Thursday, April 11, 2013

Mexico Violence: Clashes Between Federal Police, Gunmen Leave 14 Dead

MORELIA, Mexico -- At least 14 people died Wednesday in a series of clashes between gunmen and federal police in Michoacan state, a western area that has seen a surge of violence in recent years attributed to drug cartels, authorities said.

Federal police said in a statement the first gunbattle began when officers aboard a helicopter spotted armed men traveling in four vehicles in the town of Gabriel Zamora.

The gunmen opened fire on the agents, who shot back and killed five assailants, the statement said.

It said one of those killed was high in the leadership structure of a Michoacan-based drug cartel, but didn't identify the group.

Hours later in the town of Apatzingan, federal agents were accompanying a caravan of citizens commemorating the anniversary of the death of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata when gunmen fired shots at some of the participants. Police killed one of the gunmen, authorities said.

The citizens continued on and were again attacked by gunmen who fired from an overpass, police said. Eight people died and another eight were wounded, including two police officers.

The Knights Templar cartel, which controls much of Michoacan, has been fighting rivals along its borders with other states including Guerrero, where a variety of smaller cartels control drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

The clashes came the same day that the Mexican government announced drug-related killings from December through March had dropped 14 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The Interior Department said 4,249 people were killed during the first four months of President Enrique Pena Nieto's administration. It said 4,934 were killed between December 2011 and March 2012.

But Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong said that "it's too early to assume victorious attitudes."

The government of previous President Felipe Calderon stopped releasing figures of drug killings in September 2011.

Osorio Chong said the federal government continued to keep a count.

The Interior Department report said 184 law enforcement officials were killed between December and March, including soldiers, and federal and local police.

Bloody clashes are still common in Mexico and there are times when it's impossible to know how many people died because drug traffickers take their dead away before authorities reach the scene.

In the border city of Reynosa, there were at least four major shootouts between rival drug gangs in March. One of the clashes lasted several hours. People reported dozens of dead on social networks and at least 12 were corroborated by witnesses. The official account, however, listed two dead.

Osorio Chong said the state of Tamaulipas, where Reynosa is located, is one of the "most important spots for this administration" when it comes to security.

___

Associated Press writer Adriana Gomez-Licon contributed to this report from Mexico City.

Also on HuffPost:

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/11/mexico-violence_n_3059094.html

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Subconscious mental categories help brain sort through everyday experiences

Apr. 10, 2013 ? Researchers found that the brain breaks experiences into the "events," or related groups that help us mentally organize the day's many situations, using subconscious mental categories it creates. These categories are based on how the brain considers people, objects and actions are related in terms of how they tend to ? or tend not to ? pop up near one another at specific times.

Your brain knows it's time to cook when the stove is on, and the food and pots are out. When you rush away to calm a crying child, though, cooking is over and it's time to be a parent. Your brain processes and responds to these occurrences as distinct, unrelated events.

But it remains unclear exactly how the brain breaks such experiences into "events," or the related groups that help us mentally organize the day's many situations. A dominant concept of event-perception known as prediction error says that our brain draws a line between the end of one event and the start of another when things take an unexpected turn (such as a suddenly distraught child).

Challenging that idea, Princeton University researchers suggest that the brain may actually work from subconscious mental categories it creates based on how it considers people, objects and actions are related. Specifically, these details are sorted by temporal relationship, which means that the brain recognizes that they tend to -- or tend not to -- pop up near one another at specific times, the researchers report in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

So, a series of experiences that usually occur together (temporally related) form an event until a non-temporally related experience occurs and marks the start of a new event. In the example above, pots and food usually make an appearance during cooking; a crying child does not. Therein lies the partition between two events, so says the brain.

This dynamic, which the researchers call "shared temporal context," works very much like the object categories our minds use to organize objects, explained lead author Anna Schapiro, a doctoral student in Princeton's Department of Psychology.

"We're providing an account of how you come to treat a sequence of experiences as a coherent, meaningful event," Schapiro said. "Events are like object categories. We associate robins and canaries because they share many attributes: They can fly, have feathers, and so on. These associations help us build a 'bird' category in our minds. Events are the same, except the attributes that help us form associations are temporal relationships."

Supporting this idea is brain activity the researchers captured showing that abstract symbols and patterns with no obvious similarity nonetheless excited overlapping groups of neurons when presented to study participants as a related group. From this, the researchers constructed a computer model that can predict and outline the neural pathways through which people process situations, and can reveal if those situations are considered part of the same event.

The parallels drawn between event details are based on personal experience, Schapiro said. People need to have an existing understanding of the various factors that, when combined, correlate with a single experience.

"Everyone agrees that 'having a meeting' or 'chopping vegetables' is a coherent chunk of temporal structure, but it's actually not so obvious why that is if you've never had a meeting or chopped vegetables before," Schapiro said.

"You have to have experience with the shared temporal structure of the components of the events in order for the event to hold together in your mind," she said. "And the way the brain implements this is to learn to use overlapping neural populations to represent components of the same event."

During a series of experiments, the researchers presented human participants with sequences of abstract symbols and patterns. Without the participants' knowledge, the symbols were grouped into three "communities" of five symbols with shapes in the same community tending to appear near one another in the sequence.

After watching these sequences for roughly half an hour, participants were asked to segment the sequences into events in a way that felt natural to them. They tended to break the sequences into events that coincided with the communities the researchers had prearranged, which shows that the brain quickly learns the temporal relationships between the symbols, Schapiro said.

The researchers then used functional magnetic resonance imaging to observe brain activity as participants viewed the symbol sequences. Images in the same community produced similar activity in neuron groups at the border of the brain's frontal and temporal lobes, a region involved in processing meaning.

The researchers interpreted this activity as the brain associating the images with one another, and therefore as one event. At the same time, different neural groups activated when a symbol from a different community appeared, which was interpreted as a new event.

The researchers fashioned these data into a computational neural-network model that revealed the neural connection between what is being experienced and what has been learned. When a simulated stimulus is entered, the model can predict the next burst of neural activity throughout the network, from first observation to processing.

"The model allows us to articulate an explicit hypothesis about what kind of learning may be going on in the brain," Schapiro said. "It's one thing to show a neural response and say that the brain must have changed to arrive at that state. To have a specific idea of how that change may have occurred could allow a deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved."

Michael Frank, a Brown University associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, said that the Princeton researchers uniquely apply existing concepts of "similarity structure" used in such fields as semantics and artificial intelligence to provide evidence for their account of event perception. These concepts pertain to the ability to identify within large groups of data those subsets that share specific commonalities, said Frank, who is familiar with the research but had no role in it.

"The work capitalizes on well-grounded computational models of similarity structure and applies it to understanding how events and their boundaries are detected and represented," Frank said. "The authors noticed that the ability to represent items within an event as similar to each other -- and thus different than those in ensuing events -- might rely on similar machinery as that applied to detect clustering in community structures."

The model "naturally" lays out the process of shared temporal context in a way that is validated by work in other fields, yet distinct in relation to event perception, Frank said.

"The same types of models have been applied to understanding language -- for example, how the meaning of words in a sentence can be contextualized by earlier words or concepts," Frank said. "Thus the model and experiments identify a common and previously unappreciated mechanism that can be applied to both language and event parsing, which are otherwise seemingly unrelated domains."

Schapiro worked with second author Timothy Rogers, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Natalia Cordova, a Princeton neuroscience graduate student; Nicholas Turk-Browne, a Princeton assistant professor of psychology; and Matthew Botvinick, a Princeton associate professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.

The work was supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Princeton University. The original article was written by Morgan Kelly.

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


Journal Reference:

  1. Anna C Schapiro, Timothy T Rogers, Natalia I Cordova, Nicholas B Turk-Browne, Matthew M Botvinick. Neural representations of events arise from temporal community structure. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; 16 (4): 486 DOI: 10.1038/nn.3331

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/f8ld3HJIOv4/130410141541.htm

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Finance: Ownership Changes at GW | Warhammer 40k, Fantasy ...


There have been a LOT of ownership changes within Games Workshop in 2013. ?Take a look at this:

As of?March 31, 2013 the major shareholders?look like this:

ShareholderNumber of sharesPercentage
The Nomad Investment Partnership LP5,154,14116.2%
Investec Asset Management Ltd3,087,7659.7%
Ruffer LLP2,557,2608.1%
Tom Kirby2,131,3946.7%
Phoenix Asset Management Partners Ltd.1,865,2185.9%
FIL Limited1,753,9005.5%

And here's what it looked like in early January 2013:
ShareholderNumber of sharesPercentage
The Nomad Investment Partnership LP5,800,00018.7%
Investec Asset Management Ltd5,700,00018.3%
Phoenix Asset Management Partners Ltd.2,900,0009.3%
Tom Kirby2,131,3946.7%
Ruffer LLP800,0002.5%
FIL Limited800,0002.5%

Some notes:

The largest three institutional investors (Nomad, Investec, Phoenix) begin selling off their GW portfolios within 1 week of the announcement of CEO Mark Wells leaving the company.

FIL and in particular Ruffer begin to purchase GW equity at a large rate. Ruffer bought a large set of shares as recently as March 21, 2013, bringing them above the 8% ownership mark.

Games Workshop equity has been fairly locked up and unchanged for a long time prior to 2013.

Thoughts and ideas?

Company about to skyrocket?
Company about to crater?
Company about to get bought?
Business as usual?

Source: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2013/04/finance-ownership-changes-at-gw.html

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How to invert screen colors on iPhone and iPad

How to invert screen colors on iPhone and iPad

For certain individuals that are visually impaired, inverting the colors of the iPhone and iPad screen may make it easier to read, particularly for users who are colorblind or partially colorblind. This is actually a built in accessibility option for all iPhones and iPads. So whether you yourself are visually impaired or you know someone who is, it could make reading text and viewing content within iOS much easier.

Here's how:

  1. Launch the Settings app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
  2. Tap on General.
  3. Now scroll down and tap on Accessibility.
  4. You'll see an option for Invert Colors in the first set of options. Toggle the switch to the On position.

You'll notice the screen colors will now invert and somewhat resemble a photo negative. This can make it easier for those with certain visual impairments to pick out content and navigate easier. You can pop back into Settings at any time to disable it if you'd like to later on.

    


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/oCGsU7UGelM/story01.htm

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Obama to bring some Sandy Hook families on AF1

FILE - In this Jan. 16, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, talks about proposals to reduce gun violence, in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington. President Barack Obama is bringing 11 relatives of those killed in the shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School to Washington on Air Force One Monday so they can personally encourage senators to back gun legislation that faces tough opposition. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

FILE - In this Jan. 16, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden, talks about proposals to reduce gun violence, in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington. President Barack Obama is bringing 11 relatives of those killed in the shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School to Washington on Air Force One Monday so they can personally encourage senators to back gun legislation that faces tough opposition. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

White House press secretary Jay Carney briefs reporters at the White House in Washington, Monday, April 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

(AP) ? President Barack Obama is providing rides to 11 relatives of those killed in the shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School so they can attend his gun control speech Monday before heading to Washington on Air Force One to personally encourage senators to back gun legislation that faces tough opposition.

After Obama's speech in Hartford, relatives of seven children and one staffer killed during December's massacre at the school will travel back to Washington with him, according to the nonprofit organization that works with the families, Sandy Hook Promise.

The White House says Obama is going to argue in his speech that lawmakers have an obligation to the children killed and other victims of gun violence to allow an up-or-down vote in the Senate ? which would require 50 votes to pass ? rather than use procedural maneuvers to require 60 votes, potentially sinking the legislation.

"Imagine what they would say to the families of victims in Newtown about why a certain measure never came to a vote because they filibustered it," White House spokesman Jay Carney said ahead of Obama's speech.

Gun legislation could come up for debate in the Senate this week as lawmakers return from spring break. The Sandy Hook families want to speak to senators who have not voiced support for the legislation, to ask for support in memory of their children and the school staff who were killed Dec. 14. The White House offered to give the families a ride so they could also attend Obama's speech before their lobbying push.

Sandy Hook Promise said in a statement, "The group is encouraging senators to come together around legislative proposals that will both save lives and respect the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans."

In his speech Monday evening, Obama plans to invoke the memories of the 26 students and staff members killed. He is speaking at the University of Hartford, near the state capitol where last week the governor signed into law some of the nation's strictest gun control laws with the Sandy Hook families standing behind him.

But legislation in Washington faces a tougher challenge, as the nation's memories of the shooting fade with time and the National Rifle Association wages a formidable campaign against Obama's proposals. Senators were negotiating Monday in search of an eleventh-hour deal to expand background checks for gun buyers, after weeks of talks had failed to reach a compromise that could win bipartisan support.

Other measures Obama wants are unlikely to pass. Senate leaders say there are not enough votes for an assault weapons ban. Prospects are also bleak for a proposal to limit the number of rounds of ammunition in a single magazine to 10.

With time running out on negotiations, the White House is making an all-hands-on-deck push this week. Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder planned to promote their plan at the White House on Tuesday with law enforcement officials. First lady Michelle Obama planned to wade into the debate Wednesday with a speech on youth violence in her hometown of Chicago. And on Thursday, Biden was taking part in a discussion on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" with people who have different views on gun control.

The matter is divisive in Newtown, Conn., as in the rest of the country. Not all Sandy Hook families support gun control, and even those involved with the lobbying push organized by Sandy Hook Promise are not backing the assault weapons ban. But those families are asking lawmakers to expand background checks, increase penalties for gun trafficking and limit the size of magazines. The magazine issue has a particular resonance with those families.

"It's been stated in recent weeks that somehow the memory of Newtown has faded, at least in Washington," Carney said, adding that the experiences of the victims' families show that's not the case. "Those memories will never fade. The pain will never go away."

Nicole Hockley told The Associated Press in an interview that she wonders if her 6-year-old son, Dylan, might still be alive if shooter Adam Lanza hadn't be able to bring 10 magazines holding 30 rounds each into the school that day. Lanza was able to get off 154 shots during a four-minute rampage in the school. But he stopped shooting briefly in her son's classroom to reload, giving 11 children time to escape.

"They ran for their lives," Hockley said in a telephone interview Friday. "Dylan was not so fortunate. If there were lower capacity magazine clips, there's a chance Dylan would be here with me today."

Hockley plans to introduce Obama in Hartford and sit on stage during the speech with her husband, Ian. The other families who plan to fly on Air Force One are scheduled to meet privately with the president before he speaks and then attend the speech. Those relatives include:

? Mark and Jackie Barden ? parents of 7-year-old Daniel

? Nelba Marquez-Greene ? mother of 6-year-old Ana

? Neil Heslin ? father of 6-year-old Jesse

? Jennifer Hensel ? mother of 6-year-old Avielle

? Bill Sherlach ? husband of Mary, a 56-year-old school psychologist

? Ben and Cheyanne Wyatt ? parents of 6-year-old Allison

? David and Francine Wheeler ? parents of 6-year-old Ben

__

Follow Nedra Pickler on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nedrapickler

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-04-08-Obama/id-ca7d0e881c724be68c989805d8b6663c

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