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RI city wins $5M Bloomberg prize with word gap fix

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) Rhode Island's capital city has won a $5 million contest created by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg with a high-tech plan to overcome a language skills problem known as the word gap that puts low-income children at a profound disadvantage in the classroom.

Providence was one of 305 cities that pitched an idea to Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge, a contest designed to spur innovation in America's cities. Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif., were selected for $1 million runner-up prizes. The winners are set to be announced Wednesday in New York.

Providence's winning proposal will equip low-income children with recording devices that count the words and conversations they are exposed to. Combined with coaching lessons for parents,, the plan is designed to help poor children overcome a language skills deficit that develops before they even start kindergarten.

A landmark 1995 study found that children in families receiving welfare hear less than one-third as many words per hour as their more affluent peers and will reach age four having heard 32 million fewer words than children from professional families. Research shows the word deficit is tied to later academic performance and employment opportunities.

"Education is the path out of poverty; I know, because I have followed it," Providence Mayor Angel Taveras told The Associated Press. "We need to make sure that path is available to more kids. The first teacher in a child's life is a child's parent. We can do something to help them."

The selection committee at Bloomberg Philanthropies selected Providence's proposal because it takes a new approach to a systemic problem and could be replicated in other cities.

"Mayor Taveras found an evidence-based solution to a major challenge the word gap for low-income children that has potential to move us forward in a cost effective, scalable, and sustainable way," Bloomberg said in a statement. "The Mayors Challenge aimed to find the most powerful ideas that have the greatest potential to spread and each of these five mayors knocked it out of the ballpark."

Called "Providence Talks," Taveras' plan will make use of a pager-sized recorder put in a child's pocket that acts as a language pedometer, recording every conversation and word spoken to them through the course of their day. The city intends to offer the voluntary program to children in low-income families, as determined by newborn screening assessments. Their parents will receive monthly coaching sessions from social workers in which they learn ways to boost a child's vocabulary, and social work agencies will be given bonuses if a child's language skills improve.

The recording devices work in English, Spanish and other languages and automatically screen out conversations from television and radio. The recordings will be kept confidential and once the devices' data are analyzed, any conversations on the recordings will be deleted. To prevent a 3year-old from losing or damaging the recorders, the devices come with specially designed clothing to hold them in place.

Providence Talks would begin with a small number of children participating and gradually expand the program to 2,850 families by 2018.

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RI city wins $5M Bloomberg prize with word gap fix

WordPress Load Testing Made Easy

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - Mar 13, 2013) - BlazeMeter, provider of the Apache JMeter compatible load testing platform for developers, today announced the release of its plugin for the leading open-source blogging software, WordPress. WordPress developers can now launch high volume load tests and optimize WordPress websites in minutes.

BlazeMeter's new WordPress plugin allows users to utilize cloud testing services to optimize the performance of their WordPress sites using BlazeMeter's load testing developer platform.

"BlazeMeter's WordPress plugin has insight into the actual WordPress installation and generates an Apache JMeter and a Selenium script for you automatically. It then provisions and configures a cluster of up to 100 dedicated servers ready to run on demand," said Alon Girmonsky, Founder & CEO of BlazeMeter. "All this is done automatically, saving developers days of scripting, provisioning and configuring, allowing developers to focus on their web and mobile applications."

The BlazeMeter plugin supports WordPress 3.1 or higher. The plugin will create a load script that will simulate both anonymous users and authenticated users visiting the WordPress website. During a load test, a dedicated cluster of load engines is launched from a preconfigured geographic location. These servers then generate traffic based on the parameters which the user defines in the BlazeMeter plugin.

During the load, real time measurements of KPIs present themselves on the report dashboard, where users can easily evaluate system performance and run numerous iterations, allowing users to locate bugs and bottlenecks, fix and re-test time and time again.

DOWNLOAD BLAZEMETER'S WORDPRESS PLUGIN

Integration details can be found on our Knowledge Base under BlazeMeter WordPress Plugin.

Users can sign up for BlazeMeter's Webinar 'WordPress Load Testing Made Easy' on Wednesday, March 20 at 9am PDT/12pm EDT. To register: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/183235902

Users can also sign up for "Load Testing for Mobile Made Easy" on Wednesday, March 27 at 9am PDT/12pm EDT. To register: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/537195718

Join BlazeMeter at the NYC Webscale Group Meetup on Thursday, March 28 from 7-9pm EDT, to discuss "Finding & Fixing Performance Bottlenecks At Web Scale."

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WordPress Load Testing Made Easy

Wells: Drive-By Shooting Is City’s ‘Top Priority’

While details remain murky about what led to a drive-by shooting early Monday that left 13 people wounded, Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) appeared this morning outside the subsidized housing development on the block where the incident went down to give an update on the situation.

"I waited a day," said Wells, standing outside Tyler House, a 284-resident subsidized apartment building on the 1200 block of North Capitol Street. "It is extra important for the police to get on this."

But what precipitated Monday morning's violence remains unknown, even as police continue their search for a pair of sedans from which the bullets were fired. A widely distributed surveillance video shows two cars rolling by a group of people gathered on the block until they are sent scrambling, but the makes and models of the cars are unclear from the grainy footage. The Metropolitan Police Department is offering a reward of up to $10,000 for information that leads to the arrest of those responsible.

Wells also spoke about the effects two nightclubs, Fur and Ibiza, have on a neighborhood that is increasingly being swallowed by the expanding clump of glass-and-steel high-rises known as NoMa. Fur Nightclub, which is about a block away from Tyler House, closed at 2 a.m. on Monday. The gunfire started at 2:07. And while D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said yesterday that there was no known connection between the nightclub and the shooting, Wells is taking a more aggressive line.

"The general impression is that the time is not coincidental," he said. "People gather over here after the clubs close. I'm definitely going to do my best to remove the nightclubs."

Wells wrote on his Twitter account ahead of the appearance that he would be joined by "relevant D.C. agencies." But this announcement went unfulfilled, as Wells was not joined by other representatives of the city government. A spokesman for Mayor Vince Gray dismissed Wells' action today as "grandstanding," according to The Washington Post's Tim Craig. Last month, Wells formed an exploratory committee looking toward next year's mayoral election.

The councilmember's outlook on the nightclubs was shared by Lonnie Duren, the chairman of the Sursum Corda Cooperative neighborhood group. Duren also bemoaned the fact that a Boys and Girls Club at 128 M Street NW is set to close its doors at the end of the month, depriving the neighborhood's youths of a safe and responsible facility.

"This has been an ongoing thing," Venus Little, the president of Tyler House's tenant council, said about violent crimes outside the building. "I'm living it. I'm seeing it. We need some help in regard for people to feel free to come outdoors without being wounded by a gun or a knife."

As for whether the nightclubs played a role, Little seemed hesitant to draw a direct line. "I think it's the people, not the nightclubs," she said.

Tyler House sits on a block that very well represents a visual definition of the the changes that part of D.C. is experiencing. Behind it, North Capitol Street still looks largely as it did when the neighborhood was zoned residential. Just a few blocks south, the skyline is filled with construction cranes raising up flashy new apartment buildings and office towers. Within a few years, the neighborhood, which currently is home to just 3,000, will have as many as 15,000 residents, Wells said.

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Wells: Drive-By Shooting Is City's 'Top Priority'

DC Drive-By Suspects Sought; Concerns About Retaliation

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) -- D.C. Police are still searchingfor the suspects in Monday's drive-by shooting that wounded 13 people in North Capitol.

On Tuesday, a D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells said he's worried about retaliation escalating the violence.

"Oh man, my son, he was crying, Daddy, Daddy," said Darius Day.

Tyler House residents like Darius Day say they're living on edge, worried that this drive-by shooting could lead to more violence.

"Very concerned about any retaliation."

Councilmember Wells came to Tyler House to reassure residents that solving this crime is the city's top priority. But even the Councilmember admits they've got few leads.

"Very impressive how little is known about what happened," he said.

Police spent Tuesday executing search warrants on at least two cars that might have been used in the shooting. But so far, no arrests and no motive.

"We've had a number of car break-ins. We've had a number of robberies and events around the two nightclubs and... I'm definitely going to do my best to remove the nightclubs from this area," Councilmember Wells said.

The nightclubs sit right in the middle of this up and coming NOMA neighborhood. On this side, the North Capitol Street side where Tyler House is located, is where the shooting took place. But on the other side you've got a lot of new development, new residential and office spaces.

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DC Drive-By Suspects Sought; Concerns About Retaliation

Councilmember: Close NoMa nightclubs

WASHINGTON -- A District council member is speaking out after more than a dozen people were injured in a drive-by shooting early Monday morning.

"I'm definitely going to do my best to remove the nightclubs from the area," says Tommy Wells, speaking about the nightclubs Fur and Ibiza.

The clubs are located within a block of where 13 people were injured on North Capitol Street. No one was killed in the incident.

Police have not determined whether the shooting was related to club patrons or whether it involved a dispute between rival neighborhoods. But Wells says regardless, the area has become too residential to support such establishments.

"Releasing 2,000 to 3,000 to 4,000 people between the two clubs at night really does have a major impact on an area that's no longer industrial," he says.

Wells is the chairman of D.C.'s public safety committee.

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Marriage proposal stunt leads to arrests. But did she say "Yes?" (Video)

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Councilmember: Close NoMa nightclubs