When Kera launched out of Toronto last year, their goal was to "teach the world how to use software". Alas, it seems Kera has taught its last lesson. In a farewell post on their blog, the company has announced that they'll be shuttering their products in one month.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/KGq0sWgawko/
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If you thought the patent war between Motorola (Google) and Apple was already over, you were mistaken. Though, today's decision by the ITC to toss Moto's complaint against Cupertino regarding the use of sensors to control the interface of a phone, might be one of the final blows struck. The claim over patent No. 6,246,862, was the last patent-in-suit standing from its 2010 complaint against Apple. Now it's been completely invalidated. The decision can still be appealed in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and we can almost guarantee the company will take advantage of that option. (In fact, it already is with previous decisions that did not go in its favor.) With courts tossing out complaints left and right, and some companies even willingly withdrawing them, we certainly keep hoping that the era patent Risk is coming to an end.
The ITC tossing out yet another complaint is a big loss for Motorola and Google. But, Apple has lost plenty of its own suits recently. It seems that both sides are settling into a stalemate. And ultimately pushing these competitors to innovate in the market instead of the courtroom is good for consumers.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Google
Source: FOSS Patents, ITC (PDF)
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/ylUCRFbHGwE/
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The New Digital Age book cover is photographed in San Francisco, Friday, April 19, 2013. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday. (AP Photo)
The New Digital Age book cover is photographed in San Francisco, Friday, April 19, 2013. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday. (AP Photo)
In this Friday, March 22, 2013, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt gestures during an interactive session with group of students at a technical university in Yangon, Myanmar Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company?s CEO, shares his ruminations and visions of a radically different future in ?The New Digital Age,? a book that goes on sale Tuesday, April 23, 2013. (AP Photo/Gemunu Amarasinghe)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) ? Some illuminating books already have been written about Google's catalytic role in a technological upheaval that is redefining the way people work, play, learn, shop and communicate.
Until now, though, there hasn't been a book providing an unfiltered look from inside Google's brain trust.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who spent a decade as the company's CEO, shares his visions of digitally driven change and of a radically different future in "The New Digital Age," a book that goes on sale Tuesday.
It's a technology treatise that Schmidt wrote with another ruminator, Jared Cohen, a former State Department adviser who now runs Google Ideas, the Internet company's version of a think tank.
The book is an exercise in "brainstorming the future," as Schmidt put it in a recent post on Twitter ? just one example of a cultural phenomenon that didn't exist a decade ago.
The ability for anyone with an Internet-connected device to broadcast revelatory information and video is one of the reasons why Schmidt and Cohen wrote the book. The two met in Baghdad in 2009 and were both struck by how Iraqis were finding resourceful ways to use Internet services to improve their lives, despite war-zone conditions.
They decided it was time to delve into how the Internet and mobile devices are empowering people, roiling autocratic governments and forcing long-established companies to make dramatic changes.
The three years they spent researching the book took them around the world, including North Korea in January over the objections of the U.S. State Department. They interviewed an eclectic group that included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Mexican mogul Carlos Slim Helu, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the former prime ministers of Mongolia and Pakistan. They also drew on the insights of a long list of Google employees, including co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
The resulting book is an exploration into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead as the lines blur between the physical world around us and the virtual realm of the Internet. Schmidt and Cohen also examine the loss of personal privacy as prominent companies such as Google and lesser-known data warehouses such as Acxiom compile digital dossiers about our electronic interactions on computers, smartphones and at check-out stands.
"This will be the first generation of humans to have an indelible record," Schmidt and Cohen predict.
To minimize the chances of youthful indiscretions stamping children with "digital scarlet letters" that they carry for years, online privacy education will become just as important ? if not more so ? than sex education, according to Schmidt and Cohen. They argue parents should consider having a "privacy talk" with their kids well before they become curious about sex.
Not surprisingly, the book doesn't dwell on Google's own practices, including privacy lapses that have gotten the company in trouble with regulators around the world.
Among other things, Google has exposed the contact lists of its email users while trying to build a now-defunct social network called Buzz. It scooped up people's passwords and other sensitive information from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Last year, Google was caught circumventing privacy controls on Safari Web browsers, resulting in a record $22.5 million fine by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. European regulators have a broad investigation open.
Google apologized for those incidents without acknowledging wrongdoing. Schmidt and Cohen suggest that is an inevitable part of digital life.
"The possibility that one's personal content will be published and become known one day ? either by mistake or through criminal interference ? will always exist," they write.
The book doesn't offer any concrete solutions for protecting personal privacy, though the authors suspect that calls for tougher penalties and more stringent regulations will increase as more people realize how much of their lives are now in a state of "near-permanent storage."
"The option to 'delete' data is largely an illusion," Schmidt and Cohen write.
People can choose not to put any of their information online, but those that eschew the Internet risk become irrelevant as online identities become increasingly important, the book asserts. Schmidt and Cohen foresee an option that will allow all of a person's online accounts ? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix and various other subscriptions ? to be merged together into a "constellation" that will serve as a one-stop profile.
If this book is right, there is no turning back from the revolution that is making Internet access as vital as oxygen and mobile devices as important as our lungs.
As much disruption as there already has been since Google's inception in 1998, Schmidt and Cohen contend that the most jarring changes are still to come as reductions in the cost of technology bring online another 5 billion people, mostly in less developed countries. At the same time, the combination of more powerful microprocessors, much-faster Internet connections and entrepreneurial ingenuity will turn the stuff of science fiction into reality.
Schmidt and Cohen are convinced that holograms will enable people to make virtual getaways to exotic beaches whenever they feel need. Nasal implants will alert us to the first signs of a cold. Virtual assistants ? the kind Google is developing with Google Now and Apple with Siri ? will become constant companions that influence when we shop and what we buy. Those assistants will generally steer us in directions drawn from an analyses of our personal preferences vacuumed off the Internet and stored in vast databases.
These aren't far-out concepts to the tech cognoscenti, or even younger generations who can barely remember what it was like to surf the Web on a dial-up modem, let alone use a typewriter.
The ideas will be more unnerving to older generations still trying to figure out all the things that their smartphone can do.
Schmidt, who will turn 58 on Saturday, can remember the days before there were personal computers. But he has been studying tech trends for decades, long before he became Google's CEO in 2001 and became a mentor and confidant to company co-founders Page and Brin. That collaboration established him as one of the world's best-known executives and minted him as a multibillionaire. Before joining Google, he was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems and CEO of software maker Novell Inc.
Many of the book's themes expand upon topics that Schmidt regularly mused about in speeches and interviews that he gave as Google's CEO. Some of his past remarks, particularly about the loss of privacy, rankled critics who believe Google had become too aggressive in trying to learn more about people's individual interests so it could sell more ads, its chief source of revenue.
Schmidt also won plenty of admirers in powerful places, including President Barack Obama, who called upon Schmidt's advice during his 2008 campaign. Political pundits once considered Schmidt to be a leading candidate to join Obama's cabinet, though Schmidt has said he never had any interest in a government job.
Schmidt relinquished the CEO job to Page two years ago, freeing him to devote more time traveling to meet government leaders around the world.
Cohen, 31, is regarded as a rising star in tech circles, though he isn't as well-known as his co-author. Time magazine just named Cohen as one of the world's 100 most influential people in its annual list. Cohen worked on State Department policy planning and counter-terrorism in both the Bush and Obama administrations.
Schmidt and Cohen emerged from their research convinced that most governments don't fully understand the implications of ubiquitous Internet access and mobile computing. They expect repressive regimes to do everything in their power control the flow of information and to abuse databases to spy on citizens. They also foresee smaller countries waging computer-based attacks on countries they would never target with troops and weapons.
Even as they address the dark sides of technology, Schmidt and Cohen hypothesize that the world ultimately will be better off as more people spend more time connected to each other on the Internet. Societies will be more democratic, governments will become less corrupt as their transgressions are exposed and people will become smarter and better informed.
"Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips," Schmidt and Cohen assert.
___
"The New Digital Age" is being published by Alfred A. Knopf with a suggested retail price of $26.95.
___
Online:
http://newdigitalage.com
Associated Pressmarlon byrd charles colson humber raffi torres michael mcdonald jon jones vs rashad evans earth day 2012
By Nathan Layne and Emi Emoto
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's SMBC Nikko Securities will expand its domestic retail branch network by more than 20 percent over the next three years as it bets that the new premier's economic policies will lift the stock market further, the head of the country's third-largest brokerage said.
Tetsuya Kubo, who became president of the brokerage arm of banking group Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc (SMFG) this month, said he wanted to open 25 new branches as part of an effort to increase retail client assets by one-third, to 30 trillion yen ($302 billion), by 2016.
The aggressive shift in strategy for SMBC Nikko, which has 109 branches and has not opened a new one in five years, could also mean tougher competition for Nomura Holdings Inc and Daiwa Securities Group Inc , Japan's two largest securities firms which have about 180 and 120 branches, respectively.
Kubo, 59, said there was a need to invest in the brokerage's retail network after years of tight cost controls under the previous owner Citigroup Inc
"Nikko is strong in retail but for the past several years we didn't really put resources into branches and staff," Kubo, previously chief financial officer of SMFG, told Reuters in an interview last week. His comments were embargoed for release on Monday.
"To be a winner over the long term there is a need to increase staff," Kubo said. Earlier this month, the company announced it would boost overall staffing by 600, to 8,600, under a three-year business plan.
A DIFFERENT LOOK
Kubo said he was confident that bold fiscal and monetary steps under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, aimed at pulling the economy out of deflation, would continue to push stock prices higher.
He would not be surprised, he said, if the Nikkei stock average <.n225> reached 16,000 by the end of 2013. That would be a gain of another 20 percent for the benchmark from its close on Friday at 13,316.48, after already rallying some 50 percent since Abe was tipped as a candidate for premier in mid-November.
Kubo also noted a marked increase in interest from foreign investors during the final months of his tenure as the banking group's CFO, when the aggressive economic stimulus espoused under "Abenomics" set stocks rising and the yen tumbling.
While it was normal to be called on by asset managers in charge of Japan, he also started to get requests for meetings from global managers of equity funds.
"There was a different look in their eyes. They wanted to know what was happening in Japan, what had changed," he said.
Japanese individuals, which park the bulk of their $15 trillion worth of savings in bank deposits and other low-yielding instruments, have been a particularly hard sell for Japanese stock brokers and asset managers. Memories still linger of the collapse of Japan's asset bubble two decades ago, which hit retail investors hard.
Kubo sees SMBC Nikko's ties to its parent bank, which owns 100 percent of the broker, as a key advantage over independent securities firms such as Nomura and Daiwa in tapping the renewed retail investor interest in stocks.
The brokerage has attracted 1 trillion yen in assets through referrals from SMFG bank clients since becoming part of Japan's third-largest banking group, Kubo said.
Of the 7 trillion yen increase in retail assets the brokerage is targeting over the next three years, it hopes to capture another 1 trillion yen through such referrals from SMFG, which has 10 times the number of accounts as SMBC Nikko, he said.
($1 = 99.2400 Japanese yen)
(Editing by Edmund Klamann)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/smbc-nikko-bets-abenomics-plans-first-branches-five-213812190--sector.html
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FILE- in this Thursday, Sept. 25, 2003 file photo provided by the Freedom Forum, Al Neuharth, founder of the USA Today and the Freedom Forum listens as former U.S. Sen. George McGovern speaks during the dedication of the Al Neuharth Media Center on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D. Neuharth has died in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. The news was announced Friday, April 19, 2013 by USA Today and by the Newseum, which he also founded. (AP Photo/Freedom Forum, Dave Eggen, File)
FILE- in this Thursday, Sept. 25, 2003 file photo provided by the Freedom Forum, Al Neuharth, founder of the USA Today and the Freedom Forum listens as former U.S. Sen. George McGovern speaks during the dedication of the Al Neuharth Media Center on the campus of the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D. Neuharth has died in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. The news was announced Friday, April 19, 2013 by USA Today and by the Newseum, which he also founded. (AP Photo/Freedom Forum, Dave Eggen, File)
FILE - In this Dec.1999 file photo, Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, poses at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. USA Today founder Al Neuharth has died in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. The news was announced Friday, April 19, 2013 by USA Today and by the Newseum, which he also founded. (AP Photo/Peter Cosgrove, File)
COCOA BEACH, Fla. (AP) ? Al Neuharth changed the look of American newspapers when he founded USA Today, filling the newspaper with breezy, easy-to-comprehend articles, attention-grabbing graphics and stories that often didn't require readers to jump to a different page.
Critics dubbed USA Today "McPaper" when it debuted in 1982, and they accused Neuharth, of dumbing down American journalism with its easy-to-read articles and bright graphics. USA Today became the nation's most-circulated newspaper in the late 1990s.
The hard-charging founder of USA Today died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 89. The news was announced by USA Today and by the Newseum, which he also founded.
Jack Marsh, president of the Al Neuharth Media Center and a close friend, confirmed that he passed away Friday afternoon at his home. Marsh said Neuharth fell earlier this week and never quite recovered.
Sections were denoted by different colors. The entire back page of the news section had a colored-weather map of the entire United States. The news section contained a state-by-state roundup of headlines from across the nation. Its eye-catching logo of white lettering on a blue background made it recognizable from a distance.
"Our target was college-age people who were non-readers. We thought they were getting enough serious stuff in classes," Neuharth said in 1995. "We hooked them primarily because it was a colorful newspaper that played up the things they were interested in ? sports, entertainment and TV."
USA Today was unlike any newspaper before it when it debuted in 1982. Its style was widely derided but later widely imitated. Many news veterans gave it few chances for survival. Advertisers were at first reluctant to place their money in a newspaper that might compete with local dailies. But circulation grew. In 1999, USA Today edged past the Wall Street Journal in circulation with 1.75 million daily copies, to take the title of the nation's biggest newspaper.
"Everybody was skeptical and so was I, but I said you never bet against Neuharth," the late Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham said in a 2000 Associated Press interview.
The launch of USA Today was Neuharth's most visible undertaking during more than 15 years as chairman and CEO of the Gannett Co. During his helm, Gannett became the nation's largest newspaper company and the company's annual revenues increased from $200 million to more than $3 billion. Neuharth became CEO of the company in 1973 and chairman in 1979. He retired in 1989.
As Gannett chief, Neuharth loved making the deal. Even more so, the driven media mogul loved toying with and trumping his competitors in deal-making.
In his autobiography, "Confessions of an S.O.B.," Neuharth made no secret of his hard-nosed business tactics, such as taking advantage of a competitor's conversation he overheard.
He also recounted proudly how he beat out Graham in acquiring newspapers in Wilmington, Del. He said the two were attending a conference together in Hawaii, and he had already learned that Gannett had the winning bid, but he kept silent until he slipped her a note right before the deal was to be announced.
During the mid-1980s, Gannett unsuccessfully attempted to merge with CBS in what would have been the biggest media company at the time. The deal fell apart, something that Neuharth considered one of his biggest failures.
Neuharth was proud of his record in bringing more minorities and women into Gannett newsrooms and the board of directors. When he became CEO, the company's board was all white and male. By the time he retired, the board had four women, two blacks and one Asian. He also pushed Graham to become the first female chairman of the American Newspaper Publishers Association.
"He was a great leader," said former AP president and CEO Tom Curley, who worked closely with Neuharth for many years. "He certainly was one of the pioneers on moving women and people of color into management positions. He was a very strong manager who commanded respect, I think, throughout the industry as well as from those who worked with him. His hardscrabble life, poverty in South Dakota and fighting in World War II prepared him for any battles in a competitive arena, and he loved to compete and he loved to win."
Before joining Gannett, Neuharth rose up through the ranks of Knight Newspapers. He went from reporter to assistant managing editor at The Miami Herald in the 1950s and then became assistant executive editor at the Detroit Free Press.
Allen H. Neuharth was born March 22, 1924, in Eureka, S.D. His father died when he was 2. He grew up poor but ambitious in Alpena, S.D., and had journalism in his blood from an early start. At age 11, he took his first job as a newspaper carrier and later as a teenager he worked in the composing room of the weekly Alpena Journal. His ambition already was noticeable.
"I wanted to get rich and famous no matter where it was," Neuharth said in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "I got lucky. Luck is very much a part of it. You have to be at the right place at the right time and pick the right place at the right time."
After earning a bronze star in World War II and graduating with a journalism degree from the University of South Dakota, Neuharth worked for the AP for two years. He then launched a South Dakota sports weekly tabloid, SoDak Sports, in 1952. It was a spectacular failure, losing $50,000, but it was perhaps the best education Neuharth ever received.
"Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before they're forty," he said in his autobiography. "The bigger you fail, the bigger you're likely to succeed later."
Neuharth married three times. His first marriage to high school sweetheart Loretta Neuharth lasted 26 years. They had a son, Dan, and daughter, Jan. He married Lori Wilson, a Florida state senator, in 1973; they divorced in 1982. A decade later, he married Rachel Fornes, a chiropractor. Together, they adopted six children.
After he retired from Gannett, Neuharth continued to write "Plain Talk," a weekly column for USA Today.
He also founded the The Freedom Forum, a foundation dedicated to free press and free speech that holds journalism conferences, offers fellowships and provides training. It was begun in 1991 as a successor to the Gannett Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm.
Jim Duff, president and chief executive officer of the Freedom Forum, said, "Al will be remembered for many trailblazing achievements in the newspaper business, but one of his most enduring legacies will be his devotion to educating and training new journalists," according to the post on the Newseum website. Duff added, "He taught them the importance of not only a free press but a fair one."
With his entrepreneurial flair, Neuharth put the Freedom Forum on the map with Newseum, an interactive museum to show visitors how news is covered. The first museum in Arlington, Va., was open from 1997 to 2002. It was replaced by a $450 million facility in Washington that opened in spring 2008. There was also the Newscapade, a $5 million traveling exhibit.
In a June 2007 interview in Advertising Age, Neuharth was asked about the future of printed newspapers amid the upheavals of the news business.
"The only thing we can assume is that consumers of news and information will continue to want more as the world continues to become one global village," he said. "The question is how much will be distributed in print, online and on the air. I don't know how much will be delivered on newsprint. Some will be delivered by means we can't even think of yet."
___
Associated Press Writer Kristi Eaton in Sioux Falls, S.D., contributed to this story.
Associated Presswilt chamberlain joe arpaio cat in the hat green eggs and ham wiz khalifa and amber rose oh the places you ll go blunt amendment
Apr. 17, 2013 ? To maneuver a car into a parking spot parallel to the road can be quite a challenge. It would be an easy task, of course, if only the vehicle could move sideways. As this is not possible, the sideways motion must be pieced together -- sometimes elegantly, sometimes less so -- in a series of forward and backward movements and turns on the steering wheel. Such a finely tuned sequence of movements also enables cats to almost always land on their feet after a free fall. Researchers at ETH Zurich have now used a similar principle for steering a quantum system into a desired state. This new type of control should be useful in situations in which quantum systems must be precisely controlled, not least in the context of quantum computers.
Big quantum world
For their research, scientists in the group of Andreas Wallraff, a professor at the Department of Physics, use "artificial atoms" made of electronic circuits, which they control with microwave pulses. These circuits comprise superconducting components -- that is, components in which electric currents can flow without resistance -- and typically measure fractions of a millimeter. "For a quantum physicist, these circuits are enormously large objects, but they display behavior that is very similar to that of atoms," explains Wallraff.
Unlike in natural quantum systems, such as atoms, electrons or photons, the design and properties of the quantum circuits can be changed and adapted to different applications. Moreover, the fragile quantum states can survive for several microseconds in these superconducting circuits -- a relatively long time for quantum objects. During this time the state can be manipulated with microwave pulses, in order to study the quantum state itself or to make use of it in a quantum computation.
Finding the right twist
These favorable properties notwithstanding, the quantum circuits are highly sensitive to external disturbances (caused, for example, by imperfect shielding), just as natural quantum systems. Under the direction of Stefan Filipp, a scientist in the Wallraff group, the ETH Zurich researchers have now found a possible way to render the quantum states more robust against disturbances. They make use of the geometry of so-called Hilbert spaces; these abstract spaces are the 'natural habitat' of any quantum system. Similarly as a car is driven through a two-dimensional space, a quantum system is steered through its Hilbert space.
Both for parallel parking and for controlling quantum systems, the specific sequence of operations is important. For example, when a motorist first performs all steering-wheel movements and then all forward and backward movements, then she or he will hardly end up in the parking spot. The situation is comparable for the physicists' artificial atoms, which they control with microwave pulses. "We obtain different results depending on the order in which we apply the individual pulses, even if the pulses have an identical shape, the same energy and the same length. This can only be explained by the different routes the system takes through its Hilbert space," says Stefan Filipp.
Path towards a quantum computer
"This is the first time that somebody obtained this specific type of control over an isolated quantum object and was able to study the process in detail," adds Abdufarrukh Abdumalikov, scientist in the Wallraff group. An important factor for the ETH physicists' success was that they could work with relatively short microwave pulses. "This allowed us to perform operations quickly, before the quantum state was irrevocably destroyed," says Abdumalikov.
The researchers expect that their method may provide a viable path towards a practical quantum computer. The development of such devices, which use the laws of quantum mechanics to tackle computational tasks, is a very active field of current study. Quantum physics opens up a whole range of new possibilities for information processing, and one day quantum computers may help solve problems that are computationally too complex for any conventional computer to solve within reasonable time.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/iEg1C9zNuqY/130417131823.htm
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RIVER FOREST, Ill. (AP) ? Family and friends of a young American diplomat killed while delivering textbooks to a school in southern Afghanistan remembered her Wednesday as a brave, selfless woman who did not let fear stop her from trying to make a difference in faraway places.
A funeral service for Anne Smedinghoff drew hundreds of people to a church in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, where she grew up.
Mourners lit small candles as they sat in the pews and some held white roses. They watched as pall bearers removed the U.S. flag draping her wooden coffin. For many blocks surrounding the church, white ribbons were tied around trees and lampposts.
The 25-year-old a foreign service officer was killed April 6 in southern Afghanistan along with four other Americans and an Afghan doctor while they were walking from a military base to a nearby school. Two explosions occurred, apparently a suicide car bombing followed by a roadside blast.
"It is with tremendous sadness that we gather here today," said the Rev. Kenneth Fischer, speaking to the mourners as the funeral began. "We are all heartbroken with you."
He called Smedinghoff a "bright, talented, generous young woman. ... Only 25 years old, she had so much more to give."
Speaking before the service at the church, attached to the Catholic school that Smedinghoff attended as a child, family friend Kevin Udrow talked about the tough assignment she signed up for in Afghanistan.
"Some people do not fear situations like that, feeling that they can make it a better place," Udrow said. "She just thought that she could correct some of the evils in the world."
Since her death, co-workers, family and former teachers have remembered her as an adventuresome traveler who volunteered for the toughest assignments because places like Paris and London, she once told her father, would be so boring.
She joined the U.S. Foreign Service straight out of college. Her first assignment for the foreign service was in Caracas, Venezuela, and she volunteered for the Afghanistan assignment after that.
While in Afghanistan, one of Smedinghoff's favorite projects was working with the Afghan women's soccer team and helping it gain greater acceptance inside the deeply conservative country. To ensure she would better interact with the Afghan players, Smedinghoff even practiced her own soccer skills on her days off.
Smedinghoff, the daughter of an attorney and the second of four children, grew up in River Forest, an upscale suburb about 10 miles west of Chicago.
She went to Johns Hopkins University, where she majored in international studies and became a key organizer of the university's annual Foreign Affairs Symposium in 2008. The event draws high-profile speakers from around the world.
At a memorial last week at Fenwick High School, Smedinghoff's former Spanish teacher, Irene Drago, said the woman had a gift for foreign languages and a quiet intelligence.
Drago said teachers are supposed to inspire their students, but sometimes students like Smedinghoff come along and inspire their teachers.
Smedinghoff continued to visit the school, most recently a few months ago.
Secretary of State John Kerry stopped in Chicago on Monday to visit Smedinghoff's parents. Kerry praised Smedinghoff as being "full of idealism and full of hopes" in taking books to school children.
Smedinghoff had assisted Kerry during a visit to Afghanistan two weeks before she died.
The April 6 attack also killed three U.S. service members, a U.S. civilian Defense Department worker and an Afghan doctor.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/funeral-held-diplomat-killed-afghanistan-153146369.html
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