RolePlayGateway?

In order to be able to give us the chance for varied play and more powerful enemies, I've decided to revamp the way the Saiyans in this RP will increase in strength after each battle. Obviously, this is going to be done because if we're to reach the level of Super Saiyan anytime in the foreseeable future (which requires a power level of 1,000,000 at minimum), we'll need to beef up much faster. So, here goes nothing! If you have suggestions I'd be glad to hear them.

Obviously, these new calculations will make the inequalities in power much more prevalent, but that's where we will all have to work together and tolerate each other's differences as we continue through the RP.

As a final note, all categories include recuperation time in their calculations. None of these calculations take place immediately after battle. Using Grisha and Trish as examples, if they were given time to fully recuperate after their fights then Blaze wouldn't stand a chance against either of them. Also, victorious battles against named enemies do not stack. Obviously, if they did stack, Blaze would multiply his base power of 1030 by 29.9 bringing it all the way up to 30,797. Not quite fair, is it? So yeah, they don't stack. Only the most relevant calculation will be used, and in Blaze's case, that will be his fight with Jagoda.

(OPL - Original Power Level)

Category 1 - Victory

* Participation in (but not directly responsible for) victorious battle against named enemy = OPL * 5.3
* Victory in Battle (Random Enemy/ies) = OPL * 3.2
* Victory in Battle (With another cast member) = OPL * 7.6
* Victory in Battle (Named Enemy) = OPL * 11.5

Category 2 - Defeat (Obviously, thanks to Saiyan DNA, these will be much higher than victory calculations)

* Defeat in Battle (Random Enemy/ies) = OPL * 9.7
* Defeat in Battle (With another cast member) = OPL * 12.4
* Defeat in Battle (Named Enemy) = OPL * 16.8
* Near Death Defeat (Any Circumstance) = OPL * 25

Category 3 - Training

* Random = Random Number generator provided in the link below will be used to determine what your increase is and will be given a range determined by your base power level. Obviously, the higher your base power level, the smaller the range.
- http://www.random.org

* Special Training = Special Training is now a calculation which will become realized through direct discussion with me. You will contact me via a private message and make your initial request based on what you think would be fair and what you think your character should be able to accomplish given their location, equipment, and wether or not they have a training partner.

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RolePlayGateway

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Ex-National Geographic photo chief Gilka dead at 96

(Reuters) - Robert Gilka, director of photography for National Geographic magazine for 22 years and a mentor to leading photojournalists, died on Tuesday at age 96, the National Press Photographers Association said.

He died in hospice care in Arlington, Virginia, following his third case of pneumonia this year, the NPPA said, citing photojournalist Bruce Dale.

"There is laughter and there are tears because Bob touched so many lives in remarkable ways," Chris Johns, National Geographic's editor in chief, told News Photographer magazine. "He encouraged us, set standards of excellence and instilled in us the desire to become better photographers and editors."

Many photographers considered him a legend for how he ran the photo operation at magazine renowned for its spectacular images.

In 2006, the Alexia Foundation, which promotes photojournalism, honored him with a lifetime achievement award.

Gilka was head of the Milwaukee Journal's picture desk starting in 1952 and joined the staff of National Geographic in 1958 as a picture editor, the NPPA said. He was named photography director in 1963 and retired from National Geographic in 1985.

After leaving the magazine, he was an adjunct professor of photojournalism at Syracuse University until 1992, the NPPA said.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in New York; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ex-national-geographic-photo-chief-gilka-dead-96-010950436.html

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Your cat isn't totally ignoring you -- really!

Cats

Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News

6 hours ago

technewsdaily.com

Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers, a new study finds

Cats may try to hide their true feelings, but a recent study found that cats do actually pay attention to their owners, distinguishing them from all other people.

The study, which will be published in the July issue of Animal Cognition, is one of the few to examine the cat/human social dynamic from the feline's perspective. Cats may not do what we tell them to, but they usually adore their human caretakers.

Co-author Atsuko Saito of The University of Tokyo explained to Discovery News that dogs have evolved, and are bred, "to follow their owner's orders, but cats have not been. So sometimes cats appear aloof, but they have special relationships with their owners."

NEWS: Cats Adore, Manipulate Women

"Previous studies suggest that cats have evolved to behave like kittens (around their owners), and humans treat cats similar to the way that they treat babies," co-author Kazutaka Shinozuka of the University of South Florida College of Medicine added. "To form such baby-parent like relationships, recognition of owners might be important for cats."

Their study, mostly conducted in the homes of cats so as not to unduly upset or worry the felines, determined just that.

The researchers played recordings of strangers, as well as of the cats' owners, to the felines. The cats could not see the speakers.

PHOTOS: Panthers On The Prowl

The cats responded to human voices, not by communicative behavior- such as by vocalizing or moving their tails -- but by orienting behavior. In this case, "orienting" meant that the cats moved their ears and heads toward the source of each voice.

The felines also, at times, displayed pupil dilation, which can be a sign of powerful emotions, such as arousal and excitement. Other studies have found that natural pupil dilation can be directly tied to brain activity, revealing mental reactions to emotional stimuli.

All of these reactions happened more often when cats heard their owners, and particularly after they had become habituated to, or familiar with, the strangers' voices.

The feline reactions are therefore very subtle, but cats have evolved not to be very demonstrative.

Cats, for example, hide illness because "in the wild, no one can rescue them and predators pay attention to such weak individuals," Saito said. Even though a watchful owner would try to save the cat, the feline's gut reaction is to remain stoic and avoid any possible threat at a time of vulnerability.

Felines may be hard to read sometimes, but not always. Saito said some of the cats during the study and elsewhere have "fawned over me eagerly," purring and displaying affection familiar to many other feline fanciers.

The researchers point out that, after 10,000 years of cohabitating with humans, domestic cats have the ability to communicate with us, and we seem to understand them, for the most part.

Humans who have never owned or been around cats much can pick up basic feline emotions solely by the sound of certain purrs and meows, Saito said. In studies, such people can classify the cat vocalizations according to particular situations.

Kazuo Fujita is a researcher in the Department of Psychology at Kyoto University who has also studied cats.

Fujita told Discovery News that "this is an important study" on how cats think, "which has remained mysterious due to difficulties in testing them."

Source: http://feeds.nbcnews.com/c/35002/f/653377/s/2dd79a23/l/0L0Snbcnews0N0Cscience0Cyour0Ecat0Eisnt0Etotally0Eignoring0Eyou0Ereally0E6C10A463618/story01.htm

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Voxer Transforms Into A Walkie-Talkie Service For The Business ...

Voxer is making its entrance into the business world with a set of new high-end features for its walkie-talkie style, push-to-talk service.

Voxer Pro and Voxer Pro For Business run on Android and iOS devices just as with the standard service. If unfamiliar, the Voxer?service is an app for sending voice and text messages. Download the app, import your contacts and then start sending messages. It?s somewhat ideal for this asynchronous world. The messages can be sent without having to make a call in order to talk on the phone. That may seem impersonal but it is a bit like keeping a correspondence with someone.

The standard app is free. Voxer?Pro is $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. New features include an interrupt mode and, the one I love, extreme notifications, which come in as loud repetitive alerts. Voxer?Pro Business costs $4.95 per month per user until?October 1 when the price will increase to $9.95 per month per user.

Voxer?Pro Business ?also has what the company calls Voxer?Pro Manager, a desktop business communications system that provides administration control and visibility into the company?s network with a real-time map with geo-tagged location to help manage employees.

The Voxer service has amassed millions of users since its launch in 2011. It always seemed to me a bit simple and I wondered how much it would last. But how wrong I was. Apparently it has been the intent all along to offer Voxer as a business service. And what a smart move it is proving to be. In combing through all of its data, Voxer has found thousands of people who are using Voxer for their work. As Liz Gannes wrote today, about 21,000 Mary Kay Cosmetics sales people use the service. That shows how deeply voice messaging can spread into society.

It reminds me of my interview yesterday with Carlin Wiegman, the co-founder of Biba, a conferencing and messaging service. Wiegman sold his company, CubeTree, to SuccessFactors in 2010. He explained that the enterprise social networking technology developed by CubeTree, Yammer and the others in the market did very well but they all capped at tens of millions of users. He attributed that to the lack of adoption outside of the young worker set accustomed to using activity streams to message each other. But voice and text messaging has a much deeper market reach. Texting reaches hundreds of millions of people. Messaging systems have that same potential.

Just look at Voxer. In a few years it has amassed tens of millions of users. Social networking services inside the business world have taken years to reach anything near that kind of user base.

And so Voxer surfaces an interesting possibility. Is messaging the killer social enterprise app? If so, then you can expect a swarm of competitors attack this space.

But the big target for Voxer is Nextel, which has amassed a fortune with its walkie-talkie-style service. Nextel represents the old-school heavyweight enterprise systems that integrate proprietary devices for communications. Voxer is replacing the hardware with software, available across any device.

Then there are the Microsoft Lyncs and Skypes of the world, along with Cisco and the tens of thousands of apps from the Twilio ecosystem. There are even the likes of services such as Twello, the Twitter-based voice messaging platform.

It?s a crowded field but Voxer looks like it?s off to a smart start, using messaging for those everyday uses of the modern workday.

We founded Voxer with a vision to make voice communications more useful. The team behind Voxer played significant roles in building the Danger Sidekick and the Google Android platforms and worked for Apple, Google and Samsung. Voxer is a Walkie Talkie application for smartphones. Voxer lets you send instant audio, text and photo messages to your friends (one or more!). Messages stream live as you talk and your friends join you live or listen later. Voxer is available for iOS and...

? Learn more

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/25/voxer-transforms-into-a-walkie-talkie-service-for-the-business-world/

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Wall Street to climb at open on central bank comments

By Chuck Mikolajczak

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks were poised for a higher open on Tuesday, indicating the S&P 500 may stem its recent slide after comments from central bankers in the U.S. and China eased recent concerns about a credit crunch and an end to stimulus measures.

The People's Bank of China said it would not press banks too greatly in its efforts to curb easy credit as it sought to ease worries of a possible banking crisis.

The S&P 500 on Monday closed at its lowest level since April 22 after China's central bank said the country's banks need to do a better job of managing their cash and due to continued worries about a reduction in stimulus measures from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

But equities pared losses late in the session after two Fed officials downplayed the notion of an imminent end to monetary stimulus. The benchmark S&P index has fallen 4.8 percent since the Fed signaled last week that it may begin to lessen stimulus should its economic forecasts hold true, including a 1.4 percent drop the day of the announcement.

"Equities have had a healthy pullback. Ultimately, the Fed exit should be good for equities but it's going to be a difficult transition," said Troy Gayeski, Partner and Senior Portfolio Manager at SkyBridge Capital in New York.

Adding support was data showing durable goods orders increased 3.6 percent in May, above the 3 percent forecast, the latest signs of a pick-up in economic activity.

S&P 500 futures rose 12 points and were above fair value, a formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract. Dow Jones industrial average futures gained 92 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures added 21.75 points.

The S&P/Case Shiller composite index of house prices in 20 metropolitan areas gained 1.7 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis, topping forecasts for 1.2 percent, indicating the housing recovery continues to gain momentum.

New home sales data for May is expected along with June consumer confidence at 10 a.m. (1400 GMT). Economists in a Reuters survey forecast home sales at a total of 462,000 annualized units compared with 454,000 in April. Consumer confidence is expected to show a reading of 75.4 against the 76.2 announced in May.

Lennar Corp climbed 4.6 percent to $36.60 in premarket trade after the No. 3 U.S. homebuilder reported a 53 percent jump in quarterly revenue as it sold more homes at higher prices, and said orders rose 27 percent.

Walgreen Co fell 6.4 percent to $45 in premarket trade after reporting weaker-than-expected results, citing slow front-end sales and a challenging economy.

Barnes & Noble Inc slumped 10.2 percent to $16.90 before the opening bell after the largest U.S. bookstore chain reported its quarterly net loss more than doubled.

(Reporting by Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Kenneth Barry and Nick Zieminski)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/wall-street-climb-open-central-bank-comments-132025198.html

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Pats player Hernandez taken from home in handcuffs

ATTLEBORO, Mass. (AP) ? New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez was taken from his home in handcuffs Wednesday morning, more than a week after a Boston semi-pro football player was found dead in an industrial park a mile from Hernandez's house.

Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, was found slain June 17. Officials ruled the death a homicide but did not say how Lloyd died.

Lloyd's relatives said he was dating the sister of Hernandez's fiancee, that the two men were friends and that both men were out together on the last night of Lloyd's life.

It's unclear why Hernandez was being taken into custody Wednesday before 9 a.m. and put into the back of a police cruiser. He was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt, with his arms inside the shirt and behind his back as he was led from his North Attleborough home. He casually spit into some bushes on his way to the car.

Hernandez was arrested on a state police warrant and was being booked at the North Attleborough police station, state police said on the agency's Twitter account. State police said they won't discuss the charge against Hernandez until it's presented in Attleboro District Court later Wednesday.

The Associated Press emailed a message to his attorney, Michael Fee, who hasn't discussed the investigation beyond acknowledging media reports about it. A message also was left with the Bristol County district attorney's office.

Lloyd's mother, Ursula Ward, declined to comment at her Boston home Wednesday morning.

"Nothing to say, please. Thank you," she said, before shutting the door.

A Patriots team spokesman said Monday morning that the team had no comment.

State police have searched in and around Hernandez's sprawling home in North Attleborough several times. At least three search warrants have been issued in connection with the investigation.

Reporters have been camped for days outside the home on the Rhode Island line, not far from the stadium where the Patriots play. They reported Tuesday that Hernandez got a visit from Boston defense attorney James Sultan.

The Patriots drafted Hernandez, who is originally from Bristol, Conn., out of the University of Florida in 2010. Last summer, the team gave him a five-year contract worth $40 million.

Patriots spokesman Stacey James has said the team did not anticipate commenting publicly during the police investigation.

___

Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy in Boston and Howard Ulman contributed to this story.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/pats-player-hernandez-taken-home-handcuffs-131332109.html

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Overweight causes heart failure: Large study with new method clarifies the association

June 25, 2013 ? An international research team led by Swedish scientists has used a new method to investigate obesity and overweight as a cause of cardiovascular disease. Strong association have been found previously, but it has not been clear whether it was overweight as such that was the cause, or if the overweight was just a marker of another underlying cause, as clinical trials with long-term follow-ups are difficult to implement.

A total of nearly 200,000 subjects were included in the researchers' study of the causality between obesity/overweight and diseases related to cardiovascular conditions and metabolism, which is being published for the first time in PLOS Medicine. The goal was to determine whether obesity as such is the actual cause of these diseases or whether obesity is simply a marker of something else in the subject's lifestyle that causes the disease.

"We knew already that obesity and cardiovascular disease often occur together. However, it has been hard to determine whether increased BMI as such is dangerous. In this study we found that individuals with gene variants that lead to increased body-mass index (BMI) also had an increased risk of heart failure and diabetes. The risk of developing diabetes was greater than was previously thought," says Tove Fall, a researcher at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University, who coordinated the study together with researchers from the Karolinska Institutet and Oxford University.

These scientists studied whether a gene variant in the FTO gene, which regulates the appetite and thereby increases the individual's BMI, is also linked to a series of cardiovascular diseases and metabolism. The risk variant is common in the population, and each copy of the risk variant increases BMI by an average of 0.3-0.4 units. Since an individual's genome is not affected by lifestyle and social factors, but rather is established at conception, when the embryo randomly receives half of each parent's genome, the method is thus called "Mendelian randomization." To achieve reliable results a large study material was needed, and nearly 200,000 individuals from Europe and Australia participated.

"Epidemiological studies look for associations in large populations, but it is usually difficult to reliably determine cause and effect -- what we call causality. By using this new genetic method, Mendelian randomization, in our research, we can now confirm what many people have long believed, that increased BMI contributes to the development of heart failure. We also found that overweight causes increases in liver enzymes . This knowledge is important, as it strengthens the evidence that forceful societal measures need to be taken to counteract the epidemic of obesity and its consequences," says Erik Ingelsson, professor at the Department of Medical Sciences and the Science for Life Laboratory, Uppsala University.

The results show that an increase of one unit of BMI increases the risk of developing heart failure by an average of 20 per cent. Further, the study also confirms that obesity leads to higher insulin values, higher blood pressure, worse cholesterol values, increased inflammation markers, and increased risk of diabetes.

The present study was carried out within the framework of the major research consortium ENGAGE, which brings together more than 35 studies and more than 130 co-authors. The study was coordinated by Erik Ingelsson's research group in collaboration with the Karolinska Institutet and Oxford University.

The study was funded by, among others, the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (ENGAGE), the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, and the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/x3-K-iv2mww/130625172248.htm

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