95, she was blasted with a loud horn every time she saw a blue-colored square appear on a screen. Despite the repeated blasting horn, she never developed the fear an ordinary person would feel when seeing the blue square.Other research shows SM scores normally on tests of intelligence, memory and language, and she experiences emotions other than fear. She lives independently.SM recalls being afraid as a child, like the time she was cornered by a snarling Doberman pinscher. But maybe that was before her disease wiped out the amygdala in both the left and right sides of her brain, the researchers say.She apparently hasn't felt fear as an adult, not even 15 years ago in an incident described by the researchers. A man jumped up from a park bench, pressed a knife to her throat and hissed, "I'm going to cut you."SM, who heard a church choir practicing in the distance, looked coolly at him and replied, "If you're going to kill me, you're going to have to go through my God's angels first."The man suddenly let her go. She didn't run home. She walked."Her lack of fear may have freaked the guy out," Feinstein said.But it also got her into that situation in the first place, he noted. SM had willingly approached the man when he asked her to, even though it was late at night and she was alone, and even though she thought he looked "drugged out."SM has also walked into other dangerous situations because of her lack of fear, and all in all, it's remarkable she's still alive, Feinstein said.For their report in the journal, researchers exposed her to scary situations - snakes, scenes from horror movies and the haunted house. They observed her behavior and asked her to rate her fear levels.Although she had said she hated snakes and spiders and tries to avoid them, that's not what happened at a pet store. She eagerly held a snake for more than three minutes, rubbing its scales and touching its flicking tongue. And she wanted to touch some of the store's more dangerous and bigger snakes, even after an employee warned her about the danger. She had to be stopped from touching a tarantula."This is so cool!" she exclaimed about the snake experience. When asked to rate her fear from zero to 10 during the pet shop visit, she never went higher than a minimal 2.Researchers also took her to a haunted house. She and the research team walked through with five women, all strangers, who regularly responded with "loud screams of fright," the paper reports.From the outset, SM led the way, often calling, "This way, guys, follow me!" Not only did the "monsters" fail in their attempts to scare her, but she eagerly approached them. She startled one of the masked performers with a poke to the head because she was "curious" what it would feel like.She considered the haunted house to be "highly exciting and entertaining," like the rush she gets from a roller coaster, Feinstein said. But her fear ratings? Zero.Liz Phelps of New York University, who studies the brain and emotion, said she found no sign of such fearlessness in a woman with the same kind of brain damage in a study several years ago. That woman reported feeling fear in her daily life just as much as healthy people did, Phelps said.Perhaps the explanation is differences in the level of brain development when the amygdala damage occurred, she suggested.David Amaral, a University of California, Davis, psychiatry professor who has studied how this type of brain damage affects fear in monkeys, said the new study "confirms something we've pretty much known for a long time ... The amygdala is a danger detector."---Online:Journal: http://www.cell.com/current-biology
31/12/10
Take-Two's profit, sales beat Street
0 million and $315 million.
For the year ended in March 2011, Take-Two expects a profit excluding items of 50 to 65 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion to $1.1 billion. This is above the forecast of 47 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion by Arvind Bhatia, analyst at Sterne Agee.
Bhatia said investors are looking ahead to Take-Two's fiscal year 2012, when he expects a new edition of Grand Theft to be released and when there will be no overlapping months because of changes to its fiscal calendar.
Shares closed at $11.94, down 0.5 percent, on the Nasdaq on Thursday.
(Reporting by Liana B. Baker; Editing by Tim Dobbyn and Matthew Lewis)
Intel and AMD in third quarter stalemate
Intel and AMD maintained pretty much the same market share in the third quarter, according to chip market watcher iSuppli.
By iSuppli's reckoning, Intel squeaked out an extra tenth of a point of market share in the third quarter, garnering 80.1 per cent of global microprocessor revenues, while AMD lost seven-tenths of a per cent of share, falling to 11.3 per cent of total CPU sales. On a sequential basis, Intel lost some ground, since it had 80.4 per cent of revenues in Q2 of this year, and AMD lost a little as well, since it had 11.5 per cent of the CPU revenue pie worldwide in the second quarter.
Others - which include everything else, such as ARM, MIPS, Power, and other CPUs - saw their share grow in Q3, accounting for 8.6 per cent of CPU sales. How much of this change is due to ARM, iSuppli did not say.
iSuppli thinks that the there is a pretty good chance that market share could slosh around a bit next year, with Intel putting out "Sandy Bridge" PC and server parts and AMD putting put Fusion PC and updated Opteron parts.
"There remains a very competitive situation between the two dominant suppliers," said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst for compute platforms at iSuppli, in a statement accompanying the figures. "In particular, we look forward to seeing the effect that AMD’s forthcoming Fusion products might have on the share situation for these two mega-players."
Wilkins said that microprocessor revenues rose by 23 per cent in the third quarter, but did not provide a revenue figure. (You have to pay big bucks for that data.) Revenues were up 3 per cent sequentially from the second quarter, which Wilkins said was healthy growth sequentially. ®
Facebook Introduces Facial Recognition for Photo Tagging
Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook on Thursday announced that it has begun using facial recognition software as a means of increasing the number of photos that are "tagged" with the names of the users they depict. The software will now examine past uploaded photos, and "suggest" names of similar-looking people that it recognizes in newly uploaded photos. "If for any reason you don't want your name to be suggested, you will be able to disable suggested tags in your Privacy Settings," the company wrote in a blog post.
"Just click 'Customize Settings' and 'Suggest photos of me to friends.' Your name will no longer be suggested in photo tags, though friends can still tag you manually."
Facebook notes that users are currently adding more than 100 million photo tags daily.
In October, the company added "group tagging," where a user could automatically tag the same person in a group of uploaded photos.
Related Links:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=467145887130
http://tinyurl.com/2fdmc4n (Huffington Post)
Research In Motion 3Q Profit Jumps 45% On Higher Revenue
11.1 million, or $1.74 a share, up from $628.4 million, or $1.10 a share, a year earlier. Revenue jumped 40% to $5.49 billion.
The company in September had forecast third-quarter, share earnings between $1.62 and $1.70 and revenue ranging from between $5.3 billion and $5.55 billion--both were estimates well above analysts' forecasts at the time.
Gross margin rose to 43.6% from 42.7%.
The company also forecast fourth-quarter earnings of $1.74 to $1.80 a share on revenue of $5.5 billion to $5.7 billion. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect $1.61 on $5.46 billion.
RIM shares zig-zagged after hours, jumping initially before falling into the red only to shift back into positive territory. The stock was recently up 4.3% to $61.80 in after-hours Nasdaq trading.
As of Thursday's close, the stock had fallen 12% this year, but was up nearly 40% since hitting a 52-week low of $42.53 on August 31.
The recent share-price increase reflects significant hype over its upcoming tablet, the PlayBook, though that device isn't set to come to market until early next year. It wasn't immediately clear if RIM's fourth-quarter guidance includes any revenue from the Playbook.
RIM has also taken numerous steps to fend off a fierce competitive challenge from the iPhone and a slew of Android-enabled devices. For instance, the company recently revamped support for third-party application developers, overhauled its BlackBerry operating system, making it more user friendly and introduced the BlackBerry Torch, the first BlackBerry model to include a touch screen and slide-out keyboard.
RIM also unveiled the Playbook, which will include Adobe Inc.'s (ADBE) Flash, and run on a highly-touted operating system made by QNX Software Systems. RIM acquired QNX earlier this year and followed that up with the purchase of The Astonishing Tribe, or TAT, this month. TAT is a Swedish sofware company best known for designing user interfaces for mobile devices.
Still, BlackBerry's image has suffered in the past 18 months, as RIM was late to recognize the importance of third-party applications, touch-screen interfaces and the need for a snazzy operating system. This has translated into declining market share in the key North American market, though RIM continues to post strong growth internationally.
According to Gartner, RIM's share of the North American smartphone market slipped to 27.3% at the end of the calendar third quarter from 51% a year earlier. Devices running on the Android operating system surged to 39.1% from 5% during the same period, while the iPhone dipped slightly to 27.7% from 29.5%.
stuart.weinberg@dowjones.com
(Nathan Becker in New York contributed to this article.)
Copyright © 2010 Dow Jones Newswires
Russia in contact with shuttle after glitch
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The Russian Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft, carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew of NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman, Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and European Space Agency Astronaut Paolo Nespoli, blasts off from its launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome December 16, 2010.
Credit: Reuters/Sergei RemezovBy Thomas GroveMOSCOW | Thu Dec 16, 2010 5:18pm EST
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Thursday it was in full contact with the international space station and its Soyuz shuttle after a brief loss of contact with the craft that will soon become the mainstay of the international space program.
Russia's mission control had lost communication with the Soyuz craft for several hours, Interfax news agency reported, quoting an unnamed source in the space industry.
The Soyuz spaceship blasted off on Wednesday carrying a U.S., Russian and Italian astronaut to the International Space Station, where it was expected to dock on Friday at 23:12 Moscow time (2012 GMT).
"At the current time there is a sustainable connection between the Krasnoznamenski (military satellite control center) and Korolyov (Space central command)," Interfax news agency reported Defense Ministry spokesman Alexei Zolotukhin as saying.
The Soyuz flight is one of the last before the United States retires its reusable Discovery shuttles, leaving international space station astronauts completely dependent on Russian craft for missions to space.
A source at Russia's central command said information on the ship's orbit was coming in regularly after the loss of contact.
"The parameters of the orbit of the international space station and spaceship Soyuz TMA-20 stopped coming into space command center around 18:00 Moscow time, but the flow of information was restored between 20:30-21:00," he said.
Loss of contact with space shuttles occurs from time to time, but lasts only a short time.
Central command became alarmed after hours passed without information on the spaceship's whereabouts, and contacted NASA's mission control center in Houston, urging it to use its global positioning system (GPS) to track the craft, said one of the anonymous sources quoted by Interfax.
The United States has planned only two more shuttle missions, after which NASA will hand Russia responsibility for ferrying the ISS crew, at a cost of $51 million per person.
The international space station is a $100 billion project, organized by 16 countries. It has been under construction 220 miles above Earth since 1998.
(editing by Ralph Boulton)
30/12/10
Credit card thief 'steals' own music on iTunes
, was actually part of a 12-member gang who organized the scam and downloaded about 6,000 songs from 2008-2009, stealing about $750,000. Johnson told a London court he was responsible for about 2,000 of the downloads, according to the BBC.
The scam took advantage of one time-tested credit card thief method -- many consumers don't notice small unauthorized charges on their bills, so it's much easier to steal $1 10,000 times than $10,000 one time. That's even more true at iTunes, where it's common for users to incur a string of small charges on their bills.
On the other hand, the trick is always in the delivery. When Johnson and his cohorts tried to access funds sent to them by Amazon and iTunes, they would have been easily found.
No word on the quality of the 20 songs that were uploaded, or whether anyone else bought the music.
Catch Bob Sullivan most Tuesdays and Fridays in his Red Tape Chronicles column, connect with him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter at @RedTapeChron.
comScore: Facebook, Hulu Lost Video Viewers In Nov.
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comScore: Facebook, Hulu Lost Video Viewers In Nov. Facebook drops spot, Hulu falls out of top ten
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| Print | Share: comScore: Facebook, Hulu Lost Video Viewers In Nov. Facebook drops spot, Hulu falls out of top tenComment Thursday, December 16, 2010 ViewComments By Doug Caverly 2 Buzz This
Facebook and Hulu, while doing fine in many respects, couldn't quite hold online video viewers' interest in November as they've done before. New stats from comScore indicate that both companies failed to match past performances last month, with Facebook losing a spot on a top ten list and Hulu falling off it.
To delve into the numbers: Facebook saw its unique user count fall from 47.4 million individuals in October to 42.5 million in November, which caused it to drop from fifth place to sixth in terms of attracting unique video viewers.
Hulu, meanwhile, lost its tenth-place spot to Turner Digital, which apparently outperformed it with 27.7 million viewers in November even though Hulu drew in 29.7 million viewers in October. Although comScore still found that more Hulu ads were viewed in November than the previous month.
If you're curious about some other details, the organization shared in a statement, "Yahoo! Sites captured the #2 spot with 53.8 million viewers, followed by Viacom Digital, jumping 4 positions in October with 52.9 million viewers. . . . Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions, crossing the 2.0 billion mark in October, and average time spent per viewer at 272 minutes, or 4.5 hours."
As always, it should be interesting to see what kinds of turns these numbers take in the next report.
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Font ResizeMercury News wire services Posted: 12/16/2010 02:26:14 PM PSTUpdated: 12/16/2010 02:26:16 PM PST