2 divisive figures enter Iran's presidential race

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani waves to reporters, as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election, at the election headquarters of the interior ministry in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iranian election authorities say several new high-profile politicians including hardliners, reformists, and allies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have registered for the June 14 presidential elections. The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics. Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani waves to reporters, as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election, at the election headquarters of the interior ministry in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iranian election authorities say several new high-profile politicians including hardliners, reformists, and allies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have registered for the June 14 presidential elections. The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics. Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, and his close ally Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei flash victory signs, as they arrive at the election headquarters of the interior ministry for registering of Rahim Mashaei for the upcoming presidential election, in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iran's powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has entered the race for the June presidential election. Simultaneously, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's close confident Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei also signed up in the last minutes before Saturday's registration deadline. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani puts his hands on his forehead as a gesture of respect to media, as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election, at the election headquarters of the interior ministry in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iranian election authorities say several new high-profile politicians including hardliners, reformists, and allies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have registered for the June 14 presidential elections. The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics. Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Tehran's mayor, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a former Revolutionary Guard commander, shows his identification as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election, at the election headquarters of the interior ministry in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iranian election authorities say several new high-profile politicians including hardliners, reformists, and allies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have registered for the June 14 presidential elections. The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics. Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

Former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, shows his inked finger and registration paper to media as he registers his candidacy for the upcoming presidential election, at the election headquarters of the interior ministry in Tehran, Iran, Saturday, May 11, 2013. Iranian election authorities say several new high-profile politicians including hardliners, reformists, and allies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have registered for the June 14 presidential elections. The campaign is taking shape as open season on Ahmadinejad's legacy and his combative style that bolstered his stature among supporters but alarmed critics. Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) ? A pair of powerful and divisive figures registered Saturday to run in Iran's presidential election, providing a jolt to the political scene a month ahead of the vote.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who still wields enormous influence, and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, a close confident of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, submitted their official paperwork just before Saturday's deadline. State TV showed both men at the Interior Ministry signing up. A smiling Ahmadinejad accompanied Mashaei and raised the man's hand in a gesture of support.

The two hopefuls' entry into the race presents a tough challenge to conservative candidates loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and will likely intensify competition between rival groups in the June 14 vote.

Rafsanjani now stands as the prime hopeful for reformists, who were crushed and left leaderless after a government crackdown on mass street protests following Ahmadinejad's disputed 2009 election victory.

A Rafsanjani win would likely open the way for the easing of tensions with the outside world and distance Iran from Ahmadinejad's bombastic style and the hardline policies of the Islamic Republic's conservative camp.

Iran is grappling with tough oil and banking sanctions imposed by the West over Tehran's controversial nuclear program, which have caused the country's income from oil and gas exports to drop about 50 percent. The West fears Iran may ultimately be able to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

The decision of Rafsanjani and Mashaei to run greatly reduces the chance of a Khamenei loyalist winning the vote. About two dozen conservatives, including former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who is now a top adviser to Khamenei, and Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, have registered their candidacies as well.

But Rafsanjani's candidacy means conservative hopefuls likely will have to step aside to limit the number of hardline figures in the race to have a minimum of hope for victory.

The hardline Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog, will vet the applicants before allowing them to run.

Mashaei, who has drawn the wrath of Khamenei in recent years, said he will respect the law if the council scratches his candidacy.

"All must give in to the law," he told reporters.

Ahmadinejad is barred by law from seeking a third term due to term limits under Iran's constitution.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-05-11-Iran/id-e89ec1ada0a64ae5bcea3dc0c668e3a6

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Moths That Drive Cars (Really)

What you are about to see ? and I'm not making this up ? is a moth driving a car.

That's right. A silk moth ? actually, 14 different male silk moths ? each, in turn, hooked up to a robotic vehicle at Dr. Noriyasu Ando's lab at the University of Tokyo. Every one drove the vehicle to the intended target. If this were a driving test, all the moths would have passed.

The "engine," as you can see from this photo, was a rather large roller ball, looking like a computer mouse. From what I can understand from the science paper, it kind of was a computer mouse, a free-moving polystyrene ball. The moths would scramble, or dance, across the surface, moving the ball, which moved the vehicle. This is the first time I've heard of an insect running (or driving) a robot.

The problem is, they didn't know they were driving. They are moths, after all. What they thought they were doing was zeroing in on a lady moth. Dr. Ando procured a supply of moth perfume, the pheromone scent of an aroused female, placed it at the end of a tube, turned on a tiny fan and blew the scent at the male.

The male, wildly interested, headed for the source doing a mating dance that goes straight, then zigs, then zags, then makes a few turns then a full loop ? all to impress his potential mate. Sensors in the two-wheeled vehicle detected the steps and turned them into electrical signals that steered the drive motors.

According to blogger Sebastian Anthony, writing for Wired.com:

In all, fourteen male silk moths were tested, and they all showed a scary aptitude for steering a robot. In the tests, the moths had to guide the robot toward a source of female sex pheromone. The researchers even introduced a turning bias ? where one of the robot's motors is stronger than the other, causing it to veer to one side ? and yet the moths still reached the target.

In this video, you can see a computer readout of two of the moths driving to the right place.

Thinking about all this from the moth's point of view, Dr. Ando has some explaining to do. Not only did he fill 14 male moths with false hope, but he also fastened them (lightly, perhaps) to a stick that pressed them to the ball.

His defense? He and his team want to better understand the moth's antennae and sensory motor system. These critters jump into action when they want sex; they do it extremely fast, faster than any machine, and they do it unerringly. If Dr. Ando can figure out how, he could make robots do it too, which might help in an emergency, when a robot, for example, has to instantly detect and locate the source of a chemical leak or a hidden biological weapon.

But, says Wired.com's Anthony, while robots modeled on moths are one way to go ...

Of course, another possibility is that we simply keep the moths. After all, why should we spend time and money on an artificial system when mother nature, as always, has already done the hard work for us? In much the same way that miners used canaries and border police use sniffer dogs, why shouldn't robots be controlled by insects? The silk moth is graced with perhaps the most sensitive olfactory system in the world. For now it might only be sensitive to not-so-useful scents like the female sex pheromone, but who's to say that genetic engineering won't allow for silk moths that can sniff out bombs or drugs or chemical spills?

I can imagine Bruce Willis, peering through a window, sweat trickling off his brow, his muscles tense as he catches a brief glimpse of a mysterious chemical seeping from a pipe inside Good Guy Headquarters. He smells nothing. Nobody does. But they dare not enter the room ... unless ... UNLESS ...

"Send in the silk moths," he says

Small vehicles purr into action. "We'll know in a moment," Bruce says.

Everybody relaxes.

Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/05/08/182312510/moths-that-drive-cars-really?ft=1&f=1007

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Nobody likes a 'fat-talker,' study shows

May 9, 2013 ? Women who engage in "fat talk" -- the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies -- are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds.

Led by Alexandra Corning, research associate professor of psychology and director of Notre Dame's Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab, the study was presented recently at the Midwestern Psychological Association annual conference.

In the study, college-age women were presented with a series of photos of either noticeably thin or noticeably overweight women engaging in either "fat talk" or positive body talk; they were then asked to rate the women on various dimensions, including how likeable they were.

The women in the photos were rated significantly less likeable when they made "fat talk" statements about their bodies, whether or not they were overweight. The women rated most likeable were the overweight women who made positive statements about their bodies.

"Though it has become a regular part of everyday conversation, 'fat talk' is far from innocuous," according to Corning.

"It is strongly associated with, and can even cause, body dissatisfaction, which is a known risk factor for the development of eating disorders."

Although fat talk has been thought of by psychologists as a way women may attempt to initiate and strengthen their social bonds, Corning's research finds that fat-talkers are liked less than women who make positive statements about their bodies.

"These findings are important because they raise awareness about how women actually are being perceived when they engage in this self-abasing kind of talk," Corning says.

"This knowledge can be used to help national efforts to reduce 'fat talking' on college campuses."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/sh2vdNOv6wg/130509154547.htm

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Cop reunites with man he saved on Golden Gate Bridge

Click image to see more photos. (Photo courtesy maryannerussell.com)

On March 11 2005, Kevin Berthia wanted to take his own life. He had climbed over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge and was prepared to end his life with a fatal jump into the San Francisco Bay when he heard a voice calling out to him from above.

It wasn?t the voice of a spiritual presence but rather that of California Highway Patrol (CHP) Officer Kevin Briggs. The two talked for 60 life-changing minutes before Berthia decided to climb back up the bridge and give life another chance.

Eight years later, the pair reunited as part of an emotional ceremony honoring Briggs and other members of the CHP whose job it is to verbally persuade suicidal men and women from jumping off that bridge.

?It was phenomenal,? Berthia, 30, told Yahoo News about his reunion with Briggs at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention public service ceremony.

?I didn?t know what I was going to feel, or how I was going to react,? he said. ?But when I first saw him, he walked up me and I just shook his hand. It felt like I had known this man my whole life. The nerves weren?t there. It was just two old friends being reunited.?

In the eight years since their first meeting, Berthia has dramatically turned his life around. He still resides in the Bay Area that is home to his darkest of memories. But he has now built a new life for himself, with a successful marriage and two children. He says the time Briggs spent just listening to him forged a connection that helped put him on a path of mental recovery.

?That?s what I tell people,? Briggs told Yahoo News when asked about that fateful discussion with Berthia back in 2005. ?You have to seek some help. You?re there and you?re getting better. And you can have a life now.?

Over the years, it didn?t seem likely the two men would ever see each other in person again. But in December 2012, Briggs took part in a documentary video with Yahoo that chronicled his experiences of working the suicide prevention beat on the bridge. The story centered on Berthia?s incident while retaining his anonymity. But the footage included an emotionally striking photo of Berthia with back to the camera and head hung low against the bridge while Briggs attempted to console him.

Click image to see more photos. (John Storey/San Francisco Chronicle)

The outpouring of positive responses to the video provided a catalyst for the two reuniting.

?It?s actually taken off past what I thought it would ever do,? Briggs said of the video. ?I tried to read all the comments. ?I?ve been contacted to get his my life rights for a movie and several police departments have called asking me to speak about what we do here. It?s all been very humbling to be honest.?

After an initial meeting between Briggs and Berthia?s mother, the two men and their families met privately in a small room before the ceremony began.

?I wanted to meet him again,? Briggs said, acknowledging that it was ?very unusual? for him to have contact with any of the hundreds of men and women he?s talked down from the bridge over the years. ?I just said, ?it?s great to see you.? He said, ?My Mom is your number one fan.? It was really neat.?

However, things truly came full circle when the two men took the stage. Berthia introduced Briggs to the audience.

?People understood and could respect our connection,? Berthia said. ?It was more than just a CHP officer and a man who was trying to commit suicide.?

Much of the attention was understandably given to Berthia and his courage in agreeing to speak publicly about his personal experience. But after his introduction, it was Briggs who found himself overcome with emotion and needing to lean on the young man whose life he had helped save.

?I didn?t realize how I was going to feel on the stage when I got up there,? Briggs said. ?I wanted Kevin to stay up on there on the stage with me the whole time.?

?He said that I literally saved his life,? Briggs added. ?I said that he did it himself. He had the courage. It?s his call. It?s his choosing. People were just coming up to us with tears in their eyes. One of the psychiatrists even hugged me. And that?s when it just hit me.?

After the awards ceremony, Briggs and Berthia said they made plans to stay in touch going forward. In fact, Berthia and his family plan to attend a Christmas party with Briggs later this year.

?Now that I have his number, I don?t see us never not being friends,? Berthia said. ?We are of such a different age but it never feels like that. I?ve shared things with Officer Briggs in those 60 minutes that no one else in the world knows. It?s a special bond there.?

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/years-later-cop-reunites-suicidal-man-saved-golden-171522199.html

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Web Designing For Company - SpyGhana.com

Websites have become an important part of business. It acts as a useful tool in the hands of the business organizations to penetrate a large audience on the internet. You cannot anticipate pitching the consumers who are more likely to buy and purchase products and services online. This will surely leave the business away from huge number of consumers on the internet which can be the perspective consumers. A huge number of people of world?s population are now using internet and with most of the countries opening their doors for foreign trade the geographical distances have shrunk and allowing the business to penetrate into a large consumer base. However, when you enter the online market you need to make sure that you enter with a good face of your company to attract the online community.

Web design is a general term that is used to create the web page by various tasks this helps in providing information in the internet for the users about various fields that helps in business. It provides online business services and innovative opportunity to the users. Presently web designing plays a major role in almost each and every field so that they can promote their business by serving as a effective medium.

Now a day?s most of them are having their own websites. So that we have to design the website in such a way that it looks beautiful and attractive to the users. A good website should have an appealing and smart design with rich content in it. The content in your website should be well managed in order to viewer?s attention. It increases the sales and speedy growth of the business.

Website designing is not a easy task, it takes lot of innovative work to create an unique website comparing to the other web designers. There are many types of web designing sites, all together combine to form a very attractive web page.

Web development has caught up with online business owners like a house on fire. The ecommerce platform offers tremendous potential to the business owners and that is the basic reason why we witness a surfeit of websites on the World Wide Web. So, how is it possible that online businesses get noticed and sustain the interest of the visitors? It is possible through efficient and effective development frameworks which offer cutting edge technologies with the help of which one can usurp the place of other in the competitive world. Web development platform too offers such an advantage to the online business owners.

An offshore web development company from India covers worldwide market. These companies offer custom web development services and software outsourcing services that becomes a building block in business. Developing an effective, innovative and search engine supportive website is responsible for good internet marketing. The need to manage a website strategically needs planning and in doing so an offshore web development company can come handy. Offshore services stress in keeping timely implementation of plans and furnishing estimates updates. They make sure to maintain good communication between clients and team members.

View the original article here

Do you have a story or an article to publish? Please email us to spyghana79@gmail.com.

Source: http://www.spyghana.com/web-designing-for-company/

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Hit a 90 mph baseball? Scientists pinpoint how we see it coming

May 8, 2013 ? How does San Francisco Giants slugger Pablo Sandoval swat a 95 mph fastball, or tennis icon Venus Williams see the oncoming ball, let alone return her sister Serena's 120 mph serves? For the first time, vision scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have pinpointed how the brain tracks fast-moving objects.

The discovery advances our understanding of how humans predict the trajectory of moving objects when it can take one-tenth of a second for the brain to process what the eye sees.

That 100-millisecond holdup means that in real time, a tennis ball moving at 120 mph would have already advanced 15 feet before the brain registers the ball's location. If our brains couldn't make up for this visual processing delay, we'd be constantly hit by balls, cars and more.

Thankfully, the brain "pushes" forward moving objects so we perceive them as further along in their trajectory than the eye can see, researchers said.

"For the first time, we can see this sophisticated prediction mechanism at work in the human brain," said Gerrit Maus, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper published today (May 8) in the journal, Neuron.

A clearer understanding of how the brain processes visual input -- in this case life in motion -- can eventually help in diagnosing and treating myriad disorders, including those that impair motion perception. People who cannot perceive motion cannot predict locations of objects and therefore cannot perform tasks as simple as pouring a cup of coffee or crossing a road, researchers said.

This study is also likely to have a major impact on other studies of the brain. Its findings come just as the Obama Administration initiates its push to create a Brain Activity Map Initiative, which will further pave the way for scientists to create a roadmap of human brain circuits, as was done for the Human Genome Project.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Gerrit and fellow UC Berkeley researchers Jason Fischer and David Whitney located the part of the visual cortex that makes calculations to compensate for our sluggish visual processing abilities. They saw this prediction mechanism in action, and their findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up.

For the experiment, six volunteers had their brains scanned, via fMRI, as they viewed the "flash-drag effect," a visual illusion in which we see brief flashes shifting in the direction of the motion, as can be seen in the videos above.

"The brain interprets the flashes as part of the moving background, and therefore engages its prediction mechanism to compensate for processing delays," Maus said.

The researchers found that the illusion -- flashes perceived in their predicted locations against a moving background and flashes actually shown in their predicted location against a still background -- created the same neural activity patterns in the V5 region of the brain. This established that V5 is where this prediction mechanism takes place, they said.

In a study published earlier this year, Maus and his fellow researchers pinpointed the V5 region of the brain as the most likely location of this motion prediction process by successfully using transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation technique, to interfere with neural activity in the V5 region of the brain, and disrupt this visual position-shifting mechanism.

"Now not only can we see the outcome of prediction in area V5," Maus said. "But we can also show that it is causally involved in enabling us to see objects accurately in predicted positions."

On a more evolutionary level, the latest findings reinforce that it is actually advantageous not to see everything exactly as it is. In fact, it's necessary to our survival:

"The image that hits the eye and then is processed by the brain is not in sync with the real world, but the brain is clever enough to compensate for that," Maus said. "What we perceive doesn't necessarily have that much to do with the real world, but it is what we need to know to interact with the real world."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/kGKOX1u2TeU/130508123017.htm

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Nokia Takes On the iPhone and Galaxy in New Lumia Video Test

Photos and video are so easy to shoot on phones, it is easy to overlook the quality differences, and few of us shoot enough video across devices to compare the results. So,?Nokia?is taking its message to the streets (well, YouTube) with direct comparisons against rival models.

Nokia Making Waves

Nokia is a on a mission to highlight the features of its phones that offer something over its rivals. With Windows Phone 8 failing to excite vast numbers of users then its down to the optics, software and technology in the PureView camera system in its latest models.?

This video compares footage (hopefully, we don't want any of those dumb "actually recorded on professional equipment" moments) from the latest Lumia 928 model?against the current iPhone and recent Samsung Galaxy S3 model in a night shoot, on a rollercoaster. Of course, its impossible to tell what was holding the cameras and if there were any settings tweaked, but if genuine, then it does demonstrate the Lumia PureView technology pretty well.?

Interestingly, we've seen comments suggesting that while the Lumia's night shots are indeed awesome, its daylight photo and video results aren't quite as world-beating, so this could be just another case of comparing your most favorable aspect against a competitor's weakest, what do you think?

?What's Your Best Feature?

The big question is, will watchers of this video consider image quality above, processor power, ecosystem, app availability and the many other decision points that stand between a consumer and a smartphone purchase? ?

Nokia will officially show off the Lumia 928 later this month in London, competiting directly with new Samsung and other high-class Android devices, but will some neat video be enough to convince users it is worth the hassle of an ecosystem swap to join the Nokia masses.?

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Useful article?
Tags: apple, comparison, customer experience, cxm, galaxy, galaxy s3, iphone 5, lumia, mobile, nokia, pureview, samsung, video

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cmswire/open-source/~3/G0_qgdBpxcc/nokia-takes-on-the-iphone-and-galaxy-in-new-lumia-video-test-020841.php

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