Sears Canada unveils latest concept in Sears Home stores

RBR Staff Writer
Published 22 June 2012

Sear Canada has unveiled its latest concept in Sears Home stores at Pinecrest Shopping Centre. The company said the new 78,000ft? location is the largest Sears Home store in the country.

The new retail store features products and services, including the Major Appliance and Mattress shop of any Sears location.

In addition to stocking a selection of accent furniture, chairs and tables, the multi-channel retailer is introducing Jane by Jane Lockhart, an innovative new line of furniture with eight distinct collections ,

At its new outlet, customers will have the opportunity to design their own custom furniture using the Jane Lockhart selection of colours and fabrics.

Sears Canada president and CEO Calvin McDonald said that the opening of the Sears Home store at Pinecrest is another in a series of transformational milestones for the retailer.

"We work for Canadian families and we believe we have a product offering in this location that presents the best of what Sears has to offer in appliances, mattresses, home furnishings and installed home services," McDonald added.

Sears Home claims to offer all installed home services including custom window coverings, roofing, doors, windows, furnaces and central air conditioners.

The company retail network includes 196 corporate stores, 278 hometown dealer stores, 29 home services showrooms, over 1,500 catalog and online merchandise pick-up locations, 105 Sears Travel offices.

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Learn that tune while fast asleep: Stimulation during sleep can enhance skill learning

ScienceDaily (June 24, 2012) ? Want to nail that tune that you've practiced and practiced? Maybe you should take a nap with the same melody playing during your sleep, new provocative Northwestern University research suggests.

The research grows out of exciting existing evidence that suggests that memories can be reactivated during sleep and storage of them can be strengthened in the process.

In the Northwestern study, research participants learned how to play two artificially generated musical tunes with well-timed key presses. Then while the participants took a 90-minute nap, the researchers presented one of the tunes that had been practiced, but not the other.

"Our results extend prior research by showing that external stimulation during sleep can influence a complex skill," said Ken A. Paller, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and senior author of the study.

By using EEG methods to record the brain's electrical activity, the researchers ensured that the soft musical "cues" were presented during slow-wave sleep, a stage of sleep previously linked to cementing memories. Participants made fewer errors when pressing the keys to produce the melody that had been presented while they slept, compared to the melody not presented.

"We also found that electrophysiological signals during sleep correlated with the extent to which memory improved," said lead author James Antony of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at Northwestern. "These signals may thus be measuring the brain events that produce memory improvement during sleep."

The age-old myth that you can learn a foreign language while you sleep is sure to come to mind, said Paul J. Reber, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern and a co-author of the study.

"The critical difference is that our research shows that memory is strengthened for something you've already learned," Reber said. "Rather than learning something new in your sleep, we're talking about enhancing an existing memory by re-activating information recently acquired."

The researchers, he said, are now thinking about how their findings could apply to many other types of learning.

"If you were learning how to speak in a foreign language during the day, for example, and then tried to reactivate those memories during sleep, perhaps you might enhance your learning."

Paller said he hopes the study will help them learn more about the basic brain mechanisms that transpire during sleep to help preserve memory storage.

"These same mechanisms may not only allow an abundance of memories to be maintained throughout a lifetime, but they may also allow memory storage to be enriched through the generation of novel connections among memories," he said.

The study opens the door for future studies of sleep-based memory processing for many different types of motor skills, habits and behavioral dispositions, Paller said.

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

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

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Journal Reference:

1. Antony, J.W., Gobel, E.W., O'Hare, J.K., Reber, P.J., & Paller, K.A. Cued Memory Reactivation During Sleep Influences Skill Learning. Nature Neuroscience, June 24, 2012

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.

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US restores $350 mln Malawi aid programme

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Azerbaijan - A Repressive, Corrupt Country That The West Loves: There Must Be Oil

In many ways, Azerbaijan is an outlier nation. The former Soviet republic is an overwhelmingly Shia Muslim state that has poor relations with its Shia neighbor Iran, but it enjoys warm ties with Israel. Moreover, geopolitically, Azerbaijan seeks closer ties with democratic nations like the United States and Western Europe, but it maintains repressive control over its own people; indeed, the country?s leaders are suspected of having committed grave human rights abuses.

And although it is a tiny country, just 9 million people on the Caspian Sea -- mostly farmers and fishermen -- lately Azerbaijan has been on the forefront of a lot of important people?s minds.

For example, British Prime Minister David Cameron said at an oil and gas summit last January in the capital city of Baku that "Azerbaijan is at the heart of a region whose energy resources will play a vital role in the world economy in the years to come.?

With all of its contradictions, Azerbaijan is a complex country to fully figure out; its tangled friendships and autocratic policies are often puzzling. But its recent obsession with its oil reserves is as undiluted and unwavering as anything the country has ever done.

Azerbaijan has 7 billion barrels in proven reserves of oil and produces just over one million barrels per day. (Liana Jervalidze, a research fellow at the International School of Caucasus Studies, Ilia State University, and a former official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, said Azerbaijani geologists believe the actual magnitude of reserves could be much higher.)

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The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), the government entity that manages oil and gas revenues, currently has a treasure chest of $30 billion, a figure that is expected to grow to $34 billion by the end of 2012 and soar to $50 billion over next five years. In 1999, SOFAZ?s assets totaled less than $300 million.

Azerbaijan is also aggressively investing in its energy sector to keep it pumping. Since 1995, Baku has poured in $120 billion to upgrade infrastructure. And working with Western partners like BP plc, Total S.A. and Exxon-Mobil Corp., Azerbaijan is constructing massive pipelines to transport natural gas from the Caspian Sea, through Turkey, towards markets in Europe (thereby excluding Russia and Iran from the equation entirely).

Indeed, it?s these relationships and the support that these alliances have from Western democracies that are raising eyebrows. For all of Azerbaijan?s geopolitical and strategic importance, the country is a repressive, corrupt state with a poor human rights record, precisely the type of government that Western powers attack as illegitimate when it is in, say, Syria.

Listen to the way Matt Bryza, an official with the U.S. State Department, tiptoes around the excesses of Azerbaijan?s president Ilyam Aliyev, who took power in 2003 after a tampered election: "We don't see Ilham Aliyev as a dictator. We see him as the leader of a country with an emerging democracy that has a long way to go to become a healthy democracy."

Among The Most Corrupt
Of course, oil makes strange bedfellows and there are other repressive autocracies that the West is friendly with only because of their energy reserves; Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Qatar immediately come to mind. But none of them are as corrupt or repressive as Azerbaijan.

Aliyev became President upon the death of his father Haidar Aliyev, who had been named to the top post during a military coup two years after independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In the 2003 election, Ilham garnered nearly 77 percent of the popular vote, even as activists staged loud and wildly popular demonstrations against what they viewed as a tainted election. International monitors by and large agreed, ultimately condemning Aliyev?s cronies for a variety of violations, including voter intimidation and irregularities in vote counting.

In part because of this and what has followed, Azerbaijan is considered one of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog. Out of a field of 183 countries, Azerbaijan was ranked the 40th most corrupt; the only European nations above it on the list were Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

Among other infractions, Transparency International cited the failure of Azerbaijani oil and gas companies to provide corporate disclosure; payments demanded in exchange for state medical services on entry into universities; the widespread bribery of public officials, customs officers and police officers, as well as kickbacks paid to politicians.

Opposition forces and international observers have also criticized parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan. During the 2010 parliamentary contests, European election watchers charged Azerbaijani authorities with ballot stuffing and crushing dissent by clamping down on media freedoms and preventing many opposition candidates from voting. Tellingly, not a single opposition candidate won a seat.

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