Attorney: Zimmerman should be released again

As NBC's Kerry Sanders reports, George Zimmerman's legal team says newly-released video of Trayvon Martin's killer re-enacting the shooting with investigators helps support their claim of self-defense.

By msnbc.com staff and news services

George Zimmerman, charged with second-degree murder in the killing of black teen Trayvon Martin, poses no threat to the community and should be released a second time on bail, his attorney said in a court motion released on Monday.

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Defense attorney Mark O?Mara asked that Zimmerman be granted bond as he awaits a trial in the 17-year-old Martin's shooting death during a confrontation in February in a gated community in Sanford, Fla. O?Mara says Zimmerman isn't a flight risk and stayed in touch with law enforcement during his initial release on bail.

A judge will consider the request at a second bond hearing Friday.

Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense.

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Zimmerman recounts shooting Martin in vivid detail

The neighborhood watch volunteer was granted a $150,000 bond in April but it was revoked earlier this month after prosecutors accused Zimmerman and his wife of misleading the court about how much money they had raised from donations to a website created by Zimmerman. Prosecutors say the couple?had raised at least $135,000 from the website.

During the hearing, Zimmerman's wife, Shellie, testified that the couple had limited funds to use for bail since she was a fulltime nursing student and he wasn't working. Zimmerman did nothing to correct her as she testified by telephone due to safety concerns. Prosecutors say jailhouse calls between Zimmerman and his wife a few days before the hearing show the neighborhood watch volunteer instructing his wife on how to transfer funds raised by the website to her account.

Zimmerman's wife, Shellie, was later charged with making a false statement.

"Mr. Zimmerman's failure to advise the court of the existence of the donated funds at the initial bail hearing was wrong and Mr. Zimmerman accepts responsibility for his part in allowing the court to be misled as to his true financial circumstances," O'Mara wrote in the motion.

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O'Mara also will ask Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester to reconsider his decision to make public all of Zimmerman's jailhouse calls and the statement of an unnamed witness. O'Mara said most of the calls aren't subject to the state's public records laws and the witness statement is irrelevant and could prejudice a potential jury.

Attorneys for two sets of media groups, one of which includes NBC Universal (msnbc.com is a joint venture of NBC and Microsoft), filed motions Monday arguing there was no need for the judge to reconsider his decision.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Employment - Wisconsin.gov - Employment - Job Seeker - Detail Page

Job Details ? Marian University ? Job Title Preschool Teacher? ? H.R. Contact Lisa Zedler? ? Contact Phone (920)923-8081 ? Job Description Marian University invites applications for a part-time preschool teacher to serve as a teaching member with the Teacher/Director in the Early Childhood Center. This is a nine-month position at 60% time.? ? Qualifications Bachelor?s degree. DPI certification in Early Childhood Education, Elementary or Special Education. (If certification is not in Early Childhood Education, transcripts will be evaluated for related courses that meet the education requirements for Center accreditation.)? ? Requirements Must be a minimum of twenty-one years of age. Experience of 80 working days as a full-time child care teacher or assistant child care teacher or 120 working days as a half-time worker or volunteer in a licensed day care center, a kindergarten or an early childhood program approved by the department. Willingness to support the Mission and Core Values of the University.? ? How to Apply Submit a letter of application, resume and name, address, and telephone number of three references to: Mail: Human Resources, Marian University, 45 S. National Avenue, Fond du Lac, WI 54935 E-mail: muapplicants@marianuniversity.edu FAX:(920) 923-7658 For more information see: www.marianuniversity.edu Review of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. Transforming lives through academic excellence, innovation and leadership. Marian University is a community committed to learning, dedicated to service and social justice and joined together by spiritual traditions EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER Strongly Committed to Diversity Any offer of employment will be contingent upon the receipt of criminal background and reference check information; and the determination that the candidate remains eligible and suitable for employment. ? ? Employer Marian University 45 S. National Avenue Fond du Lac, WI 54935? ? Job Address Same as the employer address. ? Website http://www.marianuniversity.edu ? ? Description Marian University is a Catholic university in the Agnesian tradition. Founded in 1936 by the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes and based in Fond du Lac, Wis., the University lives its core values as a community committed to learning, dedicated to service and social justice, and joined together by spiritual traditions. An applied liberal arts institution, Marian offers more than 50 undergraduate and graduate programs at its main campus and a variety of adult accelerated, master?s and doctoral degree programs in facilities throughout Wisconsin. The size of the university permits a very favorable student-faculty ratio, one of the lowest among Wisconsin campuses. Marian?s programs are designed to meet a full range of pre-professional and professional academic needs, including business, education, the arts, sciences, nursing and criminal justice.? ? ?

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Is Venture Capital Broken? - Scott Anthony - Harvard Business Review

12:21 PM Thursday June 7, 2012 ?|?Comments

A recent report by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation raises serious questions about the degree to which venture capital deserves emulation.

The report, provocatively titled "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us" [PDF], summarizes its findings thus:

Limited Partners ? foundations, endowments, and state pension funds ? invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently misaligned terms. Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias.

One of those narrative fallacies relates to the most basic thing that investors care about: results. Most of the funds in which Kauffman invested failed to beat public market indices, despite the higher-risk nature of their work. Kauffman found that larger funds in particular provided disappointing returns.

Kauffman didn't say it was opting out of venture capital. Rather, it plans to seek smaller funds, shift some of its money towards public equities, and co-invest in later-round deals with seasoned investors. It also called on investors to work to better align investor and venture capitalist incentives.

Within Innosight, where I lead venture investing, the report led to an invigorating debate about the industry. We debated two possible stories behind some of the report's statistics.

The first story relates to plain old-fashioned competition. Over the past decades, foundations, pensions, and other investors have poured money into venture capital, particularly in the United States. The number of funds has exploded. If one assumes that the number of great startup ideas is relatively stable at any given time (a contentious but simplifying assumption), increased supply has to decrease returns. A result that is exacerbated by the simultaneous decrease in the cost of innovation and the rise of new approaches, like Y Combinator's systematic incubation factory, Kickstarter's crowd-funding platform, and super angels like Ron Conway. Barriers to entry are decreasing and disruptive entrants are surging, a recipe that both Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen could agree augurs poorly for industry returns.

The alternative and potentially more troubling story is that the venture capital approach is fundamentally flawed. The industry has unquestionably helped to support the formation of world-changing companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, Facebook, and countless others. Yet over the past decades, venture capitalists have shown signs, despite all their experience and skills, that they've gotten better at what they do.

Maybe that's just the way it is. You can't know ex-ante which idea is the right one. If that's the case, though, it would be far better to simple spur more Y-Combinator-like incubators that follow the Steve Blank gospel of getting out of the building and iterating to discover product/market fit.

A related possibility is that a majority of venture capitalists use flawed theories of startup success. Clayton Christensen likes to describe how, in the early stage of theory development, people make predictions based on observed correlations. For example, people observed that things that flew had feathers. So people hoping to fly created large feathered wings. More advanced theories pinpoint causal mechanisms. For flight, that was Bernoulli's Principle, a theory that explained the concept of lift and why modern aircraft are not covered in feathers.

Much of the venture capital industry seems stuck in the feathers-and-wings stage of theory development. Many successful venture capitalists observe directional patterns. "Every time I have succeeded," they might think, "I've backed an 'A team,' that has targeted a hot market space." There's no doubt that's true, but that is a statement of correlation, not causality. Even worse, the narrative fallacy means that people are likely to construct stories about the past that might not have been precisely true, making future predictions even more dubious.

Google Ventures is an intriguing example of a venture organization putting more science behind its correlative analysis. As detailed in a recent Fast Company article, it has a team of statisticians crunching data to determine patterns of success in startups. For example, its team found the perceived wisdom that failure is beneficial isn't backed by data. Almost 30% of businesses founded by someone who had succeeded once succeed again, versus 15% of businesses founded by someone who failed once.

The Google Ventures approach has its limits. Without understanding why a pattern exists, making reliably accurate predictions is hard, at best. This is where good business theory comes in. Work by Christensen and other innovation thought leaders has built a body of theory about why certain ideas succeed and others fail. Other academics, in particular Noam Wasserman at the Harvard Business School, have provided useful theories to inform the critical choices facing entrepreneurs.

It's not hard to see the venture capital industry trifurcating. There will always be top-tier firms who give their seal of approval to a select group of startups. Expect to see continued growth among incubators that support fast-cycle iteration. And in between, look for a rise of companies that take the Google Ventures approach even further to approach the funding of startup companies scientifically. The rest? Well, Darwin has a way of working out such problems.

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Google shows off new backpack-worn Street View capture tool, may eventually rent them out

It looks like Google's Street View will soon be expanding to even more places than it already covers. The company has today taken the wraps off a brand new capture tool it's dubbed the Street View Trekker, which can be worn on a person's back in order to map and photograph areas that are too difficult for even a bicycle or snowmobile to reach. Naturally, it's Android-powered, and it packs two batteries that Google says will last a full day -- although its 40-pound weight will likely necessitate a few breaks during that time. No word on when we'll see the first results from it, but Google intends to take to National Parks, the Grand Canyon, castles, ruins, and more -- even the ski slopes, as seen in another picture after the break.

Update: We just spoke with Luc Vincent more in-depth about the new backpack, and what we learned is after the break.

Gallery: Google Street View Backpack hands-on

Continue reading Google shows off new backpack-worn Street View capture tool, may eventually rent them out

Google shows off new backpack-worn Street View capture tool, may eventually rent them out originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jun 2012 13:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook App Center for mobile leaks out on iOS, uses peer pressure to clinch the sale

While Facebook said it would deliver a version of its App Center store for mobile, it was shy on how that would work. An early iOS tester (since confirmed by TechCrunch) apparently didn't want to wait for an official explanation and slipped out a handful of shots: they show a mobile-optimized store that will look familiar to anyone who's picked up an iPhone or an Android phone in the past few years, but with an appropriately social bent. Friends' recommendations come front and center, and are so prominent that they take precedence over the app description; we're wondering if Facebook isn't pressuring us into downloading apps like it's a schoolyard dare. Facebook is still reluctant to say when App Center will hit pint-size proportions for everyone, though the largely complete-looking test version gives us hope for a quicker launch.

Facebook App Center for mobile leaks out on iOS, uses peer pressure to clinch the sale originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jun 2012 16:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What $40,000 gets you in presidential fundraising

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? If you have $40,000 to spend, President Barack Obama's campaign has a deal for you.

Write a big check, and you'll get you a picture with the president and a chance to swap political strategy with him ? all while enjoying a gourmet meal at the lavish home of a Hollywood celebrity or Wall Street tycoon. And if you get the campaign even more money, you might just end up with a plum post as a U.S. ambassador or an invitation to an exclusive White House state dinner.

Obama not your preference? No problem. Mitt Romney is offering donors perks that include everything from a private dinner with him to seats at the fall debates.

Welcome to the world of high-dollar presidential campaign fundraising.

Five months before the November election, both candidates are stacking their schedules with big-money fundraising events from coast to coast as they look to stockpile cash for the height of the campaign. On Wednesday, Romney was courting donors in Texas while Obama was holding four fundraisers in California that were expected to yield at least $4.6 million.

Access to the most exclusive Obama events usually sets donors back a cool $40,000. That means the upper limits of campaign fundraising are reserved for a privileged few, given that the median household income in the U.S. was $49,445 in 2010, according to the Census Bureau.

Some donors who paid the pricey tab for access to Obama fundraisers this year have been seated at exclusive dinners at the Los Angeles home of actor George Clooney or the New York townhouse of billionaire hedge-fund owner Marc Lasry. Next week, actress Sarah Jessica Parker will host a fundraiser with the president and Michelle Obama at her Manhattan home.

The president typically kicks off the high-dollar events with a version of his standard campaign speech. But the big perk for donors is the private question-and-answer session that follows. Sometimes the president grabs a microphone and fields questions from the center of the room; other times, he hops from table to table to hold small group discussions with his top fundraisers.

And of course, there's a chance to take a picture with the president.

While the press corps traveling with Obama usually is present for his opening remarks, the campaign kicks reporters out of the room before he starts taking questions.

Republicans have hammered him for attending glitzy, celebrity-filled fundraisers while the economy is still struggling to fully rebound from recession. But the White House says wealthy donors are not the core of Obama's support.

"President Obama has vast numbers of small donors who support his campaign," spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday. "The fact that the president enjoys that kind of support speaks to what his policies are. He's out there fighting for the middle class."

The Obama campaign has held dozens of fundraising events where tickets run less than $40,000. But smaller donations come with fewer perks and far less direct engagement with the president.

In San Francisco on Wednesday, a $5,000 contribution bought an opportunity to hear Obama speak at a 250-person luncheon. But a $35,800 ticket gave 25 donors the chance to talk politics with the president at a private round-table event.

Tickets to hear Obama speak at a 600-person gala in Los Angeles later Wednesday started at $1,250. A $2,500 ticket to the same event guaranteed better seats. And a $10,000 ticket came with the chance to shake the president's hand and pose with him for a photo.

On the Republican side, donors can expect to spend a minimum of $2,500 per person to hear Romney speak at a reception. And those who make a $10,000 personal donation or commit to raise $25,000 gain access to a smaller reception and a picture with the likely GOP nominee.

Fork over up to $50,000 and a Romney supporter may get a private dinner with him.

Romney's bundlers, who give the campaign all the money they collect from multiple donors, also are handsomely rewarded. Among the perks afforded to those who bundle at least $250,000 is access to the Republican convention, an election night event and a weekly briefing from the campaign. Bundlers who raise up to $500,000 also get access to the presidential debates in October.

Among the most exclusive opportunities offered to Romney bundlers: a summer retreat in Park City, Utah, later this month.

Presidential candidates can raise up to $50,800 from an individual donor as long as the money goes into a special fund that divvies up the proceeds among the candidate's campaign, his national party, state or local party committees and any other political committee.

For some wealthy supporters, as well as bundlers, a seat at a fundraiser is just the start of what they're after. Big campaign contributions can often be seen as a down payment for future access to the White House or a role in the administration.

Dozens of top Obama donors from the 2008 campaign received ambassadorships, including posts in France, Spain and Switzerland. Other prominent supporters have been awarded positions on presidential advisory boards.

Tens of thousands of dollars can also buy top donors invitations to swanky White House events. More than 30 bundlers made the guest list for Obama's recent state dinner for British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Obama is hardly the first president to grant special status to big money donors. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton both reserved seats at exclusive state dinners for supporters who made substantial financial contributions to their re-election campaigns. And if Romney is elected, he'll likely do the same, as well.

Clinton said during his presidency that high-dollar donations bought supporters a "respectful hearing if they have some concern about the issues." But he said: "Nobody buys a guaranteed result."

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Associated Press writers Jim Kuhnhenn, Steve Peoples and Kasie Hunt in Washington contributed to this report.

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Follow Julie Pace on Twitter: http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

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Netflix Replaces Apple as Nation's Top Internet-Movie Business ...

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IHS formerly known as Screen Digest has reported that revenue generated from Americans who buy/rent movies online more than doubled up to $992 million in 2011.

Netflix passed Apple in 2011 to become the nation?s leading supplier of movies streamed over the Internet, according to IHS revenue data released on Friday.

Last year, U.S. revenue generated by subscription video on demand soared 10,000 percent to $454 million,? IHS accounts this to Netflix?s decision to partially split its DVD and online-streaming services.

Netflix claimed just 1 percent of the total online movie business in 2010, but leapt to 44 percent last year. Apple, which leads the ?transactional? business as opposed to subscription, saw its revenue share fall from 61 percent in 2010 to 32 percent last year.

IHS says Netflix is so dominant in the SVOD category that it?s nearest competitor, Hulu, is only 10 percent its size.

The transactional side of the online movie business, Apple iTunes and? competitors was also up 75 percent to $273 million.

Electronic sell-through, which IHS notes is more profitable for the studios than are the online rental models, grew by only 2.4 percent last year to $236 million.

The online movie business on whole more than doubled to $992 million last year,? IHS expects it to double again this year.

IHS says ?the big growth story? of 2011, though, was Walmart?s Vudu, which captured 8.2 percent of the transactional market, up from 2.8 percent the year prior.

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