CINCINNATI (AP) - Federal authorities say a former Cincinnati city employees' union president convicted of wire fraud in the embezzlement of more than $750,000 of the union's money has been sentenced to four years and three months in prison.
Justice Department and Labor Department officials say 52-year-old Diana Frey also must repay the money she took from the Cincinnati Organized and Dedicated Employees union.
She was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Cincinnati on one count of wire fraud.
Authorities said the embezzlement of funds from the union representing 800 members occurred between 2005 and June 2011.
Prosecutors say Frey fraudulently transferred union money by check and other methods to her bank accounts to pay personal expenses.
Frey's attorney did not immediately return a call for comment.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) ? Two Pennsylvania men convicted of harassing Sarah Palin's Alaska lawyers were sentenced Friday to time served and five years' probation, with the proceedings briefly halted after a short outburst in court by one of the defendants.
During his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, 20-year-old Shawn Christy said the judge's order that he live up to six months in a Pennsylvania community re-entry program was "ridiculous."
His father, Craig Christy, 48, was ordered to perform community service.
The Christys, of McAdoo, Pa., pleaded guilty in January to making harassing phone calls to Palin's attorneys. Attorney John Tiemessen testified that the men's calls threatened Palin and attorneys. Both Christys apologized Friday for their actions.
Shawn Christy was released and sent back to Pennsylvania last month after an evaluation report said he wasn't a danger to the public.
Before that, he and his father had been held since their arrests in Pennsylvania last August. Prosecutors say the men were upset about state restraining orders issued on behalf of Palin, a former Alaska governor and the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate. The restraining orders covered Palin, her family and friends.
In Friday's sentencing, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess ordered Shawn Christy to spend up to six months at the Scranton residential facility, where a bed will become available in mid-July. Christy wanted to return to his parent's home, where he had been living until his arrest last year.
"Why can't I go home now?" he said.
"Because I'm not letting you go home," Burgess said, prompting Christy to ask what was the judge's reason for imposing the order.
"It has to do with consequences," Burgess said. "It's part of the consequences for your behavior."
"I understand my behavior, and I understand this is ridiculous," Christy said. A short time letter, Burgess called for a short recess after blurts from Christy.
Burgess ultimately said Christy could stay with his parents at their McAdoo home until a bed at the residential facility becomes available.
After the sentencing was completed, Tiemessen said Christy's behavior in court was consistent with what he and others had witnessed in the past two years, including hundreds of calls from the Christys to his law firm's offices in Fairbanks and Anchorage.
"I've seen dozens and dozens of such little outbursts and worst," Tiemessen. "It just the first one Judge Burgess has seen."
Burgess rejected binding plea deals in December that would have allowed the men to avoid jail time.
Both men faced up to two years in prison and fines of up to $250,000. Tiemessen's law firm also is seeking about $15,000 in restitution for the billable hours it says were tied up in dealing with the huge number of calls to its offices in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Defense attorneys have said the Christys don't have the financial means to pay restitution, and Burgess did not rule on that issue Friday, saying a final decision can be made up to 90 days after sentencing.
Tiemessen testified earlier this year that many of the calls from the Christys began last June, escalating in July and August. Besides being threatening, many were filled with profanity, he said.
"There were hundreds of calls a day," he said at the time. "The only thing that ever stopped it, frankly, was when they were taken into custody."
According to an affidavit by the FBI, Craig Christy threatened to kill Tiemessen in one obscenity-filled message, and in another, Shawn Christy said he might have sex with Palin. The younger Christy also threatened to come to Alaska and rape one of the attorneys, according to the document.
The restraining orders were issued after Palin left office.
The order against Shawn Christy was issued in 2010 after he was accused of stalking Palin. It was renewed last year after Palin testified that Christy appeared to be sending a clear signal when he made a one-day visit to Alaska on her February birthday.
Palin also said she feared Christy's parents because of their claim that she had a sexting relationship with their son in 2009, when he was a teen.
The order against Craig Christy was issued last year after he was accused of barraging Palin's parents with telephone messages.
Palin's parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, attended the hearing Friday. They declined to comment.
Tiemessen said time will tell if the sentencing was adequate.
"The only adequate remedy is a remedy that results in our firm, our families, our clients being left alone," he said. "We're interested in the result, not necessarily the mechanism, that achieves it."
Shirley MacLaine arrives at the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on Sunday June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9pm on TV Land. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Shirley MacLaine arrives at the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on Sunday June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9pm on TV Land. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Shirley MacLaine attends the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on Sunday June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9 p.m. on TV Land. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Meryl Streep, left, and Shirley MacLaine arrive at the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on Sunday June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9 p.m. on TV Land. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
Shirley MacLaine, left, and Julia Roberts attend the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9 p.m. on TV Land. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Shirley MacLaine, left, and Meryl Streep attend the AFI Life Achievement Award Honoring Shirley MacLaine at Sony Studios on Sunday June 7, 2012 in Culver City, Calif. The AFI Lifetime Achievement Honoring Shirley MacLaine airs on June 24, 2012 at 9pm on TV Land. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
CULVER CITY, Calif. (AP) ? It's not just a single life that gets toted up when Shirley MacLaine receives a career award. It's all her lives ? past, present and future.
MacLaine earned the American Film Institute's life-achievement award Thursday night with friends and colleagues praising her accomplishments in this life ? and cracking jokes about the reincarnation believer's other lives.
Co-stars Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Jack Black, Sally Field, Meryl Streep and others contributed to the loving roast of MacLaine, along with such friends, co-workers and admirers as Katherine Heigl, Don Rickles, Morgan Freeman and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern.
"Tonight we're here to honor a person I have known, a person I have loved my whole life," said MacLaine's younger brother, Warren Beatty, the 2008 recipient of the AFI honor.
Some stars lovingly ribbed MacLaine for her belief that she has lived many past lives. Black, MacLaine's co-star in her current comic drama "Bernie," presented a hilarious reel of himself congratulating the actress at career honors from prehistoric times to the Elizabethan era to U.S. colonial days.
"This is not the first lifetime-achievement award she's won over the ages," Black said.
Carrie Fisher, who wrote the 1990 comic drama "Postcards from the Edge" that starred MacLaine and Streep, joked that MacLaine "is actually some future person's past life. Can you imagine that lucky bastard?"
Nicholson, MacLaine's fellow Academy Award winner from 1983's "Terms of Endearment," said MacLaine loves her audiences and "is the only person outside of the clergy promising them eternal life."
The 40th recipient of the annual AFI honor, MacLaine received the best-actress Oscar for "Terms of Endearment" and was nominated four other times for such films as 1958's "Some Came Running," 1960's "The Apartment" and 1977's "The Turning Point."
The awards show, held in a historic Sony Pictures soundstage where MGM shot "The Wizard of Oz," will air June 24 on TV Land.
The ceremony featured taped segments with MacLaine recalling colorful episodes from her career, clips from her films such as "Sweet Charity," ''Being There," ''Guarding Tess" and her debut in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Trouble with Harry," and a segment on her collaborations with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and their Rat Pack pals.
"Downton Abbey" co-star Elizabeth McGovern introduced a clip of MacLaine's upcoming guest appearance on the British drama series, with MacLaine playing McGovern's mother.
MacLaine made a grand entrance to the dinner that preceded the show, taking the stage then working her way through the crowd with hugs and kisses for Beatty and wife Annette Bening, Streep, Rickles, Jennifer Aniston and others.
Streep presented the award to MacLaine, saying the actress cut a path for other women in Hollywood by doing much of her best work in middle age, when good female roles typically dry up.
"Some performers are just indelible. We fall early and we fall hard for them, and we follow them for the rest of our lives," Streep said. "That's our Shirl. That's you, babe."
Accepting the award from Streep, also a past winner of the AFI prize, MacLaine paid respect to the Jacks in her life, including Nicholson, Black and "The Apartment" co-star Jack Lemmon.
She also had fond words for all of the leading men she has known, "those I made love to on the screen and those I made love to off the screen. I swear, I remember only half."
MacLaine thanked the women who shared her dinner table for the evening, among them Streep and "Steel Magnolias" co-star Field, saying they had been her "other half of the sky, my sustaining belief that women who speak the truth will make the world a better place."
And she put in her own wisecrack about the prospects of future lives.
"For all of the over-achievers in this room, we should relax and enjoy it," MacLaine said, "because if we don't do it now, we'll do it next time."
He doesn?t even know what one is. As far as he?s concerned, it?s a furry animal he?s only seen in books and running around the floor of the Newark airport.
While I?ve known this for some time, it recently moved from the back of my mind to front and center following a brief car trip a few days ago. From the back seat, my eldest son ? who for some inexplicable reason loves to watch the instructions tick by on the screen of the GPS unit sitting on the dashboard ? requested that I program the unit to give us directions home. I politely declined, pointing out that I couldn?t be messing around with the screen as I was already driving. He followed up with that well-known, youthful na?vet? that borders on soul-piercing in its effectiveness to point our shortcomings in ourselves and our world by asking:
?Why can?t you just tell it where you want to go? Like the Xbox.?
?I don?t know, son??
Unhappy with the answer he?d received, the conversation then turned in the direction of endless questions about computers versus video games versus the car?s GPS. In all the hubbub of explaining to my eldest about the differences between them, especially how we interact with them, my youngest, despite spending many an hour on particularly snowy Vermont days upstairs in the home office playing Curious George games on the computer, piped in abruptly:
?Dad! Why would your computer have a mouse in it?! You?re just making that up!?
A lot has been made over the past few years of so-called ?digital natives? ? children who were born and raised in the age of the computer. Kids like Mark Zuckerberg, who was born in 1984, seven years after the release of Apple?s first computer. For all of his life (and mine; if I?m being honest, I?m not that much older than Zuck), computers have been part of human existence.
We were both part of the first digital generation. But still, even then the computer was something distinct from everyday life. It was culturally defining. It was epochal, some might even say. But it was by no means universally prevalent.
One of my fondest childhood memories is of the arrival of a fresh, new Tandy 1000 SL one Christmas morning. I remember it well. 50-odd lb., 13-inch CRT monitor. Big honking base ?CPU.? Keyboard? and no mouse. That came later, with the next-generation model.
The arrival of the Tandy was the moment we went from a family without a computer to a family with one. I look back at it, and I like to think it compares to the arrival of the first television set in many households in the 1940s and 1950s. The family gathered around the set to watch Ed Sullivan, neighbors aglow with jealousy.
We were by no means the first on the block to own a computer. Still, at that stage many a family didn?t yet have one. Maybe Dad or Mom used one at work, and of course, our small suburban school had a little ?lab? of them, used to mainly to teach typing. So I?d used them before, on occasion, but the power of the device ? and my borderline addiction to it ? was not apparent until it invaded the home. Or at least my home (there is probably a good ?nature vs. nurture? debate in the evolution of the computer geek).
But it wasn?t much like the arrival of the television at all. I only found out years later that my mother had to work hard to convince my father that it was more than his choice description ? ?a $3,000 pet rock.? We never huddled around the phosphorescent glow of the screen as a family. My brother ignored it nearly entirely (maybe that was only because I hogged it?). The same was true for the majority of children in the original group of digital natives: the computer was part of, but mostly peripheral to, the average child?s life. It was only a select set who really made it a part of their everyday lives.
Yet today that seems to have changed, simply by the ubiquity thrust upon the current generation of children. Computers, in the looser definition of the word that includes smart phones, tablets, traditional PCs, interactive video players, GPS devices, game consoles, and a host of other consumer and business tools and toys, are everywhere. Our car stereos become speakerphones and road maps on demand. We even use touchscreens to order lunch at deli chains and burrito joints. Living a day free of interaction with a computer is now much more difficult than it was for the first digital cohort.
Quantifying the impact of this generational shift is difficult, if not downright impossible. But we can garner quite a bit of insight from the anecdotal experiences we have with our own children today. I am a father of two wonderful sons, ages four and six. As you can imagine, given my geekish tendencies and a career centered on being up to date on some of the most advanced technologies around, my home is replete with the latest gadgets ? everything from the run-of-the-mill consumer electronics to quad copters and 3D printers.
Amongst the most prized of those gadgets (from the perspective of my six-year-old at least) are the video game consoles. We have a Wii, a Playstation, and most notably for this story, an Xbox with the Kinect attachment, hooked into the surprisingly modest-sized television in the living room. (I?ve never been a prime time TV or sports addict, so a TV bigger than the 37-inch LCD is one of those things I occasionally think of grabbing, but never bother to.)
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Xbox with Kinect allows you to eschew the traditional joystick and instead use gestures to control the game. No controllers. No remotes. Just stand in front of the three-eyed digital camera contraption and it senses where your head, heads, feet, etc., are and where they are moving to. The resulting paths of motion are translated by the console into swipes that slide content along the screen, kicks that send virtual soccer balls flying, and (thanks to some munificent math by game designers) Olympic-record-breaking long jumps you?d never be capable of in real life.
The Kinect is not the only sensing device on the market. The video below highlights another one, the Leap Motion:
This video shows the power of these devices firsthand. Like the Kinect, like the multi-touch screens of the iPhone, iPad, Androids, and other devices, the Leap Motion captures far more than just the location of a single dot. Instead it maps a wide variety of motions onto a map of intended actions. It attempts to allow for natural gestures to become the language in which we communicate with our computers.
It?s not uncommon these days for kids to experience computing without the traditional tethers of keyboard and mouse, or even remote controls and game controllers. These novel, unwired interfaces are not only coming to market, they are on the verge of becoming ubiquitous.
Take another keyboard- and mouse-free device for instance: the iPad. Just a little over two years after its introduction, the touchscreen-centric iPad is the number-one selling non-phone personal computer in the world. It outsells ? in sheer volume of units shipped ? the total of all computers shipped by any one of the top PC makers in the world: HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. That?s all their many models of desktops and laptops rolled into one:
Or consider the iPhone, which is the number-one selling phone in the world, hands down. Its next closest competitors virtually all sport touchscreens as well. Now, 50% of all phones sold in the US are smartphones, and virtually all are powered by touchscreen interfaces.
But iPad- and iPhone-like touch-based devices are just supplements for most households in the developed world (in developing nations, like most in Africa and large swaths of Asia, increasing numbers of households count their smartphones as the first and sole computing device). In the West, the touchscreen-centric devices add to their owners? computers, but still rarely wholesale replace them. The Western world, even at home, is still dominated by Windows and traditional Macs.
However, recently Microsoft announced that its Windows 8 desktop operating system, due out this fall, will be fully touch enabled. In other words, its interface will look much more like the iPhone than it does the traditional Windows interface hundreds of millions of people know today. In fact, it will look exactly like the interface on the new Windows phones, dubbed ?Metro.?
The sleek, tile-based interface is meant to work on touch screens that vary in size from phone to wall uses. And all at the tip of your fingers. The multi-touch revolution is literally remaking the computer as we know it. And more and more often, users ? children especially ? will be able to simply eschew the mouse and even the keyboard.
That?s because it?s not just touch that Microsoft is eyeing. The same gesture and voice technologies that control the Xbox will also be brought to Windows 8 as well.
The company already produces a Kinect for Windows, and hackers have been busy working on connecting the device to older versions of Windows and to a whole host of other devices, including robots:
With devices like the Leap Motion following the Kinect, gestures may someday become as common as the touchscreen is today.
You?ll be able to use your machine?s microphone to control it as well. Microsoft already brought speech recognition to cars with Ford and Fiat?s infotainment systems, and now it plans to make it ubiquitous in every device it touches.
We?ve just begun what promises to be a wholesale revolution in the way we interact with computers, as big or larger than the introduction of the mouse and graphical user interface, yet already, the first crop of these devices is beginning to change the entire way we think about interacting with computers, from top to bottom.
First, it?s not that we have ?a? computer; we now have multiple computers. And they carry names like ?phone,? ?tablet,? and ?Xbox.? With each, we touch the screens, talk to them, wave at them, and expect them to understand what we?re doing. Increasingly, they even interact back with us through speech or by navigating our physical world.
By the time my sons reach 8 and 10 ? I was 10 when I received my Tandy, which came standard with a 256-color video graphics setup that I thought was pretty awesome at the time ? the term ?click here? will have about as much personal relevance to them as ?turning? the channel or ?dialing? the telephone.
The fact that I had to ?sit down at the keyboard? to type up this message is even a half-truth. I?ve been bitten by the speech recognition bug, and the majority of what you read here was spoken aloud to my computer, which did the typing for me, whilst I paced around my office.
For me, that?s still novel. But for my sons, who have known nothing different in their short lives, gestures and voice controls and touchscreens are so common that they now expect as much from every new device they encounter. To them, it makes no sense that they cannot just talk to the GPS (something which, now that it?s been pointed out to me, seems equally preposterous given its position inside the car where inevitably both of my hands will be otherwise occupied at the 10 and 2 positions on the steering wheel).
The touchscreen is for them ? sons of a geek ? the lowest common denominator. Everything does that. Speech? Gestures? Why not?
User interface expectations are built very early on. Painted on the blank canvas that is a screen, they often come to be based on metaphors we know from our previous lives. ?Once comfortable with the way things work, it takes a pretty large benefit for us to change our behaviors (if that were not the case, the iPad onscreen keypad would have used the Dvorak layout, which has been proven time and again more efficient for typers than the QWERTY keyboard, which was invented to minimize mechanical movement and thus repairs of mechanical typewriters ? like the metric system for most American people, it?s just not enough better to make it worth even considering).
It is likely for this exact reason that, despite my penchant for gadgets, we still live in an iPad-free household. It?s because Dad (i.e., me this time) doesn?t like the thing. I find it terribly constrained. I cannot bear to type on the screen. There?s no easy way to position the screen to a good angle. But most of all, I hate not having a file system where I can download a presentation and leaf through it, making small changes, adding slides, etc. The idea that a computer doesn?t contain folders and files is as foreign to me as the lack of voice control in the car?s GPS system is to my sons.
Luckily, as one of the technological one-percenters from my own, original digital-age group, adjusting is easier for me than for most.
I almost never thumb in a message on my Android phone. I rely instead on the excellent voice recognition built in (I only wish there was a button on the phone to hold to put it into voice mode, like on the iPhone).
I use the Kinect voice controls regularly? so much so that given the choice between hopping around the nice ?Metro? interface of the Xbox with my voice commands and trying to surf through cable channels, I end up watching ?reruns? (another of those archaeologically rooted technical terms) on Netflix, via the Xbox, every single time. (Bonus: I never have to find that darned remote again!)
My youngest son, sneaking upstairs for some additional fun with Curious George?s online games, has (largely unnoticed by me until now) made the same choice with the computer in my office. He?s elected to exclusively use the giant touchscreen I installed up there ? as a geeky thing for me to explore and mostly never use ? as his sole input device. To him, the mouse on the desk might as well be the furry little creature, as it is has just as little to do with the computer as its mammalian namesake.
No, for my two young sons, their Tandy moment will not involve a black screen with blinking cursor. They may not even have a Tandy moment; or they may have had many much smaller ones already. Maybe, just maybe, they may never even know what it?s like to understand a colossal leap forward in technology stepping into their lives seemingly overnight. After all, for them, computing is already an immersive experience ? one where you interact with dozens of devices, each purpose-built for its task, each designed to work around you, rather than you having to bend to their somewhat quirky and limited means of interaction.
While members of my generation were the original ?digital natives,? things will look much different viewed through the eyes of our own children. What to expect of computers has changed in a seeming flash. But still, the geek in me knows deep down that it is precisely because many of the most inclined in their generation ? like me, Zuck, and millions of others in the prior age cohort ? will be as frustrated by the limitations of what today?s adults dreamt up that they too will work to throw them out and replace them with something even further, inspired not by Star Trek, whose vision of the user computer interface wasn?t much beyond what?s in the Xbox and iPad, but maybe by Ready Player One? or even Harry Potter.
The implications of this trend loom large for investors as well. The new paradigm for computing is about natural interaction. And any company that ignores it will ultimately limit its market going forward. PCs ate the mainframe. The Blackberry destroyed the mobile phone. The iPhone wiped out the Blackberry. The Xbox trounced the Wii. What will the next major shift in the interface bring? Time will tell, but our experiences thus far suggest the mouse will likely play a lesser role, and our hands, voices, and maybe even just our minds will play a much larger one.
I?m excitedly awaiting the arrival on my doorstep of a novel ?learning? thermostat (yes, I?m that kind of geek). Just adjust the temperature by turning the dial as you go in and out, as you wake and get ready to sleep, and it learns your patterns, creating a constantly adapting program to both make you comfortable and save energy. It adjusts to weekends ? it knows what date and time it is. The weather ? it knows where you live. When you aren?t home ? it has motion sensors. Cool stuff.
But when it arrives, I am sure my son will ask why I have to ?turn the dial? in the first place. Why can?t I just tell it to make it cooler? Why not, indeed?
As amazing as these advances are, they all are driven by the brilliant individuals whose visionary dreams guide their work. To be in on the companies most likely to survive the stiff competition in tech, an investor must understand this and keep up with the ever-shifting front lines of the tech wars.
When the tsunami hit the northern coast of Japan last year, the waves ripped four dock floats the size of freight train boxcars from their pilings in the fishing port of Misawa and turned them over to the whims of wind and currents.
One floated up on a nearby island. Two have not been seen again. But one made an incredible journey across 5,000 miles of ocean that ended this week on a popular Oregon beach.
Along for the ride were hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish all native to Japan that have scientists concerned if they get a chance to spread out on the West Coast.
"This is a very clear threat," said John Chapman, a research scientist at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore., where the dock washed up early Tuesday. "...It's incredibly difficult to predict what will happen next."
State officials were considering plans to scrape all the living organisms off the dock and bury them in the sand, so they would not spread, Chapman said.
While scientists expect much of the floating debris to follow the currents to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an accumulation of millions of tons of small bits of plastic floating in the northern Pacific, tsunami debris that can catch the wind is making its way to North America. In recent weeks, a soccer ball washed up in Alaska, and a Harley Davidson motorcycle in a shipping container was found in British Columbia, Canada.
How the dock float ? 165 tons of concrete and steel measuring 66 feet long, 19 feet wide and 7 feet high ? turned up on Agate Beach, a mile north of Newport, was probably determined within sight of land in Japan, said Jan Hafner, a computer programmer in the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center, which is tracking the 1.5 million tons of tsunami debris likely floating across the Pacific.
That's where the winds, currents and tides are most variable, due to changes in the coastline and the features of the land, even for two objects a few yards apart, he said. Once the dock float got into the ocean, it was pushed steadily by the prevailing westerly winds, and the North Pacific current.
"If you have leaves falling from a tree ... one leaf will be moving in a slightly different direction from another one," Hafner said. "Over time, the differences get bigger and bigger and bigger.
"Something similar is happening on the ocean."
After it came ashore, the Japanese consulate was able to track down the origin of the dock float from a plaque bolted to it commemorating its installation in June 2008. Deputy Consul Hirofumi Murabayashi said Wednesday from Portland, Ore., that it was one of four owned by Aomori Prefecture that broke loose from the port of Misawa on the northern tip of the main island during the tsunami.
Akihisa Sato, an engineer with Zeniya Kaiyo Service, the dock's Tokyo-based manufacturer, said the docks were used for loading fish onto trucks. One of them turned up several weeks later on an island south of Misawa, but the other two remain missing.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to redouble its efforts to track the debris, saying something as big as the dock could pose a danger to ships at sea.
NOAA's tsunami marine debris coordinator, Ruth Yender, said if the Pacific were shrunk to the size of a football field, something like the dock would be the size of a human hair, making it very difficult to monitor, even from satellites.
The dock tested negative for radiation, which was to be expected if the dock broke loose before the nuclear power plant accident triggered by the waves, said Chris Havel, spokesman for the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation, which is overseeing removal of the dock.
Chapman said the dock float was covered with masses of algae, kelp, barnacles, mussels and other organisms. One square-foot area weighed nine pounds.
"This is a whole, intact, very diverse community that floated across from Japan to here," he said. "That doesn't happen with a log or a thrown-out tire. I've never seen anything like this."
Of particular concern was a small crab that has run wild on the East Coast, but not shown up yet on the West Coast, and a species of algae that has hit Southern California, but not Oregon. The starfish, measuring about three inches across, also appears to be new to U.S. shores.
"It's almost certainly true that most of the things on this have not been introduced to this coast yet," Chapman said. "We're going to see more of these things coming."
Tom Cleveland, a housekeeping supervisor at nearby beachfront condominiums, said people curious to see it have been jamming up traffic at a beach parking lot.
"Everybody and their brother has been here looking at it and checking it out," Cleveland said. "Obviously, we knew things would be coming our way, but I didn't expect anything this size."
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Associated Press writers Malcolm Foster in Tokyo and Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
