BOULDER, Colo. ? The University of Colorado has snapped up 27 .xxx domain names in an effort to prevent pornographers from exploiting the school's name and brands, but it failed in acquiring the Colorado.xxx name.
The Boulder Daily Camera reports Wednesday ( http://bit.ly/rW9CcP) the domain names the university purchased include UniversityofColorado.xxx, CU.xxx, Buffs.xxx, and GoldenBuffaloes.xxx.
The newly created .xxx suffix is the Internet's adults-only variation on .com.
Colorado.xxx, which is a variation of the school's Colorado.edu domain, was acquired by Las Vegas brothel owner Edward Yeager.
Yeager told the Camera that he would offer the name to the University of Colorado for $1,000.
University spokesman Ken McConnellogue says he's unsure whether the school will buy the domain from Yeager.
The school spent about $200 on acquiring each domain. Other universities and schools across the country have done the same.
INDIANAPOLIS ? Arian Foster's 9-yard touchdown run in the first minute helped the Houston Texans take a 10-3 lead over the Colts at the end of the first quarter.
Foster ran for 64 yards on seven carries in the opening quarter.
Indianapolis had one first down and was held to 21 yards in the first quarter.
On Indianapolis' first play from scrimmage, Houston's Brian Cushing sacked Indy quarterback Dan Orlovsky and forced him to fumble. Houston's Brooks Reed recovered at the Indianapolis 17. Two plays later, Foster's touchdown gave the Texans a 7-0 lead 54 seconds into the game.
The Colts (1-13) went three-and-out on their next drive. Houston took over at its 38-yard line, but this time, the Colts caught the break. Robert Mathis sacked Houston quarterback T.J. Yates, forced a fumble and recovered it himself at the Houston 36-yard line. The Colts wasted the opportunity when Orlovsky was sacked by Connor Barwin at the Houston 40-yard line on third down.
Houston (10-4) punted out of its end zone on its next possession, and Indy's Pierre Garcon returned it 20 yards to the Houston 27.
Orlovsky's 12-yard completion to Austin Collie on third-and-8 set Indy up at the Houston 13. The drive stalled, and Adam Vinatieri's 23-yard field goal cut Houston's lead to 7-3.
Houston ripped off huge chunks of yardage to start the next drive ? a 29-yard pass from Yates to Kevin Walter and an 18-yard run by Foster ? to move into Indianapolis territory. Eventually, the Colts' defense tightened up, and Neil Rackers made a 44-yard field goal to push Houston's lead to 10-3 with 2:01 left in the quarter.
The Colts lead the series 16-3 and have never lost at home to the Texans, but Houston beat Indy 34-7 in the opener and has won two of the past three meetings.
Indianapolis is coming off its first win of the season, a 27-13 win over Tennessee. Donald Brown ran for a career-high 161 yards that day, including a clinching 80-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter.
The Colts dominated the AFC South for nearly a decade, but the Texans have already clinched the franchise's first home playoff game, dethroning a Colts team that won seven of the previous eight division crowns.
The Texans have kept rolling despite losing starting quarterback Matt Schaub and backup Matt Leinart to season-ending injuries. Receiver Andre Johnson missed his ninth straight game with a strained left hamstring.
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Follow Cliff Brunt on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cliffbruntap
Pina is nevertheless a triumph, a movie that does more than demolish the invisible wall between film and dance; it breaks the barrier that intervenes, even at a live performance, between seat and stage. I saw one of the pieces chosen for the film, Vollmond, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010, and from where I was sitting?in a budget-wise corner of the balcony?the action was shrunken down and flattened out. It looked like what it was: a bunch of people cavorting in a pool of water, some others playing with chairs, and a couple of guys clambering onto and off of a large rock. (I left during an endless standing ovation, as unmoved as I'd been two years before, while falling asleep at Bausch's Bamboo Blues.) But in the movie version, I got to see it from front-row center, and also from the 10th row stage-left, and from stage-right, and from the stage itself?right next to the boulder and under the sprays of water. Stunts that had seemed frivolous in person?hey, I'm stacking some chairs over here?were now soaked in meaning.
Do you see what I see?Public release date: 20-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Nancy Ambrosiano nwa@lanl.gov 505-667-0471 DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory
Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, December 20, 2011An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can beidentified by simply "looking" at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is.
But teaching a computer to "know" what it's looking at is far harder. In research published this fall in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology journal, a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Chatham University, and Emory University first measured human performance on a visual task of identifying a certain kind of shape when an image is flashed in front of a viewer for a very short amount of time (20-200 milliseconds). Human performance gets worse, as expected, when the image is shown for shorter time periods. Also as expected, humans do worse when the shapes are more complicated.
But could a computer be taught to recognize shapes as well, and then do it faster than humans? The team tried developing a computer model based on human neural structure and function, to do what we do, and possibly do it better.
Their paper, "Model Cortical Association Fields Account for the Time Course and Dependence on Target Complexity of Human Contour Perception," describes how, after measuring human performance, they created a computer model to also attempt to pick out the shapes.
"This model is biologically inspired and relies on leveraging lateral connectionsbetween neurons in the same layer of a model of the human visual system," said Vadas Gintautas of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and formerly a researcher at Los Alamos.
Neuroscientists have characterized neurons in the primate visual cortex that appear to underlie object recognition, noted senior author Garrett Kenyon of Los Alamos. "These neurons, located in the inferotemporal cortex, can be strongly activated when particular objects are visible, regardless of how far away the objects are or how the objects are posed, a phenomenon referred to as viewpoint invariance."
The brain has an uncanny ability to detect and identify certain things, even ifthey're barely visible. Now the challenge is to get computers to do the same thing. And programming the computer to process the information laterally, like the brain does, might be a step in the right direction.
How inferotemporal neurons acquire their viewpoint invariant properties is unknown, but many neuroscientists point to the hierarchical organization of the human visual cortex as likely being an essential aspect.
"Lateral connections have been generally overlooked in similar models designed to solve similar tasks. We demonstrated that our model qualitatively reproduces human performance on the same task, both in terms of time and difficulty. Although this is certainly no guarantee that the human visual system is using lateral interactions in the same way to solve this task, it does open up a new way to approach object detection problems," Gintautas said.
Simple features, such as particular edges of the image in a specific orientation, are extracted at the first cortical processing stage, called the primary visual cortex, or V1. Then subsequent cortical processing stages, V2, V4, etc., extract progressively more complex features, culminating in the inferotemporal cortex where that essential "viewpoint invariant object identification" is thought to occur. But, most of the connections in the human brain do not project up the cortical hierarchy, as might be expected from gross neuroanatomy, but rather connect neurons located at the same hierarchical level, called lateral connections, and also project down the cortical hierarchy to lower processing levels.
In the recently published work, the team modeled lateral interactions between cortical edge detectors to determine if such connections could explain the difficulty and time course of human contour perception. This research thus combined high-performance computer simulations of cortical circuits, using a National Science Foundation funded neural simulation toolbox, called PetaVision, developed by LANL researchers, along with "speed-of-sight" psychophysical measurements of human contour perception. The psychophysical measurements refer to an experimental technique that neuroscientists use to study mechanisms of cortical processing, using the open-source Psychtoolbox software as an advanced starting point.
"Our research represented the first example of a large-scale cortical model being used to account for both the overall accuracy, as well as the processing time, of human subjects performing a challenging visual-perception task," said Kenyon.
###
Link to PLoS paper: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002162
About Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov)
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, isoperated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.
About Chatham University
Chatham University prepares students from around the world to help develop solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges. Consistently ranked among the top master's level institutions in the Northeast by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, Chatham University is also ranked in the top five percent of graduate-intensive institutions nationally and experienced the fastest-growing enrollment in the Pittsburgh region over the past decade. Founded in 1869, Chatham University includes the Shadyside Campus, with the historic 39-acre Woodland Road arboretum and Chatham Eastside facility; and the 388-acre Eden Hall Campus north of Pittsburgh. For more information, call 800-837-1290 or visit http://www.chatham.edu.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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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.
Do you see what I see?Public release date: 20-Dec-2011 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Nancy Ambrosiano nwa@lanl.gov 505-667-0471 DOE/Los Alamos National Laboratory
Scientists model brain structure to help computers recognize objects
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, December 20, 2011An essential question confronting neuroscientists and computer vision researchers alike is how objects can beidentified by simply "looking" at an image. Introspectively, we know that the human brain solves this problem very well. We only have to look at something to know what it is.
But teaching a computer to "know" what it's looking at is far harder. In research published this fall in the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology journal, a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Chatham University, and Emory University first measured human performance on a visual task of identifying a certain kind of shape when an image is flashed in front of a viewer for a very short amount of time (20-200 milliseconds). Human performance gets worse, as expected, when the image is shown for shorter time periods. Also as expected, humans do worse when the shapes are more complicated.
But could a computer be taught to recognize shapes as well, and then do it faster than humans? The team tried developing a computer model based on human neural structure and function, to do what we do, and possibly do it better.
Their paper, "Model Cortical Association Fields Account for the Time Course and Dependence on Target Complexity of Human Contour Perception," describes how, after measuring human performance, they created a computer model to also attempt to pick out the shapes.
"This model is biologically inspired and relies on leveraging lateral connectionsbetween neurons in the same layer of a model of the human visual system," said Vadas Gintautas of Chatham University in Pittsburgh and formerly a researcher at Los Alamos.
Neuroscientists have characterized neurons in the primate visual cortex that appear to underlie object recognition, noted senior author Garrett Kenyon of Los Alamos. "These neurons, located in the inferotemporal cortex, can be strongly activated when particular objects are visible, regardless of how far away the objects are or how the objects are posed, a phenomenon referred to as viewpoint invariance."
The brain has an uncanny ability to detect and identify certain things, even ifthey're barely visible. Now the challenge is to get computers to do the same thing. And programming the computer to process the information laterally, like the brain does, might be a step in the right direction.
How inferotemporal neurons acquire their viewpoint invariant properties is unknown, but many neuroscientists point to the hierarchical organization of the human visual cortex as likely being an essential aspect.
"Lateral connections have been generally overlooked in similar models designed to solve similar tasks. We demonstrated that our model qualitatively reproduces human performance on the same task, both in terms of time and difficulty. Although this is certainly no guarantee that the human visual system is using lateral interactions in the same way to solve this task, it does open up a new way to approach object detection problems," Gintautas said.
Simple features, such as particular edges of the image in a specific orientation, are extracted at the first cortical processing stage, called the primary visual cortex, or V1. Then subsequent cortical processing stages, V2, V4, etc., extract progressively more complex features, culminating in the inferotemporal cortex where that essential "viewpoint invariant object identification" is thought to occur. But, most of the connections in the human brain do not project up the cortical hierarchy, as might be expected from gross neuroanatomy, but rather connect neurons located at the same hierarchical level, called lateral connections, and also project down the cortical hierarchy to lower processing levels.
In the recently published work, the team modeled lateral interactions between cortical edge detectors to determine if such connections could explain the difficulty and time course of human contour perception. This research thus combined high-performance computer simulations of cortical circuits, using a National Science Foundation funded neural simulation toolbox, called PetaVision, developed by LANL researchers, along with "speed-of-sight" psychophysical measurements of human contour perception. The psychophysical measurements refer to an experimental technique that neuroscientists use to study mechanisms of cortical processing, using the open-source Psychtoolbox software as an advanced starting point.
"Our research represented the first example of a large-scale cortical model being used to account for both the overall accuracy, as well as the processing time, of human subjects performing a challenging visual-perception task," said Kenyon.
###
Link to PLoS paper: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1002162
About Los Alamos National Laboratory (http://www.lanl.gov)
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, isoperated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and URS for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.
About Chatham University
Chatham University prepares students from around the world to help develop solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges. Consistently ranked among the top master's level institutions in the Northeast by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review, Chatham University is also ranked in the top five percent of graduate-intensive institutions nationally and experienced the fastest-growing enrollment in the Pittsburgh region over the past decade. Founded in 1869, Chatham University includes the Shadyside Campus, with the historic 39-acre Woodland Road arboretum and Chatham Eastside facility; and the 388-acre Eden Hall Campus north of Pittsburgh. For more information, call 800-837-1290 or visit http://www.chatham.edu.
[ | 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.
MAKHACHKALA, Russia (Reuters) ? The founder of a newspaper that investigated government corruption was shot dead in Russia's North Caucasus region, in what an international watchdog called "a lethal blow to press freedom."
A gunman shot Gadzhimurat Kamalov as he was leaving the offices of the newspaper Chernovik in the capital of Dagestan province shortly before midnight on Thursday, the regional Interior Ministry said.
Police said Kamalov was shot eight times and was pronounced dead on the way to hospital.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said journalists at Chernovik, known for reporting on corruption in the provincial administration, had been "routinely persecuted for their work".
"The assassination of Gadzhimurat Kamalov is a massive loss for independent journalism in the North Caucasus, Russia's most dangerous place for reporters," the advocacy group's regional coordinator Nina Ognianova said in a statement.
Russian journalists who investigate corruption face serious risks, particularly in the provinces, where authorities are less likely to face scrutiny over attacks on journalists.
Predominantly Muslim Dagestan is plagued by violence stemming from an Islamist insurgency rooted in the 1990s separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya as well as conflicts over business and political power.
There have been 19 unsolved murders of journalists in Russia since 2000, including the 2006 killing of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, according to the CPJ.
It lists Russia as eighth on its "Impunity Index", a list of states where journalists are killed regularly and governments fail to solve the crimes.
(Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Tim Pearce)
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Public release date: 20-Dec-2011
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