DeLand running back JoJo Kemp commits to South Florida

By Ryan Bass, Bright House Sports Network
Last Updated: Saturday, June 23, 2012 @ 06:14PM PINELLAS PARK --?

One of the best running backs in Central Florida is heading West.

DeLand all-purpose back JoJo Kemp committed to South Florida following his visit to campus for the "SuperBull", he announced over his Facebook, Saturday. The 5-foot-10, 190-pounder has always had the Bulls high on his list, but decided to make it official.

Kemp could not be reached for comment.

His recruiting has picked up following three stellar outings at Orlando combines last month. He had 22 scholarship offers, but decided to pick the Bulls over the likes of West Virginia, Nebraska, Pittsburgh and Arizona State, among others.

Kemp rushed for 1,163 yards on 178 carries last season with the Bulldogs, scoring 14 touchdowns.

Ryan Bass is a reporter for Bright House Sports Network. Find him on twitter,?@Ry_Bass.

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Yankees won't play chicken with Mets' Francisco

By HOWIE RUMBERG

AP Sports Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 7:14 p.m. ET June 22, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) - Derek Jeter looked at the front page of a tabloid, the one that had a composite photo of his smiling face atop a chicken's body and the headline "Cluck You!"

He just shook his head.

"What happened?" Jeter asked.

What happened was that Mets closer Frank Francisco told the New York Post this week, "I can't wait to face those chickens" before his team hosted the crosstown rival Yankees in a three-game series starting Friday night at Citi Field.

Jeter and his teammates were more confused by the comment than upset by it.

"I can't be insulted by something I don't understand," Jeter said.

With a big grin, teammate Nick Swisher added: "I don't even know what it means. ... I don't even know what to say."

Alex Rodriguez wanted to know what kind of chicken: "I like mine grilled."

Francisco did not chicken out Friday afternoon, explaining what he meant by his odd comment. He said he thinks the Yankees often protest the umpires' calls.

"I (made) a simple comment because they complain a lot for everything," Francisco said.

In his first season with the Mets, the closer did not pitch when the Yankees swept the Subway Series in the Bronx from June 8-10. But he told the Post he is excited to have a chance to strike out the side in the final series of the regular season between the teams.

Francisco has done it before, whiffing Jeter, Rodriguez and Jason Giambi in the seventh inning on May, 21, 2004, for the Texas Rangers.

Yankees catcher Russell Martin, who hit a game-ending homer off Mets reliever Jon Rauch on June 10, dismissed the comments.

"We'll see if we're chicken when he gets in the game," Martin said.

Never has chicken played so prominent a role in a Yankees story line since the fake George Steinbrenner agreed to trade George Costanza to Tyler Chicken for a fermented chicken drink and other poultry products on an episode of "Seinfeld."

On Friday, Yankees manager Joe Girardi said three chicken companies inquired about sponsoring the Subway Series this weekend.

Mets manager Terry Collins isn't about to start disciplining his players for speaking their minds.

"I'm not going to hang out in the clubhouse and watch what guys say," Collins said. "We're grown men. Frank, if that's the way he feels - I don't think he meant to stir the pot when we played these guys. They're good enough already. It is what it is."

Girardi doesn't think his team needs extra motivation.

"It doesn't really mean anything," Girardi said. "What means something is what you do on the field."

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Small Business Ideas For The Enterprising Individual | Small ...

With the global economy in transition, opportunities abound for folks looking to go into business for themselves. Of course, the small business failure rate is always high and has been exceedingly so for the past few years as consumers and potential client businesses watch their expenses carefully, excising impulse buys and deferring large purchases until their confidence returns. In such an environment, why not adopt small business ideas that offer high potential payoff for relatively low risk? Owning and operating a proven franchise business is one such idea.

Many different kinds of franchises are available to the enterprising small business owner. The quick-service restaurant industry, for example, is dominated by successful franchise businesses. Whether it's burrito joints like Chipotle and Panchero's, upscale soup-and-sandwich outfits like Panera Bread and Zoup!, or guilty indulgences like Coldstone Creamery and Mrs. Field's Cookies, in-and-out restaurants are a relatively inexpensive starter franchise that provides plenty of ownership experience and room for growth. Simple small business ideas like these provide owners with management and ownership experience as well as serious room for growth.

Restaurants are fast and easy to set up, but there are other small business ideas out there as well. Folks looking for a fulfilling source of business income need look no further than the many childcare and educational franchise opportunities currently available. Many different franchise businesses exist in this space, from more educationally-focused childcare concepts like Goddard Systems Inc. and Tutor Time LLC to concepts that focus on supervised playtime like Adventure Kids Playcare.

Separately, many franchisees make their living running nanny- and babysitter-placement services, which are far cheaper to start up than full-scale preschool concepts. For entrepreneurs just starting out on the road to financial freedom, these cheaper small business ideas may be the way to go.

While it's true that starting any business requires a significant upfront investment, some small business ideas are more likely to pay off than others--especially when they involve a proven franchise concept. The actual investment required of a potential concept owner depends on many factors including the franchise's success rate, its average per-store revenue and profit figures, the cost of setting up the business's physical location, and the geographical location in which the business operates.

Proven franchises like McDonald's and Taco Bell require a larger upfront payment from potential franchisees on account of their stellar reputations and low rates of failure. As with any investment, interested parties buying the rights to a coveted franchise name must pay a premium for the security offered by the name. While smaller or newer franchise concepts are not poor small business ideas, concepts just beginning to gain traction may not be able to offer the corporate-level support or troubleshooting that more-established businesses can. Thus, potential small business owners looking to get in to a new concept on the ground floor should expect to do more of their own legwork. Regardless of the franchisee's ultimate choice of concept, it's small business ideas like these that will drive the nation's economic recovery.

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Lack Of Health Insurance Killed More Than 26000 In 2010: Report ...

Not having health insurance could put your life at risk. Or it might not make any difference at all.

A new study has calculated that more than 26,000 Americans died prematurely in 2010 as a direct result of not having health insurance. The study, published on Wednesday by health care advocacy group Families USA, has raised old questions about whether health insurance coverage has any bearing on a person?s odds of living longer.

Families USA?s key finding ? 26,100 premature deaths a year for those 25 to 64 ? is a figure most would find sobering. This works out to about one death every 20 minutes. But it?s a conclusion that some researchers might have difficulty accepting, since its methodology is similar to that used in an earlier report with a troubled history.

What is certain is that the Families USA report arrives at a loaded moment, with the Supreme Court preparing to issue a judgment on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 health care overhaul designed to provide coverage to some 30 million Americans who lack it.

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said the availability of care is ?not a trivial matter? for the roughly 50 million Americans without health insurance.

?When people are uninsured, what they often do is defer care,? Pollack told reporters on a Wednesday conference call. ?Some people pay the ultimate price when they don?t get that care or don?t get it in a timely manner.?

The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the Affordable Care Act by June 28.

Pollack told reporters that he and his organization ?have great confidence? in the study?s conclusions, which indicate that the premature mortality rate among the uninsured grew slightly higher almost every year from 2005 to 2010.

Yet those findings are based on a methodology used in another study from a decade ago that has met with some skepticism in the research community.

The earlier study, published in 2002 by the Institute of Medicine, claimed to find that 18,000 Americans had died in 2000 as a result of having no health insurance.

The findings were widely repeated and even amplified in 2008, when Stan Dorn, a research associate at the Urban Institute, published follow-up research claiming that by 2006 the number of Americans dying as a result of not having insurance had climbed to 22,000 a year.

But there were also dissenting voices. Richard Kronick, then a professor in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, argued in a 2009 paper that the Institute of Medicine report had failed to correct for certain health-related variables, like smoking and body mass index.

Kronick argued that when these and other health factors were taken into account, no significant difference could be found between people who have insurance and those who don?t.

?The answer suggested by the evidence presented here is that there would not be much change in the number of deaths in the U.S. as a result of universal coverage,? he wrote ? an assertion that a number of policy analysts, of various ideological stripes, said they agreed with, according to the Tampa Bay Times? PolitiFact.

During the call on Wednesday, Pollack defended Families USA?s use of the Institute of Medicine methodology.

The institute is ?probably as prestigious and highly respected as any scientific body,? said Pollack in response to a question from The Huffington Post. If anything, ?most of the criticism? of the 2002 study has accused the institute?s researchers of being ?conservative? rather than inflating the data, he said.

Later, Kim Bailey, research director at Families USA and lead author of the new report, told HuffPost that while ?there are always studies that contradict each other,? the organization considered the Institute of Medicine research to be an ?incredibly rigorous? treatment of available data.

?They?re not actually doing original research of their own ? what they?re doing is aggregating the research that exists,? said Bailey about the institute. But ?a huge prevalence of data? shows ?an overwhelmingly strong link between uninsurance and premature mortality,? she said.

Also on HuffPost:

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/20/deaths-health-insurance_n_1613600.html

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U.S. seizes Tyrannosaurus bones on suspicion of smuggling

By Joseph O'Leary

NEW YORK | Fri Jun 22, 2012 5:38pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. officials on Friday seized the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur that Mongolia wants returned on suspicion that it was smuggled to the United States from the Gobi desert.

The bones of the tyrannosaurus bataar, an eight-foot-tall, 24-foot-long cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex, were taken in a moving van from the Cadogan Tate Fine Art storage company in Queens, where they had been stored in four large wooden crates.

The President of Mongolia, Elbegdorj Tsakhia, demanded that the skeleton be returned to his country after it was auctioned on May 20 for $1.05 million by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.

The buyer of the skeleton was never disclosed. But the man who acquired the skeleton and offered it to Heritage for auction, said he has been unfairly labeled as a smuggler.

"I'm just a guy in Gainesville, Florida trying to support my family, not some international bone smuggler," commercial paleontologist Eric Prokopi said in a statement.

"It's been claimed that I misrepresented what was being imported and did not properly declare its value. I can wholeheartedly say the import documents are not fraudulent," Prokopi said in the statement issued through Heritage.

A U.S. government lawsuit filed on Tuesday on behalf of Mongolia said the customs forms filed when the skeleton was imported incorrectly stated the country of origin was Great Britain, its value was $15,000 instead of $1 million it sold for, and mentioned only reptiles not dinosaurs.

Prokopi did not say in his statement where or from whom he acquired the skeleton. He said that when he received the tyrannosaurus bataar, it was a collection of loose, mostly broken bones and rocks with embedded bones. Prokopi said he and his wife spent thousands of hours preparing and mounting the skeleton, which increased its value, before it was auctioned.

On Monday, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara filed a lawsuit seeking the forfeiture of the skeleton to the Mongolian government. An order to seize the fossil was issued on Tuesday.

Robert Painter, the lawyer representing Mongolia, said that the dinosaur will be held by the U.S. government while legal proceedings on its future continue.

Anyone who comes forward to claim ownership of the skeleton will have to prove they are the rightful owner or the U.S. will repatriate the skeleton to Mongolia.

"Today we send a message to looters all over the world: We will not turn a blind eye to the marketplace of looted fossils," Mongolian President Tsakhia said in a statement.

The skeleton was discovered in 1946 during a joint Soviet-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi Desert, Bharara said.

Heritage Auctions and the Mongolian government agreed in May to jointly investigate the ownership of the skeleton. Several paleontologists examined the bones and determined they were removed from the western Gobi Desert between 1995 and 2005.

(Reporting by Joseph O'Leary; Additional reporting by Marice Richter in Dallas; Editing by Greg McCune and Anthony Boadle)

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Twitter goes down, productivity skyrockets

11 hrs.

Rosa Golijan

Updated 5:31?p.m. ET to reflect the end of the outage

You've probably already noticed, but Twitter went down for a while today. In theory, this means that productivity should have?skyrocketed around the world???as soon as we all stopped frantically trying to refresh our Twitter feeds.

We don't know much about the outage, but Twitter did add a message to its official status page, pointing out that "users may be experiencing issues accessing" the social networking service when things came crashing down. Some users were seemingly?able to access Twitter through mobile.twitter.com?throughout the outage, though.

By late Thursday afternoon, Twitter issued this update via its @twittercomms account: "Today's outage is due to a cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components. We'll provide updated information soon."?A cascaded bug has an effect that isn't confined to a particular software element; its effect "cascades" into other elements as well.

In the aftermath of this social media tragedy, I offer my sympathies to anyone who is suffered Twitter withdrawal symptoms like I am and invite him or her to seek comfort on my or on msnbc.com tech's Facebook pages.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts,?or circling her?on?Google+.

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Dell Inspiron 14z-5423

The Dell Inspiron 14z-5423 ($899 direct) brings third-generation Intel Core procressor, discrete AMD Radeon 3D graphics, and an ultrabook form factor to the sub-$1,000 laptop buyer. For an ultrabook, the system is fast and has very good 3D graphics capabilities , but on the whole the system is a little heavy and has less than stellar battery life. It's a decent choice for the user who values multimedia and 3D performance over battery performance, but overall it comes up short of our class leaders. At $899, it's more expensive than other ultrabooks, but what you're apying for is the extra 3D and multimedia performance. This is a safe, middle-of-the-road choice, and definitely a good choice for back to school, but ultimately other ultrabooks are more distinctive.

Design and Features
The Inspiron 14z looks very much the part of a new ultrabook, with its "Moon Silver" coloring on the main chassis and lighter silver ring surrounding the system. (The "Fire Red" colored panels will be available later this year.) The system comes with a full-sized, island-style keyboard, which has a decent typing feel. The keys have a slight indent, and the arrow keys in the lower right hand corner have contrasting feel. The up/down keys are convex and the left/right keys are concave, so you should be able to use them while touch-typing. The system has three backlit quick launch keys between the keyboard and the hinge, which gives you quick access to system settings, audio settings, and a quick launch app of your choosing. The touchpad is multi-touch with separate left and right mouse buttons in case you don't like using tap to click.

The system's 14-inch panel has a resolution of 1,366 by 768, which is good enough for 720p HD video (1080p HD will have to be scaled down). The ultrabook weighs just over four pounds (we measured 4.08 pounds without the power adapter), so it's fairly easy to tote around. That said, the class leading ultrabooks are almost a pound lighter. It's notable that the system has a built-in tray-loading DVD burner, which you likely wouldn't get in a 13-inch or smaller ultrabook, subnotebook, or sleekbook.

The system comes with two USB 3.0 ports, one exposed on the right, and one on the left hidden under a drop-down panel. The system's HDMI port is under the same panel, plus a full-size Ethernet port under door next to the HDMI port. The left-hand side USB 3.0 port is a PowerShare port, which can charge an external device (like a smartphone) while the lid is closed and the system is off or asleep. A 3-in-1 memory card reader and Kensington lock port round out the external connectors.

The Inspiron 14z comes with a 720p HD webcam and pre-loaded Skype for video conferencing. Audio is a highlight, with Waves MaxxAudio 4.0 processing and Skullcandy branded speakers. An updated version of Dell Stage greets you upon launch, and you can use the Dell Stage launcher to get into your multimedia.

Storage isn't too much of a concern. The Inspiron 14z comes with a 500GB hard drive with a 32GB mSATA cache drive for speed. The system was quick to sleep and wake, as per the ultrabook specifications. There is a bit of extra software and services accessible thought Dell Stage, including Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly, CinemaNow, Hulu, Napster, RadioTime, Noisey, Blio, and the Cozi family calendar. The Inspiron 14z comes with Intel WiDi software pre-loaded , though you will have to use your own WiDi monitor or adapter. There are a few shortcut icons on the desktop, including eBay, My Identity Protection, and Play Games (Wild Tangent games). On the whole not too bad, but bloatware does make its presence known.

Performance
The Inspiron 14z-5423 has a 3rd-Generation Intel Core i5-3317U dual-core processor with Hyper-Threading. That processor in combination of a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7570M discrete GPU means that, for the most part, the 14z-5423 leads the ultrabook category in performance. Thanks to the GPU, the Inspiron 14z returned almost playable scores in Crysis at medium quality (41 frames per second), and a decent score at Lost Planet 2 (21 fps). Likewise, the 14z-5423 rated high scores on 3DMark 06 tests at both resolutions. The 14z-5423 will be fine for playing light- to medium-duty 3D games, and most certainly will be able to play games like World of Warcraft smoothly.

Its Intel Core i5-3317U processor helped the 14z-5423 gain speedy performance at the multimedia tests like Handbrake (1 minute 58 seconds) and Photoshop CS5 (4:35). The Editors' Choice for ultrabooks, the HP Folio 13-1020us ($899.99 list, 4 stars) trailed the Inspiron 14z at all of the multimedia tests (which scored 2:29 in Handbrake, 5:24 in CS5), as does the 2nd-generation Intel Core powered Dell XPS 13 ($999.99 direct, 4 stars) (which scored 2:40 in Handbrake, 5:23 in CS5).

The one test in which the Inspiron 14z doesn't shine is one of the most important: battery life. It scored 6:06 at the MobileMark 2007 battery test, a little disappointing. That's almost three hours behind the HP Folio 13-1020us, which received a class-leading 8 hours 47 minutes (its brother, the HP Folio 13-1029wm, got 8:40). Next up is the Toshiba Portege Z835-P370 ($1049.99 list, 4 stars) at 7:21.

Though the Dell Inspiron 14z-5423 has a larger screen than our current EC, the HP Folio 13-1020us (which has a 13.3-inch screen) and somewhat better performance on the multimedia and 3D tests, the fact that the HP 13-1020us is lighter, cheaper, and has almost three hours better battery life lets the latter hold on to its title. Both systems have 1,366 by 768 resolution screens, so all you get is slightly larger letters and images. Those who are 3D junkies are better off with a more powerful system anyway, since the Inspiron 14z gets you to "just barely playable" frame rates rather than "fully playable." Buy the HP Folio 13-1020us if you want all-day battery life from your laptop. But if you want better performance and want to finish a task quicker, take a look at the Inspiron 14z.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Dell Inspiron 14z-5423 with several other laptops side by side.

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