#Ice #Slides #Cina #Harbin #Ice #e #Snow #Festival

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#Bangkok’s #Train #Market

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#Booking.com #extends #vacation #rental #offering

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to observers of Booking.com (and the quest for global domination) as it now looks to be increasing its coverage of vacation rental properties. After small and tentative steps until now, Booking.com has struck a deal with vacation rental service InterHome to pull in properties to the global platform for consumers to search and secure.

InterHome is currently providing around 2,500 properties around the world, a fraction of its global portfolio of 32,000.

In some respects the Priceline-owned brand is simply extending its existing service (visitors to the site have been able to book bungalows and cottages “for many years”, an official says), but an agreement with a dedicated supplier such as InterHome is an interesting and strategic move.

The Booking.com official adds:

“Our goal is to be the place on the Internet where travelers can find the right place to stay at whatever budget or for whatever need no matter where they come from or where they wish to travel.”

InterHome is currently the only supplier of properties on Booking.com but if there is demand then “we will look to supply them in the best possible way”, perhaps paving the way for multiple sources of content.

Booking.com says the addition of vacation rental properties is currently in places where it sees demand for this type of accommodation, rather than suddenly flooding the database with tens of thousands of properties in similar locations to where it has hundreds of hotel properties (and, presumably, long-standing contracts).

The current number of bookable properties of any type on the system is now at over 260,000 worldwide.

The expansion of vacation rentals on the site begins a process of putting Booking.com – and its clearly successful and aggressive marketing and contracting model for hotels – into the same sector as the likes of HomeAway, and TripAdvisor to a lesser degree.

The difference at this stage is that Booking.com is going down the partner route through the likes of InterHome, rather than contracting directly with individual property owners.

Changing such a strategy would mean the launch of a painstaking process to secure and contract every single owner and a switch to its own or development of an entirely new system.

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#Fotos

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#CES #Cina #Lenovo’s #27″ #Smart #Tablet

Apparently it’s due to ship for $1,700 (£1,045) in the summertime.

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#Book #Capital

Unlike some other parts of the world, Thailand’s media industry is thriving, with publishing doing especially well. Pass any newsstand or bookshop in the country and you will spot heaving shelves packed with hundreds of colourful local and international publications, sitting amid Manga comic books, novels and reference titles. Then there are all the usual travel and gossip magazines, as well as some wonderfully weird publications (Lovely Pet, anyone?).
But while Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai is well known for having more second-hand bookshops than bars, Bangkok has rarely been seen as a stop for literary visitors.
That may change as Bangkok takes on the title of World Book Capital for 2013. It will be the world’s 13th book capital, following in the footsteps of Yerevan, Armenia (2012) and Madrid, Spain — the first Book Capital in 2001.
Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova said that the city was awarded the honour for being “community-focused” and for encouraging “the development of reading for all”. And Bangkok has more than its fair share of places to partake in this literary tradition.
The city’s retail mega malls serve English and Thai readers especially well with smart, well laid-out bookstores like Japanese bookstore chain Kinokuniya and Asia Books in the Siam Paragon mall, the largest English language bookstore chain in Thailand. With their comfy chairs, air-conditioning, hardwood floors and useful computer terminals, these large stores make browsing a pleasure and can easily compete with the US retail chain Barnes & Noble or the UK’s Waterstones.
Fans of second-hand bargains are well-served by friendly bookstores like Dasa Books on Sukhumvit Road – which offers more than 16,000 books in many different languages. The coffee corner serves a mean chocolate brownie and is a good place to curl up with a book. For less of a bookstore and more of a library experience, bookworms head to the sweet, petite Library Café (Sukumvit 24; 66-0-22-592-878) which teams a chic modernist layout with a soothing atmosphere and has fast become the place in Bangkok to hunker down for some quality reading time, coffee in hand. The owners proudly, and actively, encourage lounging, with free wi-fi and retro 1950s-style comfy furniture.
The more traditional setting of Neilson Hays Library, located in the heart of Silom, Bangkok’s business district, is especially notable on the city’s literary scene as it has become home to WordPlay, Bangkok’s first literary festival — now an annual event after launching in March 2011. WordPlay features talks and workshops with prominent local and international writers and poets like Philip Cornwel-Smith, author of the book Thai Hybrid, and Dean Barrett, author of the book Writing on Asia.

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#Listening #boost #brainpower

You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart they will become more intelligent. A quick internet search reveals plenty of products to assist you in the task. Whatever your age there are CDs and books to help you to harness the power of Mozart’s music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.

The phrase “the Mozart effect” was coined in 1991, but it is a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that feels plausible. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself, his music is complex and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, a little of that intelligence might rub off on us.

The idea took off, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It’s not just babies and children who were deliberately exposed to Mozart’s melodies. When Sergio Della Sala, the psychologist and author of the book Mind Myths, visited a mozzarella farm in Italy, the farmer proudly explained that the buffalos were played Mozart three times a day to help them to produce better milk.

I’ll leave the debate on the impact on milk yield to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? Exactly what was it was that the authors of the initial study discovered that took public imagination by storm?

When you look back at the original paper, the first surprise is that the authors from the University of California, Irvine are modest in their claims and don’t even use the “Mozart effect” phrase in the paper. The second surprise is that it wasn’t conducted on children at all: it was in fact conducted with those stalwarts of psychological studies – young adult students. Only 36 students took part. On three occasions they were given a series of mental tasks to complete, and before each task, they listened either to ten minutes of silence, ten minutes of a tape of relaxation instructions, or ten minutes of Mozart’s sonata for two pianos in D major (K448).

The students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. For a short time the students were better at spatial tasks where they had to look at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and to predict how they would appear when unfolded. But unfortunately, as the authors make clear at the time, this effect lasts for about fifteen minutes. So it’s hardly going to bring you a lifetime of enhanced intelligence.

Brain arousal

Nevertheless, people began to theorise about why it was that Mozart’s music in particular could have this effect. Did the complexity of music cause patterns of cortical firing in the brain similar to those associated with solving spatial puzzles?

More research followed, and a meta-analysis of sixteen different studies confirmed that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to manipulate shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn’t make us more intelligent.
Then it began to emerge that perhaps Mozart wasn’t so special after all. In 2010 a larger meta-analysis of a greater number of studies again found a positive effect, but that other kinds of music worked just as well. One study found that listening to Schubert was just as good, and so was hearing a passage read out aloud from a Stephen King novel. But only if you enjoyed it. So, perhaps enjoyment and engagement are key, rather than the exact notes you hear.

Although we tend to associate the Mozart effect with babies and small children, most of these studies were conducted on adults, whose brains are of course at a very different stage of development. But in 2006 a large study was conducted in Britain involving eight thousand children. They listened either to ten minutes of Mozart’s String Quintet in D Major, a discussion about the experiment or to a sequence of three pop songs: Blur’s “Country House,” “Return of the Mack,” by Mark Morrison and PJ and Duncan’s “Stepping Stone”. Once again music improved the ability to predict paper shapes, but this time it wasn’t a Mozart effect, but a Blur effect. The children who listened to Mozart did well, but with pop music they did even better, so prior preference could come into it.

Whatever your musical choice, it seems that all you need to do a bit better at predictive origami is some cognitive arousal. Your mind needs to get a little more active, it needs something to get it going and that’s going to be whichever kind of music appeals to you. In fact, it doesn’t have to be music. Anything that makes you more alert should work just as well – doing a few star jumps or drinking some coffee, for instance.

There is a way in which music can make a difference to your IQ, though. Unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than putting on a CD. Learning to play a musical instrument can have a beneficial effect on your brain. Jessica Grahn, a cognitive scientist at Western University in London, Ontario says that a year of piano lessons, combined with regular practice can increase IQ by as much as three points.

So listening to Mozart won’t do you or your children any harm and could be the start of a life-long love of classical music. But unless you and your family have some urgent imaginary origami to do, the chances are that sticking on a sonata is not going to make you better at anything.

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#Back #to #the #future

The annual gathering has become a Mecca for gadget fans, attracting more than 150,000 people to wander its 170,000 sq m (1.85m sq ft) of floorspace in search of the latest trends amongst the 20,000 new products debuted each year.

In fact, it has grown so big that some now question whether it is still relevant and whether it has a future.

But over the last four decades, the annual trade show has undeniably introduced the world to many of the consumer electronic trends that shaped our world.. and many that didn’t.

How did it grow so big and why does it attract so much attention every year?

Explore these retro pictures of the CES of yesteryear.

More stunning image galleries:

Gruesome tools and intimate views

Christmas treats and the end of the world

Bathing snow monkeys, a tweeting pope and elephant dung coffee.

Architectural giants and a new way of seeing the Moon

Red pandas, Saturn and Nature’s unstoppable forces

The world’s largest bloom, the world’s largest aquarium and the world’s fastest sailing boat

Venice under water, a total eclipse and a pedestrian-avoiding car

Space shuttle, Baumgartner and Hurricane Sandy

The best of 2012 galleries:

A year in space

The year in technology

A year of discovery

People of the year

The year in weather

The year in wildlife

Weird and wonderful

Places

New frontiers

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