An elephant that speaks Korean

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2012) ? An Asian elephant named Koshik can imitate human speech, speaking words in Korean that can be readily understood by those who know the language. The elephant accomplishes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his trunk in his mouth.

The elephant's vocabulary consists of exactly five words, researchers report on November 1 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Those include "annyong" ("hello"), "anja" ("sit down"), "aniya" ("no"), "nuo" ("lie down"), and "choah" ("good"). Ultimately, Koshik's language skills may provide important insights into the biology and evolution of complex vocal learning, an ability that is critical for human speech and music, the researchers say.

"Human speech basically has two important aspects, pitch and timbre," says Angela Stoeger of the University of Vienna. "Intriguingly, the elephant Koshik is capable of matching both pitch and timbre patterns: he accurately imitates human formants as well as the voice pitch of his trainers. This is remarkable considering the huge size, the long vocal tract, and other anatomical differences between an elephant and a human."

For one thing, Stoeger says, elephants have a trunk instead of lips. While their large larynx can produce very low-pitched sounds, Koshik's speech mimicry exactly copies the pitch and other characteristics of his human trainers' voices. A structural analysis of Koshik's speech showed not just clear similarities to human voices, but also clear differences from the usual calls of elephants.

There have been some earlier reports of vocal mimicry in both African and Asian elephants. African elephants have been known to imitate the sound of truck engines, and a male Asian elephant living in a zoo in Kazakhstan was said to produce utterances in both Russian and Kazakh, but that case was never scientifically investigated.

In the case of Koshik, Angela Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Tecumseh Fitch, and their colleagues confirmed that Koshik was imitating Korean words in several ways. First, they asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard when listening to playbacks of the elephant's sounds.

"We found a high agreement concerning the overall meaning, and even the Korean spelling of Koshik's imitations," Stoeger says. But as far as the scientists can tell, Koshik doesn't actually mean what he says.

It's not completely clear why Koshik adopted his unusual vocal behavior, but the researchers suggest that it might go back to his days as a juvenile. Koshik was the only elephant living at the Everland Zoo in South Korea for about five years, during an important period for elephant bonding and development. Humans were his only social contacts.

"We suggest that Koshik started to adapt his vocalizations to his human companions to strengthen social affiliation, something that is also seen in other vocal-learning species -- and in very special cases, also across species," Stoeger says.

Recording of Koshik imitating human speech: Trainer (first) and Koshik (second) producing "annyong"(hello): http://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/49235.php?from=224898

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, 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. Angela?S. Stoeger, Daniel Mietchen, Sukhun Oh, Shermin de?Silva, Christian?T. Herbst, Soowhan Kwon, W.?Tecumseh Fitch. An Asian Elephant Imitates Human Speech. Current Biology, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.09.022

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/top_news/top_science/~3/pvUtYDBvVFM/121101121534.htm

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Storm-wracked states prepare for Election Day

NEW YORK (AP) ? Election officials were ordering generators, moving voting locations and figuring out how to transport poll workers displaced from coastal areas as Tuesday's presidential election became the latest challenge for states whacked by Superstorm Sandy.

The storm, which devastated East Coast communities with power outages, flooding and snow, had already disrupted early voting in parts of Maryland, West Virginia, New Jersey and North Carolina. With less than a week to go before the general election, officials in the hardest-hit states were scrambling to ensure orderly and fair balloting in places still dark or under water.

Few expected the tight presidential contest between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to be affected by voting problems caused by the storm.

Communities along Lake Erie in top battleground Ohio have lost power, but election officials said early voting continued to be robust. The states crippled most by Sandy ? New York, New Jersey and Connecticut ? are largely Democratic and considered safely in Obama's camp.

But Connecticut has a competitive race to replace retiring Sen. Joe Lieberman, New York has several closely watched House contests, and all three states have other races whose outcomes could rest on voter turnout.

Michael McDonald, a professor of public affairs at George Mason University in Virginia who studies turnout, said a calamitous weather event right before a presidential election was unprecedented. McDonald said that in such a tight presidential race any turnout diminished by Sandy could make a difference in the overall popular vote.

"It's unlikely disruptions from Sandy would affect the outcome of the election within those states," McDonald said. "But if those voters, who are mostly Democrats, end up being subtracted from the national popular vote, you'll get a lower vote share for Obama than he would have received if those people had voted."

With every state along Sandy's destructive path using electronic voting machines, election officials were pressing local electric companies to make restoring power a priority to places that were to serve as polling places.

"We've provided lists of poll sites to local utilities, and some of the voting machines do have battery backup," New York State Board of Elections spokesman Tom Connolly said. "We are also planning to get generators to polling sites, but it's not like we have an unlimited supply of generators."

Elected leaders across the states affected by Sandy were taking different approaches to the impending vote tallies.

In hard-hit New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg referred all voting-related questions to the city Board of Elections. But he said recovery crews were working hard to restore electricity to schools, many of which serve as polling places. Voting should proceed smoothly in those places, he said.

"There are some where there were transformers in the basement that were damaged ... the Board of Elections will have to find alternative locations," Bloomberg said at a news conference.

Elections spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez said officials were determining the condition of polling places around the five New York boroughs even as the storm stripped power from the agency's headquarters, forcing workers into temporary office space.

"Our trucks are loaded and ready for delivery of all voting materials and equipment once we know that sites have not been damaged," Vazquez said. Elections officials, she said, "will be working around the clock and through the weekend to make sure that all voting sites receive everything they need to be up and running on Election Day."

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has refused to talk about voting plans at his storm briefings, focusing on rescue and recovery efforts instead.

"Right now I'm much more concerned about preventing any other loss of life, getting people to safe places, and then we'll worry about the election. The election will take care of itself," he said.

Republican Secretary of State and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno said that county clerks' offices have been ordered to remain open this weekend to help process mail-in ballots. The deadline for when clerks may accept mail-in ballot applications was extended until the close of business Friday. Voters must return them no later than the close of the polls Tuesday.

New Jersey's largest city, Newark, is under a state of emergency. At least half its residents don't have power and three people have died as a result of the storm. At a news conference Thursday, Mayor Cory Booker said he's had preliminary conversations regarding Election Day but does not yet have a plan for getting people to the polls.

"I have a lot of faith in the power of this democracy, the resiliency of our communities and that when Election Day comes we will make a way for people to vote," Booker said.

County election officials along New Jersey's storm-battered Atlantic Coast were taking it upon themselves to assess the damage to polling places and determine contingency plans.

Michael Kennedy, the Democratic registrar for the board of elections in hard-hit Cape May County on the Atlantic Coast, said many polling places would have to be combined. "It's still a pretty big mess out there. Some of them are under water and out of power," Kennedy said of the polling sites.

Kennedy said he was also concerned about having enough volunteers to staff the sites. "A lot of our poll workers live on barrier islands and were relocated because of the storm," he said.

In Connecticut, Gov. Dan Malloy signed an executive order extending the voter registration deadline until Thursday ? it had been Oct. 30 ? to accommodate people affected by the storm. Connecticut's strict voting rules ? the state does not have early voting, and residents can only request an absentee ballot if they are out of the area ? added urgency to the task of preparing polling places.

Secretary of the State Denise Merrill was holding daily conference calls with some 260 local election officials to determine their needs, her spokesman, Av Harris, said.

"Could some polling places be moved? Yes. There are procedures in place, and people are volunteering to help out," Av Harris said. "This is New England, people help their neighbors. That's the best way to get through this."

___

Associated Press writers Geoff Mulvihill and Katie Zezima in New Jersey and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed to this report.

Follow Beth Fouhy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/bfouhy

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-11-01-US-Superstorm-Voting/id-47f8fee5b5334fc1bebe851e7f6a7fec

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Apple rewrites its apology to Samsung, now appearing in UK newspapers

Apple has rewritten its apology to Samsung following its previous version which was labelled as ?non-compliant? by the court that made the initial ruling. Apple was told by Lord Justice Longmore, Lord Justice Kitchin and Sir Robin Jacob that it had to change the wording of the statement and that it should be carried on its home page with at least an 11-point font. The new statement is now appearing in UK newspapers but has not yet appeared on Apple.com. The news comes from The Next web.

When Apple placed the apology on its website on October 26, it ran part of the order but also included references in its UK lawsuits that Samsung products were ?not as cool? as its iPad and iPhone devices. The link to the apology was also tucked away in a hard to view section of its website. Apple representatives apparently told the court that it would take up to 14 days to change the statement, but one of the judges refused to believe it.

So 24-hours later, Apple has published the necessary apology in UK newspapers but it remains to be seen how long it will take to update on its website. Currently the original unsatisfactory statement has been removed so we would expect the revised statement to appear sooner rather than later.

Source: The Next Web,, Image: Tim Acheson

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/EBIxAEvO2oM/story01.htm

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GM and Chrysler rebut Romney auto bailout claims (Los Angeles Times)

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Dawn sees 'young' surface on giant asteroid Vesta

ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2012) ? Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup, the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face. Data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a form of weathering that occurs on the moon and other airless bodies we've visited in the inner solar system does not alter Vesta's outermost layer in the same way. Carbon-rich asteroids have also been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history.

The results are described in two papers released today in the journal Nature.

"Dawn's data allow us to decipher how Vesta records fundamental processes that have also affected Earth and other solar system bodies," said Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "No object in our solar system is an island. Throughout solar system history, materials have exchanged and interacted."

Over time, soils on Earth's moon and asteroids such as Itokawa have undergone extensive weathering in the space environment. Scientists see this in the accumulation of tiny metallic particles containing iron, which dulls the fluffy outer layer. Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) and framing camera detected no accumulation of such tiny particles on Vesta, and this particular protoplanet, or almost-planet, remains bright and pristine.

Nevertheless, the bright rays of the youngest features on Vesta are seen to degrade rapidly and disappear into background soil. Scientists know frequent, small impacts continually mix the fluffy outer layer of broken debris. Vesta also has unusually steep topography relative to other large bodies in the inner solar system, which leads to landslides that further mix surface material.

"Getting up close and familiar with Vesta has reset our thinking about the character of the uppermost soils of airless bodies," said Carle Pieters, one of the lead authors and a Dawn team member based at Brown University, Providence, R.I. "Vesta 'dirt' is very clean, well mixed and highly mobile."

Early pictures of Vesta showed a variety of dramatic light and dark splotches on Vesta's surface. These light and dark materials were unexpected and now show the brightness range of Vesta is among the largest observed on rocky bodies in our solar system.

Dawn scientists suspected early on that bright material is native to Vesta. One of their first hypotheses for the dark material suggested it might come from the shock of high-speed impacts melting and darkening the underlying rocks or from recent volcanic activity. An analysis of data from VIR and the framing camera has revealed, however, that the distribution of dark material is widespread and occurs both in small spots and in diffuse deposits, without correlation to any particular underlying geology. The likely source of the dark material is now shown to be the carbon-rich material in meteoroids, which are also believed to have deposited hydrated minerals from other asteroids on Vesta.

To get the amount of darkening we now see on Vesta, scientists on the Dawn team estimate about 300 dark asteroids with diameters between 0.6 to 6 miles (1 and 10 kilometers) likely hit Vesta during the last 3.5 billion years. This would have been enough to wrap Vesta in a blanket of mixed material about 3 to 7 feet (1 to 2 meters) thick.

"This perpetual contamination of Vesta with material native to elsewhere in the solar system is a dramatic example of an apparently common process that changes many solar system objects," said Tom McCord, the other lead author and a Dawn team member based at the Bear Fight Institute, Winthrop, Wash. "Earth likely got the ingredients for life -- organics and water -- this way."

Launched in 2007, Dawn spent more than a year investigating Vesta. It departed in September 2012 and is currently on its way to the dwarf planet Ceres.

JPL manages the Dawn mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Dawn, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/dawn and http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov .

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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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/top_news/top_technology/~3/EGalYMTQz6U/121031144327.htm

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iSelfImprovement ? 7 Goal Setting Steps

The three keys to living without limits have always been the same. They are clarity, competence, and concentration. Goal setting will help you live without limits. Learning how to set goals is an art. Learn why setting goals is a necessity. Here are 7 Must-have conditions to set goals.

1. State your goal in positive terms.

People often set a goal in terms of what they don?t want! ?I don?t want to smoke, to be angry?? It?s ?what I want to do or want to be? See the difference? Hear the nuance? Are you ready to state positively every goal you want to achieve?

2. Make sure the goal can be self-initiated and maintained The goal doesn?t depend on the attitude of your neighbor, on the behavior of your wife or family. The success of your goal must depend on you, and you alone.

3. Your goal must be sensory specific

Here comes the importance of clarity. The clearer the picture, the more compelling and the more attractive it is, the greater the drive to reach your final destination. Act as if the goal is already achieved. Make a very clear image, in rich details, and you will be so enthusiastic that you will automatically attract the solution.

4. State the context of the goal.

?Where and when will my goal be achieved?? The answer can be obvious for some goals but not at all for others. Try to be as specific as possible.

5. Run a Quality Control check on the goal to ensure balance in all areas of your home/work life.

Above all, you don?t want to lose your balance. When you run this ?Quality Control Check?, you play a win-win strategy. Everything is one system and the whole system must win. You will find peace of mind in knowing that you are in harmony with the system. Step back and look at all areas of your life. Is your goal worth it?

6. State the resources needed to achieve the goal: what is the price to pay?

There is always a price to pay, for everything. There is always some kind of sacrifice to make when you set a worthy goal. In this step, you will define all that you will need, in terms of time, money and energy.

7. State the value and the consistency of the goal.

Why do I want to reach this goal? Why is it important to me? Is this goal in harmony with my vision, beliefs and values? Answer these questions. If you don?t seem to be satisfied with the answers, maybe you should change your goal. Set a new goal until you feel it is in harmony with your passion, vision or mission.

When you properly set a goal with this model, two important things occur. First, you are in total harmony with your vision, belief and value systems because your entire ?You? agrees and offers no resistance. Second, you are programmed to succeed. Indeed, your very (whole) neurology and physiology are both instructed to drive you towards obtaining your desired goal. You?re totally focused.

Again, The three keys to living without limits have always been the same. They are clarity, competence, and concentration. When you set crystal clear goals, and you respect the 7 must-have conditions, you can literally live without limits, can?t you?

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Source: http://iselfimprovement.com/7-goal-setting-steps/

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Computer Training Schools | Education Blog

Training schools is the best option education for you. When you are interest to enter a training schools you can get benefits from it. One of the training schools is computer training school many students are interest to join with training school. There are many subjects studied throughout the course of computer training classes, making it very important that students only take the classes that they need or want to complete; this helps students save money on tuition expenses. There are some schools that offer computer training courses free of charge, making these types of classes very advantageous to take.

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When you are following computer training schools, the benefits you can get are by take computer training schools you can learn how to develop effective website as possible in how to maintain a positive reputation in various social media. For individual benefits, it can teach you how to use computers and internet for marketing. Many companies need the employee with have good ability to operate computer network system, because many companies use computers as their network system. Following a computer training school can help students in their personal life because they will learn how to use various programs and applications. People can use computer applications to have groceries delivered to their homes, to make phone calls, to perform accounting tasks, and much more. So if you choose computer training schools it is good option for you, to face the best career future, don?t wait any longer choose computer training schools.

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Source: http://www.virtualeducasinaloa.com/computer-training-schools.html

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