Ramanisblog

Tag: Fresqui

  • Most Affordable 2010 Cars

    Pay attention to more than price when looking for a wallet-friendly vehicle.
    In 2010, three tailor-made Bugattis–the Veyron Sang d’Argent, the Grand Sport Soleil de Nuit and the Veyron Nocturne–will hit the road. The supercars, which get to 60 mph in under 2.5 seconds, will be available next spring. Price? More than $2 million apiece.

    For the driver looking for speed at a less-racy price, a 2010 Chevrolet Camaro or Jaguar XF will still roar (the Camaro’s V8 SS gets to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds, the Jaguar’s supercharged V8 in 4.7) but won’t break the bank in the process.

    Those performance cars join the Toyota ( TM – news – people )Avalon, Lincoln MKS and Nissan Maxima on our list of the most affordable vehicles in their segment. They may not have the lowest manufacturer suggested retail prices on the lot, but over years of ownership, their value becomes readily apparent.

    Behind the Numbers
    To identify 2010’s most affordable vehicles for their segment, we used Vincentric data to determine the total cost of ownership for a vehicle, including five-year totals for fuel costs, maintenance, repairs, average national insurance rates, depreciation, interest, opportunity costs and taxes. (Vincentric is an auto consulting firm based in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.)

    The data assumes an annual rate of 15,000 miles driven per vehicle and a price of $2.60 for regular fuel, $2.86 for premium, and $2.75 for diesel. It also applies an inflation rate for fuel prices, since the calculations predict costs over five years. We evaluated affordability based on the percentage of each vehicle’s total five-year costs compared with its total costs, including base price and one-time fees. MSRPs are adjusted for fees and destination charges, in accordance with Vincentric data.

    Toyota and Chevrolet each did well on our list, with entries like the $27,670 Toyota Prius, $27,075 Toyota Tacoma, $65,588 Chevy Silverado, and $68,280 Chevrolet Corvette all leading their segments.

    Sales last month for each of those automakers reflect their appeal: Toyota posted gains of 1% over November 2008; Chevrolet gained 4.8% year-over-year. Overall, the industry broke even in sales year-over-year. Asian brands gained 6.8% total; domestics lost 6.8%.

    From our list of affordable cars, the Prius sold 9,617 units last month, up 11.1% over November 2008. While Prius owners can expect to pay $4,296 on fuel for five years, and $915 on repairs, owners of vehicles in the same segment can pay as much as $12,300 and $1,240, respectively.

    Education Pays
    Experts say cars like the Prius and BMW’s X6 (up a respectable 7.8% last month) appeal to consumers because they offer a whole package of value, not just a cheap sticker price. Prospective buyers are smarter than ever about determining which vehicles are affordable.

    Two things automakers are doing to improve the affordability of their cars–besides lowering the price, of course–are improve reliability and efficiency. (The combustion engine alone could improve its efficiency by as much as 20%, according to engineers at Bentley). Maintenance, repairs and fuel comprise a large chunk of expenses over five-years’ time. The less often a car has to be at the gas station or in the shop, the more money it saves.

    Consumers are catching on. Auto sales are projected to hit 11 million by year end (down from 13.2 million in 2008)–but Internet traffic related to buying is way up, says Chip Perry, CEO of Autotrader.com. The Atlanta-based automotive marketing company lists local dealer inventories, buying and selling tips, comparison tools, reviews and pricing and incentive information for prospective buyers. It has gained a 35% year-over-year increase in on-site traffic for the past 10 years. Perry doesn’t expect it to let up anytime soon.

    “Our average monthly total audience was 15.3 million [unique visitors] through September,” he says. “You would expect that our numbers are going down, but we’re up 8% over 2008. We expect to grow next year.”

    Seventy-five percent of car-buyers shop online, according to AutoTrader data, with the average buyer spending 55 minutes a month researching vehicles on the site. Chevrolet is the No. 1 shopped-for car brand on AutoTrader.com. Toyota is No. 3. (Ford is No. 2).

    David Wurster, who leads product development and industry analysis for Vincentric, says the exponential growth in online research is no surprise. Self-education is the key to finding something affordable.

    “Just intuitively, you know that in a down economy that is what consumers need to be doing,” he says. “This is how you really determine how much it costs to operate the car, as opposed to just the payment.”

    That’s small consolation to would-be Bugatti owners. No amount of research will make those cars affordable.

  • The brain may feel other people’s pain

    We are all parts of the Universal conciousness, which is an attribute of Reality( Brahman)
    This was called(consciousness) was named as elan vital by Henri Bergson.
    We feel, rather we think, we are different from others due to Space and Time.Please read my blogs on Philosophy and Astrophysics.
    NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – If you’ve ever thought that you literally feel other people’s pain, you may be right. A brain-imaging study suggests that some people have true physical reactions to others’ injuries.

    Using an imaging technique called functional MRI, UK researchers found evidence that people who say they feel vicarious pain do, in fact, have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions upon witnessing another person being hurt.

    The findings, published in the journal Pain, could have implications for understanding, and possibly treating, cases of unexplained “functional” pain.

    “Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain,” explained Dr. Stuart W. G. Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers on the new study.

    “Consequently,” he told Reuters Health in an email, “there is considerable effort to uncover other ways in which the pain might be generated.”

    Derbyshire said he now wants to study whether the brains of patients with functional pain respond to images of injury in the same way that the current study participants’ did.

    For the study, Derbyshire and colleague Jody Osborn first had 108 college students view several images of painful situations — including athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection. Close to one-third of the students said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.

    Derbyshire and Osborn then took functional MRI scans of 10 of these “responders,” along with 10 “non-responders” who reported no pain while viewing the images.

    Functional MRI charts changes in brain blood flow, allowing researchers to see which brain areas become more active in response to a particular stimulus. Here, the researchers scanned participants’ brains as they viewed either images of people in pain, images that were emotional but not painful, or neutral images.

    The investigators found that while viewing the painful images, both responders and non-responders showed activity in the emotional centers of the brain. But responders showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with non-responders, and as compared with their own brain responses to the emotional images.

    “We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain,” Derbyshire said.

    He noted that the responders also tended to say that they avoided horror movies and disturbing images on the news “so as to avoid being in pain” — which, the researcher said, is more than just an empathetic response.

    As far as the potential practical implications of the findings, Derbyshire said it would be a “reach” to think that such brain mechanisms might be behind all functional pain. But, he added, “they might explain some of it.”
    http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BK35F20091221?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

  • Bus Thief smashes into 50 cars on rampage.

    Watch video.

    http://news.sky.com/skynews/video

  • US ‘Forged’ Nuclear Documents, Says Iran

    Charges and counter charges-who is telling the Truth?
    Iran’s president has said documents appearing to show his country is working on a nuclear bomb trigger were “forged” by the US.

    Iranian president Ahmadinejad visits the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility
    The papers, revealed last week by The Times newspaper, describe a four-year plan to test the neutron initiator.
    Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the reports about a nuclear trigger were “fundamentally not true”.
    Speaking to US TV network ABC News, he said of the documents: “They are all a fabricated bunch of papers continuously being forged and disseminated by the American government.”
    Foreign intelligence agencies have dated the documents to early 2007, four years after Tehran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme, the newspaper claimed.
    The world powers know the documents are damning but they are choosing to wait until they use them to try and damn Iran.
    Sky’s foreign affairs editor Tim Marshall
    He said accusations that Iran was continuing work on a nuclear arms plan were “a repetitive and tasteless joke”.
    US President Barack Obama’s senior advisor David Axelrod has said any accusation that Washington had fabricated documents was “nonsense”.
    He added: “Nobody has any illusions about what the intent of the Iranian government is.”
    Tehran has insisted its nuclear programme is solely for civilian purposes and rejects Western suspicions that it is covertly trying to develop a bomb.
    Mr Ahmadinejad also said Iran was ready to strike a uranium enrichment deal if the US and the West respect the Islamic Republic and stop making threats.
    Iran is under three sets of UN sanctions for refusing to suspend enrichment and it risks more after rejecting a UN-brokered deal to send its low-enriched uranium abroad to be further refined into fuel for a reactor.
    http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Iran-President-Mahmoud-Ahmadinejad-Says-US-Forged-Documents-About-Nuclear-Bomb-Trigger-Claims/Article/200912415506440?DCMP=EMC-news_OBU

  • Avatar’s gaze illuminates social brain


    Please follow the link and watch video.
    Video: Follow my eyes

    They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different brain areas than following.

    This could help unravel the brain activity underlying the process of “joint attention”, thought to be key to complex, human social interactions. It could also offer insights into why social interactions can break down for people with autism.

    Joint attention – the ability and motivation to both guide and follow someone else’s gaze – develops early in infants. It is considered necessary for complex social interactions, the learning of language and co-operation. For example, an eye signal from one person to another can indicate a potential meal, mate or menace.

    In people with autism, joint attention seems to be abnormal, which may underpin some of the social difficulties they experience. Previously researchers have studied brain activity in people watching a video designed to engender a feeling of joint attention in the viewer. The new study is the first to separate out the processes of following and initiating joint attention.

    Watch me watch her

    Psychiatrist Leonhard Schilbach at the University of Cologne in Germany and his colleagues developed an avatar that can hold someone’s gaze and an infrared camera that tracks the eye movement of someone watching the avatar. The system was set up inside an MRI scanner.

    Then the team asked 21 healthy volunteers to use their eyes to guide the avatar’s gaze towards a grey box projected on a computer screen, or to follow the avatar’s gaze, while inside the scanner. The camera allows the researchers to determine when the volunteers are following the avatar’s gaze and when the avatar is following theirs.

    The real-time fMRI scans revealed that when the volunteers successfully got the avatar to follow their gaze, brain areas involved in reward and motivation were activated. When they followed the avatar’s gaze, a different area of the brain, known to be involved in imagining what other people are thinking, was active. “It’s kind of surprising that sharing something as basic as a grey square is something we enjoy,” says Schilbach.

    Get engaged

    The finding is novel, says autism researcher Peter Mundy at the University of California, Davis, because previous studies of joint attention have not distinguished between initiating and responding.

    It points to the possibility that differences in motivation to initiate joint attention “may be involved in the early social impairments of autism”, he says.

    Mundy adds that interactive avatars will be helpful in other areas of social psychology by allowing us to simulate social interactions and observe the neural systems they involve. “Our method is progress in the direction of studying things which stem from being engaged with another person,” agrees Schilbach.

    His team now plans to study the brains of people with autism as they interact with the avatar.

    Journal reference: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21401
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18236-avatars-gaze-illuminates-social-brain.html