Naples Real Estate

From vacationers, to people who simply want a place to spend the rest of their life, one of the best things you can do is look into the many Naples houses for sale. To make the most of your hard earned money, however, there are several important tasks that you need to undertake in order to make the most of your investment.

Get a home inspection

One of the basics in purchasing real estate is by having a certified home inspector check out the property you want to purchase first. The best real estate offerings actually have their property pre-inspected before being placed in the market to ensure potential buyers of the quality of the houses. Even if this is the case, it’s still worth having your own inspection done. A house is a complex structure and most people are unable to fully assess the extent of wear and tear on a house, especially if touch up jobs has been done prior to having the lot placed on sale. There is nothing worse than finding out that the roof leaks months after your purchase, or finding out that the disposal system needs repair after you have already sealed the deal. Employing a qualified home inspector can provide the information in advance to ensure that you get the most out of your investment.

Get surveyed

Some of the most common real estate disputes are the result of an overlooked survey on the house. Instead of finding out after you have officially bought the property that your paid land actually encroaches on a neighbor or on state land, such as roads, have a survey done on the property that you are looking into. Make sure that you hire a certified surveyor, and that you get a report of the legal description of the property, which must be counterchecked with the pertinent public records. As laborious as this sounds, it may save you thousands of dollars in the future.

Get home insurance

Finally, after sealing the deal immediately work on getting home insurance for your new home. Among the many places where you can invest your money, Naples is one of the best with a sunny climate for most of the year and no major parasites such as termites that can threaten your investment. With home insurance, however, you can be prepared for any of the many unforeseeable events that tend to crop up in the most unlikely opportunities. When choosing the home insurance for your property, you can use the web for getting price quotes for insurance services that are within your budget. Make sure, however, that you talk to the company yourself before finalizing any agreements and make sure that insurance company can suitably answer all of your questions.

With home inspection, surveys, and home insurance, getting the best deal is as secure as it can be. Taking the time to research and check the facts in advance can save you time and money in the long run.

Eight U.S. airlines will use up to 1.5 million gallons a year of synthetic diesel made from plant waste starting in 2012, the fuel’s manufacturer announced today.

Rentech Inc.’s fuel will be used for ground-service transportation at Los Angeles International Airport and be made primarily from urban woody green waste such as yard clippings, the company said.

Using the renewable fuel will be American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, US Airways, Southwest Airlines, Alaska Airlines and UPS Airlines.

Rentech plans to produce the fuel at a new plant in Rialto, Calif., which is slated to open in 2012.

The Air Transport Association of America, the domestic industry trade group that joined Rentech in announcing the deal, called the purchasing agreement the first of its kind and said it could signal an industrywide move toward using lower-carbon fuels.

“This transaction promises to be the first of many such green-fuel purchase agreements by the commercial aviation industry,” said Glenn Tilton, ATA’s chairman.

Likewise, Rentech heralded the agreement as a sign of things to come.

“We expect this agreement to serve as a model for future supply relationships at other airports and for other fuels, including Rentech’s synthetic jet fuel, which was recently approved for commercial airline use,” said D. Hunt Ramsbottom, Rentech’s president and CEO.

by Daniel Saltman / The Post-Standard

Wednesday August 19, 2009, 4:45 PM

An Onondaga County sheriff’s deputy was suspended without pay Wednesday over a traffic stop in which he Tasered a mother in front of her children in January.

After an administrative hearing Wednesday, Deputy Sean Andrews was suspended from his $49,095-a-year job for 30 days, according to Deputy John D’Eredita, a spokesman for Sheriff Kevin Walsh.

Andrews, a deputy for the past four years, was taken off road patrol after he pulled over Audra Harmon and shot her with his stun gun twice in front of her two children on Hopkins Road in Salina. He initially told her he saw her talking on her cell phone while driving, but after she said she could disprove that, he accused her of driving 5 mph over the speed limit, according to Harmon. When she got out of her minivan then did not immediately return at his request, he drew his Taser on her. After she got back in the van, Andrews pulled her out and Tasered her.

Harmon was charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and speeding. All the charges were dropped.

The case was reported last week in The Post-Standard and was broadcast on national television and spread across the county via the Internet. The publicity did not lead to Andrews’ suspension, D’Eredita said. Walsh could not be reached for comment.

What happens next with Andrews will be determined by the civil service process, D’Eredita said. If his suspension goes beyond 30 days, his pay must resume, according to state law. If that happens, Andrews would be placed in the sheriff’s “temporary assignment unit,” where deputies facing pending discipline report to a room but are not allowed to do any work.

Neither Andrews, 37, nor his lawyer could be reached for comment.

Harmon, 38, sued the sheriff’s office last week over the incident. Her lawyer, Terrance Hoffmann, said he hopes the sheriff’s office takes more disciplinary action against Andrews. But if the deputy’s record is free from any other misconduct, he should not be fired over the Tasering, Hoffmann said.

“We would like for him to be intensively retrained not only in the appropriate use of Tasers, but also trained in how to appropriately deal with the public,” Hoffmann said. “We would also like an apology.”

John O’Brien can be reached at jobrien@syracuse.com or 470-2187.

Civil rights leaders worried race played a role in death of suicidal neighbor

Daniel Saltman

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – Alonzo Heyward carried a rifle around his low-rent Chattanooga neighborhood one day last month, ranting about suicide and ignoring the pleas of friends for hours before six city police officers surrounded him on his front porch and decided it had to end.

His father says Heyward told the officers, “I’m not out here to hurt anybody.”

But police, who tried unsuccessfully to disarm Heyward, fired 59 rounds to kill him on July 18. The medical examiner found 43 bullet wounds in his chest, face, arms, hands, legs, buttocks and groin. Police contend Heyward was a danger to others and threatened the six officers.

Chattanooga police spokeswoman Jerri Weary described the case as “suicide by cop.”

Civil rights leaders concerned
As questions continue to surround the shooting, Heyward’s family and civil rights leaders take issue with the police response. Heyward, a 32-year-old moving company employee, was black. The six officers are white. They were temporarily placed on administrative leave but have since returned to work.

“We have a large concern about the amount of shots fired,” said Valoria Armstrong, president of the Chattanooga branch of the NAACP.

A Chattanooga Times Free Press editorial cartoon asked “IS THIS EXCESSIVE FORCE?” — spelling out the question with letters labeling the wounds in a drawing based on Heyward’s autopsy report.

His father, James Marine, 61, does not believe Heyward really wanted to kill himself or that he was trying to commit “suicide by cop.”

“He just needed somebody to talk to,” Marine said. “I believe he was just depressed at that time.”

A Tennessee Bureau of Investigation inquiry is ongoing. Federal and local authorities are awaiting the TBI report before they do their own examinations of the case. Hamilton County District Attorney Bill Cox said he wants to see the TBI report before deciding whether to pursue a criminal case.

Police: There’s ‘no magic number’
Police spokeswoman Weary said the officers confronted Heyward when they responded to a report of three men wrestling over a gun in the street just after 4 a.m.

Heyward’s father said there was never any wrestling over the .44 Magnum rifle that his son was carrying and sometimes pointing at his chin.

Police said the officers tried but failed to disarm Heyward with a stun gun. Weary said Heyward ignored repeated commands to drop the rifle and officers fired when they felt threatened by the way he moved it.

Police accounts and a patrol car video indicate the shots were fired in three volleys, all within 30 seconds. Each officer used a .45-caliber pistol. Some officers emptied their magazines, reloaded and fired again, while others didn’t fire all their bullets, Weary said.

Some of the gunshots ripped through the unoccupied front room of the house Heyward was renting from his employer, the owner of a local moving company. No one else was injured.

Eugene O’Donnell, a former policeman and prosecutor who is now a professor of police studies at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there is “no magic number” when it comes to officers firing at a suspect.

If death is believed to be imminent “there isn’t anybody in the country who can tell the cops 10 shots and no more,” O’Donnell said.

“Unfortunately this is replicated all over the country. When you send the police they bring deadly force with them. They come armed and they come predisposed to use force,” O’Donnell said.

Heyward’s police record
According to court records, Heyward had been charged three times in the past with domestic assault. The first two were dismissed. The third, from a January 2008 incident, remained pending at the time of his death.

He was sentenced in 2005 to 11 months, 29 days in the county workhouse for passing worthless checks, but the sentence was suspended for good behavior and he was given probation.

He also had a few driving-related charges on his record, including a violation of the auto registration law for which he received a 30-day suspended sentence in 1997.

The morning he died, Heyward was distraught after returning from a party where he had been drinking, his father said.

“He didn’t think anybody cared about him,” Marine said.

Heyward also was upset about not seeing his children — a daughter and two sons — according to brother James Heyward.

CONTINUED : Police told Heyward was drunk

Daniel Saltman

We may think we know the telltale signs of lying, be it shifty eyes or nervous fidgeting. Professional interrogators look for such tells, too, assuming a suspect’s nervousness betrays his guilt. But interrogation can rattle even the innocent, so nervousness alone cannot distinguish liars from truth-tellers.

Scientists looking for better ways to detect lies have found a promising one: increasing suspects’ “cognitive load.” For a host of reasons, their theory goes, lying is more mentally taxing than telling the truth. Per­forming an extra task while lying or telling the truth should therefore affect the liars more.

To test this idea, deception researchers led by psychologist Aldert Vrij of the University of Portsmouth in England asked one group to lie con­vincingly and another group to tell the truth about a staged theft scenario that only the truth-tellers had experi­enced. A second pair of groups had to do the same but with a crucial twist: both the liars and the truth-tellers had to maintain eye contact while telling their stories.

Later, as researchers watched videotapes of the suspects’ accounts, they tallied verbal signs of cognitive load (such as fewer spatial details in the suspects’ stories) and nonverbal ones (such as fewer eyeblinks). The eyeblinks are particularly interesting because whereas rapid blinking suggests nervousness, fewer blinks are a sign of cognitive load, Vrij explains—and contrary to what police are taught, liars tend to blink less. Although the effect was subtle, the instruction to maintain eye contact did magnify the differences between the truth-tellers and the liars.

So do these differences actually make it easier for others to distinguish liars from truth-tellers? They do—but although students watching the videos had an easier time spotting a liar in
the eye-contact condition, their accuracy rates were still poor. Any group differences between liars and truth-tellers were dwarfed by differences be­tween individual participants. (For example, some people blink far less than others whether or not they are lying—and some are simply better able to carry a higher cognitive load.)

All this makes it hard to put the study’s findings into practice—especially out in the field, where the people most likely to lie are those who are good at lying. “In the real world, there’s no Pinocchio-like cue that distinguishes liars from truth-tellers,” says study co-author Ronald Fisher of Florida International University. Magnifying subtle differences may be the next best thing. [For more on lie detection, see “Portrait of a Lie,” by Matthias Gamer; Scientific American Mind, February/March 2009.]

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, “The Load of Lying.”

Posted on: August 12, 2009 3:52 PM, by Ethan Siegel

It wasn’t all that long ago that I wrote a five-part series on Hubble’s old camera, WFPC2. I call it “The Camera that Changed the Universe.” Part 1 focused on Hubble showing us just how deep, rich, and full of wonder our Universe is. Let’s remember how this happened.

The first thing we did was take a patch of sky that was relatively empty. No bright stars, no large galaxies or clusters, no planetary nebulae, just a little tiny patch of black, empty sky.

And then we point Hubble at it. And what do we do? We sit there. And wait. Collecting tiny, miniscule amounts of light. First, for minutes on end. And then the minutes turn into hours, and the hours turn into days. All the while, Hubble just patiently sits there, pointing at the same patch of empty sky. Over 10 days, Hubble took a photograph of the same exact patch on the sky 342 times. They then added up the light from all 342 of these images. The result?

The Hubble Deep Field, taken by WFPC2. Every point of light in this image (except for about 6 which are dim stars) is a galaxy. Thousands upon thousands of new galaxies were discovered. Some were only a few million light years away, others were over ten billion light years away. All told, we learned that there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in our Universe. And we learned it from this single photograph.

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Well, nearly a decade after this, they installed a new, better camera, called the Advanced Camera for Surveys. And to one-up the Hubble Deep Field, they picked a different blank patch of sky, went even deeper, and created the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Take a look:

There are approximately 10,000 separate galaxies in this tiny little piece of sky. Well, the good folks at NASA and the ESA have created a 3-D flythough simulation of the image, showing you what it would look like if you actually flew through this image! Now that you know how distances work in cosmology, all they had to do was measure the redshift of each galaxy and program it in. Tony Darnell narrates it, and I’ve embedded it for you right here! (You can start at the 2:53 mark if you want to skip the intro.) And remember, as you watch it, that each dot of light in this image is a galaxy, comparable to our own Milky Way, with nearly a trillion stars, only one of which is our own Sun.

If you only watch one astronomy video this year, make it this one. (If you’re going to watch two, watch this one, too.) This is unbelievable eye-candy, and I encourage you to enjoy it! Thanks to Nancy at Universe Today for pointing this out.

Perhaps all those concerns about a negative backlash against the town hall protests that would ultimately inure to the benefit of those pushing ObamaCare were overblown, because it looks like the public is siding with the protesters:

WASHINGTON — The raucous protests at congressional town-hall-style meetings have succeeded in fueling opposition to proposed health care bills among some Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds — particularly among the independents who tend to be at the center of political debates.

In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say demonstrations at the hometown sessions have made them more sympathetic to the protesters’ views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.

Independents by 2-to-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now.

(…)

• A 57% majority of those surveyed, including six in 10 independents, say a major factor behind the protests are concerns that average citizens had well before the meetings took place; 48% say efforts by activists to create organized opposition to the health care bills are a major factor.

• There’s some tolerance for loud voices: 51% say individuals making “angry attacks” on a health care bill are an example of “democracy in action” rather than “abuse of democracy.”

• Some actions are seen as going too far. Six in 10 say shouting down supporters of a bill is an abuse of democracy. On that question, unlike most others, there isn’t much of a partisan divide: 69% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans agree.

If these numbers stand up, it would be a significant blow to the Obama Administration and to the fortunes of health care reform in Congress.

Posted on 12 August 2009