Thursday, April 11, 2013

AT&T's Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket gets Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean

AT&T Samsung Galaxy SII Skyrocket

Update only available via KIES software

The Jelly Bean flavor of Android is hitting yet another phone today. This time it's AT&T's Samsung Galaxy S2 Skyrocket that's getting Android 4.1.2, some nine months after its Ice Cream Sandwich update. This one's only available through Samsung's KIES desktop software, unfortunately, but that's a small price to pay for a big update. 

Here's what you have to look forward to:

  • Google Now with enhanced voice activation
  • Adds Browser bar, Drive Mode, ATT Locker, Mobile Hot Spot, Featured Apps widget as preloaded applications
  • Removes Qik and MSpot applications
  • Improved Call Quality

Samsung's KIES software is available on Windows or Mac. Be sure you've got at least 50 percent battery before performing surgery.

Download: Samsung KIES; Galaxy S2 Skyrocket Jelly Bean Instructions

    


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/dKIWx8-JtL4/story01.htm

morgellons disease arik armstead sag awards red carpet torrey pines nhl all star game 2012 pollyanna samuel adams

China pulls 'Django Unchained' on day of premiere

BEIJING (AP) ? "Django Unchained" became "Django Unscreened" on Thursday as Quentin Tarantino's violent slave-revenge saga was pulled from Chinese theaters on its opening day, with the importer blaming an unspecified technical problem.

The rare suspension order by China Film Group Corp. was confirmed by theater employees throughout China, and has led to speculation that the Hollywood film could have run afoul of Chinese censors despite weeks of promotion in the country.

Calls to the importer and to China's regulatory agency, the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, were unanswered. The China office of Sony Pictures, which released the film, refused to comment.

"Django Unchained" reportedly cut some violent scenes and had already been cleared by China's rigorous censors, who generally remove violence, sex and politically edgy content. With such an exacting system, suspension on a film's premiere date is unusual.

Tian Zaixing, general manager of the Beichen Fortune Center movie theater in the southern city of Kunming, said he could not recall any other imported film being halted on the opening day. The order from China Film Group came in a phone call around 10 a.m., he said.

"We were excited about the film yesterday," he said. "We had had high expectations for this film's box office."

Tian said he had hoped the movie would bring about one-tenth of the monthly box office, or about 150,000 yuan ($24,000), to his six-screen theater in April. Now, he must scramble to fill newly opened slots for screening.

"This means we might not be able to meet our box-office goal for the year," Tian said.

The cited technical reason might only be a ruse, said Tian, who was unable to provide an alternative explanation.

He dismissed speculation that a nude scene was the offending culprit.

"The censors have sharper eyes than we do," Tian said. "Shouldn't they have already spotted it?" He added the scene was not lewd at all but powerful in making the audience sympathetic toward one character.

The film stars actors well known to the Chinese audience: Leonardo DiCaprio as a plantation owner and Jamie Foxx as a freed slave who trains to become a bounty hunter and demands his wife's freedom.

It made more than $160 million at the North American box office and has proved successful overseas as well. China has risen to the second-biggest movie market with sales of $2.7 billion last year, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

A man who is on the official promotional team for the film but refused to give his name because of the perceived sensibility of the issue said there had been no prior warning about the suspension and that the film's midnight premiere was unaffected.

Photographer Xue Yutao said he was about one minute into the movie at a Beijing theater Thursday morning when a couple of theater employees walked in and told the audience that the screening would be postponed. The announcer did not give a reason or say when the movie would be re-shown, Xue said.

"It was so sudden. I was very shocked," Xue said. "How could this be possible? Something like this has never happened before."

Xue said he resorted to a pirated copy of the film and did not see anything that would have offended Chinese censors.

"I'm not a noble man," the photographer said of his viewing of pirated movies. "I would still prefer to see it in the theater."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/china-pulls-django-unchained-day-070834644.html

dominion power Heather Clem Con Edison LaGuardia Airport weather radar the weather channel national grid

Google's Bufferbox Move To The Bay Area Didn't Surprise Swapbox, Which Remains Focused On Scaling

swapbox_nob1Who knew that package delivery would become a hot space, especially when it involves installation of physical lockers? Last week, we uncovered that Google’s recent acquisition, Bufferbox, was planning to invade the San Francisco Bay Area with its shipping service. Of course, after being acquired, nobody knew what would become of Bufferbox, so another Y Combinator company, Swapbox, stepped in to fill the potential void. I spoke with Swapbox’s founders today and learned that their plans and strategy are “unchanged,” and that the team knew that Bufferbox would eventually come to the Bay Area, expanding from its current locations in Canada. Swapbox recently installed its service in San Francisco’s Nob Hill section, mostly because of the concentration of people in the area. The company’s co-founder, Neel Murthy, says that activity with Swapbox is impressive in such a short period of time, with two-thirds of its customers being repeats. Of course, with Swapbox and Bufferbox, you don’t get assigned your own static P.O. Box, you can have your items shipped to any location that’s available. “We’re still just steadily rolling out Swapboxes, building out the independent infrastructure that everyone can use, and growing our footprint,” Murthy says. He added that the company is set up to install the Swapbox quickly, thanks in part to its modular design, which allows them to easily fit the cabinet into the space that’s available. Basically, no custom cabinets are needed. Of the feedback that Swapbox has received, the most interesting is that its customers are asking them to build out notification services that remind them to pick up their shipments before they leave work. Murthy says that Swapbox is seeing an average of four hours between notification that the item has been received and the actual pickup. The key to services like this, which are being mimicked by huge retailers Amazon and Walmart, is that consumers shouldn’t have to worry about being at home to wait for a package. If one of these services is available in an area where you work, it’s likely that you’d rather go there to pick up your package than to wait for FedEx to come back after a missed drop-off. Something like Swapbox isn’t limited to just Amazon and Walmart purchases, which is an advantage in getting repeat customers. After Nob Hill, Swapbox will be infiltrating the Mission, another highly populated area in San Francisco. The current cost to

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/kbjg_hn4HY4/

in plain sight hunger games movie review bats hunger games review jeff saturday jason smith jon corzine

Ben Affleck 'jealous' over Matt Damon smooch

GUS RUELAS / Reuters

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

By Marc Malkin, E! Online

Ben Affleck admits it's not easy watching Michael Douglas kiss Matt Damon in their upcoming Liberace film, "Behind the Candelabra."

"Pretty jealous, pretty jealous," the "Argo" Oscar winner cracked Tuesday night at the premiere of his new movie, "To the Wonder," when we asked if he was envious of Mr. Douglas.

He added, "It burns me up. You know, I feel the envy in my heart. I can't stand it."

Remember, Damon does refer to Affleck as his "hetero life mate."

"I saw 'Behind the Candelabra,'" Affleck said Tuesday. "I don't know about the hetero part anymore."

NEWS: Are Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran the next big bromancers?

"Candelabra," directed by Steven Soderbergh, is the real-life story of Liberace and his very tumultuous relationship his much younger lover Scott Thorson.

Matt Sayles / AP

"I've seen it," Affleck said. "It's spectacular to see. Matt is amazing. Michael Douglas is amazing. (Steven) Soderbergh's brilliant."

While the film is "light" and "fun," Affleck said, "It's also quite resonate."

We cannot wait.

Also at Tuesday's premiere, sponsored by Disaronno and Fiji Water, were Affleck's costars Rachel McAdams and Olga Kurylenko, Zachary Levi, Katie Aselton, Mark Duplass, Justin Chatwin and Wes Craven.?

PHOTOS: More movie premiere pics!

Related content:

Source: http://todayentertainment.today.com/_news/2013/04/11/17703060-ben-affleck-jealous-that-michael-douglas-got-to-kiss-matt-damon?lite

espn jeremy lin sleigh bells meek sturgis sturgis whitney houston laid to rest daytona bike week

New exploit roots Droid RAZR HD on Android 4.1.2, among others

RAZR HD

This latest root method works on all current Android versions of multiple Motorola phones

Yesterday we witnessed a Motorola milestone (no pun intended) when Dan Rosenberg announced he had found a method to unlock the bootloaders of multiple non-OMAP Motorola phones, including the Attrix HD, Droid RAZR HD/HD Maxx, and the Droid RAZR M. The unlock method would require root access, which unfortunately left Droid RAZR HD users out in the cold if they had already accepted the latest OTA update to Android 4.1.2.

Coming to the rescue of those disenfranchised Droid RAZR HD owners, Dan has released a new exploit that roots the following Motorola phones, regardless of what Android version they're currently running:

  • Droid Razr HD
  • Droid Razr Maxx HD
  • Atrix HD
  • Photon Q
  • Droid Razr M

The above phones are the only ones that are officially supported with this new root method. However, Dan has stated that this exploit will likely work with other phones -- including non-Motorola devices. For a complete list of instructions and links to the required files, follow the source link below.

Source: droidrzr.com

    


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/goXJMdO0ruY/story01.htm

sherri shepherd sherri shepherd arkansas razorbacks trisomy 18 ozzie guillen ozzie guillen buster posey

Lights, chemistry, action: New method for mapping brain activity

Apr. 10, 2013 ? Building on their history of innovative brain-imaging techniques, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have developed a new way to use light and chemistry to map brain activity in fully-awake, moving animals. The technique employs light-activated proteins to stimulate particular brain cells and positron emission tomography (PET) scans to trace the effects of that site-specific stimulation throughout the entire brain. As described in a paper published online today in the Journal of Neuroscience, the method will allow researchers to map exactly which downstream neurological pathways are activated or deactivated by stimulation of targeted brain regions, and how that brain activity correlates with particular behaviors and/or disease conditions.

"This technique gives us a new way to look at the function of specific brain cells and map which brain circuits are active in a wide range of neuropsychiatric diseases -- from depression to Parkinson's disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and drug addiction -- and also to monitor the effects of various treatments," said the paper's lead author, Panayotis (Peter) Thanos, a neuroscientist and director of the Behavioral Neuropharmacology and Neuroimaging Section -- part of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Laboratory of Neuroimaging at Brookhaven Lab -- and a professor at Stony Brook University. "Because the animals are awake and able to move during stimulation, we can also directly study how their behavior correlates with brain activity," he said.

The new brain-mapping method combines very recent advances in a field known as "optogenetics" -- the use of optics (light activation) and genetics (genetically coded light-sensitive proteins) to control the activity of individual neurons, or nerve cells -- and Brookhaven's historical development of radioactively labeled chemical tracers to track biological activity with PET scanners.

The scientists used a modified virus to deliver a light-sensitive protein to particular brain cells in rats. Genetic coding can deliver the protein to specifically targeted brain-cell receptors. Then, after stimulating those proteins with light shone through an optical fiber inserted through a tiny tube called a cannula, they monitored overall brain activity using a radiotracer known as ^18FDG, which serves as a stand-in for glucose, the body's (and brain's) main source of energy.

The unique chemistry of ^18FDG causes it to be temporarily "trapped" inside cells that are hungry for glucose -- those activated by the brain stimulation -- and remain there long enough for the detectors of a PET scanner to pick up the radioactive signal, even after the animals are anesthetized to ensure they stay still for scanning. But because the animals were awake and moving when the tracer was injected and the brain cells were being stimulated, the scans reveal what parts of the brain were activated (or deactivated) under those conditions, giving scientists important information about how those brain circuits function and correlate with the animals' behaviors.

"In this paper, we wanted to stimulate the nucleus accumbens, a key part of the brain involved in reward that is very important to understanding drug addiction," Thanos said. "We wanted to activate the cells in that area and see which brain circuits were activated and deactivated in response."

The scientists used the technique to trace activation and deactivation in number of key pathways, and confirmed their results with other analysis techniques. The method can reveal even more precise effects.

"If we want to know more about the role played by specific types of receptors -- say the dopamine D1 or D2 receptors involved in processing reward -- we could tailor the light-sensitive protein probe to specifically stimulate one or the other to tease out those effects," he said.

Another important aspect is that the technique does not require the scientists to identify in advance the regions of the brain they want to investigate, but instead provides candidate brain regions involved anywhere in the brain -- even regions not well understood.

"We look at the whole brain," Thanos said. "We take the PET images and co-register them with anatomical maps produced with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and use statistical techniques to do comparisons voxel by voxel. That allows us to identify which areas are more or less activated under the conditions we are exploring without any prior bias about what regions should be showing effects."

After they see a statistically significant effect, they use the MRI maps to identify the locations of those particular voxels to see what brain regions they are in.

"This opens it up to seeing an effect in any region in the brain -- even parts where you would not expect or think to look -- which could be a key to new discoveries," he said.

This work was supported by the intramural program at NIAAA as well as grants AA11034, AA07574, AA07611. Additional co-authors include: Lisa Robison and Ronald Kim, Stony Brook University; Eric J. Nestler and Michael Michaelides, Mount Sinai School of Medicine; Mary-Kay Lobo, University of Maryland School of Medicine; and Nora D. Volkow, NIAAA.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. P. K. Thanos, L. Robison, E. J. Nestler, R. Kim, M. Michaelides, M.-K. Lobo, N. D. Volkow. Mapping Brain Metabolic Connectivity in Awake Rats with ?PET and Optogenetic Stimulation. Journal of Neuroscience, 2013; 33 (15): 6343 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4997-12.2013

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/aZlH-IuvApA/130410191602.htm

Selena Gomez ariel winter Paige Butcher David Petraeus Petraeus Mia Love wall street journal

Research enables fishermen to harvest lucrative shellfish on Georges Bank

Apr. 10, 2013 ? Combined research efforts by scientists involved in the Gulf of Maine Toxicity (GOMTOX) project, funded by NOAA's Ecology and Oceanography of Harmful Algal Blooms (ECOHAB) program, and administered by the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS), have led to enhanced understanding of toxic algal blooms on Georges Bank. This new information, coupled with an at-sea and dockside testing protocol developed through collaboration between GOMTOX and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigators, has allowed fishermen to harvest ocean quahogs and surf clams in these offshore waters for the first time in more than two decades.

The shellfish industry estimates the Georges Bank fishery can produce up to 1 million bushels of surf clams and ocean quahogs a year, valued $10 -- 15 million annually. "There is a billion dollars' worth of shellfish product on Georges Bank that is property of the United States but that can't be harvested because of the threat of toxicity, and 99.9% of the time, it is good wholesome product," says Dave Wallace of North Atlantic Clam Association and a GOMTOX participant. "In an unusual and unique partnership, we worked with GOMTOX scientists, the FDA, and the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and Delaware and now that huge resource can go into commerce, which helps the entire country."

"We are extremely pleased that research funded by NOAA can provide such an economic boost to New England shellfisheries," says Robert Magnien, Director of NCCOS' Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research. "It is a clear example of how research authorized by the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Research and Control Act can protect both public health and local economies through collaborations between academic scientists, state and federal regulatory agencies, and the shellfish industry."

An elevated area of the sea floor between Cape Cod and Nova Scotia, Georges Bank is one of the best fishing grounds on Earth. But since 1990, it has been closed to harvesting of surf clams and ocean quahogs after harmful algal blooms (also referred to as "red tides") caused paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) that sickened fishermen. For decades scientists speculated the blooms on Georges Bank were fueled by coastal blooms in the Gulf of Maine.

More recent research by GOMTOX investigators, however, has shown that Georges Bank is home to a separate and distinct population of the toxic algae, which is described in a recently published paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientist Dennis McGillicuddy and other members of the GOMTOX team.

It has been known for many years that the phytoplankton Alexandrium fundyense is the cause of the harmful algal blooms that occur to varying severity each spring and summer along the coastal Gulf of Maine, sometimes extending as far south as Cape Cod and the adjacent islands. The algae's seed populations or "cysts" germinate from seabeds starting in early spring and bloom at the sea surface, until all of the necessary nutrients in the water are consumed. As the nutrients run out, the cells form cysts and fall to the seafloor, as seed for the following spring. High concentrations of the toxic algae can cause closure of shellfish beds and cost the region many millions of dollars.

Precisely why the blooms vary in severity has been much more difficult to determine, and has involved extensive seasonal sampling of water and sediments, study of coastal currents, environmental and oceanographic conditions, availability of nutrients, and the development of a computer program to model all of the variables.

Researchers got the first signal that something very different was happening on Georges Bank during a research cruise to count Alexandrium cells in sea water samples in spring/summer 2007. "We devised our sampling strategy to look at the cells' transport pathways from coastal waters onto the Bank," says McGillicuddy. Throughout the coastal Gulf of Maine, the numbers were very low. But when the research team started sampling at Georges Bank, they found very high concentrations of Alexandrium in the water, despite the fact that the bloom had not really begun along the coast of Maine.

"I'll never forget the moment we hit a big patch of cells on Georges Bank," says Dave Townsend, a GOMTOX scientist from the University of Maine and co-author of the paper. "We extended our sampling to go all the way across Georges Bank and we were still hitting them. We had to turn around and completely reorganize our sampling strategy based on what we were seeing in the microscope."

For such a large bloom to occur, the researchers reasoned the number of cysts on Georges Bank must be similar to the quantities needed to initiate a bloom along the coast. Yet, their fall 2007 survey to map the cyst distribution in the seabed on the Bank found very few cysts -- quantities not likely to cause a large bloom along the coast.

In the three-year course of intensive study on Georges Bank since then, blooms have occurred every year, in concentrations that would typically lead to toxicities in coastal shellfish beds. Yet, a parallel effort by the fishing industry and federal testing labs to analyze shellfish samples from Georges Bank found the bivalves to be clean of toxins. So while toxins were produced at and near the surface, they were not delivered to the surf clams and ocean quahogs in the seabed in quantities sufficient to threaten human health.

The system on Georges Bank was indeed a riddle: Few cysts, yet large blooms; a large bloom, yet little to no toxicity in the shellfish. Applying the same detailed analyses to the offshore population of Alexandrium that they applied to coastal populations, the scientists discovered the optimum growing conditions for Alexandrium on Georges Bank were colder and saltier than those of their coastal relatives. Their analysis uncovered how the currents in the region can isolate Georges Bank to create colder and saltier conditions. If the conditions are favorable, the researchers say, Alexandrium populations can double every three days, and in a month's time, grow from concentrations of 10 cells per liter to 10,000.

Further setting the Georges Bank population apart was the finding by GOMTOX colleagues at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth's School for Marine Science and Technology (SMAST), working in collaboration with the FDA, who determined that the toxin content of algae on Georges Bank was different than the coastal Gulf of Maine populations. "The toxins present in Alexandrium cells from Georges Bank were, on average, two times lower than those in the coastal Gulf of Maine," said Chrissy Petitpas, a doctoral student working in Professor Jefferson Turner's lab at SMAST.

Despite this new information and the knowledge that the clams have been shown to be safe for humans to eat at the present time, the fact remains that concentrations of the toxins in the clams on Georges Bank in 1989 and 1990 did reach dangerous levels. Scientists know that coastal shellfish populations are directly exposed to the toxins when the blooms make landfall, but they remain uncertain about the conduit for toxicity from the surface ocean to the deep shellfish beds on Georges Bank, located at about 50m depth.

But, thanks to an innovative screening protocol and regulatory structure developed collaboratively by the FDA, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, the fishing industry, and testing labs approved by the National Shellfish Sanitation Program, a system is now in place to monitor, test, and verify that clams harvested from Georges Bank are safe. The clams are checked by fishermen at sea using the newly available test kit, and re-checked by regulators when the fishing vessels reach the dock. Combined with the weekly monitoring of shellfish beds along the coast during the bloom season to protect human health, these monitoring systems are extremely effective at keeping toxic shellfish off the market.

"Toxin levels in shellfish on Georges Bank have been very low over the last few years. We are confident that this new testing protocol will serve to protect public health should toxin levels rise again in the future," said Stacey DeGrasse, seafood research coordinator in the FDA's Office of Regulatory Science and a major participant in the development of the new offshore testing protocol. "We intend to continue to work closely with NOAA to ensure that the shellfish from this region are harvested safely."

"I've run over 2,500 samples from Georges Bank since mid-March, and all of them have been clean of toxin," says Darcie Couture, a former manager of the marine biotoxins program at the Maine Department of Marine Resources, who now operates the federally permitted testing lab. "We've been fortunate in finding a way that we can safely harvest that product out there."

"Although we can't predict when conditions on Georges Bank will favor a large bloom, our knowledge of the bloom dynamics was used in establishing a suitable management approach," says Don Anderson, a senior scientist at WHOI and the lead investigator on the GOMTOX project.

For the scientists, the work to understand the dynamics of the Georges Bank population continues. New DNA evidence uncovered by Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health researchers Deana Erdner (University of Texas) and Mindy Richlen from Don Anderson's laboratory at WHOI, suggests the Georges Bank Alexandrium population is genetically distinct.

"We thought the Georges Bank population was just the little toe at the end of the coastal population, but it's not. It is separate, and it occupies a distinct niche from the rest of the Alexandrium in this region," says McGillicuddy. "This was a big surprise to us."

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/7nDqH4FI0l4/130410131447.htm

bobby petrino brian dunn vin scully petrino fired george zimmerman charged big sean sherri shepherd

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Quake risk from fracking 'minimal'

New research suggests that fracking is not a significant cause of earthquakes that can be felt on the surface.

UK scientists looked at quakes caused by human activity ranging from mining to oil drilling; only three could be attributed to hydraulic fracturing.

Most fracking events released the same amount of energy as jumping off a ladder, the Durham-based team said.

They argue that the integrity of well bores drilled for fracking is of much greater concern.

The research is published in the Journal of Marine and Petroleum Geology .

Continue reading the main story

?Start Quote

Hydraulic fracturing is not really in the premier league for causing felt seismicity...?

End Quote Prof Richard Davies Durham University

In recent years, hydraulic fracturing has become a significant means of recovering oil and gas that is too tightly bound into rock formations to be recovered by normal drilling.

Fracking, as it is called, utilises a mixture of water, sand and chemicals pumped underground at high pressure to crack open sedimentary rocks and release the fuels within.

Earth movers

But opponents of fracking have long been concerned that the process could induce earthquakes such as the one that occurred near a shale gas operation in Lancashire in 2011.

Now researchers from Durham University's Energy Institute say that the pumping of fracking liquid does indeed have the potential to reactivate dormant fault lines. But they say that compared to many other human activities such as mining or filling reservoirs with water, fracking is not a significant source of tremors that can be felt on the surface.

Continue reading the main story

Earthquakes

  • There are thousands of earthquakes each day, most too small to be detected without equipment
  • Earthquakes are usually caused by the motion of tectonic plates over the viscous mantle beneath
  • The Shaanxi earthquake of 1556 is the deadliest on record - killing nearly one million

"We've looked at 198 published examples of induced seismicity since 1929," Prof Richard Davies from Durham told BBC News.

"Hydraulic fracturing is not really in the premier league for causing felt seismicity. Fundamentally it is is never going to be as important as mining or filling dams which involve far greater volumes of fluid."

The researchers detailed just three incidences of earthquakes created by fracking - one each in the US, the UK and Canada. The biggest at Horn River Basin in Canada in 2011 had a magnitude of 3.8.

"Most fracking related events release a negligible amount of energy roughly equivalent to, or even less than someone jumping off a ladder onto the floor," said Prof Davies.

What has been shown to cause bigger seismic activity is the underground injection of oil-drilling waste water. Recent research in the US has linked this to a 5.7 magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma in 2011. This isn't an issue in the UK as the practice of injecting waste water underground is banned by EU legislation.

If oil and gas exploration companies want to reduce the risk from fracking completely, the key thing according to Prof Davies is not to drill too close to tectonic faults.

By using 3D seismic imaging he says, these problem could be identified and the risk of quakes avoided. However this technology is not a legal requirement at present and is likely to be resisted as it will increase drilling costs.

Cement issues

Of greater concern to Prof Davies is the long term threat posed by the well bores that are drilled to allow fracking to take place. There have been concerns that over time the cement that is used to line the wells may give way under pressure.

"I think there are some good research questions about the long term integrity of well bores - it has been shown in the US and Canada that a percentage have not been cemented properly and are going to leak or do leak - that's what I would focus on," he added.

This view is echoed by Robert Jackson, professor of environmental sciences at Duke University in the US, who has published research on ground water contamination through hydraulic fracturing.

"If I were to emphasise one thing it would be well integrity. There are many examples of well integrity issues, we know that a certain number of wells leak through time. Some people might say 5 % but one study suggested as many as half of all wells have sustained casing pressure, suggesting there is something wrong," he said.

Prof Jackson says that transparency is key to successfully developing the shale gas industry. With new incentives from the Government announced in the budget to boost the recovery of shale gas, the likelihood was the fracking industry was going to expand rapidly in the UK.

According to Prof Jackson this would have implications for people all over the country.

"One thing that will change in the UK, is that gas extraction is no longer in the North sea it is in people's neighbourhood," he said.

"It is an industrial activity in people's backyards. It means trucks, dust, noise - people aren't used to that in the UK."

Follow Matt on Twitter.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22077230#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

mega millions results lotto numbers susan powell megamillions winners university of louisville louisville ky lotto winners

Clouds blamed for record ice melt in Greenland

The 2012 summer witnessed the largest ice loss ever in Greenland since scientists started recording melt rates there in 1979, and new research indicates that clouds might be the cause.

By Charles Q. Choi,?OurAmazingPlanet / April 3, 2013

Extent of surface melt over Greenland?s ice sheet on July 8, 2012 (left) and July 12, 2012 (right) based on data from three satellites. (Light pink: probable melt, meaning at least one satellite showed melt; dark pink: melt, meaning two to three satellites

Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory

Enlarge

The culprit behind the record-shattering level of ice melting in Greenland in 2012 may have been low, thin clouds, new research suggests.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

These novel findings, detailed in the April 4 issue of the journal Nature, may help answer climate mysteries elsewhere in the Arctic, the researchers said.

If the?sheet of ice covering Greenland?were to completely melt, such destruction of 720,000 cubic miles (3 million cubic kilometers) of ice would?raise global sea levels?by 24 feet (7.3 meters). In summer 2012, Greenland saw an?extraordinarily large amount of melting?across nearly its entire ice sheet. In fact, it was the largest ice melt seen in Greenland since scientists began tracking melt rates there in 1979. Ice-core records suggest melting events so extreme have only happened once every 150 years or so over the past 4,000 years.

"The July 2012 event was triggered by an influx of unusually warm air, but that was only one factor," said study researcher Dave Turner, a physical scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Severe Storms Laboratory. "We show that low-level clouds were instrumental in pushing temperatures up above freezing."

Thin clouds

Turner and his colleagues discovered the role these clouds played by analyzing temperature data from the ICECAPS experiment run at Summit Station atop the Greenland Ice ?Sheet at about 10,500 feet (3,200 m) above sea level. Melting occurred even all the way up there on July 11, 2012. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

The idea that low clouds might help melt ice might seem mistaken at first, since they usually reflect solar energy back into space. (Cloudy days tend to be cooler than sunny ones.) However, the research team's computer models suggest these clouds can be both thin enough to allow sunlight to pass through to heat the surface and thick enough to trap thermal radiation emitted upward by the surface. (This thermal radiation is a form of light but comes in longer wavelengths than visible light and is invisible to the human eye. The Earth's surface absorbs the sun's rays and then re-emits this thermal radiation.)

Climate models often underestimate the occurrence of these clouds, thus limiting their ability to predict Arctic climate change and other phenomena. This new research suggests this kind of cloud is present about 30 percent to 50 percent of the time over both Greenland and across the Arctic, said Ralf Bennartz, lead author of the study and an atmospheric physicist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

More observations needed

"A very narrow range of cloud thickness allows for?amplification of surface warming," Bennartz told OurAmazingPlanet. "This shows how well we have to understand individual components of the climate system, such as clouds, in order to accurately understand the system as a whole."

More observations are key to a better understanding of these components, he added.

"We need to continue detailed observational studies at Summit Station in Greenland in order to better understand processes leading to melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and help improve the representation of these processes in global climate models," Bennartz said.

Follow OurAmazingPlanet?@OAPlanet,?Facebook?and?Google+.Original article at?LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

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

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/4YigxfKpYjI/Clouds-blamed-for-record-ice-melt-in-Greenland

how i met your mother Jordan Pruitt real housewives of new jersey Kanye West sex tape emmys emmys torrey smith

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Avon plans to cut over 400 jobs, exit Ireland

(Reuters) - Avon Products Inc said on Monday it will slash more than 400 jobs as part of a turnaround plan aimed at restoring the cosmetics maker to profitability.

Avon, the world's already showing signs of improvement biggest direct seller of cosmetics, is under its new chief executive, Sheri McCoy, who was brought in a year ago.

"We continue to work aggressively toward turning around the business," McCoy said on Monday. In February, Avon reported surprisingly strong fourth-quarter earnings after reversing sales declines in top markets like Brazil and Russia.

Job will be cut across all regions and functions and will include the restructuring or closing of smaller, underperforming markets, primarily in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Avon said. It will leave the Ireland market.

The cuts, which will be completed by the end of the year, are expected to generate $45 million to $50 million in annual savings. They are part of McCoy's plan to cut overall costs by $400 million.

Total charges related to the cuts are expected to range from $35 million to $40 million, with about $20 million of that being recorded in the first quarter of 2013, the company said.

Avon has some 39,000 associates and more than six million active representatives who sell its products, according to its 2012 annual report.

(Reporting by Martinne Geller in New York; Editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/avon-plans-cut-over-400-jobs-exit-ireland-113738744--finance.html

lottery numbers mega millions lottery jackpot winning numbers mega millions megamillions drawing olbermann mega millions march 30

At least 14 injured in attack at Houston college

By Andrea Lorenz

(Reuters) - At least 14 people were injured during a mass stabbing at a local community college in the northwest Houston area Tuesday morning, according to the local rescue officials.

Four people were critically injured during the incident at the Cy-Fair campus of Lone Star College in Harris County, the Cy-Fair volunteer fire department said.

One suspect was detained, local police said.

"LOCKDOWN at LSC-CyFair. Seek shelter now. If away, stay away," the school posted on Twitter at noon local time.

Three people were shot at a separate campus of Lone Star College in January.

(Reporting By Andrea Lorenz; Writing by Brendan O'Brien)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/multiple-injuries-reported-stabbing-houston-college-173356578.html

Richard Engel Daniel Inouye steelers scarlett johansson tim tebow survivor snl

Obama warns GOP against blocking gun bill

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? President Barack Obama says the contentious debate over gun control measures "shouldn't be about politics." He's warning Republican lawmakers against using delay tactics to sink legislation.

Obama is speaking about his gun proposals in Connecticut, where 20 children and 6 adults were killed in a horrific school shooting last year. The shooting spurred fresh debate in Washington over gun control measures.

The president is singling out GOP lawmakers who want to use procedural maneuvers to block legislation. Obama says the move would be akin to saying the public's opinion doesn't matter.

He is also challenging the notion that gun legislation would be a political victory for him. He says the debate "isn't about me" and should instead focus on families that have been torn apart by violence.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-warns-gop-against-blocking-gun-bill-215546035.html

john goodman kendall marshall whitney houston news sylvia plath whitney houston autopsy results obama trayvon jim yong kim

Brain's stress circuits undergo profound learning early in life, scientists find

Apr. 7, 2013 ? Researchers at the University of Calgary's Hotchkiss Brain Institute have discovered that stress circuits in the brain undergo profound learning early in life. Using a number of cutting edge approaches, including optogenetics, Jaideep Bains, PhD, and colleagues have shown stress circuits are capable of self-tuning following a single stress. These findings demonstrate that the brain uses stress experience during early life to prepare and optimize for subsequent challenges.

The team was able to show the existence of unique time windows following brief stress challenges during which learning is either increased or decreased. By manipulating specific cellular pathways, they uncovered the key players responsible for learning in stress circuits in an animal model. These discoveries culminated in the publication of two back-to-back studies in the April 7 online edition of Nature Neuroscience.

"These new findings demonstrate that systems thought to be 'hardwired' in the brain, are in fact flexible, particularly early in life," says Bains, a professor in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology. "Using this information, researchers can now ask questions about the precise cellular and molecular links between early life stress and stress vulnerability or resilience later in life."

Stress vulnerability, or increased sensitivity to stress, has been implicated in numerous health conditions including cardiovascular disease, obesity, diabetes and depression. Although these studies used animal models, similar mechanisms mediate disease progression in humans.

"Our observations provide an important foundation for designing more effective preventative and therapeutic strategies that mitigate the effects of stress and meet society's health challenges," he says.

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Calgary, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal References:

  1. Wataru Inoue, Dinara V Baimoukhametova, Tam?s F?zesi, Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Kathrin Koblinger, Patrick J Whelan, Quentin J Pittman, Jaideep S Bains. Noradrenaline is a stress-associated metaplastic signal at GABA synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3373
  2. Jaclyn I Wamsteeker Cusulin, Tam?s F?zesi, Wataru Inoue, Jaideep S Bains. Glucocorticoid feedback uncovers retrograde opioid signaling at hypothalamic synapses. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3374

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/mind_brain/depression/~3/k7ZzaCJsu0Q/130407133314.htm

punxsutawney phil ground hog groundhog day 2012 serrano staten island chuck dr jekyll and mr hyde edwin jackson

Thatcherism: the radical ideology that became the global norm

By Jeremy Gaunt

LONDON (Reuters) - More than three decades after Margaret Thatcher became Britain's prime minister, her economic legacy - reviled and revered - still ripples across the world.

Whether it is euro zone finance ministers demanding debt-laden countries privatize state-run companies, U.S. politicians seeking spending cuts and curbs on unions, or Britain itself putting its Royal Mail on the auction bloc, the tenets of Thatcherism, for better or worse, are alive.

Thatcher, who died on Monday aged 87, stood for deregulation, a smaller state, free markets and privatization. If that sounds familiar, it is because her playbook has been copied around the world.

None of those policies were common in 1979 when Thatcher became Britain's first woman prime minister with the country reeling in post-war economic decay.

"She shifted the boundaries of what was politically possible," said Steve Davies, a director and economic historian at Britain's Institute of Economic Affairs think tank.

"On the one side policies such as privatization and deregulation came to be taken seriously. On the other, policies that were taken seriously - like the command economy - are no longer taken seriously."

Thatcherism - and its U.S. cousin Reaganomics, after the president, Ronald - were seen as radical departures. The term privatization, for example, was barely known before her tenure. A Google search in 2013 brings up more than 14.5 million hits.

When Thatcher took over Britain, much of its industry like those of other European countries was in the hands of the state.

She sold off steelmakers, carmakers, aerospace firms, oil and gas giants, airlines and the telecoms monopoly - often to strong objections from political opponents and workers within the former state-owned industries. Even public housing was offered for sale, at a discount, to the tenants who lived in it.

There is still opposition. The U.S. public services union ASCME, for example, describes privatization as "driven by wrong-minded public officials and corporate greed".

And not all privatizations were successful. Bold competition has brought down costs and encouraged growth in some areas such as telecommunications. Complex, heavily infrastructured businesses such as railways - privatized by her successor John Major - have arguably done less well.

But the debate now is generally on how far privatization should run, not on whether it should be unwound.

Sell-offs of state-owned businesses are now a de rigeur part of euro zone bailout programs. In Greece, the European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout requires the sale of real estate, more than 20 companies, and dozens of marinas and ports.

Thatcher's economic influence outside of Britain was most visible in Eastern Europe. After the fall of the Communist bloc at the end of her tenure, new leaders there made her a hero and embraced privatization as the express route to capitalism.

In many countries the transfer of state assets to private hands was a success; in others, less so.

In Russia, a privatization scheme designed by self-professed Thatcherites was brazenly run by its own beneficiaries. It awarded the crown jewels of Soviet industry to a handful of politically-connected insiders, creating a caste of overnight billionaires, more than a few of whom would later become Thatcher's neighbors in London's exclusive Belgravia district.

"The emergence of oligarchic structures and dramatic increases in inequality... demonstrate the limitations of applying Baroness Thatcher's legacy too literally," said Erik Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

DEREGULATION

Thatcher's "big bang" deregulation of British financial markets saw the City of London strut into its role as Europe's banking capital, and helped turn global finance into the swaggering industry it became for the past generation.

Other industries faced the opposite fate on her watch. Her biggest battles were with coal miners, in a state-run sector that was already in rapid decline after Britain discovered cheaper, safer and cleaner offshore natural gas.

When she took power there were nearly a quarter of a million coal miners in Britain, sustaining communities that had known little else since the industrial revolution. When she left there were barely 50,000 people still working in the mines. Today only a few thousand remain.

Her embrace of deregulation would get mixed reviews at the moment, given the excesses that led to the financial crisis of 2008. Indeed, there has been something of a backlash against the relatively unfettered wealth-creation Thatcher espoused.

"Thatcher created a more dynamic and laissez faire society, but the social cost in terms of communities destroyed was immense," said Timothy Ash, a strategist at Standard Bank who remembers long lines of police vans outside his school, which was adjacent to a coal mine that was later closed down.

But free market economics - epitomized by Europe's single market, which Thatcher supported even as she waved her handbag threateningly at much of the rest of the bloc's ideas - has become the dominant economic philosophy in most of the world.

Again, the argument today is on the issue of how much you can protect your economy or control excesses, rather than on the assumption that you should run things from the centre.

"There are still legitimate question about outcomes," said Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York. "But she tremendously advanced the case of free markets for goods, capital and labor around the world."

(Additional reporting by Carolyn Cohn and Sujata Rao; Editing by Peter Graff)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/thatcherism-radical-ideology-became-global-norm-181101505--business.html

bastille day breaking bad breaking bad food network star British Open 2012 bane Aurora Colorado

Surprising predictor of ecosystem chemistry

Surprising predictor of ecosystem chemistry [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 8-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Kyla Dahlin
kyla.dahlin@gmail.com
415-238-1916
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C. Carnegie scientists have found that the plant species making up an ecosystem are better predictors of ecosystem chemistry than environmental conditions such as terrain, geology, or altitude. This is the first study using a new, high-resolution airborne, chemical-detecting instrument to map multiple ecosystem chemicals. The result, published in the April 8, 2013, Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a key step toward understanding how species composition affects carbon, nitrogen and other nutrient cycling, and the effects of climate change, land use, and other ecosystem pressures.

Two important ecological goals are to understand the distribution and diversity of plants in their environment and how nutrients and energy flow through ecosystems. Both are essential to predict how the environment may change in the future, but untangling the relative importance of different influences has remained challenging.

Lead author Kyla Dahlin explained: "We used the high-resolution mapping capabilities of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (CAO AToMS), and found that the plant communities that make up Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in Northern California were the strongest predictors. They explained 46% to 61% of the variation in plant chemical traits, and these traits hold the key to how ecosystems function."

The plant communities at Jasper Ridge include savanna/grasslands, evergreen oaks and chaparral, wetland ecosystems, and more. The researchers measured four traits mapped with CAO AToMS from the air: leaf nitrogen, leaf carbon, leaf water concentration, and canopy water content.

The researchers combined the airborne data with maps of known environmental regulators, such as terrain and geology, and maps of plant communities and land-use history to ask whether environmental conditions or plant communities were more indicative of the chemical variation of the vegetation. They found that environmental conditions played a role, but that plant communities were the stronger predictor.

Co-author Greg Asner, principal investigator of the CAO, commented, "The results are a powerful demonstration of the use of the latest airborne spectroscopic mapping techniques to understand the multiple chemicals in the foliage of vegetation, allowing us to relate the chemical information to biodiversity and environment. These are the tools of the future for ecological research and conservation science."

"This study is especially exciting for Carnegie because it answers questions about the roles of landscapes and plant communities that were posed by Carnegie investigators in the early decades of the 20th century," said co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology.

###

The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Avatar Alliance Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, Mary Anne Nyburg Baker and G. Leonard Baker, Jr., and William R. Hearst III.

The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Surprising predictor of ecosystem chemistry [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 8-Apr-2013
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Kyla Dahlin
kyla.dahlin@gmail.com
415-238-1916
Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C. Carnegie scientists have found that the plant species making up an ecosystem are better predictors of ecosystem chemistry than environmental conditions such as terrain, geology, or altitude. This is the first study using a new, high-resolution airborne, chemical-detecting instrument to map multiple ecosystem chemicals. The result, published in the April 8, 2013, Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a key step toward understanding how species composition affects carbon, nitrogen and other nutrient cycling, and the effects of climate change, land use, and other ecosystem pressures.

Two important ecological goals are to understand the distribution and diversity of plants in their environment and how nutrients and energy flow through ecosystems. Both are essential to predict how the environment may change in the future, but untangling the relative importance of different influences has remained challenging.

Lead author Kyla Dahlin explained: "We used the high-resolution mapping capabilities of the Carnegie Airborne Observatory Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (CAO AToMS), and found that the plant communities that make up Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in Northern California were the strongest predictors. They explained 46% to 61% of the variation in plant chemical traits, and these traits hold the key to how ecosystems function."

The plant communities at Jasper Ridge include savanna/grasslands, evergreen oaks and chaparral, wetland ecosystems, and more. The researchers measured four traits mapped with CAO AToMS from the air: leaf nitrogen, leaf carbon, leaf water concentration, and canopy water content.

The researchers combined the airborne data with maps of known environmental regulators, such as terrain and geology, and maps of plant communities and land-use history to ask whether environmental conditions or plant communities were more indicative of the chemical variation of the vegetation. They found that environmental conditions played a role, but that plant communities were the stronger predictor.

Co-author Greg Asner, principal investigator of the CAO, commented, "The results are a powerful demonstration of the use of the latest airborne spectroscopic mapping techniques to understand the multiple chemicals in the foliage of vegetation, allowing us to relate the chemical information to biodiversity and environment. These are the tools of the future for ecological research and conservation science."

"This study is especially exciting for Carnegie because it answers questions about the roles of landscapes and plant communities that were posed by Carnegie investigators in the early decades of the 20th century," said co-author Chris Field, director of the Department of Global Ecology.

###

The Carnegie Airborne Observatory is supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Avatar Alliance Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation, Mary Anne Nyburg Baker and G. Leonard Baker, Jr., and William R. Hearst III.

The Department of Global Ecology was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. The department is located on the campus of Stanford University, but is an independent research organization funded by the Carnegie Institution. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.

The Carnegie Institution for Science is a private, nonprofit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with six research departments throughout the U.S. Since its founding in 1902, the Carnegie Institution has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/ci-spo040313.php

MIRIAM MAKEBA casey anthony dennis rodman history channel mila kunis hugo chavez rand paul

How communities effectively punish antisocial behavior

Apr. 7, 2013 ? New research provides an insight into how groups of people tackle social dilemmas and effectively punish those engaging in anti-social behaviour.

Neighbours playing loud music is an example of where a social dilemma can arise about who should tackle the wrong-doer if a whole group of people is affected. If everyone expects someone else to punish the wrongdoer, the loud music will persist. However, research by the University of Oxford and the ETH Zurich has revealed that when a group can identify a strong member from amongst themselves, it is more likely that this results in a tacit agreement about who should punish the wrongdoer.

By contrast, when a group finds it hard to identify which of their members is the strongest, the wrongdoer is less likely to be deterred, say the findings published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a laboratory experiment, the researchers involved 120 volunteers, divided into groups of four, to play games with money tokens. Each player was given a bank of 140 money tokens with one of the four randomly assigned as the cheat. The cheat could decide whether to refrain from cheating and gain nothing, or risk cheating to potentially gain 70 tokens from each of the three players. The three players had to decide independently whether to challenge the cheat to reclaim the money for themselves, as well as the other players -- the snag being that the challenge would entail a monetary cost to the challenger while the free-riding players would retrieve the full 70 tokens. However, if none of the players challenged the cheat, the cheat would keep their tokens and get away with it.

First, the cost for the player challenging the cheat was set at 30 tokens, meaning that player could only claim 40 tokens while a free-rider received back 70 tokens. In this set of games, about one-third (35 per cent) of the players challenged the cheat to reclaim the money, despite the cost to themselves.

A marked change in the pattern emerged, however, when the costs to the challengers were made slightly unequal. While two of three players would lose 40 tokens for challenging the cheat, the other one of the three would only lose 30 tokens. In these games, a tacit agreement set in that the strongest of them, i.e. the player with the least to lose, should challenge the cheat, even though the differences in the monetary strengths of the players were only small. The researchers also varied the size of the penalty that would be imposed on the cheat to assess what role this played to stop cheating behaviour.

They found that in groups with a strong player, money tokens were reclaimed from the cheat by the strong player in 83 per cent of cases. What is more, when the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 40 penalty points, this resulted in a substantial reduction of cheating in groups with a strong player; a reduction as high as in groups with all equal players where the penalty for cheating was increased from 0 to 120 penalty points.

Surprisingly perhaps, the researchers discovered that when the wrongdoer knew that there was a strong player in the group and the risk of punishment was therefore high, this proved to be as effective a deterrent as monetary penalties three times higher in groups with players of equal strength.

Co-author Dr Wojtek Przepiorka, from the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, said: 'Our findings help us understand how social order was possible in human prehistory, where official law enforcement bodies did not exist. It suggests that the natural order was for groups where someone was marked out as the strongest would be more likely to challenge the wrongdoer. The idea of who was strongest would have varied according to the society's norms and culture: it could be body size, wealth, valour or other endowments.

'Interestingly this certainty of being punished can be a stronger deterrent than the size of the penalty itself. This is also informative of cooperative behaviour amongst members of a community and indicates how social norms may have developed.'

Andreas Diekmann, Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich, who also authored the study, said: 'It is important to learn more about how social order has emerged in human groups without third party intervention. In contrast to previous studies, with our experiment we were able to demonstrate that it is possible to solve cooperation problems without assuming individuals with punitive preferences. A very small degree of inequality amongst the group members is enough to make the punishment of wrongdoers more likely and this has a deterrent effect. As a result, antisocial behaviour is reduced substantially even though punishment is rarely exercised.'

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Oxford.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. W. Przepiorka, A. Diekmann. Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2013; 280 (1759): 20130247 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.0247

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/HocihPqN_Ug/130407144507.htm

usain bolt Closing Ceremony London 2012 Tom Daley Leryn Franco The Campaign Kinesio tape randy travis

Girl next door Annette Funicello dies at 70

NEW YORK (AP) ? She was the first crush for a generation of boys, the perfect playmate for a generation of girls.

Annette Funicello, who became a child star as a cute-as-a-button Mouseketeer on "The Mickey Mouse Club" in the 1950s, ruled among baby boomers, who tuned in every weekday afternoon to watch her on their flickering black-and-white television sets.

Then they shed their mouse ears, as Annette did when she teamed up with Frankie Avalon during the '60s in a string of frothy, fun-in-the-sun movies with titles like "Beach Blanket Bingo" and "How to Stuff a Wild Bikini."

Decades later, she endeared herself to baby boomers all over again after she announced in 1992 that she had multiple sclerosis and began grappling with the slow, degenerative effects with remarkably good cheer and faith.

Funicello died on Monday at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Calif., of complications from MS, the Walt Disney Co. said. She was 70 and had dropped from public view years ago.

"She really had a tough existence," Avalon told The Associated Press. "It's like losing a family member. I'm devastated but I'm not surprised."

Avalon said that when they were working together, she never realized how beloved she was. "She would say, 'Really?' She was so bashful about it. She was an amazing girl," he recalled.

The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was 13 when she gained fame on "The Mickey Mouse Club," a kids' variety show that consisted of stories, songs and dance routines. It ran on ABC from 1955 to 1959.

Cast after Walt Disney saw her at a dance recital, she appeared in the Mouseketeer uniform of mouse ears, a pleated skirt and a turtleneck sweater emblazoned with her first name, and captivated young viewers with her wholesome, girl-next-door appeal.

She became the most popular Mouseketeer, receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.

"It was a happy time. They were wonderful times," she recalled in a TV interview as an adult ? and she might just as well have been speaking for her "Mickey Mouse Club" audience.

Singer and composer Paul Anka, the one-time teen idol who briefly dated Funicello when they were on the concert circuit in the late 1950s, said that like seemingly every young American male of the time, he was in love with her.

"She was just the girl next door and they were drawn just to her," Anka said. "She had that thing. She had the it, and there was just no stopping it."

They eventually drifted apart, but during the time they were together, he said, Disney tried to end their relationship, resulting in one of Anka's biggest hits, "Puppy Love."

"The Disney crowd, and understandably so, didn't want her too involved at too young an age," Anka told the AP. "We had our professional careers and what have you, and they continued to tell her it was a puppy love, and marriage should not be in question. And I wrote about it."

When "The Mickey Mouse Club" ended, Funicello was the only cast member to remain under contract to the studio. She appeared in such Disney movies as "Johnny Tremain," ''The Shaggy Dog," ''The Horsemasters," ''Babes in Toyland," ''The Misadventures of Merlin Jones" and "The Monkey's Uncle."

She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as "Tall Paul" and "Pineapple Princess."

Outgrowing the kid roles by the early '60s, Annette teamed with Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.

The filmmakers weren't aiming for art, and never stumbled across it. As Halliwell's Film Guide says of "Beach Party": "Quite tolerable in itself, it started an excruciating trend."

The films had songs, cameos by older stars and some laughs. The 1965 "Beach Blanket Bingo," for example, featured subplots involving a mermaid, a motorcycle gang and a skydiving school run by Don Rickles, and comic touches by silent film star Buster Keaton.

Among the other titles: "Muscle Beach Party," ''Bikini Beach," ''How to Stuff a Wild Bikini" and "Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine."

The beach films featured ample youthful skin. But not Funicello's.

She remembered in 1987: "Mr. Disney said to me one day, 'Annette, I have a favor to ask of you. I know all the girls are wearing bikinis, but you have an image to uphold. I would appreciate it if you would wear a one-piece suit.' I did, and I never regretted it."

The shift in teen tastes begun by the Beatles in 1964 and Funicello's first marriage the following year pretty much killed off the beach-movie genre.

After that, she had no interest in edgier, more "adult" roles.

"People are more interested in changing my image than I am," she said in an interview. Scripts were sent to her, and "I read the first 10 pages and I'm a prostitute or a doper, and I fold them up and send them back."

In the 1970s, she made commercials for Skippy peanut butter, appearing with her real-life children.

She and Avalon were reunited in the 1987 movie "Back to the Beach," in which Lori Loughlin played their daughter.

Funicello was "kind and down-to-earth," Loughlin told the AP. "She was truly the embodiment of the friendly, all-American girl that we all loved to watch in the beach movies."

It was during the filming of "Back to the Beach" that Funicello noticed she had trouble walking ? the first insidious sign of MS. She gradually lost control of her legs. Fearing people might think she was drunk, she went public with her condition in 1992.

She wrote of her triumphs and struggles in her 1994 autobiography, "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes" ? the title taken from a Disney song. In 1995, she appeared briefly in a television docudrama based on her book. And she spoke openly about the degenerative effects of MS.

"My equilibrium is no more; it's just progressively getting worse," she said. "But I thank God I just didn't wake up one morning and not be able to walk. You learn to live with it. You learn to live with anything, you really do."

Kathy Lennon, who was one of the singing Lennon Sisters and became friends with Funicello after appearing on "The Mickey Mouse Club," said she and Funicello stayed in touch until a few years ago, when Lennon made her usual call to wish the actress a happy birthday and learned that MS had robbed her of her ability to speak.

"Annie's just not talking now," Lennon recalled Funicello's husband saying.

Funicello was born Oct. 22, 1942, in Utica, N.Y., and her family moved to Los Angeles when she was 4. She began taking dance lessons, and she won a beauty contest at 9. Then came her discovery by Disney.

Funicello's devotion to Walt Disney remained throughout her life.

"He was the dearest, kindest person, and truly was like a second father to me," she said. "He was a kid at heart."

Asked about revisionist biographies that have portrayed Disney in a negative light, she said: "I don't know what went on in the conference rooms. I know what I saw. And he was wonderful."

In 1965, Funicello married her agent, Jack Gilardi, and they had three children, Gina, Jack and Jason. The couple divorced 18 years later, and in 1986 she married Glen Holt, a harness racehorse trainer.

After her film career ended, she devoted herself to her family.

"We are so sorry to lose Mother," her children said in a statement. "She is no longer suffering anymore and is now dancing in heaven."

___

Associated Press writers Bob Thomas, Greg Risling and John C. Rogers and AP Television Writer Lynn Elber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/girl-next-door-annette-funicello-dies-70-210233958.html

emmylou harris disco inferno b.i.g 1000 words ron white ron white buckyballs