'Loser' exit prompts tears, transforms team

Chris Haston/NBC

The cast of "The Biggest Losers."

By Ree Hines, TODAY contributor

Longtime fans of "The Biggest Loser" are familiar with a phenomenon known as "the week-two curse." Anyone who didn't know about the troubles that traditionally follow the contestants' earliest efforts, certainly got a crash course on the curse Monday night.

The action picked up right where it left off in the last episode -- with the white team reeling from the loss of TC, whose ouster came hot on the heels of Nikki's voluntary exit. With just three members going forward, Jillian Michaels' team worried what the future might hold.

But Team White was far from the only one to fret. Host Alison Sweeney announced that the dreaded red line would return to the weigh-in again and claim another victim without so much as a vote. So the unlucky one with the lowest percentage of weight loss on the losing team by the end of the week would go the way of TC.

That had everyone worried, and that's where the so-called curse concerns came in. On "The Biggest Loser," the second week is often regarded as the hardest week. Players drop big pounds during week one, but often plateau after their initial success. In past seasons, losing no weight at all or even gaining a pound or two wasn't unheard of in week two. That goes for frontrunners and lagging "Losers" alike.

So with that thought looming over the contestants, they all prepared to give it everything they had. Good thing, since Bob Harper, Dolvett Quince and Jillian each set up outdoor gyms to put the players through their paces.

The workouts were, as always, grueling. But they weren't the toughest stuff the contestants faced. In fact, the huffing and puffing must have seemed easy compared to what came next for some of them -- one-on-one visits with "Loser's" resident doc, Robert Huizenga.

Jackson, from Team Red, learned that sleep apnea was robbing his body of much needed oxygen every night. Pam, from the white team, viewed a test tube highlighting the cloudy fat content in her own blood. The assessments were particularly harsh for Team Blue's Gina and Michael. She discovered she had "out of control" diabetes, while he learned that at age 34, he had the arterial calcification of a man in his late 70s.

They each aspired to use the bad news as a motivator for a better future, but first they had to get through the rest of the week's obstacles.

Speaking of obstacles, the official challenge for the week saw eight-time NFL Pro Bowler Antonio Gates direct the teams through speed drills. Teen players Biingo (blue), Lindsay (red) and Sunny (white) were on hand and stood to benefit the most, since the team to complete the drill in the best time would win $5000 and (a visit from another NFL player) for their kid's school.

In the end, the small but determined (and really fast) Team White won it for Sunny.

But unfortunately, that was the only bit of good fortune the three-member team had all week.

Despite a rough weigh-in for Team Blue -- complete with a zero-pound loss for Jeff -- it was the white team that fell to the curse and ultimately came in last place.

The team of three was suddenly down to just two. It was their seemingly strongest player, Nate, that fell under the red line.

"That makes me really sad. It does," Nate said. "I look back, and I'm proud of the work that I've done. I was starting to write a new book of my life. I wanted 'The Biggest Loser' journey to be a lot longer than two weeks."

There was hardly a dry eye to be seen -- even Jillian broke down.

Still, it wasn't all bad news for Nate. In an update at the end of the show, he revealed that he's continued his weight-loss progress back home. He also had a big reveal for his girlfriend.

After declaring, "I feel like I deserve her now," Nate got down on one knee and proposed.

She said, "yes!"

Find out what the competition holds for the remaining contestants when "The Biggest Loser" airs next Monday at 8 p.m. on NBC.

What did you think of the results on Monday night? Do you think it was really Nate's time to go? Share your thoughts on our Facebook page.

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Source: http://theclicker.today.com/_news/2013/01/07/16399851-biggest-loser-shocker-exit-prompts-tears-transforms-a-team?lite

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Sony SideView hands-on (video)

It wasn't exactly a spotlight announcement at today's Sony CES press event, but it's a cool feature nonetheless. As we mentioned in our liveblog of the event, the feature brings to mind Microsoft's SmartGlass, and after playing around with it for a bit, our minds haven't really changed on that front. Essentially, it's a method for turning your tablet or handset into a supplementary content and control device as you're watching your TV. It's got a program guide, information on cast and crew, a remote and apps all built-in.

It's an extremely intuitive system -- we were able to pick it up as soon as we picked up the device. Click Program Guide and you get a list of shows. Click on one of those and you get a synopsis and information on cast members. You can click through from there and find full bios of the featured actors. And if the show is on now, you can choose it directly from there. If you're a bit more old-fashioned, you can also choose a remote control from the side. The Sony rep we spoke with told us that the system interacts with your set-top box to pull TV content.

Continue reading Sony SideView hands-on (video)

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/NoXldRT-zao/

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LG's 13.3-inch Windows 8 Ultrabook Z360 hands-on

By now, you should be familiar with all the Windows 8 options flooding the market and here on the CES 2013 show floor, LG's showing off its latest Ultrabook entry: the Z360. The thin and light device measures just 13.6mm and weighs in at 1.15kg making it easily openable with just one finger. Of course, since the Z360's 13.3-inch 1080p IPS panel doesn't support touch input, there's an array of dedicated "Metro" hot keys along the left edge of the keyboard. Inside, you're getting a fourth-generation Intel Core i5 processor (alternate Core i3 and i7 configurations are also possible) which allows for the device to cold boot in just eight seconds. On the Z360's bottom right, you'll find two slots for microSD slightly hidden, as well as HDMI and wired ethernet ports around the device. LG hasn't made its pricing or release details known at this time, so stay tuned for those additional details.

Gallery: LG Z360 Ultrabook hands-on

Continue reading LG's 13.3-inch Windows 8 Ultrabook Z360 hands-on

Filed under: Laptops, LG

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/08/lgs-13-3-inch-windows-8-ultrabook-z360-hands-on/

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Skip the subway, take a ski lift to work instead

6 hrs.

John Roach , NBC News

The future of mass transit will come with sweeping views, private cars, and schedule-free travel if a proposed gondola-based system takes off from sketchpads at a design firm, which stands a shot at occurring in fast-growing Texas.

Gondolas are enclosed cabins that dangle from moving wires. They are commonly used to transport skiers and snowboarders up mountains and tourists around amusement parks. Michael McDaniel and his colleagues at ?Frog, an international design firm, believe the ski lifts can improve transit in big cities.

?Just given that the technology was developed for traversing extremes in elevation, it actually makes itself very handy for navigating through the urban fabric,? McDaniel told NBC News.

Construction costs for gondolas range between $3 million and $12 million per mile compared to $35 million per mile for surface rail, $132 million per mile for elevated rail and $400 million per mile for subways, according to Frog?s calculations.

In addition, the cabins are always moving through the station. If passengers want a private car for themselves and their friends, they can wait a few seconds for an empty one. Gondolas also eliminate the need for riders to plan their day around a bus or train schedule.

?They are getting the same freedom that they would have with their own automobile but without the burden or complexity of having an automobile,? McDaniel said. A hub-and-spoke design would permit a main line to circle an urban core and shoot out individual lines to more distant neighborhoods.

He and colleague Jared Ficklin came up with the concept while looking at a century-old photograph of their office building in downtown Austin, Texas. Rail tracks crisscross the intersection in front of the building. Today, the city plans to re-lay tracks for an expanded light rail system.

The designers saw irony in the fact that the future of their city?s transportation was a recreation of what existed during their grandparents? childhood. There had to be a better way, they thought.?

Ficklin drew inspiration from his ski-bumming days in Colorado, where resorts such as Telluride now use chair lifts to move people around town in addition to up the slopes. Why not extend the concept to bigger cities?

To find out if the idea was feasible, the designers used it as a training exercise for junior designers at their firm. ?About halfway through the research, we started looking at what we were discovering and were like, ?Wow this actually seems kind of feasible,'?? McDaniel said.

He presented the concept, called the Wire, at a design conference in San Francisco in November 2012. An article about the presentation caught the eye of Alan McGraw, the mayor of Round Rock, Texas, an Austin suburb. He is on a transportation planning committee for the greater Austin area.

McGraw went to Frog?s offices and met with the designers. He was impressed with the presentation and drawings, which show, for example, transit stations located in the top floors of skyscrapers and parking garages.

What?s more, since most of the infrastructure is overhead, real estate costs and right-of-way issues are minimized. ?You are going over all of your problems, literally,? McGraw told NBC News.

McGraw, who is a skier himself, said he had often wondered why overhead ski-lift-like transportation systems were absent from cities.

?When I bring it up, people just laugh and then they just kind of move on,? McGraw said. Dig a little deeper, though, and ?it goes from giggles to 'Okay, why not?'?? he added.

Some potential marks against the concept include unknown operation and maintenance costs, which could eat up the savings gained from the lower construction costs.?

In addition, the fastest gondolas move no more than 15 miles per hour. That?s fine for dense urban cores in places such as New York City, but less than ideal for covering the wide open spaces of Texas.

?It is not the answer to all of the problems,? McGraw said, but a gondola system is a potential piece to the transportation puzzle and worth considering, which he and his committee have begun to do.?

?From communication to the automobile, we are innovating,? he said. ?We are trying to make things work better and more efficiently. Well, why aren?t we doing that with mass transportation as well??

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/skip-subway-take-ski-lift-work-instead-1B7872322

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Racial essentialism reduces creative thinking, makes people more closed-minded

Jan. 7, 2013 ? New research suggests that racial stereotypes and creativity have more in common than we might think.

In an article published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researcher Carmit Tadmor of Tel Aviv University and colleagues find that racial stereotyping and creative stagnation share a common mechanism: categorical thinking.

"Although these two concepts concern very different outcomes, they both occur when people fixate on existing category information and conventional mindsets," Tadmor and her colleagues write.

The researchers examined whether there might be a causal relationship between racial essentialism -- the view that racial groups possess underlying essences that represent deep-rooted, unalterable traits and abilities -- and creativity.

They hypothesized that, once activated, an essentialist mindset would lead to a reluctance to consider alternative perspectives, resulting in a generalized closed-mindedness.

The researchers manipulated participants' beliefs about racial essentialism by having them read one of three articles: one that described fictitious scientific research supporting racial essentialist beliefs, one that described fictitious research supporting racial nonessentialist beliefs, or one about the scientific properties of water.

The participants then took a commonly used test of creativity called the Remote Associates Test. The participants were given three distinct words and they had to identify a single target word that linked the three words together. So, for example, given the words "manners," "round," and "tennis," the correct answer would be "table."

The researchers found that participants primed with an essentialist viewpoint were less creative, solving significantly fewer of the word problems correctly than participants in the other two groups.

Results from a follow-up study showed that the link between racial essentialism and decreased creativity could be explained, at least in part, by an increase in closed-mindedness.

Together, these studies suggest that essentialism exerts its negative effects on creativity by changing how people think, as opposed to changing what they think. This finding fits with previous research on information processing and creativity.

The research also suggests that essentialist beliefs are fairly malleable. While there are many different aspects that still need to be explored, Tadmor and colleagues speculate that it might be possible to use these findings to devise an intervention program that reduces racial essentialist beliefs, thereby leading participants not only to become more socially tolerant but also to unleash their creative potential in the process.

Co-authors on this research include Melody M. Chao of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Ying-yi Hong of Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University and Beijing Normal University; and Jeffrey T. Polzer of Harvard University.

This research was partially supported by grants from the European Union Marie Curie International Reintegration Program; the Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel; the Research Grants Council in Hong Kong; and the Ministry of Education, Singapore.

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Journal Reference:

1. C. T. Tadmor, M. M. Chao, Y.-y. Hong, J. T. Polzer. Not Just for Stereotyping Anymore: Racial Essentialism Reduces Domain-General Creativity. Psychological Science, 2012; DOI: 10.1177/0956797612452570

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/WrpfPpcfZ5Q/130107130937.htm

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Palestinians threaten to take Israel to the ICC over settlements

TEL AVIV //Palestinians threatened yesterday to take Israel to the International Criminal Court over the construction of about 2,610 homes in the first new Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem for 15 years.

The unprecedented legal action may be open to Palestine after its recognition by the United Nations last month as a non-member observer state.

Their threat follows the approval yesterday by the Jerusalem municipal committee of construction of a new settlement in a hilltop area in south-east Jerusalem known as Givat HaMatos.

The site is mostly empty except for several dozen rundown trailer homes inhabited by Israelis unconnected to the settlement enterprise, and building new homes would establish a new permanent neighbourhood, according to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now. The group said the site would be the first Jewish settlement in east Jerusalem since Har Homa in 1997, while Benjamin Netanyahu was in his first term as prime minister. He is now in his second term and targeting a third in elections next month.

Mohammed Shtayyeh, who was the Palestinian Authority's special envoy for the UN bid, warned yesterday: "The intensification of settlement activity and all the Israeli actions, from killings to arrests, are pushing us to accelerate our recourse to the International Criminal Court."

Hanan Ashrawi of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee said the Givat HaMatos plan was "extremely dangerous". "Israel is defying and provoking the international community as though it wants to punish everyone who voted in favour of a Palestinian state at the UN."

Ms Ashrawi said Palestinian officials were weighing several actions to take against Israel, including "judicial accountability". She declined to say in which international legal body such moves may be carried out.

With their new UN status, the Palestinians may have access to bodies such as the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where they can file complaints related to settlement construction - viewed as illegal by the international community - and other offences.

Also yesterday, the Israeli housing ministry gave final approval for about 1,000 new homes in West Bank settlements, some deep inside the Israeli-occupied territory required by Palestinians as part of a future independent state.

The two approvals came two days after Israel gave the green light for the construction of 1,500 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement of Ramat Shlomo, a move that drew an unusually strong rebuke from the United States, Israel's staunchest ally, and from the European Union.

Anti-settlement activists and Palestinian leaders say the Givat HaMatos construction would be especially damaging to the creation of a Palestinian state because it blocks access to east Jerusalem from the southern parts of the West Bank. The Palestinians view east Jerusalem as the capital of their future state, which they also want to include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Mr Netanyahu was adamant yesterday about constructing homes for settlers in east Jerusalem despite international criticism. At a meeting with foreign ambassadors, he said: "Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years. Imagine that you would limit construction in your own capital, it doesn't make sense."

Mr Netanyahu, who commentators say is vying for more right-wing support with the settlement construction plans ahead of the election, said Israel will "build in Jerusalem for all its residents, this is something that has been done by all previous governments and this is something that my government will continue to do".

Hagit Ofran, director of the settlement watch project at Peace Now, said the Givat HaMatos plan was one of the most damaging for the future creation of a Palestinian state, along with this month's announcement to advance building in the so-called E1 corridor near Jerusalem.

Ms Ofran said construction would complete the isolation of east Jerusalem from the southern areas of the West Bank. It would especially isolate the east Jerusalem Palestinian village of Beit Safafa, which is already surrounded by the Israeli settlements of Har Homa and Gilo, and hinder more than 10,000 inhabitants from reaching the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

"Beit Safafa will be an enclave inside Israel without a connection to the West Bank. In effect, you will not have Palestinian continuity from the West Bank to all the Palestinian neighbourhoods of east Jerusalem," Ms Ofran said.

The plan's approval would now be followed by the issuing of construction tenders, Ms Ofran said, a process that could take several months to a year.

Sami Ershied, a lawyer and activist from Beit Safafa, said the village's residents would now have little possibility to mend an acute housing shortage in the community, which he said needs at least 600 more homes for young families.

vbekker@thenational.ae

* Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

Source: http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/middle-east/palestinians-threaten-to-take-israel-to-the-icc-over-settlements?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=News&utm_campaign=feed

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