PingChat! becomes Touch, delivers real-time social collaboration to Android, BlackBerry and iOS (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | Comments
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/O0Egte2WUNE/
mike mcqueary joe paterno fired joe paterno fired glen campbell matt nathanson matt nathanson rick perry oops
While this can't be the first time LEGO and indie hit Minecraft have been mentioned in the same breath, I think it's the first time they've really been mixed to this degree. Mojang, the developer of the multi-million-selling mining and adventuring game has put up a project on LEGO's CUUSOO site, which allows people to submit LEGO projects and get royalties from them if they're selected for production.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/k6HC7kRdijE/
ashley judd brewers harbaugh the walking dead season 2 milwaukee brewers will power will power
3 December 2011 by Cullen Roche 6 Comments
Interesting piece in Bloomberg over the weekend interviewing various billionaires about their current investment perspective. ?I thought the most interesting question was the best piece of investing advice they ever received. ?It?s a diverse group with some thought provoking insights. ?The whole piece is a fun read just for a change of pace. ?The advice follows:
Mikhail Prokhorov, Russian billionaire entrepreneur:??Keep your back straight and don?t fidget? ? a piece of Russian folk wisdom.
Donald Trump, real estate mogul: ?My father, Fred C. Trump, told me to know everything you can about what you?re doing. He believed in being thorough and was wary of blind spots.?
Eli Broad, ?American?businessman:??Don?t bet the farm.?
Patrick Soon-Shiong, South African-American surgeon who was founder, chairman, and CEO of Abraxis BioScience: ?Invest in yourself and the people you believe in.?
John Paul DeJoria, billionaire businessman: ?How to buy a put, told to me by a woman named Rebecca.?
Joe Jamail, Lebanese American attorney and billionaire: ?My dad told me, ?Don?t buy any g?? stocks, OK?? He had a chain of grocery stores. He liked that cash coming in.?
Randal J. Kirk, founder, chairman and chief executive of New River Pharmaceutical:??Good deals are like bus stops; there is one on every corner.? Told to me by Red Robertson of Grundy, Virginia, who invested in my first deal. The advice illustrated he was not so interested in the deal as in my dedication to it. One invests in the guy behind the deal, above all else.
Rubens Menin Teixeira de Souza, Chairman & CEO of?MRV Engenharia: ?Buying Brazilian C bonds when they were trading at 40 cents on the dollar. The securities, issued in the 1990s, traded at par in 2005 when the government bought back the last of them.?
Source: Bloomberg
?
Source: http://pragcap.com/the-best-investing-advice
lamichael james lamichael james epstein harrisburg pa chynna phillips magic cube slaughterhouse
LONDON (Reuters) ? Britain's Turner Prize, one of the world's top contemporary art honors, is awarded later on Monday, and for only the second time in its 27-year history the ceremony will be held outside London.
The host in 2011 is the BALTIC gallery in Gateshead, northern England, where celebrity photographer Mario Testino will present the prize.
The move outside the capital has been welcomed, both for underlining that it is a national, not London honor and for the quality of the space dedicated to the Turner show.
"The Baltic in Gateshead has had its ups and downs, but the Turner looks happier there than it ever has in the tomb-like Tate Britain," said Charles Darwent, writing in the Independent on Sunday newspaper.
"Of course, the Tate is still behind the prize, but you wouldn't necessarily guess it. I can't recall a stronger show over the past 27 years, better chosen, better displayed, more poised or grown-up."
The four nominees for the award, which comes with a 25,000 pound cheque and contemporary art celebrity status in Britain and beyond, are Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw.
Glasgow-based Boyce, whose sculptural installation combines the outside feel of a park with interior design and high modernism, is the bookmakers' favorite.
He is closely followed by Shaw, the only painter among the nominees, who evokes bleak urban landscapes of crumbling buildings and wasteland in small, detailed images.
A long way behind in terms of betting odds, but popular among the critics, is Black, whose fragile installations involve see-through cellophane "curtains" and huge mounds of paper colored in powdered paint.
Finally, Lloyd's room of video works deliberately draws the viewer's gaze to the technology she uses as well as the images they project.
Whoever wins the prize, some in the art world feel 2011 has helped put the Turner Prize back on the cultural map.
In the past it has been dismissed as "emperor's new clothes," and previous winners include Martin Creed, whose exhibit in 2001 was an empty room with lights going on and off.
Three years earlier Chris Ofili triumphed with paintings propped up on elephant dung.
But it has also helped launch the careers of some of Britain's leading contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst, who won in 1995, Steve McQueen (1999) and Antony Gormley (1994).
Richard Dorment of the Telegraph wrote of this year's show: "Here's a turn up. Just when I thought the Turner Prize couldn't get more irrelevant if it tried, bingo, along comes a first-class shortlist and an exhibition as good as any I've seen in two decades of reviewing the event."
(Reporting by Mike Collett-White, editing by Paul Casciato)
personhood herman cain press conference joe frazier dead joe frazier dead topamax lexapro trazodone
ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2011) ? "Face recognition is an important social skill, but not all of us are equally good at it," says Beijing Normal University cognitive psychologist Jia Liu. But what accounts for the difference? A new study by Liu and colleagues Ruosi Wang, Jingguang Li, Huizhen Fang, and Moqian Tian provides the first experimental evidence that the inequality of abilities is rooted in the unique way in which the mind perceives faces. "Individuals who process faces more holistically" -- that is, as an integrated whole -- "are better at face recognition," says Liu.
The findings will appear in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.
In daily life, we recognize faces both holistically and also "analytically" -- that is, picking out individual parts, such as eyes or nose. But while the brain uses analytical processing for all kinds of objects -- cars, houses, animals -- "holistic processing is thought to be especially critical to face recognition," says Liu.
To isolate holistic processing as the key to face recognition, the researchers first measured the ability of study participants -- 337 male and female students -- to remember whole faces, using a task in which they had to select studied faces and flowers from among unfamiliar ones.
The next two tasks measured performance in tasks that mark holistic processing. The composite-face effect (CFE) shows up when two faces are split horizontally and stuck together. It's easier to identify the top half-face when it's misaligned with the bottom one than when the two halves are fitted smoothly together. "That's because our brain automatically combines them to form a new" -- and unfamiliar -- "face," says Liu: evidence of holistic processing. The other marker of holistic processing is the whole-part effect (WPE). In this one, people are shown a face, then asked to recognize a part of it -- say, the nose. They do better when the feature is presented within the whole face than when it stands on its own among other noses: again, we remember the nose integrated into the whole face. The researchers also assessed participants' general intelligence.
The results: Those participants who scored higher on CFE and WPE -- that is, who did well in holistic processing -- also performed better at the first task of recognizing faces. But there was no link between facial recognition and general intelligence, which is made up of various cognitive processes -- a suggestion that face processing is unique.
"Our findings partly explains why some never forget faces, while others misrecognize their friends and relatives frequently," says Liu. That's why the research holds promise for therapies for that second category of people, who may suffer disorders such as prosopagnosia (face blindness) and autism. Knowing that the mind receives a face as one whole thing and not as a collection of individual parts, "we may train people on holistic processing to improve their ability in recognizing faces," Liu says.
The article is entitled, "Individual Differences in Holistic Processing Predict Face-recognition Ability."
Recommend this story on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:
Other bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Association for Psychological Science.
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: 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://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111202155755.htm
david ortiz matthew shepard matthew shepard aaron curry aaron curry ios 5 features ios 5 features
NEW YORK ? As they peruse the Internet, voters in New Hampshire and Iowa are probably seeing ads for Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama alongside those for shoes and holiday gifts. The ads will then follow those voters around the Web, popping up on news sites, Google searches and on social networking sites like Facebook.
Online advertising, once used primarily as a way to reach young and heavily wired consumers, has emerged as an essential communications tool in the 2012 presidential contest. While few expect Web ads to supplant television commercials anytime soon, strategists say online ads may be the most nimble, efficient and cost-effective way to reach voters.
"Online advertising cuts through because of its ability to target. It's unparalleled in any other medium," said Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt. "TV may be more effective for driving a big message, but per usage, the Internet is more powerful. We are probably one presidential cycle from everyone believing that."
Web ads can take many forms, from small display boxes to clickable videos to 15- or 30-second commercials known as "pre-rolls" a viewer sees before the start of a news clip or YouTube video.
Targeting is key. While campaigns invest heavily in television ads to reach a mass audience, Web ads are geared specifically to people based on their ZIP code, demographics and, most importantly, their Internet browsing history.
That means someone who has visited the Obama campaign website will likely start seeing his ads on a number of different Web pages. And those who use Google to search for information on the Republican candidates might notice a Romney campaign pre-roll the next time they watch a TV show online.
Campaigns also buy ads on websites that cater to the different demographic groups the campaigns are hoping to reach.
"When someone expresses interest in politics online, it's an incredibly good time for the campaigns to talk to them," said Andrew Roos, a Google account leader who works with Democratic campaigns on Web ad strategy. "You want to grab people when they are paying attention and ask them to take another action, like send money or attend an offline event. It's an old-school organization principle that has been working its way online."
Campaigns were slow to adapt to online advertising even as the corporate world flocked to the Web with product ads years ago. Internet ad revenue climbed to nearly $7.9 billion in the third quarter of 2011, up 22 percent from the same time last year, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, which tracks online ad spending.
Corporations now spend from 18 to 28 percent of their advertising budget online, while campaigns historically have spent no more than 5 percent.
Chris Talbot, a freelance campaign digital strategist, noted that big companies can devote considerable time, money and research to figuring out what works online and what doesn't. Campaigns don't have that luxury.
"There is no `next quarter' in politics, so campaigns usually revert to a template of what's worked in the past," he said.
In 2008, Obama and Republican presidential rival John McCain both did limited online campaign advertising. Web ads grew more prevalent in the 2010 midterm elections, when 85 of the top-spending House races and 600 interest groups bought display ads on Google.
To be sure, plenty of Internet users say they aren't thrilled with the proliferation of online ads, particularly those that follow them from site to site.
A USA Today/Gallup poll taken in late 2010 found 9 out of 10 respondents said they pay little attention to online ads. Two-thirds said they don't believe advertisers should be able to target them based on their past Web searches.
"The only way it works is on a mass scale. Most people ignore ads on the Web," said Aaron Shapiro, head of the digital marking firm HUGE.
Web ads' biggest advantage, many strategists say, is accountability.
"Online ads are very metric driven ? you can figure out how many impressions you got, how many people clicked, how many people signed up for an email address. All of that is calculated in real time," Google's Roos said. "It's much more efficient than direct mail and TV."
The Romney campaign's Moffatt said Web ads became part of the media strategy when officials there realized how much their own viewing habits had changed.
"Strategists here acknowledge they really don't watch live TV," Moffatt said.
___
Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this report.
___
Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bfouhy
who do you think you are frank mccourt ricin in god we trust ben gibbard zooey deschanel damian mcginty
