ohindavid

Saturday, 29 December 2012

Big changes coming to Sunsong Ranch in 5.2

There's been plenty of talk over the last couple of months about Sunsong Ranch, the farm that players can adopt and use to grow various crops of their own. A lot of that talk revolved around whether or not Sunsong Ranch was the first step towards player housing, a feature that a lot of players have been wistfully wishing for since the days of vanilla. Earlier this month, we asked Cory Stockton and Dave Kosak if this was indeed the case, and the response was that while the ranch could be interpreted that way, player housing wasn't something intended for the future.

However, both Stockton and Kosak were excited with how well the farming feature had been received, and with how well it integrated with other features in the game. As a new feature, the farm works seamlessly with other professions in the game. Being able to grow your own resources has been a tremendous boon for players, but the question still remained -- how could the farming feature be improved even further?

Well ... how about as an additional means to gather reputation?

Farm improvements in 5.2

Patch 5.2 will see a few new features added to Sunsong Ranch, the most important being the option to purchase it. Technically, while players are able to use the farm, it still belongs to Farmer Yoon -- he's just allowing players to use the farm because they've been such a tremendous help in getting the farm cleaned up, and getting Yoon in with the Tillers to boot. Even though players have earned the favor of everyone in Halfhill, the farm still isn't really their property.

With patch 5.2, you'll be able to purchase the farm from Yoon and own it outright. This means that the farm will turn into a rest point like an inn, and players will be able to bind their hearthstones to their farms and instantly log out at that location. As far as requested improvements go, this was at the top of the list for many players. As for how much that farm will cost you ... well, we'll have to wait and see. The new Sunsong Ranch features will not be available on the PTR, but they will be coming soon.

But purchasing the farm does more than give you a new hearthstone option. If you own the farm, you'll begin to get work orders from the various factions scattered across Pandaria. Filling out those work orders will give you a reputation boost with the issuing faction. This additional feature does two things -- makes that reputation grinding a little easier, and further cements that integrated nature of the farm that the developers seem to be so fond of.

We don't currently know what form that reputation boost will take -- whether it will be a flat amount of reputation rewarded, or a buff that increases reputation gain with a faction. But any bonus to reputation gain is apt to be well-received, and it's a purpose for the farm that goes beyond the usual helpful boost to professions.

Quality of life improvements

But that's not all we'll be seeing out of Sunsong Ranch. Along with the option to purchase the farm, several quality-of-life improvements will be added as well. Players that are tired of planting 16 seeds one at a time will be glad to hear that seed bags will now be available, allowing you to plant four plots worth of crops at a time.

Special crop seeds have been in since Mists of Pandaria's launch. While you can use these special crop seeds to gather materials like fabric, cloth, leather, and enchanting materials, the yield on these special crop seeds was pretty low. In 5.2, the yield has been improved to make farming more competitive with gathering these items out in the world -- making the seeds a much more useful purchase.

Planting seeds has always resulted in crops that need to be tended to. Players have to water the plants, pull pesky weeds, spray for bugs, or murder encroaching wildlife. But there was a dual-layered nature to farming that got tiresome -- if you picked a plant, you'd either end up with soil that needed to be tilled, a weed that needed to be pulled before the soil could be tilled, or occupied soil with a virmen that needed to be killed before the soil could be tilled.

If you've reached exalted with the Tillers and purchased a Master Plow, in 5.2 it will now do something about those annoying virmen living in the soil. Running the Master Plow over the offending soil will pop the virmen out of the ground stunned and at 30% health, making them far less of a nuisance. In addition, Wild Crops -- the swinging vines that require players to hop on and wrestle for a minute or so -- will now occur less often.

It's really nice to see that this useful new feature is still being worked on and improved over time, and in ways that are genuinely useful to players. The ability to use the farm as an additional means to gain reputation is a really good move. And even though Sunsong Ranch really can't be considered player housing, it's still nice that we'll be able to buy the place, bind our hearthstones, and call it a far more personal home than any inn in Pandaria.

Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

Tags: chee-chee, cooking, ella, farm, farmer-yoon, farming, fish-fellreed, gina-mudclaw, halfhill-market, haohan-mudclaw, jogu-the-drunk, mists-of-pandaria, old-hillpaw, patch-5.2, patch-5.2-ptr, reputation-rewards, sho, sunsong-ranch, the-tillers, tillers, tina-mudclaw, wow-farming

Filed under: News items, Mists of Pandaria

Source: http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/12/27/big-changes-coming-to-sunsong-ranch-in-5-2/

Amber Tamblyn Lilit Avagyan Nashville TV Show VP debate drew brees drew brees sandusky

New Delhi Journal: Indian City Overwhelmed by Air Pollution ? New Delhi Journal

[unable to retrieve full-text content]New Delhi has introduced policies aimed at improving air quality, but the efforts have not been able to keep up with population growth.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/world/asia/indian-city-overwhelmed-by-air-pollution-new-delhi-journal.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Rise of the Guardians Pumpkin Pie Jack Taylor Apple Pie Recipe black friday How long to cook a turkey green bean casserole

Keith Jarrett: The K?ln Concert (Full Album) (Little green footballs)

Share With Friends:

| Politics - Top Stories News, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/273703111?client_source=feed&format=rss

umf elite eight stephon marbury the lion king suzanne collins cherry blossom festival nc state

Space spider dies in D.C. after surviving 55 days in space

Space spider dies in D.C.: Neffi survived 55 days aboard the International Space Station. But the famous spider died after four days in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C.

By Staff,?Associated Press / December 6, 2012

A jumping red-backed spider spent 55 days on the International Space Station. But his trip to Washington was less successful.

NASA

Enlarge

The U.S. astronaut corps has lost another member.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

Nefertiti, a spider that traveled 42 million miles through space before returning to Earth in October, died after being sent to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

The experiment was designed to determine if a spider dependent on gravity for catching its meals would be able to adapt and eat in micro gravity.

RECOMMENDED: Are you scientifically literate? Take the quiz

According to the Boulder Daily Camera , the spider was able to hunt down fruit flies in her sealed space environment on the International Space Station. The spider managed to survive despite a miscalculation on the amount of food needed for the mission.

The Johnson jumping spider (species Phidippus johnsoni). arrived at the Smithsonian's Insect Zoo this past Thursday. By, Monday it had expired.

The Boulder Daily Camera reported:

"Neffi, of a species that typically enjoys a lifespan of about one year, was 10 months old. Monday's passing of the so-called "spidernaut," according to the Smithsonian, was due to natural causes. However, the Smithsonian conceded that no necropsy was performed on the deceased arachnid.
The experiment that made Neffi famous was conceived as part of the NASA-sponsored YouTube Space Lab contest in which two student-proposed studies were selected from thousands submitted worldwide by video. Amr Mohamed, 18, of Egypt, suggested examining whether a spider normally dependent on gravity for catching its meals would be able to adapt, and eat, in a micro-gravity environment."

According to NASA, Mohamed's project was designed to look at whether jumping spiders, like the zebra and red-backed species, can adapt their hunting abilities to microgravity. Jumping spiders do not build webs for catching their food. These particular spiders hunt using their excellent vision to track and stalk prey, jumping and striking with a lethal bite -- similar to cats hunting mice.
?

?"I have always been fascinated by science because with a handful of equations, I can explain the world around me," said Mohamed in his Meet the Winner YouTube video. "The idea of sending an experiment to space is the most exciting thing that I have ever heard in my life."

Eventually, Mohamed's experiment was designed by Colorado University. It demonstrated that a spider was able to hunt down fruit flies in her sealed space environment on the International Space Station just fine -- until her food supply ran out, explained Stefanie Countryman, the projects manager for K-12 Educational Projects at CU's BioServe Space Technologies.

RECOMMENDED: Are you scientifically literate? Take the quiz

___

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/science/~3/6lgvtKzJ7oM/Space-spider-dies-in-D.C.-after-surviving-55-days-in-space

Shakira chick fil a chick fil a iOS 6 bank of america Yunel Escobar Eye Black Cruel Summer

Dr. Craig Malkin: Can Cyborgs Fall in Love?

Watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post.

Up until Amber Case's thought-provoking TEDTalk, the whole idea of cyborgs falling in love might have seemed like the premise for an outrageous science fiction story. You know -- the kind with cheesy cover art, depicting a fetching, scantily clad fem-bot, draped around a beefy, steely-eyed hero. (I picture him winking.) But thanks to her work, and the work of MIT psychologist, Sherry Turkle, who also studies the influence of technology on identity, we've begun grappling with the far less amusing notion that we, ourselves, are the cyborgs. Suddenly, the question as to whether or not cyborgs can fall in love has become as pressing as it is real. And answering it requires that we take a hard, honest look at what we've become.

Even prior to the Internet, the idea that we exist in multiple versions of self was accepted wisdom by many. I am my daughter's father, my wife's husband, my client's therapist. Each relationship -- each environment -- calls on a slightly different version of who we are, so that in many ways, we create, and our created, by our own experiences. That's what Case and Turkle mean by the second self. It's the self we fashion for cyberspace even as it fashions us.

In the process of crafting our second self, we can only retain our humanity -- and our capacity to love -- if we use technology in a way that doesn't leave us anemic and enervated. . - Dr. Craig Malkin

When we talk about our cyborg self, then, what we're really describing is the as yet crude admixture that emerges from the blend of human needs, desires, motivations, and perceptions and the projected self we know through cyberspace. The second self isn't at all the same as the human self, precisely because who we are is limited and shaped by the cyberspace in which it dwells.

Case offers an apt metaphor, for example, for the astonishing constriction of time and space afforded by cell phone technology: a worm hole, the theoretical short cut between two points in time and space. With each call, our mental self is instantaneously transported from one point to another.

But the metaphor is telling. Many wormhole theories draw on the idea of a singularity or black hole, and most physicists agree that nearing a singularity would tear us apart. On Twitter, communication is restricted to 140 characters, so the self that emerges there is less nuanced by necessity. It serves a purpose in that world, reaching out in bits and pieces of communication, but the rest of us -- the more human part of us, messy, complicated, ambivalent, loving, striving, reaching, flinching -- is left behind.

We are rent asunder when we enter cyberspace, fragmented -- made smaller. The very constrictions of time and space that permit magically instantaneous communication also mean that the more we reach out with this second, cyberself, the less human we become; we only know ourselves -- and are known -- in bits and pieces. When the second self takes over, our full humanity begins to fade, like the iconic heroes of The Matrix, whose bodies atrophied from lack of use while their projected identities wandered through cyberspace, unwitting captives of the machines. The quality of our cyborg self -- and therefore, our capacity to love -- depends entirely on which self we use to reach out to those around us. That's where things get a little bleak.

Fathers, Turkle reminds us, now push their children on the swing with one hand, while glancing at their smart phone with the other. And more chillingly, in one of the more somber moments of her talk, Case warns us that, in all the frenzy to return texts and react to the rapid fire information which surrounds our cyborg selves, we've sacrificed the capacity to reflect; in so doing, we've lost ourselves. With no time to sit and think and dream and ponder and create, one of the most powerful means we have of knowing ourselves has begun to vanish. The self emerges in moments of silence, outside the hum and buzz of "the culture of distraction." Does the father pushing his child with one hand truly know himself? Does his daughter know him?

Love, I would argue, requires the full experience of our own humanity and self-knowledge. It requires that we make ourselves vulnerable, open, expansive, allowing the moment to fill us, and ourselves to fill the moment we're in. Our deepest attachments develop when we can show all of who we are and be accepted, and that includes romantic love. The crudely pixilated self of cyberspace can hardly represent the best of us.

In the process of crafting our second self, we can only retain our humanity -- and our capacity to love -- if we use technology in a way that doesn't leave us anemic and enervated. That means living with intention -- staying present, and choosing, wisely, the moments we decide to step through the wormhole, rather than quietly, mindlessly slipping into it. I once wrote that "technology is only as healthy as our use of it," and I still believe that. The more we reflexively dwell (and hide) in cyberspace, the less practice we have at being fully human, and the harder it becomes.

And that means we can only truly love -- and fall in love -- when we lead with our humanity, and reach out to touch one another with all of who we are. We can't afford to leave even one hand behind in cyberspace while embracing our children. It's up to us to decide how much humanity is left in the emerging cyborg race. And that means it's up to us whether or not cyborgs can fall in love.

If you like my posts, let me know! Let's connect on facebook andTwitter. I frequently respond to comments and questions there. And feel free to check out www.drcraigmalkin.com for more tips and advice, as well as information on my book in progress.

The next Hold Me Tight Couples Workshop takes place April 26-28, 2013. For more information and to register, visit www.drjenniferleigh.com.

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TEDWeekends will highlight some of today's most intriguing ideas and allow them to develop in real time through your voice! Tweet #TEDWeekends to share your perspective or email tedweekends@huf?ngtonpost.com to learn about future weekend's ideas to contribute as a writer.

Friday, 28 December 2012

Modern-Day Typhoid Marys

Patients put on face masks as they leave a SARS clinic in Toronto in 2003

Photo by J.P. Moczulski/AFP/Getty Images.

If germs hung a recruiting sign for their hosts, it would probably be a version of the World War I poster of Uncle Sam pointing: We want YOU to help us reproduce. All hosts were equally eligible for service, infectious-disease researchers thought. Assuming the recruits weren?t immune due to a prior infection or vaccination, anyone should have roughly the same potential to spread a disease?s pathogens. But then came severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

This pandemic started as just another strange pneumonia from southern China, but in 2003 it turned into a global outbreak that infected 8,098 people and killed 774. Key to the disease?s spread, researchers found, was a small but crucial portion of the population that became known as ?superspreaders,? people who transmitted the infection to a much greater than expected number of new hosts. The more scientists learn about superspreaders, the more they are beginning to realize that this tiny segment of the population is the driving force behind the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.

Perhaps the most infamous superspreader in history was Mary Mallon, aka Typhoid Mary. An Irish cook in New York City in the 1900s, she was chronically infected with Salmonella typhi. Although the infection didn?t cause any symptoms for Mallon, she did excrete large numbers of typhoid bacteria in her feces. Her career as a cook made it easy to transmit fecal bacteria to customers through the food she prepared. She infected about 50 people and killed several (official counts vary) before she was arrested and jailed for refusing to give up her career as a cook.

To epidemiologists, people like Typhoid Mary were seen as an anomaly and not the main drivers of infectious disease spread. Instead, epidemiologists focused on a number they called R₀, the average number of people a single person could infect. The value of R₀ depends on three main factors: the number of susceptible individuals in the population, the number currently infected, and those resistant to infection. If the value of R₀ is less than one, it means that each individual infects less than one other person, and the outbreak will ultimately die out. However, if the value of R₀ is greater than one, the disease has the potential to spread.

When you look across a large population, R₀ is a good estimate of whether and how a particular infection might spread. At an individual level, it turns out, R₀ is less accurate. Most people won?t spread the disease at all, but a very few people will spread the infection to tens or even hundreds of others.

As computer models of infectious disease grew more powerful and precise, scientists began to realize that a lot of infectious disease spread is due to superspreaders. Researchers call it the 80/20 rule: Twenty percent of the population is responsible for 80 percent of disease spread. The key to understanding and stopping outbreaks of infectious disease means homing in on this small portion of the population that drives the majority of transmission.

Accounting for the presence of superspreaders also means accounting for their much more common counterparts: people who don?t spread the disease to anyone. Their R₀ is zero. Taken together, that means a disease is much more likely to be introduced into new areas by superspreaders, but it is also more likely to fizzle out in those places due to nonspreaders. Only occasionally, as with SARS, can the pathogen be introduced to somewhere new and then, like a spark on dry kindling, ignite a massive blaze of infection.

On Feb. 21, 2003, a 64-year-old doctor checked into Room 911 at the Hotel Metropole in Hong Kong. He was already sick with SARS but felt well enough to travel. Public health officials documented a total of seven people directly infected by the doctor, making him a superspreader. Several of the people he infected were also superspreaders. One young man infected every doctor, nurse, and medical student who examined him in a Hong Kong hospital?more than 100 health care workers in total. A flight attendant from Singapore went on to infect at least 160 others. These travelers then brought the SARS virus home with them as a very unwelcome souvenir. One of these infected individuals arrived in Toronto. Several days after she returned home, she developed symptoms consistent with SARS and ultimately died. Nine other SARS cases and three deaths were directly linked to her, and the outbreak ultimately spread to 257 others. This chain of contagion accounted for more than 70 percent of Toronto?s total SARS cases. Although Toronto was besieged by SARS in 2003, Vancouver (with a similar population) saw only a handful of cases. The reason? No superspreaders were infected in Vancouver, said infectious disease expert James Lloyd-Smith of the University of California, Los Angeles. ?SARS made the superspreader phenomenon so obvious we could no longer ignore it,? he said. But ?SARS is just one point along a continuum?all infectious show this [pattern] to some degree.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=19d4c8c776196a0f0bd9d5f0ecd7ee39

pipa and sopa sopa pipa wikipedia blackout kyla pratt justified season 3 custer scott walker

Video: Smoother Skies Ahead For Airlines?

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/cnbc/50303179/

new york times columbine breaking news Google News Newton virginia tech shooting Bbc News