How To Get Low-cost Auto Insurance coverage Quotes ? Bnr.Co

As the globe economic climate improves, a lot more and much more people are obtaining cars. However, the greatest headache for a majority has usually been how to get cost-effective insurance coverage quotations. It is a mandatory requirement by all states and governments that all vehicle owners have some type of fundamental car insurance coverage. This is to shield other road users from loses that may be incurred right after an accident. The process of selecting an inexpensive and trustworthy insurance firm is not a task for the faint hearted. A excellent insurance cover goes beyond third celebration policy cover to protecting you against financial ruin due to theft, fire and accidents.

Discussed herein are various methods to enable you get affordable car insurance

Techniques through which you can get cheap insurance coverage
Safe your car: Regardless of whether you are purchasing a new or second hand automobile, make certain that it has been installed with some form of security system set up, e.g. an alarm. These are security measures against unauthorised access to your car and as such stand a likelihood of getting a discount on the insurance.

Multiple automobile discounts: Most households today have at least two automobiles. There are insurance coverage firms that provide insurance cover for two cars at the price tag of 1. In some cases, the cost of the second automobile would be much reduce. It is advisable that when in the marketplace for insurance coverage quote that you ask about discount on the second automobile.

Annual Policies: Whereas, paying for bi-annual policies may appear cheaper at closer appear its a lot more pricey when compared to annual policies. Choosing an annual policy can save you some price on your car. Moreover, you are not affected by insurance coverage rates that could alter half way through the year.

Clean Driving License: The more accidents you result in on the road the a lot more you are likely to spend on premiums. When driving on the road it really is advised that you take extra caution even if you are on the right side of the law.

When scouting for insurance agents, instead of searching newspaper and yellow pages advertisement, to get low-cost insurance quotes, make use of the world wide web. This offers you with the advantage of scrutinising hundreds of insurance businesses that can meet your wants at sensible rates, e.g. insurance cover for women, students and elderly. This is in contrast with getting to walk from 1 business to yet another therefore saving you time, energy and funds in the method.

Source: http://www.bnr.co/autos/auto-insurance/how-to-get-low-cost-auto-insurance-coverage-quotes/

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How can I replace a Delta 1400 shower valve cartridge? - Home ...

Ok, I found the problem. Answering it in hopes that it helps someone else someday... The cartridge I bought in the store was in fact the wrong piece. While the white part that is further away from the wall was the correct type the blue part was model UPG 7 vs UPG 2. It looks almost the same but the intake parts are slightly offset.

Source: http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/24616/how-can-i-replace-a-delta-1400-shower-valve-cartridge

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Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro: The Future Of The Web Will Be Personalized

At the DLD conference in Munich today, Henrique de Castro, Yahoo's new COO and Google's former president of partners business solutions discussed the state of the web today and his vision for its immediate future. Sadly, de Castro argued that he couldn't really talk about Yahoo itself, given that he's only been there for eight weeks now. Still, his ideas about the future of the web itself can probably provide us with some hints about Yahoo's future, too.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/UrmvOgYvFS4/

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Manti Te'o Hoax Had Parallels to Alleged Perpetrator's Life

The script for the elaborate hoax played on Manti Te'o, from a horrific car accident to a leukemia diagnosis, according to reports, had parallels to the alleged perpetrator's life.

In December, three months after the fictional Lennay Kekua was killed off, the alleged orchestrator of the hoax, Ronaiah Tuiasoposo, called Te'o to confess it was all a sham, the Notre Dame football star told ESPN.

Also on the line, he said, was Kekua, the woman whom he spent hours talking to on the phone and once called the love of his life.

"They said, 'It's Lennay'. And so we carried on that conversation and I just got mad. And I just went on a rampage," Te'o said.

The woman, whose voice he fell asleep to at night on the phone, may have been a fabrication, but the alleged script used to fool Te'o seemed to mirror Tuiasoposo's reality.

Click here for a who's who in the Manti Te'o case

Tuiasoposo's father posted on Facebook that his son and his band survived a severe car accident last March.

And at the same time the fake Kekua was diagnosed with leukemia, Tuiasoposo's cousin, Jazmine Lutu, also in her early 20s, was battling the disease, USA Today reported.

Watch Katie Couric's interview with Manti Te'o and his parents Thursday, Jan. 24. Check your local listings or click here for online station finder.

The sophistication and the depth of the hoax, which was publicly unraveled last week, left many people with questions that are only beginning to be answered.

Te'o received phone calls, text messages and letters before every football game from his "girlfriend." He was in contact with her family, including a twin brother, a second brother, sister and parents. He called often to check in with them, just as he did with his own family. And "Kekua" kept in contact with Te'o's friends and family, and teammates spoke to her on the phone.

"There are a remarkable number of characters involved. We don't know how many people they represent," Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick said at a news conference this week. "There are male and female characters, brothers, cousins, mother, and we don't know if it's two people playing multiple characters or multiple people."

"It goes to the sophistication of this, that there are all these sort of independent pieces that reinforce elements of the story all the way through," he said.

One of Te'o's teammates who asked not to be identified told ABC News that it was normal for Te'o to pass his phone around to teammates when he was on the line with "Lennay" so they could say hello to her.

"I talked to her," this teammate said. "I wasn't suspicious."

When Te'o got the call telling him that Lennay had died last fall, he was in the locker room, the teammate said.

"He got real emotional, crying," the teammate said. "He's an emotional guy."

The teammate said he thinks Te'o genuinely got hoaxed. The fact that Te'o talked about meeting her and touching her hand -- when really he only "met" her on the Internet -- makes this teammate think that he was not completely telling the truth about his relationship.

"I think he was just embarrassed about it, the whole Internet thing," the teammate said. The player said he hasn't talked to Te'o since this story broke.

In response to Te'o's comments that the investigators hired by the school never interviewed him, just asked for a picture and any evidence he had, Notre Dame spokesman Dennis Brown provides the following statement:

"Notre Dame engaged with a highly regarded investigative firm to, first and foremost, determine who had perpetrated what by all appearances was a hoax. The 'catfish' scheme and those responsible for it were discovered so quickly that there was no need for an interview with Manti - though that would have been the next step had nothing turned up. The investigators' work has been verified by media reports and the confession this week of the principal participant."

Brown said that the investigators started their work on Jan. 2 and on Jan. 4 and the school received an oral report with the information on the "catfish" scheme and the perpetrators.

Depth of Deception

A newly released transcript of Sports Illustrated writer Pete Thamel's Sept. 23 interview with Te'o gives a hint at the staggering depth of the deception.

Te'o told Thamel that he'd been told Lennay Kekua's real name was Melelengei, but since no one could pronounce it properly it was shortened to Lennay. But her family nicknamed her Lala, he said.

Te'o's knowledge about the details of his girlfriend's life was often murky, including her majors in school, occupation and extent of her injuries after an alleged April 28 car accident with a drunk driver.

What he was absolutely clear about was how much time he spent in contact with her, especially while she was in the hospital recovering from the car accident, which led to the discovery of her leukemia.

"I talked to my girlfriend every single day," Te'o told Themel. "I slept on the phone with her every single day. When she was going through chemo, she would have all these pains and the doctors were saying they were trying to give her medicine to make her sleep. She still couldn't sleep. She would say, 'Just call my boyfriend and have him on the phone with me, and I can sleep.' I slept on the phone with her every single night."

He would spend eight hours a night with someone, somewhere, breathing on the other end, he told Thamel.

Te'o recounted how his girlfriend who was "on a machine" after being in a coma.

"We lost her, actually, twice. She flatlined twice. They revived her twice," he said. "It was just a trippy situation."

For a while Kekua was unable to talk and he described the nurse-deemed "miracle" of how Kekua's breathing would pick up when she heard his voice on the phone.

"There were lengthy, long telephone conversations. There was sleeping with the phone on connected to each other," Swarbrick said. "The issue of who it is, who's playing what role, what's real and what's not here is a more complex question than I can get into."

Perhaps one of the most touching displays of love from Kekua to Te'o, he told the writer, was the one-page letter she would write him on her iPad before each game. One of her siblings, often her twin brother Noa, would then read him the letter over the phone before sending it to him.

"She and I, man, we had this relationship where it was just amazing," Te'o told Thamel. "With all of that time on her hands in the hospital, she was never thinking about herself and what was hurting her. She was just always thinking about others. She went on and wrote a letter to me before every game. Things that she would want me to know."

When Kekua "died" in September 2012, the news came from her brother who texted Te'o from Kekua's phone number, he told Thamel. The brother then called Te'o to deliver the news.

"He was just crying and crying and crying," Te'o said. "I just had to calm him down. I was like, 'You have to speak clearly. I need to know what's going on.' That's when he told me, 'Lala is gone.' That's what they call her. They call her Lala."

"Catfish" movie director and actor Ariel Schulman told "Good Morning America" that he believes there may have been "a few other people duped by the fake Lennay character."

Te'o at first kept a low-profile after the news of the scandal broke. But he has since released a statement calling the situation "incredibly embarrassing" and granted an interview to ESPN. ABC News' Katie Couric will conduct the first on-camera interview with Manti Te'o for her syndicated daytime talk show, "Katie," on Jan. 24 .

Also Read

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/manti-teo-hoax-had-parallels-alleged-perpetrators-life-145634627--abc-news-topstories.html

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Will Climate Change Get Cold Shoulder in Obama's 2nd Term?

As President Barack Obama prepares to take the oath of office for the second time, he has promised that climate change will be a priority in his second term. The chances that significant climate action will actually happen, however, remain slim, policy experts say.

"I always have hope, but it is sometimes hard to see how real progress, substantial progress, is going to be made with the fact that the Congress is so polarized," said Travis Franck, a policy analyst for nongovernmental organization Climate Interactive.

After his re-election, Obama told Time magazine that his daughters inspired him to think long term, particularly about issues of climate change. And in his first news conference after the election, the president told reporters that he planned to shape a climate change agenda, but gave no details on what that agenda might look like ? though he did say that a tax on carbon emissions was likely a non-starter.

These statements took place before the massacre at Newtown, Conn., which pushed gun control to the forefront. And climate change will surely have to vie for attention with other divisive issues, such as an upcoming congressional battle over the nation's debt ceiling. While Obama may be able to take some executive action to tighten environmental regulations in certain sectors, such as fuel-efficient vehicles or clean energy, experts say, a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to cooperate with the administration's global warming agenda.?

"From my point of view, being an observer from Europe, I think it's more likely this sector-by-sector approach is implemented than a national climate policy," said Niklas H?hne, the director of energy and climate policy at Ecofys, a renewable energy and climate policy consulting firm. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

An urgent call for action

Obama's second term comes at a time when climate scientists are making increasingly urgent calls for action to mitigate the effects of a warming world. In November, University of Bern, Switzerland, climate researcher Thomas Stocker warned in the journal Science that every year of delay makes it harder to keep warming below levels that would severely disrupt the planet.

A cap of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) of warming, the most conservative goal discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, is already out of reach, Stocker wrote. After 2027, the world can no longer hope to keep warming below 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C), which is the number currently at the center of international climate negotiations.

The World Bank also issued a report in November, calling for global action on climate change. And in January, a study published in the journal Nature found that the biggest determiner of whether the world would successfully tackle climate change is not tech savvy or hoped-for green development, but the timing of political action.

Public opinion appears receptive to climate change as well. About 73 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 33 percent of Republicans say they are somewhat or very worried about climate change, according to a September 2012 survey of Americans by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.

Support for action was higher. Three-quarters of independents, 93 percent of Democrats and 52 percent of Republicans said global warming should be at least a medium priority for the president and Congress. Severe weather such as the summer's wildfires out west may have shifted these opinions, as the same numbers in March 2012 (before the fires) were 9 points lower for Democrats and 7 points lower for independents. Republicans held steady between March and September.

Challenges in Congress

The party schisms seen in the polling data are more pronounced in Congress, where representatives routinely deny the scientific consensus that climate is changing and that greenhouse gas emissions by humans are the main driver.

"I'm not going to bet the U.S. economy or the Texas economy on a theory that is not proven," Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) told the Dallas Morning News this month. "Climate has always been changing." [Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Attitudes like Barton's are why climate policy specialists expect little in the way of climate legislation in the upcoming four years.

The administration can make some progress on its own, said Elizabeth Sawin, co-director of Climate Interactive. In Obama's first term, for example, the administration ordered new fuel standards for lightweight vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and there was money included in the economic stimulus for public transportation and clean energy. Similar efforts in the second term could move the country toward lower carbon emissions, Sawin told LiveScience.

"Anything is better than nothing," she said.

But a piecemeal approach is less likely than an overarching plan to succeed in slowing warming significantly, Franck, the policy analyst for Climate Interactive, said. Moreover, a failure to act nationally puts the administration in an awkward spot in international negotiations. The 2011 climate talks in Durbin, South Africa, set a plan for a new international climate treaty to be prepared by 2015.

"We've lost a lot of credibility in climate change negotiations, because we've been kind of paralyzed," Franck told LiveScience. "If [international negotiators] bring home a treaty or agree to something, when does it get ratified by the Senate? Will we have domestic legislation already? Will the Senate pass it and then we'll have to pass domestic legislation?"

If the Obama administration is stuck with instituting piecemeal regulations, it will be a "major challenge" to communicate this progress to the international community, H?hne told LiveScience.

"The international climate negotiations really depend on the U.S. bringing something forward," he said. "If the U.S. doesn't bring something forward that is considered by most players as something new and something ambitious, then the new international agreement in 2015 will not be ambitious."

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas?or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook?& Google+.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-cold-shoulder-obamas-2nd-term-133707964.html

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Inauguration weekend kicks off with day of service

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Three days of inaugural celebrations kicked off in Washington Saturday, with President Barack Obama heading up a National Day of Service ahead of his swearing-in for a second term.

The president and first lady, Michelle Obama, planned to volunteer in the Washington area Saturday. Vice President Joe Biden, his wife, Jill, and others members of his family spent the morning filling care packages for U.S. troops serving overseas, veterans and first responders.

Obama added the day of service projects in 2009 and hopes it will become a tradition for future presidents.

Volunteers also gathered on the National Mall on a crisp, sunny morning in Washington for a service summit. In a videotaped message played at the event, Mrs. Obama said the volunteers were "showing once again that by giving back, we can lift up our fellow citizens and build stronger, healthier communities."

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton, the honorary chairwoman of the volunteer effort, kicked off the summit by praising her family's "chain of service."

The president will be officially sworn in for his second term on Sunday in a small ceremony at the White House. He'll take the oath of office again on Monday before hundreds of thousands of people on the National Mall, followed by the traditional parade and formal balls.

Thousands of workers and volunteers were making final preparations for the celebration. Hotels and government buildings along the parade route were adorned with red, white and blue bunting. White tents, trailers and generators lined the Mall.

Yet there is decidedly less energy surrounding Obama's second inauguration than there was in 2009. That history-making event drew 1.8 million people for the swearing-in of the nation's first black president.

This time, Obama takes the oath of office following a bruising presidential campaign and four years of partisan fighting. He's more experienced in the ways of Washington. He has the gray hair and lower approval ratings to show for it.

For at least the inauguration weekend, the fiscal fights and legislative wrangling will be put aside in favor of pomp and circumstance.

The White House did not say in advance what Obama's service project would be. In 2009, he helped spruce up a shelter for homeless teens in one of Washington's poorer neighborhoods then visited wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The White House sees the call to service as a way for Americans across the country to honor the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. The day Obama publicly takes the oath of office marks King's birthday, and 2013 is the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader's March on Washington.

Also Saturday, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden were hosting the Kids' Inaugural Concert, an evening event paying special tribute to military spouses and children.

The crowds pouring into Washington were expected to be far smaller than they were four years ago, and there will be fewer inaugural balls for the president and first lady to attend. Still, Obama's swearing-in at the Capitol is expected to draw up to 800,000 people, which would make it the largest second.

The president was still working on his inaugural address heading into the weekend. He isn't expected to delve deeply into the policy objectives he'll tackle in a second term, but the tone and theme of the speech will set the stage for the policy fights to come.

Aides said he will make the point that while the nation's political system doesn't require politicians to resolve all of their differences, it does require Washington to act on issues where there is common ground. He will speak about how the nation's core principles can still guide a country that has changed immensely since its founding.

Temperatures were forecast to fall throughout the weekend and be in the 30s on Monday when the crowds gather along the parade route that will take Obama from Capitol Hill to the White House.

Despite scaling back on some of the revelry, the inauguration will be a star-studded affair. Top acts including Beyonce, Katy Perry and Brad Paisley have signed on to perform at the weekend's events.

The inauguration also is bringing thousands of Obama campaign staffers and donors to Washington, with many getting invitations for tours and other events at the White House. On Friday, the president and first lady held two private events for donors who helped finance his 2012 campaign.

___

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.

___

Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/inauguration-weekend-kicks-off-day-085009053--politics.html

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Te'o among many victims of online wishful thinking

FILE - In this Oct. 20, 2012, file photo, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o chases the action during the second half of an NCAA college football game against BYU in South Bend, Ind. The wrenching story of Te'o's girlfriend dying of leukemia _ a loss he said inspired him to play his best all the way to the BCS championship _ was dismissed by the school Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, as a hoax perpetrated against the linebacker. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

FILE - In this Oct. 20, 2012, file photo, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o chases the action during the second half of an NCAA college football game against BYU in South Bend, Ind. The wrenching story of Te'o's girlfriend dying of leukemia _ a loss he said inspired him to play his best all the way to the BCS championship _ was dismissed by the school Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, as a hoax perpetrated against the linebacker. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

In a photo provided by ESPN, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o pauses during an interview with ESPN on Friday, Jan. 18, 2013, in Bradenton, Fla. ESPN says Te'o maintains he was never involved in creating the dead girlfriend hoax. He said in the off-camera interview: "When they hear the facts they'll know. They'll know there is no way I could be a part of this." (AP Photo/ESPN Images, Ryan Jones) MANDATORY CREDIT

FILE - In this Nov. 17, 2012, file photo, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o takes the field during senior day before an NCAA college football game against Wake Forest in South Bend, Ind. The wrenching story of Te'o's girlfriend dying of leukemia _ a loss he said inspired him to play his best all the way to the BCS championship _ was dismissed by the school Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, as a hoax perpetrated against the linebacker. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

FILE - In this Aug. 16, 2012, file photo, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o answers a question during NCAA college football media day in South Bend, Ind. The wrenching story of Te'o's girlfriend dying of leukemia _ a loss he said inspired him to play his best all the way to the BCS championship _ was dismissed by the school Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013, as a hoax perpetrated against the linebacker. (AP Photo/Joe Raymond, File)

CHICAGO (AP) ? It started out a stunner: The Heisman Trophy runner-up had told heartbreaking stories about a dead girlfriend who didn't exist. Then it became unreal: The All-American linebacker said he had been duped, and theirs was a relationship that existed only in phone calls and Internet chats.

The reaction was predictable: Unbelievable. Couldn't happen.

People speculated he must be a straight-laced Mormon, naive and unfamiliar with modern-day dating hazards. Or he must be part of an elaborate hoax designed to bolster his image. Because no big-time college football player, beloved on campus and adored by millions, could have a girlfriend he's never ... actually ... met.

Yet even people who really ought to know better say what Notre Dame's Manti Te'o says happened to him has happened to them, and they believe it happens far more often than people care to admit.

"If we shake the tree, we would find hundreds of thousands of people falling out of the tree who are experiencing something like this," said Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the California-based American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

It's just human nature, Epstein said, something known formally by psychologists as "confirmation bias." We watch the news that matches our political beliefs. We discount viewpoints we don't like. We ignore good advice and miss red flags, so we can continue believing in something we want to be true.

In Epstein's case, it was believing he'd made a real connection with an attractive Russian woman named Ivana he met online. In fact, she was nothing more than a computer bot someone had set up to respond to queries on an online dating site.

"A lot of people still make fun of me," he said.

Today's social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, make it easy to "meet" someone without ever doing more than chatting online or exchanging emails. The same tools that allow for such casual contact also can be used by impostors to create intricate personas that exist only on the Internet.

All of it simply makes it that much easier to delude ourselves.

"After a generation of kids growing up with Facebook and decades of online life, you'd think we wouldn't be so easily duped, but I think these people who do the duping are more inventive than people who use the technology," said Steve Jones, a communications professor and online expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

It's been happening since people first began mingling in chat rooms more than 20 years ago. In 2006, one mom in Missouri, Lori Drew, created a MySpace page for non-existent teenage boy so she could "romance" ? and strike back at ? a girl she thought was spreading rumors about her daughter. Humiliated, the targeted girl later killed herself.

"As far back as the 1980s, men were impersonating women, kids were pretending to be adults, and all kinds of relationships with non-existent or phony people flourished online," says Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, who studies social media.

Now, he says, "the rise of Twitter and Facebook have only made that easier."

Those behind Te'o's imaginary girlfriend, for instance, created more than one Twitter account for her and appear to have used photos lifted from a California woman's Facebook page to make it look that much more real.

"In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious," Te'o said in a statement earlier in the week. "If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was."

Te'o has company. As Notre Dame rose to No. 1 in the AP Top 25, sport writers nationwide recounted the story of the heroic, grieving athlete who persevered on the field after a girlfriend named Lennay Kekua was diagnosed with leukemia. Te'o and his family provided them with plenty of stories about the relationship, and no one figured out it was fiction until Deadspin.com broke that news this past week.

In his first interview since, Te'o told ESPN he had lied to his father about having met Kekua. To cover that up, he apparently lied to everyone else.

"That goes back to what I did with my dad. I knew that. I even knew that it was crazy that I was with somebody that I didn't meet," Te'o said during the off-camera interview Friday. "So I kind of tailored my stories to have people think that, yeah, he met her before she passed away."

The fact is that many people don't like to admit that they find love online, let alone that they might be misled by someone they've met that way.

For a young woman in Chicago, it started last February when a potential love interest responded to a personal ad she'd posted in the Craigslist "W4M" section. They communicated for several months online, first by email, and then instant messaging and then online voice chat.

She sent him her photo. He delayed sending his, again and again, and put off meeting in person. He wasn't ready, he told her. It bothered her, but she was so taken with the ease and intimacy of their long, daily conversations ? about their lives and their jobs, their family and friends, even sex.

After this went on for eight months, he abruptly deleted his email and Yahoo Messenger accounts, the only means she'd had to reach him. She didn't even know his last name and wouldn't know him if he passed her on the street.

"It all sounds ridiculous when you're not immersed in the situation, but when you are, it's incredibly easy to get sucked in and not want out," said the 23-year-old, a young professional who shared her story on the condition of anonymity, still hesitant to admit how truly heartbroken she was over a person she'd never met in person.

Te'o offered similar details Friday, telling ESPN he never met Kekua face-to-face and when he tried to speak with her via Skype and video phone calls, the picture was blocked. Still, he said he didn't figure out the ruse.

After he was told Kekua had died of leukemia in early September, Te'o admitted he misled the public about the nature of the "relationship" because he was uncomfortable saying it was purely an electronic romance. Skeptics remain, including some young adults accustomed to making connections on the Internet and by text message.

"Maybe I'd be more inclined to buy it if he was an everyday 'Joe Schmoe,' but with his fame, I can't imagine it happening," said Jennifer Marcus, a 26-year-old New Yorker who blogs about dating and other topics. "To me it seems like he did it for sympathy, or maybe has a few screws loose like a ton of people in this world. People go to great lengths to fit in."

For the 23-year-old Chicagoan, her experience online hasn't led her to swear off using Craigslist and the OkCupid website to find dates. She has, however, started heeding the red flags she once ignored, she says, and cuts off communication with anyone who won't meet with her in person.

"I don't want my time wasted again with someone who isn't willing to give the same amount of transparency and availability that I am," she said. "I'm planning a third date with someone who is very much the person he claimed to be."

___

Online:

Epstein's article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=from-russia-with-love

___

Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://twitter.com/irvineap

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-01-19-Notre%20Dame-Duped%20Like%20Te'o/id-4c6ec277aeb04ab0980b241c02c042ee

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