Every four years since 1984, Hanisch Bakery & Coffee Shop of Red Wing, Minnesota sells two sets of buttercream cookies ? one decorated red and one blue ? representing the Republican and Democrat candidate running for president that year. So far, every cookie that won the bake-off won the election.
Accurate? Yes. Scientific? Not so much.
Hanisch Bakery is one of several food merchants around the country that now pits presidential candidates against each other, using food and beverages to predict who will win the Oval Office.
Heath Hall, co-owner of D.C.-based Pork Barrel BBQ, began a ?BBQ Straw Poll? this year in which competitors buy Mitt Romney or Barack Obama T-shirts and bumper stickers off the restaurant?s website to gauge who will win the 2012 election. Each item purchased receives one vote, and followers can track for weekly progress updates on Twitter.
Hall feels that ?the BBQ voter? represents an accurate cross-section of America because the cooking style is universally embraced by nearly every demographic and socioeconomic group nationwide.
?It?s probably the truest food that relates to all kinds of voters. It doesn?t matter if you?re male, female, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, rich, poor, or where you live geographically ? it really appeals to the entire melting pot. What America is is tied to what barbecue is,? Hall told The Daily Caller.
Even 7-Eleven joined in on the phenomenon, designating Sept. 28 as ?CofFree Day,? and distributing large-sized coffee in red or blue cups, depending on which candidate will receive the customer?s vote. Traditional 7-Eleven cups were available for undecideds or those who wished to remain nonpartisan.
Oddly enough, in all three elections 7-Eleven has held with its coffee-driven ?7-Election,? customers accurately predicted who would end up in the White House, according to the company. The competition continues after CofFree Day, and results are updated daily at?7-election.com.
More than 6 million cups, all representing votes, were purchased in each of the three prior competitions.
Hall said the reason so many voters participate in these polls is because the food and restaurant industries resonate so deeply with the American public.
?Most restaurant or small business owners have risked everything they have at one point, or are still risking everything they have, to make their business run, so it?s part of the economic debate that?s going on right now,? Hall said. ?It?s about that passion that a lot of Americans have, that entrepreneurial spirit that they interject themselves into.?
Still, Bill Harnisch insists the informal polls are just a fun way to express political preferences.
?My favorite story is when two brothers came in, and one wanted a blue cookie, and the other wanted a red one. Their mother said, ?This may be a free country, but it?s not a free household.? So they both had to get a Romney cookie.?
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The Saints took all four singles matches behind Luat Le, Eric Radoi, Joe Motto and Eddie Locke and picked up two doubles wins from Connor Garnett and Ben Vernhes and Nikhil Grover and Tu Pham to move past Lake Washington.
Newport grad earns honors from collegiate squad
Chris Lilley, a member of Newport's state championship tennis team in 2011, was named Athlete of the Week at George Fox University in Newberg, Ore. after advancing further than any of his teammates at the USTA/ITA Small College Northwest Regional.
Lilley won three matches to make it all the way to the semi-finals of the singles bracket and reached the quarterfinals in doubles, finishing his first collegiate tournament with a mark of 5-2.
Volleyball
Bellevue 0 Mercer Island 3 (25-6, 25-11, 25-9)
The Wolverines were swept by Mercer Island despite 14 digs from Julia Pettere.
Remember Tamagotchi, the electronic pet you had to feed and watch nearly 24/7 just to see it grow up? It just got resurrected on the smartphone... sort of.
Meet Photogotchi, a free gaming app that converts pictures into pixel-art images that are fed to one?s Photogotchi ? a Tamagotchi-inspired digital creature ? to make it grow.
?The goal of the game is to earn points by taking as many photos as you want to feed your pet. In the process, it motivates users to become active photographers in their day-to-day lives,? tech site Mashable said.
Developed in August by European digital agency CarnationGroup, Photogotchi aims to revive the 1990s Tamagotchi nostalgia by including them in a fun game.
With Photogotchi, users can adopt and name their own Photogotchi once they download the app, and then choose a color which determines the type of creature they get.
Also, users can take photos of anything they like, and then turn them into unique images using five different 8-bit filters in the app.
?The more photos you feed the Photogotchi, the bigger and more colorful it becomes,? Mashable said.
Users can take in many photos, share them on different social networks or take pictures at night. They can watch as the Photogotchi starts off as an egg, cracks and then grows up.
Mashable said Photogotchi?s creators are planning to add a feature that will let users with the same color Photogotchis to play a game against teams with different colors.
Mashable said CarnationGroup does not have a business model for the app yet, but is considering making t-shirts for users with photos of their Photogotchis.
The app will be released for iPhones on October 1 and for Windows phones a couple days later, it added. ? LBG, GMA News
Condominiums today are some of the most popular types of housings in the Philippines. This is because these types of housings are known to offer the benefits that many Filipinos are looking for, and one of those is because of the accessibility that it can offer to their residents.
The Luxury of Condominiums The main advantage of condominiums is that allowed its residents to live within mass transit distance or even walking distance from their workplaces, such as the many condo Manila. This allowed them to easily and conveniently access their workplaces without having to go through the hassles of rush hour in the morning.
In addition to workplaces, many popular entertainment places such as malls, shopping centers, bars, and pubs, are also within reach of these many condominiums, which is the reason why most of its residents are wealthy families, executives, as well as high-wage earners.
However, in addition to its location, condominiums are also known to offer other advantages that made it popular in the market. According to real estate experts, condominiums were known as some of the only types of housings in business and commercial districts that can offer their own maintenance and security personnel in the market, such as the many condo Manila of today.
Luxury of its Maintainability and Security Condominiums, according to many real estate experts, are some of the many popular types of housings in the Philippines that can offer their own maintenance personnel that assures the maintainability of their condominium, as well as security that assure the safety of their residents, which made condominiums even more popular in the Philippines.
Another major advantage that made condominiums a popular home for many of the wealthiest Filipinos in the market, as well as for many executives, is because condominiums are the only types of modern housings in business and commercial districts that can offer their amenities.
Luxurious Amenities According to real estate experts, condominiums are the only types of modern housings in the middle of a busy district that can offer amenities such as swimming pools, gyms, and sports complexes that residents can freely and exclusively enjoy.
Other than these amenities, there are also other types of condominiums in the Philippines that can also offer their own recreational parks and playgrounds. These types of condominiums are known as condominium complexes.
New Terms of Payment There are also a number of new condo Manila that can offer a new term of payment that made it even more popular among many Filipinos. This is because these new condominiums can now be bought and paid in installment, allowing more Filipinos to get the chance to enjoy living in a luxurious type of housing without having to invest millions in one sitting. For more information visit to our site at http://www.atayala.com
At Compass we celebrated the Olympic Games that were held in London recently.
The Olympic Games are held every four years in a different chosen host country. There is a Torch Relay that carries the Olympic Flame from Olympia in Greece to the host country where the cauldron is lit up by the flame.
There is then an opening ceremony and then a big celebration and parade of nations. The Olympic Games went for sixteen days while people from participating countries competed in many different sports. When competing placed athletes are awarded medals:
- First place gets a gold medal, second place gets a silver medal and third place gets a bronze medal.
At Compass we made an Olympic Torch and had our own Torch Relay. We then had a celebration with music and dancing in the Dojo as our own Opening Ceremony. We played games representing some of the Olympic sports in Recreation Training like soccer, gymnastics, running, basketball and volleyball.
We learned about flags of each country and we tried food from different countries as well.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Uncontrolled security threats on the Internet could return much of the planet to an era without electricity or automated transportation, top U.S. and Russian experts said on Thursday.
Former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden warned that the United States had yet to resolve basic questions about how to police the Internet, let alone how to defend critical infrastructure such as electric generation plants.
And if recently discovered and government-sponsored intrusion software proliferates in the same way that viruses have in the past, "somewhere in 2020, maybe 2040, we'll get back to a romantic time - no power, no cars, no trains," said Eugene Kaspersky, chief executive officer of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, the largest privately held security vendor.
The back-to-back presentations at a Washington conference painted the starkest picture to date about the severity of the cybersecurity problem.
The past two years have seen an escalation of such warnings, especially about what U.S. officials have termed an unprecedented theft of trade secrets and. more lately, mounting threats to infrastructure.
At the same time, Congress failed last month to pass legislation aimed at protecting vital facilities, which Hayden bemoaned, and Kaspersky earlier this year detected extremely sophisticated surveillance programs that infiltrated personal computers and energy facilities in the Middle East.
If previous viruses were like bicycles, Kaspersky said, then the Stuxnet worm that damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at the Natanz plant in Iran two years ago would be a plane, and the latest programs, dubbed Flame and Gauss, would be "space shuttles."
Researchers are still dissecting those heavily encrypted viruses. Kaspersky and others say they are related to Stuxnet, which officials have privately admitted was designed by U.S. and Israel intelligence forces.
But Kaspersky said Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss would become templates.
Although Stuxnet infected thousands of machines in friendly nations, it was written by cautious "professionals" who minimized collateral damage, Kaspersky said at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit at the National Press Club. The knock-off versions by others will be much less discriminating, he added.
To show how quickly computer attacks can proliferate, Kaspersky said an electronic assault that disabled thousands of computers at Saudi Arabia's Aramco in mid-August had followed a separate infection reported by an Iranian oil company a few months ago.
Mounting a defense against nation-sponsored attacks will be extraordinarily difficult, Kaspersky said, as it requires new operating systems designed to manage equipment at crucial facilities. He said stopping criminals and terrorists who will adopt the same techniques would take strong international cooperation and deeper monitoring of the Internet, which many oppose on privacy grounds.
"We need to upgrade our understanding that the world is different," Kaspersky said. "We need to pay more attention to the critical information technology security issues."
Yet Kaspersky and Hayden said international treaties or even nonbinding agreements were nowhere in sight.
What is more, Hayden said, both the divided U.S. Congress and even different agencies within the executive branch have failed to reach a consensus on fundamental concepts, in part because the issues are still so new.
A Senate bill backed by President Barack Obama would have set voluntary cybersecurity standards for critical plants and allowed for greater information-sharing between intelligence agencies and private companies. But the bill encountered opposition from both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which objected to additional regulation, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which was worried about privacy issues.
The White House is now developing an executive order that would not go so far, but it still wants more powerful laws.
Even inside the administration, Hayden said, the Defense Department has defined cyberspace as a warfare domain that it must "dominate," while the Department of Homeland Security has publicly disagreed.
A core problem is that the same communications networks are used both for military operations and civilian transactions, which are protected from unreasonable searches.
While most Americans would welcome a local police officer shining a light at a shrub in their yard after seeing something suspicious, almost no one would feel the same way about questionable Internet activity.
The National Security Agency has the most advanced capabilities for cyberattacks and defense in the world, Hayden said.
"It is awesome," he said. "But nobody there has the authorization to defend you," because the NSA is generally barred from domestic eavesdropping.
As governments and companies recognize that they have all been hacked and focus more on limiting the damage from breaches, Hayden called for more extensive debate from civilians on how the United States should treat the Internet.
"You and I have not yet given our government guidance about what we want it to do," he said.
It appears that Ed Hochuli and his friends will be back very soon. (Getty Images)
As it turned out, the NFL's nightmare scenario -- a team losing a game it should have won -- was all it took for the league and the NFL Referees' Association to get back to the bargaining table and wrap up a new deal. Negotiations picked up momentum after the Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers, 14-12, on Monday Night Football on a touchdown catch by Seattle receiver Golden Tate that was highly questionable.
"That game reshaped everything ... it shook me. I think it shook a lot of people," one NFL owner told Mike Freeman of CBS Sports.
According to several reports from many sources, the two sides?have?agreed to the details of a multi-year collective bargaining agreement that will bring the real officials back from their lockout and on the field for Thursday night's game between the Baltimore Ravens and Cleveland Browns.
From the joint statement released by the NFL and NFL Referees' Association:
The NFL and NFLRA are pleased to announce that they have reached an agreement tonight on an eight-year collective bargaining agreement, subject to ratification by the NFLRA.
"Our officials will be back on the field starting tomorrow night," Commissioner Roger Goodell said. "We appreciate the commitment of the NFLRA in working through the issues to reach this important agreement."
"Our Board of Directors has unanimously approved taking this proposed CBA to the membership for a ratification vote," said Scott Green, president of the NFLRA. "We are glad to be getting back on the field for this week's games."
The NFLRA will vote to ratify the new CBA on Saturday. Because the CBA isn't in effect until that takes place, Goodell had to lift the lockout so that the real refs could work on Thursday night. Those officials set to work Sunday's games will retrieve their equipment in Dallas before and after the vote, and there may be a brief refresher seminar.
Compensation for the officials will increase from an average of $149,000 a year in 2011, to $173,000 in 2013, and capping at an average of $205,000 by 2019. Starting in 2013, the NFL can make some officials full-time employees as well. To date, all ?officials have been part-time, seasonal employees, and most have other jobs outside the game.
The pension plan that the officials wanted to hold on to will reportedly be extended for another five years, with the retirement plans switching to 401k accounts after. The NFL wanted a new pool of 21 officials added to the NFLRA's current staff of 121 members, but the compromise will create a new developmental program.
The developmental officials will work with the existing crews and rise through the ranks as they are graded?appropriately. Until they are deemed ready, the developmental refs will not be NFLRA members and cannot work games. It was the NFL's wish that a larger pool of officials be ready to sub in for refs that are either sick or injured, and that there be a program by which officials whose performance is considered sub-par would be "benched."
[Busbee: Replacement refs responsible for everything that's wrong in the world]
Both sides were concerned that the Thursday night teams are not subject to the competitive imbalance that would result from some teams playing games under the jurisdiction of the replacement officials. And the impetus was clear after the Monday night game -- the NFL and NFL Referees' Association met for at least 25 of the subsequent 36 hours.
Peter King of SI.com reported earlier Wednesday that Ed Hochuli, the Arizona attorney considered the dean of NFL officials by most fans and media people, has been engaging the locked-out officials in weekly rules-related conference calls. All officials got a Hochulli-implemented test once a week, and Big Ed the Muscular went over the results with his comrades.
"That's one of the reasons why the officials will be up to date and ready to go,'' a source told King. "Ed grabbed the bull by the horns and made sure that whenever this thing ended, the regular officials would be ready to go back to work immediately.''
"As soon as I heard the rumors today, I got down on the floor and started doing push-ups," Hochuli told Jeff Darlington of the NFL Network.
Stay tuned for more details as they are made available.
Other popular content on the Yahoo! network: ? Packer T.J. Lang's Twitter explosion could be most re-tweeted Tweet of all time ? Fantasy: Pickups of the Week ? Lingerie Football League commissioner mocks NFL for low officiating standards ? Y! News: Town rallies around pranked homecoming queen
The GOP has a feminine face, UCLA study findsPublic release date: 27-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Meg Sullivan msullivan@support.ucla.edu 310-825-1046 University of California - Los Angeles
At least when it comes to female politicians, perhaps you can judge a book by its cover, suggest two UCLA researchers who looked at facial features and political stances in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker's voting record," said lead author Colleen M. Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.
The researchers also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less stereotypically feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the greater the distance the politician's appearance strayed from stereotypical gender norms.
In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predications increased in direct relation to the lawmaker's proximity to feminine norms.
"I suppose we could call it the 'Michele Bachmann effect,'" said Kerri Johnson, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at UCLA.
The findings are forthcoming online in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The work was inspired by prior research that has shown that Americans have a better-than-chance ability to determine whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican on the basis of appearance alone. The mechanism behind these judgments, however, is not well understood.
"At least when it comes to female politicians, assessing how much a face reflects gender norms may be one way of guessing political affiliations," said Johnson.
In addition, the findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that suggest that voters may use shortcuts in forming impressions of political candidates.
Carpinella and Johnson focused on the House of Representatives because the body was large enough to yield statistically valid results and its members would not be as easily recognized by study subjects as members of more high-profile political bodies, such as the U.S. Senate.
They started the project by feeding portraits of 434 members of the 111th House of Representatives into a computer modeling program used by researchers in their field. Loaded with a database of hundreds of scans of faces of men and women, the FaceGen Modeler allows researchers to measure how much the details of any one face approach the average for either gender.
The model compared each representative's face to the norm on more than 100 subtle dimensions, including the shape of the jaw, the location of eyebrows, the placement of cheek bones, the shape of eyes, the contour of the forehead, the fullness of the lips and the distance between such features as the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. Armed with these dimensions, the researchers were able to arrive at an amalgamated score assessing the extent to which the face exhibited characteristics common to men or to women. Theoretical values ranged from -40 (highly male-typed) to +40 (highly female-typed).
"We weren't looking at hairstyle, jewelry or whether a person was wearing make up or not," Carpinella said. "We wanted to get an objective measure of how masculine or feminine a face is, based on a scientifically derived average for male or female appearance."
In addition to party affiliation, the researchers took into account each politician's DWNOMINATE score, a scale developed by political scientists that uses voting records to determine how conservative or liberal a lawmaker is.
Because the GOP is more frequently associated with policies that uphold traditional sex roles, the researchers expected to find that Republican representatives of both sexes would have more sex-typical faces than their counterparts across the aisle. The theory, however, did not hold for male politicians. In a finding that the researchers do not view as a particularly revealing, the faces of male Republicans, on average, scored as less masculine than the faces of their Democratic counterparts.
"It may be unnecessary for Republican men to exhibit masculinity through their appearance," Carpinella said. "Their policy advocacy and leadership roles may already confer these characteristics on them."
But a telling difference emerged among female politicians. The faces of Republican women rated, on average, twice as sex-typical or feminine as those of Democratic women. And among conservative lawmakers of both genders, women were 13 points more feminine on average than men were masculine. Among more liberal politicians, women were five points more feminine than men were masculine.
"The difference is highly pronounced for the conservatives but is less pronounced for the liberals," Johnson said.
Researchers then showed 120 undergraduates photos of the 434 politicians and asked them to guess the lawmaker's political party. When the undergraduates guessed that a politician was Republican, their judgments were 98 percent more likely to be accurate for women with the highest rankings for femininity; the accuracy of their judgments increased the more feminine the politician's face. When the undergraduates guessed that a politician was Democrat, their judgments were 58 percent less likely to be accurate for more feminine-looking women, and the accuracy of their judgments decreased the more feminine the politician's face.
Among Republican representatives whose features ranked as highly feminine were Kay Granger (TexasDistrict 12), Cathy Rodgers McMorris (WashingtonDistrict 5) and Michele Bachmann (MinnesotaDistrict 6).
Among Democratic representatives whose features ranked as less gender-typical were Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (formerly at-large representative for South Dakota), Rosa DeLauro (ConnecticutDistrict 3) and Anna G. Eshoo (CaliforniaDistrict 14).
Additional research is required to understand the roots of the GOP's more feminine face when compared with the Democratic Party, but the researchers believe that branding plays a role.
"The Democratic Party is associated with social liberal policies that aim to diminish gender disparities, whereas the Republican Party is associated with socially conservative policy issues that tend to bolster traditional sex roles," Johnson said. "These policy platforms are manifest in each party's image apparently also in the physical characteristics exhibited by politicians."
Party leadership may play a role in promoting and electing candidates who display physical characteristics that reflect party values, but research is needed to determine whether this is the case and to understand the means being employed, the researchers said.
Whatever their origins, expectations of displays of femininity can be problematic for female professionals because past research has demonstrated that people tend to view women as either competent or feminine not both.
"We suspect that conservative constituents demand that their politicians be not just competent but also gender-typical, especially among women," Johnson said. "As a result, we think these women may find themselves in a double bind."
The research is part of a burgeoning new field in the social sciences called "social vision," which is dedicated to understanding how others are perceived based on subtle visual cues. The field has implications for prejudice-formation and understanding stereotyping, as well as for generally understanding human experience. Johnson's past research has looked at subtle cues in body type and motion that serve as cues to sexual orientation.
The researchers next plan to look at how the gendered nature of a politician's appearance may relate to the judgments of political competence and to real-world political success once elected to office.
"With the increasing emphasis on television and Internet video as a source of political news, a candidate's physical appearance is an important part of politics, especially political campaigns," Johnson said. "A considerable portion of the electorate may not be well-informed, and they may be making decisions based on subtle cues that need to be revealed and understood."
###
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
The GOP has a feminine face, UCLA study findsPublic release date: 27-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Meg Sullivan msullivan@support.ucla.edu 310-825-1046 University of California - Los Angeles
At least when it comes to female politicians, perhaps you can judge a book by its cover, suggest two UCLA researchers who looked at facial features and political stances in the U.S. House of Representatives.
"Female politicians with stereotypically feminine facial features are more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and the correlation increases the more conservative the lawmaker's voting record," said lead author Colleen M. Carpinella, a UCLA graduate student in psychology.
The researchers also found the opposite to be true: Female politicians with less stereotypically feminine facial features were more likely to be Democrats, and the more liberal their voting record, the greater the distance the politician's appearance strayed from stereotypical gender norms.
In fact, the relationship is so strong that politically uninformed undergraduates were able to determine the political affiliation of the representatives with an overall accuracy rate that exceeded chance, and the accuracy of those predications increased in direct relation to the lawmaker's proximity to feminine norms.
"I suppose we could call it the 'Michele Bachmann effect,'" said Kerri Johnson, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of communication studies and psychology at UCLA.
The findings are forthcoming online in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
The work was inspired by prior research that has shown that Americans have a better-than-chance ability to determine whether someone is a Democrat or a Republican on the basis of appearance alone. The mechanism behind these judgments, however, is not well understood.
"At least when it comes to female politicians, assessing how much a face reflects gender norms may be one way of guessing political affiliations," said Johnson.
In addition, the findings contribute to a growing body of evidence that suggest that voters may use shortcuts in forming impressions of political candidates.
Carpinella and Johnson focused on the House of Representatives because the body was large enough to yield statistically valid results and its members would not be as easily recognized by study subjects as members of more high-profile political bodies, such as the U.S. Senate.
They started the project by feeding portraits of 434 members of the 111th House of Representatives into a computer modeling program used by researchers in their field. Loaded with a database of hundreds of scans of faces of men and women, the FaceGen Modeler allows researchers to measure how much the details of any one face approach the average for either gender.
The model compared each representative's face to the norm on more than 100 subtle dimensions, including the shape of the jaw, the location of eyebrows, the placement of cheek bones, the shape of eyes, the contour of the forehead, the fullness of the lips and the distance between such features as the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip. Armed with these dimensions, the researchers were able to arrive at an amalgamated score assessing the extent to which the face exhibited characteristics common to men or to women. Theoretical values ranged from -40 (highly male-typed) to +40 (highly female-typed).
"We weren't looking at hairstyle, jewelry or whether a person was wearing make up or not," Carpinella said. "We wanted to get an objective measure of how masculine or feminine a face is, based on a scientifically derived average for male or female appearance."
In addition to party affiliation, the researchers took into account each politician's DWNOMINATE score, a scale developed by political scientists that uses voting records to determine how conservative or liberal a lawmaker is.
Because the GOP is more frequently associated with policies that uphold traditional sex roles, the researchers expected to find that Republican representatives of both sexes would have more sex-typical faces than their counterparts across the aisle. The theory, however, did not hold for male politicians. In a finding that the researchers do not view as a particularly revealing, the faces of male Republicans, on average, scored as less masculine than the faces of their Democratic counterparts.
"It may be unnecessary for Republican men to exhibit masculinity through their appearance," Carpinella said. "Their policy advocacy and leadership roles may already confer these characteristics on them."
But a telling difference emerged among female politicians. The faces of Republican women rated, on average, twice as sex-typical or feminine as those of Democratic women. And among conservative lawmakers of both genders, women were 13 points more feminine on average than men were masculine. Among more liberal politicians, women were five points more feminine than men were masculine.
"The difference is highly pronounced for the conservatives but is less pronounced for the liberals," Johnson said.
Researchers then showed 120 undergraduates photos of the 434 politicians and asked them to guess the lawmaker's political party. When the undergraduates guessed that a politician was Republican, their judgments were 98 percent more likely to be accurate for women with the highest rankings for femininity; the accuracy of their judgments increased the more feminine the politician's face. When the undergraduates guessed that a politician was Democrat, their judgments were 58 percent less likely to be accurate for more feminine-looking women, and the accuracy of their judgments decreased the more feminine the politician's face.
Among Republican representatives whose features ranked as highly feminine were Kay Granger (TexasDistrict 12), Cathy Rodgers McMorris (WashingtonDistrict 5) and Michele Bachmann (MinnesotaDistrict 6).
Among Democratic representatives whose features ranked as less gender-typical were Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (formerly at-large representative for South Dakota), Rosa DeLauro (ConnecticutDistrict 3) and Anna G. Eshoo (CaliforniaDistrict 14).
Additional research is required to understand the roots of the GOP's more feminine face when compared with the Democratic Party, but the researchers believe that branding plays a role.
"The Democratic Party is associated with social liberal policies that aim to diminish gender disparities, whereas the Republican Party is associated with socially conservative policy issues that tend to bolster traditional sex roles," Johnson said. "These policy platforms are manifest in each party's image apparently also in the physical characteristics exhibited by politicians."
Party leadership may play a role in promoting and electing candidates who display physical characteristics that reflect party values, but research is needed to determine whether this is the case and to understand the means being employed, the researchers said.
Whatever their origins, expectations of displays of femininity can be problematic for female professionals because past research has demonstrated that people tend to view women as either competent or feminine not both.
"We suspect that conservative constituents demand that their politicians be not just competent but also gender-typical, especially among women," Johnson said. "As a result, we think these women may find themselves in a double bind."
The research is part of a burgeoning new field in the social sciences called "social vision," which is dedicated to understanding how others are perceived based on subtle visual cues. The field has implications for prejudice-formation and understanding stereotyping, as well as for generally understanding human experience. Johnson's past research has looked at subtle cues in body type and motion that serve as cues to sexual orientation.
The researchers next plan to look at how the gendered nature of a politician's appearance may relate to the judgments of political competence and to real-world political success once elected to office.
"With the increasing emphasis on television and Internet video as a source of political news, a candidate's physical appearance is an important part of politics, especially political campaigns," Johnson said. "A considerable portion of the electorate may not be well-informed, and they may be making decisions based on subtle cues that need to be revealed and understood."
###
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Financial emergencies have a habit of cropping up just when you least expect them. This is why it is important to prepare for such times by putting some cash away each month in an account that you must keep off limits and even in emergencies withdraw from the funds after a lot of deliberation. We list here some ways you can take precautions and some ways you can get cash in case you are ill prepared or such emergencies.
Taking precautions ? Putting money in the bank
The best way to deal with financial emergencies is to prepare for them. Look at it as something that is bound to happen, except you don?t know when. This way you will be able to set aside a fixed amount of cash each month and will be able to fall back on it when difficult times come calling. Setting aside an amount that will go into a term deposit is the safest way you can get your hands on some cash when you need it most.
Investing in gold
Gold is a great investment. There is no limit to the quantity you can invest in and have ready liquidity whenever you need it. If an emergency comes calling you will not only be able to cash in on the money you used to buy the gold but the gold will have appreciated as well.
Get yourself a credit card or two
A credit card can be a very handy source for some emergency cash. You should get yourself a couple of cards. Use one for your daily shopping and other purchases and repay the debt each month, this will help you build a healthy credit history that will come handy when you need to apply for a loan, and you will also have the card handy for financial emergencies. Keep the other card, or cards, away just in case you need extra cash in an emergency.
Get a payday loan
If you are in dire straits and need some urgent cash, you could avail of a payday loan that takes a few hours, or at the most 24, to get money into your checking account. The problem here is the high processing cost and the fact that you have to repay it by the next payday or the fines and fees are exorbitant ? more than 25 percent.
Apply for a personal loan
If you have a few days to get the cash you need, you could apply for a personal fast loan from your bank or local creditor. They usually process it within a week and do not ask what you need it for. You can spend it on anything you want. However, a personal loan comes at a higher rate of interest.
Home Equity ? if you need a lot of cash
If you need a lot of money you could apply for a home equity loan. This is a loan against your part of the property you are repaying the mortgage for. The other part is owned by the mortgage company. The more of the mortgage you repay the greater your equity in the property. This equity can be evaluated and you can get as much as 90 percent of the value of your home equity.
However, nothing beats having money saved up in the bank. So, start saving now.
John Smith is a professional content writer for one of Australia?s fast growing finance lenders,?Fast Loan Today.
Tagged as: credit cards, fast loan, Finance, financial emergency, fiscal relief, home equity loan, personal loan
Deepak Chopra, whose extraordinary Enlightenment series includes the phenomenal New York Times bestsellers Buddha and Jesus, delivers the most powerful installment yet: God. In this beautiful and thought-provoking teaching novel?a Story of Revelation?one of the Western World?s acknowledged master teachers of Eastern philosophy and preeminent influencers in the realm of spirituality and religion reveals the evolving nature of God. Here is truth and enlightenment for the next generation of spiritual seekers; a book Deepak Chopra?s millions of fans worldwide have been waiting for. God: A Story of Revelation by Deepak Chopra In Deepak Chopra's powerful, groundbreaking, and imaginative new book, a unique blend of storytelling and teaching, the New York Times bestselling author explores the evolution of God.
Deepak Chopra will provoke more discussion in the worlds of spirituality and religion with the publication of the fourth book in his bestselling Enlightenment series. God: A Story of Revelation, (hardcover; $25.99; ISBN #9780062020680) will be released on September 25, 2012, and promises to be the most powerful installment yet.In addition, Chopra is the subject of a documentary ?Decoding Deepak? that will be released by SnagFilms on October 5.
In Deepak Chopra's powerful, groundbreaking, and imaginative new book, a unique blend of storytelling and teaching, the New York Times bestselling author explores the evolution of God. By capturing the lives of ten historical prophets, saints, mystics, and martyrs who are touched by a divine power, Chopra reveals a riveting portrait of a constantly changing God. Our belief?and therefore God itself?transforms with each passing century. In this new novel, Chopra brings to life the defining moments of the most influential sages, ultimately revealing universal lessons about the true nature of God.
Job in the Old Testament experienced something completely different from Paul in the New Testament; Socrates chased a mercurial spirit almost unrecognizable to the strange voice that called to Rumi, Shankara moved from town to town sharing the truth about a God that stood in marked contrast to the one that guided Anne Hutchinson?yet one sees an undeniable pattern. These visionaries took the human race down unknown roads and Chopra invites us to revisit their destinations. Tearing at readers hearts and uplifting their souls, God leads us to a profound and life-altering understanding about the nature of belief, the power of faith, and the spirit that resides within.
Deepak Chopra is the founder of The Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, California, and is acknowledged as one of the master teachers of Eastern philosophy in the Western World. He has written more than fifty-five books and has been a bestselling author for decades with over a dozen titles on the New York Times bestseller lists, including Buddha, Jesus, and many others.
Synopsis ?Decoding Deepak?
Film-maker and journalist Gotham Chopra embarks on a year long road trip with his father Deepak Chopra in an attempt to resolve the spiritual icon he is to the world vs. the real man known to his family. From devoted disciples that range from Lady Gaga to lost souls searching for themselves in the red rock deserts of Sedona, Gotham begins to paint a raw portrait of his dad that only a son can. The film travels across the planet chronicling colorful Deepak activities ? from a traditional monk ordainment in Thailand to a literal decoding of ancient family registers in rural India. On the home front, Gotham also takes a closer look at the expansive spiritual empire his father has built over his 25 year career that initially was conceived out of Deepak?s own deep personal and spiritual dissatisfaction, and a decidedly non-spiritual (and boozy) origin.
Ultimately what emerges is a picture of a Deepak that while reminiscent of other popularized Indian gurus, is more dad than demigod. Full of flaws, foils, intelligence, and irreverence, the decoded Deepak uncovered by his son?s honest scrutiny of him is a symbol of a world searching for answers in the most unlikely places and a deeper plunge into the meaning of identity itself.
A reading discussion guide for God is available in advance on a live Twitter discussion with Deepak Chopra on Tuesday, October 2.
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Dolphin birth video: A female dolphin calf was born at Dolphin Quest Hawaii at the Hilton Waikoloa Village. The survival rate of dolphins born in captivity is higher than dolphin births in the open ocean.
By Oskar Garcia,?Associated Press / September 25, 2012
A 12-year-old dolphin at a Hawaii resort has given birth to a female calf that seems to instantly recognize her mother in a video of the birth posted online.
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Footage of last week's birth on the Big Island shows the baby dolphin's tail moments before she emerges from her mother. Once she is born, she shoots up to the water's surface to take her first breath, then quickly swims alongside her mother.
The birth occurred in a manmade lagoon at Dolphin Quest Hawaii at the Hilton Waikoloa Village, where visitors can touch and swim with the marine mammals.
IN PICTURES: Pink dolphins
Resort officials will monitor the baby around the clock for now, as its first 30 days of life are its most critical in terms of survival, said Julie Rocho-Levine, manager of marine animals for Dolphin Quest. Trainers will closely note when the baby nurses, among other things, she told The Associated Press on Monday.
The rate of survival for babies of first-time mother dolphins in the wild is about 50 percent, Rocho-Levine said. But that rate is much higher for dolphins born with access to top-notch care from humans, she said.
Marilee Menard, executive director of the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, said 70 percent of the dolphins in accredited facilities in North America were born in a zoo or aquarium.
Officials say it's the first calf for the mother, Keo.
"I'm a mom myself, so I feel like I was able to appreciate her just calm, relaxed nature throughout the whole entire situation," said Rocho-Levine, who was there for the birth.
"It seemed as though she (Keo) was seeking out that human companionship and finding comfort in the people she knows and spends her days with," she said.
Keo was calm enough to allow veterinarians to perform an ultrasound during labor.
Dolphin Quest officials plan to wait to name the baby until after its first month of life.
IN PICTURES: Pink dolphins
___
Associated Press writer Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this report.
___
Oskar Garcia can be reached at http://twitter.com/oskargarcia
Playing basketball is not always about shooting the ball and scoring. How to get the basketball into the hoop with art makes it more interesting. Dunking basketball is in itself an art. If you can dunk, it would surely be awesome and your audience will love it and will certainly idolize your skill in playing! But it is frustrating if you missed a slam dunk especially if it is suppose to be a winning shot for your team.
There are many ways on how to be successful in your dunk and height does not always matter in helping you achieve this. A lot of people think that height is the only thing you should be very concerned of when doing a dunk. Being tall is a plus factor but having average height does not mean you cannot make a dunk. It is a mistaken belief that only those who are tall can make a rumbling dunk in front of somebody else face.
With hard work, proper training and precautions, you can easily improve your vertical jumping. Learn how to dunk in just few weeks, here are the tips.
* Warm up. Muscle strain is the result of forcing your muscle into an action without proper warm up. Let your muscles adjust first before engaging into a strenuous activity. It's like warming up your vehicle before you travel.
* Do some jumping and plyometric exercises regularly. Slowly bend your knees with your back straight. You can go down low and then slowly go back up. You can do this with weights to build up muscle power. Increase the number of repetitions as you go on. You can hold the weight behind your head, one vertical line with your spine. This will strengthen your abdominal and lower back muscles.
* Give attention to your jumping techniques because this will give you important changes and improvements in your vertical leap.
* Don't overwork your leg muscles. Our muscles also need some rest period. A lighter activity can be an alternative. When the muscle is overworked, they cannot function well and this may also result to muscle burn.
* Practice in handling the basketball. Taller people naturally have bigger hands as compared to smaller ones thus palming a basketball is much easier for them. Do hand exercises that will boost your hand muscles.
* Think before you jump. Timing is very important to prevent injury. Aim as high as you can and concentrate on your jumping fully.
* Keep on trying. If you fail the first time you attempted to do a dunk, never give up. Be patient. If you sustain injury while on the process to learn how to dunk, remember that you can heal and start again. Practice makes perfect.
Regardless of your height, it is important to focus on what you are doing. Height does not matter as long as you have the perseverance and the hard work to learn how to dunk and become the best player in your team.
TOKYO (Reuters) - Toyota Motor Corp has scrapped plans for widespread sales of a new all-electric minicar, saying it had misread the market and the ability of still-emerging battery technology to meet consumer demands.
Toyota, which had already taken a more conservative view of the market for battery-powered cars than rivals General Motors Co and Nissan Motor Co, said it would only sell about 100 battery-powered eQ vehicles in the United States and Japan in an extremely limited release.
The automaker had announced plans to sell several thousand of the vehicles per year when it unveiled the eQ as an pure-electric variant of its iQ minicar in 2010.
"Two years later, there are many difficulties," Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota's vice chairman and the engineer who oversees vehicle development, told reporters on Monday.
By dropping plans for a second electric vehicle in its line-up, Toyota cast more doubt on an alternative to the combustion engine that has been both lauded for its oil-saving potential and criticized for its heavy reliance on government subsidies in key markets like the United States.
"The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded Toyota's development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.
Toyota said it was putting its emphasis on that technology, an area in which it is the established leader. Toyota said on Monday it expected to have 21 hybrid gas-electric models like the Prius in its line-up by 2015. Of that total, 14 of the new hybrids will be all-new, the automaker said.
Toyota has previously said that it expects to have a hybrid variant available for every vehicle it sells. In a gas-electric hybrid like the Prius, a battery captures energy from the brakes to provide a supplement to the combustion engine, boosting overall mileage, particularly in stop-and-go city traffic.
Pure electric vehicles, like the Nissan Leaf, carry only lithium-ion batteries. Consumer demand for the vehicles has been capped by their limited range and the relatively high cost of the powerful batteries they require.
FAR FROM TARGET
The decision to drop plans for more extensive rollout of its eQ city car leaves Toyota with just a single pure EV in its line-up. The automaker will launch an all-electric RAV4 model in the United States that was jointly developed with Tesla Motors.
Toyota expects to sell 2,600 of the electric-powered sports utility vehicle over the next three years. By comparison, Toyota sold almost 37,000 Camry sedans in August alone in the United States, the automaker's largest market.
Toyota is also far from its plug-in hybrid sales target. The automaker planned to sell between 35,000 and 40,000 Prius plug-in hybrids in 2012 in Japan. So far it has sold only 8,400, or about 20 percent of its target.
The plug-in Prius is designed with a battery that can be charged for just over 20 km (12.4 miles) of battery-powered driving. After that, the vehicle behaves like a more traditional hybrid and relies on its gas engine for extended range.
"We believe that there is social demand for the plug-in hybrid, but our efforts to let the customers know what it is have not been enough," Uchiyamada said.
A broad industry consensus sees plug-in cars accounting for only a single-digit percentage of total global sales over the next decade. Nissan remains more bullish, forecasting that by 2020 one-tenth of all cars sold will be electric.
Globally, Nissan has sold about 38,000 Leaf electric cars since the vehicle's launch at the end of 2010.
U.S. President Barack Obama has set a goal of getting one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015, a target many analysts say will be impossible to achieve.
(Writing by Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)
Posted by BrodzikBusboom629 on Sep 22, 2012 in ANIMAL | Comments Off
Banks are secured collectors plus they give over cash with straightforward answers to the actual customer. However, financial institutions furthermore choose a settlement ensure. Guarantor financial loans are usually well suited for those who have before encounter downside to their particular credit rating. They could improve their personal credit record as well, if the settlement is completed properly.
Guarantor lending options entail a third person. This kind of next individual should have a favorable credit background. They?re usually somebody who possess a residence, generate more than ?800 and are also among Twenty-three and also 70 years of age. Such a great situation, the normal quantity that?ll be of course for the customer is all about ?5000. Nevertheless, the quantity is based on the evaluation with the credit history with the guarantor and many risk factors. In the event the guarantor himself has taken a loan or mortgaged his / her house then a banking institutions is going to take this kind of factor into consideration. The role of the guarantor inside the complete deal is very simple. They usually don?t hear from the lender when the consumer is able to pay off the credit in time. Nevertheless, when the applicant doesn?t pay back the quantity inside time period, next under the agreement from the guarantor financial loans, the particular guarantor is liable to cover the borrowed funds quantity along with the interest and all some other costs.
In contrast to the unsecured loans, in which the candidate alone is likely for many fees about the loan, underneath the guarantor mortgage the actual guarantor gets accountable for repayment as they have got stood as surety. It?s a large obligation which is why solely those which know the candidate strongly enough might consent to function as the guarantor for this particular loans.
Under the unique circumstances, it really is observed that banking institutions are usually leaving offering heavy funds to people. Banks are actually able to spend that towards the organizations, which subsequently lend the cash to folks. Nonetheless, financial institutions usually are not ready to directly provide funds towards the consumer, especially on an unsecured foundation.
Along with short term loans such as pay day loans, the amount is going to be limited, the particular payment term very quick and also the rate of interest very high, and also other costs. Defaulting or slowing down repayment can lead to nonetheless much more costs getting extra upon and also the customer is going to be with high risk of finding yourself paying often times more the total amount they?ve got lent. Therefore the customer has to take into account all phrases carefully before signing the agreement for this type of bank loan. This loan should be considered being a temporary, cease gap set up simply as well as sufficient cash flow needs to be set up to fulfill responsibilities.
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In a rather unfortunate incident, roughly 250 units of the iPhone 5 that were to go on sale at a store in London have been stolen. CNET reports that the booty that thieves got away with was the entire stock of iPhone 5 that was to go on sale. Reportedly, the police plan to question an O2 shop assistant regarding the theft. ??
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The stolen handsets were to go on sale at O2 Store in the Tandem Centre in Colliers Wood near Wimbledon, on the same day. Even as investigations continue in the matter, it is being estimated that the stolen handsets are worth roughly ?100,000 (Rs 87 lakh approximately).
Entire stock of a store gets stolen
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Demands for the iPhone 5 are so high that queues have already begun to form outside Apple stores, indicative of Apple?s loyal fanbase.?As per recent reports, the new phone went on sale across, Europe, Asia and Australia and mobile carriers spoke of record demand. Reportedly, Apple has booked more than 2 million orders for the device in the first 24 hours, which is double the first-day sales of the previous iPhone 4S.
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As per reports, "Some analysts expect Apple to sell up to 10 million iPhone 5 models in the remaining days of September and JP Morgan estimates the phone release could provide a $3.2 billion boost to the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter. The amount is almost the same as the economy of Fiji."
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Here is a quick look at the highlighted features of the iPhone 5:
4-inch, 326ppi Retina display at 1136 x 640 pixels,
GPRS, EDGE, EV-DO, HSPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, LTE and Wi-Fi
GPS
Bluetooth
8 megapixel camera with 1080p HD recording, 720p front-facing camera
16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions
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Made entirely out of aluminium and glass, the iPhone 5 weighs a mere 112gm and is 20 percent lighter than the iPhone 4S, and is the thinnest iPhone yet at 7.6mm thick. Apple has chosen to debut iOS 6 with the iPhone 5 and the new OS includes Apple's own Maps app, an updated version of Siri and lots more. Overall, the new iPhone has been upgraded in almost all respects.
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One of the biggest changes to iOS is the addition of Apple?s own Maps app in the place of Google Maps, which Apple has done away with. The new Maps app has a built-in search for local points of interest, with over 100 million possible suggestions. Other features of the Maps app include navigation, routing, 3D maps, satellite imagery ? that wraps around the 3D maps ? and the ability to get directions directly through Siri. Most of the standard features of the Maps app, including satellite view, are available in almost all countries the iPhone ships to.
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Siri has also been updated and new features include support for more languages, easy access to sports scores, restaurant recommendations and movie listings; Siri and Facebook-enabled apps like Photos, Safari and Maps; and Shared Photo Streams via iCloud.
At Compass we celebrated the Olympic Games that were held in London recently.
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Public release date: 27-Sep-2012
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God: A Story of Revelation by Deepak Chopra In Deepak Chopra's powerful, groundbreaking, and imaginative new book, a unique blend of storytelling and teaching, the New York Times bestselling author explores the evolution of God. 
Posted by BrodzikBusboom629 on Sep 22, 2012 in ANIMAL |