Madonna fan guilty in NYC resisting arrest trial

NEW YORK (AP) — A former firefighter with a crush on Madonna has been convicted of resisting arrest outside her former New York City apartment building as he spray-painted poster boards with love notes.

A jury delivered its verdict Friday in Robert Linhart‘s trial. He could face up to a year in jail.

Defense lawyer Lawrence LaBrew tells the New York Post (http://bit.ly/ZgI4jl) that Linhart will appeal.

Linhart was arrested in September 2010. Police say he parked his SUV outside the singer’s Manhattan apartment, laid out a tarp and wrote out such messages as “Madonna, I need you.”

Jurors told the Post they felt it was fine for Linhart to express himself to the Material Girl. But they said they believed police testimony that he resisted arrest by flailing his arms.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

States given more time to work on health exchanges

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration gave states extra time to work toward setting up new health insurance exchanges on Friday, days after President Barack Obama‘s re-election ensured the survival of his healthcare reform law.

The move is seen as a concession to dozens of states that delayed compliance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act until after the November 6 election. Opponents of the plan had hoped a victory for Republican Mitt Romney would ultimately result in the law’s repeal.

But with Obama now heading into a second term, and a November 16 federal deadline to declare their plans looming, many states needed more time to prepare for exchanges, complex marketplaces meant to offer working families private insurance at federally subsidized rates beginning in 2014.

Since Tuesday’s election, seven states including Texas, Kansas, Virginia and Florida have said they will not pursue state-operated exchanges and conservative political donors are mounting a publicity campaign to encourage more defections.

But there are also signs that opposition could be waning in some states.

In cases where states decide not to participate, the federal government says it will go in and build an exchange on its own.

“The administration would like to do whatever it can to bring states in,” said Larry Levitt, a healthcare policy expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health issues.

“It’s always been expected that if the president got reelected, a lot of states sitting on the sidelines would realize they don’t want the federal government building a state health insurance system. That’s what we’re seeing happening.”

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a November 9 letter to governors that the administration still expects states to declare whether they intend to operate their own exchanges by next Friday.

But they now have until December 14 to file blueprints showing how they would operate the marketplaces. So far, about 13 states are well on their way to setting up their own exchanges.

States can also choose to develop their exchange in partnership with the federal government. As many as 30 could go that route.

Sebelius said states that prefer a partnership now have until February 15, 2013, to declare their intentions and prepare the appropriate paperwork. She said states can still apply to run exchanges in subsequent years but emphasized that the start date for coverage has not changed.

“Consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia will have access to insurance through these new marketplaces on January 1, 2014, as scheduled, with no delays,” she said in the letter, which described the deadline extension as a response to state requests for more time.

Analysts characterized the extension as a substantial offer from the federal government.

“It’s about as far as they reasonably could extend, knowing that the systems have to be ready by Oct 1, 2013,” said Patrick Howard, who advises states on healthcare issues for Deloitte.

The Affordable Care Act, the most sweeping health legislation since the 1960s, would extend health coverage to more than 30 million uninsured Americans. About half would receive coverage through a planned expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor, and the other half through the exchanges.

The list of states that say they will not participate in the healthcare exchanges grew this week when Virginia and Kansas added their names.

Texas, South Dakota, South Carolina, Alaska and Florida confirmed to Reuters on Friday that they will not participate in exchanges. Louisiana had also opposed the plan before the election, but officials there did not respond to inquiries about their plans under Obama’s second term.

But Maine, which advised the administration last April that it did not intend to pursue a state-based exchange, said on Friday that further guidance from Sebelius’ department could make a difference.

“It’s too soon to tell,” said Adrienne Bennett, spokeswoman for Republican Governor Paul LePage.

“We’re willing to look at the information and move forward. But we can’t move forward if we don’t have information from the Obama administration. So we’re in a holding pattern,” she said.

Several Republican advocacy groups are expected to push against the implementation of Obama’s healthcare law. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative non-profit in part funded by billionaire Koch brothers, on Friday urged U.S. governors to reject the state-based exchange options, calling them “flawed” and “bloated bureaucracies” that put states’ budgets at risk.

(Writing by David Morgan; Editing by Michele Gershberg, Eric Walsh, Claudia Parsons and David Gregorio)

Health News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Official: China can meet 7.5 percent growth target

BEIJING (AP) — China‘s sharp economic downturn has ended after trade and consumer spending improved in October but the world’s second-largest economy is not ready for a recovery and exporters face tough conditions, officials said Saturday.

The economy should be able to meet the government’s 7.5 percent growth target this year, the chairman of the country’s planning agency told a news conference during a congress of the ruling Communist Party.

The comments echoed private sector analysts who say economic activity is improving but a recovery from China’s deepest slump since the 2008 global financial crisis will be gradual and weak.

“The figures do indeed indicate an obvious trend of the Chinese economy stabilizing,” Zhang Ping said.

“That said, we should not let down our guard,” he said. “Our conclusion is that the foundation is not solid enough for a rebound in the Chinese economy and therefore we need to step up our efforts.”

Trade data on Saturday showed export growth accelerated in October to 11.6 percent from the previous month’s 9.9 percent. Data released Friday showed auto sales, consumer spending and investment also improved in October.

Zhang gave no indication what new initiatives Beijing might consider. The government has cut interest rates twice this year and is injecting money into the economy through higher spending on building airports and other public works and investment by state companies. But it has avoided a large stimulus after its huge response to the 2008 crisis fueled inflation.

Economic growth fell to a three-and-a-half-year low of 7.4 percent in the quarter ending in September. Growth for the first three quarters of the year was 7.7 percent, putting the government’s target for the year within reach.

Also in October, inflation fell, giving Beijing room to launch new stimulus if needed with less danger of igniting new price spikes.

The improvement is welcome news for the ruling Communist Party, which is in the midst of a congress to install younger leaders who might benefit from an economic uptick.

Still, Commerce Minister Chen Deming warned that Chinese exporters face tough conditions due to weak global demand and rising operating costs.

“The trade situation will be relatively grim in the next few months and there will be many difficulties next year,” Chen told a news conference.

Stronger exports will help manufacturers that were battered by last year’s slump in global demand. Thousands closed and survivors slashed payrolls, raising the danger of unrest as Communist leaders tried to enforce calm ahead of the leadership transition.

The import weakness meant China’s global trade surplus widened by nearly 90 percent over a year ago to $ 32 billion — the highest monthly level this year.

Chen also warned that “growing trade protectionism” might hurt exporters.

World leaders pledged after the 2008 crisis to avoid steps that might hinder trade and hamper a recovery. But Beijing and trading partners including the United States, Europe and Japan have raised tariffs on goods including autos and solar panels in a series of disputes over market access, subsidies and other issues.

Lackluster Chinese import demand reflects government curbs on lending and investment to cool inflation and overheating.

Those controls helped to crush surging prices but hurt China’s large construction industry and depressed its voracious appetite for steel beams, wiring and other materials made of imported iron ore, copper and other commodities. That is bad news for miners and other commodity exporters such as Australia and Brazil that supply China.

Economy News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Assad says will live and die in Syria

DOHA (Reuters) – President Bashar al-Assad said he would “live and die” in Syria and warned that any Western invasion to topple him would have catastrophic consequences for the Middle East and beyond.

Assad’s defiant remarks coincided with a landmark meeting in Qatar on Thursday of Syria’s fractious opposition to hammer out an agreement on a new umbrella body uniting rebel groups inside and outside Syria, amid growing international pressure to put their house in order and prepare for a post-Assad transition.

The Syrian leader, battling a 19-month old uprising against his rule, appeared to reject an idea floated by British Prime Minister David Cameron on Tuesday that a safe exit and foreign exile for the London-educated Assad could end the civil war.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he told Russia Today television in an interview to be broadcast on Friday. “I am Syrian; I was made in Syria. I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

Russia Today’s web site, which published a transcript of the interview conducted in English, showed footage of Assad speaking to journalists and walking down stairs outside a white villa. It was not clear when he had made his comments.

The United States and its allies want the Syrian leader out, but have held back from arming his opponents or enforcing a no-fly zone, let alone invading. Russia has stood by Assad.

The president said he doubted the West would risk the global cost of intervening in Syria, whose conflict has already added to instability in the Middle East and killed some 38,000 people.

“I think that the price of this invasion, if it happened, is going to be bigger than the whole world can afford … It will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” the 47-year-old president said.

“I do not think the West is going in this direction, but if they do so, nobody can tell what is next.”

QATAR, TURKEY CHIDE OPPOSITION

Backed by Washington, the Doha talks underline Qatar’s central role in the effort to end Assad‘s rule as the Gulf state, which funded the Libyan revolt to oust Muammar Gaddafi, tries to position itself as a player in a post-Assad Syria.

Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani urged the Syrian opposition to set its personal disputes aside and unite, according to a source inside the closed-door session.

“Come on, get a move on in order to win recognition from the international community,” the source quoted him as saying.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu delivered a similar message, saying, according to the source: “We want one spokesman not many. We need efficient counterparts, it is time to unite.”

An official text of a speech by Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid Mohamed al-Attiyah showed he told the gathering: “The Syrian people awaits unity from you, not divisions … Your agreement today will prove to the international community that there is a unity … and this will reflect positively in the international community’s stance towards your fair cause.”

Across Syria, more than 90 people were killed in fighting on Thursday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

In Turkey’s Hatay border province, two civilians, a woman and a young man, were wounded by stray bullets fired from Syria, according to a Turkish official. Turkish forces increased their presence along the frontier, where officials have said they might seek NATO deployment of ground to air missiles.

Syria poses one of the toughest foreign policy challenges for U.S. President Barack Obama as he starts his second term.

International rivalries have complicated mediation efforts. Russia and China have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have put Assad under pressure.

Syria’s conflict, pitting mostly Sunni Muslim rebels against forces dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, whose origins lie in Shi’ite Islam, has fuelled sectarian tensions across the Middle East. Sunni Arab countries and Turkey favor the rebels, while Shi’ite Iran backs Assad, its main Arab ally.

“VICIOUS CIRCLE”

The main opposition body, the Syrian National Council (SNC), has been heavily criticized by Western and Arab backers of the revolt as ineffective, run by exiles out of touch with events in Syria, and under the sway of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.

British Foreign Minister William Hague said London would now talk to rebel groups inside Syria, after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week criticized the SNC and called for a new opposition body to include those “fighting and dying”.

But the plan for a body that could eventually be considered a government-in-waiting capable of winning foreign recognition and therefore more military backing ran into trouble almost as soon as it was proposed by SNC member Riyad Seif.

The meeting has so far been bogged down by arguments over the SNC representation and the number of seats the rival groups – which include Islamists, leftists and secularists – will have in a proposed assembly. Seif said he hoped for agreement on that on Thursday night, although the talks may continue into Friday.

Senior SNC member Burhan Ghalioun said the participants were moving towards consensus: “The atmosphere was positive. We all agree that we don’t want to walk away from this meeting in failure,” he told reporters.

Seif’s proposal is the first concerted attempt to merge opposition forces to help end the devastating conflict.

The initiative would also create a Supreme Military Council, a Judicial Committee and a transitional government-in-waiting of technocrats – along the lines of Libya’s Transitional National Council, which managed to galvanize international support for its successful battle to topple Gaddafi.

Michael Doran of the Brookings Institute in Washington told a forum in Doha it would not work for Syria. “It’s not a ridiculous idea, but it’s not going to succeed,” he said.

A diplomat on the sidelines of the talks said international divisions in the U.N. Security council did not help.

“It’s a vicious circle. They are asking the opposition to unite when they admit they are not themselves united,” he said.

(Writing by Tom Perry and Samia Nakhoul; Editing by Alistair Lyon, Alastair Macdonald and Philippa Fletcher)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Icahn says has mulled Netflix takeover, no decision made

(Reuters) – Activist investor Carl Icahn, who holds an almost 10 percent stake in Netflix, said on Thursday he has considered a hostile takeover bid for Netflix, but it was uncertain he stood a chance of acquiring the Internet streaming service.

Asked by TV network CNBC whether he would “go hostile” on Netflix, Icahn said, “The thought had certainly entered my mind. I have to admit I think about it, but we haven’t made that decision.”

While Icahn said a hostile takeover was “certainly an alternative,” he downplayed the possibility several times. He added that he would not be able to pay as much for Netflix as a “synergistic buyer” looking to acquire an Internet movie and TV subscription service.

Netflix has been the subject of periodic acquisition speculation, with potential names tossed around from Microsoft Corp to Amazon.com Inc.

Icahn last month disclosed he had amassed control of 9.98 percent of Netflix shares. Most of his purchases were in the form of call options that expire in September 2014. The billionaire, who is known for shaking up corporate management, has said Netflix was undervalued and an attractive acquisition target for a number of companies.

Netflix has since adopted a poison pill defense to prevent a hostile takeover, a move that Icahn on Thursday called “reprehensible.”

A Netflix spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Icahn’s remarks.

(Reporting By Liana B. Baker in New York; Additional reporting by Katya Wachtel and Sam Forgione in New York and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Ex-oilman named new leader of world’s Anglicans

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain named a former oil executive as the new Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world’s 80 million Anglicans on Friday as the church struggles to overcome a painful rift over the issues of female bishops and same-sex marriage.

Welby, 56, who has been bishop of the northern English city of Durham for little more than a year, will replace incumbent Rowan Williams who steps down in December.

The long-awaited appointment, announced by Prime Minister David Cameron‘s office in a statement, follows weeks of intense speculation that a row over whether to choose a reformer or a safe pair of hands had stalled the nomination process.

For Welby, the move capped a meteoric rise up the Church of England hierarchy since quitting the business world and being ordained in 1992.

The bespectacled father-of-five is seen as more conservative than the liberal Williams and is widely reported to be against gay marriage but in favor of the ordination of women bishops.

(Writing by Maria Golovnina Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Malaria vaccine a letdown for infants

LONDON (AP) — An experimental malaria vaccine once thought promising is turning out to be a disappointment, with a new study showing it is only about 30 percent effective at protecting infants from the killer disease.

That is a significant drop from a study last year done in slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — though that is still far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants aged 6 to 12 weeks, the target age for immunization.

Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, described the vaccine’s protection levels as “unacceptably low.” She was not linked to the study.

Scientists have been working for decades to develop a malaria vaccine, a complicated endeavor since the disease is caused by five different species of parasites. There has never been an effective vaccine against a parasite. Worldwide, there are several dozen malaria vaccine candidates being researched.

In 2006, a group of experts led by the World Health Organization said a malaria vaccine should cut the risk of severe disease and death by at least half and should last longer than one year. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and kills more than 650,000 people every year, mostly young children and pregnant women in Africa. Without a vaccine, officials have focused on distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, spraying homes with pesticides and ensuring access to good medicines.

In the new study, scientists found babies who got three doses of the vaccine had about 30 percent fewer cases of malaria than those who didn’t get immunized. The research included more than 6,500 infants in Africa. Experts also found the vaccine reduced the amount of severe malaria by about 26 percent, up to 14 months after the babies were immunized.

Scientists said they needed to analyze the data further to understand why the vaccine may be working differently in different regions. For example, babies born in areas with high levels of malaria might inherit some antibodies from their mothers which could interfere with any vaccination.

“Maybe we should be thinking of a first-generation vaccine that is targeted only for certain children,” said Dr. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, one of the study investigators.

Results were presented at a conference in South Africa on Friday and released online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is scheduled to continue until 2014 and is being paid for by GlaxoSmithKline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.

“The results look bad now, but they will probably be worse later,” said Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is developing a competing malaria vaccine. He noted the study showed the Glaxo vaccine lost its potency after several months. Hill said the vaccine might be a hard sell, compared to other vaccines like those for meningitis and pneumococcal disease — which are both effective and cheap.

“If it turns out to have a clear 30 percent efficacy, it is probably not worth it to implement this in Africa on a large scale,” said Genton Blaise, a malaria expert at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who also sits on a WHO advisory board.

Eleanor Riley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the vaccine might be useful if used together with other strategies, like bed nets. She was involved in an earlier study of the vaccine and had hoped for better results. “We’re all a bit frustrated that it has proven so hard to make a malaria vaccine,” she said. “The question is how much money are the funders willing to keep throwing at it.”

Glaxo first developed the vaccine in 1987 and has invested $ 300 million in it so far.

WHO said it couldn’t comment on the incomplete results and would wait until the trial was finished before drawing any conclusions.

___

Online:

www.nejm.org

Diseases/Conditions News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Stock index futures signal flat to higher open

PARIS (Reuters) – Stock index futures pointed to a flat to higher open on Wall Street on Friday, with futures for the S&P 500 up 0.15 percent, Dow Jones futures flat and Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.29 percent at 1000 GMT.

World stocks were on course for their worst weekly performance since June on Friday as concerns over the U.S. fiscal cliff and the outlook for Europe hit sentiment.

Groupon will be in focus after the group’s results again fell short of Wall Street‘s already-cautious expectations as the daily deal company failed to turn around a struggling European business, sending its shares to a record low.

Activist investor Carl Icahn said on Thursday he has considered a hostile takeover bid for Netflix but was uncertain he stood a chance of acquiring the Internet streaming service in which he holds a 10 percent stake.

Mexico’s top cement maker Cemex said on Thursday that it was pleased with the way its U.S. business was evolving but acknowledged it is still far from fully recovering.

Energizer Holdings Inc said on Thursday that it would cut more than 10 percent of its workforce, or about 1,500 people.

Boeing Co reported it has bagged more than 1,000 net new orders so far this year, putting the U.S. planemaker on course to sell more aircraft than European rival Airbus for the first time since 2006.

Career Education Corp will close 23 campuses and cut 900 jobs amid losses and falling student enrollments that also threaten to affect its financial position.

TSMC <2330.TW>, the world’s biggest contract chip maker, said on Friday that sales in October rose 32.3 percent from a year earlier to a record high.

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc said it is evaluating its future, confirming a report that the healthcare technology firm may sell itself, sending its shares up 7 percent.

Merrill Lynch, part of Bank of America Corp , on Thursday lost its bid to dismiss a federal regulator’s lawsuit accusing it of misleading Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into buying billions of dollars of risky mortgage debt.

Nvidia forecast revenue below expectations due to a slowdown in tablet-processor shipments and a troubled PC market but shares of the graphics chipmaker rose on the announcement of a quarterly dividend.

Rare earth producer Molycorp Inc reported a third-quarter loss on Thursday, as lower rare earth prices and higher production costs outweighed a boost in output.

Chrysler Group LLC’s minority owner is expected to lay out its argument on Monday in a legal dispute over the price Italian carmaker Fiat will pay for the first of several incremental stakes in the U.S. carmaker.

Russia’s second-largest crude producer, LUKOIL , said on Friday it will study an offer from Exxon regarding Iraq’s West Qurna-1 oilfield, which the U.S. major wants to leave, Interfax news agency reported.

President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress must urgently confront the country’s looming year-end “fiscal cliff,” a senior Federal Reserve policy-maker said on Thursday. “This could cause tremendous damage to the U.S. economy if it is not addressed in an appropriate way,” St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard told reporters.

The International Monetary Fund on Thursday urged the United States to quickly reach an agreement on a permanent fix to avoid automatic tax hikes and spending cuts early next year, saying a stop-gap solution could be harmful to the global economy.

On the macro front, investors awaited the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan’s preliminary November consumer sentiment index, due at 1455 GMT, expected to show a reading of 83.0 compared with 82.6 in the final October report.

Investors will also keep an eye on wholesale inventories for September, due at 1500 GMT.

U.S. stocks fell on Thursday and could be in line for more weakness as worries about Washington’s ability to find a timely solution to the “fiscal cliff” dominate investor thinking in coming weeks.

The Dow Jones industrial average <.DJI> lost 121.41 points, or 0.94 percent, to end at 12,811.32. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index <.SPX> fell 17.02 points, or 1.22 percent, to 1,377.51, ending at its lowest level since August 2. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.IXIC> dropped 41.70 points, or 1.42 percent, to close at 2,895.58.

(Reporting by Blaise Robinson)

Business News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Ghana building collapse traps dozens, kills 1

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) — A five-story shopping center built earlier this year in a bustling suburb of Ghana‘s capital collapsed Wednesday, killing at least one person and leaving several dozen people trapped in the rubble, authorities and eyewitnesses said.

Rescue crews used cranes to try and remove debris from the top of the building amid fears that machinery sifting through the wreckage could injure trapped survivors. Crowds of bystanders gathered as rescuers sifted through cement and glass.

The fatality at the Melcom Shopping Center at Achimota, a suburb of Accra, was confirmed by Public Affairs Officer of the Ghana Fire Service Billy Anaglate. “We are still working to find out the fate of others who may be trapped under,” he said.

Other officials told The Associated Press that the death toll was likely to rise.

An AP reporter at the scene saw at least one man pulled from the debris, covered in dust and who was then whisked into an ambulance.

A Greater Accra Regional Public Affairs officer, deputy superintendent Freeman Tettey, confirmed that one person died and told the AP that 51 have been rescued and sent to hospitals around the capital.

“I was on my way to the shop when l saw it crumpling down,” Kojo Boadi, an eyewitness, said.

President John Mahama declared the scene a disaster zone and cut short his election campaign in the north of the country to be able to visit the site. The presidential election is scheduled for December.

The five-story store opened in February is part of the Melcom chain owned by Indian immigrant magnate, Bhagwan Khubchandani. His late father arrived in Ghana in 1929 as a 14-year-old to work as a store boy in the-then Gold Coast.

The store sells a variety of cheap, imported household goods and appliances that are popular with working-class Ghanaians.

Africa News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..

Twitter Chats Beckon to Some Graduate Students

In olden, pre-Twitter days, graduate students traipsed around academic conferences meeting peers and mentors. But Twitter chats–or hashtags, the number signs indicating a topic of conversation–are the new networking spaces, at least according to a recent blog post on The Daily Muse, “10 Great Twitter chats for Grad Students.”

“Participating in regularly scheduled Twitter chats can help you learn the tricks of your trade, connect with colleagues who share your interests, and begin to build a name for yourself within your field,” writes Tamara Powell, a California State University–Sacramento lecturer and doctoral candidate at University of California–San Diego.

But data from the social Web index, Topsy, indicate that the chats on Powell’s list might not be so well trafficked, and some graduate students question how effective Twitter can actually be for academic discussions.

Although #gradchat has only generated 743 Tweets so far–127 in the past 30 days, according to Topsy–it earned the No. 1 slot on Powell’s list and the accolade of being a “one-stop shop for all things graduate education.”

Justin Cohen, a Ph.D. candidate at International Bible College and Seminary in Independence, Mo., has participated in #phdchat–No. 5 on the Daily Muse list–but he and his peers prefer to use the video conferencing tool GoToMeeting to communicate and share resources. “Students can gain from the experience [on Twitter],” he says, “but the question is ‘gain what?’”

[See how grad applicants use social media to bypass admissions offices.]

At Claremont Lincoln University in California, advisers generally recommend that students spend little time on social networks and “instead focus on getting published in peer-reviewed journals and presenting papers at conferences,” says theology doctoral candidate, Katherine Rand. Twitter chats would have to be issue-oriented, rather than broad, to be useful to grad students, she says.

Kelly Heuer, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Georgetown University, has never participated in a Twitter chat, and most of the people she knows who have are bloggers or business owners. “Academic self-promotion is usually a far subtler enterprise, and a pretty uncomfortable one at that,” she says.

But Eric Schulman, a graduate public relations student at Georgetown, and Mohammad Arfeen, a biomedical sciences M.S. student at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago, encourage graduate applicants and students to participate in Twitter chats.

“Twitter chats provide the opportunity to connect students and professionals from practically anywhere,” says Schulman. Twitter chats can be particularly beneficial for public relations, marketing, and advertising students, whose disciplines “pull heavily from relationship-building and communication,” he adds.

[Read a study claiming 2012 grad school alumni draw high salaries.]

Arfeen sees chats as a means to an end. “Chats are useful for figuring out who’s active on social media in a field, but if you want to establish a meaningful relationship … you’ll have to go out of the chat,” he says.

As the communications director at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, which hosts #CMGRchat for community managers, J.D. Ross has a horse in the race.

Twitter chats can help grad students “get a feel for what the real-world job or role entails” and introduce them to contacts who can help them get a foot in the door when they job hunt, he says.

Searching for a grad school? Get our complete rankings of Best Graduate Schools.

Social Media News Headlines – Yahoo! News

Read More..