Exam Tips, Certification Exam Guides, Microsoft Exam Tips, CISCO Exam Tips: 08/03/13

Saturday 3 August 2013

Best Travel Pictures of 2013 Named

Photograph by Wagner Araujo

Competitors in the Brazilian Aquathlon run in Rio Negro in the winning image of National Geographic's 2013 Traveler Photo Contest.

"I photographed it from the water and my lens got completely wet, but there was so much energy in these boys that I just didn't worry about it," said photographer Wagner Araujo of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

National Geographic Traveler director of photography Dan Westergren, one of this year's judges, said: "This photo really captures my attention because of the peak action it depicts. I love the horizontal tension caused by the main subject on his way out of the picture to the right."

The 25th annual photo contest received more than 15,000 entries in four categories: Travel Portraits, Outdoor Scenes, Sense of Place, and Spontaneous Moments. (See all the entries.)

Published August 1, 2013

View the original article here

Moche Mural in Peru Revealed in Stunning Detail

In the bone-dry coastal desert of northern Peru, the ancient Moche sculpted and painted intricate murals on the adobe walls of the site now known as Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon). Created between A.D. 100 and 800, the images hold intriguing clues to a mysterious people who left no written texts to help explain their beliefs and customs.

Now, a composite photo in super high resolution has captured one of those murals in amazing detail, allowing anyone with a computer to zoom in for close-up views of individual figures. (Click here for the interactive version of the photo.)

Covering 200 square feet (19 square meters) in the corner of one of the temple's plazas, the polychrome relief vividly portrays scenes from the spiritual life of the Moche. Human sacrifice, for instance, was a common ritual in this culture. It's shown here in mid-action, with the perpetrator thrusting a weapon at the defenseless victim, who is splayed on his back. In other spots, warriors appear in various poses that must have held great meaning centuries ago—grasping an iguana by its tail, brandishing a weapon in each hand, and holding up a decapitated head. (See more pictures of a Moche sacrifice chamber.)

The mural includes many animals—fish and crayfish (presumably from the nearby Moche River), as well as snakes, scorpions, monkeys, foxes, buzzards, an unidentified feline, and dogs that appear to be barking. It also may show scenes from daily life—people capturing birds with nets, fishing from a kind of reed boat still used locally today, even smelting gold.

The Moche are known for their masterful ceramics and metalwork. Their intricate artifacts of gold are best known from the treasures uncovered in 1987 in the tomb of the Lord of Sipan, the richest unlooted grave found to date in the New World.

At Huaca de la Luna the wall with the wealth of motifs caught the eye of Fabio Amador—a senior program officer in National Geographic's department of research, conservation, and exploration—while he was visiting grantees in the field.

It seemed like the perfect subject for a gigapixel image, a panorama made of billions of pixels that capture every element in sharp detail. Using a process developed by GigaPan Systems, Amador took hundreds of photos with a camera mounted on a robotic tripod. Those photos were then stitched together seamlessly with proprietary software.

"I really wanted to get to the detail, the design elements, without losing their placement in the larger context of the mural," Amador says.

Archaeologists have been using gigapixel photography as a scientific aid since GigaPan was founded in 2008. The technology has helped record a Paleolithic site in southwestern France and the site of a Macedonian cult on the Greek island of Samothrace, for example.

Amador sees two large roles for gigapixel photography in this field: first, facilitating research by allowing experts to take a close look at sites anywhere in the world; and second, giving the public a heightened appreciation of those sites. "The modern archaeologist is capable of not only making the discovery, but also communicating to the world the beauty of the past," he says.

Excavations began at Huaca de la Luna long before archaeology was a modern discipline. When German archaeologist Max Uhle did the first work there between 1898 and 1899, it was more adventure than science.

Since 1991, an international team of experts has been studying the Huaca de la Luna murals in depth.

"We're still not sure of the significance of the complex themes," says archaeologist Santiago Uceda of Peru's Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, "but our working hypothesis is that they're intimately related to the Moche myths that gave rise to the ceremonies and rituals carried out in that sacred space."

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Excuse Me, Who Am I?

With no memory, ''Benjamin Kyle'' awoke beaten and naked in a Burger King parking lot in 2004. His identity remains unknown.

"Benjamin Kyle" awoke in the parking lot of a Burger King in 2004, naked, beaten and with no sense of who he was. To date, his real identity remains unknown.

Photograph by Imke Lass, Redux

In February, Michael Boatwright awoke in a Palm Springs, California, hospital unaware of who he was. Even though he had been admitted to the hospital with a U.S. passport and a California identification card, he spoke only Swedish and insisted his actual name was Johan Ek. Photos tracked down by hospital staff several weeks later showed he had lived in Sweden as a child.

A psychiatrist diagnosed Boatwright with transient global amnesia in a fugue state—a combination of two types of amnesia related to memory loss and confusion about one's location. But while transient global amnesia lasts only a few hours, a fugue state can last for years.

The term "fugue state" was first used in the 1901 French publication Mental State Hystericals. The word "fugue," which means "running away" or "flights of fancy" in French, was used to describe a young woman who would have "hysteric attacks" and then act like a different person. She could recount these actions only when under hypnosis. When the article was translated into English, the French word fugue was used—and it stuck.

"Fugue state" has migrated to pop culture as well: A British newspaper wrote in July that tennis player Novak Djokovic, "who's been visibly shaken and playing second-rate tennis for at least the last hour and a half, somehow slips into this silent-killer fugue state."

David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University, has worked with patients diagnosed with fugue state. He shared what is known about this rare disorder. (Related: "Remember This" in National Geographic magazine.)

So what exactly is a fugue state?

It's a form of amnesia in which the person forgets consciously various aspects of their identity. They often forget their current name, they forget their family connections, and they sometimes wander off and go on somewhere and start engaging in a new life for a while, without being consciously aware of who they were or where their previous friends or family [are]. It's a rare disorder, but it does happen.

I had one patient whose father had died, and he had a very conflicted [relationship with his] father and never really sorted it out. And he found himself on a plane going to England, which is where his father had been living before he died. And so it was an attempt to kind of revisit what had and hadn't happened in his relationship with his father but not one that he was consciously thinking through.

Why do they typically wander off instead of staying put?

The idea is that one of the stressors that may have triggered the fugue is something going wrong in the life they had before. So there may be conflict with a marital partner or trouble at work or getting into some kind of legal trouble.

So it may be that one way of resolving their conflict is to disappear and change identities.

What typically causes a fugue state?

There's usually some kind of life stress going on. They're in personal stress, marital problems, financial stress, legal problems. I know one case in which a woman found herself wandering around an army base ... even though she was not a soldier and didn't know who she was or why she was there. It turned out that her husband was on the base, and she had gotten letters from somebody who knew him claiming that he was having an affair. And so she found herself wandering around there.

They were reconciled, her fugue ended, so they got back together. So it can be that kind of acute stressor.

How rare is this condition?

This particular dissociative disorder is extremely rare, but I couldn't give you numbers. Most experts like me who treat people with this disorder have seen maybe five or six of them in their careers.

What does treatment usually involve?

It's actually a very difficult thing to treat. These people are often kind of stuck and don't particularly want to recover their earlier identity. I sometimes use hypnosis with them to try and get them to go back to a time before the change happened and see if they can recover memories of their earlier life and recover their identity. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

There's no particular medication that specifically helps with it. It's management and trying to get them to learn about their previous life and help them figure a way to deal with the stressors that might have led to the amnesic episode.

Was treatment different for this disorder back when you treated your first patient versus now?

I'd like to say we've advanced a lot, but no, it wasn't all that different.

Is there any way modern science is able to uncover more about this?

In theory we could be doing some functional neural imaging and trying to see if there are specific regions of the brain that are working. We know now that many forms of amnesia and fugue occur because of an imbalance in relationships between two parts of the brain: the frontal cortex that can inhibit response and the limbic system, particularly the hippocampus, where we store and retain memories. People with dissociative disorders [such as amnesia] tend to have hyperactivity in the frontal cortex and less activity in the limbic system and the hippocampus in particular. So it's a kind of inhibition of memories.

In theory, that's what is going on in these people. The problem is we don't have them before and after [in brain scans]. We [only] have them after they've got it. In the future we might be able to better understand and perhaps manage the imbalance between these two parts of the brain.

How so?

We're now developing ways to stimulate certain parts of the brain and perhaps inhibit others, so in theory it might be possible to influence function in specific regions of the brain that might tip the balance and help them recover their original identities.

How short or long can a fugue state last? Is there a range?

It can either be for a couple of days or it can go on for years.

Is it possible for someone to fake a disorder like fugue state?

It's possible if you're a good actor and know something about the disease, I suppose.

Does this mental issue affect one type of person more than others?

We really don't know. Most of the ones I've seen [with this disorder] proved to be very hypnotizable. Not everyone is. So it's easier for them to slip from one identity state to another.

What does it mean to be more hypnotizable? Do you need certain personality traits to be more hypnotizable than someone else?

High hypnotizables tend to be people who are very trusting of other people. They are more intuitive. They get easily absorbed in events. They get so caught up in a good movie they forget they're watching a movie. They often have a history of either positive imaginative involvements with parents and others or physical abuse. So they've learned to use their minds to detach themselves either in a positive way or from traumatic circumstances.

And that seems to be something that someone in a fugue state would do?

Right.

How much do our memories define who we are as people?

A great deal. It's our body of experiences, and if we can't remember those experiences then it changes who we are. We define ourselves based on how we interacted with people and who we know and how they react to us. So an impairment in memory is bound to be an impairment in identity.

Follow Harmony Huskinson on Twitter.

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Vandalized Lincoln 'Can Stand Adversity'

Yesterday police charged a 58-year-old woman with defacing a pipe organ at the Washington National Cathedral. She has been questioned about similar vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial and Smithsonian Castle last week.

All three locations were spattered with green paint, and police will test samples from each.

While the cost of the damage at the Lincoln Memorial has not been estimated, the removal and repair at the Washington National Cathedral could cost $15,000. It turns out that cleaning off paint from an artistic or historic icon is not as simple as grabbing a sponge and some dish soap.

National Park Service spokesperson Carol Johnson has been overseeing the cleanup at the Lincoln Memorial, where 90 percent of the paint has already been removed from the statue. She spoke with National Geographic about the conservation process.

Why is it so difficult to remove the paint?

Mostly because it is a historic icon that is made of white Georgia marble and has to be protected. We always start with the gentlest cleaner. We started with a first washing with water. Then we started using products that are conservator-approved. And this is all being overseen by an architectural preservationist.

Also, the workers are not just laborers. They're people who have worked on these taller memorials for years and years. We have to be very, very gentle with the stone so it isn't harmed at all. We leave the cleaner on for 24 hours, wash it off, see how it is, and then we go to the next level.

If you started with a stronger cleaner, would there be more of a risk to the stone?

Yes. We don't put anything on that we haven't evaluated and analyzed. All of that takes time.

What we're using right now is a substance that actually puts oxygen under layers of paint and then you can wash it off. Each layer is going to take some time. So they're going to have to do several applications to make it work.

What are the workers using now?

Right now they're using something called MasonRE. What they use is dependent on the stone. This is marble, but they also work on granite.

They brought this one in for this particular job. But they're evaluating other ones. And they've got to look at the literature, make sure they do tests on it before. So it's a very painstaking, deliberative process.

How do you test and analyze these products?

We wouldn't take something and test it on the statue. We would test it elsewhere to make sure it does what we want without harming the marble.

Is it tested in a lab?

That's done by the company that makes it and then we look at their test results. And a lot of this is stuff we've used in the past too.

How many people have been working on cleaning up Lincoln?

There's a lot of man-hours that have gone into this. Right now we have a special events crew putting up the finishing touches on the scaffolding. We have the preservation crew. We have an architectural preservationist. We have somebody doing historical photography. So it's a lot of man-hours.

Is vandalism of the memorials common?

We get graffiti in some places, but this one in particular is highly unusual, not only because of the location but because of the amount. Quite a bit of it was splashed on the statue.

What other famous monuments have been vandalized like this?

The Lincoln Memorial was vandalized in 1962, a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. There was a racial epithet put on the back of it in big pink letters. Generally the kind of things we clean are much smaller and not as serious.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Follow Harmony Huskinson on Twitter.

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Portable Brain-Scan Headsets: 4 Incredible Applications

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Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement National Geographic Society P.O. Box 98199 Washington, DC 20090-8199 USA 38.90531943278526, -77.0376992225647 800-647-5463 CELEBRATING 125 YEARS » Search National Geographic Searchnationalgeographic.com Search NationalGeographic.com Search Video Connect: Home Daily News The Magazine Maps Science Education Games Events Blogs Movies Explorers Apps Trips Video Video Home Nat Geo TV Nat Geo Wild Animals Kids News More Photography Photography Home Photo of the Day Galleries Wallpapers Photo Tips Photographers Your Shot Buy Prints Video Newsletters Animals Animals Home Facts Photos Video Animal Conservation Environment Environment Home Energy Freshwater Global Warming Habitats Natural Disasters The Ocean Newsletters Travel Travel Home Top 10 Destinations A-Z Trip Ideas Travel Blogs Traveler Magazine Photos Video Our Trips Newsletters Adventure Adventure Home Gear Ultimate Adventurers Trip Ideas Parks Photos Video Blog Nat Geo Trips AllTrails Newsletters Television National Geographic Channel Nat Geo Wild TV Schedule Shows Video Blogs Kids Kids Home Games Videos Animals & Pets Photos Countries Fun Stuff Community News Animal Jam Little Kids Subscribe National Geographic Magazine National Geographic Kids National Geographic Little Kids National Geographic Traveler Shop Store Home Genographic Kits Best Sellers New Kids Shop Gift Finder Channel Shop Sale Shop by Catalog Email Signup National Geographic Daily News HomeAnimalsAncientEnergyEnvironmentTravel/CulturesSpace/TechWaterWeirdNews PhotosNews VideoNews Blogs Portable Brain-Scan Headsets: 4 Incredible ApplicationsNew technology is moving brain research outside the lab and into the real world. The Emotiv Insight brain scanning headset.

The Emotiv Insight brain-scanning headset may help scientists understand the mind on the go.

Image courtesy Emotiv Lifesciences

Tan Le, Photograph from Australia Unlimited/National Geographic

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic

Published August 1, 2013

Our brain controls what we think, feel, and do, but scientists have a limited capability to watch it at work outside the lab. National Geographic Emerging Explorer Tan Le hopes to change that while, in the process, fighting neurological disorders, enhancing learning, and even helping the disabled move things in the physical world with the power of the mind.

Emotiv Lifesciences, the company Le co-founded, produces portable, high-resolution EEG (electroencephalogram) brain-scanning headsets that Le hopes will open new windows on the complex functioning of our brain. On August 1, Emotiv unveiled Emotiv Insight, a faster, next-generation wireless brain scanner that collects real-time data on the wearer's thoughts and feelings and delivers it directly to a computer, phone, or other device through Android, iOS, OSX, Linux, and Windows platforms.

Le hopes the product, which costs $199, can further democratize brain research and help scientists gather more data. Using the EEG headsets, she says, people around the world can study brains under conditions and stimuli as varied as those we encounter in everyday life—because subjects can wear the headset while doing everyday tasks.

"The idea is to empower us all to understand more about ourselves," Le said. "That's really the mystery of the mind."

She added, "It's all very, very personal. Sure, there are some commonalities in the way the brain functions. But what we know now with epigenetics [the study of how the expression of heritable traits is modified by environmental influences] is that every learning experience, every activity we undertake, actually affects our [neural] networks. Your brain yesterday is different than your brain today."

An EEG records the electrical fluctuations in the brain and tracks changes in activity as neurons fire when you are engaged in a cognitive task. It's a time-tested process, but traditionally its use has been limited to the lab and a subset of people because it's relatively costly and time-consuming.

What's needed instead, Le stressed, is as much data as possible on as many brains as possible.

"Until recently there's not been any sort of concentrated effort to collect EEG recordings on well individuals, and that really is an essential part of any sort of background study into abnormalities," Le said. "It's a classic case of science being very skewed toward studying the problem set."

So if we're interested in epilepsy we study patients with epilepsy. If we're interested in Alzheimer's we study patients with Alzheimer's, Le noted.

But with no idea what the norm is, she added, correlations or features that appear in these brains may be present in non-afflicted people as well.

Emotiv hopes to help create a massive digital repository of brain-scan information, as well as a platform for sharing brain data with interested parties around the world. With that information, researchers could send out experiments online and collect data from a wide range of subjects who wear the headsets while performing all types of directed tasks.

"It used to be that you sat in your lab and worked kind of independently of other people," said Kevin Whittingstall, the Canada Research Chair in Neurovascular Coupling and a professor at the University of Sherbrooke. "What we've realized is that the brain is so complex we need to start grouping together data sets to paint a better picture."

"What I think is very promising with the Emotiv system is that the hardware remains constant," added Whittingstall, who has no connection to the project. "With one hospital using one EEG system and another using another system, the electrode positions might be different, for example, and it's hard to integrate the data." (Read "Beyond the Brain" from National Geographic magazine.)

Here are four applications of the portable brain scanners that Le says are already beginning to take shape:

1. Moving Things With the Mind

The EEG headset has helped paralyzed patients control an electric wheelchair and make music via computer using only the power of their minds, said Le.

"The hope is that it's going to be more of a democratizing force, so that whether you are able-bodied or not you're still going to be able to communicate and interact with your world in a meaningful way," Le said during a recent trip to Washington, D.C., for the National Geographic Explorers Symposium. "And we're starting to see the first signs of that."

When patients think of an action—verbalizing a word, for example—the headset can record the brain patterns for that action into a computer via a wireless connection. Then, when the wearer repeats the action, the computer can perform it—allowing or facilitating communication, for example, among those who had lost some or all of that ability.

"I think it speaks to the power of software and algorithms to decipher and interpret electrical signals from the brain," Le said. "When you can start to interpret what's going on in the brain, you can extract unique features that then can help you use them as a command to trigger different events in a device or an application on some sort of computing platform."

The human-machine interface can be used for things as trivial as playing a video game, or as life changing as operating a prosthetic limb—and today's achievements represent only the tip of the iceberg, said Le.

2. Diagnosing Disease

Le stresses that because we lack a large, easily accessible database of "normal" brain data, we're likely missing opportunities to identify and track the causes of brain ailments from their earliest stages—when intervention might be less dramatic and more successful.

"A lot of these conditions are developmental in nature, meaning that you don't get Alzheimer's [or autism] overnight," she said.

Historically, Whittingstall added, most of our information regarding brain function was obtained by studying how damage to one particular area was linked to a cognitive deficit, such as language or memory impairment.

"With EEG, we can now start to non-invasively map out brain function so it enables you to record data from many subjects and improves the statistical power to detect the tiniest differences between experimental conditions," he added.

Le hopes the headset will not only help identify neurological conditions and study their progressions in the ever-changing brain, but also enable intervention.

"The brain is plastic; it's very capable of change, so if it's going down a route that we don't want it to go down, then let's do something about it and fine-tune how we intervene based on feedback from the brain itself," she said. (Video: Visit the Brain Bank at Harvard.)

3. Making Learning Easier

With EEG technology becoming more affordable, scientists and citizens alike can get a more complete picture of how each individual brain operates in real-world situations, ranging from social interactions to studying to intense physical activity, said Le.

"People are more and more interested in quantifying their physical health, and I think we're going to start seeing people more interested in quantifying their cognitive, behavioral, and mental health," Le said.

This window on how the individual brain works could also inspire personally tailored applications to help it learn better. "The value to the individual is that you can start to put together some sort of productivity profile for yourself," said Le. "When am I optimized to do some sort of creative brainstorm work?" she added, as an example.

Whittingstall agreed that such learning boosts could be part of the near-term future. "If you can monitor the brain as someone learns a language, for example, you might correlate their ability to learn through changes in their brain waves," he said.

"However, being able to actually put your brain into that state that's optimized for learning might be further off," he cautioned. (Related: "How Your Brain Cleans Itself—Mystery Solved?")

4. Organizing Data by Thoughts and Emotions

Le suggests that brain-scan information could one day be used to help people organize the avalanche of data, videos, images, audio, and other media that is steadily mounting.

"The first time you view an image [of something you experienced], you're going to have a very strong visceral response because you are reliving that moment," she explained, pointing to the example of watching a video of your child taking her first steps.

Because such images can have a strong emotional cue, there may be a way to label them with some kind of personalized emotional tag based on a brain scan, Le suggests. The concept could allow each of us to build a library of cherished video or images that are organized not just by date or location, but also by the emotional descriptions of what each of them produce in our own brains.

All these applications, exciting as they seem, represent a technology that's still in its infancy—and no one knows where it may lead. "There's no way to tell what the killer app is," Le said.

"The biggest job is to try to get as many people excited about the technology as possible so they can play with it, work with it, and expand it in their own areas of interest and their own passions," she said. "Hopefully we can find some great innovations as a result."

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