Fairly Simple Math Could Bridge Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity

A framework that relies on college-level mathematics could describe what happens to particles in so-called space-time rips, gravity fluctuations such as those that occur during the birth of a black hole

By Eugenie Samuel Reich and Nature magazine

Image: wylieconlon/Flickr

From Nature magazine.

Could an analysis based on relatively simple calculations point the way to reconciling the two most successful ? and stubbornly distinct ? branches of modern theoretical physics? Frank Wilczek and his collaborators hope so.

The task of aligning quantum mechanics, which deals with the behaviour of fundamental particles, with Einstein?s general theory of relativity, which describes gravity in terms of curved space-time, has proved an enormous challenge. One of the difficulties is that neither is adequate to describe what happens to particles when the space-time they occupy undergoes drastic changes ? such as those thought to occur at the birth of a black hole. But in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on 15?October (A.?D. Shapere et?al. http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3545; 2012), three theoretical physicists present a straightforward way for quantum particles to move smoothly from one kind of ?topological space? to a very different one.

The analysis does not model gravity explicitly, and so is not an attempt to formulate a theory of ?quantum gravity? that brings general relativity and quantum mechanics under one umbrella. Instead, the authors, including Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, suggest that their work might provide a simplified framework for understanding the effects of gravity on quantum particles, as well as describing other situations in which the spaces that quantum particles move in can radically alter, such as in condensed-matter-physics experiments. ?I?m pretty excited,? says Wilczek, ?We have to see how far we can push it.?

The idea is attracting attention not only because of the scope of its possible applications, but because it is based on undergraduate-level mathematics. ?Their paper starts with the most elementary framework,? says Brian Greene, a string theorist at Columbia University in New York. ?It?s inspiring how far they can go with no fancy machinery.?

Wilczek and his co-authors set up a hypothetical system with a single quantum particle moving along a wire that abruptly splits into two. The stripped-down scenario is effectively the one-dimensional version of an encounter with ripped space-time, which occurs when the topology of a space changes radically. The theorists concentrate on what happens at the endpoints of the wire ? setting the ?boundary conditions? for the before and after states of the quantum wave associated with the particle. They then show that the wave can evolve continuously without facing any disruptions as the boundary conditions shift from one geometry to the other, incompatible one. ?You can smoothly follow this process,? says Al Shapere at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, a co-author on the paper, adding that, like a magician?s rings, the transformation is impossible to visualize, but does make mathematical sense.

The desire to escape the mathematical headaches caused by such transformations is one motivation for string theory, which allows smooth changes in the topology of space-time, says Greene. He suggests that the approach developed by Wilczek, Shapere and MIT undergraduate student Zhaoxi Xiong could be applied within string theory too.

Although Wilczek originally believed that the result was new, a 1995 paper by Aiyalam Balachandran of Syracuse University in New York proposed a similar strategy for describing changes in topology in quantum mechanics (A. P. Balachandran et al. Nucl. Phys. B 446, 299?314; 1995). Balachandran acknowledges that his work hasn?t hit the mainstream and says that he hopes Wilczek?s paper will prompt others to take a closer look. ?Conventional approaches to this problem don?t get very far,? he says. ?This opens up a new technique.?

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=bc197e209bfbbd53a937770ef0d7d1f5

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Australia's Sermanni hired as new US women's coach

FILE - In this July 6, 2011, file photo, Australia head coach Tom Sermanni smiles prior to their group D match against Norway at the Women?s Soccer World Cup in Leverkusen, Germany. Sermanni was hired Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012, to replace Pia Sundhage, who led the United States women's soccer team to back-to-back Olympic gold medals and their first World Cup final in 12 years. Sermanni has spent the last eight years as Australia's coach, taking the Matildas to the quarterfinals of the last two Women's World Cups. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - In this July 6, 2011, file photo, Australia head coach Tom Sermanni smiles prior to their group D match against Norway at the Women?s Soccer World Cup in Leverkusen, Germany. Sermanni was hired Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012, to replace Pia Sundhage, who led the United States women's soccer team to back-to-back Olympic gold medals and their first World Cup final in 12 years. Sermanni has spent the last eight years as Australia's coach, taking the Matildas to the quarterfinals of the last two Women's World Cups. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

CHICAGO (AP) ? When Tom Sermanni shook hands with Pia Sundhage after her last game as coach of the U.S. women's soccer team, he should have asked her for a few tips.

Sermanni was hired Tuesday to replace Sundhage, who led the Americans to back-to-back Olympic gold medals and their first World Cup final in 12 years. Sermanni has spent the last eight years as Australia's coach, taking the Matildas to the quarterfinals of the last two Women's World Cups.

"He has the knowledge, experience and vision to take on the challenge of keeping our team at the top of the world," U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati said in a statement. "He has a tremendous passion for the game, knows the American players, understands our system and knows the process of preparing a team for a World Cup tournament."

Sermanni, a 58-year-old originally from Glasgow, Scotland, has spent much of the last 20 years in Australia, where he is credited with transforming the Matildas into one of the world's top programs. In addition to their quarterfinal appearances at the 2007 and 2011 World Cups, the young Australians won the 2010 Asian Women's Cup. Their runner-up finish at the same tournament in 2006 earned Sermanni Asian Football Confederation coach of the year honors.

The Australians are ninth in the world, matching their highest ranking.

Sermanni also coached Australia from 1994-97, leading the Matildas to their first appearance in a World Cup, the 1995 tournament in Sweden. He was among 10 candidates for FIFA's 2011 Women's Coach of the Year.

"Tom's legacy for Women's Football in Australia will be felt for many years to come as he has helped transform our women's national team to a very professional and competitive group of players," Ben Buckley, CEO of Football Federation Australia, said in a statement. "Tom will always be considered a close friend of Australian football no matter where he is in the world."

Sermanni was selected after a five-person search committee, which included Mia Hamm, considered more than 30 candidates. The current U.S. players said they didn't care whether the new coach was male or female, American or foreign-born, so long as the right coach was selected.

The coaches of both U.S. national teams are foreign-born, with German-born Jurgen Klinsmann, a longtime California resident, coaching the men.

"Someone who's good enough, that's all I care about," Abby Wambach said earlier this month. "Be the person who brings the World Cup back."

Sundhage was 91-6-10 in her five years with the Americans, including a 23-1-1 record this year, and the U.S. was ranked No. 1 in the world for most of her tenure. She resigned Sept. 1 to return to her native Sweden, where she is now the women's national team coach.

"We need a strong person to come in and add to the history that this team, specifically, has created in the last two years," Wambach said. "... This team is scary good, and we need to have someone who can put all the Xs and Os together."

After Sermanni's hiring was announced, Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan and Wambach welcomed him via Twitter.

"really pumped about (at)TomSermanni being the new uswnt head coach!!! Welcome. (hashtag)movingforward," Wambach said.

Sermanni has experience coaching young players, which will be key as the U.S. begins integrating its next generation. Though veterans like Wambach, captain Christie Rampone and Shannon Boxx have all talked of playing through the 2015 World Cup in Canada, the next major tournament, there is plenty of depth and talent at the lower levels, too. The U-20 team just won the World Cup, and the U-23 team won both tournaments it played this year.

Sundhage had also begun changing the Americans' style of play. As the game evolves and improves around the world, relying on the advantages it has in size, speed and power is no longer enough for the U.S. Sundhage introduced a Barcelona-style attack that relied on creativity and ball possession, and Sermanni will have to decide whether to continue that or not.

"U.S. Soccer has always been at the forefront of supporting the women's game, and it's exciting to coach the team in this next chapter of its history," Sermanni said. "After coaching against many of these players for years, I am looking forward to working with an accomplished group of veterans while integrating the numerous talented young players who are itching for a chance to prove themselves.

"I'm honored to have this opportunity to work with tremendous players and in a program that has had such a tradition of success," he added.

Sermanni does not take over officially until Jan. 1, and will coach Australia in the East Asian Cup Qualification tournament from Nov. 20-24 in Shenzen, China. Interim coach Jill Ellis will lead the Americans in exhibitions against Ireland on Nov. 28 in Portland, Ore., and on Dec. 1 in Glendale, Ariz., as well as three games that have yet to be announced.

A midfielder, Sermanni played professionally from 1971-89 at clubs in Scotland, England, Australia and New Zealand, including Blackpool and Torquay, and scored more than 50 goals. He got into coaching soon after, and has had stints as both a men's and women's coach in Japan, the U.S. and Malaysia, in addition to Australia.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2012-10-30-US%20Women-Sermanni/id-580af4064cff4c7a9a5a94356e4e8762

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EURid, UNESCO to present report on IDNs | New Europe

The success of the .?? landrush highlights the impact of user education and marketing on public demand.

The .eu registry EURid and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) will present on 6 November a report on the global uptake of Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs).

The study is planned to go out at the 7th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan and it will present updates to the report published in 2011 on the global use of Internationalised domain names which support non-Latin scripts and multilingualism online.

IDNs* have become strongly linked with Internet governance discussions on multilingualism. Of approximately 6 000 languages in the world, only 12 languages accounted for 98% of Internet web pages in 2008, while, according to UNESCO data, English was the dominant language online with 72% of web pages.

According to last year?s joint report, the introduction of IDNs in the Internet root domain was an important milestone in the development of multilingualism on the Internet, especially for non-Latin scripts, including Arabic and Cyrillic.

In addition, the study concluded that IDNs were only one factor in achieving a multilingual Internet, but there was what more to be done to achieve this aim, including securing basic Internet access for the majority of the world?s population, as well as strengthening the environment for creating local language content.

Furthermore, the links between IDN registrations and local languages were classified as ?strong?, as for example the intensity of .eu IDN registrations in Greece (Greek script) and Bulgaria (Cyrillic script).

Last but not least, it was suggested that implementation of key services like email would further benefit uptake, making IDNs fully useable.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that by 2016 around 50% of the world population is expected to be also internet users, the threats associated with growth of domain names increase. Among the most common threats associated with growth of domain names include phishing, counterfeiting and digital piracy.

Interest towards domain names is definitely growing with every single year. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) for example published in June this year a list containing more than 1 900 new domain name suggestions. Out of the 1 900 new suggestions, only 166 were of non-Latin scripts.

*Internationalised Domain Names are domain names that contain non-ASCII characters. These characters include, for example, the Swedish ?, the German ?, the Romanian ? and characters from the Bulgarian and Greek alphabets as a whole.

Source: http://www.neurope.eu/article/eurid-unesco-present-report-idns

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Why Scott Forstall Is Out - Business Insider

Scott Forstall, the executive at Apple who led development of its mobile software, iOS, is leaving the company.

While Apple just announced the news, there are already multiple reports leaking the real reasons why he's gone.

In short, Forstall's abrasive personality combined with a series of high-profile errors seem to have done him in.

Jessica Lessin at The Wall Street Journal says Forstall's departure from Apple was "not his decision." She also says he was clashing with Apple executives recently.?

Forstall has long been reported to be a divisive figure inside Apple. A year ago Bloomberg BusinessWeek wrote a profile of Forstall, and our main takeaway was: Forstall is a polarizing, political, "a-hole," who has forced out a number of Apple's executives because they hated working with him. He's also a hard-working genius, and a mini-Steve Jobs.

He reportedly had a "fraught" relationship with hardware designer Jony Ive and hardware engineering boss Bob Mansfield. He couldn't be in a room with those guys unless Tim Cook was on hand to mediate. This is probably why it's no coincidence that Mansfield and Ive are getting new responsibilities while Forstall is on his way out.

Forstall was also reportedly the driving force behind the departure of two Apple executives in the middle of last decade: Tony Fadell, who led the iPod group, and Jean-Marie Hullot, who was CTO of the applications group in 2005.

To that end, Ryan Block at Gdgt says Forstall was trying to gather power after Steve Jobs died. If he had pushed out executives in the past, there's a good chance he would do so again. CEO Tim Cook probably wanted to stop that before it started.

Forstall's departure is a stunner because he was referred to as the CEO-in-waiting at Apple last year by Fortune. However, that sort of high profile was not sitting well with people at Apple. Kara Swisher at AllThingsD says he was "exhibiting 'growing open challenges'" to Cook.

Steve Jobs was close with Forstall, says John Gruber. And despite Forstall's abrasive personality, he was protected by Jobs, Gruber speculates. With Jobs gone, Forstall didn't have a powerful defender.

Putting the personality problems aside, Forstall was failing to do his job. And for that alone, it makes sense for him to be ousted.

While he did a brilliant job building iOS on top of the core technologies behind Apple's operating system for Macs, he has overseen two major failures in the last two years. Siri was a big letdown, and Forstall led its development. The launch of Apple's homegrown maps has been an epic debacle. Cook was forced to apologize to customers and Apple is scrambling to clean up the mess.

Fortune's Adam Lashinsky reports?that?"Forstall refused to sign the letter apologizing for the mapping fiasco, sealing his fate at Apple."

Aside from those high-profile screwups, iOS's development has slowed down. While Google and Microsoft are adding new features, iOS seems to be stuck in neutral with only incremental upgrades. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Why add features just for the sake of it?

However, Lessin at the WSJ says Forstall was emailing Apple employees concerned that "the group wasn't working on enough big ideas in mobile software."

And Robert Scoble, who is plugged into the tech scene heard something similar?though his sources had a different take on it:?"I hear from inside Apple that Scott had no ideas and was begging employees to send him ideas for what to do. He had to go and the signal has been sent that if you are at the top at Apple and have no ideas, you won't survive."

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-scott-forstall-is-out-2012-10

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Microsoft?s Antoine Leblond: Windows 8 Will Have More Apps In Its Store Than Any Other Platform Had At Launch

There's been a lot of chatter about the amount of apps in the Windows Store ahead of this week's Windows 8 launch. Earlier today, I had a chance to sit down with Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows Web Services Antoine Leblond to discuss the current state of the Windows Store and the new developer ecosystem

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/uNQiEKREFVo/

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Sports Roundup: field hockey; football ? Williston Observer

Field hockey in quarterfinals Friday

The Champlain Valley Union High School field hockey team will face off against second-seeded Essex High School on Friday at 3:30 p.m.

On Tuesday, the Redhawks?seeded at number seven with a 6-6-2 record?won their first playoff game against 10th-seeded Colchester High School.

If the Redhakws win Friday?s gam?set for 3:30 p.m. at Essex?they will head to the semifinal match on Tuesday.

On Oct. 18, CVU narrowly lost its last regular season game against Burlington 0-1.

?Observer staff report

?

Football heads to BFA-St. Albans

The Champlain Valley Union High School football team will head to Bellows Free Academy-St. Albans on Friday night for its first round of playoff games.

The last time the two teams met, BFA defeated the Redhawks 14-28, though many of CVU?s key players sat that game out due to injuries.

On Oct. 19, the Middlebury High School defeated the CVU 7-35 in the last game of the regular season. The Redhawks finished with a record of 5-3.

?Observer staff report

Source: http://www.willistonobserver.com/sports-roundup-field-hockey-football/

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Targacept to cut 38 percent jobs after ADHD drug failure

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The Reference Frame: ATLAS: some small multijet excesses

Well, multijets with 1 lepton and MET

All the observations at the LHC are so far consistent with the Standard Model, including the \((125.7\pm 0.5)\GeV\) Higgs boson. Well, kind of. There are some possibly emerging hints of deviations.

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Multilepton and multijet excesses belong among the "so far small anomalies" that people like me carefully watch. And ATLAS just gave us a new reason to watch multijets today because they released the following preprint:

Search for supersymmetry at \(\sqrt{s} = 7\TeV\) in ?nal states with large jet multiplicity, missing transverse momentum and one isolated lepton with the ATLAS detector

The paper officially announces that the analysis based on the 2011 dataset is consistent with the Standard Model. However, the consistency isn't as good as you may be expecting. The data are actually pretty interesting.

Well, most figures (including Figures 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) show some excesses ? getting somewhat close to 2 sigma. Let's look at Figure 6, for example.

You see that the region beneath the thick crimson curve was excluded ? but one actually expected to exclude a larger region, up to the dashed blue line above it. They're within 1+ theoretical sigma away from each other. Still, the decrease of the crimson full curve in the middle of the graph looks somewhat steep ? as if the exclusion curve were trying to avoid the point\[

m_0=1,500\GeV,\quad m_{1/2}=300\GeV

\] or a nearby point. I want to suggest to the optimistic reader that MSUGRA/cMSSM with these parameters could have something to do with the reality.

If you look at previous TRF blog entries on multijets and multileptons, you will see that the multilepton remarks dominate. However, you will discover a multijet CMS excess although it was based on the tiny 2010 dataset only.

Nanopoulos et al. have actually been somewhat excited about the 9-jet signals as a possible sign of their favorite "aromatic" \({\mathcal F}-SU(5)\) model.

There's obviously no smoking fun in the new ATLAS paper based on the 2011 data but if the excesses are real, then the collisions that have already been recorded should be enough for a 4-sigma bump or so.

Sometimes in November, at the Kyoto conference, Incandela of CMS promised a "small package of updates". However, both CMS and ATLAS probably only plan to release fully updated analyses with the whole 2012 dataset sometime in 2013.

Stay tuned. ;-)

Source: http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/10/atlas-some-small-multijet-excesses.html

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Britain's gas supply prey to Qatar marketing strategy

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain is in danger of suffering a long-term loss of liquefied natural gas (LNG) supply as top exporter Qatar sends only left-over short-term deliveries to the UK while more and more of its LNG goes to higher paying Asian customers.

Analysts and British energy companies say the strategy rewards Qatar but puts Britain at a significant disadvantage.

Britain depends increasingly on Qatar to plug a growing energy supply deficit but has so far failed to receive a supply guarantee from the Gulf producer.

Instead, Qatar is trying to lock the majority of its gas into the Asian market through signing long-term supply deals with customers in Japan, South Korea and emerging markets like China and India, where gas demand is rising fast and prices are higher.

Qatari shipments provided a quarter of Britain's gas needs last year.

Supplying unattractively priced British markets currently works to Qatar's advantage as it withholds gas from Asia and keeps prices in target markets like Japan and South Korea high, just as long-term contracts are being negotiated.

But the lack of binding supply agreements means that a sudden rise in Asian demand could leave Britain short of much needed LNG imports.

"The UK's security of supply is not as good as previously thought," Niall Trimble, director of the Energy Contract Company said.

Fearing a sudden LNG supply disruption, especially during the high demand winter heating season, the British government is closely monitoring Qatari LNG flows, sources close to the matter said.

"This is compounded by the fact that we are the only importer on the planet without guaranteed supplies of LNG, so if there is another Fukushima-style event, it's our supply that would be hit," Trimble added.

The crisis at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant in March last year and resultant idling of the country's nuclear power plant fleet spurred record imports of substitute fuels like LNG, with many cargoes diverted away from markets in Europe.

"Preliminary estimates for the first half of 2012 suggest that LNG imports in Europe were down a quarter compared to the same period of 2011, with the UK reduction close to 43 percent," energy consultants Wood Mackenzie said in a research report.

"European LNG imports peaked in 2011 and will decline through the medium term," it added.

British government documents seen by Reuters show that Qatari officials have repeatedly resisted calls to guarantee shipments, preferring instead to decide deliveries based on strategic objectives and market conditions.

"The draft agreement presented by the Qataris is not acceptable to Centrica - the cargos could be fully diverted, and price is high, and the contract duration (3 years) too short," the document says.

The details of a three-year, two billion pound ($3.23 billion) gas supply deal between British utility Centrica and Qatar signed in 2011 show that up to a quarter of Britain's gas may be diverted at Qatar's behest, according to briefing documents prepared for former UK energy minister Charles Hendry and supplied to Reuters by Greenpeace.

It also shows that Centrica failed to lure the gas-rich Gulf state into an initially proposed 20-year supply agreement worth 30 billion pounds.

LOOKING EAST

LNG exporters have largely set their sights on an Asian future as European gas demand is set to stagnate as a result of slow economic growth and low increases in population while there are plentiful pipeline supplies from Russia, Norway and North Africa.

"With Qatar now producing at full capacity, attention has turned to increasing market share in Asia," Wood Mackenzie said, adding that several long-term supply contracts with Asian partners had been signed with Qatar this year.

Because Qatar is producing at full capacity and has set a moratorium on expanding its export terminals, these new long-term supply deals mean that less Qatari gas will be available to be sent to Britain during a time when global gas markets are expected to tighten.

Some British officials have set their hopes on LNG exports from the United States, where a shale gas exploration boom in recent years has opened up vast new reserves that U.S. companies hope to export from 2015.

But analysts say that U.S. LNG exports are likely to be capped in order to guarantee domestically low energy prices, and that most U.S. LNG exports would likely flow to Asia, where prices are expected to remain higher for the foreseeable future.

Despite this risk, it is unlikely that Qatar will completely stop sending LNG tankers to Britain.

"It is not physically possible for Qatar to divert everything to Asia since its large vessel sizes are not compatible with many ports," an executive at Centrica said, ensuring that the UK continues received deliveries.

Additionally, Qatar holds significant LNG import assets in Britain, owning the South Hook terminal in the Welsh port of Milford Haven, and letting it sit idle would delay returns on investment for Qatar.

The Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey also defended Britain's handling of its gas supplies.

"The great strength of the UK's liberalised gas market is that it has the ability, through market means, to attract gas shipments as and when they are required," he told Reuters earlier this year.

So while Britain's chances of losing all its LNG supply to Asia for good appear slim for now, the threat hanging over Europe's biggest gas market is the prospect of large-scale periodic disruptions, which could cause sharp rallies, especially during peak-demand periods like winter. ($1 = 0.6186 British pounds)

(Editing by William Hardy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/britains-gas-supply-prey-qatar-marketing-strategy-130435774.html

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NY AG sues JPMorgan over Bear Stearns securities

NEW YORK (AP) ? The New York attorney general's office has hit JPMorgan Chase & Co. with a civil lawsuit, alleging that investment bank Bear Stearns ? prior to its collapse and subsequent sale to JPMorgan in 2008 ? perpetrated massive fraud in deals involving billions in residential mortgage-backed securities.

The lawsuit is the first to be filed under the auspices of the RMBS Working Group, which was set up by President Barack Obama to investigate and prosecute alleged misconduct that contributed to the financial crisis.

New York-based JPMorgan said it intends to contest the allegations. Spokesman Joseph Evangelisti noted that the lawsuit relates solely to alleged actions by Bear Stearns prior to its takeover by JPMorgan in May 2008.

In the lead-up to the financial crisis, subprime mortgages were sold to people with less-than-ideal credit. Many of them defaulted on their loans when the housing bubble burst and their introductory "teaser" interest rates skyrocketed.

Because many of those mortgages had been sliced and repackaged as securities that could be bought and sold ? known as RMBS ? the mass defaults led to huge losses at large U.S. banks and other financial firms, helping fuel the global economic meltdown.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman is alleging that Bear Stearns led its investors to believe that the loans in its RMBS portfolio had been carefully evaluated and would be continuously monitored. Bear Stearns failed to do either, resulting in investors buying securities backed by mortgages that borrowers couldn't repay and defaulted on in huge numbers, Schneiderman alleges.

The complaint further alleges that even when Bear Stearns executives were made aware of the problems, the firm failed to correct its practices or disclose material information to investors. The executives routinely overlooked negative findings and continued to package the loans into securities for sale to investors, it says.

Investors have so far lost $22.5 billion on more than 100 subprime securities that Bear Stearns issued in 2006 and 2007, according to the complaint. That's over one-quarter of the original principal balance of $87 billion. The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief, damages and payment of restitution to investors for "fraudulent and deceptive acts."

"We're disappointed that the NYAG decided to pursue its civil action without ever offering us an opportunity to rebut the claims and without developing a full record ? instead relying on recycled claims already made by private plaintiffs," JPMorgan's Evangelisti said in a statement.

"We will nonetheless continue to work with members of the president's RMBS Working Group and are fully cooperating with their inquiries," he added.

Bear Stearns teetered on the verge of bankruptcy in early 2008 after its two hedge funds imploded, costing investors $1.8 billion and kicking off the domino effect that led to the 85-year-old bank's demise. With the backing of the New York Federal Reserve, JPMorgan bought the ailing investment bank for about $2.3 billion.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-10-01-JPMorgan-NY%20AG%20Lawsuit/id-79abc1bf96e44755ba8420d1d40c4bb7

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Playoff scramble: Chaos, confusion are kinda fun

Baltimore Orioles right fielder Nick Markakis, left, and manager Buck Showalter watch a baseball game between the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels on a center field scoreboard after beating Boston Red Sox 6-3 in Baltimore, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2012. If the Angels had lost, Baltimore would have clinched its first playoff berth since 1997. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Baltimore Orioles right fielder Nick Markakis, left, and manager Buck Showalter watch a baseball game between the Texas Rangers and Los Angeles Angels on a center field scoreboard after beating Boston Red Sox 6-3 in Baltimore, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2012. If the Angels had lost, Baltimore would have clinched its first playoff berth since 1997. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Texas Rangers' Mike Napoli, right, celebrates his home run with Mitch Moreland (18) during the third inning of the second baseball game of a doubleheader against the Los Angeles Angels, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2012, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Texas Rangers fans hold signs for relief pitcher Koji Uehara, of Japan, during the second baseball game of a doubleheader against the Los Angeles Angels, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2012, in Arlington, Texas. The Rangers won 8-7. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The Texas Rangers are set for the playoffs, eager to break out the bats, balls and gloves for really big games.

Maybe they should log on to MapQuest, Hotels.com and Travelocity, too.

Because with three days left on the schedule, the postseason picture is still impossibly scrambled. An October free-for-fall, with not a single team yet certain of when, who and where it will play later this week.

Seven of the 10 playoff spots have been filled. Texas took care of three clubs Sunday ? its win over the Angels assuring the Rangers, Orioles and Yankees of postseason slots.

The only in-or-out race is in the AL Central, where Detroit has a magic number of one for eliminating the Chicago White Sox. Not so clear is which clubs will be division champs and which will be wild cards.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-10-01-Playoff%20Jumble/id-ffa53cbaab304381a62f8448f8fb8d06

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