Prep Roundup: Tennis, Track & Field, Softball - The Sports Desk

FROM STAFF REPORTS

BOYS TENNIS
NORTHWEST REGION
Riverbend?s No. 1 boys tennis doubles tandem of Eric Ciccone and Ian Howdyshell were eliminated in the semifinals of the Northwest Region tournament at the University of Virginia Tennis Center at Boar?s Head on Thursday.
Freedom?s Leslie Wong and David Craig defeated Ciccone and Howdyshell
2?6, 6?1, 6?0.
In girls play, the Bears? doubles team of Taylor Nichols and Julia Klaczynski were also eliminated at the regionals, falling 6?2, 4?6, 6?1 to Forest Park?s Rachel Halinski and T. Travis.
On Wednesday, Nichols fell in singles competition to Halinski, who went on to win the regional singles title.
Nichols and Klaczynski will rejoin the Bears when they play Cox on Tuesday in the Group AAA quarterfinals.

TRACK
REGION A MEET
The Washington & Lee boys track team placed first in the Region A meet at West Point High School on Thursday.
The Eagles tallied 57 points, ahead of second-place finisher Mathews (51 points), and Northumberland (47) and Essex.
W&L?s 1,600 relay team (Jeremiah McNeal, Markus Anderson, Moses Ovievl and Otho Gaskins) finished first with a time of 3:34.
Hudson Hutt (2.13) posted a second-place finish in the 800, and Gaskins (52:03) finished second in the 400.
The Eagles will send 15 boys and two girls to the Group A meet next Saturday in Radford.

SOFTBALL
COLONIAL FORGE 5, FRANKLIN COUNTY 3
Destiny Sharp went 2-for-3 at the plate, recording a double and two RBIs to lead Colonial Forge past Franklin County in the first round of the Northwest Region tournament.
Emily Bradford added two hits and an RBI on four trips to the plate for the Eagles (11-12). She also scored two runs.
Colonial Forge pitcher Lexy Markert?Sadando gave up runs in just one inning.
Colonial Forge?s Sami Anderson added an RBI, Ashley Bastano had two hits, and Morgan Kyer added a hit of her own.

R H E
Colonial Forge 1002 200 5 8 2
Franklin County 0300 000 3 3 13
LEXY MARKERT?SADANDO and Morgan Kyer. BRITTANY FLORA, Haley Saul (4) and MacKenzie Chitwood.

ESSEX 2, RAPPAHANNOCK 0
Emily Tunstall and Emily Broache each drove in a run as Essex defeated Rappahannock.
Essex will face King William on Wednesday in the first round of regional action.

R H E
Essex 0100 010 2 2 6
Rappahannock 0300 000 3 3 13
BRITTANY JORDAN and Kaitlin Faunders. CARLIE CLARKE and Hannah Pierson.

WEDNESDAY?S RESULTS
TRACK & FIELD
REGION II MEET
Javanique Burruss won three events to lead Louisa?s girls to a second-place team finish at Tuscarora.
Burruss claimed the long jump (18?11), triple jump (37?5) and 100-meter hurdles (14.73). She also ran on the second-place 400 relay (48.72) as the Lions finished with 57 points, trailing only Handley (66). Teammate Natese Rangland was second in the long jump (17?3).
Louisa?s boys finished seventh. Corey Osborne and Raeshawn Bishop finished third and fourth, respectively, in the 400 (both 50.31), then ran on the third-place 1,600 relay (3:30.91).

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Biden reflects on tragic accident loss in speech to soldiers' families (Los Angeles Times)

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St. Thomas real estate analysis: lower-priced homes are 'flying off ...

April?s active market for single-family homes priced under $14o,000 is one of several positive signs for the Twin Cities? real estate market.

While it?s not a term often used to describe the housing market, a University of St. Thomas real estate professor observed that ?the market for single-family homes priced under $140,000 has become quite active. They are flying off the shelves right now,? said Herb Tousley, director of real estate programs at the university.

The finding was one of several signs of a healthier housing market that were outlined in the UST?Residential Real Estate?Index, a monthly analysis of the 13-county Twin Cities area prepared by the Shenehon Center for Real Estate at St. Thomas? Opus College of Business.

Tousley said that new listings for the lower-priced homes are coming onto the market at a rate of about 1,100 per month and they are being sold at a rate of about 900 t0 1,000 per month.

?The number of homes on the market in this price range has steadily been declining since the beginning of the year,? he said. ?Although many of these homes are foreclosures and short sales, there are several types of buyers, including first-time homeowners and investors, who are purchasing these properties at a fast clip.?

Because of the active market, there is just a 3.1-month supply of the less-expensive properties compared to a 4.7-month supply for the market as a whole.

Here are other signs that point to the beginning of a healthier housing market in the Twin Cities:?

• The median price for traditional-home sales (not foreclosures or short sales, which are homes sold for a price less than the outstanding mortgage balance) continued to rise in April after recording a strong gain in March. The March-to-April increase was 1.8 percent, with the median price moving from $196,000 to $199,500.??
• The number of homes for sale in the Twin Cities continues to remain low by historical standards.? In April, as in March, homes were being sold at a rate nearly as great as the rate they came on the market. It the trend continues, the inventory will remain low and that will help boost sales prices.?
• The percentage of distressed sales (foreclosures and short sales) remained below 50 percent for the second-consecutive month. In April, 42.8 percent of all homes sold in the Twin Cities market were distressed, the lowest percentage in 17 months.?
• St. Thomas? composite index uses nine data elements to track the health of the traditional, foreclosure and short-sale markets.? For April, the traditional-sale index gained 1.9 percent over March, the short-sale index rebounded 2.4 percent, and the foreclosure index increased 4.6 percent.
  ?
• April?s data indicates that foreclosures appear to be finding a bottom. Tousley said, however, ?that does not mean the foreclosure crisis is behind us. There are still many properties that need to be sold and the relatively high rate of distressed-property sales is going to be with us for several years.??

?The bottom line is that most of the median-sale price increase that occurred in April was driven by the sale of traditional, single-family homes. This is a healthy development because both the median sale price and the number of traditional, single-family homes on the market increased significantly in April,? Tousley said.

And while April?s data is ?one more step in the right direction,? Tousley cautioned that ?median prices and sales volumes will have to continue to exceed the previous year?s levels for the balance of 2012 before we can say that the housing market truly is on the road to recovery.?

More details can be found on the Shenehon Center?s website: http://www.stthomas.edu/business/centers/shenehon/research/default.html.

Tags: Minneapolis St. Paul Real Estate, Residential Real Estate Index, Shenehon Center for Real Estate

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2012 at 8:12 am and is filed under Centers, Faculty, real estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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The Brain May Disassemble Itself in Sleep (preview)

Features | Mind & Brain See Inside

Slumber may loosen the links that undergird knowledge, restoring the brain daily to a vibrant, flexible state

By Jason Castro ?| May 24, 2012?|

Image: John Hershey

In Brief

1. Most scientists agree that sleep has significant benefits for learning and memory.
2. Conventional wisdom holds that recently formed memories are replayed during sleep and in the process become more sharply etched in the brain.
3. Emerging evidence suggests that sleep also serves as a reset button, loosening neural connections throughout the brain to put this organ back in a state in which learning can take place.

Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn?t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn?t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot.

In a provocative new theory about the purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin?Madison has proposed that slumber, to cement what we have learned, must also spur the brain?s undoing. As the conscious mind settles into sleep, the neural connections that create a scaffold for our knowledge must partially unravel, his theory suggests. Although this nightly dismantling might seem like a curious act of cerebral self-sabotage, it may in fact be a mechanism for enhancing the brain?s capacity to encode and store new information.

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Avoid Tyranny of the Urgent with Small Business Planning | Small ...

In my previous blog, Small Business Planning Steps for Growing Your Business?I discussed various small business planning steps that you can use to?grow your business. I mentioned?that in having worked with over 1,200 businesses in the past 15 years I have found that there are basically two ways in which a business can operate, namely, a fruit-stand model and a factory model. At the end of that blog post I looked at four small business planning steps that you can go through to start to take your business to the next level and move from a fruit-stand model to a factory model.

This fruit-stand versus factory model issue plays out in another way. So many business owners fall into is the ?tyranny of the urgent? trap where they don?t take the time to develop, debug and optimize the processes and products in their businesses. Many times, owners get caught in this syndrome because they are so busy with the business and the demands of getting the work done, which is in essence ?working in the business? that they don?t take the time to ?work on the business.?

As a small business planning firm we have found that while it takes more time and effort on the front end of a business to develop the systems for factory-type business, including add on products, the benefit is the business ends up not being dependent on the business owner for its daily operations and you avoid falling into the tyranny of the urgent syndrome. I have found the following are the typical attributes of fruit stand versus a factory-model business.

Exhausting fruit stands:

• Not fully systematized
• Not scalable and difficult to grow to the next level
• Overly dependent on the business owner

Economic factories:

• Fully systematized
• Scalable and not difficult to grow to the next level
• Not overly dependent on the business owner

In reality I am over simplifying the differences between a fruit stand and a factory business because in the real world there is a continuum of each model. Additionally, please dispel the thought that in providing small business planning services we have found that all fruit-stand businesses are small. Recently I ran into a $20 million business with over 100 employees that suffered greatly because it operated in many fruit stand ways.

Small Business Planning Involves Fully Systematizing Your Business

How do you move your?business from a frustrating fruit stand to an economic factory? In my previous blog post I discussed that you need to ask yourself, what can I do to enhance my product?s ability for my customer to achieve or reach their goals and how can I develop new products that will enable my business to more fully to meet their goals?

The next step is to start to fully systematizing your business by developing the Processes and Procedures within your business in order to consistently deliver your current and future products. When this step is combined with the?previous small business planning steps?you will be able to start down the path which will ?move you from the ?endless fatigue of an exhausting fruit stand? to the ?enduring freedom of an economic factory?.

?

Related posts:

1. Small Business Planning Steps for Growing Your Business

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Like curry? New biological role identified for compound used in ancient medicine

Public release date: 25-May-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Adrian Gombart
Adrian.gombart@oregonstate.edu
541-737-8018
Oregon State University

CORVALLIS, Ore. Scientists have just identified a new reason why some curry dishes, made with spices humans have used for thousands of years, might be good for you.

New research at Oregon State University has discovered that curcumin, a compound found in the cooking spice turmeric, can cause a modest but measurable increase in levels of a protein that's known to be important in the "innate" immune system, helping to prevent infection in humans and other animals.

This cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide, or CAMP, is part of what helps our immune system fight off various bacteria, viruses or fungi even though they hadn't been encountered before.

Prior to this, it was known that CAMP levels were increased by vitamin D. Discovery of an alternative mechanism to influence or raise CAMP levels is of scientific interest and could open new research avenues in nutrition and pharmacology, scientists said.

Turmeric is a flavorful, orange-yellow spice and an important ingredient in many curries, commonly found in Indian, South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. It has also been used for 2,500 years as a medicinal compound in the Ayurvedic system of medicine in India not to mention being part of some religious and wedding ceremonies. In India, turmeric is treated with reverence.

The newest findings were made by researchers in the Linus Pauling Institute at OSU and published today in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"This research points to a new avenue for regulating CAMP gene expression," said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the Linus Pauling Institute. "It's interesting and somewhat surprising that curcumin can do that, and could provide another tool to develop medical therapies."

The impact of curcumin in this role is not nearly as potent as that of vitamin D, Gombart said, but could nonetheless have physiologic value. Curcumin has also been studied for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

"Curcumin, as part of turmeric, is generally consumed in the diet at fairly low levels," Gombart said. "However, it's possible that sustained consumption over time may be healthy and help protect against infection, especially in the stomach and intestinal tract."

In this study, Chunxiao Guo, a graduate student, and Gombart looked at the potential of both curcumin and omega-3 fatty acids to increase expression of the CAMP gene. They found no particular value with the omega-3 fatty acids for this purpose, but curcumin did have a clear effect. It caused levels of CAMP to almost triple.

There has been intense scientific interest in the vitamin D receptor in recent years because of potential therapeutic benefits in treating infection, cancer, psoriasis and other diseases, the researchers noted in their report. An alternative way to elicit a related biological response could be significant and merits additional research, they said.

The CAMP peptide is the only known antimicrobial peptide of its type in humans, researchers said. It appears to have the ability to kill a broad range of bacteria, including those that cause tuberculosis and protect against the development of sepsis.

###

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[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

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.

Public release date: 25-May-2012
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Adrian Gombart
Adrian.gombart@oregonstate.edu
541-737-8018
Oregon State University

CORVALLIS, Ore. Scientists have just identified a new reason why some curry dishes, made with spices humans have used for thousands of years, might be good for you.

New research at Oregon State University has discovered that curcumin, a compound found in the cooking spice turmeric, can cause a modest but measurable increase in levels of a protein that's known to be important in the "innate" immune system, helping to prevent infection in humans and other animals.

This cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide, or CAMP, is part of what helps our immune system fight off various bacteria, viruses or fungi even though they hadn't been encountered before.

Prior to this, it was known that CAMP levels were increased by vitamin D. Discovery of an alternative mechanism to influence or raise CAMP levels is of scientific interest and could open new research avenues in nutrition and pharmacology, scientists said.

Turmeric is a flavorful, orange-yellow spice and an important ingredient in many curries, commonly found in Indian, South Asian and Middle Eastern cuisine. It has also been used for 2,500 years as a medicinal compound in the Ayurvedic system of medicine in India not to mention being part of some religious and wedding ceremonies. In India, turmeric is treated with reverence.

The newest findings were made by researchers in the Linus Pauling Institute at OSU and published today in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The work was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"This research points to a new avenue for regulating CAMP gene expression," said Adrian Gombart, an associate professor of biochemistry and biophysics in the Linus Pauling Institute. "It's interesting and somewhat surprising that curcumin can do that, and could provide another tool to develop medical therapies."

The impact of curcumin in this role is not nearly as potent as that of vitamin D, Gombart said, but could nonetheless have physiologic value. Curcumin has also been studied for its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

"Curcumin, as part of turmeric, is generally consumed in the diet at fairly low levels," Gombart said. "However, it's possible that sustained consumption over time may be healthy and help protect against infection, especially in the stomach and intestinal tract."

In this study, Chunxiao Guo, a graduate student, and Gombart looked at the potential of both curcumin and omega-3 fatty acids to increase expression of the CAMP gene. They found no particular value with the omega-3 fatty acids for this purpose, but curcumin did have a clear effect. It caused levels of CAMP to almost triple.

There has been intense scientific interest in the vitamin D receptor in recent years because of potential therapeutic benefits in treating infection, cancer, psoriasis and other diseases, the researchers noted in their report. An alternative way to elicit a related biological response could be significant and merits additional research, they said.

The CAMP peptide is the only known antimicrobial peptide of its type in humans, researchers said. It appears to have the ability to kill a broad range of bacteria, including those that cause tuberculosis and protect against the development of sepsis.

###

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

?

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.

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