Memory Strengthened by Stimulating Key Site in Brain

"The entorhinal cortex is the golden gate to the brain's memory mainframe," explained senior author Dr. Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Every visual and sensory experience that we eventually commit to memory funnels through that doorway to the hippocampus. Our brain cells must send signals through this hub in order to form memories that we can later consciously recall."

Fried and his colleagues followed seven epilepsy patients who already had electrodes implanted in their brains to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. The researchers monitored the electrodes to record neuron activity as memories were being formed.

Using a video game featuring a taxi cab, virtual passengers and a cyber city, the researchers tested whether deep-brain stimulation of the entorhinal cortex or the hippocampus altered recall. Patients played the role of cab drivers who picked up passengers and traveled across town to deliver them to one of six requested shops.

Need for a shield against financial contagion

The capital market of Bangladesh has seen its worst in recent times. In the frontier of multivariate assumptions and perceptions, we believe that there are lessons to be learned from the mistakes and more importantly, reforms have to be initiated to avoid a financial contagion.

The term financial contagion was first coined in July 1997, when the currency crisis (better known as the Asian Crisis) in Thailand quickly spread through East Asia. The term derived through its medical inference, talks about small shocks that initially affects particular sectors of the economy or financial intermediaries but eventually affects the entire economy.

We would like to bring in context certain events of the Asian Crisis that affected the emerging economies in 1997. We will similarise certain events of the crisis with the Bangladeshi stockmarket in terms of money flow and policy phenomena.

This is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, Bangladesh has been identified as an emerging economy for the next decade and therefore, learning from the development of previous emerging economies and reformation is to our benefit.

Secondly, the Bangladesh stockmarket has already faced such recession and the economy has started to show a phenomenon that was common to the pre-crisis events of those economies.

Furthermore, we will put forward some of the extra ordinary policy and project reformations that have taken place in countries like Thailand and Malaysian stockmarket for the betterment of their whole economy. The intent is to shield Bangladesh from a stockmarket debacle in the future because of flawed vision and policy. The next decade of economic growth has to be facilitated by the capital market, not hindered by it.

Being labelled as an emerging economy is a positive note for all of us. But the question will remain as to whether we are prepared to handle the growth process or not. Without dynamic management of regulations, the economy can easily suffer as the stockmarket has suffered from policy wise inertia. In such cases, Bangladesh will not be the first or a unique case either. Countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and South Korea faced the Asian Crisis in 1997 for similar reasons while playing the role of emerging economies in those times. In the early 90s, when these countries enjoyed GDP growth of 8 percent-12 percent, they were called by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as 'Asian Miracles'. In those times, there were certain events that can be considerable, although we should keep in mind that these are cursory descriptions rather than a fully comprehensive analysis.

Bank Alfalah group CEO in town

Atif Bajwa, the newly appointed group chief executive officer of Bank Alfalah, arrived in Dhaka yesterday on a two-day tour, the bank said in a statement.

During the visit, Bajwa will meet the employees of the bank, regulators and valued clients.

Bajwa has over 29 years of international banking experience and has worked in Europe, US, Far East, the Middle East and Pakistan.

He started his career with Citibank as a corporate banker in 1982 and handled different assignments with Citi in Pakistan, New York, Bahrain and Central and Eastern Europe.

He also worked with ABN AMRO Bank, Mashreq Bank and MCB Bank, according to the statement.

Printed stickers could monitor food and vaccines

A plastic temperature-recording sticker that could provide detailed histories of crates of food or bottles of vaccine would be the first to use all-printed electronics componentsincluding memory, logic, and even the battery. The cost per sticker could be only 30 cents or less.

Thin Film Electronics, based in Oslo, Norway, aims to marry the company's printed memory with printed transistors from PARC in Palo Alto, California; a printed temperature sensor from PST Sensors, a spin-off from the University of Cape Town in South Africa; and a printed battery from Imprint Energy, a spin-off from the University of California, Berkeley. The first prototype using all the components is expected later this year.

"There are lots of efforts in academia and research where they play with printing electronics," says Janos Veres, who manages the printed electronics team at PARC. What's new is "somebody trying to do it commercially and figuring out what are the first things you can make with 10 or 20 bits of memory and a simple battery," he says. "We need a library of different building blocks that are made by the same standard manufacturing process to get this ecosystem working."

The envisioned product will be designed to work either with a printed display or a contact readout, and include a battery that can last six to nine months, allowing the sticker to make a continuous record of temperature. Existing temperature sensor stickers that cost just pennies offer a crude measurementusing a chemical reaction to change color when they hit certain thresholds, alerting to possible spoilage.

At the higher end, systems that can record exact temperatures over long periods of time, and store this data for either display or retrieval, cost $15 to $25 or more, and are limited to high-value items or pallet-sized shipments.

Jennifer Ernst, a Thin Film Electronics vice president, says the mix of materials, substrates, and printing technologies is still in development. "To the best of my knowledge, it's the first time a set of companies have announced a plan to put a fully integrated system together," she says. If it all works out and the performance is reliable, "we can achieve cost targets that silicon systems just can't touch," she adds.

Angelic "Steve Jobs" loves Android in Taiwan TV ad

He may have derided Android devices in real life but in the afterlife Apple Inc founder Steve Jobs is glad he can use one -- or at least that's the story a Jobs look-alike tells in a recent TV commercial for a Taiwanese electronics company's new product.

In the ad, Taiwanese comedian and impersonator Ah-Ken, dressed in Jobs' trademark black turtle neck sweater and blue jeans and sporting white angel's wings and a halo, extols the virtues of Action Electronics Co.'s combined tablet PC and multi-language dictionary, which runs on Google Inc's Android.

"Introducing the new generation of the pad," says the "Jobs" character, whipping the Action Pad out of his back jeans pocket, wings flapping as he shows off the dictionary functions on a giant screen behind a darkened stage furnished with a sofa and small table.

"Thank God I finally get to play other tablets," the character adds in the 20-second commercial's final scene, a broad grin on his face as he taps away on the device on the sofa. The ad is subtitled in English throughout, a nod to the device's dictionary function.

Jobs, who died in October 2011, famously referred to Android as "shit," according to his biography, and was quoted in the book as saying he was going to "destroy" Android and was prepared to go to "thermonuclear war" over the product.

The commercial does not use Jobs' name or refer to him or Apple in any way, but has drawn some sharp reactions on YouTube, with some branding it distasteful and disgusting and one even calling for a boycott of the company.

Chen didn't see any adverse reaction from Apple

IBM brings smarter computing for Bangladeshi companies

IBM has unveiled smarter computing solutions that help clients in Bangladesh transform, grow and become more competitive.

A wide range of workload-optimisation hardware solutions, such as IBM Storwize V7000, IBM Starter Kit for Cloud and IBM BladeCenter blade servers were presented at the IBM Smarter Computing Forum.

Tailored to the local market needs through business partners like Thakral, these smarter computing solutions bring the benefits of improved economics and business performance to Bangladesh clients.

IBM introduced its Smarter Computing approach to information technology (IT) last year as a way for organisations to realise greater efficiencies, improved reliability and better performance, all at a lower cost.

This strategy centres around three fundamental aspects leveraging analytics to exploit vast amounts of data for business goals, utilising optimised systems that are designed for specific tasks; and managing as much of the IT as possible with cloud-computing technologies.

"Smarter Computing is an approach within reach. These forward-thinking organisations in Bangladesh are indeed poised for greater successes through innovation. We are excited about the opportunity to assist our clients in Bangladesh, as they build globally competitive businesses”, said Subram Natarajan, executive, Technical Computing & Systems Solutions Centre, IBM India, South Asia.

From dorm room to Nasdaq: Facebook's meteoric ascent

Facebook on Wednesday filed to raise $5 billion in an initial public offering. Here are a few highlights of its meteoric rise, several of which were chronicled in David Fincher's seminal Oscar-winning 2010 movie, "The Social Network":

October 28 2003 - Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard psychology sophomore, writes "Facemash," a website that asked users to judge students' attractiveness based on their dorm-directory photos. The authorities -- and many students -- were not amused.

February 4 2004 - Zuckerberg launches Thefacebook.com, a social network that allows users to create basic profiles including personal information and photos.

February 10 2004 - Harvard students Cameron Winklevoss, Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narenya send Zuckerberg a cease-and-desist letter, accusing Zuckerberg of independently developing thefacebook.com while he was hired to work on their social networking project, HarvardConnection.

June 2004 - Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist, invests $500,000 in Facebook.

May 26, 2005 - Accel Partners, the venture capital firm headed by investor Jim Breyer, invests $12.7 million in Facebook, valuing the company at roughly $100 million.

October 24, 2007 - Microsoft Corp announces that it purchased a 1.6 percent share of Facebook for $240 million, giving the company a total implied value of around $15 billion.

April 7, 2008 - Facebook settles with the founders of "ConnectU", the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra, for a purported $65 million, according to promotional material later published by ConnectU's lawyers.

May 26, 2009 - Russian investor Yuri Milner's Digital Sky Technologies invests $200 million for a 1.96 percent stake, bringing Facebook's value down to $10 billion.

June 3, 2010 - Zuckerberg sweats profusely as he takes questions about Facebook's privacy policy while onstage at the All Things Digital conference. The episode, which the Twittering classes dubbed a "Nixon Moment," renewed questions about Zuckerberg's viability as the CEO of a company rumored to go public soon.

June 30, 2010 - In one of the more bizarre twists in Facebook's history, New York businessman Paul D. Ceglia files suit against Zuckerberg, claiming he had struck a deal with the founder in 2003 for half of Facebook's revenue and rightfully owned 84 percent of the company. Three successive lawyers withdrew from his legal team within a period of four months in late 2011. The litigation remains ongoing.

October 10, 2010 - Columbia Pictures releases "The Social Network," a film about Facebook's beginning, directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin.

January 2, 2011 - Facebook raises $500 million from Goldman Sachs and Digital Sky Technologies in a deal that valued the company at $50 billion.

January 2011 - Goldman controversially markets as much as $1.5 billion worth of Facebook shares to its private investors, but withdraws the offer from American clients on January 18 following intense media coverage and scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The offer was withdrawn because of accusations that it ran afoul of regulations prohibiting share-placement sponsors from aggressively promoting a deal to potential investors.

November 29, 2011 - Facebook agrees to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived users on what information it would keep private. The incident underscored how user concerns about privacy were spurring top-level government scrutiny of Silicon Valley.

January 25, 2012 - Trading of Facebook shares is halted on the secondary market as rumors of an impending IPO gain steam.

February 1, 2012 - Facebook files its Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking to raise $5 billion in a highly anticipated IPO.

Runway Great pleasure, great sadness…

It is with great pleasure mixed with great sadness that we are here today to announce the upcoming Dhaka release of Tareque Masud's last film “Runway”, February 10th to 21st at the National Public Library. Great pleasure of course because it is a long-awaited moment for us, over one year having passed since the premiere show of the film in October 2010. Great sadness, because Tareque himself cannot be here with us today to share this moment.

Tareque was always a trailblazer in whatever he did, and the release of “Runway” was no different. From the outset, he decided to adopt a radically different approach to releasing the film, bypassing mainstream commercial distribution channels and taking the film himself to the far reaches of the country. The capital Dhaka was to be the last stop in Runway's journey. His reasoning was that with the demise of the cinema hall network throughout the country, the only effective way to reach audiences was through parallel distribution, and priority should be given to the cinema-deprived audiences outside the capital city. And so he became the “cinema feriwallah”, taking Runway first to Chittagong on Dec. 16th, 2010, then on to Sylhet, Khulna, Rajsahi, Kushtia, Mymensingh, Sirajganj, Narail, and Faridpur among other places. Then, after August 13th, as Tareque would have wanted, Runway's journey continued onwards, to Manikganj, Jessore, Rajbari, Bhanga, Netrakona, Barisal, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Comilla…

And so at last we come to Dhaka, later than we would have planned, and with a different mood as well. Now it is not just the release of Runway that we bring to Dhaka, but along with it a special tribute to Tareque Masud and his creative partner, cinematographer Mishuk Munier, who died with him on that fateful day. Therefore we have included in our screening programme the last three works they made together: along with “Runway”, also the short fiction “Naroshundor”, and the 2-minute “Ekush”, on International Mother Language Day.

In some way it is appropriate that this release programme takes place in the month of February: as we remember the martyrs of Ekushey, we can also remember these martyrs of cinema, Tareque, Mishuk and their other three production team members, Mustafiz, Wasim, and Jamal. May they all rest in peace, and may their dreams of better cinema, and a better world, live on forever.

Release details: February 10th-21st, 2012
Venue: Public Library Auditorium
Showtimes: 3 shows daily 3pm, 5pm and 7pm.
Only Feb. 21st: 5 shows at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, 5pm and 7pm.

Antoni Tàpies Spanish abstract painter, dies at 88

Antoni Tàpies, a Spanish abstract painter whose seductive tactile surfaces, often scratched with mysterious graffiti-like marks, made use of unconventional materials like marble dust, ground chalk, sand and earth, died on February 6 in Barcelona. He was 88.

Tàpies came to prominence in the late 1940s with richly symbolic paintings strongly influenced by Surrealist painters like Miró and Klee, a style he abandoned by the mid-1950s as he turned to what became his signature work: the heavily built-up surfaces that were often scratched, pitted and gouged and incised with letters, numbers and signs.

Using a wide variety of materials, on canvases and boards that often suggested walls, doors, windows or gates, he grounded his work in the brute reality of the Spanish street and in the turbulent political dramas of his youth in Catalonia, including the Spanish Civil War and the Catalan nationalist movement.

The rich, painterly textures and sober use of color in his “matter paintings” lent a moving solemnity the critic John Russell referred to their “seignorial dignity” to works that “seemed to have been not so much painted as excavated from an idiosyncratic compound of mud, sand, earth, dried blood and powdered minerals.”

Tàpies chafed at being characterised as an abstract painter. At the same time, he refused to explicate the tantalising scratches, letters and crosses that seemed to offer the viewer a text. His dreamlike symbols, fished from the soup of the unconscious, suggested an ancient language waiting to be deciphered, but Tàpies declined to assist.

Tàpies was born in Barcelona on December 13, 1923. His father was a lawyer and Catalan nationalist who served briefly with the Republican government.

At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis. He spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art that had already expressed itself when he was in his early teens.

To please his father, he enrolled in the University of Barcelona to study law, but he continued to produce art and for two months studied drawing at the Valls Academy. With the Catalan poet and playwright Joan Brossa, he founded Dau al Set (The Seven-Spotted Die), a progressive arts magazine, and, at an exhibition of his work in Barcelona, became friends with Miró, a decisive influence. In 1954 he married Teresa Barba Fàbregas. They had three children, Antoni, Miguel and Clara.

Mars an unlikely place for life?

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet's surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analysing individual particles of Martian soil. Dr Tom Pike, from Imperial College London, will discuss the team's analysis at a European Space Agency (ESA) meeting on 7 February 2012.

The researchers have spent three years analysing data on Martian soil that was collected during the 2008 NASA Phoenix mission to Mars. Phoenix touched down in the northern arctic region of the planet to search for signs that it was habitable and to analyse ice and soil on the surface.

The results of the soil analysis at the Phoenix site suggest the surface of Mars has been arid for hundreds of millions of years, despite the presence of ice and the fact that previous research has shown that Mars may have had a warmer and wetter period in its earlier history more than three billion years ago. The team also estimated that the soil on Mars had been exposed to liquid water for at most 5,000 years since its formation billions of years ago. They also found that Martian and Moon soil is being formed under the same extremely dry conditions.

Satellite images and previous studies have proven that the soil on Mars is uniform across the planet, which suggests that the results from the team's analysis could be applied to all of Mars. This implies that liquid water has wbeen on the surface of Mars for far too short a time for life to maintain a foothold on the surface.

Dr Pike, from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial, who is lead author on the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, explains:

"We found that even though there is an abundance of ice, Mars has been experiencing a super-drought that may well have lasted hundreds of millions of years. We think the Mars we know today contrasts sharply with its earlier history, which had warmer and wetter periods and which may have been more suited to life. Future NASA and ESA missions that are planned for Mars will have to dig deeper to search for evidence of life, which may still be taking refuge underground."

During the Phoenix mission, Dr Pike and his research group formed one of 24 teams based at mission control in the University of Arizona in the USA, operating part of the spacecraft's onboard laboratories. They analysed soil samples dug up by a robot arm, using an optical microscope to produce images of larger sand-sized particles, and an atomic-force microscope to produce 3D images of the surface of particles as small as 100 microns across. Since the end of the mission, the team has been cataloguing individual particle sizes to understand more about the history of the Martian soil.

In the study, the researchers looked for the microscopic clay particles that are formed when rock is broken down by water. Such particles are an important marker of contact between liquid water and the soil, forming a distinct population in the soil. The team found no such marker. They calculated that even if the few particles they saw in this size range were in fact clay, they made up less than 0.1 percent of the total proportion of the soil in the samples. On Earth, clays can make up to 50 percent or more of the soil content, so such a small proportion in the Martian samples suggests that the soil has had a very arid history.

They estimated that the soil they were analysing had only been exposed to liquid water for a maximum of 5,000 years by comparing their data with the slowest rate that clays could form on Earth.

The team found further evidence to support the idea that Martian soil has been largely dry throughout its history by comparing soil data from Mars, Earth and the Moon. The researchers deduced that the soil was being formed in a similar way on Mars and the Moon because they were able to match the distribution of soil particle sizes. On Mars, the team inferred that physical weathering by the wind as well as meteorites breaks down the soil into smaller particles. On the Moon, meteorite impacts break down rocks into soil, as there is no liquid water or atmosphere to wear down the particles.

This research has received support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council; the Danish Research Agency; the Wolfermann-Nägeli Foundation, Switzerland; the Space Center at EPFL, Switzerland; the Swiss National Science Foundation; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.