Hotel Near Sports Venues - People Biologically Take Pleasure In The Pain Of Others

Source       - http://www.upi.com/
By             - Press Release
Category   - Hotel Near Sports Venues
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Hotel Near Sports Venues

U.S. researchers find people are biologically responsive to taking pleasure in the pain of others -- Schadenfreude -- at least if they envy them. 

Mina Cikara of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Susan Fiske of Princeton University measured the electrical activity of cheek muscles with an electromyogram, which captures the electrical activity of facial movements when an individual smiles. 

Participants were shown photographs of individuals associated with different stereotypes: the elderly (pity), students or Americans (pride), drug addicts (disgust) and rich professionals (envy). 

These images were then paired with everyday events such as: "Won five dollars" (positive) or "Got soaked by a taxi" (negative) or "Went to the bathroom" (neutral). Participants were asked how this would make them feel, and their facial movements were recorded.

"Because people don't like to report envy of Schadenfreude, this was the best method for gathering such responses. And, in this experiment, we were able to viscerally capture malicious glee," Fiske said. "We found that people did smile more in response to negative than positive events, but only for groups they envied."

In a second study, participants viewed the same photographs and events as the first study and were asked to rate how they felt on a scale of 1-9. 

Similar results emerged: Participants felt the worst about positive events and the best about negative events in regards to the rich professionals, the study said. 

"A lack of empathy is not always pathological. It's a human response, and not everyone experiences this, but a significant portion does," Cikara said. "If you think about the way workplaces and organizations are set up, for example, it raises an interesting question: Is competition the best way to get your employees to produce? It's possible, in some circumstances, that competition is good. In other ways, people might be preoccupied with bringing other people down, and that's not what an organization wants."

The findings were reported in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Family Friendly Attractions New Orleans - Google Letting You Hand-Write Your E-mails

Source       - http://www.ksl.com/
By             - Heather Kelly
Category   - Family Friendly Attractions New Orleans
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Family Friendly Attractions New Orleans

For many, typing has long overtaken handwriting as their primary word and sentence creation method. So much so that some schools no longer teach cursive. 

But Google is bringing some good old fashioned handwriting back to modern communication, adding new handwriting input tools to Gmail and Google Docs. 

Those tools now allow you to write out what you want to say with a mousepad or cursor and Google will do its best to create a typed version of your words. The input box will show the most likely matches for your word, so below your handwritten "cats" it might display this list of possible words: cats, rats, Cats, oats, and carts. Click on the right one and keep on writing. 

The tool might have a harder time deciphering your fancy calligraphy or messy chicken scratches, but it seems to do a decent job with my sloppy cursive-ish writing. 

While English is an option, it's more for complicated alphabets where drawing out a character is sometimes easier than typing it, like Japanese or Hindi. 

"Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages," said Google's Xiangye Xia in a blog post announcing the feature. 

Gmail users can get the new tool in more than 50 languages, Google Docs users in more than 20.

To test it out, go to your Gmail or Docs settings and, under the Languages setting in the General tab, click "Show all language options." Select the box that says "Enable input tools" and you'll get a list of every type of keyboard Google has to offer. The languages with a pencil icon beside them are the ones that support written words.

Once you've added an input option, you can select it anytime from a drop down on top of the menu bar above the document or email you're writing.

Google already has handwriting support for its mobile translation apps so you can scrawl a word on the screen and see it instantly in another language. This is particularly helpful if you're not familiar with a local alphabet and want to know what something says. 

New Orleans Extended Stay Hotel - Lower Blood Sugar, High Is Your Recalling Power

Source       - http://www.pentagonpost.com/
By             - Hazel Bender
Category   - New Orleans Extended Stay Hotel
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

New Orleans Extended Stay Hotel

If you don’t have diabetes but you suffer from high blood sugar then you may be suffering memory loss. A new study has revealed that people who didn’t have type 2 diabetes but had blood sugar at the high end of the normal range performed worse on memory tests than those with lower blood sugar.

Germany researchers conducted study on 141 people with the average age 63. Only those participants were chosen who didn’t have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes. The researchers found that the participants showed no signs of memory problems. Further the study participants took a series of memory tests and had their blood sugar tested. They also had brain scans to measure the size of the hippocampus area, which plays an important role in memory.

Researcher Agnes Flöel of Charité University Medicine in Berlin says she and her colleagues “correlated long-term blood-sugar levels with the number of words people could recall on a memory test.”

During the tests and further research, the team of scientists found that participants with higher long-term blood-sugar levels suffered memory loss as they were able to recall fewer words. Moreover, their hippocampus was also smaller in size. The findings suggested that even for people within the normal range of blood sugar, lowering their levels might be a possible way to prevent memory problems as they age.

 

The findings of the study were published in the medical journal Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology.

Meanwhile, the researchers also expressed need for higher and in-depth study on the issue as the current study is relatively small and doesn’t prove cause and effect. 

Control your glucose

Experts have suggested that glucose levels are key to understand many diseases including stroke, diabetes, brain diseases.

The risk of dementia is higher in people with diabetes. Moreover, the elevated glucose impacts brain function and recovery in people following a stroke.

When something goes wrong with the body’s ability to regulate glucose levels in the blood, the brain is not able work as well as it should, says Keith Fargo of the Alzheimer’s Association.

If glucose is not functioning properly, it can affect brain function and brain health over the long-term, says Rachel Whitmer, a senior research scientist at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research.

Your glucose level is determined by a combination of “genetics, diet and hormonal response,” Ratner says. “For those who have perfectly normal glucose metabolism, there is little they can do to change their level. The body controls glucose very tightly. The body is that good.”

If you want to keep your blood sugar in a healthy range, that doesn’t mean “you should never eat sugar,” he says. It means you should eat a healthy diet with a reasonable number of calories and a balanced intake of protein, fat and carbohydrates, he says.

Exercising regularly and eating a healthy diet can help keep blood sugar at a healthy level.

Attractions In New Orleans - Apps to Protect Your Info Online -- 'TakePart Live' Tech Affect

Source      - http://news.yahoo.com/
By            - Jose Iniguez
Category  - Attractions In New Orleans
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Attractions In New Orleans

Every week we show you some apps, sites, and services that do more than monitor your favorite YouTube cat videos -- they give you high-tech solutions for real life problems. We call it the "Tech Affect."

This week's recommendations -- as featured on the Wednesday, Oct. 23 episode of 'TakePart Live' -- provide with you with tools to keep your personal information safe and private online. All three were handpicked by our special guest expert, CTO of Beyond Trust Marc Maiffret.

2-step Verification – Two-step verification is an optional security feature that requires you to verify your identity using one of your devices, like a phone. This extra layer significantly raises the bar for people who may be trying to hack into your accounts. TrueCrypt – This is a free, open source, on-the-fly encryption service that can encrypt your entire computer, or even selected folders or files within your computer. KeePass – This is a free password manager that keeps you from having to remember all of the many passwords for all of your logins by keeping them all in one place.

Extended Stay In New Orleans - Apple Announces The Thinner, Lighter iPad Air And New iPad Mini

Source      - http://betanews.com/
By            - Mark Wilson
Category  - Extended Stay In New Orleans
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

 

Extended Stay In New Orleans

It was a feature-packed morning of announcements where it seems as though Apple was going to give away everything for free. Sadly the freebies are limited to software and the new range of hardware has to be purchased in the regular way. The big news for tablet fans is the iPad Air. Borrowing its name -- in part at least -- from the MacBook Air range, thinner and faster are the adjectives of the day.

Phil Schiller said: "Thinner, lighter, more powerful than ever before, and incredibly, excitingly new that it deserves a new name: iPad Air". Boasting the same A7 processor as the recently announced iPhone 5s, the iPad Air is just 7.5mm thick and weighs 1 pound -- compare this to 9.4mm and 1.4 pounds for the previous model. Despite the thinner design and smaller battery size, we can still expect 10 hours of usage from the tablet which offers up to eight times the performance of the original iPad, and up to 72 times the GPU performance.

Silver and white, and space gray and black models are available from 1 November with prices starting at $499 for the Wi-Fi-only 16GB model. If you want a cellular data connection, the price jumps to $629. The iPad 2 remains on sale for $399.

The iPad mini is also sure to cause some excitement. This miniature model really is just a shrunken version of its bigger brother. The screen may be smaller but it is now a Retina display which boasts the same number of pixels as the iPad Air. Inside, there's the same A7 processor, up to four times faster graphics than its predecessor and the same 10 hour battery life.

The color choices are the same as with the iPad Air (silver and white, and space gray and black), and the 16GB Wi-Fi-only model starts at $399. The original iPad mini remains on sale for the reduced price of $299. It's still more expensive than the likes of the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HDX, but the gap is closing.

Suites In New Orleans - Scientists Discover DNA Body Clock

Source     - http://www.theguardian.com/
By            - Ian Sample
Category  - Suites In New Orleans
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Suites In New Orleans

A US scientist has discovered an internal body clock based on DNA that measures the biological age of our tissues and organs.

The clock shows that while many healthy tissues age at the same rate as the body as a whole, some of them age much faster or slower. The age of diseased organs varied hugely, with some many tens of years "older" than healthy tissue in the same person, according to the clock.

Researchers say that unravelling the mechanisms behind the clock will help them understand the ageing process and hopefully lead to drugs and other interventions that slow it down.

Therapies that counteract natural ageing are attracting huge interest from scientists because they target the single most important risk factor for scores of incurable diseases that strike in old age.

"Ultimately, it would be very exciting to develop therapy interventions to reset the clock and hopefully keep us young," said Steve Horvath, professor of genetics and biostatistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Horvath looked at the DNA of nearly 8,000 samples of 51 different healthy and cancerous cells and tissues. Specifically, he looked at how methylation, a natural process that chemically modifies DNA, varied with age.

Horvath found that the methylation of 353 DNA markers varied consistently with age and could be used as a biological clock. The clock ticked fastest in the years up to around age 20, then slowed down to a steadier rate. Whether the DNA changes cause ageing or are caused by ageing is an unknown that scientists are now keen to work out.

"Does this relate to something that keeps track of age, or is a consequence of age? I really don't know," Horvath told the Guardian. "The development of grey hair is a marker of ageing, but nobody would say it causes ageing," he said.

The clock has already revealed some intriguing results. Tests on healthy heart tissue showed that its biological age – how worn out it appears to be – was around nine years younger than expected. Female breast tissue aged faster than the rest of the body, on average appearing two years older.

Diseased tissues also aged at different rates, with cancers speeding up the clock by an average of 36 years. Some brain cancer tissues taken from children had a biological age of more than 80 years.

"Female breast tissue, even healthy tissue, seems to be older than other tissues of the human body. That's interesting in the light that breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. Also, age is one of the primary risk factors of cancer, so these types of results could explain why cancer of the breast is so common," Horvath said.

Healthy tissue surrounding a breast tumour was on average 12 years older than the rest of the woman's body, the scientist's tests revealed.

Writing in the journal Genome Biology, Horvath showed that the biological clock was reset to zero when cells plucked from an adult were reprogrammed back to a stem-cell-like state. The process for converting adult cells into stem cells, which can grow into any tissue in the body, won the Nobel prize in 2012 for Sir John Gurdon at Cambridge University and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University.

"It provides a proof of concept that one can reset the clock," said Horvath. The scientist now wants to run tests to see how neurodegenerative and infectious diseases affect, or are affected by, the biological clock.

"These data could prove valuable in furthering our knowledge of the biological changes that are linked to the ageing process," said Veryan Codd, who works on the effects of biological ageing in cardiovascular disease at Leicester University. "It will be important to determine whether the accelerated ageing, as described here, is associated with other age-related diseases and if it is a causal factor in, or a consequence of, disease development.

"As more data becomes available, it will also be interesting to see whether a similar approach could identify tissue-specific ageing signatures, which could also prove important in disease mechanisms," she added.

Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues - Apple Expected To Unveil New iPads On Tuesday

Source       - http://www.mercurynews.com/
By             - Patrick May
Category   - Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues
Posted By - Homewood Suites New Orleans

Suites Near New Orleans Sports Venues

With just 66 shopping days left until Christmas, Apple (AAPL) is about to give Santa Claus more goodies to stuff into those stockings.

At an event Tuesday morning in San Francisco, the Cupertino-based tech giant is expected to unveil a fifth-generation iPad as well as a follow-up version of the iPad mini it released a year ago. And while its email invitation cryptically announces, "We still have a lot to cover," one thing is clear: With its stock price well below its onetime high and its share of the tablet market continuing to shrink, Apple has a lot riding on this launch.

IDC analyst Tom Mainelli thinks this week's iPad refresh should help Apple as well as the burgeoning pack of rivals chipping away at the iPad's former dominance.

"A new iPad launch always piques consumer interest in the tablet category, and traditionally that has helped both Apple and its competitors," he said. After Apple skipped its traditional iPad upgrade last spring, Mainelli added, "its numbers were down, but almost everyone else's were down too. So while Apple's market share may have dropped, they still drive the overall tablet market, and consumers are still paying close attention to what Apple is doing with its products."

As with past Apple events, the rumor mill has been working overtime. Most analysts and bloggers expect the new iPad will sport the more powerful 64-bit A7X processor and reveal a slimmer physique than its predecessors. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the tablet will be 15 percent thinner than the iPad 4 and feature more rounded edges.

And since Apple has historically offered the same features across different platforms, evidenced by the personal assistant Siri eventually showing up on both iPhones and iPads, most observers widely believe the second-version iPad mini will come with the same Retina display that the larger iPad already features.

One big question is whether either of the new devices will feature Touch ID, Apple's proprietary fingerprint identity sensor featured on the new iPhone 5s unveiled last month. A Chinese blog site leaked photos of a purported fifth-generation iPad with the sensor in place of the traditional home button. And analyst Tim Bajarin with Creative Strategies says improving its tablet's security makes sense as Apple continues to push its devices into the business world.

"We believe that as an iPad 5 starts showing up in more and more corporate accounts, and as more employees are taking their tablets to work with them, security becomes an ever more important part of the equation," Bajarin said. "And since Apple owns the Touch ID technology, they could also introduce it on the iPad mini."

Apple's event comes as the tablet computer plays an increasingly significant role both in the lives of consumers and in the way companies conduct business. From iPad-equipped airline pilots and warehouse managers to schoolteachers and their tablet-toting students, the device has become a crucial and handy tool for the mobile masses.

IDC reports that tablet shipments in the fourth quarter are expected for the first time to surpass total PC shipments, which include desktop and laptop computers. And it forecasts tablets will do the same on an annual basis by the end of 2015.

So even though Apple's piece of the global tablet pie may be smaller than it was in 2010 when the first iPad went on sale -- a drop from 77 then to 37 percent today -- IDC's Mainelli says that doesn't necessarily mean Apple's in trouble.

"When the iPad first launched, nobody was really all that competitive in the tablet market, so since then 

Apple has only had one direction to go, and that's down" in terms of market share, he said. "Having said that, Apple doesn't chase market share at the expense of profitability or a good user experience. So while there are a lot of guys out there making Android tablets, not a lot of them are making any money.

"At the end of the day," Mainelli said, "the companies left standing are those who put out good products that people want and make money doing it."