$50,000, six-foot air conditioner obeys voice commands

7 hrs.

Devin Coldewey , NBC News

Stay cool this summer and impress your friends (and creditors) at the same time with this fabulously expensive and enormous air conditioning unit from LG. It looks like a cross between a Xbox 360 and a Dalek, and it costs tens of thousands of dollars.

LG's?Whisen series of AC units, announced Wednesday, is unquestionably the top of the line. You can control it by voice from up to 16 feet?away, and you won't even have to yell, since it's low-power and quiet. Or use your smartphone to check its status and turn it on while you drive home.

It's equipped with an infrared sensor that counts the number of people in the room and adjusts the fans, or simply tuns on or off when someone enters. And there's a normal camera as well, which you can access remotely to check on the cats or watch for burglars ? that is, if neither is?scared off by the towering robot in the living room.

Of course, it cools the air as well, and LG claims it does so faster than any other unit in its class by intelligently blowing the?coldest air in the directions that need it. And it does this with 72 percent less power than competing products, according to them.

The catch? Pricing starts at about $23,000 and runs all the way up to $50,000 for the fully-equipped "Champion style" model. For that price, you could hire someone?full time?to follow you around and fan you with banana leaves.

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBCNews Digital. His personal website is?coldewey.cc.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/50-000-six-foot-air-conditioner-obeys-voice-commands-1C7802818

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New insights into how plants grow in response to light, water and gravity

Jan. 2, 2013 ? Elementary school students often learn that plants grow toward the light. This seems straightforward, but in reality, the genes and pathways that allow plants to grow and move in response to their environment are not fully understood. Leading plant scientists explore one of the most fundamental processes in plant biology -- plant movement in response to light, water, and gravity -- in a January Special Issue of the American Journal of Botany.

Plant movements, known as tropisms, are crucial for plant survival from the second a plant germinates to how a plant positions its flowers for pollinators and seed dispersal. "They are basic processes that underlie all of plant physiology and growth," says Sarah Wyatt, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Plant Biology at Ohio University. Plants adapt and acclimate to their surroundings using tropisms, including moving in response to light (phototropism), water (hydrotropism), and gravity (gravitropism).

To inspire cutting-edge research on plant tropisms, Sarah Wyatt and plant biologist John Kiss, Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Mississippi, co-edited the special issue and invited plants scientists worldwide to write 24 articles that advance and summarize the field. "Tremendous progress has been made in the field of tropism research in the past decade," comments Kiss. "This issue was an opportunity to bring the community together," adds Wyatt, "and highlight some truly incredible science that has been ongoing 'under the radar' if you will and often under difficult circumstances."

Research in outer space is just one difficult circumstance by which scientists study how plants move. Growing plants in space has become a reality. "The International Space Station is now complete and the U.S. is committed to its utilization until at least 2020," Kiss says. Food and replenishing breathing air are vital functions plants can play on the ISS, and space flight experiments help scientists understand basic mechanisms plants use to grow and move because of gravity, or lack thereof.

Back on Earth, work on gravity and other tropisms is important for understanding plant growth, development, and responses to changing climates. Basic tropistic mechanisms in response to water and light could also enhance agricultural practices, explains Kiss, since crop plants experience environmental stressors like drought and overcrowding.

Tropisms have captured the interest of scientists for centuries. The way plants move can appear so eerily human that in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather, predicted that plants have multiple brains that can communicate with muscles to tell plants how to grow.

From Erasmus and Charles Darwin to modern-day scientists and techniques, the biology of plant tropisms has come a long way. Some of the special issue articles review the history of plant tropisms to the present day, whereas others move the field forward through new research. New genetic and molecular tools, for example, are used to shed light on the mechanisms plants employ to respond to water and gravity. Many articles focus on the famous model organism in plant science, Arabidopsis thaliana. Other articles on gravitropism include work on cereal grasses important for agriculture as well as the aquatic-dwelling fern Ceratopteris richardii.

The issue kicks off with a broad review article about how roots revolve and bend, known as circumnutation. Vines that wrap around objects as thin as wooden stakes or as thick as tree trunks all use circumnutation to climb. Research on circumnutation in stems is common, points out Dr. Fernando Migliaccio of the Institute of Agro-Environmental and Forest Biology in Italy. But as in all plant sciences, rigorous work about what goes on below the surface of the soil is scarce, even though root behavior below ground could be essential for understanding how plants establish and survive in agricultural and natural settings.

Time-lapse photography has popularized the most famous tropism -- phototropism, or how plants move toward light. Phototropism may be the most well-studied tropism, but one relatively unexplored area of phototropism is how plants grow and move in green light, as studied by graduate student Yihai Wang and his advisor Kevin Folta at the University of Florida. Light becomes greener when it passes through nearby plants. A plant growing in a shady spot under a tree receives less sunlight, and it also receives different wavelengths of light that change its growth patterns. Scenarios like this happen every day in the natural world, explain Wang and Folta. "Oftentimes a plant cannot possibly compete by out-growing or over-reaching a neighbor, and it must adopt a new program of acclimation," they say. Wang and Folta explore new findings about how plant species use gene expression and physiology to cope and survive in green-enriched environments.

The special issue continues with articles tackling how gravitropism works. Recent discoveries of plant hormones and the proteins that transport them have reinvigorated scientists to investigate the pathways plants use to perceive gravity. Original research in this special issue begins to "untangle the complex interactions" of plant growth regulators like plant hormones, proteins, and organic compounds, explain Wyatt and Kiss.

Wyatt and Kiss hope to inspire young scientists to conduct research on the fundamental field of plant tropisms on Earth and in space. "Remember the seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why," quotes Wyatt of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. "This is the wonderment that is inherent in tropistic responses -- tropisms capture the imagination."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by American Journal of Botany, 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. S. E. Wyatt, J. Z. Kiss. Plant tropisms: From Darwin to the International Space Station. American Journal of Botany, 2013; 100 (1): 1 DOI: 10.3732/ajb.1200591

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

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/nlVTDfvJ0pM/130102105418.htm

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Businesses And Individuals Grapple With Decisions About ...

News organizations preview what's to come in 2013 as provisions of the Affordable Care Act are put in place.

Kaiser Health News: Health Care Predictions For A New Year (Video)
KHN reporters preview some of the big issues coming this year: The fight over controlling spending and what it means for Medicare; state decisions on health law implementation; and changing how hospitals and doctors are paid (1/1).

Politico Pro: The Year Ahead In Health Care: What To Watch In 2013
This year, the Obama administration will have to guide the states through set-up of the exchanges ? or, in many states, set them up entirely on its own. The law will have to withstand at least some level of rate shock as insurers adjust to new coverage requirements. And with deficit reduction sure to be a hot topic this year, the health law may have to withstand new attempts to dip into its funding (Haberkorn, 1/2).

NPR: What The Health Law Will Bring In 2013?
Most of the really big changes made by the 2010 health law don't start for another year. ... But Jan. 1, 2013, will nevertheless mark some major changes. One of those changes that will affect everyone with private health insurance actually took effect last September. But most people won't see it until they renew or apply for new health insurance. It's called a summary of benefits and coverage. The idea is to help people actually understand what's in their insurance policies (Rovner, 1/1).

McClatchy: New Year Means Tax Increases To Pay For Health Care Law
Five new tax increases take effect on Jan. 1 to help pay for the nation?s health care overhaul. New provisions of the Affordable Care Act require affluent taxpayers to pay more for Medicare and, for the first time, have their investment income subject to Medicare taxes as well. Also, people who use flexible spending accounts for health care expenses will pay higher taxes. And taxpayers who spend a lot out of pocket on their health care will find it harder to deduct those expenses from their taxable income (Pugh, 12/31).

The Wall Street Journal: Companies Prepare For Health Law
One of the biggest decisions for many companies this year will be what to do about their health benefits. They have just 12 months before the major provisions of the federal overhaul law take effect on Jan. 1, 2014, reshaping health coverage in the U.S. Employers with at least 50 workers will owe penalties if they don't cover full-time employees. Most Americans will face a parallel "individual mandate" to obtain insurance. And new online marketplaces called exchanges will sell insurance plans in each state, paired with federal subsidies for lower-income people (Mathews, 1/1).

The Wall Street Journal: Under Health Law, Employers Must Insure Workers' Dependents
Large employers who are subject to the health overhaul law's requirement to provide insurance or pay a fee must also extend coverage to their workers' dependent children, according to federal regulations released Friday. The 144-page proposed regulation that the Obama administration unveiled late Friday offered new details for how employers will have to comply with the health overhaul law (Adamy, 12/28).

CBS (Video): Businesses Begin Bracing For The Affordable Care Act
The new legislation will require businesses with 50 or more workers to provide affordable health care for their employees starting in 2014 or pay a penalty of up to $2,000 per worker. Businesses with fewer than 50 employees -- that's 96 percent of all companies, will be exempt. They won't have to do anything. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a health policy advisor to the White House who helped develop the new plan, said the cost to businesses is a "real concern"?(Mason, 1/1).

This is part of Kaiser Health News' Daily Report - a summary of health policy coverage from more than 300 news organizations. The full summary of the day's news can be found here and you can sign up for e-mail subscriptions to the Daily Report here. In addition, our staff of reporters and correspondents file original stories each day, which you can find on our home page.

Source: http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2013/January/02/health-reform-law-obamacare.aspx

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Companion Animal Psychology: Will Grey Parrots Share?

A fascinating study by Franck P?ron and colleagues looks at
the question of whether or not grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) will share,
with each other or with a human. Two hand-reared parrots took part: Griffin,
the dominant bird who is 14 years old, and Arthur, who is 11. The birds live in
large individual cages in the same room as each other, and often take part in
studies of parrot cognition. This means they were well placed to understand the
task involved: choosing one of four coloured cups, each of which has a
different meaning.

For the purposes of this study, the cups were as follows:-

Green cup ? sharing. The bird and their partner both get a treat.

Pink cup ? selfish. The bird gets a treat but the partner does not.

Orange cup ? giving. The partner gets a treat, but they do not.

Violet cup ? null. No one gets a treat.

The treats varied, including pieces of cashew nut and almonds, and sometimes small candies. In the first experiment, the cups were arranged on a tray without the birds seeing what went under them. Two humans performed a demonstration session, so the birds could see what the results of different cup choices were. Then the experiment began. ?

The tray was presented to the first bird, who had to make a choice, and treats were distributed accordingly. Then the second bird got to make a choice. In total, there were fifty sessions, in which each bird got to make ten choices. Griffin led in 24 of the sessions, and Arthur led in the other 26 (it was meant to be equal, but there was a mistake).?

The birds did not choose randomly, and nor did they co-operate by always choosing the sharing cup, which would have maximized the rewards for both of them. Griffin, the dominant bird, chose selfishly when he went first, but when he had the second choice he continued to sometimes share. Arthur became more selfish over the trials, whether he was leader or follower. And while Arthur was silent throughout, Griffin sometimes said ?want nut? or ?nut?, or squeaked in a frustrated way, in response to his own or Arthur?s choices.

Of course, the parrots already had a relationship with each other which may have affected their choices. Perhaps Arthur became more selfish over time because, as the subordinate bird, it was unusual that he had a chance to do so without reprisal.

The second experiment was similar, except the birds were paired with several humans. One human was always selfish, one was always giving, and the other copied whatever the parrot had just done. In most cases, the birds had ten sessions of ten trials each (i.e. ten choices for the bird and ten for the following human), although there was some variability due to students? schedules. The main difference was that for Arthur, towards the end, there was a three week hiatus in testing because of students? exams.

As before, both birds avoided the giving and null cups. Griffin?s behaviour changed over the time of the trials. When the human was giving, Griffin began to share more over time. When the human was selfish, he became more selfish over time. With the copycat, it wasn?t clear that Griffin understood this, although there was a slight increase in sharing behaviour.

Arthur?s results were complicated by the three week gap in testing. He is a bird who doesn?t respond well to absences by people he is used to interacting with, and often greets them on their return by biting or shunning them. Prior to the gap, he was tending towards more sharing with the ?giving? human, but after the gap he reversed this behaviour. He also didn?t seem to like the copycat, and often chose the ?null? cup, which may have been his way of saying he had had enough.

These results show that Griffin seemed to understand the concept of sharing, since he tended to pick the ?share? cup more often with the ?giving? human (note that he wasn?t copying the human, because that would have involved picking the ?giving? cup). Both birds showed awareness of the value of the choices. Their choices changed over time and (at least to some extent) according to what their partner did.

One of the things I especially like about this study is that the parrots? personalities shine through.

Do you have a bird at home, and if so what kind?

Reference

P?ron F, John M, Sapowicz S, Bovet D, & Pepperberg IM (2012). A study of sharing and reciprocity in grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus). Animal cognition PMID: 23065183

Source: http://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2013/01/will-grey-parrots-share.html

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2013 real estate and economy predictions | MetaFilter

?

SFH in Victoria/Vancouver isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

It already is, at least in Vancouver.

You simply cannot indefinitely sustain a median home price of over $1,000,000 when the average household makes less than $70,000. The zero-down and cash-back mortgages are gone, as are the CMHC-insured mortgages with amortizations of 40, 35, and 30 years. Not only is the government no longer pulling out all of the stops to keep housing prices rising, it's pushing a few back in.

I don't own a ghost that's been leveraged on a bogus future value like what happened in the US.

Real values of real estate can't rise above what people can afford in the long term. Incomes in Victoria haven't gone up nearly as much in the past ten years as housing, and it doesn't look like the provincial or federal governments are going on a spending spree anytime soon.

The idea that desire equals demand is silly. It's desire plus money. It doesn't matter if a billion more people want to buy a house in Toronto if none of them make enough money to spend $400,000 on it.

delight, glee, and gloating when the bubble there finally popped (despite their friends and family being in a world of pain which most of them are still in)

The damage to their friends and family was done during the runup, not the correction.

Unlike the US in the aughts, the things fueling the demand for condos aren't illusory. Canada doesn't have NINA loans.

If only. What do you call it when mortgages can be more than one of: stated-income, zero-down, and cash-back? It's a good thing that this was tightened up over the summer. The banks are still all too happy to lend you enough rope to hang yourself with because they won't take the loss; CMHC will.
posted by one more dead town's last parade at 9:58 PM on January 1

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Source: http://www.metafilter.com/123369/2013-real-estate-and-economy-predictions

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Ubuntu teaser counts down to January 2nd launch, hints at touch-based OS

"So close, you can almost touch it." The Ubuntu home page is currently dominated by a banner with that teaser, along with a clock counting down to 8AM ET on Wednesday, January 2nd. Our guess is that the pre-CES announcement may focus on mobile, with a touch-friendly interface possibly on the horizon. During a Slashdot Q&A in December, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth clued readers in on the company's plans to bring the OS to mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, as part of a strategy to familiarize desktop users with the Linux-based operating system. While this week's announcement may fall in line with that objective, it's likely to be just one part of the equation, with 14.04 LTS not set to launch until April 2014 at the earliest. Either way, we have more than a day to go before Ubuntu's mystery is unveiled, so tune your browser to the source link below to join in on the countdown fun.

[Thanks, Brian]

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Software, Mobile

Comments

Source: Ubuntu

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/01/ubuntu-teases-touch-os/

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