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Video and images of the devastation from the Quebec town where an oil-laden train crashed and exploded, leaving 20 people confirmed dead and 30 others missing and presumed dead. 'All the details â€" the mini versions of Stonehenge, Nelson's column and Big Ben â€" come together to showcase Britain's history'Throughout the recession, I had been photographing the English landscape, exploring how it fitted with ideas of national character. Then I was asked to be the official photographer of the 2010 general election.My pitch to the International Olympic Committee was to do something a bit different for the London Games: to stand back, to always have an elevated view, and to gain more of a perspective. I was the only "art photographer" to be granted access.

These events are usually recorded close-up: you can spot the sports photographers with their big lenses in this picture.The logistics were exhausting: I had to get to places that aren't normally available to photographers.

As the Games were heavily controlled, this proved tricky.

Tripods were banned for safety reasons â€" I had to strap my camera on to a spectator's seat.

This shot was taken in Greenwich Park, where the equestrian events were held.
It captures Marcus Ehning from Germany in the individual jumping: he came 12th overall.The venue was the ultimate example of London 2012 creating a tableau of the city.

Everything in this frame has a certain connotation, from the architectural importance of Queen's House in the centre, to the imperial significance of the Cutty Sark tea clipper in the distance; further away, Canary Wharf symbolises the changing economic fortunes of the city. The print is 2m across, so when it's exhibited, you can see all the other details â€" such as the mini versions of Stonehenge, the Magna Carta, Nelson's column and Big Ben decorating each jump.

All these elements come together to provide a theatrical presentation of the history of Britain. The image itself looks painterly and unreal, like an extreme digital composition, while overhead there's a sinister black blob: an eye-in-the-sky TV camera reminding us that this whole event is actually a stage set.As this shot attests, there's no doubt the Olympics were a highly successful advert for Britain, although the question remains as to what their legacy will be.

I feel lucky to have experienced them at close hand.

Like everybody, I wasn't sure what they would be like â€" and they were extraordinary.Interview by Sarah Phillips. This image features in Landmark: The Fields of Photography, at Somerset House, London WC2, until 28 April. CVBorn: Croydon, 1974Studied: Human geography at the University of SheffieldInfluences: Stephen Shore, Patrick Keiller, Paul Graham, Jem SouthamHigh point: "Being the official 2010 general election photographer."Low

point: "Having one of my first published photographs appear in the Daily Mail.

It was John Prescott wearing a conductor's hat sticking his tongue out."Top tip: "Be an author of your own ideas, not an illustrator of others'."PhotographyOlympic Games 2012Sarah Phillipsguardian.co.uk
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsA lack of suitable crash test dummies has left many car seats unregulated - and untested.

When a field-goal kicker lines up for an attempt in a football game, television viewers will typically be presented with the kicker’s record from that distance â€" on all attempts from 40 to 49 yards, for instance. Meanwhile, if the kick in question is a crucial last-second attempt, the opposing coach will usually call a timeout, to “ice” the kicker â€" give him more time to feel the pressure, that is â€" while television announcers will often discuss the kicker’s past performance in such “clutch” situations.It turns out, however, that the distance of a field-goal attempt is just one of many factors determining the odds of its success â€" and that “icing” the kicker is virtually useless.
That is the conclusion, at any rate, of a detailed study by MIT graduate students that was selected as one of the eight finalists in the research-paper competition at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, held Friday and Saturday in Boston.

The study, examining all 11,896 field-goal attempts in the National Football League from 2000 through 2011, finds that while distance is significant, “environmental factors” such as a high-altitude setting and the presence of artificial turf as a playing surface notably improve success for kickers; cold temperatures, rain, a grass field and a low-altitude setting make kicks more likely to fail.

This means that a 45-yard field goal attempted in snow is 18 percent less likely to sail through the uprights than a 45-yard field goal tried in 50-degree weather with no rain. A 50-yard field-goal attempt in Denver in September, therefore, should be regarded much differently than a 50-yard attempt in Cleveland in December.“Environmental factors have an effect,” says Torin Clark, a PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and a co-author of the paper. “But we found that none of the psychological factors matter at all â€" pressure, icing the kicker, whether you’re playing at home or away.” Clark wrote the paper with two other graduate students in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Aaron Johnson and Alexander J. Stimpson. Like a lot of people who engage in sports analytics, they are knowledgeable fans â€" “sports geeks,” they say â€" who decided to question the conventional wisdom prevalent in sports.

Interest in sports analytics among people like Clark, Johnson and Stimpson has made this year’s conference, the seventh annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the biggest yet: It will have 2,700 attendees at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, including some 800 students from more than 100 institutions, while more than 90 professional sports teams will have analysts at the event.

There will be 30 panels over two days, and more than 150 research papers have been winnowed to the final group of eight, with the ultimate winners collecting a $10,000 prize.Bill James and beyondSports analytics dates at least to the 1940s, when Branch Rickey, the legendary general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, commissioned statistics-based studies of baseball. Its first public breakthrough occurred when Bill James, an avid Kansas-based fan, produced an annual “Baseball Abstract” from 1982 through 1988. James created a wealth of new tools for evaluating players, strategies, and many other aspects of the game â€" how much baseball’s unique parks influenced player performance, for example â€" that seeped into baseball culture in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2003, when the writer Michael Lewis produced the book “Moneyball,” about the efforts of the Oakland Athletics to use James-style analysis, sports analytics reached a whole new level of acceptance.

Lewis is among many well-known figures speaking at the event, including statistician and political analyst Nate Silver (who first became known for his work in baseball analytics) and a wide variety of team owners, general managers, coaches and sports professionals whose jobs did not exist a decade ago: The Houston Astros, for example, have sent their “director of decision sciences,” Sig Mejdal, a former NASA researcher with two engineering degrees from the University of California at Davis, to the event.Indeed, a serious academic background is a characteristic shared by many practitioners of sports analytics. The authors of another contender in the research-paper competition, Timothy Chan and Douglas Fearing, met as graduate students in MIT’s Operations Research program, where Fearing worked closely with Stephen Graves, the Abraham J.

Siegel Professor of Management at MIT Sloan.Their paper in this year’s competition â€" “The value of flexibility in baseball roster construction” â€" was inspired by Graves’ work on flexibility in manufacturing networks: If one factory in a production system breaks down, it is imperative to have other production facilities versatile enough to keep a chain of manufacturers linked together. Similarly, Chan, now an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and Fearing, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, observe that teams must have ways of fielding credible lineups when injuries inevitably occur.“The

analogy is pretty strong,” says Chan, whose main body of research involves finding ways to optimize health-care delivery.

“There may be an ideal lineup you’d like to play, but as soon as an injury occurs, that goes out the window.” It is valuable, then, for teams to have backups capable of playing multiple defensive positions. And teams can also benefit by platooning, or alternating, right-handed and left-handed batters at the same position, depending on the opposing pitcher they face. Using a baseball metric known as Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), Chan and Fearing were able to estimate how well players would handle defensive duties at multiple positions, and used well-established tools to compare players’ hitting performance to that of replacement-level players. Using stats from the 2012 season, the researchers found that positional flexibility, if applied, could add as much as 15 percent of the total value to a team (in this case, the Chicago Cubs).

Also, they found that the teams most susceptible to injury are the Washington Nationals and the Tampa Bay Rays.Most

of Fearing’s work focuses on the operations of airlines, but as a lifelong baseball fan who grew up collecting baseball cards and studying the statistics on the back, he enjoys developing more sophisticated metrics than the ones he perused as a kid. Indeed, Fearing says, studying airlines is like analyzing baseball in at least one respect: “They are both research environments in which there is a lot of data.”

Though his ill-fated design became a synonym for bad ideas, Mr. Brown was proud of it and drove one into his 90s. A new study led by MIT neuroscientists has found that brain scans of patients with social anxiety disorder can help predict whether they will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy.Social anxiety is usually treated with either cognitive behavioral therapy or medications. However, it is currently impossible to predict which treatment will work best for a particular patient.

The team of researchers from MIT, Boston University (BU) and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) found that the effectiveness of therapy could be predicted by measuring patients’ brain activity as they looked at photos of faces, before the therapy sessions began.The findings, published this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, may help doctors choose more effective treatments for social anxiety disorder, which is estimated to affect around 15 million people in the United States.“Our

vision is that some of these measures might direct individuals to treatments that are more likely to work for them,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and senior author of the paper.Lead authors of the paper are MIT postdoc Oliver Doehrmann and Satrajit Ghosh, a research scientist in the McGovern Institute.Choosing treatmentsSufferers of social anxiety disorder experience intense fear in social situations that interferes with their ability to function in daily life.

Cognitive behavioral therapy aims to change the thought and behavior patterns that lead to anxiety.

For social anxiety disorder patients, that might include learning to reverse the belief that others are watching or judging them.

The new paper is part of a larger study that MGH and BU ran recently on cognitive behavioral therapy for social anxiety, led by Mark Pollack, director of the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders at MGH, and Stefan Hofmann, director of the Social Anxiety Program at BU.

 “This was a chance to ask if these brain measures, taken before treatment, would be informative in ways above and beyond what physicians can measure now, and determine who would be responsive to this treatment,” Gabrieli says.Currently

doctors might choose a treatment based on factors such as ease of taking pills versus going to therapy, the possibility of drug side effects, or what the patient’s insurance will cover. “From a science perspective there’s very little evidence about which treatment is optimal for a person,” Gabrieli says.The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brains of patients before and after treatment.

There have been many imaging studies showing brain differences between healthy people and patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, but so far imaging has not been established as a way to predict patients’ responses to particular treatments.Measuring brain activityIn the new study, the researchers measured differences in brain activity as patients looked at images of angry or neutral faces. After 12 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy, patients’ social anxiety levels were tested. The researchers found that patients who had shown a greater difference in activity in high-level visual processing areas during the face-response task showed the most improvement after therapy. The findings are an important step toward improving doctors’ ability to choose the right treatment for psychiatric disorders, says Greg Siegle, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s really critical that somebody do this work, and they did it very well,” says Siegle, who was not part of the research team. “It moves the field forward, and brings psychology into more of a rigorous science, using neuroscience to distinguish between clinical cases that at first appear homogeneous.”Gabrieli says it’s unclear why activity in brain regions involved with visual processing would be a good predictor of treatment outcome. One possibility is that patients who benefited more were those whose brains were already adept at segregating different types of experiences, Gabrieli says.The researchers are now planning a follow-up study to investigate whether brain scans can predict differences in response between cognitive behavioral therapy and drug treatment.“Right

now, all by itself, we’re just giving somebody encouraging or discouraging news about the likely outcome” of therapy, Gabrieli says.

“The really valuable thing would be if it turns out to be differentially sensitive to different treatment choices.”The

research was funded by the Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research and the National Institute of Mental Health. NEW DELHI â€" The Indian Parliament’s lower house passed a landmark law Tuesday that sets tougher penalties for rapists and for police officers who refuse to file a woman’s complaint of rape, as well as criminalizing offenses such as stalking, voyeurism and acid attacks. Read full article >> Several hotels that weren’t always the ideal place to stay with young children are now going out of their way to accommodate them. Can you calculate the percentage by which Apple stock must increase to return to its highest value? A versatile condiment with a sweet touch.
Coca-Cola India is working with Dhingana, a music streaming service, to promote songs from its “Crazy for Happiness” advertising campaign.

If you're disappointed that the sequester has the White House canceling tours, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has your back. In a letter to constituents, he says that the Capitol building is still happy to host â€" and suggests that the White House could have planned better. Read full article >> It doesn't matter whether Shane Larkin is passing the ball or taking it from the other team. The Miami point guard always wants to keep his teammates involved. The House has approved legislation that could permit termination of the Marine Corps' multibillion-dollar amphibious Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, giving Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates a victory in his attempt to reduce Pentagon spending on costly or unneeded programs. A new rule allows coaches to work out with players for eight hours a week in the summer, including two hours on the court.

Army civilian police Capt.

Andrew Poulos Jr. helped bust a counterfeiter last year who produced templates for federal law enforcement credentials and sold them over the Internet. Filed under: Cellular, Applications, BusinessAs the complexity of certain advanced wireless handsets and fully-fledged smartphones becomes more prevalent, carriers need a way to manage those devices on the network -- millions of them.As

such, Sprint has partnered with mFoundation to do just that. It will be able to provision, configure, diagnose and manage feature phones and smartphones on its network -- remotely and with (hopefully) a minimum of fuss.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments Richard Dart, Imran Mahmood, and Jahangir Alom plead guilty to acts preparatory to terrorismThree men, including a convert to Islam and a former police employee, have been jailed for secret conversations about preparing a possible terrorist strike against the United Kingdom.Richard Dart, from Dorset, converted to Islam around 2010 after attending lectures by the extremist Anjem Choudary. Dart, Imran Mahmood, and Jahangir Alom, who was also schooled in an extremist interpretation of Islam by Choudary, were jailed for a total of more than 20 years for terrorist involvement.Choudary told the Guardian he had been a key influence in Dart's understanding of Islam. Dart, the son of teachers from Weymouth, changed his name to Salahuddin al-Britani."Everything he knew, he studied with me," Choudary said. "He attended one of my lectures in west London to find out about Islam, and then he basically attended everything we had."The

three men pleaded guilty to acts preparatory to terrorism.

They were not found with any explosives or chemicals.Mahmood had gone to Pakistan where he received terrorist training. A rucksack of his was found to have traces of the explosive PETN on it.
Dart and Alom tried to find terrorists to train them in Pakistan, but failed.An

investigation by Scotland Yard and MI5 led to "silent conversations" between Dart and Mahmood being recovered from a laptop.

To avoid their discussions being picked up by listening devices, they had sat in Dart's west London flat typing out messages to each other in a Word file on a computer.Investigators

were able to recover the files, and the crown alleged the men had discussed targets in the UK, including Wootton Bassett, the town to which British soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq were returned to throngs of locals paying their respects. Targets including MI5 and MI6 were also discussed.Choudary
dismissed the guilty pleas, saying: "It was just talk, people say these things all the time, it doesn't mean they are going to do it."He

said that in the months before the three men were arrested in July 2012, Dart and Alom became distant.

Choudary said he would have taught them that violent jihad abroad may be justified but attacks against Britain were not.But

he said his view ran contrary to those of popular extremist preachers on the internet such as Anwar al-Awlaki, a preacher based in Yemen linked to major terrorist plots such as the Fort Hood massacre in the US and plots in the UK including the attempted murder of Stephen Timms MP.Awlaki was killed by the US, and Choudary described him a martyr who was now in paradise.Choudary's account of the radicalisation of Dart and Alom, a former Met police community support officer and one-time soldier, show that journeys into terrorism are not always random events.Choudary has been involved in a succession of extremist groups, from al-Muhajiroun, which was banned, and then successor groups that attract media attention for extremist statements and which annoy the majority of Muslims in the UK who believe they portray the religion in a poor light.Dart refused to stand when he was sentenced at the Old Bailey, saying: "I don't wish to stand up, I believe ruling and judging is only for Allah."Dart, 30, of Broadway, Ealing, west London; Mahmood, 22, of Northolt, west London, and Alom, 26, of Stratford, east London, were stopped at airports while travelling to and from Pakistan. Counter-terrorism officers want to question a fourth man, Mohammed Tariq Nasar, believed to be living in Pakistan.Dart

was sentenced to 11 years, of which he will serve six in prison and five years on licence. Alom was given four years and six months, and Mahmood more than 14 years, of which he must serve nine years and nine months behind bars.Mr
Justice Simon said they were all "committed fundamentalists" who would have been prepared to kill.

He told Dart and Mahmood: "I'm satisfied to the required criminal standard that neither of you had ruled out an attack in the United Kingdom, and that you, Mahmood, were looking at arming yourself with a bomb."Deputy assistant commissioner Stuart Osborne, head of the Met's counter-terrorism command, said: "This case serves as a classic example of how terrorists live in our midst while preparing their acts and their determination to travel overseas to train before returning to the UK to achieve their aims."UK

security and terrorismLondonVikram Doddguardian.co.uk

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds The Boston Bruins and goalie Tuukka Rask were less than 80 seconds away from a seventh game of the Stanley Cup Final.

The Nets, with Coach P. J. Carlesimo, have revamped their lineup and rotation throughout the season, and that strategy is continuing against the Bulls in the playoffs. Q. DEAR TIM: The wood deck railing at my home rotted prematurely and needs to be replaced. How long should deck railings last? I love mine but wonder whether I should replace it with a vinyl railing or even an aluminum one.

Jeff Withey scored 22 points and every senior had a big night at their last home game, leading No. 4 Kansas past Texas Tech 79-42 at Allen Fieldhouse on Monday night. The acting commerce secretary, Rebecca Blank, will leave her post in July to become chancellor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The top job at commerce has been snakebit for President Obama, dating to the days before his first term. Obama’s first two choices for the position, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson (D) and former New Hampshire governor Judd Gregg (R), both pulled out before the Senate could vote on them. Read full article >> A flight from Moscow to Havana took off on Thursday with no sign of Edward J.

Snowden, raising the possibility that his legal limbo in a Moscow airport could continue for