Photoshop Cs6 Beta

Photoshop Cs6 Beta, Adobe has announced, for the second time in its history, a free public beta of Photoshop. Photoshop CS6 will be available to try for the next few months as Adobe readies its Creative Suite of applications for launch alongside the brand new Creative Cloud online hub, targeted to creative pros. The Photoshop beta is available now on Adobe Labs. For Macs, the new Photoshop version works only on 64-bit Mac systems, and no longer in 32-bit mode. Windows PCs will need to have Windows XP with Service Pack 3 or higher.

Various under-the-hood improvements promise to make life easier and protect long hours of labor intensive operations. The highest profile of these include Background Save and Auto Recovery, Preset Migration and Sharing, and the new Mercury Graphics Engine.

Simply selecting some program preferences lets Photoshop automatically save and recover your work in the event of a power interruption. When you upgraded from previous versions of Photoshop, you often lost painstakingly applied presets that automated many repetitive tasks. The new version lets you apply your presets, tools and workspaces to the new upgrade. While the Mercury engine is familiar to users of Premiere Pro, Photoshop’s new Mercury Graphics Engine is mostly a software-based implementation of multicore functionality.

The changes in the new version of Photoshop are immediately apparent. The program has gone over to the dark side by default, opening to a sophisticated-looking dark gray interface. This is intended to complement themes of some of Adobe’s other creative programs — specifically Lightroom 4, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Additional default themes in medium gray, light gray, and black are also included. However, you can set the interface colors to whatever you want, and they change immediately. The same holds true for Photoshop’s companion asset management application, the now 64-bit Bridge. The dark, Aperture-like theme looks attractive, but as with all light type on a dark background, menu items can be difficult to read.

Cherry Blossom Festival

Cherry Blossom Festival, On March 27, 1912, Helen Taft, the wife of President William Howard Taft, and Viscountess Iwa Chinda, who was married to the Japanese ambassador to the United States, planted two cherry blossom trees in West Potomac Park, a green space on the banks of the Potomac River not far from the National Mall.

The next month, more trees were planted along the Tidal Basin and into Rock Creek Park, the vast urban park that stretches through the capital. Eighteen cherry trees were soon planted on the White House grounds.

This year, Washington will mark the 100th anniversary of those trees, some of which still exist, though most of the originals have died and been replaced. Their blossoming is celebrated annually with the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which is timed for late March, when the blooms are at their peak. This year the festival runs from March 20 to April 27. The peak, when 70 percent of the trees are covered in blossoms, is forecast for March 20-23.

But while the capital celebrates the centennial of the cherry blossom trees (they do not bear fruit), in fact the push to bring the delicate blossoms to Washington began much earlier.

A journalist and a government bureaucrat deserve the credit for what has become one of the signature aspects of the U.S. capital.

The journalist, Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore, was the first to sing the praises of the blossom of the sakura trees that she’d found in Tokyo. In 1885, she suggested to the U.S. Army superintendent of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds that the trees be brought to the U.S. capital and planted. She repeated that suggestion to successive superintendents for years, without success.

The bureaucrat was David Fairchild, who would become a world renown botanist for his work in the Department of Agriculture’s Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, which dispatched “plant explorers” around the world to find new species to add diversity to the American landscape.

An avid botanist from his youth in Michigan and Kansas, Fairchild joined the section in 1889. In a career that lasted until 1933, he introduced more than 75,000 plants to the United States, including various species of oranges, mangos, dates, cotton and bamboo.

On a trip in 1902, he landed in Japan. Like Scidmore, he was smitten by the cherry blossom trees of Tokyo, with their small pink blossoms.

As a member of the Office of Plant Inspection, he had more luck raising the blossoms’ profile.

Museum Of Natural History

Museum Of Natural History, The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History is planning “A Whale of a Birthday Party” for Sandy, the museum’s model whale, set for 1 to 1:30 p.m. Feb. 25. The museum is at 165 Forest Ave., Pacific Grove.

Sandy the Gray Whale migrated to the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History 29 years ago and has stayed for good. Science Saturday begins at 11 a.m. on the topic of “Marvelous Mushrooms,” followed at 1 p.m. by cake and a celebration in honor of Sandy.

Created by noted marine mammal sculptor Larry Foster, the 45-foot, life-size whale originally arrived on loan in 1982. When a fundraising campaign invited people to sponsor Sandy for $3 a pound, $24,000 was raised and Sandy had a permanent home in the museum collection. Several generations of kids have since grown up with Sandy and visiting the free museum.

Sandy’s birthday party will feature cake (as long as it lasts), activities, a group photo with Sandy and more. Everyone involved in Sandy’s original acquisition is especially welcome and appreciated, including those who might still have an original Sandy certificate to share.

Facebook Study More Takers Than Givers

Facebook Study More Takers Than Givers, A leading edge study released today by Pew Research Center combines server logs of Facebook activity with survey data to investigate the make-up of Facebook friendship networks and types of social behaviours.
Latest research from Pew Research finds that the majority of Facebook users get more from their Facebook friends than they give.
The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a nationally representative phone survey of 877 people the aims being to investigate the social and civic lives of social networking sites (SNS) users.
The results of this study were published in June 2011 in a report entitled “Social networking sites and our lives.”
Out of 877 original respondents who were Facebook users, 269 identified in and recruited from this random, representative telephone survey, allowed Pew to access data on their use of Facebook in order to match it with their survey responses.
In addition, Pew joined with Facebook and matched individual responses from the survey with profile information and computer logs that revealed how those same people used Facebook services over a one-month period in November 2010.
As reported from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet Project, some of the main results of this special analysis are:
1. 40% of Facebook users made a friend request, but 63% received at least one request
2. Users pressed the like button next to friends’ content an average of 14 times, but had their content “liked” an average of 20 times
3. Users sent 9 personal messages, but received 12
4. 12% of users tagged a friend in a photo, but 35% were themselves tagged in a photo
In other words, the results show that the 269 facebook users in the sample seem less active and willing to reciprocate Facebook activities than their facebook friends.
In order to clarify these unusual findings and other results of the survey, Digital Journal contacted the director of the project Lee Rainie.

The Heart Attack Grill

The Heart Attack Grill, The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas is proud of its name. It warns customers, “This establishment is bad for your health.” So this story may sound too good to be true: A customer at the restaurant, while eating a 6,000-calorie burger called the Triple Bypass Burger, was stricken with an apparent heart attack. And it was all caught on the cell phone video

But some patrons thought it was all an act. The video of the incident went viral online. The video shows paramedics wheeling a man having a heart attack out of a restaurant that advertises its food can kill. It’s the kind of publicity other restaurants would run from — but not this one.

Jon Basso, owner of the Heart Attack Grill, told CBS News, “We throw slogans at you like, ‘Taste worth dying for.'”

Basso calls himself Dr. Jon and his waitresses “nurses.” Diners wear hospital gowns.

“I am here to tell you straight out I am here to make a buck,” Basso said.

Basso says plenty of restaurants serve unhealthy food — he’s just honest about it.

Basso told CBS News, “Anything that is legal that you want to eat or drink that’s fun, that enriches your life at the moment, I will sell it to you.”

Sharon Myers, a Heart Attack Grill customer, said at a visit to the restaurant, “Every once in a while you have to indulge, so we thought we would indulge today.”

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