Mobile management vendors like Good Technology and MobileIron are increasing efforts to pitch Android and iOS as alternatives to BlackBerry, thanks to improved security and management tools.
On Monday, BlackBerry announced it had abandoned plans to sell itself and will instead take a US$1 billion loan from a consortium involving shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company is also getting a new leader in former Sybase CEO John Chen, who joins the company as chairman and interim CEO. Although the deal buys BlackBerry more time and a CEO who knows enterprise mobility, it still faces many challenges and CIOs need to plan for all possibilities. IT faces additional pressure from employees who want to use a wider variety of devices.
Competitors are pouncing on the uncertainties around BlackBerry. "BlackBerry's decision to remain a public company increases the uncertainty their customers feel. It is accelerating the need to develop long-term mobility strategies that account for new mobile platforms," said Jeff McGrath, senior director of product marketing at Good Technology.
Good recently launched consultancy services aimed at enterprises that want to migrate. The company's core offering is Good for Enterprise, which secures email and browser access with Common Criteria EAL-4+ certification and FIPS 140-2 validated encryption for iOS and Android. The platform is compatible with Windows Phone, as well.
Competitor MobileIron also wants a piece of the pie, and today it announced a release of its Android package. The company has worked with Divide, previously Enterproid, to offer native email, contacts and calendar functions. All content is encrypted and stored in a secure container on the mobile device. It too now has FIPS 140-2 validated encryption, MobileIron said. MobileIron has also integrated its management software with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform, and in September announced support for IBM's Notes Traveler client for Android, for which IBM released APIs for MDM vendors to use.
Good Technology and MobileIron aren't the only vendors that offer software to help replace BlackBerry smartphones. Other providers include Absolute, AirWatch, Apperian, BoxTone, Centrify, Citrix Systems, Fiberlink, Fixmo, Samsung, SAP, and Soti. And BlackBerry's own BlackBerry Enterprise Service (BES) 10 now can manage iOS and Android devices. In fact, BlackBerry isn't giving up without a fight. It is still a "brand with enormous potential -- but it's going to take time, discipline and tough decisions to reclaim our success," Chen said in statement on Monday.
And although the competition has improved, replacing BlackBerry's integrated device management functionality and excellent security is a tall order. The company is still the gold standard when it comes to mobile security, said Ovum analyst Richard Absalom. Depending on the level of security needed, different measures are required, from regular mobile device management to platforms that can separate enterprise apps from the rest of the OS, said Leif-Olof Wallin, a research vice president at Gartner.
Here's a look at some key moments in the history of the Country Music Association Awards, which honor the best of the country music (the 47th annual CMAs air on Wednesday night).
— 1967: The first CMA Awards were not televised. It is billed as a "Banquet and Show," hosted by Sonny James and Bobbie Gentry. The Jack Greene hit "There Goes My Everything" wins single and song of the year. Greene's album, "There Goes My Everything" is named album of the year. Eddy Arnold becomes the first CMA Entertainer of the year.
— 1968: The CMA gets televised on NBC. It does not air live: It is taped and shown about two weeks later as part of "Kraft Music Hall." Glen Campbell is named entertainer of the year in a ceremony hosted by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.
— 1971: Charley Pride becomes the first black to win CMA entertainer of the year as the CMAs air independently as an NBC special.
— 1972: Loretta Lynn becomes the first woman to win CMA entertainer of the year.
— 1975: In a shocking moment, on live television, reigning entertainer of the year does not announce the name of John Denver when he wins the top prize. He instead sets fire to the card in disgust (some believed Denver was too pop to be considered country). Denver accepts the award via satellite from Australia.
—1981: Barbara Mandrell makes history, becoming the first artist to win entertainer of the year more than once. Meanwhile, the horizon award is introduced to honor new artists, and Terri Gibbs takes that honor.
— 1991: President George H.W. Bush and first lady Barbara Bush attend the ceremonies, which were dominated by Garth Brooks. He wins four trophies, including entertainer of the year, album of the year for "No Fences" among others.
— 1999: Shania Twain becomes the first female to win entertainer of the year in 13 years.
— 2000: The Dixie Chicks take home four awards, including entertainer of the year and album of the year for "Fly." Brad Paisley wins the horizon award.
— 2005: For the first time, the awards are held outside of Nashville, airing from New York City. Keith Urban wins entertainer of the year.
— 2009: Taylor Swift becomes the youngest person to win CMA entertainer of the year at age 19.
— 2012: Blake Shelton takes home three trophies, including a song of the year trophy with wife Miranda Lambert, but the biggest win is for entertainer of the year.
NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter has set a price of $26 per share for its initial public offering, which means the company's stock can begin trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange in the most highly anticipated IPO since Facebook's 2012 debut.
The price values Twitter at more than $18 billion based on its outstanding stock, options and restricted stock that'll be available after the IPO. That's more than Macy's, which has a market capitalization of $17 billion, and Bed Bath & Beyond, which is around $16 billion.
The pricing means the short messaging service will raise $1.8 billion in the offering, before expenses. The company is offering 70 million shares in the IPO, plus an option to buy another 10.5 million. If all shares are sold, the IPO will raise $2.09 billion, making it the biggest IPO for an Internet company since Facebook raised $16 billion last year.
The company, named after the sound of a chirping bird, is set to begin trading Thursday morning under the ticker symbol "TWTR."
Twitter, which has never turned a profit in 7 years of existence, had originally set a price range of $17 to $20 per share for the IPO, but that was an obvious lowball designed to temper expectations. It was widely expected that the price range would go higher. Back in August, for example, the company priced some of its employee stock options at $20.62, based on an appraisal by an investment firm and it's unlikely to have lost value since.
On Monday, Twitter raised the price range to $23 and $25 per share, signaling an enthusiastic response from prospective investors. That Twitter's final price was above the expected range bodes well for the company's stock.
Twitter's public debut will be one of the most closely watched IPOs since Facebook's in May 2012.
But Twitter has valued itself at just a fraction of Facebook and sought to cool expectations in the months and weeks leading up to the offering. With that, the San Francisco-based company is likely hoping its stock avoids the fate of Facebook's shares, which didn't surpass their IPO price until more than a year after the offering.
Tempering expectations was a big theme in the weeks leading up to Twitter's IPO. The company tried to avoid the trouble that plagued Facebook's high-profile offering. Facebook's public debut was marred by technical glitches on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. As a result, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Nasdaq $10 million, the largest ever levied against an exchange. Those problems likely led Twitter to the NYSE.
Still, $18 billion is a lofty valuation for Twitter compared with its peers. At its current price, Twitter valued at roughly 28 times its projected 2013 revenue —$650 million based on its current growth rate. In comparison, Facebook trades at about 16 times its projected 2013 revenue, according to analyst forecasts from FactSet. Google Inc. meanwhile, is trading at about 7 times its net revenue, the figure Wall Street follows that excludes ad commissions.
Research firm Outsell Inc. puts Twitter's fundamental value at about half of the IPO price, says analyst Ken Doctor. That figure is based on factors such as revenue and revenue growth.
"That's not unusual," Doctor says. "Especially for tech companies. You are betting on a big future."
Earlier on Wednesday, Barclays Capital said Twitter had hired it to be its "designated market maker," a critical role when a stock starts trading. A DMM is an experienced trader who supervises the trading of a company's stock on the NYSE. If technical problems arise, the NYSE uses DMMs to bypass electronic trading systems, allowing humans to trade a company's stock. That is not possible on all-electronic stock exchanges such as the Nasdaq.
Twitter got its start 7 years ago, first with Jack Dorsey and then Evan Williams as CEO. Its current chief is Dick Costolo, a former Google executive who once aspired to be a stand-up comedian. On March 21, 2006, Dorsey posted the world's first tweet: "Just setting up my twttr." Noah Glass, who helped create Twitter —but is not mentioned in the company's IPO document — posted the same words just 10 minutes later.
Since then, the social network that lets users send short messages, or "tweets," in 140-character bursts has attracted world leaders, religious icons and celebrities, along with CEOs, businesses and a slew of marketers and self-promoters. Twitter now has more than 230 million users, more than three-quarters of them outside the U.S.
The outsized proportion of international Twitter users is both a challenge and an opportunity for the company. Only 26 percent of Twitter's revenue comes from abroad, though the company has said that it plans to generate more international revenue by hiring additional sales representatives in countries such as Australia, Brazil and Ireland.
__
AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke in San Francisco and AP Markets Writer Ken Sweet in New York contributed to this story.
Educational video games can boost motivation to learn, NYU, CUNY study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
6-Nov-2013
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Contact: James Devitt james.devitt@nyu.edu 212-998-6808 New York University
Math video games can enhance students' motivation to learn, but it may depend on how students play, researchers at New York University and the City University of New York have found in a study of middle-schoolers.
While playing a math video game either competitively or collaboratively with another playeras compared to playing alonestudents adopted a mastery mindset that is highly conducive to learning. Moreover, students' interest and enjoyment in playing the math video game increased when they played with another student.
Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology, point to new ways in which computer, console, or mobile educational games may yield learning benefits.
"We found support for claims that well-designed games can motivate students to learn less popular subjects, such as math, and that game-based learning can actually get students interested in the subject matterand can broaden their focus beyond just collecting stars or points," says Jan Plass, a professor in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and one of the study's lead authors.
"Educational games may be able to help circumvent major problems plaguing classrooms by placing students in a frame of mind that is conducive to learning rather than worrying about how smart they look," adds co-lead author Paul O'Keefe, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now at Stanford University's Department of Psychology.
The researchers focused on how students' motivation to learn, as well as their interest and performance in math, was affected by playing a math video game either individually, competitively, or collaboratively.
Specifically, they looked at two main types of motivational orientations: mastery goal orientation, in which students focus on learning, improvement, and the development of abilities, and performance goal orientation, in which students focus on validating their abilities. For instance, in the classroom, a student may be focused on improving their math skills (mastery), or, instead, trying to prove how smart they are or trying to avoid looking incompetent compared their classmates (performance).
Researchers consistently find that a mastery goal orientation facilitates learning because students are focused on accruing knowledge and developing abilities. They also view mistakes and difficulties as part of the learning processrather than an indictment of their lack of ability. By contrast, performance goal orientations may hurt the learning process, particularly for those who do not feel competentfor instance, students who fear looking less intelligent than their classmates may avoid opportunities that would, in fact, bolster their understanding of the material.
However, scholarship has shown that typical educational contextsnotably, classroomslead students to adopt stronger performance goal orientations than a mastery goal orientation.
Consequently, researchers have sought to understand how to promote students' mastery goal orientations and weaken the performance goal orientations that lead students to avoid potential learning opportunities.
One candidate is educational video games, which, at first glance, would seem to result in performance rather than mastery orientations given their competitive focus and that they are often played with others. But, given the popularity of gaming among school-aged students, exploring their potential value intrigued the study's authors.
To test this possibility, the researchers had middle-school students play the video game FactorReactor, which is designed to build math skills through problem solving and therefore serves as diagnostic for learning.
In order to test the impact of different settings on learning, students were randomly assigned to play the game alone, competitively against another student, or collaboratively with another student. The researchers controlled for students' abilities by conducting a pre-test.
The findings revealed that students who played the math game either competitively or collaboratively reported the strongest mastery goal orientations, which indicates that students adopted an optimal mindset for learning while playing the video game with others.
Their results also showed that students playing under competitive situations performed best in the game. In addition, those playing in both competitive and collaborative conditions experienced the greatest interest and enjoyment.
"The increased interest we observed in the competitive and collaborative conditions suggests that educational games can promote a desire to learn and intentions to re-engage in the material, and in the long run, may create independent and self-determined learners," notes O'Keefe.
The authors caution about generalizing their results, however.
"Although we found a host of beneficial outcomes associated with playing the game with a partner, our results may be limited to the educational content of the game, its design, or our experimental procedure," says Plass. "Future research will need to examine design features that optimize learning across curricula."
###
The study's other co-authors included: Elizabeth Hayward, Murphy Stein, and Ken Perlin of New York University and Bruce Homer and Jennifer Case of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, all of whom are members of the multi-institutional Games for Learning Institute (G4LI), co-directed by Perlin and Plass. The Games for Learning Institute is funded by Microsoft Research.
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Educational video games can boost motivation to learn, NYU, CUNY study shows
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
6-Nov-2013
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Contact: James Devitt james.devitt@nyu.edu 212-998-6808 New York University
Math video games can enhance students' motivation to learn, but it may depend on how students play, researchers at New York University and the City University of New York have found in a study of middle-schoolers.
While playing a math video game either competitively or collaboratively with another playeras compared to playing alonestudents adopted a mastery mindset that is highly conducive to learning. Moreover, students' interest and enjoyment in playing the math video game increased when they played with another student.
Their findings, which appear in the Journal of Educational Psychology, point to new ways in which computer, console, or mobile educational games may yield learning benefits.
"We found support for claims that well-designed games can motivate students to learn less popular subjects, such as math, and that game-based learning can actually get students interested in the subject matterand can broaden their focus beyond just collecting stars or points," says Jan Plass, a professor in NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and one of the study's lead authors.
"Educational games may be able to help circumvent major problems plaguing classrooms by placing students in a frame of mind that is conducive to learning rather than worrying about how smart they look," adds co-lead author Paul O'Keefe, an NYU postdoctoral fellow at the time of the study and now at Stanford University's Department of Psychology.
The researchers focused on how students' motivation to learn, as well as their interest and performance in math, was affected by playing a math video game either individually, competitively, or collaboratively.
Specifically, they looked at two main types of motivational orientations: mastery goal orientation, in which students focus on learning, improvement, and the development of abilities, and performance goal orientation, in which students focus on validating their abilities. For instance, in the classroom, a student may be focused on improving their math skills (mastery), or, instead, trying to prove how smart they are or trying to avoid looking incompetent compared their classmates (performance).
Researchers consistently find that a mastery goal orientation facilitates learning because students are focused on accruing knowledge and developing abilities. They also view mistakes and difficulties as part of the learning processrather than an indictment of their lack of ability. By contrast, performance goal orientations may hurt the learning process, particularly for those who do not feel competentfor instance, students who fear looking less intelligent than their classmates may avoid opportunities that would, in fact, bolster their understanding of the material.
However, scholarship has shown that typical educational contextsnotably, classroomslead students to adopt stronger performance goal orientations than a mastery goal orientation.
Consequently, researchers have sought to understand how to promote students' mastery goal orientations and weaken the performance goal orientations that lead students to avoid potential learning opportunities.
One candidate is educational video games, which, at first glance, would seem to result in performance rather than mastery orientations given their competitive focus and that they are often played with others. But, given the popularity of gaming among school-aged students, exploring their potential value intrigued the study's authors.
To test this possibility, the researchers had middle-school students play the video game FactorReactor, which is designed to build math skills through problem solving and therefore serves as diagnostic for learning.
In order to test the impact of different settings on learning, students were randomly assigned to play the game alone, competitively against another student, or collaboratively with another student. The researchers controlled for students' abilities by conducting a pre-test.
The findings revealed that students who played the math game either competitively or collaboratively reported the strongest mastery goal orientations, which indicates that students adopted an optimal mindset for learning while playing the video game with others.
Their results also showed that students playing under competitive situations performed best in the game. In addition, those playing in both competitive and collaborative conditions experienced the greatest interest and enjoyment.
"The increased interest we observed in the competitive and collaborative conditions suggests that educational games can promote a desire to learn and intentions to re-engage in the material, and in the long run, may create independent and self-determined learners," notes O'Keefe.
The authors caution about generalizing their results, however.
"Although we found a host of beneficial outcomes associated with playing the game with a partner, our results may be limited to the educational content of the game, its design, or our experimental procedure," says Plass. "Future research will need to examine design features that optimize learning across curricula."
###
The study's other co-authors included: Elizabeth Hayward, Murphy Stein, and Ken Perlin of New York University and Bruce Homer and Jennifer Case of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, all of whom are members of the multi-institutional Games for Learning Institute (G4LI), co-directed by Perlin and Plass. The Games for Learning Institute is funded by Microsoft Research.
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Share
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma
FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011, AT 3:07 PM Obama Gets Firsthand Look at a Tornado Damage
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
TUESDAY, APRIL 20, 2010, AT 6:19 PM Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long. Tornado Kills at Least Five in Oklahoma. Very long title. Long long long.
Red Hat's long been one of the big go-to outfits for deploying Linux in the enterprise. Now, after its announcements at the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong this week, it's angling to move up a level and become synonymous with deploying OpenStack in the enterprise, too.
OpenStack, an open source infrastructure for creating private cloud environments, has much of the same aura of an open source success story as Linux did. Its major corporate backing distinguished it from the competition posed by rivals (in this case, CloudStack and Eucalyptus), and it enjoyed the release of a new major point revision of the product earlier this year.
But OpenStack is still a sprawling, complex product that takes patience and hard work if you want to wring results from it. It doesn't offer the kind of out-of-the-box cloud experience the likes of Amazon have striven to deliver, which has translated into a good deal less corporate adoption than its developers and boosters (who are often one and the same) would like. Still, those difficulties have only encouraged Red Hat to double down on its efforts to get OpenStack into the enterprise.
Red Hat's plan to tame OpenStack Could Red Hat tame OpenStack in the way it made Linux into a genuinely deliverable product, not just a technology with a fun name? Its Hong Kong announcements make it sound that way, as it described several steps toward making OpenStack more of an integral part of Red Hat's existing product family.
First step: Provide better management tools. To that end, Red Hat's integrated OpenStack with the new version of Red Hat CloudForms (3.0), its system for managing public, private, and hybrid clouds. Setup and deployment of OpenStack resources can be done automatically through CloudForms, meaning there's one less command line to monkey with when you want to provision or retire instances.
Second step: Do something about the way OpenStack handles storage. OpenStack has three distinct storage components: one for managing system images (Glance), one for block storage (Cinder), and one for object storage (Swift). Red Hat has consolidated management for all of those under Red Hat Storage Server, so you can now treat them as you would any other storage object managed by Red Hat Linux. (Red Hat's Unified File and Object Storage technology for Storage Server was actually already built on top of OpenStack's Swift.)
Gliding down the red carpet as she prepares to play hostess with the mostest, Carrie Underwood arrived at the 2013 CMA Awards earlier tonight (November 6) in Nashville, Tennessee.
Before joining co-host Brad Paisley, the "Blown Away" starlet smiled for fans and shutterbugs alike.
In addition to her hosting duties, the 30-year-old songstress is up for three awards, including Female Vocalist of the Year, Album of the Year, and Music Video of the Year.
Competition will be fierce as things get underway tonight, with Taylor Swift and Kacey Musgraves each scoring a whopping six nominations.
Our favorite flying human Yves 'Jetman' Rossy is up to his old tricks again of making us all feel like tiny little life wasters. This time, he took a majestic flying tour around Mt. Fuji in his quad rocket-powered jetpack that can go as fast as 185mph. Just look at him zoom across the sky like Iron Man. So incredible.
The pastoral is one of literature's oldest forms; it's safe to say our ideas about nature, however, have changed rapidly and radically in the modern age. Poet Harryette Mullen makes a beautiful marriage between those new ideas and a classic poetic form in her first collection in over a decade, Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary.
The tanka is a Japanese form dating back centuries. It's a 31-syllable poem that usually includes what Mullen calls "a refined awareness of seasonal changes and a classical repertoire of fleeting impressions." In Urban Tumbleweed, Mullen has written 366 tankas, describing a year of living in Los Angeles and traveling to places like Texas, Ohio and Sweden while taking careful note of the natural world around her. The book is dense with jacaranda, rainstorms, bedbugs, epazote and neighborhood watches, while faithfully evoking both the form and ancient spirit of the tanka, making Urban Tumbleweed a gorgeous book that should establish Mullen as a poet with wide appeal.
Each tanka offers up a different type of poetic energy: Some of them work as factoids, others are addressed to her neighbors and friends, but almost all of them are built from the collisions of sensual details that take place around Mullen as she tries to be more mindful of her surroundings. While she writes about riding the bus to work or about pulling a blanket over her head during a storm, she is also writing a quiet argument about living in two worlds: the insistent, natural world, as well as the civilization that sometimes complements nature and other times complicates it.
Harryette Mullen teaches poetry and African-American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her previous works include Recyclopedia and Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Courtesy of Graywolf Press
Harryette Mullen teaches poetry and African-American literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her previous works include Recyclopedia and Sleeping with the Dictionary.
Courtesy of Graywolf Press
As the year goes on and as Mullen — a poet renowned for her ability to play with language and sound — becomes more acclimated to the form, the seemingly random collection begins to cohere and gives us perspective into how she sees the world. The tankas don't offer much space for storytelling, but there are moments in the book, particularly thrilling, in which the tankas seemed linked by the common story of her routine day and how it's transformed by her attention. In one tanka, for example, she writes:
So light and delicate, skimming tips of maidenhair trees. I thought you were butterflies. Now I see you are the tiniest birds.
The tankas are delightful because they evoke the jubilation of discovery that the practice of seeing and then finding language to give life to what one sees is like, the very core of what poetry can do.
At the same time, the book also offers a subtle critique of the dissonance of contemporary civilization, as in this poem:
Tasting artisan chocolates, hard to choose between Shangri-La with goji berries or Aztec flavored with smoky chilies.
I don't know if the poem is earnest or ironic, but the images themselves invite a range of readings about what we are in nature and about how our alterations to the planet alter our experience of the natural world. These subtle moments throughout the book remind a reader that this is not just a book of impressions, but also a reconsideration of the 21st century pastoral.
At their lightest, Mullen's tankas can seem aphoristic, but the gorgeous and canny unity of the book's images, a signature of Harryette Mullen's poetry, sustains them. As laments or jokes or love letters, Mullen's tankas evade nothing. Instead they confront what being is, the significance of our minute interactions with the natural world. "How does a cold, faraway moon regulate the implacable tides?" she asks, evoking both astronomy and governance. In this latest collection, Mullen brings her love of form and syntax to a rhetorical intersection with the transitory natural world in an exciting portrait of postmodern ecology, an ambitious and subtle work.
Activision has released a new Call of Duty app for iOS, made to be used alongside the latest game in the series, Call of Duty: Ghosts. IGN has a video walkthrough from the developer, as seen above. The app interacts with the game's multiplayer mode, and helps you personalize and track your experience within the game. You can sync your device while the app is open to get the most out of the app.
There is a lot of functionality in the app for clans, groups of Call of Duty players that play together. Clan leaders can manage the group, and do things like change and upload new emblems, check the clan roster, and more.
You can make changes to your loadouts, selecting new guns for your soldiers to carry and which perks they use, right in the app. After you make these selections, you can then push them back to the game. Additionally, you can customize the look of your soldier, from what helmets they wear to their gender.
The second screen functionality lets you sync to the game and use your device as you play. You can switch loadouts from the app, which will then change in the game right after you die. You'll be able to view post-match stats after every game to analyze your performance and the performance of others.
The Call of Duty app is available as a free, universal download right now on the App Store. For a full walk through of the app with the developers, check out the video below courtesy of IGN
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the difficulties plaguing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,. The massive failure at healthcare.gov website is getting new criticism for lack of proper cybersecurity protections. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2013, before the Senate Finance Committee hearing on the difficulties plaguing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act,. The massive failure at healthcare.gov website is getting new criticism for lack of proper cybersecurity protections. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - In this Oct. 30, 2013 file photo, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington. Sebelius is returning to Capitol Hill for a fresh interrogation on the health care law, this time from senators with growing concerns about President Barack Obama's crowning legislative achievement. Sebelius was due to face questions Wednesday from the Senate Finance Committee. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)
File-This April 17, 2013 file photo Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont. questions Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius as she testifies on Capitol Hill before the committee's hearing on President Barack Obama's budget proposal for fiscal year 2014. After warning months ago that a “train wreck” was coming in implementing the nation’s new health care law, Baucus now says he thinks the rollout can get back on track after a bumbling beginning. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite,File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Prodded to be more candid with Congress, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Wednesday the administration's flawed health care website needed a couple of hundred fixes when it went online more than a month ago and conceded, "we're not there yet" in making all needed repairs.
At the same time, she turned aside any suggestion that the system be taken off line until it could be fixed fully. Doing so "wouldn't delay people's cancer or diabetes or Parkinson's" disease, she told the Senate Finance Committee.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and the panel's chairman, said Sebelius must be "candidly, fully totally" forthcoming with Congress about the repair effort, "so that we don't wake up at the end of November and find out we're not there yet." He referred to the administration's goal for completing the repairs.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the panel's senior Republican, was harsher.
"While I am glad that you are accepting responsibility for this disastrous rollout, I would have preferred that you and the rest of the administration were honest with us to begin with," he said.
But Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who faces a tea party-backed challenger in 2014, was harsher still. "You have said the American people should hold you accountable, which is why today I repeat my request for you to resign."
Sebelius, a former governor of the state Roberts represents, sat impassively as he spoke.
Despite the web site's well-chronicled woes, Sebelius said it has improved dramatically since the administration launched its repair effort. Echoing testimony delivered on Monday by another administration official to a different committee, she said it is now able to process nearly 17,000 registrations an hour, with almost no errors.
She said a punchlist drawn up by Jeff Zients, who was brought in to oversee repairs, contained "a couple of hundred functional fixes that have been identified and they are in priority grouping."
While progress has been made, "we're not where we need to be. It's a pretty aggressive schedule," she said.
One Democrat, Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, urged Sebelius to make sure contractors who built the faulty website are held accountable. "I want you to burn their fingers and make 'em pay for not being responsible and producing a product that all of us can be proud," he said.
Republicans focused increasingly on issues of security, cost and coverage cancellations rather than the website, which Hatch said he assumed would be fixed.
Sebelius and Sen. Mike Crapo sparred after the Idaho Republican said many individuals will face far higher premiums next year when the program is in effect than they currently do.
The HHS secretary responded that the prices that insurance companies are charging are 16 percent lower than the Congressional Budget Office estimated. Crapo asked if she was saying prices would fall in 2014 compared to this year, and she conceded she was not. At the same time, she said that for the first time, the law will provide millions of Americans with government assistance in paying for insurance.
To the chagrin of increasingly nervous Democrats, Republicans are also on the attack about the millions of Americans whose health insurers have told them their current policies are being canceled. Obama has said that people who liked their coverage would be able to keep it.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, peppered Sebelius with questions about President Barack Obama oft-stated pledge that anyone who likes their coverage will be able to keep it — a promise the administration no longer makes.
Asked if that was an accurate statement, Sebelius declined Cornyn's request for a yes or no answer.
Insurers are sending cancellation notices to customers whose current policies lack enough coverage to meet the law's more demanding standards — at least 3.5 million Americans, according to an Associated Press survey of states.
The Obama administration has said people facing cancellations will be able to find better coverage from their current insurance company or on state or federal exchanges where competing policies are being offered.
Lawmakers of both parties have introduced rival bills that would let people retain their existing health insurance policies. But administration officials refused to state their views Tuesday on those proposals.
___
AP Special Correspondent David Espo and AP reporters Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Josh Lederman contributed to this report.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — The Country Music Association Awards continued to show its love for Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton on Wednesday night while giving a nod to new duo Florida Georgia Line and doling out a few more awards to Taylor Swift.
Lambert won her fourth straight female vocalist of the year award while her husband, Shelton, won album of the year and male vocalist — a category he also won for the fourth year in a row. Florida Georgia Line took too early awards to join Swift, Keith Urban and Tim McGraw atop the early winners list.
"I really didn't think this was going to happen this year," Lambert said before thanking each of the other nominees.
The husband and wife have been favorites of the CMA's 6,000 voters for the last three years and Wednesday as no different. Shelton's album of the year win for "Based on a True Story ..." was a bit of a surprise, a year after taking entertainer of the year.
"I had mentioned earlier today that if there was an award that would mean the most to me tonight, it would be album of the year," said Shelton, getting serious after jokingly snatching his trophy from presenter Sheryl Crow.
Florida Georgia Line's Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley scored single and vocal duo of the year. Their quick tally was more proof the so-called bro country movement is the sound of the moment in mainstream country. FGL kicked off the show performing a fist-pumping medley with Luke Bryan, and very quickly returned to the stage to take the trophy for single of the year for their "Cruise" remix featuring Nelly. They also played the new song "Round Here."
"It's been a constant thing all year — we've been trying to wrap our minds around what's going on," Hubbard said backstage. "It's been a dream come true for us and a huge blessing for us and something we could have never imagined."
Kacey Musgraves — who, along with Taylor Swift, led all nominees with six — won the new artist trophy, besting a field that included Florida Georgia Line. With smart songwriting, a progressive bent and a strong sense of self like country's other top women, Musgraves made an auspicious mainstream country debut this year with her album "Same Trailer Different Park." She attended
"This first year for me has just been undescribable," said Musgraves, who set a record for nominations for a woman in her first year on the show.
Swift tied Florida Georgia Line with two trophies after her "Highway Don't Care" collaboration with Tim McGraw and Keith Urban won musical event and music video of the year before the show began. Lee Brice's "I'd Drive Your Truck," about a fallen soldier whose father still drives his truck, won song of the year, and Little Big Town took its second straight vocal group of the year.
Swift later performed a somber, acoustic version of her hit "Red" with Vince Gill, Alison Krauss and Sam Bush and was given the CMA's Pinnacle Award. The award goes to artists who take country music to a worldwide audience. Garth Brooks is the only previous winner. He won in 2005.
The CMA brought a star-studded welcoming group out of stage for Swift that included George Strait, Rascal Flatts, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, Keith Urban and Brad Paisley — all of whom gave Swift a chance to open for them on the road a teenager. A video salute followed with appearances by Justin Timberlake, Julia Roberts, Carly Simon, Ethel Kennedy and Mick Jagger — whose appearance made Swift shout.
Swift recounted a call she got out of the blue from her Big Machine Records head Scott Borchetta when she was 16.
"He said, 'Can you be on the road in two days to open for Rascal Flatts,' and I immediately started screaming and said, 'This must be a miracle,'" she said. "He said, 'No, it's not a miracle. Eric Church got fired for playing too long."
She added: "You've made me feel so special right now, thank you."
Swift also is nominated for her third entertainer of the year award, the night's top honor.
Bryan and FGL weren't the only acts teaming up. Collaboration was the theme of the night as Strait and Alan Jackson joined together to salute the late George Jones with a rendition of "She Stopped Loving Him Today." Hunter Hayes and Jason Mraz took a tour of the Bridgestone Arena while performing "Everybody's Got Somebody But Me." And Brown and his band joined in on a growing hard-rock trend in country as Foo Fighter Dave Grohl joined the band on drums for new song high-powered "Day for the Dead." Church earlier turned things up to 11 with his new song "The Outsiders."
Hosts Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley got the show going on a jovial note as they took the stage with their opening skit, first joking about feuds in music. They got Bryan and Zac Brown to hug it out after their mild feud over song trends in Nashville. They joked about Julianne Hough's misguided blackface Halloween costume, urging Darius Rucker to start his own feud with the singer. They skewered Obamacare to a Nashville audience that roared with approval.
Then, they brought out the guys from the hit show "Duck Dynasty" and parodied Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," with Willie Robertson doing a little twerk for Underwood.
And in one of the night's most anticipated moments, Kenny Rogers received the CMA's Willie Nelson lifetime achievement award and was saluted by Jennifer Nettles, Rucker and Rascal Flatts. Rogers sat on stage and mouthed along as Rascal Flatts sang "Just Dropped In (to See What Condition My Condition Is In)," the crowd helped Rucker sing "The Gambler" and Nettles and Rogers finished the tribute by singing "Islands in the Stream."
"It's been a hell of a month," Rogers said. "The (Country Music) Hall of Fame last week, this this week. I can't wait to see what's coming next week."
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http://www.cmaawards.com
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Follow AP Entertainment for updates from the show: http://twitter.com/APEntertainment. Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.
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