Knight Science Journalism Tracker ? Blog Archive ? All Fracked Up

Source: Wikimedia Commons

About ten days ago, the University of Buffalo released a peer-reviewed study ? or so it described it at that moment ? which seemed to cast a positive light on the way regulators were able to managing the risks of the controversial method of gas extraction known as fracking.

The researchers at Buffalo?s Shale Resources and Society Institute had analyzed fracking in Pennsylvania and found that increased regulation was, indeed, making it safer. They cited a pattern of fewer environmental ?events? under the new rules.? The finding, the authors suggested, could be considered positive in light of some ambitious fracking proposals for? New York?s Marcellus Shale.

And certainly most of coverage emphasized that apparently positive outcome. In the local paper, The Buffalo News, the story by David Robinson was headlined : ?Fracking ?Risks? Found To have Been Diminished?.

The outlook was similarly upbeat in some 100 other stories (according to a Google News check) that followed the announcement. The Associated Press coverage (shown here in The Washington Post) said the report found that ?State regs reduce impact of gas drilling in Pa., will also work in NY?. At Forbes, the headline was ?Fracking Safety Improves Dramatically, Says Independent Study.?

Still,? even in this early coverage there were signs of caution.? As Robinson noted in the Buffalo News story,? study?s lead author,? Timothy Considine, of the University of Wyoming, had? been consistently funded by the drilling industry. The head of the institute had done some consulting for the gas industry also. The story quoted the Public Accountability Initiative, an activist group, which believed that the report had understated the more damaging findings.

On Thursday, the group released its own accounting of the Buffalo report. It reanalyzed the same data and found the authors seemed to have cherry-picked the environmental events. This second look at the numbers indicated that fracking related problems had actually been on the increase. And they pointed out that the report didn?t actually seem independent in nature:? The report lifts entire passages, without proper attribution, from an explicitly pro-fracking report released last year by the conservative Manhattan Institute and written by three of the four authors of the UB study.

Further, the university was incorrect in describing the report as a peer reviewed study.? In fact, the University of Buffalo ended up posting a corrected press release in order to clarify that this was a report, not a study that had gone through the kind of meticulous scientific analysis expected from peer review.? group also emphasized? this was, as the university not a scientifically peer-reviewed study. Here is a link to the corrected press release.

After this, the coverage wasn?t quite so upbeat.

From Sharon Kelly at Grist: ?Check the Math: Study Reporting ?Safer? Fracking Reveals Oil Industry Ties to Academia.?

From Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones: ?Frack-friendly Report Debunked.?

?Bad Science? Peer Reviewed Study Promoting Fracking Was Not Peer Reviewed? from Victoria Bekiempis at the Village Voice.

?University of Buffalo backpedals,? reported Joseph Spector at New York?s Democrat and Chronicle. Farther afield, at the International Business Times, Pierre Bertrand wrote: ?When a university is accused of misrepresenting its own data, that makes understanding the controversial drilling technique known as fracking even more challenging.?

And back at the Buffalo News, Robinson outlined the criticisms in careful detail in a Friday story, which focused on the advocacy group?s conclusions: ?The evidence does not support the notion that fracking is becoming any safer.? Shortly later, the university responded to the growing chorus of criticism ? largely by distancing itself from the researchers: ?Faculty members are free to conduct research on any topic, including controversial ones, and to disseminate their findings without prior review or approval by the university,?

I?ve told this chronologically because I think the chronology very nicely illustrates a process at work here: 1) University press office over-enthusiastically reports a report. 2) Positive stories result, especially in business oriented publications like Forbes 3) Advocacy group releases its own report 4) Critical stories result, especially in publications more sympathetic to the group?s viewpoint, such as Mother Jones. 5) University responds by promising investigation which will eventually lead to new press release.

In the end, I forecast that? only the Buffalo News will really cover the results of that investigation, which is after all, a local story.? And in the end, the local paper, with its detailed, old-fashioned reporting of all sides of this story, did the best job of capturing the politics, the tensions, and the underlying cynicism of the official process.

It?s a reminder that old-fashioned journalistic fundamentals still work ? and are definitely still needed in the days of new-fashioned university research.

UPDATE: And here?s an excellent follow up from Kevin Begos at Associated Press, taking a closer look at the lead researcher on that University of Buffalo study and finding a history of industry conflicts.

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? Deborah Blum

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3:AM Magazine ? Horse latitudes

Jaimy Gordon interviewed by Thomas Bunstead.

jaimy-gordon

3:AM: Could you talk about your experience of racing tracks like Indian Mound Downs in Lord of Misrule??What do you think it is about this milieu that prompted you to write about it? Are there really men like Medicine Ed who cook up mad alchemies to dope the horses?

JAIMY GORDON: I worked on the racetrack from 1967 to 1970, mainly on two rundown half-mile tracks - Shenandoah Downs and Charles Town Races - in Charles Town, West Virginia. Most of the grooms in my day were African American, many from the deep South, especially South Carolina, Arkansas, and Mississippi, where the practice of folk magic or ?root-work? was widespread. Medicine Ed mixes up his own special horse goofer, but he also references the name of a company whose root-working products he favoured in the past - Lucky Heart Curios, Memphis, Tennessee - and that company was still in business when I began work on Lord of Misrule some years ago. One of their popular items was Jockey Club Fast Luck Oil, whose name suggests that it was not unknown on the racetrack, to gamblers and grooms alike.

3:AM: ?It was no need for studying and dreaming? (Medicine Ed says); ?You looked around for your twin? (Tommy Hansel says, addressing himself when he has gone mad). The ventriloquism in Lord of Misrule is magnificent and, in my eyes, must have done much to recommend the novel to the National Book Award panel. Do you find writing in this way comes naturally?

JG: Voice is my first interest, in other people?s writing and my own. I don?t keep a diary but I do write down peculiarities of diction, idiom and sentence structure when I hear them. I hoard curious slang, proverbs, and proverbial tropes like ?Some of them fellers wouldn?t work in a pie factory? (which I overheard from a farmer in West Virginia who didn?t like unions). And by the way, I?m a sucker for voice as well in music, theatre, politics, history, law and religion. Some things I like: opera; Leadbelly; Abraham Lincoln; Jussi Bj?rling; Bach cantatas; Shakespeare; Mary Wollstonecraft; Emma Goldman; Numbers, 22-24 (the story of Balaam and Balak); and virtually everything Captain Sir Richard F. Burton ever did, wrote, or translated.

3:AM: I read on a blog an interesting thread about the racetrack characters. Someone said they seemed caricatured, someone else was saying ?but if you know the people in this world, they are so mad and damaged and have lived so fast, they are often caricatures of themselves?. Where do you stand on this - are they realistic representations of people or exaggerated to carry other aspects of the story?

JG: A few critics have complained that they hear echoes of Damon Runyon in Lord of Misrule, especially when the novel is in the loan shark, Two-Tie?s point of view. For Two-Tie?s Yiddish?inflected wheeling and dealing, I borrowed the idiom of my mother?s shady uncles, especially my great uncle Willie, a loan shark who operated on the periphery of the racetrack and was murdered in Baltimore in 1980.

I do admit to having read Damon Runyon carefully. He was one of the most stylised American writers where voice is concerned and a great purveyor of vintage slang from the sporting life. When I landed on the racetrack in 1967, my first thought was: Wow, these people really do talk like Damon Runyon characters. For one, they favour perpetual present tense, especially when using the verb to win, which on the racetrack has only one form: ?My horse Pelter win last week. Two dollars say he win today and I think he win next week too.?

3:AM: Some of the main characters in Lord of Misrule appear in a short story of yours that was included in the Best American Short Stories 1995 anthology. What is the link between the two? Why did Lord of Misrule take another 15 years to appear, and what passed in-between?

JG: Your readers need to understand that I am the slowest writer in America, not only absurdly meticulous but also shamelessly distractible, likely, for example, to start taking Italian lessons three months before my deadline for Lord of Misrule (I did that, but luckily came to my senses).

As the slowest writer in all the Americas, I had vague plans to write the racetrack novel for 25 years before I even got around to writing that short story, ?A Night?s Work?,? in 1995. Favouring novels both to read and to write, I write few stories. This one, which introduces the loan shark, Two?Tie, and the handsome drunken blacksmith, Kidstuff, was a conscious sketch for the novel, an experiment above all to see whether I could call up the voices of that raffish and woebegone world at such a distance of time.

I had good luck with ?A Night?s Work?, and when I began to write Lord of Misrule, I aimed towards it and had every intention of wrapping the novel around it - that would have been 30 pages I wouldn?t have to write, after all - but I missed. There?s even a logical inconsistency between the two plots unless you consider the alcoholic blacksmith such a fixture of racetrack life as to be immortal, or anyway capable of coming back from the dead.

3:AM: A review in The Scotsman said that ?because of the way in which [main characters] Tommy and Maggie are mutually enslaved by their passions, the bizarre list of writers to whom Gordon has been none too precisely compared - Laurence Sterne, Kathy Acker, John Barth, TC Boyle, Cynthia Ozick - should include Leonard Cohen too.? ?Do you feel close to any of these writers?

JG: I certainly drank deep of Laurence Sterne for my more digressive and antic books (like She Drove Without Stopping, which was also modelled in some respects on Samuel Butler?s The Way of All Flesh), but not for Lord of Misrule. Kathy Acker, whom I knew, cultivated a crudity in her prose that made her beloved of her English audience (since English writers, unlike most Americans, usually have some polish to lose), but that aspect of her work didn?t draw me closer to her. What I do have in common with Acker is a willingness to look unblinkingly at bodily affinities, functions and secretions, including but not limited to sex.

I consider John Barth a genuine influence, along with the other brilliant American postmodernists John Hawkes and Robert Coover - I read them all and they?re all old enough, or would be if they?d lived - but Updike, Bellow and Robert Stone were also influences. As for women, it was mostly the English novelists, Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, and even Margaret Drabble, who?s only a little older than I but showed me plenty. Cynthia Ozick I was delighted to discover at an age when my sense of style in prose was already fully formed. I think both of us were probably influenced by Isaac Bashevis Singer, vintage Gimpel the Fool. Leonard Cohen? I was more susceptible to Ray Charles, Leadbelly, Ma Rainey, Schumann?s settings of Heine and Eichendorff, Jan??ek?s ?From the House of the Dead - and I used to weep to the old East Berliner Communist cabaret singer Ernst Busch.

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3:AM: As well as the shuffling narrative - some scenes are completed and then begun again half way through from another character?s perspective - I was particularly interested in Lord of Misrule?s slipping between first and third person - like the un-signposted shifts between past and present in She Drove Without Stopping - which I understand from certain blogs some readers have found challenging, but I think others will enjoy for exactly that reason. I wanted to ask why you think you went for these techniques, why they were appropriate for this story, but also how you feel your concern for voice and technical ?innovation? fits into a tradition - if there are other writers you are speaking to?

JG: In a way, my earliest intention with Lord of Misrule was more retro than innovative: I wanted to write a social novel in which, Middlemarch-like, all the human types within that society would be represented - only, the society would be the cheapest, crookedest racetrack in West Virginia. I was going to use free indirect discourse, also known as third person effaced or limited narration, also known as third person interior point of view - the commonest choice in presenting point of view in fiction since Flaubert - and I was going to work from the discrete points of view of four different human characters.

For once I wasn?t going to include a character anything like me - there I fell down on the job, as you know - and although I always meant to follow the advice of my old teacher John Hawkes and make the horses into full characters, I didn?t know I would occasionally dip into a horse?s point of view; it just happened. I found myself departing from third person with the horse trainer, Tommy Hansel, who, as you noticed, is half mad from the start, and whose grandiloquent thoughts about himself and others always hover above his head in second person, looking eerily down.

What makes the book most unusual for readers, I think, is how heavily the exposition of view is inflected by the way those four characters would actually speak, including the Jewish loan shark and the old timey black groom. That the four points of view are somewhat incongruent, even when they observe the same scene - that I offer no ?master narrative?, as one critic noted with some dismay. Well, haven?t we learned anything about the nature of truth in the last 150 years? And especially on a racetrack?

3:AM: Would you talk about the relationship between Jane in She Drove Without Stopping and Maggie in Lord of Misrule? Both are runaways, and both have their relatively violent relationships with men humorously depicted. What interests you about them? Why do you find yourself driven to explore their experiences?

JG: As I said, I didn?t want to let that reckless young woman into Lord of Misrule, and when she wormed her way in anyway. I was so disgusted that I couldn?t bring myself to finish the novel for the next five years, until my old friend Bruce McPherson, the editor of McPherson & Company, trapped me into going back to work on it by sending me an old corrupt file in galley proofs. Not that I had disliked her all along. After all, Maggie or her near relations show up in She Drove Without Stopping, Bogeywoman, and also a book-length narrative poem I wrote about convicts and ex-convicts of my acquaintance, ?The Bend, The Lip, The Kid?.

There was a time, when I was about thirty-five and began to feel more or less safe from her, that I thought that wild young woman I had been in my twenties could be my literary stock in trade. But she hadn?t panned out - others, it seemed, didn?t find her as fascinating a character type as I did - and so I blamed her for my deepening obscurity. Once Lord of Misrule did so well, I was glad to acknowledge my maternity, so to speak. What interests me about her? She?s an American romantic, a drifter, a seeker of adventure, but adventure looks different on women than it looks on men, likewise drifting from lover to lover, place to place.

I think that, like Robert Stone, I like to put my protagonists into peril of their lives because only then will they begin to fight for them, and to wake to the fact that maybe this was their purpose all along. But this trait too looks different in women than it looks in men.

3:AM: An enigmatic line from She Drove Without Stopping that I?d like you to comment on, if you would: ?Books Jane liked, though in her care they were tinged, even brand new, with the melancholy of their early deaths.?

JG: I only meant that Jane isn?t any more careful of her books than she is of her own body. The better she likes them, the longer she hauls them around with her, exposes them to weather, drops them in bathtubs, shoves them into rucksacks, eats next to them, sleeps on top of them, floats them in the bilge of rowboats, etc. I wish I didn?t have this trait, and I?m better now than I was at Jane?s age, but compared to those of most writers, my books are a mess.

3:AM: What are you working on now?

JG: I?m working on a novel about a Jewish woman who is married to a German and living uneasily in his small town of Muckelried, where she finds six Jews who have been hiding in a cave since the war. Meanwhile she badgers her husband into inquiring into the wartime history of Muckelried, which he reluctantly does. In time their researches converge.

3:AM: What are you reading now and have you enjoyed reading recently?

JG: In connection with this project, I?m reading Victor Klemperer?s wartime diaries, Gregor von Rezzori?s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the correspondence of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal - as you can see, I?m taking the long way around.

What else have I read lately? My favourite novel of the last few years was Orhan Pamuk?s Snow, so now I?m reading his Istanbul. I admire the Australian novelist Gail Jones; I have three books of hers on my table, including her latest, Five Bells. I get sent every new horse book in the world these days. The best of them, also from Australia, is Foal?s Bread, by Gillian Mears. I loved Karen Russell?s Swamplandia, Karen tei Yamashita?s I Hotel. I?m reading Anne Carson?s The Beauty of the Husband - stunningly good, as absorbing as any novel. John Donatich?s new novel The Variations, about an inner city priest who?s losing his faith - extraordinary.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas Bunstead writes regularly for the TLS and the Independent on Sunday. He has had fiction and essays published at?>kill author, Days of Roses,? readysteadybook.com and the Paris Review Blog and has recently completed his?first novel. As a Spanish translator, he has worked with Aixa de la Cruz,? Eduardo Halfon, Yuri Herrera and Enrique Vila-Matas, and was recently chosen?by the British Centre for Literary Translation to take part in its inaugural?mentorship programme, working with Margaret Jull Costa.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Tuesday, May 29th, 2012.

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Greater Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce ...

Greater Fort Lauderdale Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (GFLGLCC) President/CEO Keith Blackburn to Moderate at Florida Diversity Council?s Inaugural LGBT Summit in Fort Lauderdale

Fort Lauderdale ? The Florida Diversity Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to personal, political, community, and economic diversity and inclusion, has scheduled its inaugural Diversity Summit for Friday, June 22. The event will consist of three sessions, and will be held at The Pride Center at Equality Park in Wilton Manors. The interactive sessions will include guest speakers and seminars addressing topics including Equality and Fairness in the Florida Workplace, Gender Identity and Expression in the Workplace, and Creating a Strong Ally Culture and Diversity Supplier Relationships. Keith Blackburn, President & CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (GFLGLCC) will moderate the session ?Creating a Strong Ally Culture and Diversity Supplier Relationships.? The GFLGLCC is the Greater Fort Lauderdale affiliate chamber of the National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC).? The NGLCC Supplier Diversity Initiative (SDI) offers businesses a tool to make connections and open doors with America's top corporations and each other. The SDI certifies Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and/or Transgender owned Business Enterprises (LGBTBEs) and works to provide opportunities for LGBTBEs to gain exposure within corporate procurement processes. About Florida Diversity Council:? The Florida Diversity Council was established in 2008. They seek to establish and disseminate best practices and to help other organizations as well as businesses establish and promote policies that foster diversity and inclusiveness. The Florida Diversity Council is affiliated with the National Diversity Council, and has regional chapters in Jacksonville, Orlando, Southwest Florida, Tampa Bay, as well as South Florida. About Greater Fort Lauderdale Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce:

The GFLGLCC is a 501 C (6) Non Profit organization, which promotes business and economic opportunities for the LGBT and LGBT-friendly community. They are an advocate and resource for all member businesses that promote equality with a unified approach by working with appropriate organizations. Additional information can be found at http://www.gogayfortlauderdale.com?

About National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce:

The NGLCC is the business advocate and direct link between lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) business owners, corporations, and government, representing the interests of more than 1.4 million LGBT businesses and entrepreneurs. The NGLCC is committed to forming a broad-based coalition of LGBT owned and friendly businesses, professionals, and major corporations for the purpose of promoting economic growth and the prosperity of our members. Additional information can be found at http://www.nglcc.org The organizers are presently looking for additional event sponsors. Registration for the half-day event is $49. Additional information and online registration forms can be found at glbtsummit.com.

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The Top Mistakes Found in Newbie Affiliate Marketing Cases ...

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After studying my own case and many of the others from many newbie affiliate marketing people that I have known over the years it is very common to see a few of the same mistakes that were made. We all make mistakes and marketing online is not easy. There are some mistakes that you can avoid just by knowing what they are, however.

By not making the newbie affiliate marketing mistakes you are going to find below you can save money, get to a full time income sooner, and have a more narrow path to travel to get your business up and running. This will help you quite a bit and you just have to be aware of what to look for with each mistake.

The Top Mistakes Found in Newbie Affiliate Marketing

1. Fear of taking action

The number one thing that I have seen in newbie affiliate marketing is that the new marketer is afraid to take action with the plan that is in front of them. I see it every day with the plan that I offer and about 1 out of every 4 people actually tries to use it. About 1 out of every 10 actually make it all the way through the plan.

This is no surprise, however, because many people are lazy and have the wrong idea about what newbie affiliate marketing actually is. Many think they can just hop online, put up a website, and poof they will be rich and never have to work again. This is not true and online marketing is hard work.

2. Program hopping

Another big one that the newbie affiliate marketing people spend a lot of time doing is program hopping. This one can get expensive and I am guilty of it as well. When I first started I hopped from one $30 program to another and probably spent nearly a grand in total before I actually started to make money online.

The funny thing is that when I was starting with newbie affiliate marketing I ended up finding the method that made me money for free. I got a free report about article marketing and I still use many of the same strategies from it today. It is amazing that all the programs I paid for I never made a dime from, but a free one got me to make money.

3. Stick with one method

The main reason I never made money with the programs I paid for is because I did not stick with them. I hurried onto what I thought would be the next best thing instead of finishing all the steps that were in the program I already had. This is another big mistake and you really do need to stick with one marketing method until you have it mastered.

Why Article Marketing can Make Newbie Affiliate Marketing Easier

Article marketing is basically writing and submitting articles to different directories with a link to your website or blog in the resource or author bio box. This will bring your site or blog traffic and this is a good way to get started with newbie affiliate marketing if you are looking to get started for very cheap or even free.

There are many article marketing guides out there and since you will not be risking much money or any at all, depending on the method you go with, it is not going to put as much pressure on you. If you were to spend a couple hundred dollars on tools and guides for this method you may feel pressure to turn a profit faster.

With article marketing you can realistically expect to make money your first month, but do not expect it to be very much. It will take a few months to really build it up, but once you have an article out there in a directory it is out there bringing you traffic for a very long time. This means that you are building a business for the long term instead of the short term.

Article marketing has been around for many years and I have personally used it for nearly 10 years now. It is a solid method to help you get started and you can find many guides for free just like I did. This means that you can make your newbie affiliate marketing journey much easier if you go with article marketing as your method to get started.

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Durant, Westbrook can't rescue Thunder in Game 2

SAN ANTONIO (AP) ? The Oklahoma City Thunder finally found a way to slow down the San Antonio Spurs. It still wasn't enough to beat them.

Tony Parker had 34 points and eight assists, Manu Ginobili added 20 points and the Spurs stayed perfect in the playoffs with a 120-111 victory in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals Tuesday night.

Kevin Durant scored 31 points, Russell Westbrook had 27 points and eight assists and James Harden rebounded from a rough Game 1 to score 30 points for the Thunder, who have lost two straight for the first time since early April. Oklahoma City dropped to 15-4 in games after losses this season.

"There are no moral victories for us," Durant said. "We were down. We dug ourselves a hole. We did what we normally do, which is fight all game, and we lost."

The Thunder trailed by as many as 22 points in the third quarter and by 16 when coach Scott Brooks resorted to intentionally fouling Spurs center Tiago Splitter, a 32 percent free-throw shooter in the playoffs entering the game.

Splitter went 5 for 10 from the line over a 54-second span before Spurs coach Gregg Popovich replaced him with Tim Duncan, and Oklahoma City trailed by the same margin ? 16 ? that it did when Brooks called for the "Hack-a-Splitter" strategy.

The Spurs seemed to lose their offensive flow after that, and the Thunder rallied in the fourth quarter.

"There's a reason why you do it, to kill the rhythm," Parker said. "I think it got us out of our rhythm."

Oklahoma City got within six points with just over 5 minutes to play. But Parker, Ginobili and Tim Duncan helped San Antonio finish off the Thunder.

Game 3 is Thursday night in Oklahoma City.

"We're upset about that loss," Durant said. "We've got to go home and regroup and watch film, see how we can get better."

The Thunder are 5-0 on their raucous home court in the playoffs. But only 14 teams in NBA playoff history have overcome 2-0 deficits to win a series, and the Spurs show no signs of letting the Thunder back in it.

"First, we've got to worry about Game 3," Westbrook said. "Regardless of what's going on with this last game or the next game, we've got to worry about Game 3 and come in with the same mindset and try to get a win."

The Spurs set an NBA record with their 20th consecutive victory bridging the regular season and the playoffs. They came in sharing the longest such streak with the 2000-01 Lakers, who won 19 straight before losing to Philadelphia in the first game of the finals.

Those Lakers went on to win the championship and Parker's performance is yet another reason to think the Spurs will do the same.

Guided by their All-Star point guard, San Antonio shredded Oklahoma City's defense with pinpoint passes for three quarters. The Spurs were shooting 63 percent from the field and 64 percent from 3-point range at one point in the third quarter.

Parker went 16 for 21 from the field, including a 3-pointer.

"Tony's been great all year," Popovich said. "He's been really focused the entire season."

San Antonio picked up where it left off from the 39-point fourth quarter that turned Game 1 on Sunday. With sharp passes and hot shooting, the Spurs jumped to a 19-9 lead after the Thunder missed six of their first seven shots and had three turnovers in the first 4 minutes.

The Spurs shot 58 percent (22 of 38) and had 13 assists in the first half. They also cut down their turnovers, committing only six in the first half after giving away 14 in the first two quarters of Game 1.

San Antonio resumed picking apart Oklahoma City's defense with precision passes after the break, scoring on five straight possessions. The biggest cheer from the crowd came after Ginobili flipped a behind-the-back pass to Parker in the corner for another 3 and the lead ballooned to 78-58.

"We have seen what we can do when we play as a team," Harden said. "We fought hard, but it was too much of a deficit to come back (from) late in the game."

The Spurs missed 12 of 15 shots during one stretch, but Parker hit an off-balance, high-arcing jumper with 3:39 left for a 107-96 lead and San Antonio controlled the game from there.

"Our guys played hard," Brooks said. "Unfortunately, we came away with nothing the last few days."

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Supreme Court to rule on Assange sex case extradition

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Bahrain grants bail for rights activist

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CFT: War vet aims to walk on at Clemson

SEC Cover PROOF 043012

You know what those words mean, right? ?Yep, a new college football season is right around the corner.

Annually the most anticipated preview magazine thanks to both its in-depth analysis and accuracy, the release date for Phil Steele?s preseason dead-tree offering is viewed in most corners of the college football world as Christmas in June.

Ahead of its release June 7, however, Steele has released his annual All-American teams that are, as always, four teams deep.

The list contains the expected cast of characters on the first team, from USC quarterback and preseason Heisman favorite Matt Barkley to his teammate and wide receiver Robert Woods to South Carolina running back Marcus Lattimore ? coming off a torn ACL ? to linebackers Jarvis Jones (Georgia) and Manti Te?o (Notre Dame).

As is ofttimes the case, even for Nostrsteelemus, there are at least a couple of head-scratchers.

Chief among them, at least from this vantage point, is the absence of Marquise Lee ? on any of the four teams. ?As a true freshman at USC last season, Lee caught 73 passes for 1,143 yards and 11 touchdowns, all second on the Trojans to first-team Steele All-American Woods. ?Granted, there are a ton of talented players at his position in the country, but there?s no way you can justify Lee not being one of the top 12 receivers ? Steele placed three receivers on each of the four teams ? in the collegiate game.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, Steele placed Oklahoma?s Landry Jones as his second-team QB, ahead of Arkansas? Tyler Wilson (third-team) and West Virginia?s Geno Smith (fourth-team). ?Not only did Jones see his production dip drastically following the emergence of true freshman Blake Bell ? Jones had just one touchdown pass the last four games, while Bell rushed for 10 touchdowns in that same span ? but there?s also the little issue of what receiver will be available, at least for the early part of the season.

A total of 51 schools are represented, with last year?s title game contestants, with Alabama and LSU*, pacing the four teams with eight and seven players, respectively. ?The Tide had the most players (three) named to the first team, with all three of those being offensive linemen.

Two other SEC or soon-to-be SEC schools had five apiece ? Texas A&M and Arkansas ? as did USC. ?Wisconsin, Florida State, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Oklahoma State all placed four players each on Steele?s teams.

Conference-wise, seven of the 11 conferences in Div. 1-A (FBS) are represented ? The Big Six, plus Conference USA. ?As expected, the SEC far and away leads all conferences with 38 selections; no other league had more than 18. ?Of the 14 teams that will play in the conference this season, 11 had at least one player on one of Steele?s four teams, the lone exceptions being Missouri, Ole Miss and Vanderbilt.

The Big 12 (including WVU) and Pac-12 were next with 18 players each, followed by the ACC with 18, the Big Ten with 14 and the Big East and Conference USA tied at two apiece.

Independent football programs Notre Dame and BYU had two and one players selected, respectively.

Below is a screen snap of Steele?s four All-American teams:

(*Tyrann Mathieu was named to the first-team as both a cornerback and punt returner.)

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