Paint Park (for PS Vita)

FourSquare, Netflix, and Twitter represent just a few of the free, fun downloadable programs in the PlayStation Vita's ($299, 4 stars) PS Store?Sony's own Paint Park (free) is now a member of that mix. Paint Park transforms the PS Vita's 5-inch OLED display into a sketchpad that lets you create doodles from scratch, mark up images taken with either of the PS Vita's cameras, and compete in ad-hoc drawing competitions with other Paint Park users that's an entertaining Draw Something alternative. I have a few niggles?such as the marker color selection being limited and the ability for players to vote for themselves in drawing matches, which may result in a high number of ties?but overall, Paint Park is a solid PS Vita app.

Grabbing the Paper and Markers
You can choose to "Paint Alone" or "Paint With Friends" upon launching Paint Park. I selected the former, which caused a dialog box to open that prompted me to "Enter A Room." I did, and encountered an all-white screen that moved me to think that the app froze or crashed. A dog-ear in the lower-right corner of the screen indicated that the blank screen was indeed the "canvas." Paint Park could use a more obvious "Start Drawing!" prompt to welcome users.?

Tapping the downward pointing triangle in the upper-right hand corner of the screen opens a menu containing a numerous options. I could undo strokes, delete a canvas, open a photo album to import images from my PS Vita, select one of four brush sizes, and choose a brush color. There are a dozen colors in total, but the range isn't as wide as I'd like; there's no true purple, but there are two blue and green hues. Also, I would like the ability to assign a color to individual markers to create a Crayola box of sorts; when you change the marker color, the color is change across all the brush sizes.

PlayStation Picaso
A finger is all you need to begin creating artwork. A magnifying glass appears onscreen to help you apply detail, but I had some difficulty coloring within lines and making fine edits due to my large fingers. I made a few quick doodles, including a very rudimentary Batman with the Gotham City skyline in the background (see slideshow).

One of the cooler features is the ability to incorporate real-world photos. Tapping the camera option on the menu lets you snap photos using either the PS Vita's front or rear-facing camera. You can then apply the markers to it as you would with a blank canvas. Flicking the dog-ear brings up a fresh canvas and saves your previous work to your memory card. Note: You'll need Sony's clunky Content Management software to download your creations off the PS Vita.

Take On Me
"Paint With Friends" lets five Paint Park users enter head-to-head competitions (in ad-hoc local wireless play) to see who can create the best art. A player creates a room in which the content is held, and a subject (such as "PCMag.com"?see slideshow), or just let Paint Park choose a topic for the participants. All involved have a limited amount of time to draw the topic or photo. All drawings and photos are displayed on-screen after the timer expires, and everyone has the opportunity to vote for the best image.

Unfortunately, you can vote for yourself, so there may come times when the match ends in a tie should the individual parties think they're truly the best (or just want to troll their friends). Several of my three-person contests ended in ties.

An Artistic Endeavor
Paint Park isn't a "must-have" PS Vita app, but it's one that comes in handy when you want to kill time in a waiting room or during a commute. For some laughs, gather a few PS Vita owning friends together and compete?just don't take the outcomes too seriously.

More Console Games Reviews:
??? Paint Park (for PS Vita)
??? Silent Hill HD Collection
??? Mass Effect 3
??? Journey
??? FIFA Soccer 12
?? more

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Britney Spears' Home Sells For $4.25 Million


Britney Spears has agreed to sell her Beverly Hills estate for $4,253,000, which is pretty impressive considering the palatial pad was listed at $2,995,000.

Since Britney is under a conservatorship, the probate process could have meant a hearing which essentially turned into a bidding war. But it won't.

Britney's father and lawyers didn't want to risk losing the buyer and asked the judge to cancel the hearing. They got their wish, and the sale is final.

Britney Spears' House

The house, of course, is the site of her infamous meltdown in early 2008, during which police arrived and she was placed on a 5150 psychiatric hold.

Fortunately, that also marked the beginning of her career turnaround.

Even though Spears got significantly more than the asking price, she bought the estate in 2007 for $6.8 million. Darn you, California housing market.

On the flip side, she's reportedly making $15 million for The X Factor this fall, and earns more than $800,000 a month from music and other sales.

She'll live.

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Ex-PM cleared of major charges in Iceland crisis trial

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Iceland's former prime minister was found innocent on Monday of three major charges of negligence related to the country's 2008 economic collapse, and guilty of a smaller count that carried no prison sentence.

The verdict by a special court was seen by many as little more than a slap on the wrist for Geir Haarde, the only leader in the world to face prosecution over the global crisis. He had faced up to two years in prison if found guilty of the more serious charges, including neglecting to deal with an overblown banking sector.

Haarde looked on and showed no visible emotion as the 15-judge court issued its verdict, convicting him of failing to hold dedicated cabinet meetings ahead of the crisis. About 70 people, including his family and political supporters, attended the session.

Moments later, he told reporters that the judges had tried to appease a public opinion angry at a political elite perceived as fostering an unsustainable banking system that grew to 10 times Iceland's GDP just before the meltdown.

"It is absurd," a furious-looking, red-faced Haarde said.

"It is obvious that the majority of the judges have found themselves pressed to come up with a guilty verdict on one point, however minor, to save the neck of the parliamentarians who instigated this," he added.

Outside the court, a protester banged on a pot, in a repeat of the gesture that Icelanders carried out at the height of the crisis in the streets outside parliament. The protests were the biggest ever seen in Iceland, occasionally turning violent in a nation renowned for its peaceful nature.

All of Iceland's top banks went under in 2008 just days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which led to a freeze on global interbank lending. The country's crown currency nosedived and many Icelanders who had taken out foreign currency loans found themselves saddled with even bigger piles of debt.

Despite the anger, many Icelanders say the 61-year-old Haarde, generally seen as a decent person who was too soft in his role as prime minister, should not have been the only politician put on the stand.

"He was the captain on the bridge, but there were more ministers," said Arni Einarsson, a pensioner. "The politicians thought that Iceland was like the Titanic - unsinkable."

"NOT UNIQUE"

Prime Minister Johanna Sigurdardottir, who served in Haarde's cabinet during the boom years that preceded the crisis, said the verdict had taken her by surprise.

"I never thought the charges were sufficient to warrant the indictment and subsequent trial," she told state television.

Haarde said that while his government could have done something different in the run up to the island's worst-ever crisis, he doubted he could have stopped it.

"Look at what the leaders of the central banks of the U.S., the UK have said repeatedly - they didn't see this crisis coming. The IMF didn't see this crisis coming," he told Reuters after the verdict, which was broadcast live on TV.

"Look at what is happening in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy. Our situation is not unique."

Haarde, who had pleaded innocent to all charges, said he is considering taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Eirikur Bergmann, political science professor at the Bifrost University north of the capital, called the ruling "a slap on the wrist".

"He's not convicted on any of the charges leading up to the crisis - sponsoring the system that proved unsustainable," said Bergmann. "It is an in-between ruling to calm both sides of society."

Though the economy is recovering from the crisis and Iceland successfully completed a bailout program led by the International Monetary Fund, people remain distrustful of state institutions. Polls show that parliament has the support of only 10 percent of the public.

Capital controls remain in place, damaging the economic recovery.

(Writing by Alistair Scrutton, additional reporting by Omar Valdimarsson in Reykjavik and Anna Ringstrom and Niklas Pollard in Stockholm; Editing by Alessandra Rizzo)

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Many MSPs Still Lack Solutions for Backup and Recovery ...

While half of MSPs are planning to offer an offsite backup and recovery solution, the majority have not taken steps?to support their plans, according to a?recent informal survey conducted by?Modular Data Protection Services?(DPS) Inc, a company that works with cloud data protection. Modular DPS surveyed resellers of Intel AppUp Small Business Service from ?Intel Corp.

After surveying a range of MSPs, Modular DPS ?found that remote monitoring and management services was the first most popular focus area for MSPs (55.6 percent). Disaster recovery and business continuity planning came in second with 44.4 percent, while offsite data backup and recovery services placed in third with 42.1 percent.

Also, out of the 50 percent of MSPs that offer disaster recovery and business continuity planning services, only 26.3 percent of them also offer offsite data backup and recovery services. A statistic of this measures leaves us with questions. What does that means for today?s market, and how does that affect MSPs as a whole?

Modular DPS has introduced the?Modular 360 Partner Program, which?provides partners and their customers with a turnkey data protection solution that combines the necessary data protection software, materials, service document templates, and ongoing support. The solution?also includes access to the Intel AppUp?Small Business Service, which runs on the Intel?Hybrid Cloud Platform.

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Bacteria Talk, Plants Listen: The Discovery of Plant Immune Receptors, an Interview with Pamela Ronald

A series of graduate student conversations with leading women biologists, at the Women in Science Symposium at Cornell April 2-3.

Prof. Pamela Ronald, a Professor in Plant Pathology at University of California, Davis and director of Grass Genetics at the Joint Bioenergy Institute, studies genes that control the plant response to stress.

In her presentation for the Frontiers in Life Sciences symposium at Cornell University, Ronald described the isolation of a novel bacterial signal that is key to bacterial communication. In a process called quorum sensing, bacteria use this molecule, called Ax21, to communicate with each other, essentially transforming these single celled organisms into a coordinated team of fierce invaders. Remarkably, the rice XA21 receptor can detect these small molecules. That detection triggers a robust defense response. As she said, ?Bacteria talk, plants listen.?

In 1995, the Ronald Laboratory isolated and characterized the XA21 immune receptor (Song et al. Science 1995; Lee et al., Science 2009). Subsequent discoveries in flies (Lemaitre et al., 1996), humans (Medzhitov, et al. 1997), mice (Poltorak et al, 1998), and Arabidopsis (Gomez-Gomez, 2000) revealed that animals and other plant species also carry membrane-anchored receptors with striking structural similarities to XA21 and that these receptors also play key roles recognition of microbial signatures and host defense (Ronald and Beutler, Science 2010). The importance of this work is reflected in the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Beutler and Hoffman, who discovered the animal receptors.

Ronald?s team also led the isolation of a gene, Sub1A, that makes rice tolerant to flooding for over 2 weeks. This is a vast improvement over the two or three days that most conventional strains can tolerate. In flood-prone regions, submergence tolerance is critical for survival of this staple food crop and to the people who depend on it for sustenance. Her collaborator, David Mackill, has now introduced Sub1 A into six different varieties using a marker assisted breeding approach. In 2011, 1 million farmers grew Sub1 rice.

Not one to shy away from a chance for discussion, Ronald has been around the world engaging the public on the importance of science-based approaches to issues of food security, organic farming, and plant genetics. Together with her husband, organic farmer Raoul Adamchak, Ronald co-wrote the book Tomorrow?s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. This book, and the blog that followed, are accessible accounts of genetics, food and farming and the importance of sustainable agriculture.

I had the opportunity to interview Prof. Ronald following her talk. I asked what prompted her to write Tomorrow?s Table, both the book and the blog. ?I was frustrated with the quality of information available to the public,? she responded. ?If scientists could directly communicate with the public, there would be less distortion of science.? Dr. Ronald fits blogging around her research, busy grant-writing schedule, and a revision of the book. This kind of communication is particularly important as the debate about the role of GE foods continues, more than 15 years after the introduction of the first GE crops.

I also asked Ronald how she started on the Sub1 project. ?David Mackill approached me about the project when he was still at UC Davis,? Dr. Ronald explains. Mackill knew of a long-abandoned strain of rice from India that could tolerate extended periods of submersion, and he had found the general region of the genome that conferred this trait. ?I had recently isolated XA21 using a positional cloning approach and Dave asked me to use the same approach to isolate Sub1. We thought if we could isolate the gene for submergence we could introduce it into varieties favored by farmers using marker assisted breeding or genetic engineering. We applied for a grant from the USDA who funded our work to isolate the gene. My laboratory led the cloning and demonstrated that Sub1A encoded a master regulator, a transcription factor.?

Mackill?s group led the breeding. He crossed the ancient strain with locally adapted rice varieties, and used markers from the Sub1 genomic region to track the introduction of Sub1 into the resulting progeny. The advantage of this approach is that he could select for progeny that carried the Sub1A gene. This ?precision breeding? process also reduces the transfer of undesirable traits, like reduced yield and poor taste, that are difficult to screen out through conventional breeding approaches. The gene isolation and precision breeding approach successfully produced Sub1 varieties that have been embraced by farmers in India and Bangladesh.

How does one get to be a scientist that saves lives? Issues of social justice and food security came up often throughout Dr. Ronald?s career path. Her key decision, she says, came at the transition from graduate student to post-doc. Initially, she focused on plant?microbe communication because she loved the science and also because she saw potential to reduce the use of pesticides. As she chose her post-doctoral position, she switched from working on tomatoes and peppers to working on rice. It was there, in a crop feeding half of the world?s people, that she saw even greater potential for her science to contribute to the public good and enhance food security.

As a Plant Biology graduate student myself, I had to ask what drew Ronald to plant sciences in the first place. The turning point, Ronald says, was an early moment when she discovered one could even build a career out of studying plants. Backpacking with her brother and a friend through California?s Sierra Nevada range, she came across a teacher and his student, botanists, with their noses buried in a field guide. Early exposure to science, and a family that fostered an appreciation for learning and the outdoors, are recurring themes among the life scientists that I know, myself included. Prof. Ronald?s efforts to reach out to the public herself carry on this tradition by increasing public exposure to science and scientists.

When I asked her advice for junior scientists interested in communicating with the public, Dr. Ronald replied: ?Of course, the love of science always comes first. Just practice communicating, keep reading and listening to other good science communicators. Think about your audience and keep dropping the technical lingo. It takes a lot of time, but there?s a great science writing community. After a while you just get sucked in.?

Previously in this series:

Serendipity and Science: 30 Minutes with Dr. Sharon Long
The Co-Evolution of Insects, Plants and a Career
Empirically dancing your way to the top ? How Nicole Dubilier does it!
From babies to baboons: one woman?s path to success
At home underwater and on land: a conversation with Dr. Mary Power

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Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Image

In case you missed it, Part I of this article can be found here

Last week's Switched On discussed the Slacker Portable, Sony eMarker and TrafficGauge, three dedicated devices that didn't make it but saw their functionality ultimately realized via smartphones. But there have been other idea for which the idea ultimately proved popular as smartphone bits rather than separately packaged atoms.

Continue reading Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2

Switched On: When the smartphone giveth, Part 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alicia Douvall Wants Everyone To Know She Banged Simon Cowell

Alicia Douvall Wants Everyone To Know She Banged Simon Cowell

Former model Alicia Douvall didn’t appreciate being left out of a book about Simon Cowell’s life and ladies. Douvall claims she had a six month [...]

Alicia Douvall Wants Everyone To Know She Banged Simon Cowell Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News


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