Hate Doing Math? 4 Awesome Apps to Make Your Life Easier ...

Does the idea of crunching numbers (or splitting a check amongst a group of friends) make you nervous? You may be scared for a good reason. According to new research from the University of Chicago, ?mathematics anxiety? can elicit a response in the brain comparable to experiencing physical pain.

Researchers scanned the brains of participants as they solved problems, some involving math. Surprisingly, researchers discovered that the anticipation of having to do math, and not actually the act of doing math, activated the pain sensor regions of the brain.

Study author Ian Lyons, PhD graduate in psychology from the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral scholar at Western University in Ontario, Canada, compares the response to getting a shot from your doctor. ?When you see the needle coming, you mentally shrink away,? explain Lyons. ?It?s the gut reaction of ?here?s a thing coming that will hurt me,? even though rationally you know it?s not true,? he says.

Essentially, if you have high math anxiety (meaning you have a tendency to avoid math-related situations), you only consider the negative aspect of doing math, which can feel very threatening, says Lyons. ?These individuals are simulating the worst-case scenarios?they can really only see math going badly?and that can fill them with a feeling of dread, which can be painful to a certain extent,? says Lyons.

So how can you lessen the blow? Lots of math homework probably isn?t the answer, says Lyons. The solution is to treat the anxiety itself, he explains, and reassess your approach to math entirely. Luckily, there?s an app for that.

For downloadable shortcuts to offset the math-related brain pain, we turned to our own smart phones, as well as Veronica Belmont, co-host of web show Tekzilla on Revision3.com, for recommendations. Here, 4 cool number-crunching apps to download today:

Bistromath
$.99 (iOS)
Not only does this app keep track of who owes what, you can also split items (in case you shared that order of sweet potato fries) and wirelessly enable your dining partners to help figure out the math.

Expensify
Free (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Palm)
Need to track your expenses remotely? You can scan receipts, log mileage, and consolidate everything into a report once you?re back at your computer. Plus it can do all the calculations for you.

Convert
$2.99 (iOS)
Converting units, whether it?s inches to centimeters, ounces to cups, fehrenheit to celcius, etc, is a pain in the butt. Convert handles it all seamlessely, and has a built-in calculator so you don?t have to switch back and forth between apps.

CheckPlease
Free (iOS, Android)
Stumped at how much to leave your server? This free app isn?t fancy, but it easily allows you to divide up the bill and the tip for your meal separately, so nobody overpays (or accidentally leaves a tiny tip) again.

Top image: iStockphoto/Thinkstock, App images: Courtesy of Apple

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Source: http://blog.womenshealthmag.com/thisjustin/hate-doing-math-4-awesome-apps-to-make-your-life-easier/

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NH residents cast first Election Day votes

DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H. (AP) ? Residents of two tiny villages in northern New Hampshire headed to the polls at midnight, casting the first Election Day votes in the nation.

After 43 seconds of voting, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney each had 5 votes in Dixville Notch.

In Hart's Location, Obama had won with 23 votes, Romney received 9 and Libertarian Gary Johnson received 1 vote. Thirty-three votes were cast in 5 minutes, 42 seconds.

The towns have been enjoying their first-vote status since 1948 and it's a matter of pride to get everyone to the polls.

Hart's Location Selectman Mark Dindorf says you could call it a friendly competition to see who gets votes tallied first, although he says Hart's Location is a town and Dixville Notch is a precinct.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-11-06-New%20Hampshire-First%20Returns/id-9d612084b5114ed7a2acf8d0692ad376

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Romney And Obama Tied, But Romney Leads Amin...

Tale of the Tape for Sunday, November 4, 2012:

Romney and Obama are tied, but Romney has a solid lead over Obama among white voters, who vote more and are more enthusiastic this year to vote. The figures include who have already vote and likely yo vote. So watch out for the Bradley and Wilder Effects!!!

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows the race tied with President Obama and Mitt Romney each attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide. One percent (1%) prefers some other candidate, and another one percent (1%) remains undecided. See?daily?tracking history. These figures include both those who have already voted and those likely to vote. Obama leads among those who have already voted, while Romney leads among those deemed likely to vote. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of voters are projected to be Democrats and 37% Republicans. Both candidates do well within their own party, while?Romney has a nine-point advantage among unaffiliated voters. One key to the outcome on Election Day will be the racial and ethnic mix of the electorate. In 2008, approximately 74% of voters were white. The Obama campaign has argued that this will fall a couple of percentage points in 2012 with an increase in minority voting. Others have noted the increased enthusiasm among white voters and the decreased enthusiasm among Hispanic voters and suggest that white voters might make up a slightly larger share of the electorate this time around. It is significant because?Romney attracts 58% of the white vote, while Obama has a huge lead among non-white voters.
If the white turnout increases on Election Day, it will be very difficult for the president to win. If it decreases, it will be very difficult for him to lose. Rasmussen Reports currently estimates that white turnout will be similar to the 2008 totals.--
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Syrian rebels capture oilfield near Iraqi border

BEIRUT (AP) ? Syrian rebels firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades captured an oilfield in the country's east on Sunday after three days of fierce fighting with government troops protecting the facility, activists said.

The head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Rami Abdul-Rahman, said rebels overran the Al-Ward oilfield in the province of Deir el-Zour near the border with Iraq early Sunday. About 40 soldiers were guarding the facility that the rebels had been pounding for the past three days, he said, adding that opposition fighters also captured several regime troops.

Oil was a major source of revenue for the cash-strapped regime of President Bashar Assad before the European Union and the United States imposed an embargo on Syria's crude exports last year to punish the government for its brutal crackdown on protesters early on in the uprising.

"This field used to supply the regime with fuel for its tanks and our aim was to stop these supplies," Omar Abu Leila, an activist in Deir el-Zour, told The Associated Press by telephone. He said there was heavy fighting recently near the oil facility that is located just east of the city of Mayadin.

Both activists said the rebels shot down a fighter jet near the oil field Sunday. It was not clear if the warplane was taking part in fighting in the area.

Abu Leila said that the oilfield had been functioning up until shortly before the rebels seized it. It was not clear whether the facility was damaged in the fighting or sabotaged by regime forces.

Analysts say the rebels would not benefit economically from capturing the oil filed, although the opposition's latest conquest could reduce crude supplies available to the government.

"It's another blow to Assad in terms of ... the oil available to him," said Robin Mills, head of consulting at Manaar Energy Consulting & Project Management in Dubai. The capturing of Al Ward is largely symbolic, Mills added. The rebels face serious challenges getting much ? if any ? of the captured oil to the market since the main export pipeline along the Mediterranean coast remains under government control.

"I don't see how they can export the oil that way," Mills said. "And even if they could, I don't see that anyone would pick up that oil."

In the past year, Syrian officials have repeatedly accused rebel units of targeting the country's infrastructure, including blowing up oil and gas pipelines in the energy-rich northeast of the country.

Syria exported some 150,000 barrels of oil a day before European and U.S. imposed sanctions took effect. In 2010, it earned $4.4 billion by selling to EU countries alone.

The uprising against Assad started with peaceful demonstrations in March last year, but has since morphed into a bloody civil war. Activists say more than 36,000 people have been killed in 19 months of fighting.

Damascus claims the opposition is part of a foreign plot to destroy the country, and accuses rebels of being mercenaries of the West and oil-rich Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have supplied the fighters with weapons.

On Sunday, state media said rebels detonated a car bomb near a major hotel in the capital, wounding several people. They also said the rebels ? the government refers to them as terrorists ? were behind the assassination of a leading member of the ruling Baath party in northeast Raqqa province.

The powerful car bomb shook the Dama Rose hotel and shattered much of its glass, according to an AP reporter at the scene. The hotel has been used in the past by U.N. observers visiting Syria, including the Damascus representative of the new U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, Lakhdar Brahimi.

State-run SANA news agency said the bomb weighted around 50 kilograms (110 pounds) and went off about 500 meters (yards) from the army chief of staff's building.

The pro-government Ikhbariyeh TV said the explosives were planted under a car, parked in an outdoor lot near the country's main labor union building. At least 12 people, all union members, were wounded by shattered glass, the organization's chief, Mohammad Azouz, told the AP.

In Raqqa province, gunmen broke into the home of Baath party official Ismail al-Hamadeh at dawn and sprayed him with bullets as he slept, according to a SANA report.

Elsewhere in Syria, activists said the army clashed with rebels in the northern cities of Idlib and Aleppo, as well as in Damascus and the southern border town of Daraa, where the uprising began.

In the Damascus suburbs of Harasta and al-Hajira, the army and opposition fighters exchanged heavy fire, killing a handful of rebels, SANA said. The fiercest fighting took place in Harem on the edge of Idlib, where 30 civilians were killed allegedly in clashes between rebels and the army, the agency said.

The Observatory said the Syrian army launched air strikes on rebel hideouts in Idlib's suburbs, mainly the strategic city of Maaret al-Numan, which rebels captured three weeks ago. Their presence in the city, along the main highway between Damascus and Aleppo, has disrupted the military's main supply route to the northern front.

____

Associated Press writers Bassam Mroue in Beirut, Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, and Adam Schreck in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-rebels-capture-oilfield-near-iraqi-border-153620004.html

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Putin in public after health rumors soar

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Climate modeler identifies trigger for Earth's last big freeze

ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2012) ? For more than 30 years, climate scientists have debated whether flood waters from melting of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet, which ushered in the last major cold episode on Earth about 12,900 years ago, flowed northwest into the Arctic first, or east via the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a frigid effect on global climate.

Now University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientist Alan Condron, with Peter Winsor at the University of Alaska, using new, high-resolution global ocean circulation models, report the first conclusive evidence that this flood must have flowed north into the Arctic first down the Mackenzie River valley. They also show that if it had flowed east into the St. Lawrence River valley, Earth's climate would have remained relatively unchanged.

"This episode was the last time the Earth underwent a major cooling, so understanding exactly what caused it is very important for understanding how our modern-day climate might change in the future," says Condron of UMass Amherst's Climate System Research Center. Findings appear in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Events leading up to the sharp climate-cooling period known as the Younger Dryas, or more familiarly as the "Big Freeze," unfolded after glacial Lake Agassiz, at the southern edge of the Laurentide ice sheet covering Hudson Bay and much of the Canadian Arctic, catastrophically broke through an ice dam and rapidly dumped thousands of cubic kilometers of fresh water into the ocean.

This massive influx of frigid fresh water injected over the surface of the ocean is assumed to have halted the sinking of very dense, saltier, colder water in the North Atlantic that drives the large-scale ocean circulation, the thermohaline circulation, that transports heat to Europe and North America. The weakening of this circulation caused by the flood resulted in the dramatic cooling of North America and Europe.

Using their high resolution, global, ocean-ice circulation model that is 10 to 20 times more powerful than previously attainable, Condron and Winsor compared how meltwater from the two different drainage outlets was delivered to the sinking regions in the North Atlantic. They found the original hypothesis proposed in 1989 by Wally Broecker of Columbia University suggesting that Lake Aggasiz drained into the North Atlantic down the St. Lawrence River would have weakened the thermohaline circulation by less than 15 percent.

Condron and Winsor say this level of weakening is unlikely to have accounted for the 1,000-year cold climate event that followed the meltwater flood. Meltwater from the St. Lawrence River actually ends up almost 1,900 miles (3,000 km) south of the deep water formation regions, too far south to have any significant impact on the sinking of surface waters, which explains why the impact on the thermohaline circulation is so minor.

By contrast, Condron and Winsor's model shows that when the meltwater first drains into the Arctic Ocean, narrow coastal boundary currents can efficiently deliver it to the deep water formation regions of the sub-polar north Atlantic, weakening the thermohaline circulation by more than 30 percent. They conclude that this scenario, showing meltwater discharged first into the Arctic rather than down the St. Lawrence valley, is "more likely to have triggered the Younger Dryas cooling."

Condron and Windor's model runs on one of the world's top supercomputers at the National Energy Research Science Computing Center in Berkeley, Calif. The authors say, "With this higher resolution modeling, our ability to capture narrow ocean currents dramatically improves our understanding of where the fresh water may be going."

Condron adds, "The results we obtain are only possible by using a much higher computational power available with faster computers. Older models weren't powerful enough to model the different pathways because they contained too few data points to capture smaller-scale, faster-moving coastal currents."

"Our results are particularly relevant for how we model the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice sheets now and in the future. "It is apparent from our results that climate scientists are artificially introducing fresh water into their models over large parts of the ocean that freshwater would never have reached. In addition, our work points to the Arctic as a primary trigger for climate change. This is especially relevant considering the rapid changes that have been occurring in this region in the last 10 years."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Massachusetts at Amherst, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Alan Condron and Peter Winsor. Meltwater routing and the Younger Dryas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1207381109

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_environment/~3/q2qLLD6K-ao/121105151332.htm

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China Communist Party Probes Premier Wen's Alleged Family Riches - Report

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