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Lowe’s Companies, Inc. announced it will offer all active, reserve, honorably discharged, and retired military personnel and their immediate family members a 10 percent discount on in-store purchases made during the Veterans Day holiday. The discount is available Nov. 8-15.

“Lowe’s is grateful to the men and women who have proudly served our country,” said Tom Lamb, senior vice president of marketing for Lowe’s. “We are pleased to offer this discount to those who have made sacrifices for the benefit of our nation.”

The discount is available on in-stock and special order purchases up to $5,000 (maximum discount $500). To qualify, individuals must present a valid military ID or other proof of service. Excluded from the discount are sales via Lowes.com, previous sales and purchases of services or gift cards. The offer is not redeemable for cash and is nontransferable.

Lowe’s has extended benefits for employees serving in the military and offers employment opportunities to military personnel after their service has ended. More than 12,000 Lowe’s employees are veterans. (Good to hear!)

Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), a Department of Defense agency, announced the opening of the nomination season for the 2010 Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award. National Guard and Reserve members and their families are eligible and encouraged to nominate employers who have provided exceptional support of military employees above the federal law requirements.

Nominations will be accepted at www.FreedomAward.mil from November 2, 2009 to January 18, 2010. The Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award is the highest recognition given by the U.S. Government to employers for their outstanding support of their employees who serve in the National Guard and Reserve.

The 2010 recipients will be announced in the spring and honored in Washington, D.C. at the 15th annual Secretary of Defense Employer Support Freedom Award ceremony on September 23, 2010.

Visit www.FreedomAward.mil for more information!

After the tragedy in Fort Hood, many people are asking how they can help out. You can find opportunities to volunteer in the San Antonio area, or donate from wherever you are!

The VA is calling for volunteers to assist with the Veterans History Project. This Veterans Day, honor our veterans. Record their stories!

The VA says that by recording the oral histories of our veterans, we preserve the human face of American history for generations to come and honor those men and women who swore to protect and defend the U.S. Each day as Veterans Day approaches, the VA home page will introduce you to veterans’ oral histories from the digital archive of the Library of Congress — one from each state and territory. Interested in learning more about a veteran from your state? Just click on the map. To find out more about the Veterans History Project and how you can submit a veteran’s oral history to the Library of Congress, go to www.loc.gov/vets. Do something special to honor veterans on Veterans Day, record their history!

It’s featured on the VA homepage, too!

Tributes.com, an online resource for local and national obituary news and multimedia tributes, announced today that they have added a new product to their line of online memorial offerings specifically designed to help families honor lost loved ones who served in the U.S. military. Tributes.com is now providing families with easy-to-use tools to create a lasting military tribute, complete with information on their loved one’s time of service, duty stations and deployments, photo slideshows for military memories, as well as branch-specific themes, as a way to honor and remember their fallen heroes.

You can also read “A New Age of Memorials“, by Don Vaughan to take another look at remembering your loved ones online.

Carter Floor Remarks:

Mr. Speaker, good afternoon. As the author of the identical companion bill, H.R. 1182, and the Representative to Fort Hood, Texas, I rise in very strong support of the Military Spouses Residency Relief Act. First, allow me to thank everyone who has worked for the last few years to bring us to this point to include Senators Burr and Feinstein for taking up this cause and shepherding this past-due reform through the Senate. I would also like to thank Chairman Filner for supporting our military spouses and requesting the bill be taken up today. We greatly appreciate all the V.S.O.s who lent their support including the Military Officers Association of America, the Air Force Sergeants Associations, AMVETS, the VFW and the Military Spouse Business Association. Above all, I would like to thank all the military spouses who encouraged their Representatives and Senators to support this bill. Finally, I would like to extend a very special thanks to Rebecca Poynter and Joanna Williamson, the two entrepreneurial spouses who brought us this issue and devoted so much of their own time toward its passage.

This small measure will provide invaluable relief to numerous military spouses who regularly uproot their entire lives to accommodate the needs of our Armed Forces.

The Servicemember’s Civil Relief Act provides basic civil relief to our men and women in the Armed Services in exchange for their voluntary service. These range from relief from adjudication while deployed in combat to maintaining a single state of domicile regardless of where their military orders may send them. This state of domicile provides an important stability for our soldiers, airmen, and marines. Though their orders may send them to numerous states, they are able to simplify their state income tax requirements, maintain property titles, and continue to vote for the elected officials from their hometown. Without the SCRA protections, the service member would have to deal with all of those every time they move to a military installation located in a different state.

This bill would amend the SCRA to allow a military spouse to claim the same state of domicile as the service member for the purposes of state income and property taxes as well as voter registration. Spouses could elect to stand united with their spouse – not only in support of our country – but sharing the same state as a home base. This reform would prevent a military family from suddenly losing up to 10 percent of their income if they are called upon to relocate to a different state. This is a significant loss of income that occurs as a direct result of government orders.

S. 475 would also provide the impetus for military spouses to put their names on deeds and titles, which would build and strengthen their own credit and further ensure legal protection.

But their spouses must still deal with those stresses even while faced with the challenge of moving, finding schools for child

With Veterans Day coming next week, I ask that all of us not only remember our service members current and past, but take a moment to remember all the military spouses who have sacrificed for and supported our soldiers. Keeping that in mind, I ask my colleagues to grant this invaluable relief to our military families and support the passage of the Military Spouses Residency Relief Act.

Can machines be taught to read? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) intends to find out with its Machine Reading Program.

DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory have awarded BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., $29.7 million in funding to develop an automated reading system that bridges the gap between naturally occurring text and the artificial intelligence reasoning systems that need such knowledge.

The initial use of such an intelligent learning system would be to automate military intelligence analysis, but BBN Technologies maintains the system would have civilian applications, such as providing access and automated analysis for libraries that have converted to digital texts.

Ralph Weischedel, principal investigator for the program, says, “One of our goals is to make knowledge available to machines much more cheaply, and the way to do that is by developing a machine that can read text and transform it into a formal representation the machine can understand.”

Weischedel notes the program is essentially a software project, using off-the-shelf hardware, that focuses on three subject matter areas — natural language understanding, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning.

“Our approach involves all three area and involves the premier scientists from those disciplines,” he says. “While we’ve just begun, we want to grow into a full-fledged reading system so a machine can solve problems and transmit knowledge, building on actual reasoning capability.”

Weischedel points out that because there are substantial software components to be built into the system, “we’re at the nuts and bolts stage of where they can communicate. And we’re coming up with applications program interfaces that allow the components we build to talk to customers’ system, so we’re at the level of basic software engineering integration.”

The Machine Reading Program has a five-year contract life.

The artificial intelligence systems that might benefit from machine reading are used in logistics, diagnostics, planning, prognostics, and situation awareness areas. However, because much of the material in such military systems is in natural language text, which artificial intelligence does not process, DARPA wants to bridge the gap that exists between those two information states.

“What we’re doing is groundbreaking,” Weischedel says. “There’s no software that can do this right now.”

About the author: Alan M. Petrillo is a Tucson, Ariz., freelance writer who works in a wide variety of fields, writing for national and regional magazines and newspapers. He’s also the author of the historical mystery, Full Moon.

WWII in HD is the first-ever World War II documentary presented in full, immersive HD color. Culled from thousands of hours of lost and rare color archival footage gathered from a worldwide search through basements and archives, WWII in HD will change the way the world sees this defining conflict. Using footage never before seen by most Americans–converted to HD for unprecedented clarity–viewers will experience the war as if they were actually there, surrounded by the real sights and sounds of the battlefields. Along the way they’ll meet a diverse group of soldiers whose wartime diaries and journals show in visceral detail what the war was really like.

This visually astonishing landmark series presents the story of World War II through the eyes of 12 Americans who experienced the war firsthand. Viewers will hear the story of Army nurse June Wandrey, who served from the beginning of the war in North Africa to the liberation of the camps in Germany. They will meet Shelby Westbrook, a young African American from Toledo, who became a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen; Jimmie Kanaya, the son of Japanese immigrants, who served in the U.S. Army and was imprisoned in Europe; and Jack Werner, a Jewish émigré who escaped from Austria before the war and wound up fighting not against Hitler and the hated Nazis, but in the Pacific Theater.

WWII in HD: A 10-Hour Event, Five Consecutive Nights
Beginning Sunday, November 15 at 9/8c

• Sunday, Nov 15
  9 pm Darkness Falls
  10 pm Hard Way Back

• Monday, Nov 16
  9 pm Bloody Resolve
  10 pm Battle Stations

• Tuesday, Nov 17
  9 pm Day of Days
  10 pm Point of No Return

• Wednesday, Nov 18
  9 pm Striking Distance
  10 pm Glory and Guts

• Thursday, Nov 19
  9 pm Edge of the Abyss
  10 pm End Game