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Remember all that new voting equipment purchased after the 2000 presidential election, when those discredited punch card machines were tossed out? Now, the newer machines are starting to wear out.

Election officials are trying to figure out what to do before there's another big voting disaster and vendors have lined up to help.

During their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., this week, state election officials previewed the latest voting equipment from one of the industry's big vendors, Election Systems and Software.

"It's all still very much manual labor with people crossing off lists with pencils. And so ... the public is expecting more."

- Denise Merrill, Connecticut secretary of state

ES&S expects a huge surge in buying very soon. It hopes its new ExpressVote machine will appeal to those who want convenient voting as well as the security of a paper ballot that's counted separately.

"We're seeing a buying cycle that's starting now, and will probably go for the next maybe four or five years," said Kathy Rogers, a senior vice president at ES&S who used to run elections for the state of Georgia.

Rogers says companies have to be more flexible than they were 10 or so years ago. Both the technology and how people vote is changing rapidly.

"Some are moving to all vote by mail; some are increasingly becoming early vote sites," she said. "We have some that have moved as far away from direct record electronics as they possibly can, and then we have others who love that technology."

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That technology is those touchscreen voting machines that many states bought after 2000. Some states including Maryland are scrapping them in favor of paper-backed equipment, because of security concerns. But in a sign of the times, Maryland is leasing its new equipment from ES&S, instead of buying — just in case something better comes along in a few years.

"I don't have to tell you all, the technology is old and it's ancient by technology standards," said Matt Masterson in an address to the election officials. He helped run Ohio's elections and is a newly appointed commissioner on the federal Election Assistance Commission.

Masterson says most current voting equipment was purchased three years before the iPhone was introduced. Officials now have a lot of catching up to do.

"The public's out ahead of us on this one," Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill said. "I mean, they are amazed that we don't have them being checked in with laptops at the polling places, for example; it's all still very much manual labor with people crossing off lists with pencils. And so ... the public is expecting more."

Like the convenience they see today when they shop or bank. The big problem is figuring out who's going to pay for all these new machines. After the 2000 elections, Congress gave states $3 billion, but no one expects that to happen again. Merrill says state and local governments will have to figure out what to do, and soon.

"Because it could become a national embarrassment if we continue to have the problems we've had," she said. In her state, those problems include computer card failures.

Vendors say they're well aware that there's a tough sell ahead — that people are searching for something that's easy to use and accurate, but also cheap. This is why George Munro of Democracy Live says his company is pushing off-the-shelf technology that can be adapted for voting.

"So a voter can come in, use any Windows 8 tablet, it's not connected to the Internet or anything, but they can mark their ballot right on the screen and then print their ballot off," Munro says. He says it costs a lot less than regular voting equipment. And when it no longer serves its purpose, he says the tablets could be donated to schools or other government departments.

It's an idea that's gaining some attention, but not necessarily customers, yet. Election officials — at this conference, at least — are still just looking.

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Elections

People in West Africa often touch and wash the dead in their community. That's a problem when it comes to handling Ebola victims. Their bodies are known to be contagious. And so Red Cross body collectors receive careful training and protective gear before they embark, but it's tough to alter this tradition.

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Now researchers have confirmed how long those bodies can be contagious. The Ebola virus can survive for up to a week in a dead primate.

"As long as the virus is viable then there shouldn't be any difference between a live body and a dead body," head researcher Vincent Munster, a virus ecologist at the National Institute of Health, tells Goats and Soda. His findings will be published in May in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Ebola isn't the only virus that can linger after death.

"Just because a body dies, it doesn't mean that all cells die simultaneously," says Alan Schmaljohn, a microbiology and immunology professor at the University of Maryland, who is unaffiliated with the study. Viruses continue to reproduce, although the total number of viral cells decreases exponentially as the body decays.

Of all the viruses that stick around, the most persistent is smallpox. "It can last for an exceedingly long time," Schmaljohn says, describing how the virus remains viable in scabs. "That's part of what makes the smallpox vaccine such a good vaccine," he says. Because the virus is so tough to kill, doctors could easily move the vaccine from place to place without refrigeration.

But it'd be tough for a smallpox scab to harm another person. Schmaljohn says that a person would have to grind up the scab and apply it to broken skin before the virus would pose a risk. So exhuming a corpse from a 1910 victim "would not be hazardous," says Schmaljohn.

A respiratory illness like influenza also isn't such a concern, because the dead aren't likely to sneeze on you. Still, a living person who touches influenza-infected mucus, even from a dead person, might get sick.

As for Ebola, it can spread through many different channels. So it's really easy to catch from people living and dead. "When somebody succumbs to the Ebola virus, the virus is everywhere [on that person's body]," says Munster. "Anywhere you would take a swab you will find the virus." The decaying body emits fluids — blood, saliva, pus, feces — and all of them could carry the Ebola virus. So if any of those fluids come into contact with an orifice or an open cut on a living person, there's a decent chance that person will get infected. And that's the case for at least one other disease that seems far less exotic: norovirus or stomach flu.

ebola

The latest crop of 300 new North Korean slogans to mark North Korea's 70th anniversary has just been released. Stand back as they "cascade down and their sweet aroma [fills] the air":

— Thoroughly get rid of abuse of authority and bureaucratism!

— Let us raise a strong wind of studying the great Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism!

— Fire an opening salvo of an ideological campaign and make our fire concentrated, regular and accurate!

You get the idea.

Agence France-Presse describes the "exclamation-mark peppered list" of slogans published Thursday in translation by the the official KCNA news agency, as running the gambut from praise for dutiful wives to an exhortation to "make mushroom cultivation scientific!"

Even allowing that they probably come off more melodious in their original Korean, some of the commandments are so awkward that it's hard to imagine them sounding right in any language.

To wit: "Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland by the joint operation of the army and people!" or "Let this socialist country resound with Song of Big Fish Haul and be permeated with the fragrant smell of fish and other seafoods!" Then there's the simple "Grow vegetables extensively in greenhouses!"

Some of them are entirely lost in translation. Take the edict to "Play sports games in an offensive way!"

Reuters reports: "The slogans, which ran to more than 7,000 words in translation and spanned two pages of the party's broadsheet newspaper, called for a wide range of improvements including 'more stylish school uniforms' and 'organic farming on an extensive scale.'"

The BBC says: "Propaganda in the form of slogans, posters, stamps and books has played an important role in the country since the state was founded in 1948 so the appearance of a new batch of exhortations is not surprising."

James Grayson, an emeritus professor of modern Korean studies at Sheffield University tells the BBC that the new slogans are "typical of most totalitarian states."

He says they are reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution and after the establishment of the Communist regime. "[If] you think of the Nazis and Italian fascism it's not an unusual thing... It's the strength and the quantity of the North Korean ones that is unusual," he tells the news agency.

Grayson, however, notes a theme that marks most of the slogans: "A lot of this has to do with very practical things to do with the economy, especially food."

The "enemy" United States, was not spared, of course: "Should the enemy dare to invade our country, annihilate them to the last man!"

AFP quotes defector Lee Min-Bok, who fled North Korea 14 years ago and now lives in the South as saying "We were permanently buried by an avalanche of slogans.

"We had to memorize a lot of them to show our loyalty, but they slowly lost any meaning for anyone, especially after the famine in the 90s," said Lee, 57.

"That greenhouse one has been around for decades. The problem is nobody had any plastic sheets of glass to build them, or fuel to heat them," he added.

North Korea

Movie musicals used to be box-office poison, but lately they've found ways to sing to a wider crowd. The onscreen Les Miz did away with lip-synching, Annie went multi-cultural, Into the Woods belted out revisionist fairy-tales — and combined, those three movies have taken in almost three-quarters of a billion dollars.

Now — just in time for Valentine's Day — comes The Last Five Years, a virtually sung-through musical romance with another central gimmick and twists, tricks, and quirks enough to make me want to sing its praises despite a flaw or two.

The plot is entirely concerned with a supremely adorable NY couple — Cathy (Anna Kendrick) and Jamie (Jeremy Jordan) — who appear both cute and made for each other. He's a budding novelist, she's an aspiring actress. They fall in love, they marry, they fall apart, all in five years ... and yes, I know that sounds like a spoiler.

But it's not, because Cathy's first bleary-eyed lyrics tell us their union's come to naught:

Jamie is over and Jamie is gone
Jamie's decided it's time to move on
Jamie has new dreams he's building upon
And I'm still hurting.

Only after she's sung about the breakup, much as Fanny Brice does at the ouset of Funny Girl, does the movie flash back to beginnings: the two of them tearing their clothes off, leaping into bed, as Jamie sings ecstatically about breaking his Jewish mother's heart by falling for this blonde "Shiksa Goddess."

Young love, right? So now the plot can go forward. Except that The Last Five Years has an ingenious trick up its structural sleeve. While his songs tell the story conventionally, starting at the beginning, his songs are alternating with her songs, which tell the story in reverse. He goes start to finish, she goes finish to start, and their only duet is right in the middle, on the day she accepts his proposal.

Sounds confusing, but it's all pretty effortless in Richard LaGravenese's clean, clear adaptation of a stage two-hander by composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown. The dovetailed songs, in fact, end up revealing quite a lot about, not just their relationship, but relationships in general. You feel the ache of endings in the joy of beginnings, and know which forks in the road will lead straight off cliffs.

Which is not to suggest there aren't surprises along the way — Cathy's resilience is impressive, for instance, as her partner's career takes off while her dreams of Broadway stardom lead only to summer stock in Ohio.

Kendrick qualifies as the movie's secret weapon — actually not so secret now that she's charmed audiences in both Into the Woods and Pitch Perfect. She's so appealing here, in fact, that audience sympathies are likely to be less-than-evenly split between the two leads. Jeremy Jordan's Jamie is plenty energetic, but in terms of appeal, he's sort of the Omar Sharif to her Barbra Streisand.

LaGravanese tries to balance that where he can, by making Jamie one of the world's most physically active writers, hardly ever sitting still with an idea when he can instead be rushing from pillar to post in cars, on the run, biking, and even on the Staten Island Ferry. That allows the director to do a nice job of opening up a show that on stage is generally done with two performers and very little else.

The movie sketches in a whole world around Cathy and Jamie, though the story still comes down to just them, and their haunting, bittersweet recounting of The Last Five Years.