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Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Deal of the Day ? 27? HP ENVY 27 IPS-panel LED-backlit LCD monitor with Beats Audio
Tuesday’s LogicBUY Deal is the 27″ HP?ENVY 27 LED-backlit LCD monitor (model no. C8K32AA#ABA) for?$375.99. ?Features: 1920 X 1080 edge-to-edge screen with 178? horizontal and vertical viewing angles 10,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, 250 nit brightness, 72% typical color gamut Inputs: VGA, DisplayPort, HDMI Beats Audio with 6W per channel Included cables:?5.9ft VGA, HDMI, audio 1-year [...]
Arab Idol winner gets hero's welcome in Gaza
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) ? Thousands of excited Gaza residents have mobbed the area's southern border crossing with Egypt to welcome home the winner of the Arab Idol talent contest.
Around 4,000 people gathered early Tuesday for the arrival of Mohammad Assaf, the 23-year-old who is the first Palestinian to win the popular reality show. His victory on Saturday sparked huge celebrations in the West Bank and Gaza.
Assaf is widely viewed as a unifying symbol in the Palestinian territories. His victory won praise from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and even some officials from Gaza's conservative Hamas rulers.
Assaf is on the Egyptian side of the border and is expected to cross shortly.
After a stop in the Palestinian territories, he plans on moving to Dubai to continue his recording career.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/arab-idol-winner-gets-heros-welcome-gaza-092642845.html
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Giving children non-verbal clues about words boosts vocabularies
June 24, 2013 ? The clues that parents give toddlers about words can make a big difference in how deep their vocabularies are when they enter school, new research at the University of Chicago shows.
By using words to reference objects in the visual environment, parents can help young children learn new words, according to the research. It also explores the difficult-to-measure quality of non-verbal clues to word meaning during interactions between parents and children learning to speak. For example, saying, "There goes the zebra" while visiting the zoo helps a child learn the word "zebra" faster than saying, "Let's go to see the zebra."
Differences in the quality of parents' non-verbal clues to toddlers (what children can see when their parents are talking) explain about a quarter (22 percent) of the differences in those same children's vocabularies when they enter kindergarten, researchers found. The results are reported in the paper, "Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary three years later," published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Children's vocabularies vary greatly in size by the time they enter school," said lead author Erica Cartmill, a postdoctoral scholar at UChicago. "Because preschool vocabulary is a major predictor of subsequent school success, this variability must be taken seriously and its sources understood."
Scholars have found that the number of words youngsters hear greatly influences their vocabularies. Parents with higher socioeconomic status -- those with higher income and more education -- typically talk more to their children and accordingly boost their vocabularies, research has shown.
That advantage for higher-income families doesn't show up in the quality research, however.
"What was surprising in this study was that social economic status did not have an impact on quality. Parents of lower social economic status were just as likely to provide high-quality experiences for their children as were parents of higher status," said co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow, the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at UChicago.
Although scholars have amassed impressive evidence that the number of words children hear -- the quantity of their linguistic input -- has an impact on vocabulary development, measuring the quality of the verbal environment -- including non-verbal clues to word meaning -- has proved much more difficult.
To measure quality, the research team reviewed videotapes of everyday interactions between 50 primary caregivers, almost all mothers, and their children (14 to 18 months old). The mothers and children, from a range of social and economic backgrounds, were taped for 90-minute periods as they went about their days, playing and engaging in other activities.
The team then showed 40-second vignettes from these videotapes to 218 adults with the sound track muted. Based on the interaction between the child and parent, the adults were asked to guess what word the parent in each vignette used when a beep was sounded on the tape.
A beep might occur, for instance, in a parent's silenced speech for the word "book" as a child approaches a bookshelf or brings a book to the mother to start storytime. In this scenario, the word was easy to guess because the mother labeled objects as the child saw and experienced them. In other tapes, viewers were unable to guess the word that was beeped during the conversation, as there were few immediate clues to the meaning of the parent's words. Vignettes containing words that were easy to guess provided high-quality clues to word meaning.
Although there were no differences in the quality of the interactions based on parents' backgrounds, the team did find significant individual differences among the parents studied. Some parents provided non-verbal clues about words only 5 percent of the time, while others provided clues 38 percent of the time, the study found.
The study also found that the number of words parents used was not related to the quality of the verbal exchanges. "Early quantity and quality accounted for different aspects of the variance found in the later vocabulary outcome measure," the authors wrote. In other words, how much parents talk to their children (quantity), and how parents use words in relation to the non-verbal environment (quality) provided different kinds of input into early language development.
"However, parents who talk more are, by definition, offering their children more words, and the more words a child hears, the more likely it will be for that child to hear a particular word in a high-quality learning situation," they added. This suggests that higher-income families' vocabulary advantage comes from a greater quantity of input, which leads to a greater number of high-quality word-learning opportunities. DMaking effective use of non-verbal cues may be a good way for parents to get their children started on the road to language.
Joining Cartmill and Goldin-Meadow as authors were University of Pennsylvania scholars Lila Gleitman, professor emerita of psychology; John Trueswell, professor of psychology; Benjamin Armstrong, a research assistant; and Tamara Medina, assistant professor of psychology at Drexel University.
The work was supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/U2KmlDslfMQ/130624152529.htm
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10 Things to Know for Today
Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:
1. RUSSIA CALLS DEMAND FOR EXTRADITING SNOWDEN 'UNACCEPTABLE'
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lashed out at the U.S. for warning negative consequences if Russia doesn't turn over the NSA leaker.
2. SEARCHING FOR SNOWDEN
Lavrov says Snowden hadn't crossed the Russian border. He didn't board a Cuba-bound flight he was registered on in Moscow and the country where he sought asylum doesn't know where he is.
3. ATTACK ON AFGHAN PRESIDENTIAL PALACE
Taliban militants with military-style uniforms infiltrated one of the most secure areas of the capital; all eight attackers died. It wasn't clear whether Karzai was at the palace.
4. INTERNET SHUTDOWN ON KOREA ANNIVERSRY
Major websites in both North and South Korea crashed for hours on the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean war.
5. WHAT PROSECUTORS WANT ZIMMERMAN JURY TO HEAR
They will ask a judge today to allow phone calls the ex-neighborhood watchman made to police about suspicious people in his neighborhood.
6. OBAMA'S CLIMATE CHANGE PLAN
The president will propose the first-ever carbon dioxide emission limits on new and existing power plants at a speech today.
7. IMMIGRATION TEST CLEARS WAY FOR SENATE VOTE
Senate passage of the overhaul that allows millions a chance at citizenship is likely this week, but House Republicans have shown little support.
8. WHY THE WEATHER IS SO EXTREME
The AP's Seth Borenstein says the jet stream that generally rushes from west to east in a straight line has been wobbly and going north and south.
9. ANOTHER BUSINESS DROPS PAULA DEEN
Smithfield Foods, which sold hams with Deen's name on it, ended its relationship with the food celebrity after she admitted using racial slurs.
10. LAST-MINUTE GOALS POWER CHICAGO TO STANLEY CUP
Brian Bickell and Dave Bolland each scored 17 seconds apart to give the Blackhawks a 3-2 win over the Boston Bruins and its second Cup in four years.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/10-things-know-today-101340019.html
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An expansive physical setting increases a person's likelihood of dishonest behavior
June 24, 2013 ? A new study from researchers at leading business schools reveals that expansive physical settings (e.g. having a big desk to stretch out while doing work or a large driver's seat in an automobile) can cause individuals to feel more powerful, and in turn these feelings of power can elicit more dishonest behavior such as stealing, cheating, and even traffic violations.
"In everyday working and living environments, our body postures are incidentally expanded and contracted by our surroundings -- by the seats in our cars, the furniture in and around workspaces, even the hallways in our offices -- and these environments directly influence the propensity of dishonest behavior in our everyday lives," said Andy Yap, a key author of the research who spearheaded its development during his time at Columbia Business School.
The study states that while individuals may pay very little attention to ordinary and seemingly innocuous shifts in bodily posture, these subtle postural shifts can have tremendous impact on our thoughts, feelings and behavior. Building on previous research that expansive postures can lead to a state of power, and power can lead to dishonest behavior, the study found that expanded, nonverbal postures forced upon individuals by their environments could influence decisions and behaviors in ways that render people less honest. "This is a real concern. Our research shows that office managers should pay attention to the ergonomics of their workspaces. The results suggest that these physical spaces have tangible and real-world impact on our behaviors" said Andy Yap.
The research includes findings from four studies conducted in the field and the laboratory. One study manipulated the expansiveness of workspaces in the lab and tested whether "incidentally" expanded bodies (shaped organically by one's environment) led to more dishonesty on a test. Another experiment examined if participants in a more expansive driver's seat would be more likely to "hit and run" when incentivized to go fast in a video-game driving simulation.
To extend results to a real-world context, an observational field study tested the ecological validity of the effect by examining whether automobile drivers' seat size predicted the violation of parking laws in New York City. The field study revealed that automobiles with more expansive driver's seats were more likely to be illegally parked on New York City streets.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/jr5oOmq2d9k/130624133145.htm
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Cavalli Rules Out Sale Amid Renewed Investor Interest in Luxury ...
MILAN, Italy ??Cavalli Group, the Italian fashion house that dressed actress Jennifer Hudson at the Oscars, ruled out selling a stake any time soon, resisting interest from industry buyers, wealthy families and private-equity firms.
?We are on the radar of all these people, but our priority is to work on the business,? chief executive officer Gianluca Brozzetti said in an interview yesterday at a presentation of Cavalli?s spring-summer 2014 menswear collection in Milan. ?We are not entertaining any type of conversation with anybody.?
The luxury market will continue to consolidate as financial investors seek to tap rising demand in fast-growing economies and large luxury groups look to benefit from scale, according to Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Mario Ortelli. Potential buyers are ?looking at luxury with a lot of interest,? Cavalli said.
Deals this year include Gucci-owner Kering SA?s acquisitions of ring-maker Pomellato SpA and clothier Christopher Kane, and private-equity fund Clessidra SGR?s purchase of jeweler Buccellati Holding Italia SpA.
Gianni Versace SpA, an Italian maker of $950 flower-print jeans, said yesterday it expects to decide as soon as October if it will sell a minority stake publicly or privately to fund growth. Worldwide luxury sales will rise 4 percent to 5 percent this year as booming demand in Southeast Asia offsets a slowdown in China and Europe, Bain & Co. estimates.
Sales in Cavalli?s stores increased 23 percent between January and the first week of June, or 11 percent on a like-for- like basis, Brozzetti said, citing strong demand in North America, northern Europe and Asia. Southern Europe is beginning to recover after a tough start to the year, he also said.
The maker of $2,305 rayon jackets expects to register similar retail revenue growth in the second half of the year as it increases its store count to about 200, Brozzetti said.
Revenue reached 185 million euros in 2012. Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization represented 11 percent of revenue.
By Andrew Roberts;?Editors: Paul Jarvis, Robert Valpuesta.
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Plants Perform Molecular Mathematics
Image: Nigel Cattlin/Getty
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How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it actually feel an insect?s tiny, spindly legs? And how do cherry blossoms know when to bloom? Can they...
Read More??
As if making food from light were not impressive enough, it may be time to add another advanced skill to the botanical repertoire: the ability to perform ? at least at the molecular level ? arithmetic division.
Computer-generated models published in the journal eLife?illustrate how plants might use molecular mathematics to regulate the rate at which they devour starch reserves to provide energy throughout the night, when energy from the Sun is off the menu. If so, the authors say, it would be the first example of arithmetic division in biology.?
But it may not be the only one: many animals go through periods of fasting ? during hibernations or migrations, for example ? and must carefully ration internal energy stores in order to survive. Understanding how arithmetic division could occur at the molecular level might also be useful for the young field of synthetic biology, in which genetic engineers seek standardized methods of tinkering with molecular pathways to create new biological devices.
?This is a new framework for understanding the control of metabolic processes,? says Rodrigo Guti?rrez, a plant-systems biologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, who was not involved in the work. ?I can immediately think of applying it to other problems.?
Divide and survive
Plants make the starch reserves they produce during the day last almost precisely until dawn. Researchers once thought that plants break down starch at a fixed rate during the night. But then they observed that the diminutive weed Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant favored for laboratory work, could recalculate that rate on the fly when subjected to an unusually early or late night.
To Alison Smith and Martin Howard of the John Innes Center in Norwich, UK, and their colleagues, this suggested that a more sophisticated molecular calculation was at work. The team hypothesized the existence of two molecules: one, S, that tells the plant how much starch remains, and another, T, that informs it about the time left until dawn.?
The researchers built mathematical models to show that, in principle, the interactions of such molecules?could indeed drive the rate of starch breakdown such that it reflected a continuous computation of the division of the amount of remaining starch by the amount of time until dawn.
For example, the models predicted that plants would adjust the rate of starch breakdown if the night were interrupted by a period of light. During that period of light, the plants could again produce starch. When the lights went out again, the rate of starch breakdown should adjust to that increase in stored starch, the models predicted ? a result that the researchers confirmed in Arabidopsis plants.
The team then trawled the literature looking for Arabidopsis mutants with known handicaps at different steps along the starch-degradation pathway. These showed that the models were compatible with the behavior of these mutants, which result in a higher than usual amount of starch remaining at the end of the night.
Simple principles
To find proteins that might be interacting directly with their hypothesized S/T computation system, the researchers also subjected these mutants to an unexpectedly early night ? a situation that would normally cause plants to slow starch degradation. They found one mutant that could not alter the rate at which it consumed starch in response to this situation. That suggests that the mutated gene, called PWD,?normally regulates this response, and may be an important player in the plant?s molecular calculations.?
Guti?rrez says that the concept of biological arithmetic division provides a simple modeling principle that can stimulate new ways of looking at metabolism, although he is not yet convinced that plants execute division in the way suggested by the model. ?Whether the plant is really doing that, I?m not sure,? he says. ?But it?s a fascinating approach.?
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=plants-perform-molecular-mathematics
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