Gay dating site's Super Bowl ad rejected by CBS

ManCrunch says that CBS's decision to nix its ad is 'straight-up discrimination.'By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writerJanuary 29, 2010: 4:43 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Super Bowl network CBS rejected an ad Friday from ManCrunch.com, a gay dating Web site.

"After reviewing the ad, which is entirely commercial in nature, our standards and practices department decided not to accept this particular spot," said CBS spokeswoman Shannon Jacobs. "We are always open to working with a client on alternative submissions."

The ads for Super Bowl 2010 bring back some old faces as well as a few newcomers.

View photos

CBS (CBS, Fortune 500) said it turned down the ad partly for financial reasons, but ManCrunch believes that there's more to it than that.

"It's straight-up discrimination," said Elissa Buchter, spokeswoman for the Toronto-based dating site.

Jacobs of CBS declined to comment on the charge of discrimination.

Buchter provided a copy of the CBS rejection letter to CNNMoney, which states that the ad "is not within the Network's broadcast standards for Super Bowl Sunday."

The letter also states that the CBS sales department "has had difficulty verifying [ManCrunch's] credit status."

Buchter said that basing the rejection on credit status doesn't make sense because "we offered to pay cash." But Jacobs said CBS has no record of any such offer.

CBS is charging up to $3 million for 30-second spots. Buchter said ManCrunch would have been charged $2.5 million for its ad and would have had no trouble paying it, since the newly formed company recently raised $40 million from investors.

Shortly before ManCrunch announced the rejection, Jacobs of CBS said her company was reviewing the ad and it was "just one of many."

Jacobs also said the spots were "virtually sold out. We have one, maybe two spots left."

ManCrunch's ad, which can be viewed on its Web site, shows two men watching the Super Bowl. Their hands brush each other in the potato chip bowl, which inspires a passionate, male-on-male make-out session.

ManCrunch is not alone. Godaddy, an online retailer of Web site domain names, is running an ad in the Super Bowl this year but it had another ad rejected by CBS in the process. The rejected ad features a man named Lola.

This year's Super Bowl, between the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints, will be played Feb. 7 at Sun Life Stadium near Miami. The facility in Miami Gardens, Fla., formerly called Dolphin Stadium, was recently renamed.

Liberals pledge tribunal independence

Last Updated: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 | 5:15 PM ET Comments0Recommend5

CBC News

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/01/26/parliament-liberal-.html

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said Tuesday his party would put limits on the government's influence over its tribunals.

"I'm willing to accept those limits, and we will put forward in the Liberal platform in the months ahead some clear definitions of how we would safeguard the independence of these tribunals ...," said Ignatieff.

Ignatieff spoke following a Liberal roundtable on governance, which heard from the former heads of three agencies who say they experienced interference from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.

The speakers were former nuclear safety commission head Linda Keen, former RCMP public complaints commission head Paul Kennedy, and Peter Tinsley, the former military police complaints commissioner.

Health of women, children

With Parliament prorogued until March 3, the Conservatives shifted their focus to discussing the health of women and children in poor countries.

Harper produced an opinion column for the Toronto Star and the French-language La Presse.

He said his government will focus on the health of women and children in the world's poorest countries at the upcoming G8 conference.

Bev Oda, the minister responsible for foreign aid, met with various groups on Parliament Hill to discuss how to deliver aid to the poor.

Wheelchair mobility at the tip of the tongue

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/01/25/hm.wheelchair.tongue/index.html?hpt=C2

By Val Willingham, CNN Medical Producer

January 25, 2010 9:04 a.m. EST

The Tongue Drive system's technology was developed for individuals with paralysis caused by spinal cord injury, stroke or Lou Gehrig's disease.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Georgia Tech researchers test wheelchair that's guided by the tongue
• Tongue is directly connected to the brain, does not go through spinal cord
• Tongue Drive system could one day help individuals with high-level spinal injuries, ALS
• Wheelchair tester Cruise Bogle: "It got easier as I went on"

Watch for "Health Minute" on HLN, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. ET weekdays.

(CNN) -- Cruise Bogle, 18, was skimboarding with friends in Delray Beach, Florida, when he took a wave that whipped his board out from under him. Bogle was thrown backward, and his head hit the ocean floor. When friends saw him lying still in the surf, they knew something was wrong and rushed him to the hospital.

"I broke my C4 vertebra and was left paralyzed from the neck down," says Bogle of that fateful day in December 2008. "I then spent two weeks in the ICU at Delray Medical Center and was flown to Shepherd Center on New Year's Eve."

According to the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, more than 11,000 Americans sustain spinal cord injuries each year. Although advances have been made in improving the quality of life for people such as Bogle, now a quadriplegic, innovators are always looking for something better.

Bogle became a part of this quest while at Shepherd Center in Atlanta, Georgia. It's one of the largest rehabilitation centers on the East Coast. Bogle was tapped to test drive a new piece of technology.

Shepherd joined forces with scientists from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology to try out a new wheelchair, powered not by a keyboard, buttons or a wand in the mouth, but by the patient's own tongue.

Why the tongue?

"One of the major advantages of the tongue is that it's directly connected to the brain," says Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor at Georgia Tech and head of the project. "The tongue is unlike the rest of the body, which is connected to the brain through the spinal cord. A patient who has even the highest level of spinal cord injury can still move his or her tongue like me or you."

Watch more on the tongue-controlled wheelchair

Video: Tongue-controlled wheelchair

One of the major advantages of the tongue is that it's directly connected to the brain.
--Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor at Georgia Tech

The first clinical trials of the Tongue Drive system, as it is called, tested the ability of individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries to navigate the wheelchair using only tongue movements.

"I was offered the position while at Shepherd Center," explains Bogle. "I think I was the twelfth person who participated."

For the trial, Bogle first trained with a computer to learn how to move his tongue to generate the different commands for his chair, such as forward, backward, right and left.

Once he mastered the commands, researchers fitted his tongue with a small magnet, no bigger than a piece of rice. The magnet works like a mouse pad, with the tongue as the cursor. Move the tongue forward and it sends a wireless signal to six sensors in a special headset that cause the wheelchair to move forward. Move the tongue back, and the chair goes into reverse.

Bogle was then run through some paces with his chair, navigating an obstacle course of cones. By touching the tongue to certain parts of his mouth, he was able to make the chair move without any bulky attachments.

Ghovanloo says the beauty of the chair goes beyond mobility.

"The users like it because they don't look much different when using the chair, as opposed to other mobile units that use sip and puff methods [like the one used by the late Christopher Reeve] or keypads to get around," explains Ghovanloo. "These patients, the last thing they want is to look even more different when in a wheelchair. This design helps."

Although trial participants were patients with spinal cord injuries, Ghovanloo and doctors from Shepherd say patients with other conditions could also use the tongue wheelchair.

"The technology is developed for all individuals who are suffering from a high level of disability," says Ghovanloo. "It could help people who suffer from different types of strokes, as well as those who have ALS, [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's Disease], which can paralyze the patient."

Other researchers are working on mouth-manipulation techniques to control wheelchairs, but Georgia Tech is the only group focusing on the tongue.

Since the clinical trials, Tech researchers have been looking for ways to improve the equipment, in the hopes of making it even smaller. While the original trial only worked with six commands, the Tongue Drive system in development now has the ability to capture a much larger number of tongue movements, each representing a different command.

For Bogle, now 20 and attending college in Florida, he believes good things will come from his participation in the trial.

"The wheelchair was pretty crazy," he says. "It was awkward at first to control a wheelchair with my tongue, but it got easier as I went on." And he adds enthusiastically, "It is amazing technology, and I can't imagine what else Georgia Tech will turn out in the coming years."

Scientists discover oldest footprints on Earth

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/01/07/tetrapods.poland.evolution.discovery/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

January 7, 2010 10:14 a.m. EST

A model representing what a tetrapod may have looked like.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Scientists discover fossilized footprints of 395 million-year-old four-legged creature
• Discovery pushes the evolutionary scale back by nearly 20 million years
• Compared in significance to discovery of the first miocene hominoids

RELATED TOPICS

• Geology
• Nature and the Environment

(CNN) -- Scientists have found the oldest fossilized footprints made by a four-legged creature forcing a rethink on when fish first crawled out of water and onto land.

The discovery of the footprints in a former quarry in the Holy Cross Mountains in south-eastern Poland are thought to be 395-million years old -- 18 million years older than the earliest tetrapod (a vertebrate with limbs rather than fins) body fossils.

The report published Thursday in the science journal Nature says the footprints of the tetrapod measure up to 26 (10 inches) centimeters wide, which scientists say is indicative of an animal around 2.5 (7.5 feet) meters in length.

The footprints are also 10 million years earlier than the oldest known elpistostegids -- creatures which displayed some animal characteristics but retained fins.

Philippe Janvier from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and reviewer of the paper told CNN: "It is a really stunning discovery because it's the earliest evidence we have of tetrapods. These footprints are clear enough to attest that tetrapods were there 395 millions years ago."

The report's authors say their findings "force a radical reassessment of the timing, ecology and environmental setting of the fish-tetrapod transition, as well as the completeness of the body fossil record."

As well as finding fossilized footprints, Per Ahlberg, Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Sweden and his co-authors from the Polish Geological Institute in Warsaw also report finding several tracks of different sizes and characteristics.

The tracks, they say, have distinctive 'hand' and 'foot' prints and no evidence of a dragging body.

Ahlberg said in a video on the Nature Web site: "The trackway shows pairs of prints -- the sort of tracks a salamander would leave if it walked. In order to make tracks like the ones found you need to have front legs and back legs that are about the same size."

Ahlberg said the disused quarry where the fossils were discovered has yielded some of the most exciting finds he has encountered in his career as a paleontologist.

Although Janvier describes the lack of skeletal evidence as "frustrating" it doesn't undermine the importance of the discovery. "It changes what we thought about the evolutionary tree concerning the part dealing with transition from fish to land vertebrae." Janvier said.

"The divergence between the tetrapods and their closest fish relatives is much younger than previously thought and it obliges us to find actual evidence -- skeletons or complete fossils -- in much earlier strata that could enlighten us between this divergence."

Late-night teens 'face greater depression risk'

Teenagers need at least nine hours sleep a night, say experts

Going to bed earlier protects teenagers against depression and suicidal thoughts, research suggests.

A US study of 12 to 18-year-olds found those with bedtimes after midnight were 24% more likely to have depression than those who went to bed before 2200.

And those who slept fewer than five hours a night had a 71% higher risk of depression than those who slept eight hours, the journal Sleep reports.

It is estimated 80,000 UK children and young people have depression.

The researchers from Columbia University Medical Center in New York looked at data from 15,500 teenagers collected in the 1990s.

One in 15 of those studied were found to have depression.

As well as the higher risk of depression, those who were set a bedtime by their parents of after midnight were 20% more likely to think about suicide than those whose bedtime was 2200 or earlier.

Those who had less than five hours sleep a night were thought to have a 48% higher risk of suicidal thoughts compared with those who had eight hours of sleep.

Enough sleep, good food and regular exercise and all essential to stay emotionally healthy Sarah Brennan, YoungMinds

Teenagers who reported they "usually get enough sleep" were 65% less likely to be depressed.

Depression and suicidal thoughts were also more likely in girls, older teenagers and in those who had a lower self-perception of how much parents care about them.

Most of the parents of the adolescents in the study set a bedtime of 2200 or earlier.

A quarter set a bedtime of 2400 or later.

On average the teenagers were having seven hours and 53 minutes sleep a night - less than the nine hours recommended at that age.

Study leader Dr James Gangwisch said although it it was possible that youngsters with depression struggle to sleep, the fact that parental set bedtimes were linked with depression suggests that a lack of sleep is somehow underpinning the development of the condition.

He said a lack of sleep could affect emotional brain responses and lead to moodiness that hindered the ability to cope with daily stresses.

This moodiness could affect judgment, concentration and impulse control.

Regular exercise

"Adequate quality sleep could therefore be a preventative measure against depression and a treatment for depression," he added.

Sarah Brennan, chief executive at the mental health charity YoungMinds, said: "Enough sleep, good food and regular exercise and all essential to stay emotionally healthy.

"Nearly 80,000 children and young people suffer with depression, yet we are still failing to provide our young people with the help and support to cope with it and prevent it.

"Providing parents with information about how to look after your body, for example by getting enough sleep, and how to get help if they are worried about their teenager, will ensure problems are tackled early and prevent serious mental health conditions such as depression."

Irish atheists challenge blasphemy law

The words of Pope Benedict are among the quotations published

An atheist group in the Irish Republic has defied a new blasphemy law by publishing a series of anti-religious quotations on its website.

Atheist Ireland says it will fight any action taken against it in court.

The quotations include the words of writers such as Mark Twain and Salman Rushdie, but also Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad and Pope Benedict XVI.

The new law makes blasphemy a crime punishable by a fine of up to 25,000 euros (£22,000; $35,000).

The government says it is needed because the republic's 1937 constitution only gives Christians legal protection of their beliefs.

The new law was passed in July 2009 but came into force on 1 January.

Atheist Ireland responded by publishing 25 quotes it considers anti-religious on its website.

The group said its aim is to have the law repealed and to attain a secular Irish constitution.

Chairman Michael Nugent said it would challenge the blasphemy law through the courts if it were charged, the London-based Guardian newspaper reported.

"This new law is both silly and dangerous," he said. "It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas."

Atheist Ireland says it will hold a series of public meetings around the country to launch its campaign.