So I came up with a simple three step process to download all the images on a given page easily.

1. Save the html source of the Flickr.com page.

2. Give the source to this C++ code and get download links to all images.

3. Download all the images using FlashGet.

PS: If someone could write a Java script of this C++ code and write a wrapper to automatically get the HTML source, the above can be reduced to just one step.

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Original article appeared here.

Image credit: Sourav Banerjee

The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other.

"When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. Kosik, co-director and Harriman Chair in Neuroscience Research, at UCSB’s Neuroscience Research Institute. Kosik is a leading researcher in the area of Alzheimer’s disease.

"One of the most important processes is that the synapses — which cement those memories into place — have to be strengthened," said Kosik. "In strengthening a synapse you build a connection, and certain synapses are encoding a memory. Those synapses have to be strengthened so that memory is in place and stays there. Strengthening synapses is a very important part of learning. What we have found appears to be one part of how that happens."

Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins. Those proteins build the synapse and make it stronger. Just like with exercise, when new proteins must build up muscle mass, synapses must also make more protein when recording memories. In this research, the regulation and control of that process was uncovered.

The production of new proteins can only occur when the RNA that will make the required proteins is turned on. Until then, the RNA is "locked up" by a silencing molecule, which is a micro RNA. The RNA and micro RNA are part of a package that includes several other proteins.

"When something comes into your brain — a thought, some sort of stimulus, you see something interesting, you hear some music — synapses get activated," said Kosik. "What happens next is really interesting, but to follow the pathway our experiments moved to cultured neurons. When synapses got activated, one of the proteins wrapped around that silencing complex gets degraded."

When the signal comes in, the wrapping protein degrades or gets fragmented. Then the RNA is suddenly free to synthesize a new protein.

"One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you need to have proteins degrade and also make new proteins," said Kosik. "You have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis to occur. That’s the elegant scientific finding that comes out of this."

The scientists were able to see some of the specific proteins that are involved in synthesis. Two of these — CaM Kinase and Lypla — are identified in the paper.

One of the approaches used by the scientists in the experiment was to take live neuron cells from rats and look at them under a high-resolution microscope. The team was able to see the synapses and the places where proteins are being made.

Provided by UC Santa Barbara

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According to the official statement “Google Goggles works best on books & DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text. Right now, it’s not so good at pictures of animals, plants, cars, furniture, or apparel”.

It does not surprise me that Google has developed this application. What is most interesting is how quickly Google has transformed ongoing research into a product. It was only a few months back that I read the Google paper on landmark identification, and here it is neatly bundled into an application.

My interest in Computer Vision and object recognition also makes me wonder as to how the folks at Google were able to make all this work at such a large scale. The paper I reference above provides clues but the transforming the said research into an application has some serious data flow problems. One answer can be inferred from the statement quoted above. The user has has to specify a category before with the search image. Meaning there is some case specific optimization involved. If this is true, the image search problem in the general case is still un solved!

Here are some links:

http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

http://www.google.com/googleblogs/pdfs/google_landmark_recognition.pdf

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The situation is even worse with Facebook messages. Recently, I received a message in my inbox that was sent to a number of people. Soon the conversation digressed and a debacle of senseless messages followed. While some participants enjoyed, other recipients were getting their inboxes flooded. As it happens the only way to continue a conversation over Facebook messages is to reply to all recipients. If a recipient gets tired, there is no way for them to ‘untag’ themselves from the thread. These poor people have to live with this nuance for the rest of their Facebook lives.

So, I present this question to the readers. Why is it that Facebook ties you to a message for ever that you did not choose to receive in the first place, without providing you a way to prevent people from sending you such messages?

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Listed below are 10 best Adsense plugins which help you work smarter with wordpress.

• Adsense Deluxe – offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Easily switch all AdSense ads to a new color scheme across the entire site.
• Adsense Injection – inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog. Takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let�s you pick how many to show on single post pages.
• Adsense Inline – inserts Google adsense in blog posts.
• Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin – allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template. Set it up to show different Adsense ads for articles older then ‘n’ days. E.g. insert a 468�60 ad at the bottom of a new article for regular readers, and replace with higher paying 336�280 ad after 7 days for the search engine visitors.
• Adsense Beautifier – makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings. (May not be compliant with Adsense TOS now)
• AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
• AdRotator Wordpress Plugin – rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
• Adsense Earnings Wordpress Plugin – displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
• AdSense Manager – is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.
• AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System – allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
• Author Adsense Wordpress Plugin – allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author�s ads to admin ads.
• Author Adsense MU Plugin – Webmasters of Wordpress MU sites can generate adsense revenue from hosted blogs as this script allows you to set an admin ID and the ratio of admin ad�s to blogger�s ads.
• Google Ad Wrap – wraps posts and comments inside Section Targeting tags for better targeted ads.

Support and upgrades are provided by the respective authors of these wordpress plugins. Use at your own risk. If you know of more Adsense wordpress plugins you like, let me know in comments and I can add them to the list.

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Here is a brief introduction.

Mr. Abedi founded BCCI FAST in 1980 with a donation of Rs. 100 million, to promote education in computer science. It is now the first multicampus university of Pakistan, known as National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences. It has four campuses situated in Islamabad, Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore.

GIK University was also the brainchild of Mr. Abedi. He felt that Pakistan should have another university for higher education, at Ph.D. level, for engineering and sciences and it should be comparable to universities in any developed country.

A legendary banker was born on May 14, 1922, in Lucknow. He has undoubtedly enlightened the financial panorama with the radiance of his vision and zeal. This revered personality is none other than Agha Hassan Abedi who spent his early life in Lucknow. He acquired his post-graduate degree in literature but adopted banking as his profession. He beautifully fused the mundaneness of banking with a high level of human intellect and carved a scenic landscape of innovation and ingenuity. 
Agha Hassan Abedi started his banking career with Habib Bank Limited in Bombay and served the institution till 1957. He parted amicably from Habib Bank on a dispute of ‘principle’ and in 1959 laid the foundations of afinancial institution named United Bank Limited in collaboration with the Saigols. 
United Bank Limited has achieved significant milestones and had expanded to a network of over 600 branchesnationwide with more than a dozen overseas branches. It emerged as the second largest bank of the country and remained a formidable competitor to Habib Bank till its nationalisation in 1974.
When nationalisation of financial institutions was looming on the anvil, Abedi set up a bank in Luxembourgcalled BCCI with the help of Bank of America, the royal family of the UAE and other Middle Eastern countries. The Ramazan war of 1973 brought to the international forefront "oil as a weapon" which translated into a lucrative resource generating a stream of income for the Middle East for many decades to come. Consequently the region was flushed with abundance of petro dollars. This aroma reeked of the perfect ingredients to attract international banks to indulge in the scrumptious deal of managing the excess bounties of petro-dollar-loaded Arab states.
The highly acclaimed pioneer of the then strikingly notable Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) broadened the purview of the bank by instituting it in 73 countries the world over in less than two decades. It even bagged the position of the sixth largest bank in terms of country network against the difficult competition posed by global banks.
The bank was shut down… in fact forcibly closed by a college of regulators. The bank was highly liquid, but not comfortably profitable. It didn’t suffer from any non-treatable financial malaise unknown to the global banking industry, but that it was shut down was more a consequence of the interplay of diabolical political and regulatory suspicion. 
Agha Hassan Abedi was an articulator of new management concepts. He exhibited the depth of his soul by speaking on compassion, empathy, humility, interdependence, tolerance, forbearance and interfusion. He took the role of a great leader; he also played the part of a mentor for his staff, an inspiration to the entire financial sector, envy to the competitors, awe to the peers and an addition to the list of great leaders. Amongst the innumerable conferences that he convened, I recall how fresh he was when he called the day’s proceeding to an end at 3:00 am in Athens, Greece, having promptly started the meeting at 10:00 am the previous day.
As management trainees we always referred to him fondly as "Agha sahib". He brushed shoulders with top political leaders belonging to the US, the USSR, China, India, Pakistan and the UAE and for many of them he acted as a financial and economic consultant. He spoke of Corporate Social Responsibility in the late 70s. He helped President Jimmy Carter in the establishment of Carter Centre, including the setting up of ‘Global 2000′ which dedicated itself to the underprivileged and downtrodden citizens of the third world. He personally supported many charities globally. Abedi sahib, you were great and will remain so in the fond memories of many.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Sirajuddin Aziz

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Basic PC Laws

Let’s start with Nerve Central–the computer.

Law 1: For every fix that a Windows Update patches, the update will break two more things on your PC. –Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 2: The likelihood that Windows will automatically install time-sucking critical updates is directly proportional to your need to get your PC started. –Steve Fox, PC World

Law 3: The hard drive always fails just before you were going to back it up. –Denise Paolucci, Dreamwidth Studios via Help A Reporter Out (HARO)

Law 4: Your data will get corrupted just before you plug in your new backup external drive. –Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 5: Your backup plan is only as good as your last successful restore. –Michael Fisher, ElephantDrive.com via HARO

Law 6: The number of USB ports on your Mac will always be one less than you need at any given time. –Blair Hanley Frank, Macworld

Law 7: Feeling time pressure to make a computer fix quickly will cause you to take longer. –David Marshak, via PC World Facebook page

Law 8: If you close the PC case with screws before testing, it won’t work; If you test before closing, it will. –Harry Liebman via HARO

Tech Support Rules

Now that you’ve mastered the basics, you’re ready to move on to Tech Support.

Law 1: Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you’ll be tech support for life. –Danny Allen, PC World

Law 2: Build a computer for someone, and he/she owns you! –Louis Farbstein, via PC World’s Facebook page

Law 3: Recommend a product that you’ve used with no problems, and the friend/family member who buys it will immediately descend into RMA [product return] hell. –Scott Keck, via PC World’s Facebook page

Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company’s IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you. –Lars Jacobsen, via PC World’s Facebook page

Law 5: If it’s broken and you call tech support, it will fix itself while you’re on hold. –Brenda Christensen, Public Relations, Servoy.com via HARO

Internet Ordinances

You can find a world of trouble online. For instance…

Law 1: Within a month of agreeing to be "friends" with your boss on Facebook you will regret it, big time. –Tom Spring, PC World

Law 2: The crappier the Web site, the sleazier (and sketchier) the ads. –Tom Spring, PC World

Law 3: When entering "Captcha" verification codes on a Web site, you’ll always type in the numeral 1 when the site wants a lowercase L, and a capital O when the site wants the number 0. –Steve Fox, PC World

Law 4: Just before taking out the boss in a WoW raid, your Internet connection will die. –Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 5: The difficulty involved in redeeming a rebate is directly proportional to the dollar value of the rebate. –Tom Spring, PC World

Law 6: A nasty draft e-mail will always find its way to the (unintended) recipient. –Brian X. Chen

Precepts of Mobile Tech

Desktop technology isn’t the only source of inevitable woe in your life. All those shiny mobile devices can cause pain, too, since the freedom of untethered technology doesn’t extend to immunity from rank on rank of frustrating unalterable laws. We report 10 master Mobile Laws here.

Law 1: The charger for your current cell phone will not work with the next cell phone you buy. –Kimberly Brinson, PC World

Law 2: Your laptop’s charger weighs half of what your laptop weighs. –Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 3: A laptop battery will drain at twice its normal rate whenever you leave home without your power cord. –Kimberly Brinson, PC World

Corollary: Your laptop’s battery life is inversely proportional to the amount of work you need to get done on a single charge. –Blair Hanley Frank, Macworld

Law 4: Your iPod or iPhone will be on its last burst of power just as the plane door shuts. –Anne B. McDonald, PC World

Law 5: A replacement battery charger will cost 70 percent of the original purchase price of the device. For phones, the figure is 140 percent! –Robert Strohmeyer, PC World

Law 6: Your cell phone will inevitably break before your two-year contract is up, forcing you to overpay for a new, less-cool model. –Lauren Barnard, PC World

Law 7: The proprietary charging plug (cost to produce: 50 cents) for your device will disappear within two weeks and will cost you $40 to replace. –Darren Gladstone, PC World

Law 8: On any vacation, the memory card for your digital camera will be safely lodged in the card reader on your desk at home. (And the camera’s proprietary battery will be dead, with the charger sitting next to the card reader.) –Anne B. McDonald, PC World

Law 9:

A cup of coffee on your desk is guaranteed to render your laptop utterly useless. –Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 10: Your MagSafe adapter will always come unplugged precisely when you need to charge your Mac laptop’s battery. –Nick

Software Statutes

Finally, if entanglements with hardware principles don’t leave you bound and gagged, there are always software standards to render you helpless.

Law 1: Your software provider’s online support pages contain explicit instructions for troubleshooting every conceivable problem–except yours. –Mark Sullivan, PC World

Law 2: Nine times out of ten, tinkering with your Registry to fix a system issue will create a new problem that’s more severe than the original. –Travis Van, ITDatabase via HARO

Law 3: Ten times out of ten, downloading a spyware product will create hidden processes/services more insidious than the original malware/adware encroachment you set out to stop. –Travis Van, ITDatabase via HARO

Law 4:

The performance increase you can expect from running a Registry cleaner can be calculated as z(n + y), where n is the number of Registry entries cleaned, y is your system CPU’s clock speed in gigahertz, and z = 0. –Robert Strohmeyer, PC World

Law 5: The larger the number of people who want your iPhone app, the likelier Apple is to reject it. –Nick Mediati, PC World

Law 6: iTunes will crash. That’s it. No, really. –Darren Gladstone, PC World

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Tool Bag Lost In Space Meets Fiery End

A tool bag lost by a spacewalking astronaut last year met its fiery demise in Earth’s atmosphere Monday after months circling ever closer to the planet.

The $100,000 tool bag plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

"Based on its size and composition, we expect the object to completely burn up before hitting the Earth," center officials said in a statement.

The tool bag was lost during a Nov. 18 spacewalk at the International Space Station. In addition to the Joint Operations Space Center, amateur skywatchers also tracked the bag as it silently circled the Earth.

Center officials did not immediately have a specific time and location for the tool bag’s ultimate demise, but a Sunday report by the Web site Universe Today predicted the wayward space satchel would hit the Earth’s atmosphere at about 9:16 a.m. EDT (1316 GMT) over the Pacific Ocean, just west of Mexico.

Lost in space

The tool bag weighed about 30 pounds (14 kg) and was about the size of a small backpack. It contained grease guns, trash bags and a scraper tool.

Former NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost the bag during a November spacewalk to repair a balky solar array joint on the International Space Station as part of NASA’s STS-126 shuttle mission. A grease gun leaked inside the bag, which apparently wasn’t secured properly, and it drifted free while Stefanyshyn-Piper was trying to clean up the mess.

"There was that split second thinking that, maybe I can go jump for it and grab it. Then I realized that it would just make everything worse and then we’d have two floating objects, one of which would be me," Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a televised Nov. 19 interview from space the day after losing the bag. "So the best thing to do was just to let it go."

Stefanyshyn-Piper, an active captain in the U.S. Navy, retired from NASA’s astronaut corps last month to return to her Navy duties.

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In ongoing war between the two rivals, Google takes to the streets

In the latest shot fired in Google Inc.’s ongoing battle with Microsoft Corp., Google announced today that it’s taking this fight to the streets.

Literally.

Google is kicking off a month-long ad campaign for its online suite of enterprise office applications. The campaign will have the search giant leasing billboard space in four major U.S. cities — New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Each work day will have a different message for commuters to take in.

The move comes less than a week after Microsoft announced it is partnering with Yahoo on a search and online ad deal. The two companies announced that they had finalized negotiations on a long-anticipated deal that will have Microsoft’s Bing search engine powering Yahoo’s sites, while Yahoo sells premium search advertising services for both companies.

The deal is geared to hit Google with a united force much greater than either Microsoft or Yahoo could muster alone. Individually, neither company has much of an effect on Google and its overwhelming search market share. Together, though, they hope to at least make a dent.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc., noted that while Microsoft is busy going after Google’s search market, Google is using the billboard campaign it go after Microsoft’s bread-and-butter Office suite.

"Each company is targeting the other right now," said Gottheil. "They’re laying the groundwork for what they both see as an inevitable collision in the future. Right now, neither company is deriving much revenue from its presence in the other’s space… Microsoft is more vulnerable because they must cannibalize some of their current application revenue to expand their application market, where Google only has to maintain a rough technical equivalence with Microsoft to maintain its search franchise."

Google’s ad campaign and Microsoft’s deal with Yahoo are just the latest moves in this ongoing fight between industry giants.

In June, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, an update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. And with Microsoft’s advertising power and a lot of media attention behind it, Bing has shown strong numbers just out of the gate. But with only 8.23% of the market, Bing has done little more than nibble away at Google share, which is just over more than 78% of the search market.

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Microsoft’s Bing gained a single point of market share in July, bringing its total to 9.41 percent, according to a new report by StatCounter. The recent partnership deal between Microsoft and Yahoo has given both companies hope that they can challenge Google, which currently holds a double-digit lead in the search market. Under the terms of the partnership, Bing will power search on Yahoo sites, while Yahoo takes over worldwide sales duties for the companies’ search advertisers.

Microsoft’s share of the U.S. search market increased to 9.41 percent in July 2009, a rise of 1 percentage point, according to research firm StatCounter. At the same time, Google’s share of the U.S. market slipped during the same period to 77.54 percent, down by nearly a point, while Yahoo declined a fraction of a point, from 11.04 to 10.95.

StatCounter’s report came days after the July 29 announcement of a partnership deal between Microsoft and Yahoo: that 10-year agreement that will see Microsoft’s Bing power Yahoo’s search engine, while Yahoo assumes exclusive worldwide sales duties for the companies’ search advertisers. Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TACs) to Yahoo at an initial rate of 88 percent of search revenue generated on Yahoo’s sites.

The deal represents a recognition on both companies’ part that the only way to break Google’s lock on the search and online advertising market may be through working together. According to StatCounter’s report, a combined Microsoft and Yahoo search would have a 20.36 percent market share.

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