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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/21134540/vp/50992080#50992080
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Friday, 1 March 2013
Ryanair to cut Stansted capacity by 9 percent
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Ryanair
The Irish low-cost carrier, which accounted for about 70 percent of Stansted's traffic in 2011, said that it will cut more than 170 flights a week - a 9 percent reduction.
Single-runway Stansted, based 50 kilometers northeast of central London, is Britain's fourth-busiest airport and handled nearly 18 million passengers last year.
The news came as Heathrow Airport Holdings
Ryanair called on the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to investigate Stansted's higher increase in charges.
"Ryanair and other Stansted airlines now must ask was this surprise price increase part of a sweetener package to persuade MAG to pay 1.5 billion pounds for Stansted," Ryanair spokesman Robin Kiely said in a statement.
A spokesman for Heathrow Airport Holdings said that, as the sale of Stansted had gone through on Thursday, it was no longer in charge of the airport and would not comment.
MAG was not immediately able to comment.
Ryanair has been in a long-running pricing dispute with Stansted. In 2011 it filed a complaint with Britain's CAA and Competition Commission about charges levied by the airport.
(Reporting by Conor Humphries and Neil Maidment in London; Editing by David Goodman)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ryanair-cut-stansted-capacity-9-percent-175917576--finance.html
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'Network' analysis of the brain may explain features of autism
Thursday, February 28, 2013
A look at how the brain processes information finds a distinct pattern in children with autism spectrum disorders. Using EEGs to track the brain's electrical cross-talk, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital have found a structural difference in brain connections. Compared with neurotypical children, those with autism have multiple redundant connections between neighboring brain areas at the expense of long-distance links.
The study, using a "network analysis" like that used to study airlines or electrical grids, may help in understanding some classic behaviors in autism. It was published February 27 in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine, accompanied by a commentary.
"We examined brain networks as a whole in terms of their capacity to transfer and process information," says Jurriaan Peters, MD, of the Department of Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital, who is co-first author of the paper with Maxime Taquet, a PhD student in Boston Children's Computational Radiology Laboratory. "What we found may well change the way we look at the brains of autistic children."
Peters, Taquet and senior authors Simon Warfield, PhD, of the Computational Radiology Laboratory and Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, of Neurology, analyzed EEG recordings from two groups of autistic children: 16 children with classic autism, and 14 children whose autism is part of a genetic syndrome known as tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). They compared these readings with EEGs from two control groups?46 healthy neurotypical children and 29 children with TSC but not autism.
In both groups with autism, there were more short-range connections within different brain region, but fewer connections linking far-flung areas.
A brain network that favors short-range over long-range connections seems to be consistent with autism's classic cognitive profile?a child who excels at specific, focused tasks like memorizing streets, but who cannot integrate information across different brain areas into higher-order concepts.
"For example, a child with autism may not understand why a face looks really angry, because his visual brain centers and emotional brain centers have less cross-talk," Peters says. "The brain cannot integrate these areas. It's doing a lot with the information locally, but it's not sending it out to the rest of the brain."
Network analysis?a hot emerging branch of cognitive neuroscience?showed a quality called "resilience" in the children with autism?the ability to find multiple ways to get from point A to point B through redundant pathways.
"Much like you can still travel from Boston to Brussels even if London Heathrow is shut down, by going through New York's JFK airport for example, information can continue to be transferred between two regions of the brain of children with autism," says Taquet. "In such a network, no hub plays a specific role, and traffic may flow along many redundant routes."
This quality of redundancy is consistent with cellular and molecular evidence for decreased "pruning" of brain connections in autism. While it may be good for an airline, it may indicate a brain that responds in the same way to many different kinds of situations and is less able to focus on the stimuli that are most important.
"It's a simpler, less specialized network that's more rigid, less able to respond to stimulation from the environment," says Peters.
The study showed that both groups of children with tuberous sclerosis complex had reduced connectivity overall, but only those who also had autism had the pattern of increased short-range versus long-range connections (See image).
Under a recently announced NIH Autism Center of Excellence Grant, Peters and his colleagues will repeat the analysis as part of a multicenter study, taking EEG recordings prospectively under uniform conditions.
The current study builds on recent work by Peters, Sahin and colleagues, which imaged nerve fibers in autistic patients and showed structural abnormalities in brain connectivity. Other recent work at Boston Children's, led by Frank Duffy, PhD, of Neurology, looked at "coherence," or the degree of synchrony between any two given EEG signals, and found altered connectivity between brain regions in children with autism.
Yet another recent study, led by Boston Children's informatics researcher William Bosl, PhD, and Charles A. Nelson, PhD, research director of the Developmental Medicine Center, looked at the degree of randomness in EEG signals, an indirect indicator of connectivity, and found patterns that distinguished infants at increased risk for autism from controls.
###
Boston Children's Hospital: http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom
Thanks to Boston Children's Hospital for this article.
This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127043/_Network__analysis_of_the_brain_may_explain_features_of_autism
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Thursday, 28 February 2013
White Stone ARCPEN ? Handmade luxury stylus
The White Stone ARCPEN is a handmade solid wood stylus for capacitive touch screens. It has a luxury high-end look and is available in 3 finishes including Bubinga, Maple Cherry and Maple White with an?ergonomic chrome plated grip and a silicone tip. Included with the stylus is a?leather case that will protect it when it [...]
Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/02/27/125721/
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Comet just might hit Mars in 2014
Chris Smith / NASA file
An artist's conception shows a comet streaking through Martian skies.
By Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
There is an outside chance that a newly discovered comet might be on a collision course with Mars. Astronomers are still determining the trajectory of the comet, named C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), but at the very least, it is going to come fairly close to the Red Planet in October of 2014.
"Even if it doesn?t impact, it will look pretty good from Earth, and spectacular from Mars, probably a magnitude -4 comet as seen from Mars' surface,"?Australian amateur astronomer Ian Musgrave wrote.
The comet was discovered in the beginning of 2013 by comet-hunter Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia. According to a?discussion on the IceInSpace amateur astronomy forum,?when the discovery was initially made, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona looked back over their observations to find "pre-recovery" images of the comet dating back to Dec. 8, 2012. These observations placed the orbital trajectory of comet C/2013 A1 right through Mars orbit on Oct. 19, 2014.
However, after 74 days of observations,?comet specialist Leonid Elenin?notes that current calculations put the closest approach of the comet at a distance of 67,853 miles (109,200 kilometers), or 0.00073 AU from Mars in October 2014. That close pass has many wondering if any of the Mars orbiters might be able to acquire high-resolution images of the comet as it passes by.
But as?Ian O?Neill from Discovery Space?points out, since the comet has only been observed for 74 days (so far), so it?s difficult for astronomers to forecast precisely where the comet will be 20 months from now. "Comet C/2013 A1 may fly past at a very safe distance of 0.008 AU (650,000 miles)," O'Neill wrote, "but to the other extreme, its orbital pass could put Mars directly in its path. At time of Mars close approach (or impact), the comet will be barreling along at a breakneck speed of 35 miles per second (126,000 miles per hour)."
Elenin said that since C/2013 A1 is a hyperbolic comet and moves in a retrograde orbit, its velocity with respect to the planet will be very high, approximately 56 kilometers per second (126,000 mph). "With the current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3, which might indicate the diameter up to 50 kilometers [30 miles], the energy of impact might reach the equivalent of staggering 2?10^10 megatons!"
While the massive Comet Shoemaker?Levy 9 (9.3 miles or 15 kilometers in diameter) that crashed into Jupiter in 1994 was spectacular as seen from Earth orbit by the Hubble Space Telescope, the sight of C/2013 A1 slamming into Mars would be off the charts.
Astronomers are certainly keeping an eye on this comet, and they will refine their measurements as more data comes in. You can see the orbital parameters available so far at?JPL?s Solar System Dynamics website.
More about comets:
This report originally appeared on the Universe Today website as "Is a Comet on a Collision Course With Mars?" Copyright 2013 Universe Today. Reprinted with permission.
Source: http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/26/17107085-comet-just-might-hit-mars-in-2014?lite
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Strong Links to a Healthy Life All Around Us
When you come to an intersection, you probably walk when the light is green or the signal icon tells you it's OK to cross. You do not need a multi-year research study to tell you how to proceed. Not so with science-based behaviors. Here, we would need to study years of people walking across the street, controlling for ambient light, traffic density and patterns, weather conditions, color patterns in pedestrian clothing, eyesight, and a number of other factors. If we had been waiting to cross that street we would, in all likelihood, have expired long ago.
So it is with the research findings called "startling" about the health benefits of Mediterranean diets, just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Fresh fruits and vegetables, lots of fish, olive oil, and nuts, and healthy wine consumption were linked to big reductions in heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. These are not marginal benefits at the edge of healthy behaviors. They are the big ones.
I am happy for the research. Even while longevity gains continue, they would be far more impressive if people took proper care of themselves. For those who do, typical life spans should be well into the 90s, not the mid-80s, which is the average for all Americans now age 65. Healthier lifestyles are also likely to reduce one of the biggest financial stresses of retirement: big medical bills that aren't fully covered by Medicare. Lifetime out-of-pocket healthcare spending for a typical 65-year-old couple now averages north of $250,000 and can easily be double or triple that for affluent retirees.
[Read: What People Who Live to 100 Have in Common.]
Of course, I also was happy years ago when I read about the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in earlier research findings. Beyond physical benefits, it is increasingly likely that this diet also helps ward off Alzheimer's and cognitive decline in general.
Still, we stand on the corner waiting to cross the street. Why?
For many years, the odds have overwhelmingly supported the notion that we can receive a huge future payoff from an investment today in better health, diet, and lifestyle choices. Sadly, the compelling logic of the wellness argument is often defeated by one of the cardinal findings of behavioral economics: People have a lot of trouble making a tangible sacrifice today in exchange for a possible reward in the future. Even if the sacrifice is modest and the reward enormous, the time mismatch is a game-ender for many. It's like positioning the fulcrum of a teeter-totter near one end instead of in the middle. No matter how hard the person on the short end tries, it's just too hard to balance the board.
One way to correct this imbalance is to make the sacrifices seem less difficult and the rewards truly astronomical. You see this approach used all the time. Particularly with diet: The marketing messages stress how easy it is, how little effort is required before those pounds slide away, how you become irresistibly attractive, your life and career improve, you discover eternal life, and so on.
[Read: How to Plan for a Long Life.]
On our teeter totter, diet and exercise are perched on the short end, and improved health and longevity on the long end. And it's at the long end that some astounding future benefits await. Thirty years of vigorous living versus a wheelchair in a neglected corner of a nursing home.--or worse. Regular cardiovascular exercise is also associated with lower rates of dementia. Get your blood flowing, add oxygen, and marvelous healthful results may ensue. We're not talking about running marathons, either. Moderate exercise works if it's done frequently. Spend 30 minutes a day walking and you can be there.
Key components of the Mediterranean lifestyle and diet include:
-- Getting plenty of exercise and eating your meals with family and friends
-- Eating a generous amount of fruits and vegetables (legumes are best)
-- Consuming healthy fats such as olive oil and canola oil
-- Using herbs and spices instead of salt to flavor foods
-- Nuts, chocolate with a high cocoa content, low-fat cheese, and even lots of eggs
-- For wine drinkers, a glass a day of red wine is recommended
-- Consuming very little red meat
-- Eating fish or shellfish two to three times a week, including at least some high-fat fish such as salmon and tuna
[See 10 Ways to Save on Food Costs]
The real breakthrough we need, however, is not in research but in figuring out how to change human behavior. It's likely, of course, that it can be costly to follow a Mediterranean diet, placing the best eating practices beyond the budgets of many Americans. But there is no defensible reason healthy and affordable foods can't be more widely available and consumed.
When government tries to mandate healthy behaviors, many people howl about "big brother," such as when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wanted to regulate oversized soft drink containers. We should also be howling when the nation's eating habits lead to chronic diseases that effectively waste hundreds of billions of healthcare dollars each year that we can't afford.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/strong-links-healthy-life-around-us-191003090.html
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Law Firm SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2013 ? Slaw
Over the past year, Google has made a number of significant changes to its delivery of search engine rankings. In light of those changes, law firms that employ various aggressive search marketing tactics need to reconsider them. In this column, I want to highlight some of the major web-spam filters that Google has created and offer some important (and ethical) lessons for maintaining a strong search engine presence.
Let?s start by discussing a couple of those changes.
Penguin and Panda
Major alterations to Google?s ranking methods tend to be given nicknames, kind of like hurricanes ? but for some businesses, these ?filters? on search results can (at least virtually) be just as devastating. In 2012, Google used Penguin and Panda to cull from their search results a number of websites that used questionable methods. Occasionally these filters also caught a few high-quality websites; but for the most part, the new search results were an improvement.
The first of these tweaks, Penguin, went after sites whose inbound link profiles were built around artificial or low-quality links ? websites that had few or no real incoming links or signs of engagement. A firm that built its website marketing around links coming from thousands of unattended (spammy) websites, for example, would be at risk for a Penguin-driven removal of their domain from the search results. Even more blatant examples might include a site that constructed its own network of ?empty? linked websites, or purchased links to such a network from a third party.
The Panda filter, to describe it simply, targeted websites that published (in many cases, mass-published over a short period of time) too much low-quality content ? pure web-spam. These are websites that have been overtly replicated: often built in an automated fashion, with repetitive or mildly tweaked messages. Publishing the same copied material on multiple-domains owned by the same business can now push those domains out of the search results.
Few law firms employ the tactics targeted by either of these filters, but there are still some lessons lawyers can learn:
- You still want fresh inbound links to your website, but buying them is never the answer. Don?t do it.
- Avoid re-publishing the same articles on multiple firm-owned domains. Instead, create a customized summary for each particular audience, and link over to the original piece.
- Websites with unique content that generate a variety of engagement styles (links, comments, social media conversations, etc.) always paint a positive picture with Google.
- Find out who exactly is linking into your firm website. If those links look like spam, they probably are. Reconsider how those links came to be, and whether you?re marketing to the right audience.
Dialed-up Anchor Text Filters for Homepages
One of the hallmark signals for search relevance has long been the words or phrases we make into clickable links. For the past ten years, websites in competitive markets have battled to acquire the most links that utilized their target search phrase, building up what?s called ?link text?.
Abuse and spam? You bet. So Google alleviated the problem by filtering out those sites with excessive ?commercial? link text profiles. But for those firms flirting with the edge of ?optimization?, this kind of filtering remained somewhat rare, and it still worked ? at least until the second half of 2012. Google has now turned up the dial significantly.
Firms that chose to swap and build links with marketing-oriented link text (in some cases, with almost nothing but) have watched their search rankings dip in recent months. Probably the worst affected were new websites under a year old and without any other search signals to offer Google (reflecting a lack of ?domain trust?).
The homepages of some law firms, in my view, could be at a similar risk, and should beware of the link text running into their homepage, because it sends mixed signals to Google. Firm homepages are normally branded around the firm?s name, which is reasonable; but if the links coming in all say ?DUI lawyers? in the link text, those two pieces don?t match ? at least, not in Google?s eyes.
Here at Stem, we?ve been advising our clients to steer clear of commercial link text directed at their homepage. Branded links ? linking on the firm?s name, ?Smith LLP?, for example ? are performing much better. And while pointing some commercial link text at the homepage remains an effective (and safe) approach, and is even somewhat required in competitive markets, lowering the percentage of commercial link text aimed at your firm homepage is smart.
More search lessons for 2013:
- You need to understand which terms and phrases are considered ?commercial? by Google. To do this, conduct searches for your firm?s services and observe the number of paid advertisements displayed.
- Sending mass amounts of commercial link text at a new or unmarketed website is a recipe for disaster.
- Domain age counts. New websites are fragile, and they get clipped by over-optimization filters faster than their older counterparts.
- Build search trust around your firm?s name and your lawyer?s names; then let your practice pages and content deliver commercial search term exposure.
Exact Match Domain Names
I wrote a piece here at Slaw a couple years ago that discussed, among other topics, the effectiveness of commercial keywords in domain names. That approach of registering two or three commercial terms in a domain name, and getting instant results with little effort, is drawing to a close. Those domains targeting commercial search phrases have recently become less effective, and when Google deems domains to be ?low quality?, they may even be filtered out of the search results.
These domain names aren?t necessarily ?dead?, but other measurable signs of engagement are also now required. Simply having a great domain name, alone, is no longer enough to jump to the top of the search rankings. At the very least, having social media presence, and a regular flow of original content (and deep links flowing into that content) is going to be a requirement before these types of sites can rank well. Or, put another way, the playing field has been leveled: there are no more shortcuts to top placement.
More lessons?
- Reduce the number of commercial terms in microsite and blog domains. A maximum of two seems sensible. (avoid: toronto-vancouver-drunk-driving-lawyers.com)
- No hyphens in domain names; this has always looked ?spammy?, and still does.
- Keep the quality signals high: good links come from established organizations who publish on the same topics as your firm does. PageRank isn?t always the best measure, but avoid links from sites with a ?PR0? or ?PR1?.
- And an optional personal tip ? I avoid online press releases for new websites. These releases often get scraped and published as ?instant content? for scam websites, sending a high volume of low-quality links into your new web property.
Conclusion
Remember, Google?s role is to index your website and then measure its relevance against the rest of the web. With billions of websites competing against each other, sites that can demonstrate their audience?s engagement are going to be considered stronger.
Some law firms (and some search consultants) will look at those measurable search signals (links, likes, +1s) and ask, ?How do we get those attributes? At all costs, how much, and how fast can we make that happen?? Not only is this the wrong approach, but it?s the type of manipulative behaviour that Google is now trying to eliminate.
The better approach is to treat these signals as the aftermath of your marketing. SEO, based on long-term thinking, can be truly effective when we make good choices: on publishing, building audiences, coding, classification, proper description, and most important, connecting with people. Many of the issues mentioned in this column are simply the result of short-term thinking and poor marketing choices.
Next column, I?ll turn the tables and look at some of the best SEO investments for 2013.
Source: http://www.slaw.ca/2013/02/27/law-firm-seo-tactics-to-avoid-in-2013/
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