Palestinian journalist jailed for Abbas photo

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) ? A West Bank appeals court on Thursday upheld a one-year prison term for a Palestinian journalist who had a photo on his Facebook page that authorities claimed portrayed President Mahmoud Abbas as a traitor, rights activists said.

It was the second such case in two months, and Abbas' Palestinian Authority is facing mounting criticism for stifling dissent. In particular, Abbas' security forces have targeted supporters of the Islamic militant Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from him in 2007.

The defendant in Thursday's case was Mamdouh Hamamreh, a reporter for the Hamas-linked Al-Quds TV.

Nimer Hamad, an adviser to Abbas, said the Palestinian president would pardon Hamamreh, but declined further comment.

Prosecutors have alleged that a photo montage on his Facebook page back in 2010 showed Abbas next to a villain in a popular TV drama about French colonial rule in the Levant. The villain was an informer for the French and the photo caption read: "They're alike."

Hamamreh denied that he was the one who posted the photo, but last year a court sentenced him to a year in prison. An appeals court upheld the sentence Thursday, said Issam Abdeen of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq.

In February, a Palestinian court sentenced university student Anas Awwad, 26, to a year in jail for "cursing the president" on Facebook. The Palestinian judiciary applies a Jordanian law that criminalizes cursing the king.

Awwad's father said at the time that his son was being punished for what appeared to be a humorous caption under a picture showing Abbas kicking a soccer ball.

An appeals court overturned Awwad's sentence earlier this month and ordered a new trial, Abdeen said. Several other Palestinians face similar charges, he said.

Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, which administers 38 percent of the West Bank, have come under fire repeatedly for squashing dissent. Hamas, which rules Gaza, has faced similar accusations, including going after supporters of Abbas' Fatah movement.

The Palestinian political split of 2007 largely halted the work of democratic institutions. It paralyzed the parliament and prevented new parliamentary and presidential elections.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/palestinian-journalist-jailed-abbas-photo-192114714.html

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Video: PFT: How can Lions maximize pick?

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Source: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/21134540/vp/51355237#51355237

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New lung cancer study takes page from Google's playbook

Mar. 25, 2013 ? The same sort of mathematical model used to predict which websites people are most apt to visit is now showing promise in helping map how lung cancer spreads in the human body, according to a new study published in the journal Cancer Research.

A team of researchers used an algorithm similar to the Google PageRank and to the Viterbi Algorithm for digital communication to analyze the spread patterns of lung cancer. The team includes experts from the University of Southern California (USC), Scripps Clinic, The Scripps Research Institute, University of California, San Diego Moores Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York.

"This research demonstrates how similar the Internet is to a living organism," said USC Viterbi School of Engineering Professor Paul Newton, Ph.D., the lead and corresponding author of the study. "The same types of tools that help us understand the spread of information through the web can help us understand the spread of cancer through the human body."

Employing a sophisticated system of mathematical equations known as a Markov chain model, the research team -- guided by USC applied mathematicians- found that metastatic lung cancer does not progress in a single direction from primary tumor site to distant locations, which has been the traditional medical view. Instead, they found that cancer cell movement around the body likely occurs in more than one direction at a time.

Researchers also learned that the first site to which the cells spread plays a key role in the progression of the disease. The study showed that some parts of the body serve as "sponges" that are relatively unlikely to further spread lung cancer cells to other areas of the body. The study identified other areas as "spreaders" for lung cancer cells.

The study revealed that for lung cancer, the main spreaders are the adrenal gland and kidney, whereas the main sponges are the regional lymph nodes, liver and bone.

The study applied the advanced math model to data from human autopsy reports of 163 lung cancer patients in the New England area, from 1914 to 1943. This time period was targeted because it predates the use of radiation and chemotherapy, providing researchers a clear view of how cancer progresses if left untreated. Among the 163 patients, researchers charted the advancement patterns of 619 different metastases to 27 distinct body sites.

The study's findings could potentially impact clinical care by helping guide physicians to targeted treatment options, designed to curtail the spread of lung cancer. For example, if the cancer is found to have moved to a known spreader location, imaging tests and interventions can be quickly considered for focused treatment before the cells may be more widely dispersed. Further study is needed in this area.

Keeping tabs on cancer's movement in the body is vital to patient care. While a primary cancer tumor (confined to a single location) is often not fatal, a patient's prognosis can worsen if the cancer metastasizes -- that is, flakes off and travels to other parts of the body to form new tumors.

The study is part of a relatively new movement to involve physical sciences in oncology research. Mathematics probability models that interpret data from specific patient populations offer a new alternative to the established approach of relying on broader clinical trends to predict where, and how fast, cancer will spread.

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Story Source:

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

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

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Journal Reference:

1. P. K. Newton, J. Mason, K. Bethel, L. Bazhenova, J. Nieva, L. Norton, P. Kuhn. Spreaders and sponges define metastasis in lung cancer: A Markov chain mathematical model. Cancer Research, 2013; DOI: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-12-4488

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/S2c0yU_9a4g/130325111150.htm

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RIT Shows Off Community Photo Project

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RIT's 28th Community Photo Project, the Big Shot, happened Saturday night at 8:30. The project's focus, the world's largest domed stadium.

Before

In the "before" shot, pictured, you can see the home of the Dallas Cowboys, Cowboys Stadium with all it's lights off for the first time since its construction.

After

Using a technique they describe as painting with light, about 2,500 volunteers from around the world helped to achieve this final image by aiming their light source at the stadium while R.I.T. photographers shot the photo.

The night-time photograph was shot from a 40 ft. construction lift.

Source: http://rochester.ynn.com/content/top_stories/650399/rit-shows-off-community-photo-project

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2013 Ford Fusion S from North America

Good comfortable vehicle, gets a lot of looks.

Can't beat the car for the price. The engine runs smooth, and it has decent pick up and gas mileage for the size of the vehicle. Interior is nice and has all of your basic luxuries in the base model, without all of the fluff.

Source: http://www.carsurvey.org/reviews/ford/fusion/2013/

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Mayor Bloomberg On Domestic Drones In NYC - Business Insider

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg considers the domestic use of military-style drones "scary" but says that there is no way to stop it.

?Everybody wants their privacy, but I don?t know how you?re going to maintain it,? Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show. ?It?s just we?re going into a different world, uncharted, and, like it or not, what people can do, what governments can do, is different ... you can?t keep the tides from coming in.?

In September a Congressional Research report stated that domestic drones may be able to bypass constitutional privacy safeguards because of their high level of sophistication.

At least 81 entities, including 17 police departments, have applied for permission to fly drones in U.S. airspace.

But the mayor seems to be referring to something more omnipresent, like having drones with ARGUS technology flying 17,500 feet above the Big Apple while transmitting high resolution images of people.

"There'll be cameras every place" within five years, Bloomberg estimated. "We're going to have more visibility and less privacy. I just don't see how you could stop that."

The mayor figures that if the city already has security cameras in strategic places around the city ? 2,400 in Manhattan alone as of 1998 ? then drones aren't any different.

?It's scary. What?s the difference whether the drones up in the air or in the building?? Bloomberg said. ?I mean intellectually, I have trouble making a distinction. And you know you're going to have face recognition software."

Donna Lieberman of the New York Civil Liberties Union told CBS that the mayor's nonchalance does nothing to quell legitimate concerns that the government could save the data to analyze it.

?It?s disappointing that the mayor shows such disdain for the legitimate concern of New Yorkers about their privacy," she said. "None of us expects that we?ll go unseen when we?re out on the street, but we also have the right to expect that the government isn?t making a permanent record."

Here the CBS news report with Bloomberg's remarks:

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/mayor-bloomberg-on-domestic-drones-in-nyc-2013-3

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Reward linked to image is enough to activate brain's visual cortex

Friday, March 22, 2013

Once rhesus monkeys learn to associate a picture with a reward, the reward by itself becomes enough to alter the activity in the monkeys' visual cortex. This finding was made by neurophysiologists Wim Vanduffel and John Arsenault (KU Leuven and Harvard Medical School) and American colleagues using functional brain scans and was published recently in the leading journal Neuron.

Our visual perception is not determined solely by retinal activity. Other factors also influence the processing of visual signals in the brain. "Selective attention is one such factor," says Professor Wim Vanduffel. "The more attention you pay to a stimulus, the better your visual perception is and the more effective your visual cortex is at processing that stimulus. Another factor is the reward value of a stimulus: when a visual signal becomes associated with a reward, it affects our processing of that visual signal. In this study, we wanted to investigate how a reward influences activity in the visual cortex."

To do this, the researchers used a variant of Pavlov's well-known conditioning experiment: "Think of Pavlov giving a dog a treat after ringing a bell. The bell is the stimulus and the food is the reward. Eventually the dogs learned to associate the bell with the food and salivated at the sound of the bell alone. Essentially, Pavlov removed the reward but kept the stimulus. In this study, we removed the stimulus but kept the reward."

In the study, the rhesus monkeys first encountered images projected on a screen followed by a juice reward (classical conditioning). Later, the monkeys received juice rewards while viewing a blank screen. fMRI brain scans taken during this experiment showed that the visual cortex of the monkeys was activated by being rewarded in the absence of any image.

Importantly, these activations were not spread throughout the whole visual system but were instead confined to the specific brain regions responsible for processing the exact stimulus used earlier during conditioning. This result shows that information about rewards is being sent to the visual cortex to indicate which stimuli have been associated with rewards.

Equally surprising, these reward-only trials were found to strengthen the cue-reward associations. This is more or less the equivalent to giving Pavlov's dog an extra treat after a conditioning session and noticing the next day that he salivates twice as much as before. More generally, this result suggests that rewards can be associated with stimuli over longer time scales than previously thought.

Why does the visual cortex react selectively in the absence of a visual stimulus on the retina? One potential explanation is dopamine. "Dopamine is a signalling chemical (neurotransmitter) in nerve cells and plays an important role in processing rewards, motivation, and motor functions. Dopamine's role in reward signalling is the reason some Parkinson's patients fall into gambling addiction after taking dopamine-increasing drugs. Aware of dopamine's role in reward, we re-ran our experiments after giving the monkeys a small dose of a drug that blocks dopamine signalling. We found that the activations in the visual cortex were reduced by the dopamine blocker. What's likely happening here is that a reward signal is being sent to the visual cortex via dopamine," says Professor Vanduffel.

The study used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans to visualise brain activity. fMRI scans map functional activity in the brain by detecting changes in blood flow. The oxygen content and the amount of blood in a given brain area vary according to the brain activity associated with a given task. In this way, task-specific activity can be tracked.

###

The full text of the study "Dopaminergic reward signals selectively decrease fMRI activity in primate visual cortex" is available on the Neuron website: http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(13)00052-4?utm_source=ECE001&utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&bid=BKXPH4F:90EZ4

KU Leuven: http://www.kuleuven.be

Thanks to KU Leuven 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/127410/Reward_linked_to_image_is_enough_to_activate_brain_s_visual_cortex

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