No one does college football better than the SEC

FILE- In this Aug. 9, 2011, file photo, LSU defensive backs Tyrann Mathieu (7), Morris Claiborne (17), Ron Brooks (13), and Tharold Simon (24) pose for photographers during NCAA college football media day at LSU in Baton Rouge, La. Mathieu and Claiborne are the first cornerback teammates to lock down spots on the AP All-American team. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

NEW ORLEANS -- A few months ago, when there were rumblings that Virginia Tech might be jumping to the Southeastern Conference, Eddie Whitley and his teammates got excited.

"Everyone was like, 'Man, I would love to play there!"' the Hokies senior safety said, his eyes lighting up. "I was like, 'Man, I wish I was a freshman now!"'

The switch never happened. Virginia Tech stayed put, at least for the time being, in the Atlantic Coast Conference. But Whitley's account sums up what just about everyone else in the nation has been forced to concede: Love it or hate it, no one plays college football like the SEC.

Look no further than Monday night's BCS title game between No. 1 LSU and No. 2 Alabama. For the first time under this format, two teams from the same league -- heck, the same division -- are facing off in a no-lose situation for the SEC. Before one strand of confetti falls to Superdome floor, the conference is assured of its sixth straight national title. No other conference has won more than three in a row.

"You've got the best athletes in the nation going to one conference," Whitley marveled. "Alabama's got linebackers that are 260, 270 (pounds). Our defensive TACKLES are 270."

The SEC's dominance has been decades in the making.

Many point to the SEC's revolutionary decision in the early 1990s to expand from 10 to 12 teams, allowing it to become the first conference to split into divisions and set up its own championship game. Other factors, everything from an exclusive national television deal with CBS to top coaches such as LSU's Les Miles and Alabama's Nick Saban to the abundance of high school talent in the Deep South, help keep the SEC on top year after year.

But the real roots of the SEC's breakaway can be traced to the turbulent '60s, when the region was ripped apart by the struggle for civil rights and its universities were still clinging to the notion of only letting whites through the schoolhouse door.

In 1966, Alabama posted a perfect 11-0 record with an all-white team but still finished third in The Associated Press poll behind Notre Dame and Michigan State, which had played to a 10-10 tie. The feeling at the time, and one that is even more apparent with the hindsight of history, was that both the Fighting Irish and the Spartans were superior programs because they had African-Americans players and faced teams that allowed them on the field, too.

"There were athletes who were qualified and capable and had the ability to play in the SEC, but they were not recruited because they were black," said Wilbur Hackett, a longtime conference referee who, in the late '60s, became the first African-American captain when he played at Kentucky, persevering through intense racial prejudice.

When it became clear that integration was inevitable, the SEC finally tapped into a whole new pool of talent, gaining the inside track to huge numbers of immensely qualified locals who had always been forced to sign with historically black schools or venture far from home, to the Big Ten or the Pacific Coast, if they wanted to play at the highest level.

Today, every SEC roster is filled with black players. Their influence on the game is undeniable.

"The league was strong, but it could have been stronger if they had integrated sooner," Hackett said. "Look at the Tennessee States and the Jackson States and the Gramblings, all the players from those schools that went on to play in the NFL. Now, those schools don't put players in the NFL because all those players are in the SEC."

Over the last 10 years, a staggering 72 players from SEC schools have been first-round draft picks. The Big 12 is next on the list, far behind at 51.

With Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton leading the way, the SEC had five of the top six picks in 2011. The odd man out was Von Miller from Texas A&M -- which is joining the league next fall.

"There's a lot of talent down there and they do a good job of coaching a lot of talent," said Al Borges, the offensive coordinator at Michigan who formerly coached at Auburn. "That's all there is to it."

Digging a little deeper, the emphasis on defense in the SEC has largely fueled its rise to power (34 of those 72 first-round picks came from the less-heralded side of the line). Not surprisingly, Alabama and LSU are the nation's two best defensive teams, filled with impact players such as Crimson Tide linebacker Dont'a Hightower and Tigers cornerback Tyrann "Honey Badger" Mathieu.

From the perspective of ESPN analyst Todd Blackledge, it all starts up front.

"I really don't think they have more speed at those skill positions on offense than the Big 12 or the Pac-12 or anyone else," he said. "But those defensive linemen in the SEC, that's where the difference is."

Blackledge points to last year's BCS title game, when Auburn stifled high-powered Oregon 22-19 to claim the SEC's fifth straight championship. Offense may excite the fans, but teams such as West Virginia (a 70-33 winner over Clemson in the Orange Bowl) and Oklahoma State (which beat Stanford 41-38 in the Fiesta Bowl) didn't qualify for the biggest game of all.

Rest assured, defense still wins championships.

"Auburn was, at best, a middle-of-the-pack defense in the SEC -- and Oregon could not block their front," Blackledge said. "Until teams in other conferences make inroads on defense, it's just going to be hard to catch the SEC."

Blackledge also believes that SEC schools are more willing to bring in junior college signees, especially on the defensive side, players who are often challenged academically and shunned by schools that don't think they can keep up in the classroom.

This, of course, fits in with another popularly held image of the SEC as nothing more than a dozen football factories (well, 11, leaving out Vanderbilt). The largest building on most campuses is a palace such as Alabama's Bryant-Denny Stadium (capacity: 101,821), a convenient symbol of college athletics gone wild. When Texas A&M joins, the conference will have eight of the 20 biggest stadiums in college football, all with seating for at least 80,000.

Of course, the SEC can quickly counter that it's hardly the only conference to place a huge emphasis on football. Three of the four largest stadiums -- at Michigan, Penn State and Ohio State -- are in the Big Ten. And while plenty of SEC programs have run afoul of NCAA rules, perhaps the worst scandal in college football history erupted beyond its borders: the child-sex abuse accusations against former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky that led to the firing of coach Joe Paterno.

But there's little doubt the SEC is boosted by an accident of geography, too. Five of the nine states in the league's current makeup have no major-league franchises of any type to steal away attention from the gridiron.

"Maybe it's the culture of the South," said Michigan lineman David Molk, whose team was in New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl. "Down here, it's football. That's it. It's football from birth."

Of course, there are those who've grown weary of all the SEC hype, who see it as a league that is reluctant to travel too far from home, yet still receives preferential treatment in the rankings and a little-too-much praise from the media.

Georgia, for instance, went 42 seasons without playing a regular-season game outside the confines of the old Confederacy (if Kentucky is included) before traveling to Oklahoma State in 2008. This season, Alabama lost to LSU at home, 9-6 in overtime, but still wound up No. 2 in the BCS rankings over other one-loss teams such as Oklahoma State.

"I do feel like they get first dibs on everything," said quarterback Tajh Boyd of ACC champion Clemson.

Certainly, the folks at Big 12 champion Oklahoma State felt they deserved a chance to play for the title rather than having to watch an SEC rematch on TV.

"People see the SEC different than they do any other conference," Cowboys coach Mike Gundy said. "It's deservingly so, because they have won in the big game. But, in my opinion, from top to bottom the Big 12 was the strongest league in the country this year."Gundy, it seems, is in the minority.

"You could say we're getting tired of hearing about the SEC, but we all know it's the best," Molk said. "They have all the talent. They should win it every year."

---

AP Sports Writers Steven Wine in Miami and Jeff Latzke in Stillwater, Okla., contributed to this report.

---

Follow Paul Newberry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/pnewberry1963

Source: http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2012/jan/05/no-one-does-college-football-better-than-the-sec/

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'Akira' Movie Shut Down To Reassess Budget

Kristen Stewart is reportedly in talks to star alongside Garrett Hedlund in the manga adaptation.
By Kevin P. Sullivan

Kristen Stewart
Photo: Larry Busacca/ Getty Images

Though "Akira" has had significant developments in recent months — including potentially adding Kristen Stewart to the cast — Warner Bros. has shut down production on the live-action adaptation of the classic anime and manga.

For years, "Akira" had been an on-again, off-again production, with the likes of Keanu Reeves and Albert Hughes involved at one point. But the most recent attempt at the film — with "Unknown" director Jaume Collet-Serra and "Harry Potter" screenwriter Steve Kloves retouching the script — made the most progress on the property to date, getting as far as casting Garrett Hedlund as Kaneda, the lead.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the story of the shutdown, citing a source close to the production. According to the report, Warner Bros. closed the Vancouver production offices in order to reassess the budget, which the studio feared was too high. Over the next two weeks, producers will meet with Collet-Serra to work on the script with an eye on reducing costs. Insiders claim that Warner Bros. is looking to reduce the $90 million budget to the realm of $60 million or $70 million.

The proposed $90 million was already half of what it was for Hughes' production. Lowering the budget to that level was one of the accomplishments under Collet-Serra's version of the film, along with casting Hedlund in the lead and eyeing high-profile stars for the supporting roles.

Kristen Stewart, Ken Watanabe and Helena Bonham-Carter were three of the stars in various stages of negotiations to join the film. The "Twilight" star had reportedly been offered the female lead as Kei, while Watanabe stepped up for the Colonel after Gary Oldman turned down the role.

Sources close to the production tell THR that despite the setback, "Akira" is far from dead, saying, "It's a very resilient movie. Warner Bros. just won't let it die."

For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.

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Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1676810/akira-kristen-stewart.jhtml

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Flip This Economy

The data let us see that the growth of house prices in the first half of the aughts was closely associated with a sharp rise in the number of people owning multiple homes. In 2000, only 20 percent of mortgages were going to multiple mortgage holders and 75 percent of those were for second houses. By 2006, 35 percent of mortgages were multiples and more than 5 percent of all loans were going to people with four or more mortgages. What?s more, the trend was especially pronounced in what we now know to have been the prime bubble states of California, Florida, and Nevada. By 2006, at least 25 percent of mortgages in these states were going to people who already owned one home, and a further 20 percent went to people with at least two.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=f2101dd35aa45973eb1a4ad3f64e6784

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Officials investigate case of deported Texas teen (AP)

EL PASO, Texas ? The grandmother of a Dallas teen who was deported to Colombia is hoping the 15-year-old can come back soon and says U.S. officials should have done more to identify the girl after she gave a fake name and claimed to be an adult.

U.S. immigration officials say they're investigating the circumstances of the case involving Jakadrien Lorece Turner, but that they followed procedure and found nothing to indicate she wasn't who she claimed to be ? an illegal immigrant from Colombia.

The girl, who ran away from home more than a year ago, was recently found in Bogota, Colombia, by the Dallas Police Department with help from Colombian and U.S. officials.

The Colombian government said the U.S. embassy on Thursday submitted the necessary documents for Jakadrien to return, but it wasn't clear exactly when she might be back in the U.S.

U.S. immigration officials deferred questions about when the teen might return to the State Department, which said it was aware of the case but declined to comment further, citing privacy reasons.

According to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the girl was enrolled in the country's "Welcome Home" program after she arrived there. She was given shelter, psychological assistance and a job at a call center, a statement from the agency said. When the Colombian government discovered she was a U.S. citizen, it put her under the care of a welfare program, the statement said.

Her grandmother, Dallas hairstylist Lorene Turner, called the deportation a "big mistake somebody made" and said U.S. officials need to do better.

"She looks like a kid, she acts like a kid. How could they think she wasn't a kid?" Lorene Turner asked on Thursday.

Jakadrien's family says she left home in November 2010. Houston police said the girl was arrested on April 2, 2011, for misdemeanor theft in that city and claimed to be Tika Lanay Cortez, a Colombian woman born in 1990.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told The Associated Press on Thursday that the teen claimed to be Cortez throughout the criminal proceedings in Houston and the ensuing deportation process in which an immigration judge ultimately ordered her back to Colombia.

The ICE official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to not being authorized to discuss additional details of the case, said the teenager was interviewed by a representative from the Colombian consulate and that country's government issued her a travel document to enter Colombia. The ICE official said standard procedure before any deportation is to coordinate with the other country in order to establish that person is from there.

The girl was given Colombian citizenship upon arriving there, the ICE official said.

The Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Jakadrien was issued travel documents at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency and with information submitted by U.S. officials. Colombian officials are investigating what kind of verification was conducted by its Houston consulate to issue the temporary passport.

It was not clear if the teen might be charged upon her return for falsifying her identity in a criminal process.

Dallas Police detective C'mon (pronounced Simone) Wingo, the detective in charge of the case, explained that in August she was contacted by the girl's grandmother, who said Jakadrien had posted "kind of disturbing" messages on a Facebook account where she goes by yet another name.

Wingo said the girl was located in early November through her use of a computer to log into Facebook. Relatives were then put into contact with the U.S. embassy in Bogota to provide pictures and documents to prove Jakadrien's identity.

Lorene Turner said she has spent a lot of time tracking down Jakadrien, whose family nickname is Kay-Kay.

"In between customers I'd get on the computer looking for Kay-Kay, I was obsessed."

She and the teen's mother, Johnisa Turner, say they did not contact Jakadrien through Facebook and plead for her to come home because they were afraid.

"I didn't want to scare her or get her in trouble with those who had her," Lorene Turner said, adding that she feared the girl might have been caught up in human trafficking. "I don't know. I'm just going crazy. She didn't have any reason to leave. She lived in a nice home (with her mother and stepfather). We were very close. I don't know why she left."

Johnisa Turner was reluctant to go into any details about the deportation, saying she didn't know anything. She referred calls to her attorney, Ray Jackson, but he could not be immediately reached.

"I was devastated," she said. "When your child doesn't come home from school, of course you go to the worst end of the spectrum. I was just hoping that she was alive and well."

Johnisa Turner said her daughter, a freshman at a new Dallas high school, was experimenting with different hairstyles and clothes but "wasn't a problem kid." She said the teen was a good student but when her grades began to slip, her parents took away some of her privileges, including closing down her Facebook account and limiting the time she could listen to music.

Johnisa Turner said she was relieved that Jakadrien has been found and wants her back in Dallas.

"Whatever it is, the past is in the past. I want her home so we can move from this day forward."

___

Ball reported from Dallas. Associated Press reporter Cesar Garcia in Bogota contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120106/ap_on_re_us/us_texas_deported_teen

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U.S. Military Size, from the Civil War to Today (ContributorNetwork)

On Thursday, President Barack Obama addressed the nation and the U.S. military regarding the size of the armed forces. The Associated Press reports Obama said the military will be "leaner" in the face of around $350 billion in budget cuts in the coming years due to mandatory cuts in the Budget Control Act. The force's downsizing comes just as the United States' presence in Iraq is ending and troops start coming home from Afghanistan.

Here's a look at the size of the U.S. military over the past 150 years.

Civil War Era

Before the Civil War began in 1861, American Military History states the regular U.S. Army had 1,080 officers and nearly 15,000 enlisted men as of June 1860. Less than a year later, President Abraham Lincoln called for men in loyal states to send 75,000 men to help put down the rebellion. Very quickly, a force of 100,000 militia men serving for five months was called up as the U.S. military readied to invade the south. The Confederate States of America also tried to raise a similar force to defend its territories.

By the end of the war, there were over 1 million volunteers serving in the U.S. military. Within two years, the force was reduced to just over 11,000, a size even smaller than before the war. Adding part-time enlistees, a regular force of 57,000 men was realized for about five years. By 1876, there were just over 27,000 personnel in the military.

World Wars

When World War I started, the American military was in the process of increasing in size. Congress authorized an increase to 400,000 members in the National Guard to augment a regular Army size of around 175,000 in peace time. When President Woodrow Wilson called for the United States to enter World War I in Europe, volunteers to the force topped 2 million.

The Information Please Online Almanac states the U.S. military reached its highest enlistment in 1945. By the time World War II ended, there were over 12 million military personnel in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps combined. The U.S. Army had about 1.5 million people at the start of World War II.

Modern Times

Since the Vietnam War, troop levels decreased from about 3 million to roughly 1.4 million active personnel over the past two decades. PBS reported in 2004 that there were 499,000 active duty U.S. Army personnel backed up by 700,000 part time National Guard troops. Those numbers were about a third less than the force available during the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Under current proposals, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps will begin troop reductions in 2015. The military will have to find savings across the board, from pay and retirement benefits to the size of overall military units.

William Browning is a research librarian specializing in U.S. politics. Born in St. Louis, Browning is active in local politics and served as a campaign volunteer for President Barack Obama and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/obama/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20120106/us_ac/10797397_us_military_size_from_the_civil_war_to_today

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Time cloaking: how scientists opened a hidden gap in time

Scientists say they have mastered 'temporal cloaking' ? manipulating light in a way that makes it appear as if 50 trillionths of a second never happened. Now, they'll try to expand the gap.

Forget wrapping an object ? say, Harry Potter ? in a cloak of invisibility. How about hiding an event using time?

Skip to next paragraph

What may be a distant dream for this year's Indianapolis Colts has been demonstrated for the first time by a team of physicists at Cornell University.

The approach is dubbed "temporal cloaking," and it builds on experiments researchers have already conducted to demonstrate that they can hide objects from view.?

Indeed, scientists had already succeeded at "spatial cloaking," which involves bending light around an object in such a way as to make it appear invisible. Temporal cloaking involves interrupting light to create a seeming gap in time in which an event can be hidden.

At this point, the time gap that the scientists created is so brief ? about 50 trillionths of a second ? that practical implications are barely a gleam in anyone's eye. But the researchers are interested in trying to lengthen the amount of time a beam's gap remains open, says Alexander Gaeta, who led the team reporting the results in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Nature.

In essence, the team briefly turned off a laser beam in a way that instruments receiving the beam could not detect. An observer would have no clue that the beam had blinked, and so would have no evidence of anything that happened to the beam in that 50 trillionths of a second.

University of Rochester physicists Robert Boyd and Zhimin Shi, who are not members of Dr. Gaeta's team, liken the phenomenon to traffic at a railroad crossing.

The crossing gate falls, interrupting traffic (the laser beam) as the commuter train passes. From the perspective of the train, for a brief period there is no traffic and it can freely pass (the hidden event). Yet once the gate rises, traffic resumes and speeds up. To an observer a mile or two away, the flow of traffic shows no evidence of interruption ? no evidence from traffic flow that a train had ever been there.

How did the team open gap in the laser beam?

The researchers took advantage of the fact that when light travels though a material, different colors travel at different speeds. To alter colors in a segment of the laser beam, the researchers used a laser-based device dubbed a time lens.

Typical glass lenses bend light, changing its distribution in three-dimensional space. Time lenses, on the other hand, "do really funny things" to light, altering its traits for a defined period of time, Gaeta says.

In this case, the team's modified time lenses briefly gave two adjoining segments of the green beam a red and a blue hue. When the segments passed through a specially designed length of optical fiber, the red light slowed and the blue light accelerated.?

The difference opened a gap in the beam ? no light ? that lasted about 50 trillionths of a second.

Coming out the other side, the researchers reversed the process, slowing the blue and speeding the red, then passing them through another time lens to returning the beam to its original green color, leaving no hint of its temporary alteration.

Well, almost no hint.

To see if their technique could hide an event from view, scientists shot a different laser beam into the gap. Usually, when two laser beams interact, the effects are easy to spot. In this case, though, the effects were more than 10 times weaker than they would have been if there had been no temporal cloaking.

For now, much work will focus on gaining a clearer understanding of the physics involved and how to take advantage of them, says Dr. Shi of Rochester.

Still, he adds, the basic physics of spatial cloaking and temporal cloaking are mathematically similar.

With the addition of a cloaking approach that "plays tricks with time" to the other approach of playing tricks with light's distribution around an object in space, "hopefully we can find an easier way to create effective cloaking."

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/G9o4JmMrGe4/Time-cloaking-how-scientists-opened-a-hidden-gap-in-time

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Stocks close higher after day of big gains

By msnbc.com news services

Stocks closed slightly higher Wednesday after a big gain to open the trading year.

Specialty stores such as Bed Bath & Beyond rose after a report that mall shopping was strong in the days after Christmas. Bank stocks, health care companies and utilities fell slightly.

But nothing moved much. Investors appeared content with Tuesday's gain of almost 180 points in the Dow Jones industrial average, which brought the Dow to its highest level since July.

"It's healthy to see that after a big rally," said Randy Warren, chief investment officer for Warren Financial Service. "People need to sit back and think about it."

Retailing industry stocks rose as a group after the report on after-Christmas sales, which were up 5.3 percent compared with a year ago.

However, Wal-Mart Stores was the biggest decliner among the Dow's 30 stocks. Analysts have been concerned that some stores raised holiday sales with deep discounts that will hurt profits.

Automakers delivered a strong end to 2011. Analysts had been expecting December to be a strong sales month for cars on the theory that more confidence in the economy would unlock pent-up demand.

European markets declined, and the euro fell back below $1.30, to $1.2945, within a penny of its lowest level in a year. Another increase borrowing costs for Italy renewed worries about Europe's efforts to restore confidence in its debt-hobbled governments.

In other corporate news:?

• Acme Packet Inc., which makes phone equipment, plunged almost 20 percent after saying its quarterly profit and revenue would be well below analyst expectations.
• Yahoo Inc. fell 2 percent after the company named Scott Thompson, president of eBay Inc.'s PayPal division, as CEO ? its fourth in five years. Yahoo has been without a permanent CEO since firing Carol Bartz in September.?
• Fallen photography pioneer Eastman Kodak is preparing to file for bankruptcy, according to a report.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/04/9954105-stocks-end-slightly-higher-after-day-of-big-gains

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