Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Egyptian election results deepen Israeli fears

A veiled Egyptian woman walks in front of symbolic coffins honoring protesters killed in recent clashes with security forces at an encampment in front of the cabinet building in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011. Islamist parties captured more than 60 percent of the vote in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections, according to partial results released Sunday. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

A veiled Egyptian woman walks in front of symbolic coffins honoring protesters killed in recent clashes with security forces at an encampment in front of the cabinet building in Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Dec. 4, 2011. Islamist parties captured more than 60 percent of the vote in the first round of Egypt's parliamentary elections, according to partial results released Sunday. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

(AP) ? For Israelis, the Islamist election surge in Egypt is depressing confirmation of a deeply primal fear: An inhospitable region is becoming more hostile still.

This sentiment has been accompanied by a bittersweet sense that Israel was dismissed as alarmist when it warned months ago that the Arab Spring ? widely perceived as the doing of liberals yearning to be free ? could lead to Islamist governments.

Speaking for most people here, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak called the emerging result of the first round of parliamentary voting in Egypt "very, very disturbing" and expressed concern about the fate of the landmark 1979 Egyptian Israeli peace treaty.

"We are very concerned," added Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, who has long warned that Egypt could potentially pose a threat. Speaking to The Associated Press Sunday, Steinitz expressed hope that Egypt "will not shift to some kind of Islamic tyranny."

Experts here, as elsewhere, point out that political Islam comes in varying shades of green: The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has about a 10 percent lead over the more radical Salafists and appears far less eager to impose a devout lifestyle or seek conflict.

But most Israelis appear to have little patience for such distinctions. There is a sense that moderate Islamists are pulling off something of a con, lulling opponents into complacency, projecting a seemingly benign piety to exploit a naive public's hunger for clean government after years of corrupt, despotic rule. And there is a long memory of Iran, once friendly to Israel, where secular forces including the military helped depose the Shah in 1979 only to swiftly be steamrolled by fundamentalists.

"These upheavals are a bad thing for the modern world, for Israel," said Yitzhak Sklar, a 50-year-old Jerusalem resident. "There is something in their religion that pushes them to extremism. Their religion calls for murdering anyone who opposes them."

Smadar Perry, Arab affairs writer for Israel's top selling Yediot Ahronot daily, bemoaned Islam's "coming out of the closet" in Egypt, symbolized by the "disappearance of jeans-clad youngsters in favor of (those with) long beards and eyes ablaze with fanaticism." Islamist rule in Egypt under any stripe would be "a terrifying problem," she wrote.

Some of the fears ? for example, that an Islamist-led government in Egypt would mold itself in Iran's image ? may be overblown. Iran's clerical rule is unique in the Middle East, and the Muslim Brotherhood stresses the idea of a theocracy has no place in its ideology. Instead, it says it's committed to an Egypt that is civil, democratic, modern and constitutional.

Israeli concerns about political Islam can be traced to its longstanding battle against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and more recently to 2006, when the Islamist Hamas group swept Palestinian legislative elections.

The Hamas victory triggered a process that ultimately left the militant group, considered a terrorist organization by much of the world for its suicide bombing campaigns and other violent acts, in control of the Gaza Strip. Since then, Hamas and other militants have used the territory as a launching pad for firing rockets into southern Israel.

The stakes in Egypt are much higher. Egypt is the largest and most influential Arab nation, with a U.S.-backed army that has staunchly honored a 1979 peace agreement with Israel.

The peace agreement has been a cornerstone of Israeli security policy for three decades, allowing the military to divert resources to fight foes in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. The treaty has also been a boon for Egypt, bringing in billions in U.S. military assistance.

"We hope that any government that will be formed in Egypt will recognize the importance of the existence of the peace treaty," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech Sunday.

At the same time, he said he had ordered a speeding of the construction of a massive fence being built along Israel's long and porous border with Egypt. Netanyahu said the fence, originally envisioned to stop the inflow of African migrants into Israel, has an "additional importance, security importance" now. In August, militants entering Egypt from the Gaza Strip infiltrated that border and killed eight Israelis.

The recent Islamic election victories in Tunisia and Morocco, considered the most moderate of Arab states, along with a growing Islamic influence in post-revolution Libya, have reinforced concerns.

"What we are facing in Egypt (and) elsewhere in the Middle East is an Islamic tsunami that we in Israel, in the West, will have to cope with in coming years," said Eli Shaked, a former Israeli ambassador to Egypt.

Shaked reflected the feeling of many in Israel that electoral wins by groups that may respect majority rule, but less so individual rights, is hardly a victory for democracy. "It seems that democracy in the Middle East has never been so far away as it is now," he said.

Israeli diplomats have cautioned against jumping to conclusions, noting that the final result in the elections for the Egyptian parliament's lower house won't be known until all stages of voting are completed in January and that presidential elections are next summer.

Yitzhak Levanon, who retired as Israel's ambassador to Egypt just last week, said officials in Cairo are well aware of the value of the peace agreement with Israel.

"There is great awareness of the importance of relations between Israel and Egypt," he told Israel Radio. "But Egypt is undergoing transformation. ... We have to monitor what's going on closely and be on guard."

He predicted tensions in the coming months between the military, parliament and a new president over division of powers. That tension and negotiations to form a majority coalition in the legislature could also limit the aims of more radical parties.

Others assess that taking on Israel cannot possibly be at the forefront of any group in an Egypt that is struggling with a desperate economic crisis. Indeed, the Brotherhood has said its priorities were to fix Egypt's economy and improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians, "not to change (the) face of Egypt into (an) Islamic state."

The Brotherhood, while no fan of Israel, has not said it wants to end the peace deal although it feels the treaty should be reviewed. The Salafis, new to politics, have not commented publicly on it.

On the societal level the Brotherhood differs as well, not favoring the imposition of strict Muslim law, preferring instead to lead by example. Elements of the Brotherhood are also known to have good ties with the military.

An emerging debate among the Islamist groups in Egypt seems to reflect this divide.

Yet on this point too Israelis consider mainly the case of Hamas, remembering their 1980s governments which ? less experienced with Islamists ? provided the group with quiet support to undermine Fatah, which was still banned here at the time.

Hamas went on to torment Israel with suicide bombings and then win the 2006 Palestinian vote because Fatah, by then Israel's ostensible peace partner, had become corrupt and detached. Palestinian voters yearned for better government, not more religion, many observers had said. Yet within a year Hamas had expelled Fatah-led Palestinian Authority forces from Gaza and has since slowly imposed its religious tenets on the population there while building up its military force.

___

Follow Dan Perry at www.twitter.com/Perry(underscore)Dan and Josef Federman at www.twitter.com/joseffederman

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-12-04-ML-Israel-Egypt/id-447bbde133d4447299c8bdf8147e8a6a

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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

New Charles Dickens coin honors author

This picture made available by Britain's Royal Mint taken Nov. 9, 2011, shows the new 2 pound sterling coin with the Queen's head, right, and the reverse with the image of Charles Dickens, made up from some of the titles of his most famous novels, which has been created to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth on 7 February 1812. (AP Photo/David Parry) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

This picture made available by Britain's Royal Mint taken Nov. 9, 2011, shows the new 2 pound sterling coin with the Queen's head, right, and the reverse with the image of Charles Dickens, made up from some of the titles of his most famous novels, which has been created to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth on 7 February 1812. (AP Photo/David Parry) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

This picture made available by Britain's Royal Mint taken Nov. 9, 2011, shows the reverse of the new 2 pound sterling coin with the image of Charles Dickens, made up from some of the titles of his most famous novels, which has been created to celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth on 7 February 1812. (AP Photo/David Parry) EDITORIAL USE ONLY

(AP) ? The Royal Mint has come up with a novel way to wish Charles Dickens a happy 200th birthday ? a new coin with a portrait of the author made up of the titles of some of his most famous fictional works.

The two-pound ($3.20) uncirculated collectible coin will be available via the Royal Mint's website for a price of 8.50 pounds ($13) starting this week, officials said.

Coins designed for circulation will be available early next year to mark Dickens' birthday. The celebrated Victorian novelist was born two centuries ago on Feb. 7, 1812.

The design released Tuesday shows a portrait by artist Matthew Dent that uses titles like "David Copperfield" and "A Christmas Carol" to form a silhouette of Dickens' face.

"I wanted the design of the coin to reference both the immense contribution Dickens has made to British literature and his iconic portrait," Dent said.

The portrait is based on a bust of the author on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

The edge of the coin is inscribed with the quotation "Something will turn up," associated with the ever-optimistic Wilkins Micawber character in "David Copperfield."

_____

Online: www.royalmint.com

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/4e67281c3f754d0696fbfdee0f3f1469/Article_2011-12-06-EU-Britain-Dickens-Coin/id-da7abb7b2c6a40478ef3edc70de38980

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Monday, December 5, 2011

Study finds climate changes faster than species can adapt

Study finds climate changes faster than species can adapt [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 5-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Steve Hinnefeld
slhinnef@iu.edu
812-856-3488
Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The ranges of species will have to change dramatically as a result of climate change between now and 2100 because the climate will change more than 100 times faster than the rate at which species can adapt, according to a newly published study by Indiana University researchers.

The study, which focuses on North American rattlesnakes, finds that the rate of future change in suitable habitat will be two to three orders of magnitude greater than the average change over the past 300 millennia, a time that included three major glacial cycles and significant variation in climate and temperature.

"We find that, over the next 90 years, at best these species' ranges will change more than 100 times faster than they have during the past 320,000 years," said Michelle Lawing, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in geological sciences and biology at IU Bloomington. "This rate of change is unlike anything these species have experienced, probably since their formation."

The study, "Pleistocene Climate, Phylogeny, and Climate Envelope Models: An Integrative Approach to Better Understand Species' Response to Climate Change," was published by the online science journal PLoS One. Co-author is P. David Polly, associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences.

The researchers make use of the fact that species have been responding to climate change throughout their history and their past responses can inform what to expect in the future. They synthesize information from climate cycle models, indicators of climate from the geological record, evolution of rattlesnake species and other data to develop what they call "paleophylogeographic models" for rattlesnake ranges. This enables them to map the expansion and contraction at 4,000-year intervals of the ranges of 11 North American species of the rattlesnake genus Crotalus.

Projecting the models into the future, the researchers calculate the expected changes in range at the lower and upper extremes of warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 1.1 degree and 6.4 degrees Celsius. They calculate that rattlesnake ranges have moved an average of only 2.3 meters a year over the past 320,000 years and that their tolerances to climate have evolved about 100 to 1,000 times slower, indicating that range shifts are the only way that rattlesnakes have coped with climate change in the recent past. With projected climate change in the next 90 years, the ranges would be displaced by a remarkable 430 meters to 2,400 meters a year.

Increasing temperature does not necessarily mean expanded suitable habitats for rattlesnakes. The timber rattlesnake, for example, is now found throughout the Eastern United States. The study finds that, with a temperature increase of 1.1 degree Celsius over the next 90 years, its range would expand slightly into New York, New England and Texas. But with an increase of 6.4 degrees, its range would shrink to a small area on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The giant Eastern diamondback rattlesnake would be displaced entirely from its current range in the Southeastern U.S. with a temperature increase of 6.4 degrees.

The findings suggest snakes wouldn't be able to move fast enough to keep up with the change in suitable habitat. The authors suggest the creation of habitat corridors and managed relocation may be needed to preserve some species.

Rattlesnakes are good indicators of climate change because they are ectotherms, which depend on the environment to regulate their body temperatures. But Lawing and Polly note that many organisms will be affected by climate change, and their study provides a model for examining what may happen with other species. Their future research could address the past and future effects of climate change on other types of snakes and on the biological communities of snakes.

###

The article is available online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028554.

Time-lapse videos showing the change in the range of Crotalus species at 4,000-year intervals over the past 320,000 years can be viewed at
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S1.gif
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S2.gif
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S3.gif

To speak with Lawing, please contact Steve Hinnefeld at IU Communications, 812-856-3488 or slhinnef@iu.edu.



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

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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.


Study finds climate changes faster than species can adapt [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 5-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Steve Hinnefeld
slhinnef@iu.edu
812-856-3488
Indiana University

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The ranges of species will have to change dramatically as a result of climate change between now and 2100 because the climate will change more than 100 times faster than the rate at which species can adapt, according to a newly published study by Indiana University researchers.

The study, which focuses on North American rattlesnakes, finds that the rate of future change in suitable habitat will be two to three orders of magnitude greater than the average change over the past 300 millennia, a time that included three major glacial cycles and significant variation in climate and temperature.

"We find that, over the next 90 years, at best these species' ranges will change more than 100 times faster than they have during the past 320,000 years," said Michelle Lawing, lead author of the paper and a doctoral candidate in geological sciences and biology at IU Bloomington. "This rate of change is unlike anything these species have experienced, probably since their formation."

The study, "Pleistocene Climate, Phylogeny, and Climate Envelope Models: An Integrative Approach to Better Understand Species' Response to Climate Change," was published by the online science journal PLoS One. Co-author is P. David Polly, associate professor in the Department of Geological Sciences in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences.

The researchers make use of the fact that species have been responding to climate change throughout their history and their past responses can inform what to expect in the future. They synthesize information from climate cycle models, indicators of climate from the geological record, evolution of rattlesnake species and other data to develop what they call "paleophylogeographic models" for rattlesnake ranges. This enables them to map the expansion and contraction at 4,000-year intervals of the ranges of 11 North American species of the rattlesnake genus Crotalus.

Projecting the models into the future, the researchers calculate the expected changes in range at the lower and upper extremes of warming predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 1.1 degree and 6.4 degrees Celsius. They calculate that rattlesnake ranges have moved an average of only 2.3 meters a year over the past 320,000 years and that their tolerances to climate have evolved about 100 to 1,000 times slower, indicating that range shifts are the only way that rattlesnakes have coped with climate change in the recent past. With projected climate change in the next 90 years, the ranges would be displaced by a remarkable 430 meters to 2,400 meters a year.

Increasing temperature does not necessarily mean expanded suitable habitats for rattlesnakes. The timber rattlesnake, for example, is now found throughout the Eastern United States. The study finds that, with a temperature increase of 1.1 degree Celsius over the next 90 years, its range would expand slightly into New York, New England and Texas. But with an increase of 6.4 degrees, its range would shrink to a small area on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The giant Eastern diamondback rattlesnake would be displaced entirely from its current range in the Southeastern U.S. with a temperature increase of 6.4 degrees.

The findings suggest snakes wouldn't be able to move fast enough to keep up with the change in suitable habitat. The authors suggest the creation of habitat corridors and managed relocation may be needed to preserve some species.

Rattlesnakes are good indicators of climate change because they are ectotherms, which depend on the environment to regulate their body temperatures. But Lawing and Polly note that many organisms will be affected by climate change, and their study provides a model for examining what may happen with other species. Their future research could address the past and future effects of climate change on other types of snakes and on the biological communities of snakes.

###

The article is available online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028554.

Time-lapse videos showing the change in the range of Crotalus species at 4,000-year intervals over the past 320,000 years can be viewed at
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S1.gif
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S2.gif
http://www.indiana.edu/~iunews/flash/videos/Video_S3.gif

To speak with Lawing, please contact Steve Hinnefeld at IU Communications, 812-856-3488 or slhinnef@iu.edu.



[ 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/2011-12/iu-sfc120211.php

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Sunday, December 4, 2011

Like humans, the paper wasp has a special talent for learning faces

Friday, December 2, 2011

Though paper wasps have brains less than a millionth the size of humans', they have evolved specialized face-learning abilities analogous to the system used by humans, according to a University of Michigan evolutionary biologist and one of her graduate students.

"Wasps and humans have independently evolved similar and very specialized face-learning mechanisms, despite the fact that everything about the way we see and the way our brains are structured is different," said graduate student Michael Sheehan, who worked with evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Tibbetts on the face-recognition study. "That's surprising and sort of bizarre."

The study marks the first time that any insect has demonstrated such a high level of specialized visual learning, said Sheehan, lead author of a paper on the topic scheduled for online publication in the journal Science on Thursday, Dec. 1.

In earlier research, Tibbetts showed that paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) recognize individuals of their species by variations in their facial markings and that they behave more aggressively toward wasps with unfamiliar faces.

In 2008, Sheehan and Tibbetts published a paper in Current Biology demonstrating that these wasps have surprisingly long memories and base their behavior on what they remember of previous social interactions with other wasps.

In their latest study, Sheehan and Tibbetts tested learning by training wasps to discriminate between two different images mounted inside a T-maze, with one image displayed at each end of the top arm of the T.

Twelve wasps were trained for 40 consecutive trials on each image type. The paired images included photos of normal paper wasp faces, photos of caterpillars, simple geometric patterns, and computer-altered wasp faces. A reward was consistently associated with one image in a pair.

The researchers found that the paper wasps, which are generalist visual predators of caterpillars, were able to differentiate between two unaltered P. fuscatus faces faster and more accurately than a pair of caterpillar photos, two different geometric patterns, or a pair of computer-altered wasp faces. They learned to pick the correct unaltered wasp face about three-quarters of the time.

Two simple black-and-white geometric patterns should have been easy for the wasps to distinguish, because the insects' compound eyes are good at detecting contrast and outlines, Sheehan said. Yet the wasps learned complicated face images more rapidly than the geometric patterns.

At the same time, introducing seemingly minor changes to a P. fuscatus facial image -- by using a photo-editing program to remove a wasp's antennae, for example -- caused test subjects to perform much worse on the facial recognition test.

"This shows that the way they learn faces is different than the way they seem to be learning other patterns. They treat faces as a different kind of thing," Sheehan said.

"Humans have a specialized face-learning ability, and it turns out that this wasp that lives on the side of your house evolved an analogous system on its own," he said. "But it's important to note that we're not claiming the exact process by which wasps learn faces is the same as humans."

The ability to recognize individuals is important to a species like P. fuscatus, in which multiple queens establish communal nests and raise offspring cooperatively, but also compete to form a linear dominance hierarchy. Remembering who they've already bested -- and been bested by -- keeps individuals from wasting energy on repeated aggressive encounters and presumably promotes colony stability by reducing friction.

Sheehan also tested a closely related species of wasp, P. metricus, which lacks the varied facial markings of the paper wasp and lives in colonies controlled by a single queen. In the T-maze test, P. metricus scored no better than chance when asked to distinguish between individuals of its own species.

"Differences in face learning between the two species cannot be attributed to general differences in visual learning, as both species learned to discriminate between pairs of artificial patterns and caterpillars at the same rate and with the same accuracy," Sheehan and Tibbetts wrote. "P. fuscatus and P. metricus differed only in their ability to learn normal face stimuli."

"The evolutionary flexibility of specialized face learning is striking and suggests that specialized cognition may be a widespread adaptation to facilitate complex behavioral tasks such as individual recognition," they wrote.

###

University of Michigan: http://www.umich.edu/

Thanks to University of Michigan for this article.

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Saturday, December 3, 2011

Russians vote in election test for Vladimir Putin (Reuters)

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (Reuters) ? Vladimir Putin's ruling party could see its vast parliamentary majority cut back in elections that began Sunday in the icy tundra and sparsely-populated swathes of Russia's far east.

At polling stations from the Arctic to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the election will indicate the scope of fatigue with Putin's 12-year rule just three months before he asks voters to endorse his return to the Kremlin as president.

Russians interviewed by Reuters across the world's biggest country gave a mixed picture. Some expressed disgust with a parliamentary election they said was likely to be rigged while others said they supported Putin and his United Russia party.

"I support United Russia. I like Putin. He is the strong leader we need in our country," said Nikolai, a 33-year-old customs officer in Vladivostok, a port city of 600,000 people on the Pacific and the biggest city in Russia's Far East.

Some voters said they would vote for Just Russia or the Communists because they were disillusioned with Putin and his party, a trend that could cost United Russia dearly.

Polls show Putin's party is likely to win a majority but less than the 315 seats it currently has in the 450-seat lower house of parliament, known as the Duma.

If it gets less than two-thirds of seats, Putin's party would be stripped of its so called constitutional majority which allows it to change the constitution and even approve the impeachment of the president.

Opposition parties say the election is unfair because the authorities support United Russia with cash and television air time while they say vote rigging will be employed to boost United Russia's result.

Supporters say the former-KGB spy saved Russia during his 2000-08 presidency from the chaos of the immediate post-Soviet era and supplied the longest and steepest economic boom in a generation. He also crushed a rebellion in the southern region of Chechnya that tested the fabric of a federation spanning 9,000 Km (5,600 miles) from the Baltic to the Pacific.

Russian customs officers held the director of an independent election watchdog for 12 hours at a Moscow airport Saturday. The United States said it was concerned by "a pattern of harassment" against the watchdog.

PUTIN'S PARTY

Putin remains by far Russia's most popular politician and the 59-year old leader is the ultimate arbiter between the clans which control the world's biggest energy producer.

But his party has had to fight against opponents who have branded it as a collection "swindlers and thieves" and a growing sense of unease among voters at Putin's grip on power.

"I shall not vote. I shall cross out all the parties on the list and write: 'Down with the party of swindlers and thieves,'" said Nikolai Markovtsev, an independent deputy in the Vladivostok city legislature.

"These are not elections: this is sacrilege," he said, adding that the biggest liberal opposition bloc had been barred from the vote by the authorities.

Opponents say Putin has crafted a brittle political system which excludes independent voices and that Russians are growing tired of Putin's cultivated tough man image.

An outburst of boos and whistling at Putin by fans at a Moscow martial arts fight and a sharp fall in opinion poll ratings during the election campaign had raised concerns Putin may be losing his legendary political touch.

FAR EAST

Putin is almost certain to win the March 4 presidential election but signs of disenchantment are extremely worrying for the Kremlin's political managers. Putin's self-portrayal as the anchor of Russian stability hinges on his popularity.

In an attempt to reinvigorate his party, which President Dmitry Medvedev is leading into the election as part of a job swap announced in September, Putin has sent his closest allies to lead United Russia in some of Russia's 83 regions.

Conquered by the Eastern Slavs under the tsars in the 18th and 19th centuries, Russia's far east covers an area almost twice the size of India but has just 6.3 million inhabitants.

Russians in the region braved temperatures as low as minus 41 degrees Celsius (minus 42 Fahrenheit) to vote eight hours before polls opened in Moscow.

Chukchi reindeer herders living across the Bering Sea from Alaska began voting in late November as did some oil workers on rigs pumping the lifeblood of Russia's $1.9 trillion economy.

Putin sent First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov to his native Far East to lead the ruling party's campaign in an area where one local journalist angered Medvedev during the campaign by appearing to imply the Far East was not even part of Russia. ($1 = 30.8947 Russian roubles)

(Writing by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/europe/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111203/wl_nm/us_russia_election

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Video: Pack your palate for culinary getaways

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/45491801#45491801

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Friday, December 2, 2011

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday Shopping [Deals]

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingWe're all going shopping this holiday season, but some will score better deals than others. How to know if you're getting the best items from the best stores at the best price? Easy: technology. From getting the inside scoop on the biggest discounts to making sure you get price reductions after you purchase, here's how to use apps and extensions to automate your shopping savings.

Photo by tele52/Shutterstock.

I personally hate shopping, especially in brick-and-mortar stores, but love giving gifts and, obviously, saving money. The following is how I'm confident I'm getting the right stuff at the right price and even discover new shopping finds along the way...without spending all day bargain hunting. The shopping workflow basically involves: First, narrowing down to the best products using Amazon, deal sites, and review sites, then scoping out the lowest prices using a combination of price comparison tools and coupon codes (automatically delivered when possible), and, finally, timing the purchase with alerts and other shopping insight tools. Signing up for price drop protection services also helps make sure you get the best deals, even after swiping that Visa card.

Step 1: Choose Wisely

A deal is only a good one if you're buying the best product for your needs, so the first thing to do?assuming you haven't already picked out the exact product you want?is figure out what exactly that is (if you have a specific item in mind already?for example, you know you you want a specific video game?skip to the next section). You might know you need a new winter coat or your parents would love a new TV, for example, but not which one out of the hundreds available. (Note: If you're anything like me, researching what to buy will be how you spend 99% of your shopping time. Don't worry though, after all the research, grabbing the deals is the easy part, as you'll see below.)

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingIf it's a really big purchase make a list of the features important to you. If you're not sure what features to look for in a new product, consult a buying guide like PriceGrabber's Shopping & Buying Guides (powered by Consumer Reports), which cover everything from appliances to clothing to toys.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingNarrow down your list of potential items: Mega-retailer Amazon may be the best source for narrowing down the universe of all things to buy, with its best sellers and top rated lists of the top 100 products by category. Head over to the best sellers list, filter by category, and start perusing your options, checking the product descriptions to see if they match your list of important features. (You could cross-reference the best sellers list with the top rated list, but generally the most popular items are the ones with the highest ratings anyway, and we're going to look at other rating sites in a bit). Once you have, say, 2-5 products, it's time to hit some other sites.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingScore the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingCheck deal sites: Sometimes saving money is more important than getting the absolute best item, or sometimes you'll feel like doing some virtual window shopping first. That's a great time to check deal sites to see what's on sale right now. Sometimes the deal is too good to pass up, even though it might not be the best item in the category. To avoid spending all day wandering around the deal sites, though, just hit up DealNews' Editors Choice page for the best picks and Slickdeals. In Slickdeals, you can do a quick search by keyword, then sort by rating.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingCompare user reviews from around the web: Visit previously highlighted Wize to get a quick look at user reviews pulled from Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Twitter, and more (including professional reviews from CNET). Wize applies a rank based on the aggregate reviews for a broad range of categories. You can also get a handy comparison chart for the top-rated products (useful for comparing specs for a laptop, for example).

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingProfessional and enthusiast reviews: You'll also want to check out in-depth reviews from people who've actually kicked the tires on the product and write about that category regularly. You might also find some recommended items outside of the Amazon list. TrustedReviews is a good source for electronics and computers, as is Tom's Hardware and Wirecutter (Whitson also mentioned a couple of other good sources in the lesson on building a computer from scratch.) For networking hardware in particular, don't miss SmallNetBuilder; for really thorough photography equipment reviews, there's dpreview; and for coffee equipment, Coffee Geek. You get the picture, there are specialist and enthusiast sites for just about everything. Cool Tools is another neat review site for a broad range of useful items, and also offers this list of great, focused review sites including ones for mountain bikes, board games, and even flashlights.

Finally, for a collection of professional product reviews in one place, combined with user reviews, visit ConsumerSearch, which covers the gamut of things you can buy.

Step 2: Find the Cheapest Prices for Your Gift

At this point, you should know which thing you want to buy now. Now comes the easy part.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingUse browser extensions: Install previously mentioned browser extension Invisible Hand for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE. The add-on checks what product you're looking at or searching for on Google, then searches other sites for a lower, real-time price; when it finds one, you get a cool little notification in your browser telling you where those other deals are. Similar extension PriceBlink does the same thing but with coupons and mail-in rebate notices, and without the Google search lookup. Take your pick.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingQuickly check shopping comparison and deal sites: Both add-ons are terrifically useful, but not perfect. A couple of times, for example, Invisible Hand suggested a cheaper price for an item slightly related but not the exact product or didn't make a suggestion at all. If you find this is the case for you, hit up PriceGrabber to compare prices yourself or simply do a Google Shopping search (which can also tell you if products are in stock at stores near you, for those times when you don't want to wait on shipping).

A quick search on Slickdeals for the specific item name might also turn up hidden deals?worth the extra couple of minutes just in case.

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingUse mobile shopping apps: If you're already shopping in a store or at the mall, you can still make sure you're getting the best prices thanks to great shopping apps for iPhone and Android. I'm using both RedLaser and ShopSavvy to compare local store prices with online ones. Since the two apps are so similar, it might seem like overkill, but in my experience they each sometimes miss a deal the other offers.

Step 3: Make the Coupons Come to You

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingRetailmenot is one of the best web sites for coupon codes, but even better is their Firefox add-on and Chrome extension, which automatically notify you when coupon codes are available for the site you are on. You might not want it installed year-round, but it's definitely worth it while you're doing your holiday shopping.

FatWallet is another site for your shopping savings arsenal. Start your shopping trip there to earn 1% to 40% cash back and also find coupons and special cash back offers. Or, if you're saving up for college expenses, try similar Upromise, which adds the cash back for shopping from its affiliate links to your 529 college fund; a handy Firefox add-on notifies you when you can earn Upromise savings and if there are coupons available.

Step 4: Buy Now or Set Up Price Alerts

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingIs the price with coupon still outside your budget? Set up price alerts to be notified when the price drops. This is also useful if you're holding out on buying because you think prices might drop even further. Previously mentioned Decide can predict if you should buy an electronics item now or wait and set up alerts for you, or you can install the Camelizer Chrome or Firefox extension to embed a price history chart right within Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg, Backcountry.com, and zZounds so you can see if prices for all kinds of products are rising or dropping.

Since Slickdeals is our favorite deal-hunting site?the community is really fast in digging up the best deals?use the site to set up your price alerts. Click on "Deal Notifications" at the top of the site, then enter in the keywords or name of the product you want SD to look for, which forum you want to search (e.g., Hot Deals), and other parameters. You'll get instant or daily notifications via email or private message so you can finally pull the trigger when the price is right.

Step 5: After You Buy, Get Money Back If the Price Drops

Score the Best Deals with This Five-Step Guide to Holiday ShoppingMany retailers offer price drop protection, but manually checking those price drops is a chore. Let previously mentioned Slice do that for you; the webapp combs through your emails to organize receipts, track packages, and, yes, notify you of price drops.

For iPhone users, also previously mentioned app Savvy gets you price reductions by taking a photo of the receipt from one of 40 retailers like Best Buy and Toys R Us.

My Shopping Workflow: Case Studies

So those are some of the best online and mobile shopping tools, and here are some examples of how they've worked for me.

Laptop SSD: I'd been planning on upgrading my laptop's hard drive to SSD, but I wasn't sure which one to get and had a tight budget of around $100.

So, step one, find the product: Using Amazon's best sellers list and navigating to the internal solid state drives subcategory, I found top-ranking laptop SSDs around my target price: a Crucial (64GB), Samsung (64GB and a bonus Batman Arkham City game), and OCZ (60GB).

Searching for "ssd" on SlickDeals, however, and sorting by rating, I found an OCZ 120GB SSD for $70 (after 2 rebates totaling $50) on TigerDirect, which comes out to an insane 58 cents per GB. Getting the rebate seemed a bit convoluted though: you had to also buy CA backup software and sign up for its auto-renewal to get part of the rebate then mail in a different rebate for the other part. Reading poor reviews about the TigerDirect rebate process and issues with the drive (albeit before firmware fixes), made me hesitant to buy, though.

A combination of Amazon reviews, Newegg reviews, and Tom's Hardware's best SSDs for the money finally led to my final choice: the Crucial drive top ranked for my price range on Amazon.

Hopping back to the Amazon product page for the Crucial drive, Invisible Hand automatically told me about places to buy it cheaper, but the eBay recommendation ($32.99 cheaper) was from a seller with a 0 rating.

So, long story short, this owner of an old laptop got herself a new Crucial SSD from Amazon. The $112.99 price, according to the Cameltracker, is $13 higher than its low of $99.99, but still $17 cheaper than its all-time high of $130.

Coffeemaker: The process is pretty much the same for other types of products. However, certain circumstances might change your methods or available tools. For example: When searching for a coffeemaker for my in-laws, I already knew they were interested in a Keurig single serve coffee brewer, so obviously I saved the whole research-the-heck-out-of-products step. Because the coffeemaker is a common appliance, though, review site Wize did pull in reviews for the Keurig (unlike the SSD drive), so I was able to make sure I was buying something they would actually enjoy using. And with some time leeway for buying this before it needs to be wrapped, I've stopped at step 4, setting a daily price alert on Slickdeals and a reminder on my calendar to buy within the next couple of weeks (Cameltracker showed I just missed a big $60 price drop a few weeks ago, so hopefully it'll drop again).

Sneakers: One last example: For impulse buys when at the store (e.g., a bottle of wine on the way home) and things best bought in store, like clothing, your comparison shopping best friend may be your smartphone. When looking for running sneakers, for example, I started my research from a desktop browser (using a combination of Amazon to narrow down brands then previously mentioned Running Shoe Advisor from Runners World to get shoe advice and read reviews). I narrowed down my choice to 4 shoes then hit the mall to go try them on (checking Google Shopping first to see if they were in stock at the stores). I ended up choosing an Asics shoe (a Runners World Best Buy award winner), but both ShopSavvy and RedLaser told me it was about $20 cheaper online, so I just bought it from the Amazon app and spent the rest of the day happy to be done shopping.

Do you use a similar shopping strategy or have other shopping tricks or tools to share with us? Post your comments below.


You can follow or contact Melanie Pinola, the author of this post, on Twitter or Google+.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/HR9Pf691V3o/score-the-best-deals-with-this-five+step-guide-to-holiday-shopping

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Why do some people never forget a face?

Why do some people never forget a face? [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 2-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Divya Menon
dmenon@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science

"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 objectscars, 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 participants337 male and female studentsto 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 itsay, 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 WPEthat is, who did well in holistic processingalso 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 processesa 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.

###

For more information about this study, please contact: Jia Liu at liujia@bnu.edu.cn.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Individual Differences in Holistic Processing Predict Face-recognition Ability" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or dmenon@psychologicalscience.org.


[ 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.


Why do some people never forget a face? [ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 2-Dec-2011
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Divya Menon
dmenon@psychologicalscience.org
202-293-9300
Association for Psychological Science

"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 objectscars, 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 participants337 male and female studentsto 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 itsay, 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 WPEthat is, who did well in holistic processingalso 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 processesa 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.

###

For more information about this study, please contact: Jia Liu at liujia@bnu.edu.cn.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "Individual Differences in Holistic Processing Predict Face-recognition Ability" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Divya Menon at 202-293-9300 or dmenon@psychologicalscience.org.


[ 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/2011-12/afps-wds120211.php

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