of Al-Qaeda, are newsworthy, they might not be essential to the reader understanding the contours of the story.

Abramson said the media is constantly facing the difficult decision of addressing national security or law enforcement issues that could potentially compromise ongoing investigations and put people in danger.

Its really a balancing test, and theres no perfect formula for it, where you weigh the urgency of the story and is it important for the public to know, and if it is, to balance that against the seriousness of the request and the sensitivity of the story that it might cause actual harm, she concluded.

While Abramson said the top responsibility of any journalists is to keep the public informed, sensitive information comes with a heavy burden of responsibility when peoples lives may be at risk.

Related Link:

Anatomy Of A Decision, Part 1: The C-Suite _______ Image Credit: "New York Times Newsroom" By Bpaulh (Own work (Original text: self-made)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Posted-In: Al-Qaeda GLG Jill Abramson New York TimesNews Management Media Interview Best of Benzinga

2017 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Anatomy Of A Decision, Part 2: The Newsroom - Benzinga

Last week's episode of Grey's Anatomy was a major one for April and Jackson (the proof is in all those Twitter reaction gifs). Fans finally got their wish for a hot and heavy romantic moment between the pair when the two passionately hooked up on a work trip in snowy Montana. (Thank you, Catherine Avery, for so brilliantly setting that up!)

"That episode ended with a tremendous amount of hope," Sarah Drew (who plays April) explained during the cast's recent panel at Paleyfest. "Whether that translates into romance or just a solidification that they are each others person and theyll always be best friends, that has yet to be seen. Well see what happens.

Although social media was abuzz that the couple might finally get back together, there was a subtle, more significant moment in the episode that viewers might have skipped over. About 10 minutes into the episode, Jackson is on the phone with April, where she's sitting on the bed in her Montana hotel room. She's got her laptop in front of her, but it's not her main focus. Instead, she's tightening a bottle having just breast pumped milk for her baby, Harriet, who was back in Seattle with Catherine.

What's significant about that, you ask? Originally, that wasn't in the scene.

"I asked to have [that] pumping scene," Drew revealed to Glamour. "As a breastfeeding mother, I would be pumping if I was away from my baby. So that action, that cut, made it into the scene. Its something I really care about and is part of, for me, what it means to be a working mother. You have to account for all of that stuff when you travel away from your child. I always really celebrate the moments where we get a window into that struggle or that journey."

Drew approached the episode's directornone other than Kevin McKidd, who plays Dr. Owen Hunt on the seriesfor permission to add the breast pumping equipment to the scene. "I was like, 'It's not in the script, but I would like to have a pump here, and I would like to be doing this action. And can we make sure that we have a wide enough shot to see it?'" (The reason for the wide shot, by the way, was that so viewers could see all the equipment required to pump breast milk. That means the plastic cords, as well as the cooler that comes with the pump which has a special ice pack so you can nestle four bottles inside without spillage.)

PHOTO: Eric McCandless/ABC

True to his word that "our show beautifully depicts the struggle we all have as human beings to juggle our lives," McKidd was happy to honor Drew's request.

"Weve been on the show so long, so we know who our characters are; its important to honor that," McKidd told Glamour. "Sarah has been playing this part for eight years. It was really important to her, so I was like, Of course, were going to do that.' One of the big themes of our show is how do we make the best life with so many commitments when were all pulled in so many directions? In that moment, it really portrayed that well. It's important to show that were all multitasking all the time, especially these doctors who are committed to their patients, but also their own lives going on, too. Its nice to let the audience know that were all going through it together.

McKidd's compassion and understanding for Drew's request only solidified why she's thrilled to have a job on such an inclusive set like Grey's. "On our set, all of the women feel free to speak up," she explained. "Its always been; Ive always felt that way. Ive always had a voice, and thats been an important thing for me since the moment I had my first baby. Like, Oh my gosh, this is so hard! Lets talk about how hard this is!

Another thing Drew loves about the show? Shonda Rhimes' commitment to showing the character's children on screen even if they aren't directly involved in that episode's storyline. "They show that daycare exists in the hospital, so you get this sense these doctors are working really hardand they are able to go in and grab 10, 15 minutes [with their kids]," she said. "Look, parenthood is hard as it is; parenthood is super hard if you are at home and that is your primary focus. Parenthood is also super hard if youre trying to juggle it with work, and these people are kicking ass and taking names at work. Its neat to see that struggle."

Added McKidd: "One of the director's jobs is to tell these stories as beautifully as we can, as truthful as we can, and to make sure everyone is included in the discussions. I think a good director manages to do that and still be a strong leader."

And for those viewers at home that did pick up on the brief scene, Drew said it was a very empowering moment for her and the show. "There were some people that tweeted about it and they were so grateful," she told us. "They were like, Yes! Even one of our wardrobe girls had a baby a year ago, and she said that was her favorite part of the whole episode. She was so grateful that it made it there on the screen. So, yeah, it was so cool.

Related: Here's Why Grey's Anatomy Will Probably Never End

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Sarah Drew Asked Grey's Anatomy to Include a Breast Pump Scene, and We're All for It - Glamour