Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/NOwW3BH9Yt8/Related Topics: Ed Sheeran Olivia Culpo American Horror Story breast cancer awareness world trade center
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Apple Expected to Announce iPad Updates at Event Next Week
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/NOwW3BH9Yt8/Related Topics: Ed Sheeran Olivia Culpo American Horror Story breast cancer awareness world trade center
Sony's $200 smartwatch works with Android phones
NEW YORK (AP) — Sony says its new computerized wristwatch will sell for $200 in the U.S. and will work with a variety of Android phones.
Sony's SmartWatch 2 hasn't gotten as much attention as Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy Gear, but it's cheaper and compatible with a broader range of phones. The Gear costs $300 and currently works only with the company's Galaxy Note 3 phone.
Unlike the Gear, however, Sony's watch doesn't let you make phone calls directly through the wristwatch. You can answer calls using the watch, but you need a Bluetooth wireless headset linked to the phone if you don't want to hold it to your ear.
Sony Corp. said Tuesday that the watch is available immediately through the company's physical and online stores. Other online retailers will also sell it.
As more people own smartphones and tablets, consumer-electronics companies are creating a new category of products to give consumers more ways to stay connected — and to spend money. Qualcomm Inc. also plans to release a smartwatch in time for the holidays, while Apple is widely believed to be developing an iWatch.
The company said its smartwatch is designed to perform common tasks such as checking texts and email, liking Facebook posts and getting calendar reminders.
"The average smartphone user reaches for their device more than 100 times per day to check text messages, read emails and social network notifications and of course, to check the time," Ravi Nookala, U.S. president of Sony Mobile Communications, said in a statement. "SmartWatch 2 makes these core tasks easier, and does much more with apps available, for everything from productivity to fitness and games."
SmartWatch 2 is designed to complement a phone — specifically those running Android 4.0 or later. Sony promises three to four days of battery life between charges, compared with about a day for the Gear. The display measures 1.6 inches diagonally, the same as the Gear.
Separately, Sony announced the U.S. availability of two new phones:
— The Xperia Z Ultra is a larger version of its Xperia Z waterproof smartphone. It has a 6.4-inch screen, among the largest out there. A standard version will retail for $650, while a faster, 4G LTE version will sell for $680.
— The Xperia Z1 is a 5-inch phone that sports a massive 20.7-megapixel camera and is capable of attaching better lenses. That retails for $670.
The phones won't be locked to a specific wireless carrier, but they won't work with Verizon or Sprint's network. Sony did not announce plans for locked, subsidized versions that require two-year service agreements.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-10-15-Sony-New%20Gadgets/id-c7accb30e2ed44e48f18889aae4c3e51Tags: pittsburgh pirates Valerie Harper affordable care act Jonathan Ferrell david ortiz
Ambience Influences How Whisky Tastes
A whisky sipped in a room smelling of fresh-cut grass with the sound of sheep "baa-ing" in the background tastes different from having the same drink in a sweet-smelling, red room with piano music playing, research suggests.
Many people have noticed that the environment where food or drink is consumed can affect its taste, but few scientific studies have been conducted to investigate the phenomenon. In the new study, participants taste-tested whisky in three different environments, reporting that it tasted different in each.
"The atmosphere plays a much bigger role than any of us realize," said study researcher Charles Spence, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. [5 Things You Don't Know About Bourbon]
For example, drinking wine on vacation in the Mediterranean is never quite the same as when buying a bottle of that wine and consuming it at home on a winter's evening, Spence told LiveScience.
Scientists more often have explored how the environment influences the taste of wine. But wine is notoriously finicky — it changes from year to year, and a badly corked bottle can taste off. Spence and colleagues used whisky because it has a similar complexity to wine, but a more consistent taste.
At a large whisky-tasting event in London, the researchers created three specially designed rooms for their taste-test: A "grassy" room had a turf floor, the sound of "baa-ing" sheep and the smell of freshly cut grass; a "sweet" room was filled with a sweet fragrance, rounded red objects and a high-pitched tinkling sound (all of which people associate with sweetness); and a "woody" room with wooden paneling and floorboards, the sounds of leaves crunching and log fires, and the smell of cedar wood.
The researchers gave between 450 and 500 members of the public who weren't whisky connoisseurs a glass of 12-year-old single-malt Scotch whisky and took them in small groups through the grassy room, the sweet room and the woody room, sequentially.
In each room, the tasters used a scorecard to rate attributes of the whisky, including the "nose" (smell), the taste or flavor, and the aftertaste, as well as how much they liked it.
The atmosphere of each room had a notable effect on how the whisky tasted, the ratings showed. Tasters rated the whisky as tasting grassier in the grassy room, sweeter in the sweet room, and having a woodier aftertaste in the woody room. Most people thought the whisky tasted best in the woody room.
To rule out the possibility that the context of the experiment was leading to the results, the group pretested a small group in a lab environment, finding that sights and sounds affected people's taste even when they weren't aware of any manipulation.
The environment was harder to control in the larger public experiment. The researchers worried that participants might knowingly try to confound the results by rating the whisky's taste as opposite from the characteristics of each room. But "on average, people were drawn toward attributes the rooms were designed to create," Spence said.
The findings, detailed today (Oct. 8) in the journal Flavour, illustrate the importance of the surroundings on the taste and flavor of food or drink.
How a meal tastes, whether at a restaurant or a dinner party, "is going to be some combination of the best ingredients combined with the atmosphere," Spence said. "Having one without the other, you get something that is never going to be as much as if you combine all the elements."
Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.
Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ambience-influences-whisky-tastes-114617806.html
Similar Articles: Olivia Culpo drew brees green bay packers
Automatic cuts re-emerge as budget battle issue
WASHINGTON (AP) — The broad, automatic spending cuts known as sequestration have re-emerged as a central issue in efforts to end the partial government shutdown and avert a federal default.
Many conservatives view the past seven months of lower spending levels as one of their rare accomplishments in dealing with President Barack Obama and want to continue them.
But GOP defense hawks complain that the next round of automatic cuts falls almost entirely on the Pentagon, and many Republicans want to shift that burden to domestic programs.
Obama and Democrats would do away with them altogether, substituting new taxes and maybe some spending cuts elsewhere in their place. Republicans are agreeable — Democrats much less so — to trimming future Social Security benefits or making wealthier retirees pay higher premiums for Medicare in place of the automatic cuts.
Sequestration deals mostly with the day-to-day operating budgets of federal agencies. The Veterans Administration is exempt, as are the biggest "mandatory" benefit programs like Social Security, food stamps and Medicaid. The president's health care program — "Obamacare" —also is exempt.
The impact of the automatic cuts that went into effect in March was not as harsh as many people feared. Some agencies were able to move money around to prevent or reduce furloughs.
For many Americans, however, the impacts have been real. Health research has slowed, thousands of Head Start slots have been eliminated and poor people have been left hanging on waiting lists for housing subsidy vouchers.
The future is uncertain but easing or eliminating a new round of automatic spending cuts in January is likely to be a focus of any budget talks once the government reopens fully. Giving agencies more flexibility to adjust to reduced funding levels also is being discussed.
A brief primer on the automatic spending cuts and what might happen next:
—Sequestration was established by the 2011 Budget Control Act to reduce government spending by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The cuts were to be divided between defense and domestic programs and achieved through caps on the money Congress can appropriate each year.
—For fiscal 2013 ending Sept. 30, sequestration lowered Congress' spending cap from $1.043 trillion to $988 billion. Of the $55 billion in spending cuts, $22 billion was from a 4.5 percent cut in domestic programs and $33 billion was from a 6 percent cut in military spending. That reduced the Pentagon's budget this past year from $552 billion to $519 billion. In addition, benefit programs were cut $17 billion. Of that, $11 billion was from fee reductions for Medicare providers like doctors and hospitals. The other $6 billion was spread among smaller programs like farm subsidies. Altogether the sequester produced total budget savings of $72 billion in 2013.
—For fiscal 2014, the sequester lowers the cap on what Congress can spend to $967 billion. Virtually all of the additional savings would come from new and deeper cuts to the military. The Pentagon's budget would drop from $519 billion to $498 billion.
—The debate: House Republicans want to maintain the $967 billion cap for fiscal 2014 but shift all the sequester cuts from the Pentagon to domestic programs. Democrats want to do away with the sequester entirely and set the spending cap at $1.06 trillion.
Congressional leaders tentatively have agreed to extend the 2013 cap of $988 billion for three months while they attempt to negotiate a broader deal for easing or replacing the automatic spending cuts.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/automatic-cuts-emerge-budget-battle-issue-060358892--finance.html
Category: revenge Derrick Thomas Whodunnit K Michelle usain bolt
Rights Groups Urge Justice Probe Of 1985 Bombing
WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil rights groups and members of Congress are pressing the Justice Department to renew its investigation of a 1985 office bombing that killed Palestinian-American civil rights leader Alex Odeh and injured seven people.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Jewish Voice for Peace and others have launched a petition campaign asking Justice to further investigate the explosion, which demolished the committee's office in Santa Ana, Calif. The online petition has about 10,000 signatures.
California Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez sent a letter to the department in June and is seeking other lawmakers to sign a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. The FBI identified suspects after the attack, but none were ever named or indicted.
"Whenever a leader for a civil rights organization is killed, it is the responsibility of our country as a whole— and a civil rights community as a whole— to stand up and demand that their killers be brought to justice and to insure that the U.S. Department of Justice does everything in its power to close the case," NAACP President Ben Jealous told reporters in a conference call Monday.
The DOJ, which has furloughed workers due to the government shutdown, had no immediate comment Monday, which also was the federal Columbus Day holiday. In 2010, the FBI described Odeh's killing in an agency news blog as "an active, ongoing priority investigation" and noted a $1 million reward.
Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., said Monday that he wants the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations to convene a hearing on the bombing.
"We're going to pursue it vigorously and we're not going to let any more time lapse," Conyers said. "We're going to continue to help all of the organizations that are involved build up more and more support for us getting to where we ought to be in terms of a horrific, violent crime that has, I think, been put on the back burner for far too long."
At the time of the attack, the FBI said they believed the bombing was the responsibility of the militant Jewish Defense League. An attorney for the group denied the allegations and asked for a retraction from the agency. The FBI also linked Odeh's killing to two other acts of domestic terrorism in Brentwood, N.Y. and Paterson, N.J. that same year.
Odeh, the West Coast regional director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was killed as he opened the door to his office on Oct. 11, 1985. The bombing occurred the morning after Odeh said on a Los Angeles television news broadcast that Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yassir Arafat was a "man of peace" because of his role in securing the release of passengers from the hijacked Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in Egypt.
Odeh, who came to the U.S. from Palestine, was described by both Jews and Arabs as a nonviolent man who advocated compromise. According to the American-Arab committee, Odeh immigrated to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1977. He was a poet and lecturer.
Related Topics: Lane Kiffin how i met your mother area 51 olinguito project runway
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Drinking With Your Eyes: How Wine Labels Trick Us Into Buying
We're all guilty of it. Even if we don't want to admit it, we've all been suckered into grabbing a bottle of wine off the grocery store shelf just because of what's on the label. Seriously, who can resist the "see no evil" monkeys on a bottle of Pinot Evil?
But the tricks that get us to buy a $9 bottle of chardonnay — or splurge on a $40 pinot noir — are way more sophisticated than putting a clever monkey on the front.
A carefully crafted label can make us think the bottle is way more expensive than it is, and it can boost our enjoyment of the wine itself, says David Schuemann of CF Napa Brand Design, who has been designing wine packaging for more than a decade.
In his new book 99 Bottles of Wine, Schuemann spills the industry's secrets about how wine labels tickle our subconscious and coerce us into grabbing a bottle off the shelf. The book is also a feast for the eyes, with about 100 photographs of the sleekest, most eye-catching wine labels in the business.
"We always make a wine look about $10 more expensive than it is. So then it appears like an even better value," Schuemann tells The Salt. "We add gold foil to the label or a gold stamping. We emboss the label or add a third dimension to give it a rich texture or tactile feel."
In general, people associate minimalist, uncluttered designs with high-end vintages and sophisticated flavors, Schuemann says. "More expensive labels tend to have a cream or white background with a simple logo. Maybe a splash of gold or metal. But they don't have critters on them. Otherwise, experienced wine drinkers think it looks cheap."
But for less-accomplished oenophiles who are still experimenting with wine, the bottle needs to "pop" off the shelf more, Schuemann says. So his team makes the labels more colorful and louder for wines under $10. "They're whimsical in a clever way," he says. "And we'll still add a bit of gold foil to show the quality."
Shelf pop: Brilliant red ink and an arresting illustration make Scarlett stand out in a sea of Napa cabernet sauvignons. A splash of gold adds richness and elegance.
Tucker & Hossler/Courtesy of CF Napa Brand Design
No part of the bottle is wasted for these subliminal mind tricks. Even that little piece of metal at the top of the bottle gets jazzed up with a fancy print, a sophisticated stripe or subtle sparkles. "Then people tend to perceive the wine as more expensive because so much care has gone into even the foil," he adds.
The foil's color on cheaper bottles helps beginners know what flavors to expect, Schuemann says. "A red foil communicates berries, while a green or yellow foil says buttery or tropical flavors are inside. Then the consumer says, 'Oh! That looks like it's going to taste good.' "
And that label can trick your tongue, too. "We've done some consumer research in which we poured the same wine for people, but from different bottles," he says. "The more they like the label, they more they like the wine."
Although Schuemann isn't a psychologist, there's some real scientific evidence to back up his ideas. A study several years ago found that when people think that they're drinking a $90 bottle, pleasure centers in the brain are more active than when they're sipping on a $5 wine — even when the two wines are actually identical.
And what about all those fancy descriptions on the back of bottles describing a chardonnay's buttery aroma and creamy mouth feel? They also work their magic on your mind, says Aradhna Krishna, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan.
"Eating and drinking isn't just about taste, but it's a combination of all our five senses — smell, touch, vision and even sounds," she says.
In one of her recent experiments, she and her team showed two groups of people ads for potato chips. "One ad focused on taste alone. But the other described how the chips smelled like BBQ and had a crunchy texture," she tells The Salt. The group that saw the second ad thought the chips tasted better because it evoked several senses.
The same goes for wine, Krishna says. "If the description on the back makes you imagine the wine's fruity bouquet and the way it feels in your mouth, then the taste will be enhanced and consumption goes up."
Who knows? You may even start salivating right there in the wine aisle.
Related Topics: Michelle Rodriguez Miley Cyrus Pregnant tina fey Kendrick Lamar Lavabit
Friday, October 11, 2013
Elephants Get the Point
Smet and Byrne, Current Biology 2013
The next time you need to show an elephant where something is, just point. Chances are he’ll understand what you mean.
New research shows elephants spontaneously understand the communicative intent of human pointing and can use it as a cue to find food.
Richard Byrne and Anna Smet of the University of St. Andrews tested 11 African elephants on what’s known as the object-choice task. In this task, a food reward is hidden in one of several containers and the experimenter signals which one by pointing to it.
People understand pointing, even as young children. But the track record of other animals on the object-choice task is mixed. Domesticated animals, such as dogs, cats, and horses, tend to perform better than wild ones. Even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, typically struggles to understand pointing when it’s used by human caretakers.
What’s so remarkable about the elephants’ success on the object-choice task is that they did it spontaneously. Byrne says that in studies of other species, the animals have had the opportunity to learn the task. This is usually during the experiment itself, which consists of a prolonged series of tests over which the animals come to realize they will get rewarded with food if they follow the line of the human’s pointing.
But the elephants performed as well on the first trial as on later tests and showed no signs of learning over the course of the experiments. The elephants Byrne and Smet tested are used to take tourists on elephant-back rides in southern Africa. They were trained to follow vocal commands only, never gestures. Smet recorded the behavior of the elephants’ handlers over several months and found they never pointed their arms for the elephants. What’s more, the elephants’ ability to understand human pointing did not vary with how long they had lived with people, nor with whether they were captive-born or wild-born. “If they have learned to follow pointing from their past experiences, it’s mystery when and how,” Byrne says. “Rather, it seems they do it naturally.”
In the experiment, Byrne and Smet varied several parameters that often affect children’s and animals’ performance on the task: whether the pointing arm was nearest the correct choice or not; whether the pointer’s arm crossed the body or was always on the side of what was pointed at; and whether the arm broke the silhouette from the elephant’s viewpoint or not. None of these made any difference. Even when the experimenter stood closer to the wrong location than the correct location, the elephants performed a little worse but still mostly responded to where her arm was pointing.
The only condition that truly stymied the elephants was when the experimenter simply looked at the correct location without pointing. Byrne says that elephant eyesight is poor compared to our own, and researchers who work with elephants have commented on how bad they are at identifying things by sight. “It would perhaps have been surprising if they had spontaneously responded to the rather subtle movements of a small primate’s head!” Byrne says.
Elephants are only distantly related to humans, which means that the ability to understand pointing likely evolved separately in both species, and not in a shared ancestor. But why would elephants attend to and understand pointing? One thing elephants do share with humans is that they live in a complex and extensive social network in which cooperation and communication with others play a critical role. Byrne and Smet speculate that pointing relates to something elephants do naturally in their society. “The most likely possibility is that they regularly interpret trunk gestures as pointing to places in space,” Byrne says. Elephants do make many prominent trunk gestures, and Byrne and Smet are currently trying to determine if those motions act as “points” in elephant society.
Reference:
Smet, Anna F. and Byrne, Richard W. (2013). African Elephants Can Use Human Pointing Cues to Find Hidden Food. Current Biology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.037
Category: notre dame football kate upton liberace Elmore Leonard iOS 7 Beta 4
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)