Juan Pablo Montoya, of Colombia, prepares for practice for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race, Friday, June 22, 2012, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Juan Pablo Montoya, of Colombia, prepares for practice for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race, Friday, June 22, 2012, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Jamie McMurray, left, talks with his team after practice for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race, Friday, June 22, 2012, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
Driver Jamie McMurray (1) leads Josh Wise during practice for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series auto race Friday, June 22, 2012, in Sonoma, Calif. (AP Photo/Ben Margot)
SONOMA, Calif. (AP) ? It's been a continuous search for consistency at Chip Ganassi Racing, where the NASCAR program has never matched the performance levels of its dominant IndyCar entries.
But there's no bitterness from Juan Pablo Montoya or Jamie McMurray, who have watched from afar as IndyCar counterparts Dario Franchitti and Scott Dixon race for wins and championships every year.
"I don't think we are jealous," McMurray said. "We are happy for those guys."
Franchitti, the four-time IndyCar champion, won his third Indianapolis 500 last month, and Dixon reached Victory Lane a week later at Belle Isle and is currently in the thick of the title race. But they both had to overcome early season struggles, which hasn't been lost on Montoya.
"I laugh because this year has been the hardest year for them for quite a few years, and I am like 'Welcome,' " he said, smiling.
Indeed, welcome to the up-and-down battles that Montoya and McMurray have faced the last several years in Ganassi's NASCAR program. The two head into Sunday's race at Sonoma at just about the halfway mark of another rebuilding year for the organization.
McMurray is 18th in the Sprint Cup Series, Montoya is 19th and combined they have only five top-10 finishes all season. But they say their cars are better, they've had increased speed of late and they are pleased with the direction of the race team.
"I think we've done a lot of progress," Montoya said. "If you really go through the team right now and see how different everything is working, it's pretty amazing. We haven't had the results we want to have, but I think there has been a lot of really good changes and we've been putting people in the right places.
"You want to run better overnight, but things have got to change. Everybody has got to adapt, and it's a process. But I really feel we made a lot of gains with the car and a lot of gains in how the engineering program is working and we definitely have been making progress."
Ganassi and co-owner Felix Sabates had arguably the most aggressive offseason in NASCAR as sweeping changes were made to the organization. Competition director Steve Hmiel and longtime team manager Tony Glover were replaced, and Brian Pattie left the organization at the end of the season after being removed as Montoya's crew chief in late July.
Ganassi brought in Max Jones as general manager, John Probst as technical director and lured Chris Heroy away from Hendrick Motorsports to crew chief Montoya. There has been added personnel, improved engineering and a cohesiveness that was absent last season, when both drivers went winless and failed to contend for spots in the 12-driver Chase for the Sprint Cup championship field.
It was a dramatic drop-off from 2010, when McMurray won three races ? including the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 ? and the drivers were far more competitive.
"It seemed like everything was going in the right direction, and the next year (in 2011) ... we just dropped the ball completely," Montoya said. "Last year was frustrating, it was more about arguing. Once we changed everybody on the team ? it's nice to be here, it's really fun to be here. We have really good people and you know they are working their butts off together to give us better race cars every weekend."
McMurray said there have been times this season when either he or Montoya has one of the fastest cars on the track, but the team is still working on getting both cars clicking at the same time and putting together complete races.
"It gets better every week. We made all those changes in the offseason, and I don't think any of us expected to change all those people around and immediately be where we were in 2010," he said. "The teams are working really well together. The way the team is structured with personnel in the engineering department and the crew chiefs, it's so much better than it was last year.
"It's a completely different environment than what it was a year ago, and it's all for the better. And Chip is still out hiring people and looking for more engineers and more people to make it better than what it is right now. My guess is somewhere around the last 10 races we're going to see a lot of the progress. It takes time."
Still, both think they'll be competitive Sunday at the road course in scenic Sonoma.
Montoya earned his first career victory at Sonoma and has four-top 10 finishes in five starts; McMurray's career-best second-place finish at Sonoma came when he was driving a Ganassi car.
The duo also announced Friday they'll team together to run the inaugural Grand-Am race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in July. They've been teammates the last two years with Dixon and Franchitti for the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona race, but will be a two-driver tandem at the Brickyard.
"I think it's good for our racing relationship to get to go do things like this," McMurray said. "It seems like every year after the Rolex race, we're closer. I think that's really important for the NASCAR side, for us to be closer and want to help each other more. When we go do that race, it seems like it does that automatically.
So, I'm looking forward to getting to go up and do the test and then the race."
HTC might be over selling it a bit with the top secret stamp, and the foot note sort of indicates that your next One device wont be interpreting Fido's barks. So, really, that only leaves one logical conclusion -- HTC is working on a voice control app. It shouldn't come as any surprise if you've been paying any attention to to mobile landscape these past few years. Google kicked off the party with Voice Actions and Apple gave the speech recognition tech some personality with Siri. Now Samsung has S-Voice and LG has Quick Voice... what's a Taiwanese manufacturer to do? Presumably make your own speech-driven virtual assistant. When will it debut, what will it be called? Who knows, but judging from the image above it seems safe to assume that HTC's new tool will be delivered as software update to at least some existing handsets.
Sandia seeks best ways to protect infrastructure, recover from disastersPublic release date: 21-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sue Major Holmes sholmes@sandia.gov 505-844-6362 DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Sandia National Laboratories is expecting the unexpected to help the nation prepare for severe weather and figure out the best ways to lessen the havoc hurricanes and other disasters leave on power grids, bridges, roads and everything else in their path.
"I think our work in critical infrastructure protection is a really great thing to be working on," said Marianne Walck, director of Geoscience Climate and Consequence Effects. She said Sandia can give policymakers the understanding and information they need to make decisions that lead to systems that are better able to absorb impacts and recover quickly, so-called resilient infrastructure.
Walck was part of a panel at the recent American Geophysical Union's inaugural Science Policy Conference that highlighted geoscience insights for the economy, public safety and national security. She discussed how Sandia is developing ways to assess the resiliency of the nation's infrastructure and provide the knowledge officials need to create more resilient systems.
Efforts to analyze natural disasters and other threats grew out of Sandia's strengths in systems engineering and complex systems analysis, Walck said. Some of the work is done through the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. NISAC models and analyzes critical infrastructure, including how interdependent and vulnerable systems may be and the consequences of having them disrupted.
"Given how much of our national and economic security rests on the resiliency of our infrastructure, the rational choice for policymakers is to experiment with models, not the system," said Lori Parrott, manager of Policy and Decision Support Analytics and the NISAC program for Sandia.
Parrott, who was not part of the panel, said Sandia can better quantify the results of such resiliency studies by taking a mathematically rigorous approach to objective assessments. Sandia has developed high-fidelity computer models of individual infrastructure elements as well as generic network models and dynamic simulations. It's part of critical infrastructure protection programs funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), DHS, Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and such agencies as DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Researchers do a risk analysis and quantify uncertainties. They look at interdependencies among systems and supply chains, the resilience of various systems, how infrastructure systems fail, cascading effects and how results might differ if a series of disasters hits instead of just one.
Walck said in an interview before the Science Policy Conference that good models allow analysts to quantify consequences of disruptions in very complex systems. "If you don't have a good model to look at or to exercise in terms of running through these various scenarios, you may not understand what could really happen," she said.
A flood, for example, could damage roads, collapse bridges and take down power lines, so officials have to decide what to rebuild first, how best to rebuild and how much that will cost, she said.
"This isn't just saying, 'Oh, I think that hurricane is going to knock out this particular chemical plant.' You have to think about what that means in terms of getting critical chemicals to industries. What societal or economic effects will result if this particular product isn't supplied? There are lots of different interactions that go on," Walck said. "It's just illuminating to understand what the impacts are if you've got particular types of infrastructure."
Analytic information can better inform policymakers so they can decide how to craft policies, how to promote incentives to create resilient infrastructure or how to prioritize recovery and restoration, Parrott said.
Each year, NISAC undertakes projects analyzing various risks. Given a particular disaster, how could people be evacuated along the roads? How much damage would hurricane-force winds cause to power lines, and would that cause governments to consider requiring underground lines in the future? Then there are rebuilding considerations. Would it be better, for example, to focus on repairing rail transportation routes in a particular area rather than trying to repair all routes simultaneously?
NISAC has developed expertise in analyzing subjects and developing models that cover everything from national transportation to interdependent supply chains. Sandia's long-term analysis projects help keep data, models and analytic expertise current so they're useful for crisis decision support, Parrott said.
NISAC has worked on a number of hurricanes, including Hurricane Irene, the only one to threaten the U.S. mainland last year. Although small compared to other hurricanes, Irene was unusual. Rather than striking a concentrated area, Irene traveled up the East Coast, threatening a large swath of significant infrastructure.
Officials asked NISAC to analyze Irene's likely impacts while the storm moved toward shore and to deliver an analysis in less than 12 hours. NISAC came through, and its analysis was used to brief FEMA and first responders, as well as the DHS and DOE, Walck said.
###
For more information on NISAC, go to http://www.sandia.gov/nisac/.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.
Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362
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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.
Sandia seeks best ways to protect infrastructure, recover from disastersPublic release date: 21-Jun-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Sue Major Holmes sholmes@sandia.gov 505-844-6362 DOE/Sandia National Laboratories
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. Sandia National Laboratories is expecting the unexpected to help the nation prepare for severe weather and figure out the best ways to lessen the havoc hurricanes and other disasters leave on power grids, bridges, roads and everything else in their path.
"I think our work in critical infrastructure protection is a really great thing to be working on," said Marianne Walck, director of Geoscience Climate and Consequence Effects. She said Sandia can give policymakers the understanding and information they need to make decisions that lead to systems that are better able to absorb impacts and recover quickly, so-called resilient infrastructure.
Walck was part of a panel at the recent American Geophysical Union's inaugural Science Policy Conference that highlighted geoscience insights for the economy, public safety and national security. She discussed how Sandia is developing ways to assess the resiliency of the nation's infrastructure and provide the knowledge officials need to create more resilient systems.
Efforts to analyze natural disasters and other threats grew out of Sandia's strengths in systems engineering and complex systems analysis, Walck said. Some of the work is done through the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program jointly housed at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. NISAC models and analyzes critical infrastructure, including how interdependent and vulnerable systems may be and the consequences of having them disrupted.
"Given how much of our national and economic security rests on the resiliency of our infrastructure, the rational choice for policymakers is to experiment with models, not the system," said Lori Parrott, manager of Policy and Decision Support Analytics and the NISAC program for Sandia.
Parrott, who was not part of the panel, said Sandia can better quantify the results of such resiliency studies by taking a mathematically rigorous approach to objective assessments. Sandia has developed high-fidelity computer models of individual infrastructure elements as well as generic network models and dynamic simulations. It's part of critical infrastructure protection programs funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), DHS, Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program and such agencies as DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Researchers do a risk analysis and quantify uncertainties. They look at interdependencies among systems and supply chains, the resilience of various systems, how infrastructure systems fail, cascading effects and how results might differ if a series of disasters hits instead of just one.
Walck said in an interview before the Science Policy Conference that good models allow analysts to quantify consequences of disruptions in very complex systems. "If you don't have a good model to look at or to exercise in terms of running through these various scenarios, you may not understand what could really happen," she said.
A flood, for example, could damage roads, collapse bridges and take down power lines, so officials have to decide what to rebuild first, how best to rebuild and how much that will cost, she said.
"This isn't just saying, 'Oh, I think that hurricane is going to knock out this particular chemical plant.' You have to think about what that means in terms of getting critical chemicals to industries. What societal or economic effects will result if this particular product isn't supplied? There are lots of different interactions that go on," Walck said. "It's just illuminating to understand what the impacts are if you've got particular types of infrastructure."
Analytic information can better inform policymakers so they can decide how to craft policies, how to promote incentives to create resilient infrastructure or how to prioritize recovery and restoration, Parrott said.
Each year, NISAC undertakes projects analyzing various risks. Given a particular disaster, how could people be evacuated along the roads? How much damage would hurricane-force winds cause to power lines, and would that cause governments to consider requiring underground lines in the future? Then there are rebuilding considerations. Would it be better, for example, to focus on repairing rail transportation routes in a particular area rather than trying to repair all routes simultaneously?
NISAC has developed expertise in analyzing subjects and developing models that cover everything from national transportation to interdependent supply chains. Sandia's long-term analysis projects help keep data, models and analytic expertise current so they're useful for crisis decision support, Parrott said.
NISAC has worked on a number of hurricanes, including Hurricane Irene, the only one to threaten the U.S. mainland last year. Although small compared to other hurricanes, Irene was unusual. Rather than striking a concentrated area, Irene traveled up the East Coast, threatening a large swath of significant infrastructure.
Officials asked NISAC to analyze Irene's likely impacts while the storm moved toward shore and to deliver an analysis in less than 12 hours. NISAC came through, and its analysis was used to brief FEMA and first responders, as well as the DHS and DOE, Walck said.
###
For more information on NISAC, go to http://www.sandia.gov/nisac/.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. With main facilities in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif., Sandia has major R&D responsibilities in national security, energy and environmental technologies and economic competitiveness.
Sandia news media contact: Sue Holmes, sholmes@sandia.gov, (505) 844-6362
[ | 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.
Even when he's not having a spectacular meltdown, Charlie Sheen is full of colorful theories. In his new Playboy interview, the actor talks about his belief in ghosts, reveals the origin of "tiger blood" -- and says he was fired from Two and a Half Men for laughing too hard at a Dave Chappelle sketch.
It's an exciting time for football (soccer) fans, as the Euro 2012 is well underway, leading up to the final match on July 1. There are a bunch of iOS apps available that can help you stay on top of the action on iPhone and iPad, but here are some of our favorites.
CHICAGO (AP) ? The Southeastern Conference's Mike Slive says he and his fellow commissioners would like to come out of the latest BCS meetings ready to make a "comprehensive presentation" on a four-team playoff to the university presidents.
Slive, the 10 other major college football conference commissioners and Notre Dame's athletic director are back in Chicago for another round of talks about creating two national semifinals that would lead to a title game.
Before the meetings began Wednesday, Slive told reporters the commissioners don't need to complete a plan for a new postseason before they leave Thursday.
He says: "We'd like to get as far as we need to get to make a comprehensive presentation to our presidents next week."
The BCS Presidential Oversight Committee meets Tuesday in Washington.
Animation filmmaker M dot Strange made it a point to make every minute of his new film 100 percent original. From the visuals and the dialog to composer Endika's accompanying soundtrack, the San Jose, Calif., filmmaker took all the necessary precautions to ensure that Heart String Marionette was coming directly and exclusively from his own devices.
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Public release date: 21-Jun-2012
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